Space We Want to Get Into It We know there are now a lot of relatively new aerospace companies trying to get lucrative government contracts for space launches. It is no secret Jeff Bezos is very upset he didn’t get a NASA contract and his arch competitor SpaceX did. He made several pleas to NASA to reverse their decision but to no avail. Now he has launched a lawsuit against NASA. I don’t see him succeeding, but one never knows. SpaceX has aggravated their competition by their successes and innovation. Sometimes this happens with very successful companies. When we talk about space junk and how much is circling the earth it is hard to visualize. Let me say this, it is really getting crowded up there and the chances of a satellite getting hit by junk is increasing. A Chinese satellite just got dinged by a piece of a Russian rocket. The ding was powerful enough to destroy the Chinese satellite. There is so much debris orbiting our planet it is getting much harder to track it all, and I really think we can no longer do this with 100 percent accuracy. Another attempt is being made to create a successful space junk removal system. We certainly need a success in this area. Aurora Propulsion Technologies will be launching their device on a Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket later this year. The launch will only be of a cubesat which is a very small satellite. This will just be a demonstration. The demonstration is supposed to demonstrate that future cubesats will have the capability of adjusting their altitude and have plasma brakes among other devices so the objects can eventually de-orbit and fall back to earth where they will presumably burn up in the atmosphere, eliminating cubesats from remaining in space after their mission. The Japanese tried to catch space junk a while back but failed. There are a lot of problems when we try and clean out the junk from orbit. It seems the only three options to clear them out might be vaporizing them, de-orbiting them, or sending them out into space. There could be more, but at the moment I can’t think of any. Can you imagine if a country launches a junk handler and blasts a country’s satellite which is being used by mistake, the trouble this might cause? This will be a tricky endeavor indeed. Boeing is the prime contractor of the Starliner, which is part of NASA’s Artemis space launch system to take us back to the moon. So far, I would have to classify it as a total failure which has gone way beyond budget and has been delayed by years. The most recent delay has set it back again and which the company says the delay should only be for a couple of months, some people are saying this could set the program back years and it seems they were right because it has now been announced it will be at least a year. Meanwhile, SpaceX has their giant rocket on the launch pad, the one which will go to the moon and Mars waiting for government permission to launch, which if successful make Boeing look like a stooge. SpaceX started out later than Boeing and by using their own funds in the beginning and are at a point where they could surpass Boeing’s attempts and do it for far less money. All I have to say a good comparison of what I am talking about is the price Boeing is charging NASA for one rocket engine which is 40 million dollars and the price SpaceX charges for a more powerful engine which is 1 million dollars which they claim to be working on getting the price down to 500 thousand dollars. Paul Allen the cofounder of Microsoft started Stratolaunch. The company’s aim is to build the world’s biggest plane and carry a rocket, which will fly to a certain altitude and be able to use smaller rockets to launch payloads into orbit. The company is also involved in working on a reusable space plane and the Talon A hypersonic vehicle along with the Talon Z. It has been the dream of scientists and engineers for many years. It is a way to get into space without rockets or propulsion of any kind. It is the Space Elevator. A sturdy cable would be anchored somewhere on earth on one end and a counterweight in space. The cable would rotate with the earth and a vehicle would be able to go up the cable into space. The cable would remain tight because of centrifugal force. Cargo could be sent up and down this way. The elevator was first proposed in 1895, but of course there was no way to build it at the time. Innovation seems to be everywhere so of course it would also be in space travel and space transportation. Look how far we have come since those first days when Yuri Gagarin climbed into his one man capsule and made it into space. Along the way we lost people, but unfortunately space is dangerous and so is getting there. It is true the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion was caused by a poor decision to launch against advice from the booster rocket maker, but most if not all of the rest of the disasters were just that, disasters. America had lost more astronauts in space disasters because the crews of the space shuttle were bigger than anything the Soviets had launched. As time went by, we seemed to get much better at launches and so did the Russians. Thank goodness. Trips going and coming from the space station have almost become routine for the United States and Russia and it has been about 18 years since an American astronaut has died from a space related accident. In 1980 an explosion of a Russian rocket killed 44 people on the ground. It has been even longer since a Russian has died in a space related accident than an American. There is no doubt anything to do with space is dangerous and just because we have been relatively safe from space accidents killing anyone for almost 20 years doesn’t mean it won’t happen again. As we ride in our ships to moons and planets there will no doubt be people lost.
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