Thursday, November 24, 2005
THE RIGHT WAY TO SPACE
Today is Thanksgiving in the US. If all goes according to plan, we really will have something to be thankful for tomorrow. A relatively small start-up company called SpaceX plans to make the first launch of its Falcon 1 rocket tomorrow afternoon (US time) from a tiny atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Just as Burt Rutan developed SpaceShip One in relative obscurity before its first flight, PayPal's founder, Elon Musk, has been quietly writing checks and providing the vision to SpaceX, which has been steadily working on a new family of rockets. But unlike Rutan's program, which built a suborbital spaceplane, the first SpaceX rocket will achieve orbit on its first flight.
Like SpaceShip One, though, the SpaceX Falcon rocket program represents a revolutionary breakthrough in the most crucial element of space tehnology -- cost. If SpaceX succeeds, they will reduce the cost of access to space by a factor of ten. Such a huge quantitative reduction in cost will surely result in qualitative progress in what can be done in space.
Keep your fingers crossed.
Meanwhile, over at the wrong way to space, the closer you look for the cause of problems with the Space Shuttle, the more problems you find. Thus, the mounting costs of trying to keep the shuttle flying are strangling hopes that the US government space program can make a fresh new start. There is a cost-effective way to deal with these problems, which is to fly the remaining shuttle flights required to complete the space station WITHOUT A CREW. This two-part article from over two years ago explains how easy it would be to do this, and how much money would be saved if it were done. Will NASA take this relatively simple, safe and cost-cutting route? Not a chance.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:34 AM
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