Sunday, April 11, 2010
Dawn of the commercial space age
Editorial commentary
Recent contributions
- Striving for civility
- Pesticide board's work will continue through merger
- Bugged over plan to exterminate pesticide board
- Heavy regulatory hand milks businesses
- Commentary archive
From the RoundTable blog
Read the latest entries
Jack Kennedy
Kennedy, of Wise, serves on the executive committee of the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority governing one of the four orbital launch capable commercial spaceports in America at Wallops Island.
Monday will mark the 49th anniversary of the first human to orbit Earth in space. That man's name was Yuri Garagin. Today, he serves as an international symbol of the human quest. He is feted annually with Cosmonaut's Day and Yuri's Night globally.
Since that day in 1961, more than 500 human beings have trained and escaped the upper atmosphere, crossing the so-called Karman Line to outer space. Men and women of numerous nationalities have been to space on vehicles built by Russian, American and Chinese governments. Hundreds more are destined to do likewise.
Only 24 humans orbited the moon between 1969 and 1972 aboard Apollo; 12 set foot on the lunar surface. It may well be at least another decade, if then, before humans set foot back on what scientists are now finding to be a resource-rich lunar surface known to harbor water and other important minerals for some future development there.
But on Thursday, President Barack Obama will articulate a new national space policy in what may be, in many ways, as bold as that cast by the late President John F. Kennedy in September 1962 at Rice University. The president will chart a new course for the federal space agency at the Kennedy Space Center, impacting not only the jobs of thousands of space workers in Florida, Alabama, Texas and Utah, but the destiny of this nation and other nations of Earth that look to the United States for leadership in space.
Like many Americans who believe in the bold endeavors of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration but who were taken aback when the president canceled the so-called Constellation Program to return Americans to the moon prior to 2020, we are now required to listen to the national space policy debate and take time for careful reflection and more-than-passing consideration.
The space shuttle is a marvel of technology and engineering, but it is nearly 40 years old and only flight capable a short-sighted distance of some 200 to 300 miles about the Earth. It was 1972 when the last human-rated spacecraft made the 250,000 mile journey to the moon, since that time, American space technology has left astronauts going ad nauseam in circles above us, going nowhere into deep space. We have been in human space exploration atrophy for more than 30 years.
Obama is at a turning point in American space policy and space-derived technology generation-skipping opportunities. The president's remarks on space policy will not be easy, indeed they will be hard for many. At the conclusion of 2010, no American-made spacecraft will be available to lift our astronauts from Earth for years. And we may bear witness to Chinese walking on the moon in the next 10 years.
Instead, this president will be making a significant bet on American private enterprise and ingenuity to return Americans to low Earth orbit and enable NASA astronauts and private citizens to go beyond. And, it will come from companies like Dulles-based Orbital Sciences Corp., Hawthorn, Calif.-based SpaceX and others. Americans will reach for the stars from Cape Canaveral and a little-known place called Wallops Island on Virginia's Eastern Shore, beginning as soon as 2016.
The challenge faced by the president is to redirect the federal space agency from an aging bureaucratic quagmire to the risk-taking, adventure-seeking enterprise culture of yesteryear again providing generation-skipping propulsion technology, energy-gathering systems and new biospheres for humans to travel stellar distances -- some 36 million to 50 million miles distant to the likes of Mars.
While disappointed in the probability that today's children and young adults under 40 will not see men and women walk on the surface of the moon in this decade, the trade-off is simple yet important.
Obama is trading an underfunded, behind-schedule moon program based on old technologies for a strong bet on American commercial enterprise. He is betting on the Internet generation, the so-called New Space crowd, with strong entrepreneurial skills and focused drive. They are the younger men and women who were raised with the can-do mantra of Old NASA; who as children sat on the living room carpet watching Captain Kirk on "Star Trek." Now turned middle-aged adults, many are building their own space boosters and capsules with their own millions made from their respective cyberspace enterprises. They are the children of Apollo and this generation's American dreamers.
Let us now recognize that space activities do encourage people to look up from their daily concerns and think more broadly about the future, a necessary action for everyone everywhere. Today, we are confronted with the reality that NASA is in transformation and that commercial enterprise space launch providers are on the rise; and they are on the rise from right here -- in Virginia.
Let NASA continue to set the science goals, but let us enable the commercial space launch sector to build space launch capacity to fulfill the dreams -- the dreams of enterprise, the dreams of the children of Apollo, the dream of every human who looks upward to the New Frontier in the commercial space age.
