Space to Play

President Obama has cancelled Moon Shot 2.0, and the Space Shuttle has flown its last orbit around the Earth. With the touchdown of Atlantis, half a century of American manned rocketeering has come to a close, leaving an unfamiliar spiritual void which no number of multinational space stations can fill. Moreover, budget outlook would suggest that during this interlude, we can only move backwards.

Space has always been the ‘fiscal frontier’, explored by governments in a fit of Cold War prestige paranoia for its novelty rather than its utility. The U.S. went to the Moon after spending a now-inconceivable 4 to 5 per cent of its federal budget on research and development; but a mere six flights later, the lunar soap opera ended. Space is now a routine, with the sangfroid of military astronauts doing little to ameliorate public indifference.

But free enterprise follows in the Shuttle’s wake, as inevitably as the privatisation of the aeroplane. A handful of companies run by colourful moguls of airlines, real estate and even PayPal, have discovered two ways of ensuring an economic return from spaceflight: tourism and government contracting. The former has hitherto been the preserve of the business elite; the latter, for once, is not restricted to Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Virgin Galactic, with its trendy SpaceShip Two, remains the flagship of new-age space tourism, offering six minutes of weightlessness for a paltry $U.S.200,000 ($A190,000). While this is unlikely to revolutionise international travel, the company has nonetheless adopted a viable, sustainable business model which will go some way to symbolically ‘democratise’ space.

The ambitious SpaceX Corporation, for all the youthful exuberance of its staff, launched the world’s first private orbital space capsule last December. A beneficiary of NASA’s new Commercial Crew Development contracts out for ferry flights to the International Space Station (ISS), providing a highly versatile and cost-effective vehicle for launching professional astronauts, fare-paying passengers and equipment.

Occupying another dimension entirely is Bigelow Aerospace, which has already launched two inflatable space habitats to twice the altitude of the ISS, with plans for a third manned station. Moreover, it is relatively cheap, costing somewhere in the region of $100 million per unit, compared with the $100 billion of the integrated tin-can ISS.

Significantly, in the choice between technological imitation and progressive innovation, the private sector has embraced the latter. SpaceShip Two is launched from a jet aircraft and will ‘shuttlecock’ back into the atmosphere without the usual inferno. SpaceX’s Dragon craft are fashioned from composite materials, costing less than $150 million per launch. Bigelow’s inflatable modules are a self-evident revolution with tremendous potential.

But conceptually speaking, privatisation is a difficult transition: manned spaceflight has forever been couched in the rhetoric of ‘humanity’ and ‘national achievement’, neither of which are compatible with corporate profiteering. The loss of a cohesive vision is also a concern. Neil Armstrong notably condemned Obama’s cancellation of the lunar Constellation Program as the beginning of a “downhill slide into mediocrity”.

This sort of complaint is not unfounded. Virgin Galactic will barely scratch the edge of the atmosphere. Nor will anyone transit to the Moon without considerable investment in the development of heavy rocketry. Russia has been reluctant to commit to anything beyond the Soyuz ferry flights and ISS maintenance. The meagre European Space Agency is focusing almost entirely on robotic spaceflight. Private companies alone have neither the funds nor the knowledge base to build Apollo-era monoliths.

Some, including SpaceX, envisage a Space Race with China and perhaps a concomitant ‘reinvigoration’ of national purpose. Republican Rep. Frank Wolf (VA), chairman of the Congressional Appropriations Subcommittee, barred scientific co-operation with the Chinese space agencies as recently as May. Fraught military relations are no doubt partly responsible, especially regarding the 2007 anti-satellite missile shots and the issue of Taiwan.

But recalling History, this is an impermanent basis for public space enthusiasm, and the astronaut will never hold the same diplomatic significance again. After all, one cannot pioneer what has already been achieved, and China (behind the propaganda panoply) most likely views its recent manned flights as a mere confirmation of superpower status.

So in the short term, commercial spaceflight will achieve a little bit less but at a much lower cost, covering a severe shortfall in orbital ‘cargo resupply capability’ which cannot be met by Russia. In the long term, it will free an enormous proportion of NASA’s budget that is currently spent on the white-winged elephant, allowing for the pragmatic pursuit of more transcendental lunar ambitions. After a financial crisis, one cannot play the Hare.

Is commercialisation a profound paradigm shift? Hardly: in popular consciousness, space has gone unnoticed for 40 years, and has been appreciated more for its utility with respect to communication networks and the decidedly prosaic GPS than it has for its romantic exoticism.

Indeed, with his constant invocation of American economic might, Kennedy wanted the Moon landings to be as much a triumph of capitalism as of democracy. Well, here it is in its purest form and the benefits for Progress, beyond the current stagnation, may well be worth the hiring of these enthusiastic ‘mercenaries’.

Benjamin Brooks is in his first year of a Bachelor of Arts (Advanced), majoring in History and English.