Boldly Go — The Spaceflight Renaissance
On Friday, March 24th, 2006, a crowd of U.S. Air Force Academy cadets packed into the FalconSat-2 flight control room at The U.S. military’s Ronald Regan Ballistic Missile Test Site on Omelek Island in the South Pacific, full of excitement. Today would mark the conclusion of a yeoman’s effort of private and military collaborations over the past six years. The satellite that they had built, the $800,000 FalconSat-2, would finally be launched into orbit after years of work and seemingly endless launch delays.
On the pad sat the launch vehicle: the Falcon 1, an experimental rocket developed by a fledgeling space company, SpaceX. It would carry the satellite on its inaugural flight after several scrubbed attempts in previous months. The cadets were not the only audience members, over 4,000 people had tuned in to watch the launch webcast.
3, 2, 1, The Falcon 1’s engine errupted to life and hurdled the rocket skyward. According to Space.com’s Tariq Malik, launch controllers could be heard via an audio link shouting “Go!”
What happened next brought the room to a stunned silence.
At launch, a corroded nut caused an engine fire. At T+25, the rocket banked and rolled as the engine failed completely, causing it to careen downward into the Pacific Ocean. The satellite was miraculously recovered, but was was no longer usable. The rocket company’s founder, Elon Musk, had sunken $100 million into the company with little to show for it. It would be another two years and another two failed attempts before SpaceX would ever reach orbit.
Ten years later, the American private space industry looks dramatically different. The legacy manufactures, Lockheed and Boeing, are being challenged by several new private space companies. Orbital ATK, Blue Origin, Bigelow Aerospace, Virgin Galactic, Moon Express, are a only a few organizations launching and testing spacecraft in the United States. But what about our friends at SpaceX? Did they ever make it off that island in the South Pacific?
SpaceX has taken a strong lead in the modern space race. Consistently demonstrating its ability to not only launch, but also land its larger Falcon 9 rocket. It has secured and completed multiple cargo missions to the International Space Station (ISS), making it the first private company to resupply it. It is also one of the three companies chosen by NASA for its human flight missions to the ISS. The rest of this year is only slated to get busier for SpaceX, as they are approaching three major milestones. First, they will debut and launch their heavy lifter rocket, Falcon Heavy. Second, they will reuse one of their landed Falcon 9 rockets in a historic second mission of an orbital first-stage rocket. Third, they will formally unveil their brand new, super-heavy rocket, spacecraft, and detailed plan to land a man or woman on Mars by 2025. You read that right. Only nine years from today.
Cool. But Who Cares?
Great question, here are the answers:
The Essential Reason
The single driving force in our evolution is the instinct to survive — survival, not only for ourselves, but for our species as a whole. Nothing — nothing — is more important to humans than the survival of the human race. With me so far?
The human race, as Tim Urban puts it, is on the brink of four major breakthroughs that support this broad priority of survival: The advent of artificial intelligence, biotechnology and solving the problem of natural death, catastrophe prevention, and interplanetary life.
Entire posts can be spent on each of these impending breakthroughs, but here are the quick rundowns of each:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI): The ability for non-living things to interpret, reason, and learn. Ideally, AI systems will also communicate through natural language with human beings. In a few short years, cognitive capabilities will be standard in all software. AI systems used in space travel can be very helpful (see: Interstellar) or, in rare cases, harmful (see: 2001: A Space Odyssey).
- Biotechnology: Our bodies’ physical functions will be replaced by hardware, upgradable in perpetuity. Human life expectancy will become indefinite. We better have more than one planet to live on before we figure this one out.
- Catastrophe Prevention: Ongoing efforts to reduce the chances of extinction events from taking place. This includes reducing carbon emissions, asteroid redirect programs, even international politics preventing nuclear war. Likelihood of extinction events can never be 0%, but we can do things to increase the chance of recovery from such events. For example…
- Interplanetary Life: Permanent and growing populations of human beings on multiple planets. Figuratively ‘backing up the hard drive’ of life on Earth. A permanent colony on Mars is the core mission of SpaceX.
These four goals, and the progress of their enabling technologies, should be at the top of everybody’s list of macro-interests. Does this mean they should demand all of your attention? Of course not; you have important day-to-day (even year-to-year) concerns to focus on. However, these goals should at least be things we care about.
The Financial Reason
There are, and will continue to be, many jobs created by the requirements of space travel. Take a handful of the many businesses that exist today in support of the space industry: rocket manufacturers, engine manufactures, software developers, engineers, industrial designers, sellers, marketers, recruiters — thousands upon thousands of jobs can be created within single companies, given their necessary scale.
NASA has seen the value of including private businesses in their own efforts. In a few years the ISS will become too expensive for NASA to maintain, so NASA is looking for a private buyer to hand the station off to within the next ten years. Astronauts also recently installed a new dock at the space station, allowing for any standardized spacecraft to dock with the ISS with the seamlessness of an autonomus tram arriving at a station. Until now, it required the efforts of several onboard astronauts to dock any visiting spacecraft.
Beyond job creation, entirely new industries will be built around mining resources from planets and asteroids, building living habitats for humans, developing new forms of communication designed for long-distance interplanetary travel. The same explosion of commerce that occured after the European discovery of the Americas is destined to repeat itself on a galactic level — not to mention the industry of space tourism which already exists. Billions of dollars in new industry will be built in the coming decades.
The Less Quantifiable Reason
This excludes, of course, the aspirational reasons for going further into space — to accomplish feats previously limited to the imagination. Mars is only the nearest of possible destinations that contain liquid water, the essential ingredient of life. In our own solar system, Jupiter’s moon Europa is said to have entire oceans beneath its icy surface that could support complex lifeforms. The nearest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, was found to have a earth-like planet orbiting within its habitable zone. Imagine the possibility of exploring these worlds or watching a human being interact with life from another solar system for the first time. You will feel that same wonder that inspired the viewers of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, that humbling feeling of how vast the universe is when staring up at the clear night sky, that grand human curiosity to explore new worlds.
If that isn’t reason enough to get excited, you should look upward once in a while.
Thanks for reading. Follow me on Medium or Twitter @thatslogical for more space stuff, as well as other logical thoughts.
