SpaceX on Sunday (early morning India time) launched four astronauts to the international space station (ISS) on the first full-fledged taxi flight for American space agency the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) by a private company.
The Falcon9 rocket took off from Kennedy Space Centre with three Americans and one Japanese, the second crew to be launched by SpaceX. The Dragon capsule on top, named Resilience by the crew in light of this year’s many challenges, most notably Covid-19, was due to reach the space station late Monday and remain there until spring.
Almost two years after SpaceX launched a mannequin in a spacesuit seated in a Tesla Roadster aboard a Falcon Heavy testflight, the company owned by billionaire Elon Musk launched four living astronauts to the ISS.
“This is truly a commercial launch vehicle,” Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, said during a post-launch news conference, “and we’re grateful to our partners at SpaceX for providing it.”It is expected that in the future space travel won’t just be limited to rockets launched by NASA or other governments and anyone with the means to afford it can take off for infinity and beyond. While that might not be true to the letter, the world’s first commercial space voyage does open up a host of possibilities for the future of space race.
Elon Musk’s push for space exploration
In 2016, Musk shocked the world when he made public his plans to one day colonise Mars. Musk had a vision – sometime in the next decade humans will travel to Mars and become a “multiplanetary species”.
“Someday soon, there will be an extinction event on Earth,” the billionaire had said at a SpaceX event, adding, “We want to make Mars seem possible in our lifetimes”. To that end, SpaceX soon released detailed videos explaining how they would accomplish interplanetary travel and on this Sunday brought their plans to fruition by sending to the ISS the world’s first commercial spaceflight.
A report by financial services company Jeffries detailed SpaceX logged $2 billion in launch revenue. In total, Jefferies estimated these rockets brought in about $8 billion in revenue in 2018. The report also stated that Musk’s company is the frontrunner for a lucrative contract under the military’s National Security Space Launch program in 2020, and officials will name two companies to launch five years of government satellites.
Till date, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets have succeeded in delivering multiple cargo payloads to orbit.
Other players vying for space travel
Much like Musk, the billionaire founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, too harbours dreams of space travel. His company Blue Origin was established in 2000 and is scheduled to launch its maiden voyage for flying wealthy patrons above the 62 mile altitude, considered to be the beginnings of outer space, so they can experience weightlessness for a few moments.
Bezos alos plans to build a moon lander for NASA astronauts and eventually commercialise space for millions of people to live and work. Another well-known individual with space plans of his own is Virgin Atlantic’s Richard Branson. Branson’s project suffered a tragic setback in 2014 when their test flight failed, killing the pilot and severely injuring the co-pilot.
Musk, Branson, and Bezos have talked about watching NASA’s moon landing as the inspiration behind their space explorations. They were the generation that watched man land on the moon but since then NASA’s advancement in space exploration has been very limited, nothing groundbreaking has happened, and now these men with means are looking to Mars and beyond.
Nasa’s support for private players
None of their ambitions could, however, be realised without the support of NASA which they received when Republican party backed Jim Bridenstine, a member of Congress in Oklahoma, took office as the space agency’s administrator in 2018. He told the Washington Post in an interview that NASA will end up saving money by “leveraging private industry capacity, innovation, and competitiveness”.The proposition raised alarm in Democrats and in the rest of the world.
Concerns of the international community
The ISS, as the space station is commonly known, is till now the largest man-made object ever to orbit the Earth. NASA, the Russian space agency, and 13 other countries built and run it jointly. Astronauts have lived aboard the ISS continuously since November 2000. It has no commercial viability, does not generate profit, and costs an enormous sum of money to build. The current plans for privatised expansion have irked Kremlin who do not look at NASA’s privatisation drive, calling it “unacceptable”.
Right now, there are two laws governing space – the 1967 UN Resolution that prohibits the placing of nuclear weapons in space, and a Federal Aviation Authority law that disallows the use of systems that have previously failed. Both are lacking in detail, which is a cause for widespread concern.