Can America’s space industry build on a new momentum?
Despite its success with its Falcon Heavy rocket, SpaceX has lots to prove.
The crowds were back. Lining the beaches and the causeways, their binoculars fixed on the same launchpad that first sent men to the moon.
But this time, the draw wasn’t the NASA heroes of the 1960s Space Age - Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong - who paved a path to the lunar surface. Instead, it was an eccentric billionaire with a big new rocket and a penchant for showmanship.
The launch of Elon Musk’s Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center last week was the latest in a series of milestones that has revived interest in space and the stretch of sand along the Florida coast that has witnessed so many epic flights out of the atmosphere. The hotels were full, the media room overflowing and the traffic near the Kennedy Space Center was bumper-to-bumper.
Musk’s triumph in a test flight that sent a sports car deep into space was something of a cross-promotional stunt involving Tesla, one of this other companies. But it also marked a turning point for a budding commercial space industry that has raised the stakes for itself by promising big things.
Now, the question is whether it can maintain its momentum and live up to the promise of returning humans to space, while landing spacecraft on the surface of the moon - inherently difficult and dangerous endeavors, even for NASA.
SpaceX’s launch comes as the Trump administration is looking to restructure the role of NASA, ensuring that private enterprise and international partners work closely with the space agency.
Vice President Mike Pence and the rest of the National Space Council — which was reconstituted under President Donald Trump— this month are scheduled to hold their second meeting, this time at Kennedy Space Center, to discuss the role that companies such as SpaceX could play in the country’s ambitions to return to the moon and explore the cosmos.
As the council convenes, one major question it will have to grapple with is: “How can we best spend our resources as a nation to ensure the most robust space portfolio we can,” said Phil Larson, an assistant dean at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a former spokesperson at SpaceX.
Lori Garver, a former deputy NASA Administrator, said the launch of Falcon Heavy should spark a change in the way NASA operates.
“This much delayed, much maligned rocket is just what the space agency needs to escape from the governmental bureaucracy that has bound her to Low Earth Orbit for the past forty-five years,” she wrote in an email. “Unfortunately, the traditionalists at NASA don’t share this view and have feared this moment since the day the program was announced seven years ago.”
The Falcon Heavy launch was a milestone not just because it became the most powerful rocket in operation, but because it boosted its payload, the Tesla Roadster, out of Earth’s orbit on a trajectory around the sun that Musk said would take it out further than Mars to the asteroid belt.
SpaceX outfitted the vehicle with three cameras that beamed back stunning images of the ruby red car soaring through the blackness of space with the Earth, a blue orb in the distance.
As impressive as the launch was, SpaceX still faces a far greater test: Flying astronauts. For all the hype and hoopla surrounding the launch of a $200,000 sports car with a space-suited mannequin named “Starman” at the wheel, SpaceX has never flown a rocket with a human being on board.
While the industry has had a series of triumphs, “that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy,” said Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who also served as the president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. “Taking humans to space should never be taken for granted.”