{"id":34045,"date":"2015-12-30T02:00:50","date_gmt":"2015-12-30T07:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34045"},"modified":"2015-12-27T10:13:03","modified_gmt":"2015-12-27T15:13:03","slug":"elon-musk-jeff-bezos-and-the-future-of-spaceflight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/12\/30\/elon-musk-jeff-bezos-and-the-future-of-spaceflight\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the future of spaceflight"},"content":{"rendered":"

Colby Cosh<\/a> on the real significance of the private space companies’ successes:<\/p>\n

The science fiction authors who originally imagined spaceflight thought it would be classically capitalistic in nature \u2014 a Wild West of chancers, gold-diggers, outlaws, and even slave-traders transposed to the skies. It ended up, in its first incarnation, being a government program. This had the merit of showing that some impossible technical problems could be solved if you threw near-infinite resources and human lives at them. But the money and will ran out before NASA got around to figuring out how to make orbital spaceflight truly routine. Reusable rockets are the important first step that NASA didn\u2019t have time to try in the Golden Age, under the pressure of a \u201cspace race\u201d between governments.<\/p>\n

Musk and Bezos are trying, I think very consciously, to revive the public interest and inspiration that this race narrative once brought. When SpaceX stuck its landing this week, having previously had a couple of flops, Bezos tweeted \u201cWelcome to the club!\u201d Musk will not mind the cheap shot too much. Bezos is doing him a favour by making a game of it.<\/p>\n

It is hard for us to feel passion about accounting, even when \u201caccounting\u201d translates to cheaper satellite technology that means subtle advances in science and cost cuts in earthbound communications tech. Anything you can turn into a mere clash of personalities will get the attention of journalists and readers more readily. Musk and Bezos are exploiting their position as two of the great stage characters of our day.<\/p>\n

The benefit they\u2019re really going for is to bring a slightly larger margin of the human neighbourhood within reach for spaceships assembled on orbital platforms \u2014 the only practical kind of spaceship, as it seems to have turned out. Routine orbital access means affordable space tourism; it means possible Mars missions predicated on traditional exploration\/adventure motives; it means deeper scientific scrutiny and even commercial study of the Moon, the asteroids, perhaps the inner planets. It means space stations that aren\u2019t just for handpicked careerist supermen.<\/p>\n

It means \u2014 well, we don\u2019t know, from this side of the future, what it means. Some grade-three kid out there may already have a \u201ckiller app\u201d for reusable rockets that nobody has considered yet. (If the cost comes down far enough, are we certain rockets won\u2019t re-emerge as a possibility for long-haul terrestrial travel? That\u2019s another assumption of early SF we have discarded, perhaps carelessly!) But it is probably a good guess that the balletic SpaceX triumph will turn out, after the fact, to have been one of the biggest stories of 2015.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colby Cosh on the real significance of the private space companies’ successes: The science fiction authors who originally imagined spaceflight thought it would be classically capitalistic in nature \u2014 a Wild West of chancers, gold-diggers, outlaws, and even slave-traders transposed to the skies. It ended up, in its first incarnation, being a government program. This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,15,13],"tags":[1050,1006,174,1049,716,708],"class_list":["post-34045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space-science","category-technology","category-usa","tag-blueorigin","tag-elonmusk","tag-innovation","tag-jeffbezos","tag-spacecraft","tag-spacex"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8R7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34045"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34046,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34045\/revisions\/34046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}