Thursday, May 24, 2012
These are the voyages of Free Enterprise….
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| DRAGON FIRE: The Falcon 9 rocket soars into space from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, carrying the Dragon capsule to orbit at 3:44 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, May 22, 2012. Photo courtesy of NASA |
To listen to all the hyperbole, Tuesday’s launch of the Falcon 9 rocket marks “new era in [space] exploration.” It’s the first time a private company has launched a spacecraft to do something that previously only a government-run space agency has done before.
“We're now back on the brink of a new future, a future that embraces the innovation the private sector brings to the table,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said after the launch. “The significance of this day cannot be overstated. While there is a lot of work ahead to successfully complete this mission, we are off to a good start.”
Whether handing off the part of our space program to the private sector is a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen, but it again got me thinking about what I had expected the space program to be like when I was a kid and what it has becoming today. It also got me wondering whether we should change the opening of “Star Trek” to:
“Space. The commercial frontier. These are the voyages of free enterprise. Its ongoing mission to exploit strange new worlds, seek out new products; and sell them to new civilizations. To boldly sell stuff where no one has sold stuff before.”
That’s not exactly as awe inspiring as the original and if I sound a bit cynical, then it’s probably just my fear that either businesses won’t see the profit in literally doing NASA’s heavy lifting or it will somehow sully my silly, idealistic notion that we should explore space simply for the sake of exploration.
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Ads on the sides of space ships aren't as far-fetched as you might think. Just
look at the side of the bright yellow container on this freighter from the
TV show "Battlestar Galactica." It reads: "Colonial Movers.
We Move Anywhere."
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Let’s face it, shuttling supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), isn’t like shipping a truckload of widgets from China to the United States. Space travel is still a risky, dangerous and expensive endeavor. Just ask the families of the Challenger and Columbia astronauts. And it seems to me businesses are currently too focused on short-term profits to take the kinds of losses and make the kinds long-term of investments a space program needs.
The day of the launch, I recall hearing a radio report or reading an article that said SpaceX, the company behind the Falcon 9, is taking a heavy loss on this mission and it’s only because of seed money from NASA and the promise of hefty contract that they undertook it in the first place.
But what’s going to happen when the government’s seed money runs out? Will the enthusiasm of companies like SpaceX dry up? Then what happens to the space program? Will we have to outsource our space missions it to other countries like we are doing now? How much further behind would that put NASA’s aspirations to launch missions to Mars or the asteroid belt or even deeper into the solar system?
I’m not the only one to have this fear.
So did the great the great astronomer and host of the wildly popular “Cosmos” TV show, Carl Sagan. In the book “Conversations With Carl Sagan” (edited by Tom Head, University Press of Mississippi, copyright 2006), Sagan said in an interview with Charlie Rose: “It’s too expensive to do by private industry or wealthy individuals. What we’re talking about, the advantages that accrue, are largely long-term advantages.”
That sentiment was acknowledged in a political blog post on the LiveJournal blog site, where Sagan is paraphrased as saying that “if humans [are] to expand out toward the rest of the solar system and one day populate the stars [then] it would be because a government, or a consortium of them.”
Yet despite all my misgivings, I too can’t help but be excited by this turn of events. While I loved the idea behind the space shuttle program and creating humanity’s first reusable spacecraft, in retrospect, I think it was a mistake. From 1981 to 2012, all we really did was fly into Earth orbit, launch some satellites and build the ISS – all things that could have been done using Apollo-era rockets.
Now just think what we could have accomplished in those same 31 years had we had companies like SpaceX doing that work for us, letting NASA concentrate on returning to the moon or going to Mars. Even if NASA’s pace of technologically innovation had only been half that of the personal computer industry, we’d still probably be on Mars by now.
Two other comments also give me hope that we are headed down the correct path on our quest for the stars.
The first is from SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who compared Tuesday’s launch of the first commercial, for-profit space flight with the dawn of the internet. “This mission heralds the dawn of a new era of space exploration, one in which there is a significant commercial space element. It is like the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s when commercial companies entered what was originally a government endeavor. That move dramatically accelerated the pace of advancement and made the Internet accessible to the mass market. I think we’re at a similar inflection point for space. I hope and I believe that this mission will be historic in marking that turning point towards a rapid advancement in space transportation technology.”
The second was made during a radio interview with a reporter from the nasawatch.com website, who pointed to historical precedent as to why such ventures work. He said that during America’s expansion westward, the U.S. Government would go out explore the land and establish an outpost on the new frontier. Almost as soon as that fort was established, who would come behind them, but the saloon-, inn- and shopkeepers.
For our sake, let’s hope both Musk and the guy from NASAWatch are right.
If they are, and space travel becomes available to the average person within my lifetime, then I think I am willing to accept the occasional ad plastered over my favorite starship hull.
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Just remember, the USS Enterprise was/will be a military vessel. I doubt u will see signs on it saying "This space for rent."
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