Archive for May 26, 2012

An Orion III, Pan Am’s first Space Clip­per, fea­tured in the science-​​fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Write down this date. The human adven­ture off the Earth has begun in earnest.

In a tri­umph of free enter­prise, a pri­vate cor­po­ra­tion has suc­cess­fully sent a sup­ply ship to the Inter­na­tional Space Sta­tion.

We knew this day would come. In his 1968 motion pic­ture, 2001: A Space Odyssey, vision­ary film­maker Stan­ley Kubrick showed us a Pan-​​Am flight to an orbital space sta­tion. For those too young to remem­ber, back in the 1960s, Pan Amer­i­can Air­ways was a major com­mer­cial air line. Pan-​​Am ceased oper­a­tions in 1991. But before that, fol­low­ing the release of Kubrick’s movie, they had been accept­ing reser­va­tions for flights to the Moon.

The real­ity so far is much less grand, but the longest jour­neys begin with a sin­gle step. Since 2009, newly-​​appointed NASA direc­tor Charles F. Bolden Jr. has advo­cated encour­ag­ing com­mer­cial enter­prise to replace the can­celed U.S. space shut­tle pro­gram. With­out a shut­tle, Amer­ica and the world are depen­dent upon Russ­ian Soyuz space­craft to carry per­son­nel to the space sta­tion, and uncrewed Progress rock­ets for sup­plies. Rus­sia had an exclu­sive lock on flights to ISS. No more. On May 25, 2012, at 12:02 p.m. East­ern Time, a pri­vate space­craft funded by Pay­Pal bil­lion­aire Elon Musk docked with the Inter­na­tional Space Sta­tion, car­ry­ing a ship­ment of sup­plies. The new Dragon space­ship from SpaceX can now sup­ple­ment Progress sup­ply flights, and, within three or four years, is expected to carry up to seven crewmem­bers at a time.

This is not the first com­mer­cial space­flight. On Octo­ber 4, 2004, the 47^th anniver­sary of the first Sput­nik launch, the Ansari X Prize was won by a privately-​​designed and con­structed manned space­ship. The X Prize offered ten mil­lion dol­lars to the first non-​​governmental orga­ni­za­tion that could send a manned reuse­able craft to the edge of space, defined as an alti­tude of 100 kilo­me­ters or 60 miles — and then do it again, within the space of a few days. The win­ning craft, Space­ShipOne, was designed by leg­endary air­craft devel­oper Burt Rutan, and funded by eccen­tric bil­lion­aire Richard Bran­son, founder of the Vir­gin Group. Bran­son and Rutan have gone on to cre­ate Vir­gin Galac­tic, a com­pany that will soon be pro­vid­ing joyrides into space for a mere $100,000 or so per ticket.

We are about to step off the shores of our lit­tle world into an enor­mous ocean. Are we ready for it? (more…)