Sunday Smiles

David Strom 2:31 PM | September 03, 2023

My strongest memories of world events from my childhood are the Vietnam War, the moon landings, and Nixon’s impeachment.

As a kid I was obsessed with the Apollo landings, and while I was only 5 when Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon and didn’t quite understand the significance of the achievement, by the time Gene Cernan stepped back into the LEM and departed the surface of the moon I was totally hooked by space.

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The shuttle era was a disappointment for a lot of reasons. Had the shuttle turned out to be as advertised it would have ushered in a new era of ready access to space and the development of a self-sustaining space economy. Instead, access to space became a slow hyperbureaucratized process that was unsafe, slow, expensive, and uninspiring.

You wanted to love the adventure of space, but the shuttle wasn’t going to deliver much of it. Except for a few spectacular missions such as fixing the Hubble Space Telescope, the shuttle did little that couldn’t have been done better and cheaper by an expendable rocket.

Then Elon Musk started SpaceX, and adventure came back. Musk cut the bureaucracy out, pursued stretch goals that no bureaucrat could envision, and upped the pace of progress by a factor of a thousand.

Musk did something NASA hadn’t since early Apollo: embrace risk and learn from failure. Of course, Musk didn’t have an impossible timeline as NASA did in the 60s and was able to fail without costing lives. His experiments with the Falcoln rockets cost enormous sums of money and put his company at risk, but a crashed Falcon rocket wouldn’t leave men to die on the moon.

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Ironically, as the timeline loosened for NASA their safety culture slackened along with the pace of innovation. We tend to look away from the uncomfortable fact that 3 times as many astronauts have died in American space accidents than in Russian ones, although Russia lost a lot more people on the ground in spacecraft-related accidents.

For all his embrace of risk-taking, Elon Musk has an impeccable safety record. It will likely not stand forever, but SpaceX has achieved the dream of routine access to space, including for human beings. Ask Boeing how hard that is. It took less than a decade to get men on the moon, but it will be more than a decade of effort for Boeing’s new Starliner capsule to become safety-certified assuming it ever is.

Musk gets all the attention in the world for his Twitter antics, but SpaceX will solidify his place in history. If Starship comes even remotely close to achieving its promise a real space economy at an unimaginable scale will be within reach.

That would likely make Musk the most important figure in the 21st century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The world would be a more boring place without the Babylon Bee

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Yes, I spend too much time on Twitter. What of it?

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