One lesson to draw from the flight of the Crew Dragon to the International Space Station is that the future is not what it used to be. Indeed, our future in space has taken a turn since the days of Apollo and moonwalks.
Imagine yourself going back in time to July 20, 1969, the date of the first moon landing. Somehow, you find yourself on a discussion panel after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have made history on one of the TV networks covering the event. After the usual conversation about the meaning of the event that half a billion people just watched on their TV screens. Walter Cronkite, in his avuncular fashion, throws out a question.
“What does the moonwalk mean for the future of space exploration? Try to imagine what we’ll be doing in space in about 50 years.”
Someone — likely the great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, a fixture on TV coverage of space missions at the time — might opine that astronauts would likely be exploring the moons of the outer planets by 2020 or so. The answer would be greeted with solemn nodding. After all, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Clarke made with Stanley Kubrick, had come out the previous year and depicted astronauts voyaging to the moons of Jupiter.
Then it becomes your turn. You decide to be the snake at the garden party and tell the truth.
“With all due respect to Mr. Clarke, he is wrong. The greatest space mission of 2020 will be the launch of a space capsule containing two astronauts to a space station.”
The statement would be greeted with consternation, to say the least. Then Cronkite, a little less avuncular, would ask you to explain yourself.
You would predict that the Apollo program, far from leading to lunar bases and expeditions to Mars, would be canceled by politicians for being too expensive an indulgence. NASA would use what it calls a reusable space shuttle for a while and employ it, in part, to build a space station, which would be smaller than the wheeled behemoth depicted in 2001. Then the space shuttle program would be canceled in its turn for being too expensive and too dangerous.
However, American astronauts will return to space in a capsule built and operated by an eccentric billionaire under contract with NASA. The spacecraft will be reusable and far less expensive to operate than anything NASA has ever built. Indeed, an alliance between the commercial sector and NASA will be seen as the key to opening the space frontier and returning to the moon and on to Mars. You might even mention that the same billionaire, Elon Musk, dreams of founding a colony on Mars and is being taken seriously. His company is also developing a lunar lander, which it would own and operate, for a return to the moon.
The panel, including Cronkite, would look thoughtful, trying to take in what, for them, is an outside-the-box scenario. Clarke might mention that he wrote about a private mission to the moon in his novel Prelude to Space, so perhaps the thing is not so far-fetched.
“Indeed not, Mr. Clarke,” you might say, “but the scenario in your novel was a nonprofit venture. The private company in the 21st century means to make a profit.”
At that point, Cronkite interrupts and says we’re going to commercial. What he says after that should best be left to the imagination. You won’t even get the chance to mention that the two astronauts in question are married to other astronauts. Astronaut wives now have a bigger role in the space program than expressing how pleased and proud they are.
The point, of course, is that humankind’s future in space will be part commercial, part public sector, with scientists and Space Force officers rubbing shoulders with asteroid miners, lunar tourist operators, and space factory managers. The launch of the Crew Dragon is just the beginning of that future, unimagined decades ago, but now finally within our grasp.
And Clarke’s expedition to the outer planets will likely be conducted with commercial interplanetary spacecraft.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration entitled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond. He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
