Space Cats!
Yesterday was "Hug Your Cat Day". Or rather one of many. Seems there's no consensus on which day to celebrate. May 12? May 28? June 4 is a pretty common day and perhaps most appropriate as June is also Adopt-a-Cat month . In any case, if you didn't take care of business, do it ASAP. We don't want any trouble.
And what does that have to do with space? Precious little. However, PayPal co-founder Elon Musk's SpaceX Corporation successfully launched their Falcon 9 rocket into orbit today. While there were no cats aboard, it did carry a mock-up of the company's Dragon spacecraft intended to deliver cargoes this year and eventually crews to the International Space Station.
Space X is one of a number of private companies vying to launch both tourists and working crews into space over the next few years, filling the void left by the retirement of the Space Shuttle later this year. My personal favorite is SpaceDev's Dream Chaser. Now based on the HL-20 lifting body, the original design was from NASA's largely completed X-34. It's the closest to the X-38 foolishly canceled in 2002. An eighty-percent complete flight prototype sits at Johnson Spaceflight Center in Houston wasting away, scraped to save money. Now, instead of having a functioning craft to replace the Shuttle, America has a gap in its manned space program and billions more spent on a now-abandoned Orion capsule. The one hope: Privately developed space travel.
The history of science fiction until the 1960's, is filled with tales of private individuals, scientists or businessmen, building their own spaceships and flying, be it by cannon or cavorite, to the Moon or beyond. No government financing, no military alliances. Up to the dawn of the Space Age with novels like Robert Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950) and films based on his work, Destination Moon (also 1950), the concept of the rugged individual held sway, despite the increasing control over the technology by the military in both the United States and the Soviet Union. With the Space Race, the concept faded somewhat, popping up now and again in various forms such as the short-lived Salvage 1 television series and novels like John Varley's Red Thunder . Each of those used a miraculous technological breakthrough, like Wells' cavorite, to allow a junkyard owner and a group of teenagers with a washed-up astronaut to travel to the Moon and Mars respectively.
In the real world, that never happened. Business firms worked as contractors and subcontractors on the big space projects of the government, projects run by committee and divided between districts across the country to insure Congressional support. Scientists the functionaries. Private space initially came in the form of commercial communications and weather satellites. Any manned proposals were for government consumption, evolutions and successors to Apollo. Indeed, in the United States, businesses were blocked from developing launch capabilities by laws forcing commercial satellite launches onto the Shuttle until President Reagan signed the Commercial Space Launch Act in 1984. The previous thinking was part of the desperate moves to justify the program's costs by making it the end-all-and-be-all of American spaceflight. That everything to everyone approach ultimately resulted in a system which could never meet its promised capabilities and killed fourteen astronauts. The 1990 Launch Services Purchase Act further simulated the private launch market.
While a private satellite launch capability grew, there was little movement on the manned side. Why? I'd suggest there was no market until very recently. No one, private or public, had the finances or motivation for a trip to the Moon and as far as LEO, the only destinations were Mir (until it was deorbited) and the ISS, both served sufficiently by Soyuz and Shuttle. The advent of space tourists flown by the Russians aboard Soyuz and the Ansari X-Prize stimulated the development of prototypical systems by several firms, notably Scaled Composites Spaceship One effort, the eventual X-Prize winner. Technological advances and a demonstrable market, combined with the aging of the Shuttle system and the need for a replacement
And what does that have to do with space? Precious little. However, PayPal co-founder Elon Musk's SpaceX Corporation successfully launched their Falcon 9 rocket into orbit today. While there were no cats aboard, it did carry a mock-up of the company's Dragon spacecraft intended to deliver cargoes this year and eventually crews to the International Space Station.
Space X is one of a number of private companies vying to launch both tourists and working crews into space over the next few years, filling the void left by the retirement of the Space Shuttle later this year. My personal favorite is SpaceDev's Dream Chaser. Now based on the HL-20 lifting body, the original design was from NASA's largely completed X-34. It's the closest to the X-38 foolishly canceled in 2002. An eighty-percent complete flight prototype sits at Johnson Spaceflight Center in Houston wasting away, scraped to save money. Now, instead of having a functioning craft to replace the Shuttle, America has a gap in its manned space program and billions more spent on a now-abandoned Orion capsule. The one hope: Privately developed space travel.
The history of science fiction until the 1960's, is filled with tales of private individuals, scientists or businessmen, building their own spaceships and flying, be it by cannon or cavorite, to the Moon or beyond. No government financing, no military alliances. Up to the dawn of the Space Age with novels like Robert Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950) and films based on his work, Destination Moon (also 1950), the concept of the rugged individual held sway, despite the increasing control over the technology by the military in both the United States and the Soviet Union. With the Space Race, the concept faded somewhat, popping up now and again in various forms such as the short-lived Salvage 1 television series and novels like John Varley's Red Thunder . Each of those used a miraculous technological breakthrough, like Wells' cavorite, to allow a junkyard owner and a group of teenagers with a washed-up astronaut to travel to the Moon and Mars respectively.
In the real world, that never happened. Business firms worked as contractors and subcontractors on the big space projects of the government, projects run by committee and divided between districts across the country to insure Congressional support. Scientists the functionaries. Private space initially came in the form of commercial communications and weather satellites. Any manned proposals were for government consumption, evolutions and successors to Apollo. Indeed, in the United States, businesses were blocked from developing launch capabilities by laws forcing commercial satellite launches onto the Shuttle until President Reagan signed the Commercial Space Launch Act in 1984. The previous thinking was part of the desperate moves to justify the program's costs by making it the end-all-and-be-all of American spaceflight. That everything to everyone approach ultimately resulted in a system which could never meet its promised capabilities and killed fourteen astronauts. The 1990 Launch Services Purchase Act further simulated the private launch market.
While a private satellite launch capability grew, there was little movement on the manned side. Why? I'd suggest there was no market until very recently. No one, private or public, had the finances or motivation for a trip to the Moon and as far as LEO, the only destinations were Mir (until it was deorbited) and the ISS, both served sufficiently by Soyuz and Shuttle. The advent of space tourists flown by the Russians aboard Soyuz and the Ansari X-Prize stimulated the development of prototypical systems by several firms, notably Scaled Composites Spaceship One effort, the eventual X-Prize winner. Technological advances and a demonstrable market, combined with the aging of the Shuttle system and the need for a replacement
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