The state of space

I read enough science fiction to know it isn’t the future until we’re in space.

We have our information age and our years that start with 2, but we’re still stuck down here in the ol’ gravity well. Weren’t we supposed to be well on our way to the stars, or at least the planets we can see from here, by 2001? What happened to the cool space station spinning to the Blue Danube?

Coincidentally, Slate V recently posted this Explainer about if we’re ever finishing our own actual space station:

Photo by Matthew Bradley

For further explication on “Blame the shuttles,” the most memorable web resource is Maciej Cegłowski’s article A Rocket to Nowhere.

As one might expect with even as limber a government agency as NASA, not much has changed in two years: the gouge in the foam tiles under the Endeavour when it landed on the 21st with no new disaster have prompted only “modest changes.”

Cegłowski further describes the current state of affairs in the closely following Meanwhile, Back in Space:

It is likely, therefore, that the next decade will open with a Space Chase (the inevitable name), as China attempts to develop a space program from scratch faster than the United States can dust off its forty-year-old blueprints. … There may even be a pad 3, some kind of unholy alliance of Europeans, Russians, and Objectivist billionaires, flying a composite rocket powered by the sheer force of the market.

My main interest in the topic is fueled by this talk from TED by Burt Rutan, founder of SpaceShipOne creator Scaled Composites.

He theorizes the state of the art in one’s childhood influences interest; I was at that particular school age where we were watching Challenger because Christa McAuliffe was there, wow, a schoolteacher going into space. I think we weren’t actually watching it, but we huddled into another classroom with a tv shortly after when the news got out. Challenger means space to many people who were adults, too, especially Florida teachers—who saw another of their own fly in that recently returned Endeavour mission.

Ron Howard is only a decade younger than Rutan, and obviously influenced by the same era of aeronautics as he. Not only did Howard make Apollo 13, but now he’s helping promote the new documentary about the Apollo missions, In the Shadow of the Moon. (See the trailer in HD.) While a single documentary can’t spark many minds in their formative era now, it can help, and the actual work being done by Rutan and his compatriots just may.

I’ve learned from my work in internet services that the key to staying alive and available is redundancy: eliminate single points of failure. Assuming we avoid the near term environmental disaster we’ve created here on Earth—the biggest SPoF of all—making it into space is incredibly important to our future as a species. The devotion of the new pioneers of commercial space promises to keep the next few years of the process interesting, if not outright fruitful.