The End of an Era
Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2011 11:33 am
About two minutes late this morning, Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off for the last time, beginning the final mission of a legacy that began twelve days before I was born.
The commentator (the person you hear do the countdown on TV) was the same person who was in that job for the first launch of Atlantis, STS-51J, a classified DOD mission that took just four days, compared to the two-week missions we have seen in recent history.
The launch director was great. When he gave his final speech regarding the legacy of Atlantis shortly before launch, you could hear the restrained anger in his voice at the idea that this was ending.
But all good things must come to an end.
Looking forward, Richard Branson is on schedule to take dozens of people into space by the end of the year, at a comparatively low rate of $200,000, and he plans on lowering that to $20,000 in time, with apologies for the fact that it's such a high amount right now (but still low compared to several million to go with Space Adventures who has sent people both into space and even to the ISS, or SpaceX, which is still in development). Space Adventures is working with a Armadillo Aerospace to create safer, more cost efficient rockets that can get a tourist into suborbital space, and eventually they want to take someone around the moon for a cool $20,000,000. I don't know about you, but going around the moon, and being 40 miles away without touching it would be torture. For more on that, we could ask Jim Lovell, who circled the moon on TWO different missions.
A new space race is upon us, but this time it will be in the hands of people of influence, instead of (basically) two governments, starting it not because they want to explore, but because they want to beat the other to the Moon in a race to show who has the biggest rocket, or something like that. Now it is in the hands of three major companies, and I am sure that a fourth, fifth, tenth and twentieth are not far behind.
Let the race begin.
The commentator (the person you hear do the countdown on TV) was the same person who was in that job for the first launch of Atlantis, STS-51J, a classified DOD mission that took just four days, compared to the two-week missions we have seen in recent history.
The launch director was great. When he gave his final speech regarding the legacy of Atlantis shortly before launch, you could hear the restrained anger in his voice at the idea that this was ending.
But all good things must come to an end.
Looking forward, Richard Branson is on schedule to take dozens of people into space by the end of the year, at a comparatively low rate of $200,000, and he plans on lowering that to $20,000 in time, with apologies for the fact that it's such a high amount right now (but still low compared to several million to go with Space Adventures who has sent people both into space and even to the ISS, or SpaceX, which is still in development). Space Adventures is working with a Armadillo Aerospace to create safer, more cost efficient rockets that can get a tourist into suborbital space, and eventually they want to take someone around the moon for a cool $20,000,000. I don't know about you, but going around the moon, and being 40 miles away without touching it would be torture. For more on that, we could ask Jim Lovell, who circled the moon on TWO different missions.
A new space race is upon us, but this time it will be in the hands of people of influence, instead of (basically) two governments, starting it not because they want to explore, but because they want to beat the other to the Moon in a race to show who has the biggest rocket, or something like that. Now it is in the hands of three major companies, and I am sure that a fourth, fifth, tenth and twentieth are not far behind.
Let the race begin.