Big news from the Final Frontier: SpaceX, the spaceflight company started by Paypal and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk, has become the first to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft that was designed, built, and operated entirely by a commercial entity, rather than a government agency. You can read the details here, but in brief, SpaceX’s capsule-style Dragon spacecraft was launched yesterday morning aboard one of the company’s own Falcon 9 boosters (which you may recall were successfully tested earlier this year); the Dragon circled the earth twice at an altitude of 186 miles, then returned beneath three big parachutes for a soft splashdown in the Pacific, just like the old Apollo moon ships. The flight was flawless, and the Dragon even came down within a mile of the waiting recovery ship.
With the future of NASA’s Ares booster and Orion space capsule uncertain and the final flights of the Space Shuttle Program fast approaching, the Falcon/Dragon system now looks to be our nation’s best bet at maintaining our spaceflight independence, rather than having to bum rides off the Russians. The next step will be bringing the Dragon to within sight of the International Space Station, followed by a third test flight in which it will actually dock with the ISS. SpaceX, feeling its oats a bit, has proposed combining those two flights and just going straight to the station, but hasn’t yet received permission to do that. And then, assuming all these tests go as well as yesterday’s, SpaceX will win a $1.6 billion contract for 12 flights to the ISS. The Dragon will be carrying only supplies on these missions, no humans — passengers are going Russian once the Shuttle retires — but the craft was designed to be configurable for passengers, so maybe once it’s proved itself… well, we’ll see.
I’d like to believe that Americans will remain at the forefront of manned spaceflight, or at least involved in it, but there doesn’t seem to be much public interest in it anymore, and with the politicians now obsessing over the national debt (while stubbornly turning a blind eye to the single largest item in the budget, our insanely huge military budget), I can’t help but feel pessimistic. Maybe outsourcing the logistics of spaceflight to private companies will help. Maybe it won’t. As I said, we’ll see.
As long as I’m blathering about space stuff, and on a somewhat happier note to wrap up the entry, NPR blogger Robert Krulwich was pondering the subject of scale the other day, and he used for example the fact that the Apollo astronauts really explored very, very little of the moon’s surface, in spite of the perceived significance of their missions. He used some interesting maps to illustrate his point, showing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s tracks superimposed over a football field and a baseball diamond. Interesting stuff… but things got really interesting when he received a message from none other than Armstrong himself, explaining why he and Buzz didn’t venture very far from the Eagle… and suggesting he, Armstrong, would’ve liked to go much farther. Armstrong, if you don’t know, is the most reclusive of all the Apollo astronauts. He rarely makes public appearances, and unlike so many of his colleagues, he hasn’t written a book about his experiences, so having him send an email response to a blog entry is a pretty big deal. Go check it out!
