First Flight

The space age began forty-seven years ago today when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into Earth orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Later today SpaceShipOne will lift off from a California desert airstrip in an attempt to claim the Ansari X Prize for the first private vehicle to reach space twice in two weeks.
I was born six days after Sputnik was launched. As a child of the space age, I should be excited by the flight of SpaceShipOne, and I suppose I am. But that excitement is tinged with nostalgia for the future we were supposed to have, and for the glory days of NASA (a nostalgia captured brilliantly by Jerry Oltion in his Nebula Award-winning novella Abandon In Place).
It’s hard to get worked up over a suborbital flight, thirty-five years after human beings first walked on the moon. I know, I’m supposed to be excited by the entrepreneurial glory of it all: I’d just as soon ride down to JFK and watch a bunch of JetBlue Airbus A320s take off. The problem with SpaceShipOne and its commercial successors is that they’re neither fish nor fowl; neither true exploration nor functional transportation. These private spacecraft aren’t going anywhere humans haven’t been before, and for them to be useful as transportation, they have to be going to someplace; for the foreseeable future, the destination for all private space launches is Right Back Where You Started. Imagine Magellan giving day tours of the Mediterranean. Don’t get me wrong: I think Burt Rutan is a genius, and I have nothing but admiration for the test pilots flying SpaceShipOne: I hope the team succeeds, and that the ship and pilot return safely to Earth, and I’m tickled that the FAA has issued its first set of astronaut’s wings to a civilian. But at best, private spaceships will provide cheaper access to space for commercial satellites and expensive sightseeing trips for tourists: worthwhile projects, I guess, but nobody’s going to be throwing ticker tape parades because of them.
Since the destruction of the Columbia space shuttle, there’s been a hue and cry over NASA’s “moribund” Human Spaceflight Program. Some of the criticism is justified, but some of it is the same old cant from Luddites who’d rather see the NASA budget scrapped for tax cuts to millionaires. This summer NASA landed two rovers on the surface of Mars, a body 50,000,000 kilometers away from Earth at its closest approach (if you flew an Airbus A320 to Mars you would arrive at Shunn International Spaceport in just under seven years—and that’s close by astronomical standards). Even though the Mars missions have no human crewmembers aboard, they are a technological feat beyond the ability of even the richest private enterprises: no corporation would sink approximately a billion dollars into research unlikely to pay off in the lifetime of the CEO, much less during an earnings quarter.
I don’t give a damn, frankly, about the first Virgin Atlantic Shuttle to Low Earth Orbit, nor am I thrilled by the prospect of the Exxon-Mobil Space Station. I’d like to see interstellar probes, blazoned with the NASA “meatball,” launched to our neighbors in the Milky Way Galaxy. I’d like to see a joint ESA-NASA crewed mission to Mars. I’d like to see the first expedition to an extrasolar planet blast off (no doubt from orbit), under an Earth flag. What makes my blood sing is not just exploration and science, but the romance of a shared endeavor. I’d like to look up at the night sky and imagine the emissaries of humankind falling through space toward a new star, rather than employees of Sumitomo Limited making another profitable run to the Kuiper Belt.
In 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on the surface of another world. A billion people all over the Earth watched on television as Armstrong put the first human footprint in the ancient Lunar dust. That his words were scripted makes them no less powerful, nor less true: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”