{"id":116299,"date":"2020-11-20T03:32:13","date_gmt":"2020-11-20T00:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/why-the-spacex-ferry-just-truly-launched-a-new-space-age\/"},"modified":"2020-11-20T03:32:13","modified_gmt":"2020-11-20T00:32:13","slug":"why-the-spacex-ferry-just-truly-launched-a-new-space-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/why-the-spacex-ferry-just-truly-launched-a-new-space-age\/","title":{"rendered":"#Why the SpaceX ‘ferry’ just truly launched a new Space Age"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Why the SpaceX ‘ferry’ just truly launched a new Space Age<\/strong>”
\n<\/p>\n

\n This week, while Americans on the ground saw the \u00adembarrassment of lost counts and found ballots, a part of America that works was making history: SpaceX and NASA launched four astronauts into orbit and docked the \u00adSpaceX capsule Resilience with the International Space Station.<\/p>\n

It was the first of six commercial astronaut launches that NASA has purchased from \u00adSpaceX, the aerospace-manufacturing firm founded by the inventor Elon Musk.<\/p>\n

As I explain in my new book, \u201cAmerica\u2019s New Destiny in Space<\/a>,\u201d we are now entering a third age of space travel<\/a>. The first age came in the early 20th century, when men like Soviet rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and American engineer Robert Goddard wrote and thought about space flight and tinkered with small rockets.<\/p>\n

That was followed by the command-economy age of the German-American engineer Wernher von Braun and the Soviet Sergei Korolev, when \u201crocket men\u201d funded by deep government pockets proved that the visionaries\u2019 visions were attainable but expensive.<\/p>\n

Now we are entering into a new phase, the sustainable age. We have gone from space projects driven by international tensions, like Apollo, or domestic politics, like the Space Shuttle, to things being done because they return economic value. And because they\u2019re getting cheaper, which makes the return of value easier.<\/p>\n

To launch a kilogram to orbit on the Space Shuttle cost almost $55,000. To do the same thing on SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 costs a mere $2,700, roughly one-20th as much. Musk is promising that it will be a mere $200 on his next craft, the Starship.<\/p>\n

A lot of things that are too expensive to do at $55,000 become profitable at $2,700 \u2014 and even more do so at $200. These are the kinds of cost reductions we are used to seeing in the electronics field, but not in the heavy-metal world of rockets<\/p>\n

The lowered costs are already allowing SpaceX to launch its Starlink constellation of global broadband-Internet satellites, something that would have been unaffordable at Shuttle prices.<\/p>\n

At $200 a kilo, all sorts of things \u00adbecome possible, from space \u00adhotels to asteroid mining to settlements on the moon and Mars. Space holds huge amounts of energy and materiel, but to take advantage of them, you have to get there. It\u2019s now becoming a lot cheaper to get there.<\/p>\n

A friend on Facebook<\/a> compared this week\u2019s SpaceX flight with the first Air Mail flight on May 15, 1918 \u2014 though, to be fair, the space launch went much more smoothly: This time, \u00adnobody ran out of gas or got lost. But the comparison is apt.<\/p>\n

In the old Air Mail program of the 1920s, the US government didn\u2019t build its own airplanes; it paid people to fly the mail, and paid them more when they used better airplanes.<\/p>\n

With this \u00adincentive, the industry rapidly moved up the learning curve, going from the Curtiss Jenny used for the first mail flights to big multi-engine planes that could cross a continent in a relatively short span. And the cost of \u00addoing so went down with experience.<\/p>\n

A small amount of federal spending, purchasing a product valuable in itself from the private economy, provided the impetus for a whole new industry, and \u00adcemented American dominance in aviation. The same thing will happ<\/a>en here, if we continue on our present path. (And SpaceX isn\u2019t the only firm: Other companies like Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and less-famous ones like \u00adSierra Nevada and Rocket Lab are also pursuing lower-cost space launches).<\/p>\n

That raises the question of politics: Will we continue to see this sort of progress under a Biden administration?<\/p>\n

Nobody knows, but the chances are pretty good. Aside from creating the Space Force, the Trump administration\u2019s space policy was pretty much a continuation of the Obama administration\u2019s. Even President Trump\u2019s much-discussed executive order recognizing that US citizens could have property rights in resources they develop on the moon and asteroids was merely an implementation of a statute passed under, and signed by, President Barack Obama in 2015.<\/p>\n

So there\u2019s reason for hope. As most of the news<\/a> continues to focus on 2020\u2019s version of hanging chads, look up to the sky, and realize that some parts of America still work; a bright future still beckons.<\/p>\n

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog. <\/em><\/p>\n

pundit@instapundit.com\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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“#Why the SpaceX ‘ferry’ just truly launched a new Space Age” This week, while Americans on the ground saw the \u00adembarrassment of lost counts and found ballots, a part of America that works was making history: SpaceX and NASA launched four astronauts into orbit and docked the \u00adSpaceX capsule Resilience with the International Space Station….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":116300,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/49964351737_NASA_SpaceX_Trump.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[80599,26099,5026,67907,5019,70678],"class_list":["post-116299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-11-19-20","tag-america","tag-nasa","tag-science","tag-space","tag-spacex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}