By: Matt Franklin
As I was perusing news items this week for a story that would really grab the readers’ attention, I thought I’d found a Pulitzer candidate in a BBC story on discovering the oldest rocks on Earth. After hyperventilating into a bag for a while, I noticed two other stories on recent endeavors in space exploration by China and privately funded organizations. I begrudgingly admitted that rockets were just way cooler than rocks. It must be something about the extra two letters, or maybe all that bright light, big noise and exploding stuff.
Each of these stories (the rockets, not the rocks) were reported separately. In brief, China recently celebrated its first Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA), while the privately funded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) just successfully launched its first privately built craft into orbit.
You may think an EVA alone is not very interesting at all. I, for instance, perform activities outside my vehicle with some frequency. As with everything else in life, it becomes much more fantastic with the addendum, “in SPACE!” Seriously, try it. “I ate lunch … in SPACE!” “I outswam Michael Phelps … in SPACE!” “I discovered some really old rocks …” OK, maybe it doesn’t work for that last one. Anyway, on Sept. 27 at 4:45 p.m. Beijing time, China finally gained some ground in the space race (Russia and America having performed EVAs in 1965).
A day later, the private space industry stuck it to the man a little when, after three previous attempts, SpaceX’s custom-built craft, the Falcon 1, launched at 7:15 and achieved Earth orbit about eight minutes later. The launch took place on a U.S. test site, which provides a convenient segue into an intelligent discussion of the need for private space ventures versus NASA. Fortunately, this is an opinion article not bound by matters of serious debate.
Some readers may have heard of the scandal behind China’s premature announcement of a successful launch regarding the Shenzhou 7 EVA mission. Fewer readers may have heard of SpaceX’s ridiculously small staff of a little more than five hundred people. Probably only a select group of readers will have already heard that the Falcon 1 was built entirely from scratch, with no outsourcing to pre-existing rocketry. No one in the readership, however, will have heard that it was really China funding SpaceX all along, or that the Shenzou 7 and Falcon 1 crossed paths somewhere over the North Pole to investigate a mysterious telemetric signal emanating from the direction of Polaris. This is because I just made that last part up, although yet another news item this week mentions the inconstant position of Polaris itself, at least as seen from Earth. There is no word as of this writing on whether Shenzhou 7’s EVA successfully glued Polaris in place once and for all.
So, what does all this mean? What should we make of all these space-walking Chinese and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) — I mean ‘rocket’ launching capitalists? Will private enterprise or gently reforming Communism take center stage for the next few historical epochs of Boldly Going?
I don’t know. I was hoping you did.
For China, one eventual goal is to catch up with the Russian and U.S. space fairing track records, including hints of a renewed, proper space race to again see if the U.S. can be beaten to the moon. This might sound like something of a lost cause, since we landed there about four years after those EVAs we discussed. What they’re really trying to do is beat our return. NASA plans to send people back to the moon around 2019.
You didn’t know about the new moon missions? I’d love to enlighten you, but I only have about 750 words per column, and I still need to offer final thoughts about privately funded space ventures. I could wax poetic with comparisons to the Wright Brothers and the growth of air travel into a major commercial business, working somewhat harmoniously. I won’t do that because I’d eventually stumble into a diatribe about airport security, and that’s been done.
Whether space travel will be propelled mostly by governmental or commercial means in the future, I can’t say. Regardless of the source, I personally applaud any effort to further mankind’s foothold into space. I mean, really, where else can you take a rocket to work? As for investigating really old rocks, did you read the part about going back to the moon?
For information on China’s spacewalk, visit:
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/080928-shenzhou-landing-wrap.html
For the SpaceX orbital launch:
http://spacefellowship.com/News/?p=6780
For really old rocks:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7639024.stm
