A few hours ago, the familiar roar of a rocket motor boomed through the humid air of Florida’s Cape Canaveral, but it wasn’t a space shuttle or a military Atlas launch. It was instead a privately owned rocket called the Falcon 9. After an aborted launch attempt earlier this morning, this gleaming debutante lifted off from its pad and streaked skyward without any obvious problems, carrying at its nose a mock-up spacecraft that may shortly replace the retiring shuttles. Behold:
(Stay with it until the end — the stage separation seen from the onboard camera is really neat!)
The Falcon 9 and its Apollo-style counterpart, the Dragon capsule, are designed, built, and operated by a company called SpaceX, which was founded by Elon Musk. You may not know his name, but you’ve likely heard of his other businesses: PayPal and Tesla Motors, the electric sports-car builder. Musk’s vision for the Falcon/Dragon combination is essentially to fulfill the promise made by the shuttle development team 30 years ago: a “space taxi” that will offer reliable, relatively cheap access to Earth orbit. Unlike NASA’s various spacecraft that are pieced together from contributions made by many subcontractors, SpaceX keeps everything in-house. The launch vehicle, the spacecraft, and the rocket motors are built by SpaceX itself. And the company is striving for design simplicity by using the same rocket motor — the Merlin, it’s called — on all its launch vehicles, including the Falcon 1, the Falcon 9, and a future heavy-lift vehicle. In the same spirit of keeping things simple, SpaceX plans for the Dragon to carry either cargo or passengers, depending on the craft’s internal configuration, rather than designing separate vehicles for different jobs. Moreover, the boosters and the Dragons are all intended to be reusable.
It all sounds good on paper, at least. And even though I’m sorry to see the shuttle program winding down, I have to admit I am excited about SpaceX’s plans. Musk’s vision sounds workable to me, and I like that someone in the private enterprise sector is thinking about practical spaceflight applications. By contrast, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, as nifty as the SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnight technology is, really strikes me as more of a rich man’s playground that won’t lead to much. I hope I’m wrong about that — I’d love to see a sky filled with many different kinds of spacecraft doing all sorts of activities, including recreational ones — but it’s just my hunch at the moment. And anyway, the SpaceShipTwo vehicles Branson has commissioned are only suborbital cruise ships. To truly replace the shuttle, we need something that will aim a bit higher.
SpaceX already has a contract with NASA to send cargo to the International Space Station in 2011; several more test flights are planned through the rest of this year. And there are other private entities looking to fill the gap left by the shuttles, as well, including a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed-Martin called the United Launch Alliance and a supersecret venture funded by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. We’re not living in the space-faring 21st century I used to imagine, but maybe there’s a chance we’ll get some version of it after all…
