HAS ELON MUSK SPARKED A 21ST-CENTURY SPACE RACE?
On 6 February at 3:45pm at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, private aerospace company SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful operational rocket in the world. Around eight minutes later, the rocket’s two side boosters touched down on landing pads in perfect sync, while the upper stage sent the payload – a cherry-red Tesla Roadster ‘driven’ by a spacesuit-wearing mannequin – hurtling into interplanetary orbit.
A few hours after the rocket launch, the company’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk told the gathered press of his ambitions for space travel. “I think it’s going to open up a sense of possibility,” he said. “We want a new space race. Races are exciting.”
While there’s no doubt that Musk is a man used to getting what he wants, most commentators believe there is still some way to go until we see anything even approaching the scale of the back and forth battle that went on between the Soviet Union and the US in the 1960s.
“I don’t think we have a space race yet,” says Robert Massey, deputy executive director of the Royal Astronomical Society. “To be honest, Elon Musk doesn’t really have any competitors – he’s clearly leading the field. Not to dismiss the efforts of others but I certainly think he has changed the paradigm.”
In little more than 15 years, SpaceX has gone from being a wide- eyed Silicon Valley start-up to the most talked about name in spaceflight – a
field traditionally dominated by national space agencies such as NASA and their private contractors Boeing and Lockheed. And it’s not alone: Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, beat SpaceX to the punch in landing a reusable rocket for the first time in November, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic continues to carry out regular test flights.
With private companies grabbing the headlines, it may seem like government agencies have been overtaken by ambitious billionaire-funded private companies. According to Massey, this isn’t the case. “What you have seen in recent years is that the ambitions of NASA have been in more distant destinations, so they are kind of saying they can leave the low Earth orbit stuff to private companies because rocket technology is so mature,” he says.
It’s also worth noting that government agencies are likely to be some of the private companies’ biggest customers and their biggest source of income.
“ELON MUSK DOESN’T REALLY HAVE ANY COMPETITORS – HE’S CLEARLY LEADING THE FIELD”
“SpaceX is already tied to NASA, as it is delivering supplies, and ultimately people, to the Space Station,” says Massey. “It’s also likely that the first customers of the Falcon Heavy will be national space agencies, probably NASA.”
Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are now working on rockets designed to take humans into space – Blue Origin on the New Glenn reusable rocket, and SpaceX on the BFR, a 100m-tall monster that Musk says will take humans to the Moon for the first time since 1972.
“I think it is conceivable that SpaceX will achieve their goal of sending people around the Moon. The difference between going around the Moon, to landing a vehicle, having people walk on the surface, returning to lunar orbit, returning to Earth orbit – that’s a lot harder,” says Massey. “My hunch is that will be done by a state, possibly the Chinese as they want to do it as a matter of national pride. I could be completely wrong, nobody expected SpaceX to develop in quite this way.”