My friend Connie sent a text message. “Crew Dragon 5:27.”
A person more religious than myself might have interpreted her text message as a prompt to review some obscure chapter in the Bible, but knowing Connie — who is even less religious than I am, if such a thing is possible — I immediately understood that she was encouraging me to tune in at 5:27pm for the November 16 launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and its payload: the four-person ‘Crew Dragon Resilience’ capsule headed for the International Space Station.
The Crew Dragon capsule, built by a company that also makes electric cars, successfully flew to the space station and deposited astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi at the airlock door, for a planned six-month visit.
Reportedly, the crew will do their best to practice social distancing.
We’re not sure at this point, however, whether astronaut Shannon Walker will truly be able to tolerate the space station environment for the entire six months. The orbiting live/work/play space hotel has been occupied by almost exclusively male astronauts — mostly, ex-military men — since welcoming its first tenants in 2000.
I mean, let’s be honest. The place is an utter mess. How any woman could bear to live here, for even a week, is hard to fathom.
Then we get the news that Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs has made the ‘finalist list’ for a proposed ‘Space Command Headquarters’. Five other possible sites have been identified, in Florida, New Mexico, Nebraska, Alabama, and Texas. The Air Force will “conduct virtual and on-site visits” of each site and choose from among the finalists in “early 2021”, according to an Air Force press release.
The military bureaucrats at the future Headquarters will direct the re-labeled “US Space Force”, an agency which had been known, since 1982, as the “Air Force Space Command” but which has now apparently become its own “independent” military branch. Congress finally realized that Air Force cannot legally fly into space, because there is no “air” there… only, “space”.
The next thing Congress did, after fixing the problem with the name, was to budget $15 billion to pay for… well, space stuff, mostly… but also including $1.4 billion for the first phase of construction on the new Headquarters, wherever that might be located.
This development has no doubt generated considerable excitement among adolescent boys, who will be envisioning themselves engaged in outer space battles a la “Buck Rogers”.
NASA gave up on flying people to the space station a decade ago, following fatal accidents with their Space Shuttle system, and for the past nine years has been buying first class tickets on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, at $90 million per seat. (They’ve also had to pay for excess luggage, for anything beyond hand-carry items.)
That may have been a profitable arrangement for the Russians. But maybe not.
Back in 2014, Elon Musk and company won a bid to start flying US astronauts to the space station with their proposed SpaceX rockets and capsules — a project for which they already had a headstart by re-purposing the bucket seats from the Tesla Model X for a slightly larger model, but leaving off the wheels and turn signals. NASA happily signed up for the project, and budgeted about $3.2 billion to buy round-trip tickets for up to four passengers, on each of six Crew Dragon trips to the space station. (SpaceX has consistently refused to sell one-way tickets.)
That puts the cost of each round-trip seat at, let’s see, $130 million per. And that doesn’t include the coffee and donuts for the 17,000 NASA employees sitting at their computers at Mission Control in Houston and various other sites.
So maybe the Russians weren’t gouging us, after all.
All of which suggests that the US Space Force, with a budget of a mere $15 billion, will not be sending a bunch of hot-shot space pilots into low earth orbit to conduct battles with hand-held laser pistols.
But maybe… we’ve been trying to rush things… in a typical American fashion? Maybe we have actual problems in our local towns and cities that need to be addressed, before we all go gallivanting off into space?
For example, this, from the 1928 novella by xxx, entitled Armageddon 2419 A.D.:
Anthony Rogers (later to be known as “Buck” Rogers) was working for the American Radioactive Gas Corporation in 1927, investigating reports of unusual phenomena in abandoned coal mines in Pennsylvania. On December 15, a nasty cave-in occurred while he was in one of the lower levels of one particular mine, and Rogers — exposed to radioactive gas — fell into “a state of suspended animation, free from the ravages of catabolic processes, and without any apparent effect on physical or mental faculties”.
He remained in suspended animation for 492 years — repeat, 492 years — before waking up to find America under the thumb of cruel rulers known as the “Hans”. Anthony Rogers used the military techniques he’d learned as a soldier during World War I (with which the Hans were presumably unfamiliar) and led a successful campaign by honest and brave, but oppressed, American gangs, to free themselves from tyranny.
It wasn’t until three years later — circa 2422 AD, that is — that “Buck” Rogers finally got his chance to fly in a spaceship.
If any of this reminds you of 2020, it should not.
But my key point here is, space has been there for a long time, and last I looked, it wasn’t going anywhere.
What’s the big hurry?