I’ve just watched the launch of the SpaceX Starship, cheering like any sports fan at the big game of his favourite team. The fight for the future goes on, between the old paradigm of government controlled space agencies and the new one of private companies who are in it for the money with a seriously heavy side order of glory. I wasn’t just cheering for SpaceX. I was cheering for the new way of doing things, that will ultimately get us out the Solar System, make us a wealthy and numerous interplanetary, hopefully interstellar, species. They just landed a hard punch to the gut of the old paradigm.
The biggest rocket in the world used to be the Saturn V. Starship makes it look small. Two hundred metric tons to orbit, and if it matches the record of Falcon it will run as regularly as a flight from Ottawa to Vancouver. It would be nice if the Canadian government would encourage Canadian companies to get into the game, but that’s politics and we don’t do that here.
That’s more of a hit to the old paradigm than it first appears. A central assumption in the old paradigm is that spaceflight is an expensive, dangerous, irregular business. Launch capacity is the lead boot on anything anyone wants to do in space. Making it cheap, regular and reliably available kicks a major leg out from under the old paradigm.
I’ve been waiting a long time for this. I can remember watching Neil Armstrong step on the moon, and that young kid saw a glorious future open up before him, when we would leave this Earth for grand adventures among the planets and the stars. Then, for fifty years, it went dormant. Lots of unmanned probes. They do exactly what they’re told when they are told to do it, in minute detail. Programming such probes is, to put it faintly, a picky business.But, ah, all that lovely control.
Those pesky human beings have annoying things like free will, and they tend to chafe under the restrictions of being treated and programmed like robots. Go read up on the Skylab mutiny. Manned space flight, whether American or Russian, was pretty strictly controlled, too. The astronauts put up with it because it’s the only game in town. It’s a monopoly, and you play by their rules. That monopoly is cracking under the strain.
NASA has had to fight for its budgets at every turn of the road, and it’s a crooked road. The Canadian Space Agency is its ill-funded poor cousin. They just had to close their laboratory in Tunney’s Pasture in Ottawa, that does modest but important things like testing space probes to make sure they’ll survive the stresses of launch and the emptiness of space. Under the window dressing in the press release, which got very little media attention, the real story is money, as in not enough of it.
Money is a very tight rein of control on space agencies, and the politicians like that just fine. Space technologies tend to leak out into society at large, so they like to have control over that, too, because technology changes society. Satellites touch every part of daily life. The ubiquitous smart phone gives us access to a huge torrent of information collected by satellites of all kinds, large and small.
People who go on the assumption that spending on space flight consists of NASA’s budget, with a nod to ESA, are straining at a gnat while they swallow a camel. Consider the size and variety of the satellite communications market. Those companies are not in business for their health. A fair amount of the order book of SpaceX and the other New Space companies is putting those satellites into space, and there’s serious money there. The military budget of a lot of nations supports a lot of military satellites, for all kinds of different purposes. They aren’t poverty-stricken either, and they are a lot less interested in political clout and a lot more in reliability.
It took the US government a while to cut the GPS constellation loose for everyone to use, but when they did it created a huge industry. As I write this, the watch on my wrist is a GPS tracker that can tell me where and how fast I ran to the metre.
People are seriously talking about industry on the moon. That’s not a new idea. I have books on my shelf with titles like “The Space Enterprise” and “The Third Industrial Revolution”, which talk about all the new industries that could create a lot of wealth right here on Earth. Those ideas are being taken seriously now. The Outer Space Treaty, a product of the old paradigm, is cracking under the strain, too. Whether anything will take its place is very much an unanswered question, and in the current state of international politics that’s not looking very likely.
It’s a turbulent time we live in. Times of change always are. But shooting the rapids will bring us to a broad river with wide lands full of untapped resources on its banks. Well worth it.
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