Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing.
It’ll be an occasion to look back, but also forward to the future of manned spaceflight.
There’ll be talk of a new dawn for space exploration. Expect particular reference to private companies, such as Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and XCOR, competing to pioneer space tourism.
There’ll also be some wild speculation about the race to get to Mars.
In a sobering essay for Quillette, Philip Backman exposes the whole enterprise to the hard vacuum of reality.
Let’s start with this space tourism business, where almost all of the progress made so far has been in regard to sub-orbital as opposed to orbital flight:
“Many may not be aware of the mighty gulf that exists between sub-orbital and orbital flight. To the uninitiated they seem very similar; a suborbital ride is over quickly but both make it to space. A closer look, however, reveals the shocking difference. Suborbital vehicles reach a speed near one kilometers per second at the time of rocket engine shut down, and because of this, they remain in space for only minutes. For low altitude orbital flight, at that same point, speed is only slightly shy of eight kilometers per second.”
And that’s not all – Backman explains that because the ‘energy of motion’ is proportional to the square of velocity, “suborbital spacecrafts can only achieve a paltry one to three percent of the kinetic energy acquired by other similar sized vehicles propelled into a continuous circular orbit”.
It’ll certainly take a ‘giant leap’ before we commercialise proper manned spaceflight.
But what about Elon Musk and his SpaceX initiative? The Falcon Heavy rocket – a partially reusable orbital launch system – had a very successful maiden flight only last month. As pictured on every front page in the world, its payload was a Tesla Roadster (another one of Elon Musk’s groundbreaking products) – with a dummy astronaut as its ‘driver’. All brilliant stuff – and brilliant PR – but, as the cynics point out, NASA put a car on the moon in 1971 together with some real astronauts to drive it.
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SubscribeAnd I would add to Polly’s list: charities and churches – where so much of the under-cover support of people in every kind of need takes place. Not a popular view, but true all the same.
charities and churches are the precursors of cookie cutter policies, unfortunately.