At our house, we’ve been watching Apple TV’s For All Mankind of late. It’s an alternate history of the U.S.-Russian Space Race of the 1960s (and beyond). The first season covers the first lunar landing, and the second deals with U.S. and Russian colonization of the Moon. The third and current season takes us to Mars (in 1994!!). Considering it has been a little over 50 years since the last Apollo mission departed the lunar surface on December 19, 1972, it’s fun to see a world in which we never took our foot off the gas pedal. By design, the show is a bit of a soap opera, but I’m a sucker for space, and the CGI is excellent.
Although I don’t remember the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, which kicked off the Space Race, I do recall seeing Echo 1 – a 100-foot Mylar balloon sent into orbit in 1960 – while standing in the front yard one night with my dad. As a school kid, I remember the excitement of the first suborbital flight of Alan Shepard and the first orbital flight of John Glenn. There was the first spacewalk of the Gemini program, the fiery tragedy of Apollo 1, and the success of Apollo 11. I dreamed of being an astronaut, inspired by TV shows like Disney’s Man In Space (youtu.be/WFXza9RH7-E) and the movie, Destination Moon.
The Space Race ended in 1969 when the United States reached the moon first, and U.S. manned space flight took a 12-year vacation. It was 1981 when we got back to space with the first Space Shuttle launch, and by then I was a computer programmer. But I’ve always followed the space program, and still get excited with each new milestone, even though many of them are being reached by unmanned missions. The James Webb Space Telescope sits a million miles from earth, an engineering marvel that takes photos which show the earliest galaxies, only 350 million years after the Big Bang. There is a helicopter scooting about on Mars. And, thanks to whoisinspace.com, I can tell you there are 10 people in space right now, seven aboard the International Space Station (ISS), and three on China’s Tiangong space station. One of those aboard the ISS is a North Bay native: Petaluma’s Nicole Mann.
Of course, space is no longer the sole province of national governments. Wikipedia has a long list of private spaceflight companies, from familiar names like SpaceX (Elon Musk) and Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos) to lesser-known entities such as RocketLabs and SpinLaunch. According to the Space Foundation in a report published last July, global spending on space reached nearly half a trillion dollars in 2021. And 2023 promises to be a big year for commercial space flight. First, SpaceX will join its Starship spacecraft to its Super Heavy first stage and make an attempt at orbital flight. United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed formed in 2006, will demonstrate its Vulcan Centaur system with the launch of Peregrine, a robotic lunar lander from another space startup, Astrobotic Technology. Finally, Blue Origin may launch its New Glenn heavy-launch system, although it has experienced a number of delays since its original target of 2020. These vehicles are all capable of lifting tens of tons into orbit.
All three of those companies make money by launching satellites into orbit. It’s a big business: 2022 saw 180 successful rocket launches to orbit—a record—and 44 more than in 2021. Of those 180, SpaceX was responsible for 61, driven in part by its need to place Starlink satellites in orbit as it expands their coverage of Earth. China launched 62 missions into orbit, and is aggressively pursuing spaceflight, specifically calling out industrial development in the Earth-Moon system. Although For All Mankind hypothetically paints our space competitors as the Russians, the real Russian space program is in decline. Russia had only 21 launches in 2021, and has announced plans to withdraw from the ISS in 2024. War is expensive.
The rise in launches per year has been accompanied by a steep drop in prices. The now-defunct Space Shuttle cost $1.6 billion to launch. Russia’s Soyuz launch vehicles currently cost between $53 million and $225 million. SpaceX charges $67 million for a Falcon Nine flight, and RocketLabs (nine launches in 2022) will charge you $5 million, although the payload is limited to 1,100 pounds. Getting things into orbit is the first step to the commercialization of space, so the growth in launches and the decline in costs are good signs.
NASA’s Artemis III mission hopes to put us back on the Moon in 2025. I may even live to see humans on Mars (hurry it up, guys!) since Elon Musk believes colonizing Mars is Plan B for our species in case we do something really stupid here on Earth and wipe out Homo sapiens on this planet. But the most exciting developments will likely be closer to home, developing new industries in Earth’s orbit.
