Private Space Travel Companies
Tesla has rockets — everyone knows about that. Amazon has rockets too. Now a Japanese company called iSpace raised $90 Million for two private moon missions.
This kind of thing is exciting. The scaled down rocket programs of recent years has been a little depressing — NASA seems depressed too — just look at how much time they dedicate to telling us about how ephemeral our presence in the universe is, and how many things might hit us and kill us.
Musk is great because he thinks big, and he throws enough force into the reach for his dreams that it is almost as if he pulls the rest of the thinkers free of the Earth’s gravitational pull as well. Rather a dreamer than some sod-bound realist just reiterating notions and objects that are already out there.
Science fiction of late has seemed to be more along the line of building machineries to go back and correct the past, than building machineries to propel us into the future. Our fiction is reflecting our own tendency to not dream so big anymore.
With a launch window of 2019, it is an ambitious undertaking, but they seem very confident, and aim to secure the Google Lunar X Prize. Projections are that the moon will have 1,000 permanent residents by 2040, with as many as 10,000 visitors and tourists making the lunar trip every year. I don’t know how real this is, but it is a much more interesting story than some meteorite barrelling down on us and promising Armageddon.
It’s true that there is a lot to fix on this planet, both socially as well as economically and environmentally, before we try to leave Earth behind, or we’re going to carry a lot of baggage with us. But getting out to the stars abd finding new planets to inhabit is something we are going to need to do at some point when our starts to expand, and then collapses, and changes the way this whole sector of space behaves.
The timeline isn’t necessarily presenting us with a pressing emergency right now, but it is a challenge we need to accept. Some of these private ventures may fail, but the lessons they teach us are very important, and you have to burn up the fuel to get the dream to escape the pull of gravity.
