Each generation reinvents space as the cosmic frontier, in the age of Gagarin
and Shepard, test pilots grinned into the TV cameras to prove that they were made
from the right stuff and in 2018 orbital space is becoming the playground for
billionaire entrepreneurs turning their childhood dreams into reality.
In this picture the administrators at NASA are the dull old guys in the
background dishing out most of the government money to established
aerospace contractors always seem to be under delivering and be behind schedule.
Despite the billions of dollars in funding, so the story goes,
NASA has let us down by failing to build interplanetary spaceships or lunar bases
and no offworld colonies have been established to protect us against
accidental extinction but is it true that NASA works too slowly and if so why
haven't they been beaten to the punch already. Where are the privately funded
spaceships or orbital stations. SpaceX's Elon Musk apparently believes
his company can beat NASA to a manned landing of Mars but he's not the first to
have such grand ambitions. A closer look at the relationship between NASA and
private enterprise in America reveals that there is much more than a two horse
race to the Red Planet. Although space history sometimes feels
like a series of giant leaps the small steps that appear on our screens are
largely selected to be good PR and marketing rather than a reflection of
the current aerospace technology. NASA is 60 years old this year
but its annual budget depends on what it can deliver within each 4-year cycle of
American politics. Even if a president expects two terms in office any NASA
project that takes longer than eight years to get results will either heap
glory on his or her political opponents or face cancellation president. John F
Kennedy's commitment to send astronauts to the moon took seven years to achieve
even with funding at eight times what it is today. The Space Shuttle also known as
the Space Transportation System was in planning when the first manned Apollo
missions flew in 1968 and 69. By the early 1970s public support for expensive
projects was fading and the Space Shuttle faced cancellation. To save the
project NASA redesigned the reusable orbiter to be
able to fly both civilian and airforce missions, the result was that the shuttle
became hugely complicated cumbersome and expensive. When the first missions began
in 1981 when Ronald Reagan entered office, the launch schedule was much slower than
planned the promised weekly flights became an average of just four missions
per year but by today's standards that seems like a decent turnaround. NASA's
shuttle required the precise coordination of advanced subsystems
built by different contractors, the largest contributions came from the
famous names in aerospace and defense the orbiter was built in Palmdale
California by North American Rockwell, the engines were developed by Aerojet
Rocketdyne, the external tank was built by Marty Marietta and the ill-fated
solid rocket boosters with a responsibility of Morton Thiokol. If the
Space Shuttle had been built by any one corporation it would have probably put
them out of business but through NASA the US government was able to fund an
unlikely combination of technologies using the power of the world's largest
economy. In those terms the shuttle program was a success building flying
and servicing a pioneering launch system over three decades but to its critics
the compromised design made every mission a disaster waiting to happen. At
the beginning of a 21st century the shuttle was shown its age and a new
launch vehicle was desperately needed but the development was as you've
guessed it progressing even more slowly than ever. In February 2003 the orbiter
Columbia was destroyed on re-entry costing the lives of its seven crew
members. America's space program was grounded for two years whilst a thorough
investigation was carried out. Meanwhile in California a small team of aerospace
engineers were fine-tuning their own reusable space plane which were about to
make world news. Burt Rutan's company Scaled Composites was competing for the
Ansari X Prize worth $10 million to the
first non-government organization to launch a spacecraft above 100 kilometers
altitude twice within two weeks. On September 29th and October the 4th 2004
Rutan's SpaceShipOne launched from white knight to 102km and then a 115km
flying higher than a record set by the X-15 40 years earlier
and enabling spaceship one to win the Ansari X PRIZE. British entrepreneur Sir
Richard Branson immediately set out to turn spaceship one into a commercial
ride into space announcing plans for a spaceport in Mojave Desert.
Branson initially said that his new company Virgin Galactic would begin
suborbital flights in 2007 but soon revised the date back to 2009 seats
began selling fast at a cool $250,000 each, Branson also managed to
secure vast sums in private funding including almost $300 million
from Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. However behind the scenes development
was progressing slowly on the engine. For the updated spaceship to a high test
based peroxide rocket motor built by the aerospace company Sierra Nevada
skepticism about Virgins ambitious schedule intensified in October 2014
when disaster struck a test flight of the VSS enterprise whilst passing the
speed of sound the Feather mechanism on a SpaceShipTwo - was deployed too early and
the VSS Enterprise broke up at an altitude of 50,000 feet and one of the pilots
Michael Ellsbury was killed. The accident was a catastrophe not least for
Branson's attempt to market spaceship - as the future of space tourism. Despite
major changes in the design Virgin Galactic has shifted focus to more
modest projects such as its small static launch system using a modified Boeing
747. The era of new space was underway but for dangers were as real as they had
been for the whole history of manned space flight. On the 21st of July 2011
the space shuttle Atlantis touched down for the last time at the Kennedy Space
Center in Florida leaving America without a manned space vehicle. This
embarrassing gap in capability would leave NASA dependent upon the Russians
for getting its astronauts to and from the ISS and the Russians were making the
most out of the situation. In 2008 when the shuttle was still around Roscosmos
charged NASA $21.6 million per seat but after the
shuttle was retired that price went up dramatically. The cost of a seat on the
Russian Soyuz, a fifty-year-old expendable vehicle but had outlived all
of its competitors in 2018 is now $81 million. NASA's next-generation
Launch System was also shaping up to be a combination of two retired systems. An
Apollo type command module atop of a shuttle style orange fuel tank boosted
by two solid fuel Rockets adapted from the Ares rocket cancelled from the
constellation program. The new rocket went by the no frills name of a Space Launch
System or SLS. At 111 metres the evolved SLS will be just a bit taller than the
Saturn 5 but more powerful and able to lift a 130 tons to low
Earth orbit. The SLS will launch no sooner than 2019 beginning with block 1
which will begin with a capacity of 70 tons payload including the manned
Orion module to low-earth orbit. Boeing is commissioned to build the core stage
powered by four RS-25 engines upgraded by Aerojet Rocketdyne to provide four
418,000 pounds of thrust a 5% increase in power
from when they last flew on the space shuttle. New solid rocket boosters under
development at the same company that built them for the shuttle Orbital ATK
have been upgraded from four segments in the shuttle boosters to a new five
segment design. The SLS upper stage were also upgrade from existing technology
United Launch Alliance's Delta 5 second stage and adapting it to become
the interim cryogenic propulsion stage using a single RL-10 engine to lift the
payload into orbit. the RL-10 engines first saw service in 1962 making it
America's oldest liquid hydrogen rocket engine. When the block 1b launches in
2022, according to current plans it will be upgraded to the larger exploration
upper stage increasing the payload capacity 105 tons to low Earth orbit
using four RL-10 C3 engines and by then the RL-10 will be a sixty-year-old
design. In the race to the moon and mars the tortoise may eventually beat the
hare. Taking NASA's approach Jeff Bezos chose the motto for Blue Origin
Gradatim Ferociter which means step by step ferociously. To illustrate the
company's coat of arms bears a pair of giant tortoises on either side of
America climbing upwards from Florida and California towards other worlds
Bezos's company has benefited from NASA investing in slow incremental
development not least in the way this has nurtured expertise in reliable
proven technologies. Engineers and technicians from the big defense and
aerospace companies have been persuaded to move to SpaceX from blue origin with
lucrative salaries and the glamorous image of the new space movement. wherever
these engineers and scientists are based NASA Awards funding in much the same way
as he always has by backing proposals from the strongest competitors and
although Elon Musk is more famous for putting crash-test dummies into orbit
than writing mottos his company SpaceX has also steadily iterated their fly
back boosters towards the rapidly reusable block 5 due to launch for the
first time in may 2018. With a billionaire entrepreneur part funding
the project spectacular rapid unscheduled disassemblies have been more
exceptabtle from a SpaceX brand than they would have been
for ones like Lockheed Martin or Boeing whose reputation for reliability depends
upon avoiding the bad press of an exploding test flight. This is the real
benefit that emerges from a new partnership of public and private space
organizations. NASA can be both fast and slow supporting speculative technologies
through companies like SpaceX whose PR machine can turn a string of failures
into a viral blooper reel. When private space tourism takes off the world will
be watching and we can only hope that the spacecraft will be a reliable step
forward rather than a dangerous detour on the way to a wider access to orbit.
After the first well-publicized flights the likelihood is that there will be
more demand for out-of-this-world transport than any one company can meet
a reputation for safety will win more customers than the boasts of those who
cross the line first