On this day, six decades ago, the old Space Age began with the launch of the first orbital satellite. Partly because it wasn’t delivered to orbit by Americans, it got the era off on entirely the wrong foot.
In 1957, at the height of the Cold War, the beeping of Sputnik in the radios of thousands of American ham operators seemed ominous. While it wasn’t a surprise to the Eisenhower administration (the Soviet launch actually established a legal precedent for overflight that we could then use for our own spy satellites), it was seen as a sign by ordinary Americans that we were behind in crucial rocketry technology with what we viewed as our mortal enemy in a potentially existential conflict. And it created a national panic.
The concern increased when the Soviets had a second launch, of a dog, that November, while two of our own attempts to follow suit ended in televised disasters on the launch pad, until we finally launched our own first satellite, the (smaller) Explorer I in early 1958.
Sputnik influenced the 1960 presidential election, with the “missile gap” between America and the USSR becoming a key part of the debate between Nixon and JFK. It was after the Soviets beat us again, this time by putting a man into space in early 1961, that Kennedy announced that America would send a man to the moon and safely return him to earth before the end of the decade.
We romanticize this era to an extraordinary degree, often losing sight of the realities. For instance, had he not been assassinated, Kennedy might well have canceled the program—he was getting concerned about the cost, and was in discussion with the Soviets about making it a joint endeavor before the fall of 1963.
And then there’s the larger problems of strategic vision. The tensions of that moment created what I’ve come to call the Apollo Cargo Cult, in which, despite statements about things like #JourneyToMars by NASA on Twitter, the only real objectives were to spend a lot of money on the biggest possible rockets with the government in charge of the whole operation.
It seems natural to us today—after all, it’s all we’ve ever known. But in a sense it was a very un-American way of doing things; a democratic state-socialist enterprise constructed in order to defeat a totalitarian one.
In the rush to beat the Soviets to the moon, we short-circuited a number of other interesting approaches that might have resulted in lower-cost modes of getting into orbit (for example, extending the X-15 spaceplane with follow-on programs, or experimenting with reusable vertical takeoff and landing rockets). Think of it this way: In the rush of the early days of the Space Age, school children were told that there would be moon bases by the 1970s and Mars landings by the 1980s. Instead, we got four and a half decades of relative stagnation in space technology, with no significant reduction in launch costs since Gene Cernan, who was the last man to set foot on the moon (it will be 45 years ago this December).
In an alternate timeline, one in which we weren’t engaged in an existential clash with a totalitarian system, America might have allowed space technology to develop more organically and competitively in the private sector. And we might well be further along by now.
This isn’t revisionist history; some people called for this approach at the time. In 1961 Ralph Cordiner, chairman of the board of General Electric, wrote a chapter of a much larger government report by the Brookings Institution, titled “Competitive Enterprise In Space.” Cordiner called for a private approach to space development and warned of government domination and stultification in the space industry, in addition to damaging intellectual-property provisions in the Space Act that created NASA in 1958. But the urgency and momentum of Kennedy’s moon program was too great to allow a more traditional American approach that wouldn’t have beaten the Soviets on the deadline, and once we got to the moon, it became common wisdom that only NASA was capable of such achievements.
Sixty years later, we’re just starting to recover from the moribund thinking we inherited from the Sputnik era. And it’s all because some of the kids who grew up with the NASA space program and its failed promises were frustrated with the lack of progress. And a few of them made millions and billions of dollars on the Internet. Some of them, including (immigrant) Elon Musk of Paypal, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon, have started to invest their own fortunes in space dreams which are vastly more expansive than NASA is ever allowed to display these days.
Bezos’s company, Blue Origin, has demonstrated a fully reusable single-stage rocket that can take passengers (or experiments) into space. He plans to put it into operation next year and has stated plans for a reusable orbital rocket to be put into operation by 2020, and then an even larger one in the following decade. Bezos has even offered NASA rides to the lunar surface for crew or experiments. (A few months ago he sold a billion dollars worth of Amazon stock specifically to invest toward the goals, and has pledged to do so again every year).
Musk, meanwhile, has been demonstrating reusability of the first stage of his orbital Falcon rocket, having successfully recovered 16 rockets in a row after some initial spectacular failed attempts. (He will be re-flying one of them in a launch this coming week.) But this is just the beginning.
In Adelaide, South Australia last week, at the International Astronautical Congress, Musk announced an entirely new approach (based on lessons learned from the Falcon program) for a fully-reusable two-stage rocket that will dwarf the Saturn V of the Apollo era, with manufacturing to start next year. He proposes it not only for trips to earth orbit, but to the moon, and Mars, and even for affordable half-hour-to-anywhere trips from any coastal point to another on earth. He proposes to cannibalize and disrupt his own current business with it, and while Bezos may be able to keep up, it will be tough for the traditional expendable launch industry to do so.
These two companies may be the asteroid to the old-space dinosaurs.
Neither Bezos or Musk can be sure of meeting their aggressive, even audacious schedules, but General William Shelton, former head of USAF Space Command said three years ago, “I don’t doubt that guy anymore, by the way. What he says, he’s going to do.”
Sixty years after the old government space age began, a much more vibrant, fast-paced and competitive one promises to finally give us lunar bases and Mars missions thanks to American ingenuity, private enterprise, and good old competition.
