I’m sorry, I just can’t help it.
I’m a big fan of space travel.
When I was ten years old, I’d write NASA fan letters to the astronauts, and they’d send me a bunch of 8 x 10 glossy photos of the astronauts, machine-autographed. I was in heaven long before John Glenn orbited the Earth. I even went to Alan B. Shepard Jr. Junior High School (hint for those too young to know this – Shepard was the first American in space).
I have not always been a big fan of NASA, which is not the same as being a big fan of space travel.
Long before Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the Moon, NASA made a huge PR blunder.
Afraid that funding would be cut if the dangers of space travel were widely known, they made going to the Moon out to be as safe as going to the corner store. Maybe safer.
Imagine, in the name of salvaging humanity’s first visit to another planet (the Moon), they made space travel boring.
If you recall the film Apollo 13, the networks didn’t even carry the messages three brave astronauts sent back to earth – because it wasn’t news.
Huh?
The one thing you could count on was that space travel wasn’t political. Oh, there were political elements to it. When JFK named his vice president to be head of the space program, Lyndon Johnson (of Texas) moved NASA’s manned flight headquarters away from Cape Canaveral in Florida, to Houston, Texas, giving us that famous line, “Houston, we have a problem” a decade later.
But Kennedy launched the manned space flight efforts – initially funded by Eisenhower – and in 1969, it was Richard Nixon who spoke to the first men on the Moon.
Today, NASA sometimes seems more political than scientific. And this is spilling over into the private sector, as NASA – unable to fund all the space missions it wants to execute – has turned over the actual space flights to private enterprise.
President Reagan would be proud of them for this decision. It has opened the doors to not only traditional space-flight equipment manufacturers like the recently troubled Boeing, which got a pair of astronauts to the space station but couldn’t get them back home again, as well as space start-ups like Blue Origin and, most notably, Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Others in the game include Rocket Lab, Virgin Galactic and Axiom Space – but they are playing for different goals, from tourism (Virgin Galactic) to deep space satellites (Rocket Lab).
I’m sure Musk is glad to receive NASA program funds – some in the billions of dollars – but he’s made it clear that his vision – to put men back on the Moon for good, but also to put a sustainable colony of men on Mars, and to do so within my lifetime.
And to do it without federal subsidies, because he can afford to do it on his own – and in doing so, turn space itself into a thriving business.
Until two years ago, though, I thought I’d never live to see the day …
And sometimes I still wonder if it will happen. Not because Musk can’t create the technology – he already has, and he’s just getting started – but because of federal regulators at NASA, the FAA, and the EPA seem intent on tying Musk’s hands when it comes to launching – not just space capsules (Boeing’s approach) or sub-orbital sorta-spaceships (Blue Origin’s approach), or space planes like the long-retired Space Shuttle, but a real honest-to-God spaceship.
Musk’s Starship – as currently built – can carry a hundred astronauts, or, more likely, a hundred men and women headed for colonies on the Moon or Mars.
Mars?
Really?
As it stands now, Musk has announced plans to send five missions to Mars by 2026 – that’s just two years away. And given the rapid progress he’s made on not just the rockets, but on a device that will grab a landing Starship in flight and lower it to the launch pad and a thousand other Mr. Wizard-like ideas that couldn’t be done … until Musk and SpaceX did them.
If NASA, the FAA and the EPA would only get out of the way, SpaceX will have men back on the Moon in a year or 18 months, and ships on the way to Mars before the end of next year. Maybe not manned ships, not at first, but that’s his goal.
If I’ve learned anything in the last two decades – never bet against Elon Musk. He’s one person who, if he can see it, he can build it – and if he builds it, it will work.
The Moon and Mars ship currently in operation has the following stats:
It's 397 feet tall, from its rocket exhausts to the top of Starship, the manned spaceship. The Starship itself is 165 feet tall. It will carry from 100 to 150 tons of cargo – or easily 100 people. It has three Raptor engines and three Raptor Vacuum engines, designed to be used only in the vacuum of outer space.
The Super Heavy, the most powerful booster rocket ever built, is powered by 33 Raptor rocket engines. Like the Starship itself, Super Heavy is fully reusable. After boosting Starship into orbit, it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere and lands back at the launch site, ready to be refueled and reused. Each Raptor engine is twice as powerful as the Merlin engines that have been safely propelling Musk’s Falcon rockets into orbit for nearly a decade.
There is one other thing to consider. Musk has created an entire industrial base on the southern coast of Texas, very close to the Mexican border, where he is manufacturing rockets and spaceships and taking them over to the several launch pads he’s created on the coast. He also flies spaceships out of two towers at the Kennedy space flight facility.
Having just survived Helene, it’s hard to ignore the threat that a massive hurricane can present to anywhere on the Atlantic or Gulf coast, it has become apparent that more launch sites would be helpful.
Image: Grok / X screen shot