Sunday, May 31, 2020

Ain't Hitchin' No More

United States astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken docked their Dragon Endeavour capsule with the International Space Station today, completing the first half of a mission that featured the first manned launch from US soil since 2011.

The pair flew a space capsule built by Elon Musk's SpaceX corporation, which launched from a booster also designed by SpaceX. It featured a reusable first stage, a new wrinkle in a program that's previously had only "disposable" boosters that it either dropped into the ocean or let drift out into space.

This space has dinged former President Barack Obama for allowing the only nation to send people to the moon to become a nation whose astronauts had to hitch rides on Russian space capsules. Although Mr. Obama deserves the part of that smack that accompanies the cancellation of the program which was supposed to succeed the space shuttle, the reality is that few White House occupants have supported the space program with much more than rhetoric. Some contemporaries of the late Richard Nixon describe him as a big devotee of manned space exploration, perhaps the only one in the presidential office, but even he allowed the post-Apollo NASA budget to get whacked around into a wispy little shadow and never really pushed a real vision onto the people he had running the shop.

In any event, the public sector stranglehold that confined private sector work to certain specific areas of the space program has loosened. The idea of the profit motive playing a role in space exploration may seem somehow unfitting for the pursuit of gaining knowledge, but it put US astronauts back into low-earth orbit on a ship that took off from US soil. I'll live with someone making a buck off of that.

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