Rocket Science

by Lauren Sukin

Chris Hadfield recently celebrated St. Patty’s in space. The Canadian astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) wore a green shirt and bow tie, snapped a space pic of Ireland that puts your Instagram to shame and recorded his own version of “Danny Boy.”

Hadfield is just one example of an individual in the new arena of aerospace. The industry, having emerged in the midst of the Cold War, is now a reinvented field: increasingly dynamic and increasingly privatized. America first began its space exploration program with the 1958 creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which has since carried Americans to the ISS and the moon and sent probes and satellites far into space. Though NASA is still unquestionably the great American space agency, it is now increasingly shifting the burden of human spaceflight to a new entity, the commercialized aerospace industry.

Young companies such as SpaceX, XCOR Aerospace and Space Expedition Corporation, Virgin Galactic and Orbital are just now taking off as symbols of American aerospace in their own right, making history as the first commercial enterprises to develop spacecraft and successfully enter into the marketplace of space travel.

As these companies have grown, the government has taken notice. The Federal Communications Commission has for the first time expanded its Experimental Authorization program to space exploration companies, which temporarily gives them access to use certain radio frequency bands in a program called Spectrum. This is a critical step to help with projects these companies are working on, but more importantly it is a key early development in what might become a long history of public–private cooperation on space and the first step by a non-NASA organization to encourage these corporations to succeed.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, a co-founder of both Tesla Motors and PayPal. The pet-project-turned-international-marvel develops and manufactures all of its parts in-house, employing a few ex-NASA engineers and a few fresh ones. Part of SpaceX’s stated goal is a permanent human colonization on Mars, but for now the company is just trying to pick up where NASA left off after Congress cut its human spaceflight program and canceled the U.S. Space Shuttle program.

Last year, SpaceX sent their innovative Dragon spacecraft up to the International Space Station — the first commercial spacecraft to dock on the ISS for a resupply mission, and the only commercial spacecraft to do so from any nation.  In fact, as of two years ago, only the European Space Agency and the governments of Japan, Russia and the United States had been able to reach the ISS. In October 2012, SpaceX’s Dragon capsule completed its first mission, and it has now begun regular resupply. Its most recent foray returned safely on March 26.

The company has a few different designs:  the Falcon Heavy, a launch-lift vehicle that can carry satellites into orbit and can handle twice the payload of the retired U.S. Space Shuttle, and the Falcon 1, a lighter-payload rocket that was the first liquid-fuel rocket designed by a commercial company to achieve orbit. Falcon Heavy, if everything goes as planned, will eventually be capable of lunar orbit missions, as well as Mars landings. That’s step one in Musk’s long-term plan.

SpaceX is part of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, a public-private partnership to encourage space technology innovation. NASA monitors the progress of these commercial industries, provides the legal flexibility for them to perform this sensitive work and pays companies for successful designs. What NASA doesn’t do is any of the design, development, manufacturing, testing or operation — meaning that, at least for human spaceflight, NASA is no longer the primary agency for technology creation.  Instead, NASA is taking a new role as the National Aerospace Supervision Agency, regulating commercial ventures such as SpaceX and contracting out to them work that used to be done in-house.

For example, in 2014 SpaceX will launch DSCOVR, a NASA environment-monitoring satellite, and in 2015 it will launch the satellites of another NASA partner, Iridium, which develops communication technology. SpaceX has launched satellites only into low Earth orbit so far but intends to put its first satellite into the higher and harder-to-reach geostationary orbit later this year. The company intends to use its rockets to launch commercial satellites from other corporations and governments as well, including public–private ventures in Argentina, Canada, Europe, Israel, Thailand and Taiwan. This is actually another step toward subsuming some of NASA’s responsibilities; in addition to launching American spacecraft, NASA has historically helped other nations’ space agencies deliver satellites.

Of course, SpaceX isn’t the only company trying to privatize space travel. Virginia-based Orbital is also working on human spaceflight and exploration technology, similarly focusing on ISS and lunar missions. It was recently awarded a contract with NASA to begin ISS resupply missions later this year. Its technology is slightly behind SpaceX’s but does show promise.

And XCOR Aerospace and Space Expedition Corporation has been making history by opening up the newest frontier in extraterrestrial commerce: space tourism. If you have $100,000 and want a 60-minute out-of-this-world trip — 5 minutes of which are weightless — you could spend next spring break in suborbital space with XCOR. As of press time, however, the company’s policy on tequila body shots remained unclear.  If you have $200,000 and want to space out for two hours, then an experience from Virgin Galactic, XCOR’s competitor, should be on your radar.

Following this privatization trend, some NASA projects have even split off to become commercial. One example is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, which uses radio technology to scan the universe for signs of intelligent life. SETI has caused a lot of controversy through the years, because no one knows whether our academic curiosity will turn space bugs from Starship Troopers, a planet full of happy space puppies or nothing at all.

Such uncertainty strikes at the heart of the matter: space is interesting, but we don’t know why we should care about it, other than that it’s big, complex and foreign. It’s hard to take aliens or Mars colonization seriously because they seem so intangible. So while we laugh when Newt Gingrich wants humans to live on the moon, in reality we are in fact working toward that, even if the 51st state of Moonlandia remains a far-off dream.

In the meantime, the private sector will keep on trying for a giant leap in human spaceflight technology. But even though the private sector is growing in size and influence, it currently still relies on NASA for money and access to technology, and NASA does serve a regulatory role as well, even for contract work. The real question might not be whether we can get to the moon as inhabitants but who should get us there. After all, if NASA is supposed to be in charge of space exploration for the United States, why is the American government putting astronauts from private companies on the ISS?

Like most things in politics, the answer is money. It’s not that we don’t want to get to space; it’s that more pressing financial matters come first. Civilians like to look up at the stars, but going there is a different question, especially when poor quality education, rising gas prices and high unemployment persist. This year’s sequester alone cut NASA’s budget by $900 million.

Though John F. Kennedy’s dreams for NASA may have been tabled because of Uncle Sam’s empty pockets, the agency is not yet gone from the scene. It remains a key player in guiding the development of privatized human spaceflight, and it is also strong in its own right. NASA has its fingers in a lot of pies — human spaceflight is just one of them.

The Cold War era space agency has contributed enormously to all aspects of STEM innovation throughout its existence. NASA has enhanced life on earth in a very tangible way, through projects such as communications satellites — those that make your TVs and iPhones work as well as those used by the military. It has also developed technology such as telescopes, probes and monitoring technology that supplements research on global warming, agriculture and even oceanography. Advances additionally include commercialized spin off byproducts of NASA research: the weird antioxidants you get in your Ivy Room smoothies, sensors (straight out of “Little Shop of Horrors”) that let plants text their farmers and even online video games to supplement your time spent browsing your substandard, sub-atmospheric Instagram.

Even though the tide is changing, NASA still has several of these projects in place and 17 more satellite launches planned in 2013 alone. It remains the leader in probe development, space situational awareness and observation satellites, as well as many other fields. In addition, one of its new major projects is the James Webb Space Telescope, designed to replace our old friend Hubble.

But NASA might be becoming a bit of an old friend, too, an agency that has gone from carrying groundbreaking and sound-barrier–breaking astronauts to destinations far, far away to an agency that has left that particular dream to the private sector in order to pursue a more regulatory role and a narrower focus on other technologies. If it’s another moon landing or a human mission to Mars that we dream of, then the future of the final frontier lies not in the hands of NASA but in the open arms of a new industry and its entrepreneurs.

Lauren Sukin ’16 is a potential Political Science concentrator and Editor-at-Large at BPR.

Art by Rachel Haberstroh