Believe it or not, for-profit space ventures have been around a while. In pulp magazine stories of the 1930s and ’40s and later in sci-fi movies of the 1950s, rockets to the moon and Mars were often built by private
Believe it or not, for-profit space ventures have been around a while. In pulp magazine stories of the 1930s and ’40s and later in sci-fi movies of the 1950s, rockets to the moon and Mars were often built by private corporations and eccentric billionaires.
When moviegoers visited the huge space station in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (released in 1968), what did they see? A Howard Johnson’s and a Hilton hotel.
Real life is catching up with science fiction.
NASA, whose astronauts have been hitching rides on Russian rockets to reach the International Space Station since the last American shuttle was mothballed in 2011, announced Sept. 16 its new plan for getting the U.S. back into space on U.S. hardware. It’s hiring private companies to do the job.
Specifically, veteran flier Boeing and newcomer SpaceX will get the contracts. Boeing will be paid $4.2 billion and SpaceX $2.6 billion. The space agency hopes to launch the program in 2017.
SpaceX, the California-based baby of billionaire Elon Musk — the company’s full name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp. — is already delivering supplies to the space station. But the company “was not founded to bring T-shirts and food and water up to space; it was founded to bring people into space,” its program manager said last month.
That’s the spirit.
It’s a spirit, by the way, seldom seen at NASA. The agency that took Americans to the moon in 1969 is today hobbled by bureaucracy. A recent report faulted even its program of counting asteroids and comets.
The project required that NASA coordinate the efforts of various observatories to find and track space rocks that could pass near Earth, and the space agency fumbled the task.
Let’s hope it won’t fumble the next one. NASA hopes that once Boeing and SpaceX start ferrying astronauts to the space station, the government’s lumbering, decades-old space program can concentrate on boldly going where no one has gone before — to the asteroids and Mars.
Assuming, of course, that private companies don’t get there first.
— From the Northwest Florida Daily
