Boeing Starliner: Crisis or Routine Glitch?

 

Since 2020, the SpaceX Dragon has been the primary spacecraft in which U. S. astronauts have traveled to and from the International Space Station (ISS).  But for at least a decade, it has always been NASA's plan to get Boeing to develop a second spacecraft for the same purpose, called the Starliner.  After two unmanned flights, the first only partially successful, last June the Starliner carried Barry Wilmore, 61, and Sunita Williams, 58, to the ISS.  But during the flight, five of the 28 thrusters used to orient the spacecraft failed.  Although the Starliner was successfully docked to the ISS, Boeing engineers have been puzzling ever since over why the thrusters failed and whether the Starliner is safe enough to return Wilmore and Williams, who otherwise will have to wait as long as eight months before returning to earth after what was supposed to be an eight-day visit to space.

 

Putting aside all questions of whether having people live in space is useful or beneficial, the fact that we have two independent companies providing transportation to the ISS is a big step forward from the early stages of manned space exploration, which were basically state-sponsored stunts put on for quasi-military reasons, to something resembling commercial operations, in which competition and a certain routine emerge.  Think of the contrast between the hype surrounding Lindbergh's 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic, and the milder publicity accompanying the first commercial flight from New York to Marseilles a dozen years later.  The same firm (Boeing) provided the B-314 flying boat that Pan American Airways used in 1939, and passengers paid $375 for a one-way ticket, which in terms of today's dollars is north of $8200.  Not exactly busfare, but it was one of the first steps in making international air travel routine.

 

As for the Boeing Starliner, thrusters are vital to preserving the orientation of a spacecraft on re-entry, when the vehicle has to face a certain way in order for the heat shield to absorb the punishing friction of air as it slows the craft down.  Entering the atmosphere pointing the wrong way is a guarantee of disaster, so Boeing is wise in delaying the return flight until they can get to the bottom of the thruster failures.

 

So far, Wilmore and Williams have not made any public comments about their unexpected delay.  It's a little more extreme than the delays experienced by thousands of commercial air travelers in the last few weeks when a computer glitch upset the schedule applecarts of dozens of airlines.  Spending an extra day or two in an airport is not much compared to eight months in space, but the two astronauts concerned are seasoned veterans, and presumably their families and whatever other commitments they had back on Earth have been dealt with satisfactorily.  I don't know how I would feel if I watched my ride home take off without me and achieve a successful landing, but I suppose it depends on how much I was enjoying myself in the ISS.  Space flight is not for everybody, and the selection process probably yields personalities who can handle nearly anything unexpected except maybe death.  And in this case, erring on the side of caution at the price of inconveniencing a couple of astronauts is probably the best thing to do.

 

We will know that space flight has finally achieved routine status when occurrences such as the one about the failed thrusters don't make news at all.  After all, we don't hear much about Amereican Airlines flight XYZ that was cancelled because of a problem with their battery backup system, because such things happen every day and the airlines have found ways to deal with them without inconveniencing their customers—well, not much, anyway. 

 

Space flight is still far from a purely commercial endeavor, however, and it's not clear whether it ever will be.  The ISS itself is a creature of international agreements of fiendish complexity, and is perhaps the best example of an institution that self-perpetuates because you can't simply shut it down and send messages up to tell everybody they're fired.  But given the obvious need to swap people in and out of the ISS, it's good that NASA persisted in getting two contractors to develop different vehicles for the same purpose.  And if history is any guide, Boeing will straighten out the thruster problem, if not on this flight, then the next one.  And the astronauts will have the luxury of knowing that their ride back to Earth isn't built by a company with a lock on the business. 

 

When the current ISS reaches the end of its planned lifespan in 2030 after being up there for about three decades, what comes next for manned space flight?  It's hard to imagine how a space station would be profitable on its own.  We already do the most commercially valuable things in space without having people up there to do them:  satellite communications and remote sensing.  And as robotics advances, the argument that having people in space allows us to do things that no robot could do may become weaker and weaker.  Because of the life-support and safety systems needed to keep people alive in space, any manned flight is going to be orders of magnitude more costly than an unmanned flight to do the same thing, unless the thing happens to be simply putting people in a new place such as Mars. 

 

It may ultimately come down to a question of international politics.  If a new space race develops between China and the U. S., or China and Europe if the U. S. loses its will to keep up, then companies like SpaceX will be able to provide the hardware and software needed.  But if a plague of space indifference spreads worldwide, as it seems to have in the U. S., I'm not sure that even a dozen Elon Musks could afford to put people into space simply for the glory of the thing, or to make enough money to recoup their astronomical investments. 

 

I hope Wilmore and Williams enjoy their extended stay, and that Boeing gets their thrusters working right the next time.  As for whether we'll ever be able to afford pleasure trips to a space station, I reserve my judgment. 

 

Sources:  I referred to an AP article on the Boeing Starliner thruster problems at https://apnews.com/article/nasa-spacex-boeing-starliner-astronauts-922b43fa8d0e1f9622022a52f8c8e2ed.  Information on the first commercial transatlantic flight was from https://www.centennialofflight.net/essay/Commercial_Aviation/atlantic_route/Tran4.htm, and I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on the Boeing Starliner and the SpaceX Dragon.

Lawyers in Space?

A recent Washington Post article highlights what would normally be a humdrum domestic dispute alleging identity theft.  The unusual feature of the dispute is that the party who allegedly accessed a bank account without permission did it from the International Space Station, and thus may have committed the first legally recognized crime in space.

Anywhere humans go, the lawyers can't be far behind.  While Shakespeare probably got a laugh in his play Henry VI when the criminal type Dick the Butcher said, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the laywers," the context was not a sober discussion of how to make a better society.  Dick and his rebel friends were imagining a fantasy world made to their liking, where all the beer barrels would be huge, all the prices low, and naturally, there wouldn't be any lawyers to get people like them into trouble.

Law-abiding citizens need have no fear of ordinate laws, and so it's only right that there are some treaties and international agreements that govern humans and human-made artifacts in space. 

The foundational agreement is something called the Outer Space Treaty, which over 100 countries have signed, including every nation that is currently capable of orbiting hardware in space.  Implemented in 1967, its most prominent theme is that space is for peaceful uses only.  It therefore prohibits keeping nuclear weapons in space.  It also forbids any country from claiming sovereignty over any part of outer space, including any celestial body.  So when the U. S. planted its flag on the moon, it was just a symbolic gesture, not the first step in creating a fifty-first state with zero population.

Right now, there are companies making quite serious plans to do space mining, build space hotels, and engage in other profit-making activity that would involve substantial amounts of investment of both hardware and human capital.  There's a concern that the Outer Space Treaty is silent on the question of individual or corporate ownership of space property, and unless we get more specific on what the rules are, such developments may be stifled.

I don't see any critical problem here, because we have abundant precedents in a similar situation:  the international laws governing ocean-going vessels.  The Disney Company puts millions of dollars into what amounts to floating hotels, and they quite happily manage to cope with the fact that while they own the ship, it travels in international waters and docks at various ports owned by other countries.  Of course, there are hundreds of years of tradition bound up in the law of the sea, and the same isn't true of space law.  But the fact that ocean-going commerce goes on quite smoothly for the most part shows such things can be done, and so that doesn't concern me at all.

What could throw the whole situation into doubt is if somebody finds a fantastically lucrative space-based enterprise.  Diamonds on the moon sounds like something that Edgar Rice Burroughs would cook up, but there are quite serious organizations out there planning to do things like mining asteroids.  And depending on what they find, we might see something like the rush of the Old World explorers to the New World, where they in fact did discover gold.  Like most naive fantasies, that discovery didn't work out quite as nicely as the explorers hoped, what with the abysmal treatment of Native Americans and the disastrous inflation that the introduction of huge amounts of gold caused in the economies of Europe. 

It's hard to imagine something similar happening as a result of a space-based discovery, but stranger things have happened.  The optimist in me, as well as numbers of Silicon Valley types who seem to think that space colonization is not only possible, but inevitable and represents the last best hope of humanity, would like to see the future of space exploration and settlement as another chance for us to get some things right.  After all, something like that was the motivation for many Europeans to make the arduous journey to the New World where unknown hardships awaited them.  Overall I'm glad they did, or else I would not have the opportunity to live in Central Texas today.

But the identity-theft case in the International Space Station reminds us that no matter what idealistic plans we make, we will take all our mental and behavioral baggage with us wherever we go.  That is why we will always need lawyers, whether in San Marcos or a moon base.  Because a certain number of us will misbehave beyond the boundaries that ordinary people around us can deal with, and so the law will have to get involved.  Right now, all the parties to the identity-theft dispute turned out to be U. S. citizens, so U. S. law applies.  But in the future, when space colonies (for lack of a better phrase) may want to set up their own independent governments, things may get considerably more complicated.  And complications mean lawyers.

One thing I haven't mentioned is the question of militarization in space.  President Trump recently announced the establishment of a Space Command, which is apparently a kind of umbrella under which the space activities of the various branches of the military will be gathered.  While the Outer Space Treaty prohibits "weapons of mass destruction" in space, it does nothing to stop nations from testing weapons or placing military personnel in space. 

It is perhaps inevitable that rivalries on the ground will end up being played out in space as well.  But we can hope that for the near future, anyway, the need for lawyers and law in space will be limited to minor issues such as the identity-theft case, and that we can view space as a place where for the time being, people can just get along.  But if they don't, I'm sure

lawyers will find a way to get involved.

Sources:  Deanna Paul's article "Space:  The Final Legal Frontier" appeared on Aug. 31 on the Washington Post website at https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/31/space-final-legal-frontier/.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on the Outer Space Treaty and "Let's kill all the lawyers." 

The Soyuz Failure and Emergency Return

Proponents of manned space flight have looked forward to the day when space travel will be as routine as getting on a bus in Toledo to go to Chicago.  You don’t normally see national headlines when a bus breaks down, but when the Russian Soyuz rocket taking an American and a Russian astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS) last week suddenly failed and the astronauts had to be rescued by an automatic emergency system, it made the New York Times and other media outlets around the world.  So we aren’t quite there yet, and it will be some time before we can even get anyone else up into orbit.

First, the failure.  On Thursday, Oct. 11, astronauts Aleksei Ovchinin and Nick Hague took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Russian Soyuz rocket.  The first stage consists of four detachable engines on four sides of the central second-stage rocket.  Two minutes into the launch, the four first-state engines normally eject themselves and the second stage lights up to continue the flight into the orbital range of the ISS.  But according to the website www.extremetech.com which quoted Russian head of human spaceflight Sergei Krikalev, experts suspect that something went wrong with one of the first-stage engine ejection systems.  One of them may have incompletely separated and collided with the second stage.  At any rate, enough damage was detected that an automatic abort system went into action, separating the capsule containing the two astronauts from the second stage and sending it in an earthbound trajectory that produced up to 6 Gs on the pair, twice what they experience during launch.  A parachute automatically deployed, and instead of spending six months in space in the ISS, Hague and Ovchinin ended their flight only a few minutes after launch in the desert-like steppes of Kazakhstan, where they were rescued by ground crews without further incident.

We can thank the Russian engineers who designed and installed the safety systems 35 years ago in what is now a pretty old but well-understood and reliable rocket system.  Russia has had its share of space-related accidents, dating all the way back to 1967 when a parachute on the Soyuz 1 flight failed to open, causing the death of astronaut Vladimir Komarov when his capsule crashed to the ground too fast.  Simplicity and reliability seem to be watchwords with the Russian space program, and while the two astronauts are no doubt disappointed that their flight was cancelled, so to speak, they are at least alive and well to talk about it.

The current residents of the ISS are in no immediate danger, as unmanned resupply rockets are still operational and they have an emergency escape capsule at hand should something require them to leave for Earth in a hurry.  But the failure of the only current means of human access to the ISS has put a big hold on the station’s plans, and on manned spaceflight in general.

In possibly a year or so, both Boeing and SpaceX hope to begin manned flights of their own, ushering in a new era of spacecraft built by private firms dedicated to the purpose, rather than the cumbersome government public-private partnerships that have up to now been responsible for all manned space travel.  But those companies’ rockets are not ready, and if recent history is any guide, they may not be ready for several years yet. 

Unlike the race to the moon, which was basically the Cold War between the old USSR and the U. S. carried out by peaceful means, private space firms are in competition only with other firms.  So it would be better to err on the side of prudence rather than rush into manned spaceflight only to have your latest creation blow up and kill people.  The rewards awaiting companies that make it first into space with humans are by no means certain, other than the glory of the thing.  But glory is hard to take to the bank. 

Tourism is one way to make money with space, but no one believes that will support the whole enterprise by itself.  And tourists have an obstinate prejudice against running a high risk of ending up as space junk or worse, so the safety record of space flight will have to be significantly improved before anything like mass tourism can come about. 

Regarding re-crewing the space station, currently the Soyuz is the only show in town, and if the accident investigation isn’t wrapped up satisfactorily by the end of 2018, we might see a situation in which the ISS crew comes home and the empty station is piloted remotely until Russian engineers are confident in launching more astronauts with the Soyuz.  Published schedules for the ISS through 2020 do not include any plans for using rockets other than Soyuz to transport astronauts to the station, so SpaceX’s manned flights will presumably be orbital demonstrations independent of the space station itself.

If manned space flight were completely routine, it wouldn’t attract the attention and excitement it does.  In my own field of engineering, some of the best students have ambitions to get involved in private space enterprises, and they go with my blessing.  But the period we are in now may be compared to where the aviation industry was in around 1920.  Flying was still regarded as an exotic and dangerous sport, and it was not yet clear how anyone would make any serious money at it. 

We can hope that the cause of the Soyuz failure can be identified and fixed soon enough that we don’t have to depopulate the ISS, and that transportation to the station can go back to its desirable no-headlines mode.  But we can also expect that the upcoming launches of private manned space rockets will get tons of publicity, even if they’re successful.  Because taking a rocket into space is still nowhere near as routine as taking a bus to Chicago.

Sources:  I referred to news reports on the Soyuz accident carried by the New York Times on Oct. 11, 2018 at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/science/soyuz-rocket.html, and also the sources https://www.space.com/42155-soyuz-abort-astronaut-nick-hague-first-interviews.html and https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/278883-russia-blames-soyuz-launch-failure-on-booster-collision.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on a list of spaceflight-related accidents and incidents, the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and the International Space Station. 

Thank God for Gravity: Scott Kelly's Endurance and the Future of Space Travel

Scott Kelly is a NASA astronaut, veteran of a year's stay on the International Space Station (ISS), and now a published author of a popular memoir called Endurance.  He is also the twin brother of fellow astronaut Mark Kelly, who is married to former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011.  At the time Giffords was shot, her brother-in-law was in orbit during an earlier ISS stay.

Needless to say, Kelly has led an eventful life, and his memoir is rather unusual in that he doesn't shy away from matters that reflect badly on either him or aspects of the space program.  He is honest about many of his shortcomings, including his first marriage that ended in divorce.  And when in the course of narrating in detail his experiences in space, he is inconvenienced by a NASA policy or action, he lets you know about it.  The part of the book that describes day-to-day life on the ISS has got to be one of the most detailed and vivid descriptions of space flight in print.  And that's the problem.  If he wrote this book to encourage people to think about mass migration to space, it may have backfired.

To a landlubber like me, Kelly's trials and risks he undergoes to be in space are appalling.  Take what sounds like a simple thing:  a space walk.  First off, it takes about five hours to get ready, involving hundreds of separate checklisted steps, many of which if neglected or done in the wrong order could result in your untimely and painful demise. 

Then there is the zero-G environment.  I never really appreciated gravity until I read Kelly's book.  On earth, you put down a pen, or a wrench, or a screw, and it stays there.  Not in space.  Every single last thing you might possibly need has to be either tied down, kept in a bag, stuck to a piece of Velcro (TM), or otherwise secured, or else on the space walk you will inadvertently contribute to the already vast quantity of space junk orbiting Earth, and lose whatever you needed in the bargain.  The most chilling aspect of his space walks is to learn that over the nearly two decades that at least some of the ISS has been up there, meteors or orbiting pieces of derelict satellites have punched holes and taken entire chunks out of handrails on the outside of the structure.  And it's just a matter of chance whether another one of those 17,000-MPH pieces of debris drills a hole through you while you're outside. 

Kelly, along with anyone else who endures the rigors of years of training and competition to go into space, deserves accolades for his monumental achievements.  But at the same time, I can't help but wonder whether the up-close view of what life in space is really like lends more weight to the argument that, like many people say of New York, it's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. 

The question really boils down to this:  is space, and whatever lies beyond in terms of potentially habitable planets, really more like America in 1620, or Antarctica in 1920?  Here's what I mean.

Right now, corporations are being organized to go into space exploration commercially, and large groups of visionaries are planning to spread humanity in some form to other planets.  From what I can tell, these folks believe that space and regions beyond it will eventually harbor lots of people, like the New World (North and South America) does now.  Some even seem to think that we have damaged our planet here beyond repair with global warming and pollution, and we better start making our plans for an exit strategy when Earth becomes uninhabitable.  Either way, these folks (who Kelly, incidentally, does not explicitly identify himself with) have an attitude toward space that says it is our manifest destiny to go there and occupy it with all the trappings of civilization:  cities, nations, the whole bit.  They would say that space now is like America was to Europe in 1620:  a new world beckoning us to explore and settle it.

If Kelly's spare-time reading had been about Columbus or Vasco da Gama, I might agree that he is of that party.  But what book did he take with him on the ISS?  Endurance:  Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, the story of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated 1914 expedition to cross the Antarctic.  Their ship got stuck in ice and Shackleton and his men ended up floating away on chunks of sea ice and lifeboats.  In his choice of reading matter, I think Kelly has inadvertently answered the question of what space exploration is most similar to in the history of humanity so far.  And it doesn't bode well for any large-scale plans that involve moving lots of ordinary people into space.

There have been manned outposts in the extreme Arctic and Antarctic regions for about a century now, and the population of Antarctica still hovers in the hundreds at most.  The fact is that the environment there is so hostile to human life that living there is extremely expensive, inconvenient, and worth while only if a strong scientific or cultural motive justifies it. 

I think space is the same way.  It's hard to imagine how we could make space travel so safe, convenient, and comfortable that you could get lots of people (I'm talking thousands at least) to attempt it.  And by definition, you have to travel through space to get to anywhere besides Earth. 

So I salute Kelly and his compatriots for the incredible achievements they have made in simply keeping the ISS running and keeping alive up there, no small part of which is due to Kelly's accumulated expertise in repeatedly fixing what has to be the world's most expensive toilet.  But by the same token, I think space travel will remain a hugely expensive and highly specialized endeavor for a narrowly chosen few, for the foreseeable future—and maybe beyond that, too.

Sources:  I thank my wife for giving me Scott Kelly's Endurance:  A Year In Space, A Lifetime of Discovery (Knopf, 2017) for Christmas.

Space Station Scores a Scientific Hit—Maybe

Long-time readers of this blog know that I have been less than complimentary to NASA, the International Space Station, and manned space flight in general.  So it’s only fair that when NASA-sponsored teams do something good, I should mention that too.  A few days ago, representatives of an international effort that produced a cosmic-ray detector that made it to the International Space Station on the next-to-last-ever Shuttle flight held a news conference.  They announced the first batch of results from their detector, and while they didn’t come right out and say they have figured out what dark matter is, they did say they found strikingly clear evidence that something funny is going on out there in interstellar space.  Dark matter, by the way, is what 80% of the universe is made of, only we don’t know what it is because it’s, well, dark, and most of it is far away.  The only way we know it’s there is because of its gravitational effects.

While experimental physicists don’t like to admit it, a whole lot of what they do is just engineering:  figuring out how to do a technical thing within a budget.  In the case of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), the budget was about $2 billion, and involved the work of hundreds of scientists at dozens of institutions all around the world.  I counted the number of authors on the Physical Review Letters paper announcing the discovery, and there are 350 of them (349 if you leave out the researcher who died before it was published). 

The AMS had a rocky road into space.  Pieces of it were assembled as long ago as 1997, and I’m sure the planning took place well before then.  Just as it was about to be loaded aboard a shuttle for transport to the International Space Station in 2003, the shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry, and the resulting delays knocked AMS off the shuttle’s manifest.  But the scientists pulled strings in Washington, and eventually got a special Congressional resolution passed in 2008 ordering NASA to get the thing up there somehow.  Finally, in May 2011, AMS flew on the penultimate shuttle flight and began collecting data.

Cosmic rays have been somewhat of a mystery ever since their discovery around 1910, when it became possible to measure them accurately.  Here at the bottom of the atmosphere, all you see is the decay products of the original rays, which are high-energy particles (mainly protons and atomic nuclei) that crash into air molecules and produce a shower of lower-energy particles.  While scientists can tell some things about cosmic rays from ground-based observations, it’s clear that to get the best idea of where they come from and what they are, you need to hoist yourself above the atmosphere and look at the things before they slam into air molecules.

           

That is exactly what AMS does.  It uses five different kinds of particle detectors and a great big magnet to bend the particle’s paths slightly in order to figure out energy, mass, and charge. While it might have theoretically been possible to put such a machine into unmanned orbit by itself, the size of the thing (it’s about ten feet on a side, roughly) and its power consumption made it a prime candidate for installation on the International Space Station.  I read the original paper describing the device, and while I don’t pretend to understand it all, I was impressed by the sheer magnitude of the task:  using over 600 microprocessors to compress 300,000 raw data inputs into a data stream that runs only 10 megabits per second, for instance.  They catch an average of about 600 particles (of all kinds) each second, and the paper describes results from eighteen months’ worth of data.

Now that you have the world’s greatest cosmic ray detector, what do you do with it?  Look for positrons, it turns out.  Why positrons, which are the electron’s antiparticle?  When a positron hits an electron, they both turn into energy and release gamma rays.  And the theorists say that when two hypothetical dark-matter particles called WIMPs (I did not make this up—it stands for “weakly interacting massive particle”) hit each other, they disappear and make a positron-electron pair.  Or something like that.  Anyway, according to reports, if you find a lot of high-energy positrons in cosmic rays, that is evidently strong evidence for something we don’t fully understand, and dark-matter collisions making positrons are one of the prime candidates for that something.

It’s sort of like if you lock up your house when you leave and the door is standing open when you come back:  you know something unusual is going on, but you don’t know exactly what yet.  That’s about where the AMS scientists are now.

They are not the first people to discover these high-energy positrons.  We are talking truly high-energy here:  they are concerned with energies from 10 billion electron volts (GeV) up to 350 GeV.  And the higher the energy they look at, the more positrons they see, as a fraction of the total of electrons and positrons together.  Obviously the trend has to poop out somewhere, but the size and shape of the curve has got them more excited than a cat who wanders into a dog park by mistake. 

The AMS experiment is not the first one to find this trend (an unmanned satellite instrument called PAMELA found similar results in 2008), but the AMS data covers a larger energy range and is more accurate.  The data will keep theorists busy for many months or years, and because AMS was designed to operate for at least 20 years, as time goes on they will have even more to work with in the future.

Was AMS worth the $2 billion it took to do it?  Supposedly, when Ben Franklin witnessed the first balloon ascension in Paris in 1783, he was asked what good it was.  His reply?  “What use is a newborn baby?”  I can find a reference to this only on the Scientific Urban Legends webpage, so it may be apocryphal, but Franklin really did witness the first balloon flight, which was the first time a human being left the ground under control (as opposed to falling out of a fifth-story window, for example).  Here 230 years later, more than a century after balloons were used for some of the first cosmic-ray experiments around 1910, we are still hoisting instruments high above the ground to look for the things.  Only this time, we may be closer to figuring out where some of them come from, and in the process we may learn more about what four-fifths of the material universe is made of.  Personally, I’d say that is worth $2 billion, especially if it was spread out over most of the world the way it was.

Sources:  The website Space.com carried an article “Potential dark matter discovery a win for space station science” at http://www.space.com/20499-dark-matter-space-station-ams.html on Apr. 3, 2013.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on dark matter, WIMPs, PAMELA, and cosmic rays. 

SpaceX Scores a First

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.

Sources:  Besides the current news coverage of SpaceX's achievement reported by Associated Press, I consulted a news release by SpaceX at http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20120525 and the Wikipedia article on Elon Musk.