If you haven’t heard, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft arrived safely at the International Space Station early Sunday morning (8:56 AM Eastern time), marking its third successful flight (and second official cargo run) to the orbiting outpost. The trip was a bit bumpy this time out… following a flawless launch, the Dragon appeared for a time to be in serious trouble. The solar panels that supply electrical power for the vehicle refused to deploy, a problem that was traced back to another problem with pressurizing the craft’s thruster propellant tanks. (Briefly, Dragon needs to make a couple maneuvers before it opens its solar “wings”; no thrusters, no maneuvers, so the onboard computer refused to deploy the solar array.) Engineers at SpaceX figured out and corrected the problem within a few hours, putting the spacecraft behind schedule, but otherwise no harm was done. And really this mishap was a good thing, from a certain point of view: SpaceX has now proven that its people and its ship can confront major malfunctions and still get the job done. This wasn’t an Apollo 13-level disaster, but it was serious enough, and could have jeopardized the mission if the ground crews hadn’t figured it out. So good job, SpaceX!

If you’re interested in reading all the details of the launch and subsequent troubleshooting, Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomy guy) has a detailed play-by-play here. Dragon will remain at the ISS for three weeks, dropping off 2,300 pounds of cargo and bringing home some 3,000 pounds of test results and used equipment.

If that’s not exciting enough for you, here are a couple of other spaceflight tidbits that have caught my eye recently:

• I’m sure everyone remembers the announcement last year that a company called Planetary Resources wants to mine near-Earth asteroids for fun and profit, a scheme that has been widely scorned by skeptics who don’t think it can be done, or don’t think it would be worth the cost. Well, skeptics be damned, there’s now another company throwing its hat into the asteroid-mining ring, a start-up called Deep Space Industries. Granted, neither company has revealed any truly detailed plans (let alone any kind of hardware that’s ready to fly), but the mere fact that people are talking seriously about attempting something that I grew up reading about in sci-fi novels, and that there are now two companies competing to try it… well, I’m excited about the possibilities. Asteroid mining really does seem feasible to me, if not right away, then within a few years, and it’s an offworld activity that has — or could have, anyhow — some genuine practical value beyond high-minded ideas about exploration for its own sake. Hell, that meteorite over Russia a couple weeks ago ought to be proof enough that there are big rocks in the sky all around us, we may as well try to put them to use. God knows we’re rapidly using up everything down here.
• Finally, did you hear that Dennis Tito, the gazillionaire who paid his own way into the history books as the first space tourist back in 2001, has set up a foundation with the aim of sending a man and a woman on a close-approach fly-by of the planet Mars in 2018? That’s when a planetary alignment between Earth and Mars that occurs only twice every 15 years will (theoretically) enable a relatively brief round-trip journey of 501 days. The idea is to send a middle-aged married couple who are beyond child-bearing age — probably, I would guess, because the radiation they’ll be exposed to will make them infertile — on a low-fuel “free return” course that will take them within 100 miles of the Martian surface before slingshoting them back home. A free-return orbit will ensure that their spacecraft makes it back regardless of any malfunction… including a worst-case scenario where the crew doesn’t survive. (Go rewatch Apollo 13 — getting into a free-return was the point of them doing that dramatic thruster burn behind the back side of the Moon.) Can an expedition of this magnitude really happen in only five years? Damned if I know… it certainly seems like a long shot. But a lot of the necessary hardware is already in development, which ought to help. SpaceX is working up a heavy-lift version of its Falcon-9 booster — the same one that has successfully shot Dragon into space four times now, as well as commercial payloads — that is supposed to be capable of sending a craft into deep space, and that should be ready in time. As for a spacecraft, there are several capsule-style vehicles under construction now, including a human-rated version of Dragon, but they’re all pretty damn cozy for such a long trip. I’ve seen an artist’s conception of a Mars craft with a Bigelow inflatable module attached for some expanded living space, but even an arrangement like that will no doubt become pretty claustrophobic after a year and a half. Whatever lucky couple wins the lottery will have their marriage put to the ultimate test, I think. And I have no idea if our current life-support technology is up to the job. What about food supplies for that long a flight? And again, there’s the radiation to contend with, once our intrepid Marsnauts leave Earth’s protective magnetic field. (The Apollo astronauts faced that problem too, but they were only exposed for a few days, not 18 months.) The launch window apparently coincides with a period of low solar activity, and I’ve read that older people would have less risk of developing cancer than younger astronauts (because they don’t have as many years left for it to develop), but still…  a mere five years really doesn’t seem like enough time to prepare for something like this, does it? Nevertheless, I tend to agree with Tito’s thinking that a big, bold proposal to do something no human has ever done before is something worth investigating. If it succeeds — a big if, I grant — but if, imagine what this could do for the pride of a nation that’s been battered pretty badly in the last couple of decades. And just imagine being one of those two people, seeing a whole new planet in person. The first people in all of history to do so. It would be… awesome. In the original, pre-1980s-slang sense of that word. Like the old ad campaign once promised, the human adventure is just beginning…

I’m always saying that this isn’t the future I was promised as a kid, but maybe that future is still on the way. Maybe it just got pushed out a bit, and I’ll still live long enough to see at least some of it come true, even if I won’t be among those making it happen…