 |
| Space-X Dragon 3 |
 |
| Boeing CST-100 |
This morning’s news carries a headline in Bloomberg
Technology “Americans Will Head to Space Again Without a Russian Taxi.” The article talks about the efforts of Elon
Musk’s company Space-X, and the Boeing Company's progress in qualifying a capsule for
manned-flight. Allowing us to move away
from our current dependence on the only NASA approved space capsule, the
Russian Soyuz, as our ride to the international space station. NASA’s last flight with the Space Shuttle was
in August 2011. If all goes well we
could perhaps have a capsule ready for routine use by 2019, but 2020 seems more
likely. If we keep to this timeline, it
will mean the Russians have met our needs for almost ten years.
Exploration is one of the essential qualities of
mankind. At least it used to be. What would the world look like if the Queen
of Spain had not financed Christopher Columbus’s failed venture to find a
shorter route to China? With the
exception we would be tearing down someone else's statue, I think it would look
almost exactly like it does today. For within
the human spirit, others would have stepped up to finance and sail in
search profit and knowledge. But we have
lost the fire that John Kennedy ignited when he decided we must compete with
the Communists of the USSR and reach the moon by the end of the decade, and we
have lost the ability to reach the consensus that Lyndon Johnson played against as
he sank massive numbers of dollars into the race to the moon.
Today NASA, and our space program, has become just another
of the on-going and self-justifying bureaucracies without the clear national
vision it once had. You need only look
at the fact we’ve been willing to use the Russian Uber service while we putzed
around seemingly without purpose and clearly without vision on how best to get
ourselves into low and medium earth orbit.
In the same amount of time that NASA, with scientists, mathematicians
and engineers, using slide rules and less computational capability than an
apple watch took to organize and run three building block programs that took us
from single person sub-orbital flight to landing two astronauts and a dune
buggy on the moon, we may be able to approve one or two different capsules able
to reach the international space station and return with two or three
passengers.
Off-hand I’d say we Americans don’t think too much about
flying in space, and that is unfortunate.
No comments:
Post a Comment