Friday, March 24, 2006
One small step...
I just watched the ill-fated launch of SpaceX's first attempt to put a payload into orbit, for a fraction of what it costs NASA to do the same thing.
As you might have guessed, the payload didn't make orbit, and it's too early for anyone to know what went wrong. But to my knowledge, this was the first private enterprise attempt to put a payload in LEO (Low Earth Orbit).
The whole thing was available via Webcast - yet another technology that some of us already take for granted. I was not only able to watch the launch from ground-based cameras, but there was also a camera mounted on the Falcon. Once liftoff happened, they switched to that view, and I saw the atoll receding, from the Falcon's-eye view of the world.
Then things went wrong. The bird started to roll, and it looked to me as though it was rolling a bit quickly. The transmission froze, and when it came back, the view was definitely spinning, and I saw a jet of flame. My assumption, for the moment, is that the rocket at this point was gyrating out of control, like a spinning top about to fall over. Then the transmission cut off, and I couldn't get it back.
I'll bet they do better with their next try. Our government and NASA are way too bloated and dysfunctional to trust with a space program; they just keep pushing the whole "bigger is better" mentality and keep awarding contracts to companies that have a history of delivering barely-standard stuff years late and for two to three times the estimated cost. They claim that there will only be a two-year hiatus between the end of the Shuttle program in 2010 (I'll bet that's optimistic) and the beginning of the CEV era of flights to the moon and Mars. If past history is any judge, it'll be 2015 at the earliest before the CEV flies. And I believe that there will already be a growing private space program by then, delivering satellites to NEO and GEO (geosynchronous - communications sats and the like), building private space stations, and supplying the ISS with stuff that NASA can't manage to get off the ground.
SpaceX. SpaceDev. Bigelow Aerospace. Virgin Galactic. These are the new pioneers. I think they'll be doing big things in the next few years.
As you might have guessed, the payload didn't make orbit, and it's too early for anyone to know what went wrong. But to my knowledge, this was the first private enterprise attempt to put a payload in LEO (Low Earth Orbit).
The whole thing was available via Webcast - yet another technology that some of us already take for granted. I was not only able to watch the launch from ground-based cameras, but there was also a camera mounted on the Falcon. Once liftoff happened, they switched to that view, and I saw the atoll receding, from the Falcon's-eye view of the world.
Then things went wrong. The bird started to roll, and it looked to me as though it was rolling a bit quickly. The transmission froze, and when it came back, the view was definitely spinning, and I saw a jet of flame. My assumption, for the moment, is that the rocket at this point was gyrating out of control, like a spinning top about to fall over. Then the transmission cut off, and I couldn't get it back.
I'll bet they do better with their next try. Our government and NASA are way too bloated and dysfunctional to trust with a space program; they just keep pushing the whole "bigger is better" mentality and keep awarding contracts to companies that have a history of delivering barely-standard stuff years late and for two to three times the estimated cost. They claim that there will only be a two-year hiatus between the end of the Shuttle program in 2010 (I'll bet that's optimistic) and the beginning of the CEV era of flights to the moon and Mars. If past history is any judge, it'll be 2015 at the earliest before the CEV flies. And I believe that there will already be a growing private space program by then, delivering satellites to NEO and GEO (geosynchronous - communications sats and the like), building private space stations, and supplying the ISS with stuff that NASA can't manage to get off the ground.
SpaceX. SpaceDev. Bigelow Aerospace. Virgin Galactic. These are the new pioneers. I think they'll be doing big things in the next few years.
