So far, as president, Donald Trump has said all the right things about space. He wants NASA focused on exploration again. He wants men flying back to the moon in 2018. In his pseudo-State of the Union last week, he reminded the country that “American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream.” At the very beginning of his term, Trump appears to be making space a priority, and NASA is on board: last week, it began to process of brining the manned circumlunar flight it has planned for 2021 forward to September of next year.
Also last week: another hat was thrown into the circumlunar ring, the hat of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Last Monday—about two weeks after President Trump asked NASA to speed up its return to the moon—SpaceX announced that it plans to send a “privately crewed Dragon spacecraft beyond the moon next year.”
The Dragon Spacecraft in question will be the Dragon 2, the man-carrying version of the space capsule that has been delivering cargo to the International Space Station since 2012. The crewmen it carries will be two private customers, who “have already paid a significant deposit”; who “will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind, driven by the universal human spirit of exploration,” pending “health and fitness tests.”
SpaceX’s moon mission will be launched atop its in-development “Falcon Heavy” rocket, which will make its first test flight this summer. When the Falcon Heavy launches, it will become the most powerful rocket in the world, and the most powerful of all time, except for the 60’s Saturn V moon rocket. It will remain the most powerful rocket in the world for about a year, until NASA tests its new SLS rocket. The SLS (whose initials stand for the truly inspired name “Space Launch System”) will then become the most powerful rocket of all time, except for the Saturn V.
The SLS will launch an Orion capsule that will either be unmanned, per the Obama-era schedule, or carrying a crew, per the new Trump timeline. The Orion made its first flight, unmanned, in 2014. The Dragon 2 will make its first unmanned flight later this year, and its first manned test flight next spring.
If everything goes right, a few months after the Dragon 2 carries astronauts for the first time, SpaceX and NASA will both attempt to send astronauts around the moon, for the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972. These moon missions will be the first hurdle of an incredible race, whose finish line is on the surface of Mars, where both NASA and SpaceX plan to go next.
What makes this a race, and not just two remarkable, simultaneous, and somewhat cooperative efforts? SpaceX is racing to stay ahead of a pack of private space companies: “Blue Origin” and “Virgin Galactic” have already made it into space, and “Orbital ATK” has already made cargo deliveries to the International Space Station. At the moment, SpaceX is at the top of private space flight pyramid, but it will have to fight to stay there.
What about NASA? If NASA can’t stay ahead of the private space market, it loses its raison d’être. NASA exists to pull off the tremendous maximum-effort missions that, in theory, require the collective contribution of the whole country and exceed the limits of any one private enterprise. If NASA falls behind, it might as well give up human exploration and focus on pure science, and on choosing which private companies to direct funding to. If NASA wants to continue to exist in its current form—and it does, and I want it to too, and so does everyone else—it will have to justify that existence by staying ahead of SpaceX, and Blue Origin and Boeing and the Russians and the Chinese and everyone else.
With neither SpaceX nor NASA able to spend any time sitting on laurels—with each prodding the other ahead, the way NASA and the Soviets did in the ’60s—there are truly astonishing things to come. And they’re going to come quickly. A moon mission in 2018 won’t be the end. It won’t be the beginning of the end. It will be the end of the beginning—the end of the first leg of breathtaking adventure that will carry humanity deep into the solar system, to Mars, to the ice-rich dwarf planet Ceres, to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, to Saturn’s cloud-and-lake-covered moon Titan, to Neptune’s captured-dwarf-planet moon Triton, to Pluto, and beyond.
What a wonderful time to be alive.
