The history of the U. S. A. in space changed in a
fundamental way last Friday when the commercial firm SpaceX delivered its first
payload of cargo to the International Space Station. SpaceX's capsule Dragon successfully docked with the station
and delivered much-needed supplies and equipment, a task formerly performed by
the now-defunct Space Shuttle.
This culminates plans that go back officially to at least 2006, when
NASA signed a Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Agreement with the
firm. CEO and primary financial
backer Elon Musk said the achievement was "just
awesome."
NASA has come in for a lot of criticism in these pages, but
signing the agreement with SpaceX was a smart thing to do, especially now that
events have vindicated the decision.
Of course, the larger hurdle of manned space flight remains in the
future for SpaceX, and that job is an order of magnitude harder than hauling
stuff, which is both disposable without moral qualms (other than the loss of
money and time) and a whole lot easier to take care of in flight. Humans in orbit require many times
their weight of life-support and safety systems, which is one reason why the
International Space Station is so much bigger than the Dragon capsule. But let's give SpaceX its due and
congratulate it on actually making money with a delivery to a manned space
outpost.
Not that the firm is likely to be profitable yet in an
overall sense. Musk, a 40-year-old
native of South Africa and founder of what became PayPal, is wealthy enough to
afford to lose money for a while.
And it remains to be seen whether SpaceX will ever lead to a corporate
space sector that profits from anything other than a few large contracts from
governments. In this sense, SpaceX
is not that much different from the aerospace contractors that have been
involved in NASA operations from the very beginning.
But Musk and SpaceX are now in the driver's seat, not
NASA. The Dragon was designed as
well as built by SpaceX, and NASA is simply playing the role of a guy who wants
some stuff moved, only instead of hiring a moving company to truck it across
town, SpaceX made a delivery in orbit.
The hope is that firms like SpaceX will focus their
organization and efforts on clear goals such as what Dragon just did, rather
than running in all directions at once as we have so often seen NASA do in
recent years. Goal-directed
behavior is not a guarantee of ethical behavior, or even success. After all, the Nazis were very
goal-directed, but their goals were evil ones. But having a clear and measurable goal allows managers to
answer the question "Do we need to do this?" easily and simply, and
makes for good operational efficiency, a characteristic that NASA has been
somewhat deficient in for the last few years.
Where does SpaceX go from here? As I mentioned, there are plans for manned space
flight. Rocketry is a notoriously
dicey field of engineering because full-up tests of entire systems are so
hideously expensive. If you build
a radio, you can set it on your workbench and turn it on, and all it costs for
the test is a few cents of electricity.
But to test a single-use rocket in a realistic way, you have to fire the
thing and watch it go wherever it was designed to go—once. If it works, you have to make sure you
build the next one exactly precisely like the first, or else you can't be sure
it will work as well as the one you tested. This means that rocket design is not a business for the
faint-hearted or under-funded soul.
Elon Musk is neither of these, and so we can look forward to
SpaceX's next trick. Every so
often, I come across a student who has caught the space bug: he or she wants to design rockets or
even try out to be an astronaut.
Until recently, I listened to such people with decidedly mixed emotions,
because the only business in town, practically speaking, was either NASA or a
contractor tied hand and foot to NASA.
And the way NASA has been operating for the last decade or two, I was
reluctant even to encourage such people.
But now that SpaceX is a viable organization and has proved
itself in a big way, I would have no hesitation in recommending a career in
commercial space exploration and related enterprises. It's interesting that when NASA scored its greatest triumph,
the July 1969 moon landing, Musk wasn't even born yet. So clearly the generational torch is
being passed, and that is a good thing.
The NASA way of doing things was good when NASA was fairly young, but
Musk's SpaceX is a new start. And
Musk seems to be the kind of entrepreneur who benignly imposes his personality
on his organization. Such people
can be hard to work for up close (witness the famed harsh perfectionism of the
late Steve Jobs of Apple), but if the CEO's overall intentions are right, the
organization can achieve a coherence and direction that makes it an attractive
place to work.
Besides space, Musk has other interests, all of which he
says he has chosen as ways of bettering humanity, which is what engineering
should be all about. His Tesla
Motors has the eventual goal of making electric cars for the masses, although
so far its only product is an expensive roadster. And he has operated a charitable foundation for some years
on the side.
It will be interesting to see whether Musk can develop to
the extent of handing off SpaceX to other good managers as time goes on, rather
than clinging to it after his usefulness to it has peaked. He is presently chief technical officer
as well as CEO, and that dual role doesn't seem likely to be sustainable for
any length of time. Let's hope
that other entrepreneurs get into the space business to provide some healthy
competition for SpaceX, and then we can say that we have truly made the
transition from government-owned and operated space exploration to a full-up
commercial model—that works.