Author Topic: Why the SpaceX ‘ferry’ just truly launched a new Space Age  (Read 355 times)

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Offline Elderberry

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NY Post by Glenn H. Reynolds 11/19/2020

This week, while Americans on the ground saw the ­embarrassment of lost counts and found ballots, a part of America that works was making history: SpaceX and NASA launched four astronauts into orbit and docked the ­SpaceX capsule Resilience with the International Space Station.

It was the first of six commercial astronaut launches that NASA has purchased from ­SpaceX, the aerospace-manufacturing firm founded by the inventor Elon Musk.

As I explain in my new book, “America’s New Destiny in Space,” we are now entering a third age of space travel. The first age came in the early 20th century, when men like Soviet rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and American engineer Robert Goddard wrote and thought about space flight and tinkered with small rockets.

That was followed by the command-economy age of the German-American engineer Wernher von Braun and the Soviet Sergei Korolev, when “rocket men” funded by deep government pockets proved that the visionaries’ visions were attainable but expensive.

Now we are entering into a new phase, the sustainable age. We have gone from space projects driven by international tensions, like Apollo, or domestic politics, like the Space Shuttle, to things being done because they return economic value. And because they’re getting cheaper, which makes the return of value easier.

More: https://nypost.com/2020/11/19/why-the-spacex-ferry-just-truly-launched-a-new-space-age/