“Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.” – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
On October 4, 1957, humans placed the first artificial satellite into Earth orbit. Sputnik I’s “beep, beep, beep,” was opening fanfare for the Space Age. Within a dozen years a man was walking on the Moon’s surface.
I spent the part of my childhood that I remember during that dozen years, age two to twelve. I grew up in Ann Arbor, MI, a space-crazy town, as a space-crazy kid. I was even one of those who sent letters in to save Star Trek for a third season. Our future was in space and I was going to be part of it.
The big aerospace bust occurred in 1971, when I was in high school. By the time I graduated, I decided to major in naval architecture and marine engineering instead of aerospace, because ships seemed as much fun as rockets, and it promised to be a more stable career. But the space dream never quite went away.
Upon graduation (with a degree in naval architecture and marine engineering) I somehow ended up going to work on the Shuttle Program at Johnson Space Center in Houston. My plan was to work there a few years and then switch back to maritime, doing offshore platform design thereafter. I could dine out on my experience as a rocket scientist (well, rocket engineer) thereafter. Instead, the mid-80s oil bust occurred as I was planning my move back to the oilpatch, and I ended up staying in the Shuttle program until it ended in 2011.
When I was in college, I envisioned myself as project manager constructing one of the many manned space platforms we would have in Earth orbit by the 1990s. We would have colonies on the Moon by the early 21st century. No one thought those dreams excessive back in the early 1970s. Some even thought them conservative. If you had told me in 1979, when I started on the Shuttle program that over the next 40 years we would never put another human in space beyond low earth orbit, or that we would only have just one permanent manned space station, I would not have believed it.
Yet here we are.
Yet I see signs that this stagnation is about to change. We have put humans into space for the first time this year using a space capsule designed and built by the private sector. The cost of launching payloads into orbit has dropped by 97 percent over the last five years. (For an indication of the impact that type of cost savings could yield consider this. The shipping container cut the cost of shipping goods 97 percent and created the global economy we have today.) There are honest-to-god profitable companies providing commercial launch services.
And within a few years access to space will not depend on national governments, other than to grant permission to launch. And as launch costs continue to drop, we can profitably exploit the resources of space. There is (literally) gold in them thar asteroids. (Well, some of them. And a whole bunch of other minerals. And solar power. And a lot of other stuff.
Perhaps the next forty years will see us again go to space, and even establish permanent human habitations in the Solar System. I hope so. Because Tsiolkovsky is right. Remain confined to a cradle to long and you die without achieving your potential.
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