My first impression of Launch America was whether SpaceX cribbed the logo from Giorgio Armani? Even the nifty space suits looked like something the Italian fashion designer would come up with. Everything about the sleek Falcon spacecraft looked like it had been lifted from contemporary Italian design. Yet, for all its cutting edge look, there is nothing new under the hood. This is a typical rocket that used stages to thrust its spacecraft into orbit. The only difference is that the fuselage is recoverable, something NASA never worried about before.
This is supposed to save big bucks yet NASA paid $2.5 billion for this launch, roughly 30 times what it has been paying Russia to ferry its astronauts to the International Space Station. That's a yuge price to be able to say we don't need you anymore. Yet, we see both the President and Elon Musk gloating over the "historic launch." The only thing historic was the fact NASA contracted the launch to a private American company. Two cheers for SpaceX and one for a President in badly need of something positive to take everyone's mind off coronavirus and the riots spreading across the country.
The fact is this launch means virtually nothing. It's nice that we are no longer reliant on Russia to carry our astronauts to the space lab, but will humans ever conquer space? The short answer is no. The longest any human has stayed continually in space is 438 days, a record set by a Russian cosmonaut in the 1990s and never repeated since. Under current conditions, it would take three years to send and return an astronaut to Mars, which is more than two times longer than Valery Polyakov's record. Fact is humans are not compatible with zero-gravity or limited gravity conditions. We are essentially earthbound.
This means that NASA or any space agency would be better served sending robots into space. They don't need Armani spacesuits or any life support systems. They can function for years in most hostile conditions, as we have seen with the Mars rover. We as humans will never get beyond our solar system. We may never get to Mars, despite Elon Musk's many assurances.
I know this sucks. We would love to think of ourselves aboard the Starship Enterprise boldly going to places no man has gone before, but it isn't in our genetic structure. Unless we find some unique way to teleport ourselves into other dimensions, we are stuck on earth. This is why the Obama administration showed little interest in human space travel. Money allocated to NASA was purely for research.
Granted, many of us hold onto the dream we can jettison our collapsing planet, but the only way to transport human life is through DNA, which may be replicated on other planets. Of course, we will need robots to transcribe this DNA into human form. So, yes we might have life after death, but it will be beyond any of our ken, and most likely not until well into the future, say two or three hundred years.
However, in the meantime we can dream. This is what we are good at, and no one likes to dream more than Elon Musk. He has all sorts of fantasies about us colonizing Mars, like in the 1960s space movies and serials, or like Disney showed in Tomorrowland. He thinks he has accomplished the first stage of this excellent adventure, even shading Russia on twitter, only to be shaded in response. Fact is he has done nothing new. All he has done is repackage space travel and profit substantially from it. He received a $750 million bonus from the SpaceX board. He should have shaded Jeff Bezos, who will have to wait until he gets a shot at sending astronauts to the moon.
But, it does take our mind off nasty events here on earth, if only momentarily. For one day, we were all glued to our television and computer screens as the countdown ticked toward takeoff at 3:22 Eastern Time. Everyone was on hand from Bill Nye to William Shatner to Neil Degrasse Tyson to tell us how important it was for the US space program. We can finally hold our head high after discontinuing our space shuttle program in 2011 and waiting nine long years for this magic day.
Trump himself was on hand to see Falcon take off, soaking in the moment as if he was personally responsible for this historic mission even though it had been planned long before he took office. For a brief moment, nothing else mattered.
Comments
Post a Comment