The Most Important Innovation Since, Maybe Fire?
Originally published by now.space, December 21, 2015. Used with permission.
April 18th, 2014. 3:46 PM Eastern Daylight Time. Somewhere off the coast of Florida.
Nothing unusual was happening. Fifteen foot waves were crashing into each other in an ordinary spring storm. Seagulls were cranky. Whales were singing in the rain. The Coast Guard was on a cigarette break.
And then an aluminum cigar the size of a 737 descended from the heavens in a deafening roar, spat out a river of kerosene flames, hovered above the water for a trifle, and sank.
Since this first test of their reusable rocket just a year and a half ago, SpaceX has come oh-so-close to recovering a spent first stage. On Monday, we all bore witness to their successful landing at Cape Canaveral: after the newly upgraded Falcon 9 rocket delivered 11 dishwasher-sized Orbcomm satellites to space, its 156-foot first stage booster flew back to Earth, and touched down gently at Landing Zone 1.
SpaceX engineers have yet to determine how much effort will be needed to fly the stage again on a future rocket; but, most insiders believe the hard part is over. And if SpaceX is ultimately successful at safely refueling and re-flying the stage, this event will transform human civilization forever.
Prior to this event, the world believed that the best way to get a satellite into orbit was to scuttle one or more pieces of the rocket along the way. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, never accepted this. He figured that if he was careful with fuel and could suss out the avionics, he could fly those pieces back and reuse them.
Just after April’s demonstration, Musk said: “what SpaceX has done thus far is evolutionary…. If we can recover the booster stage, the chance is there for revolutionary.” On Monday, the revolution began.
Before this landing, lofting a few tons to orbit cost somewhere between US$65 and $150 million. With successful refurbishment, the reusable first stage could drop that cost by two orders of magnitude, into the range of a few hundred thousand dollars. That would bring the cost of launching a rocket down to the same order of magnitude as operating a transoceanic commercial flight. Put another way — for the price of flying from San Francisco to Dubai, we could soon be flying to low Earth orbit.
Countless innovations have transformed the way we live on this planet. Fire brought us out of the caves. Agriculture let us put down roots. The printing press fostered religion and science, and the internal combustion engine made us entrepreneurs and polluters. Modern medicine let us peer into our genes, snuffing out diseases that have haunted us through history.
Each of these world-changing innovations re-defined planetary culture, and many enabled or enhanced the welfare of billions of lives to follow. Today, humanity faces endogenous threats from poverty, conflict and climate change, and we are also increasingly aware of exogenous threats operating over even longer time scales, such as asteroid impacts and neutron star explosions. In the face of these disasters, even the most advanced single-planet civilization would come to an end.
Prior to the existence of the reusable liquid-fueled rocket stage, human civilization was destined to remain on Earth. Musk again: “You back up your hard drive…. Maybe we should back up life, too?”
Until Monday’s successful landing, the prospect of humanity insuring itself from planetary collapse remained in doubt because the costs of that backup — of inoculating civilization outside of Earth — were just way too expensive to share the stage with more immediate challenges such as poverty and climate change.
Millennia into the future, if humanity succeeds in becoming a multiplanetary species, we will point to reusable rockets as the technological turning point: just as fire brought us out of the caves, reusable rockets will take us to the stars.
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Joe Mascaro (@joe_mascaro) is Program Manager for Impact Initiatives at Planet Labs, a San Francisco-based aerospace company that operates the largest fleet of Earth-imaging satellites. At Planet, Joe manages social, environmental and humanitarian engagement, expanding Planet’s efforts to improve forest monitoring and conservation, enhance food security and promote ecological resilience for some of the world’s most vulnerable communities.
