Space Travel Makes a Transition

Today at 16:33 Eastern USA time, Space-X is due to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It’s the first crewed space flight from a USA launchpad since the Space Shuttle retired in 2011. This is the first time a commercial company is launching a rocket to carry crew into orbit.

That’s tremendously important. If you have listened to one of my talks about working in the American space program, you know why. If you are only listening to something like this morning’s BBC Radio 4 coverage, they’re missing the main point.

On Radio 4, a pundit carried on about commercial flights into space relieving national space programs of the cost of launching. The presenter tried to pull a better answer forward, eventually becoming un-Britishly direct by pointing out that government programs will have to buy seats on those flights. Taxpayers will still pay for the flights.

The pundit then shifted only slightly, saying that having commercial companies do the flights will introduce competition and drive prices down. That missed the main point again. Right now only one commercial company, Space-X, is able to even attempt to rocket people into outer space. Boeing hopes to catch up soon. Virgin Galactic is next.

Capitalist competition may drive prices down, but only after there are enough companies in the field to make it no longer a semi-monopoly. It’s possible for a national space program to drive prices down faster. India has shown us that with its satellites.

Shifting launches of crew as well as cargo to commercial spacecraft does relieve national space programs of the burden of doing the work involved. That can allow a program to focus more tightly on research, which is better suited to government endeavors. Research in outer space is expensive and difficult, and there is no way to predict what it will turn up or how anyone might ever be able to make money from it. The discoveries in space that make the biggest impact on humanity often do so by advancing our foundational knowledge of the planet and the universe we live in.

But this shift to commercial space transportation does not make more rocket scientists available. There are only a certain number of people in the world who have the training, attitude and experience for such work. Some of them now work for Space-X or Boeing or Virgin Galactic instead of for NASA or a direct NASA contractor. A whole new cadre of them didn’t magically pop into existence.

So what’s the main point? Why is today’s launch so important?

Up to now, travel into space has been a grand new venture so big that only governments and extremely wealthy individuals can attempt it. Today marks the moment when space travel transitions to being more accessible. It marks the moment when the expertise to do it has spread out enough for people to ride into space on a rocket built and operated by a company instead of a government.

Looking at the history of airplane flight makes the importance of this moment crystal clear. For a long time, airplanes were the province of only government military operations and an elite few people who took crazy personal risks with leading edge science. Now we have many commercial airlines.

Space travel is in the transition that air flight made when commercial airlines formed and began to fly. We know what came next. Commercial competition pushed for lower costs, but didn’t make them happen. The key to making air travel so much more readily available to so many more people was the spread of knowledge and understanding about how it works. The more minds we turn to something, the more ideas we produce and the faster we advance that field.

We don’t just have airlines now. We have many private pilots. It’s even possible to build your own one or two seat airplane at home, or fly a microlight for fun. That’s how many people we have who really understand how to fly in air.

I look at today’s flight schedule and hope fervently for its success. But it isn’t just another crewed space flight. It’s the pivot point for the entire field of space exploration. And after we have commercial spacelines, maybe some of us will one day build our own spaceship, because that’s how many people we’ll have who really understand how to do it.

As I said, launch is scheduled for 16:33 Eastern USA time. That’s 21:33 London time. If you are in the UK, you can watch the launch or you can step outside to see the International Space Station pass overhead at about 21:30. Then about 15 to 20 minutes later, Brits should be able to see the Space-X rocket pass overhead on its way to catch up with ISS. Most of the UK has great weather for it.