Crossing the River

It has often been remarked that Outer Space (spelled always with capital letters) isn’t actually that far away from where you are sitting right now. Low Earth Orbit, where you will find the International Space Station (and where until recently you would have found Space Shuttles) is closer to my house than Los Angeles is; in fact I’m closer to much of it than I am to Chicago. What’s remarkable isn’t the distance so much as the speed – even a low orbit requires getting up to a velocity relative to the surface of the Earth that most people will never experience, which in turn requires an inconveniently large rocket and an equally inconvenient place from which to launch it. When I was a child, the concept of commercial space flight was preposterous nonsense; the stuff of bad science fiction and obviously centuries or millennia away. It took the full authority and resources of the world’s two most powerful nations just to go to space, and even if smaller countries were able to duplicate that feat, there was no way any private citizen could…

Of course, we’ve heard similar statements made about a great many other achievements, including one with which you are probably using to read this blog post (assuming that anyone is reading this blog post). Still, there remains something daunting about commercial space flights. Of course, Sir Richard Branson can launch Virgin Galactic; he’s Sir Richard Branson, after all, and Space Ship One and Space Ship Two are just sight-seeing excursion craft. Sure, Space-X managed to get a commercial cargo ship into orbit, but that’s also a company owned and run by extraordinary people, and it’s still only one company. Sure, Boeing could develop a new private space launcher, but they’re one of the largest defense contractors in the world, and they’re using serious money from NASA to fund the project. And sure, there’s Sierra Nevada Corporation, and its Space Exploration Systems division, as mentioned in a previous post. So, let me ask you, how many private companies have to go to space before we stop making these excuses?

Well, if you said five, your ship appears to have just come in – and it looks like it’s a spaceship. A Google News listing takes us to a story on the International Business News site about the Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Cygnus spacecraft, which able to dock with the International Space Station on Sunday morning. Actually, “dock” may be overstating the case; the Cygnus was launched into orbit where it managed to get close enough to the space station (and match velocities well enough) for the crew to snag it with the robot arm and bring it in. But since that’s the same way every other kind of unmanned ship docks with the station, maybe that isn’t important. And while it’s true that the Cygnus isn’t certified for human transportation yet, which makes it more of a high-speed cargo pod than an actual space ship, the company expects to work out the remaining details and start transporting people to the station by the end of its contract in 2016…

But what is truly amazing about the Cygnus is that it was made by a private company for a contract with NASA to carry about 20,000 kilos (44,093 pounds) of cargo into space on eight different flights over a four-year period – and so far it looks as though the company is actually going to complete its end of the contract. And while $90,000 per kilo – about $41,000 a pound – from the surface of the Earth to the Space Station still isn’t cheap, it’s already much lower than the prices you would have encountered just a few years ago – and still falling. If actual competition were to appear – if every company and every national government interested in transporting cargo into space were to start getting multiple bids on every contract they set up – then fantasy has become fact once again, and within our own lifetimes may actually become commonplace…

In one lifetime my grandparents watched our world go from biplanes made of wood and fabric to the Space Shuttle, our top speed go from 30 or 40 mph to 25,000, and flight itself go from a suicidal curiosity to a routine part of our world. In my lifetime I have already seen us move from vacuum tubes to nanotechnology and from magnetic tape to cloud computing. And in the past five years we have seen the number of private companies going into space rise from zero to three, with at least two more to follow in the next year or two. What will we come to regard as commonplace by the time I am old man? And, even more to the point, what impossible, fantastical, preposterous rubbish will become reality by then?