British media article: How far can the Rocket Men's journey to space go?

The British "Times" website published an article on July 10 titled "Billionaire 'Rocket Man' Takes Us on the Road to Space Conflict", written by Roger Boyce. The full text is excerpted below:

The probe, launched near the town of Truss, New Mexico, allowed Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic to defeat Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and land it in space nine days earlier. Bezos's New Shepard offers passengers about 10 minutes of weightlessness, while Branson's space plane offers 4 minutes of floating time. In addition, the windows of the Bezos aircraft are also larger. Elon Musk of Tesla (and Space Exploration Technologies) won a contract from NASA to develop a lunar lander. As a participant in the space business and recognized by the most authoritative institutions, Musk immediately tweeted and ridiculed the defeated opponent Bezos: "Can't shoot (orbit) go, hahaha." "It's a joke, of course, and it's a bit embarrassing for people with net worth less than $1 billion, which is the threshold for space startups."

Expand the new frontier of mankind

You have to try to believe that this is not just a test of masculinity, but also involves a deeper spiritual pursuit. Obviously, nothing is possible just because the future space tourism market is too big to accommodate three companies and three Rocket Men who are desperate to spend their hard-earned wealth. In part, this stems from a shared belief that space is the new frontier, and that the noble cause of expanding humanity's understanding of the universe can be used to unleash their adventurous spirit. For decades, they all thought about space travel. Branson mentioned his 17-year dream. Musk went into the rocket industry after selling his online payment company PayPal and talked about opening up a Mars colony once the required engineering conditions were in place. He proposed that cheap rockets could help humanity turn to a "multi-planetary space civilization."

When Branson invited Musk to dinner in 2011, Musk had already accomplished something — using a two-stage liquid-fueled system to put the first privately manufactured liquid-fuel rocket into orbit. In addition, he put a commercial satellite into orbit. Branson wanted to know if they could work together, but Musk wasn't sure what he could get out of the collaboration, so he didn't say yes. He then went out drinking with friends, but as Nicholas Schmid put it in his book on the modern space race, Test the Gods: "He was the last to stay in a bar, reading a dusty Soviet rocket manual." ”

However, the three Rocket Men's favorite reading materials were The American Tom Wolfe's 1979 long-form report on the early space race, "The Real Thing" (later made into the movie "Space Pioneer" - Editor's Note). The story is set in a group of American ace fighter pilots who turn their skills to space travel. Wolf said: "I am curious about what makes a person willing to sit on a giant Roman candle and wait for someone to light the lead. The book convinced Musk and Bezos that the resources pooled behind the 1969 U.S. moon landing program produced a new set of heroes who could give the nation some sort of mission and prove definitively that the United States had technological superiority.

NASA lost its dominance

Like Musk, Branson is fascinated by the flying term "pushing the limits." After the publication of The Real Thing, this phrase became a common phrase used to describe situations that required some additional effort. But Wolfe has a very precise explanation: "'limit' is a flight test term that refers to the performance limitations of a certain aircraft, how many turns it can turn at a certain speed, and so on." 'Pushing outward', detecting the limits of the periphery, seems to be the biggest challenge and the greatest satisfaction brought about by flight testing. "It resonates with the three Rocket Men. The desire to challenge the limits drove the Americans Bezos and Musk, and to a certain extent, wrote a biography of Branson's life of constant self-innovation. Moreover, this desire prompted them to view NASA, which the U.S. government set up to address the Soviet space challenge, as an overly bureaucratic, cautious, and slower space exploration process.

Musk was particularly disappointed that U.S. government contractors were spending too much money, saying they "build a Ferrari every time they launch, when in fact the Honda Accord may be enough." No wonder he was so happy later that he sold the idea for his lunar lander to NASA. During a test flight in May, he demonstrated that he could launch a giant rocket starship that would fly 10 kilometers over Texas and return safely to the ground, the largest rocket since Saturn 5 sent the Apollo team to the moon.

These "space" billionaires have slightly different goals, but agree on the core: The resilience of the West depends on the flexibility and agility of tech entrepreneurs — who can innovate quickly, rather than wasting time around bureaucracy. The first question they need to address is: Manned spaceflight or unmanned spaceflight? Can space exploration be done by increasingly advanced robots, or can human colonization with conquest and ground forces as subtext? Only by solving this problem can it be clear whether the space race is driven by scientific curiosity or driven by the vanity aspirations of politics and the super-rich.

NASA is looking for a base that can guarantee light, altitude and frozen water. Even setting up a basic outpost is laborious and expensive. Rock samples must be excavated by robots and sent back to Earth for 10 years until the best spot is found. Unmanned spacecraft then transport building materials, and more robots are used to assemble these materials. Eventually humans will arrive.

How can public interest and public funding be sustained for so long? In the discussion of "post-lunar exploration", NASA has gradually lost its dominance and has difficulty competing with the flexible, low-cost space initiatives proposed by mentally free entrepreneurs. Then-U.S. President George W. Bush had planned to build a human-operated lunar outpost between 2019 and 2024, rotating semi-annually, but it didn't happen. Musk said Space Exploration Technologies could perform its first manned mission to Mars as early as 2024. This may not be possible, but he grabbed the public's interest and announced that Mars is more attractive than the moon.

At the same time, NASA is exploring paths worth exploring. They plan to embark on a politically correct trip to the moon, choosing a female astronaut or a candidate for cultural diversity. As for Mars, they're busy mapping it and naming martian hills after scientists who have died of COVID-19. This does not mean that the government is convincing itself that it is no longer important. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been showing how governments can benefit from working with private companies.

Beware of the militarization of space

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a Washington agency founded in 1957, projects derived from the early Internet — known in large tones as interstellar computer networks — email, meteorological satellites, lasers, night vision goggles, and the Saturn 5 rocket.

The appeal of space to commercial speculation is obvious, but it has nothing to do with the romance of paradise or the coziness of weightlessness. It's about understanding the world's growing reliance on satellites, reducing the cost of satellite production and launch, and leveraging data collected in space. Spatial data can create new markets: guide farmers on what to grow. Small, inexpensive satellites can tell emergency agencies how forest fires are spreading or which rivers are rising. There are also humanitarian uses, including tracking the displacement of ethnic minorities.

Musk's competitors worry that Space Exploration Technologies' "Interstellar Connectivity" program service will allow the company to build the largest satellite network in history. The company's existing 1,500 satellites account for about a quarter of the total number of orbiting satellites, and plans to add another 10,000. Of course, Musk has deep pockets, and space will undoubtedly appear extremely crowded, because even some small countries and universities are seeking "sky eyes".

Betting on the ever-expanding market for cheap space data is still a risk. A senior analyst at a space consulting firm in the United States said: "If you put this technology out there and make it more accessible, people will start doing all sorts of things, and a lot of them will not be able to achieve at all." But in the end, the next Google or Instagram could also emerge. ”

For the space billionaires, this could be a dream come true. Whether manned commercial space travel serves this cause is another matter. It sidesteps the main questions about outer space, including not only how and by whom the vast amounts of information traveling through the air should be handled, but also how to avoid weaponizing that data. In the science fiction novel Peace on Earth by the late Polish futurist Stanisław Lem, all weapons of mass destruction are transported to the moon by spaceship and then distributed among the departments by a lunar agency. The story ends badly, not good for the Earth, not good for the Moon. The essence of 21st century warfare, communications, navigation and intelligence, all rely on satellites. Destroy a cluster of satellites and you will change the balance of power on the land battlefield. Space is a vague field of war that increases the complexity of the use of troops. It speeds up military operations, providing more up-to-date information in operational calculus, but it also introduces new weaknesses. The more militarized space is, the more debris and satellite junk it will scatter, and the less wise it will be for humans to flock to space.

Interstellar travel is truly fascinating, addictive to science fiction writers and moviegoers alike, and it adds a special appeal to a time when it's difficult to get to Mallorca, Spain. But this dream will take generations of trial and error on the part of Musk and Branson before it can come close to being realized. Even then, we may have to ask, what is the point of all this, is it just a bunch of masculine "tax exiles" going to space to play selfies? We need their brains, their ambitions, their vision, right above the earth.

Source: Reference News Network