This week, when Americans on the ground saw the confusion of lost calculations and found the ballot, it was the part of America that made history: SpaceX and NASA launched four astronauts into orbit and capsized the SpaceX capsule with the International Space Station.
It was the first of six commercial astronauts purchased by NASA from the aerospace-manufacturing firm SpaceX, founded by explorer Elon Musk.
As I explain in my new book, America’s New Destiny in Space, we are now entering the third age of space travel. The first era came in the early 20th century, when men like Soviet rocket scientist Konstantin Tsilokovsky and American engineer Robert Goddard wrote and thought about space flight and tinkered with small rockets.
After the age of command-economics of German-American engineers Werner von Braun and Soviet Sergei Korolev, the “Rocket Man” funded by deep government pockets proved that visionaries’ vision was available but expensive.
We are now entering a new phase, sustainable age. We are doing space projects powered by international tensions, such as Apollo, or domestic politics, like the space shuttle, because they offer economic value. And because they are getting cheaper, which makes the return on value easier.
It costs about $ 55,000 to launch a kilogram to orbit a space shuttle. To do the same on SpaceX’s Falcon 9, it only costs 7,700, about a -20m. Kasturi promises that it will be only 200 200 on his next craft, Starship.
Many things that are too expensive to make expensive 55,000 become profitable at 2,700 – and so even more so at 200 200. This is the kind of cost reduction we used to see in the electronics sector, but not in the heavy-metal world of rockets.
Reduced costs are already allowing SpaceX to launch the Starlink constellation of its global broadband-internet satellites, something that would not be affordable with shuttle prices.
At કિંમ 200 a kilo, everything from space hotels to planetary mining to colonies on the moon and Mars is possible. There is a huge amount of energy and material in space, but you have to get there to take advantage of it. It’s getting too cheap to get there now.
A friend on Facebook compared this week’s SpaceX flight to the first Air Mail flight on May 15, 1918 – although appropriate, the space launch proceeded more smoothly: this time, no gas was lost or lost. But the comparison is fair.
In the old airmail program of the 1920s, the U.S. government did not build its own aircraft; She used to pay people to fly mail, and pay them more when they use a better plane.
With this incentive, the industry quickly took a learning curve, from Curtis Jenny to the first multi-engine aircraft used for the first mail flights that could cross the continent in a short period of time. And the cost of doing so went down with experience.
A small amount of federal spending, to buy a product of its own value from the private economy, provided incentives for a whole new industry, and cemented American dominance in aviation. The same thing will happen here if we continue on our current path. (And SpaceX isn’t the only pay-per-view firm: lesser-known companies like Jeff Bezos Blue Origin, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Sierra Nevada and Rocket Lab are also trying to launch low-cost space launches).
It raises the question of politics: will we continue to see this kind of progress under the Biden administration?
No one knows, but the chances are very good. Aside from creating a space force, the Trump administration’s space policy was also a continuation of the Obama administration. Recognizing President Trump’s much-discussed executive order that U.S. citizens may have property rights to resources developed on the moon, Asteroids was only enforced by a law passed under President Barack Obama in 2015 and signed by him.
So there is reason for hope. As most of the news focuses on the 2020 gallows version, look to the sky, and realize that some parts of America are still working; A brighter future still hints.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and the founder of the InstaPandit.com blog.
.
