Waking Up in ‘the Golden Age of Spaceflight’

What’s driving all the new activity in the commercial-spaceflight industry? Joe Pappalardo on Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and how a capital-intensive business has started to shape the future. “It’s going to be contentious. That’s the truth. There’s no kumbaya in space.” Nemesis Games What’s driving all the new activity in the commercial-spaceflight industry? Joe Pappalardo on Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and how a capital-intensive business has started to shape the future. “What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine,” William Shatner [told]( Jeff Bezos last month. Shatner, who played the iconic Captain Kirk in Star Trek, had just completed a real-life trip to the edge of space and back, traveling on a spacecraft belonging to Bezos’s aerospace company, Blue Origin—and generating all the international media coverage the company would have hoped for. While the episode was powerful public relations, Shatner hasn’t been the only prominent name to make headlines for space travel in recent months. Bezos [made his own trip in July]( not two weeks after [Richard Branson did on a craft]( from his company Virgin Galactic. These billionaires, along with SpaceX founder Elon Musk, are leading a commercial-spaceflight industry that’s made giant strides over the past decade. What’s driving this business, and what does it mean for humanity’s future in space? Joe Pappalardo, a U.S.-based journalist and the author of Spaceport Earth: The Reinvention of Spaceflight, argues this may be “the golden age of spaceflight” as “more spacecraft are being designed and flown now than ever before in history.” He notes that America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) helped foster and fund this private industry, which now provides the agency with vehicles and other technology. According to Pappalardo, ambition, ego, and personal idiosyncrasies are all behind the initiatives of these businessmen—Musk is obsessed with going to Mars while Bezos dreams of the moon—but they also understand themselves as expanding human reach, turning science fiction into reality, even if spaceflight will likely remain a privilege of the very wealthy for decades to come. ——— Graham Vyse: What are the origins of commercial spaceflight? Joe Pappalardo: The history of U.S. spaceflight comes out of World War II. The Germans learned a whole lot about rocket technology by the end of the war, and some of them brought that to the U.S. By the Cold War, America had its A-team of rocket scientists racing the Soviet Union’s A-team of rocket scientists, each side trying to prove its system of government was better—by getting a satellite into orbit, getting human beings into orbit, getting someone to the moon. It was wrapped up in this geopolitical struggle, which informed how people viewed space. Still today, it’s about national pride and—even more now than it used to be—national security. NASA had many achievements, with the Apollo program [which landed the first humans on the moon] and the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle. After Apollo, the idea was that we didn’t need to go back to the moon. I interviewed [the American astronaut] Buzz Aldrin once, and he was so gung-ho about going to Mars, because, he said, “We’ve been to the moon.” I said, “You’ve been to the moon.” But that really was a prevailing attitude. I talked to another NASA refugee who’s now at a commercial space company and this person said the moon had become “a four-letter word” at NASA. Everything was about orbit. Everything was about the space station. Things had gotten stagnant by the time NASA retired the shuttle in 2011. At that point, there were no commercial satellite launches from the United States. To get people from Earth to the space station, the U.S. had to rely on the Russians. The parking lots at Cape Canaveral were empty. The Mars rovers were kicking ass—that’s basically what was happening at NASA. SpaceX was an unproven company at this time. NASA was weaning it, trying to get money and life into its privately funded effort to build a rocket that could deliver people and cargo to orbit—to the space station. A small cadre of rebels within NASA backed commercial companies and said, We’ll give you the seed money. Make a blueprint that can do what we need that spacecraft, launch vehicle, or rocket to do. If you can do that, you can keep the blueprints and sell tickets to whoever can afford them. That’s the ethos of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. More from Joe Pappalardo at The Signal: “When I talk to people I call NASA refugees—people who fled NASA and went to these space startups—they’re having the best times of their lives. There were no missions. There was nothing to work on. Now there are so many things flying. There’s a whole generation of engineers growing up thinking it’s normal that you get flight-ready hardware. When the government funds it, they get more for less, and industry is getting more interested by the day. The valuations of these companies are going up, because it’s not an illusion—it’s happening globally.” “SpaceX, in particular, wouldn’t be where it is without NASA support. Musk dumped a lot of his personal money into proving early technologies—new ways of building and launching rockets. NASA noticed, started trickling funding in, and then said, If you and some other companies can build a rocket and capsule to get to the space station, we’ll give you a contract to fly it. We won’t have to build our own, and you can sell that ride to anyone else as long as there’s a ticket available for us. That kickstarted SpaceX and a lot of other companies. It’s what Blue Origin wants to replicate with the moon.” “They grew up in an era where science fiction was so hopeful, incisive, revolutionary, and diverse. It affected them deeply. How do I know that? I’ve been to the SpaceX headquarters. I’ve been to the Blue Origin headquarters. I’ve seen, at SpaceX, all the rooms named after science-fiction authors. The hardware is named after science-fiction books and movies. Bezos loves The Expanse and paid to continue that series. He’s drawing from science fiction that’s even older—he’s got a full-scale replica of the spacecraft from Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. They’re living out this fantasy because they believe in the deeper message—that humanity has some continuance and we deserve it. If they’re slightly messianic about wanting to be the ones to deliver us that, well, they’ve got the money. Who else is going to do it?” ——— Meanwhile: Why has the Brazilian government accused its president of crimes against humanity? In a 1,288-page [report]( released on Oct. 20, Brazil’s Senate has accused the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro of committing crimes against humanity by intentionally allowing Covid-19 to spread unchecked throughout the country. A Senate panel recommended nine [criminal charges]( against Bolsonaro, also including fraud, inciting crime, and the irregular use of public funds. According to the report, Bolsonaro’s pandemic response led to more than half of the country’s 600,000-plus coronavirus deaths, the second-highest total for any country after the roughly 720,000 deaths in the far larger United States. Yet it’s unclear what consequences Bolsonaro, who’s up for re-election next year, will face. Any prosecution in Brazil would have to go through either the country’s top judicial official, the prosecutor general, or the country’s Congress, both of which are allied with Bolsonaro. Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian associate professor of international relations at the Sao Paolo-based Getulio Vargas Foundation, spoke with me at [The Signal]( in July about anti-Bolsonaro protests then happening across the country. I asked him what he thinks the effects of the Senate’s new report will likely be. —Michael Bluhm Stuenkel: Under normal circumstances, it would be a very serious threat. But President Bolsonaro, despite his erratic governing style, has been very careful to make sure that both the prosecutor general and the head of Congress are aligned with him. That allows him to govern with impunity. There are numerous requests to initiate impeachment proceedings, but they need to be approved by the head of Congress, so none of them is likely to proceed. The same goes for the charges made by the Senate inquiry into Bolsonaro’s mishandling of the pandemic. There’s no doubt that opposition leaders—including those who plan to challenge Bolsonaro at the polls next year—will use the inquiry and the final report to depict the president as incompetent and responsible for the health crisis in Brazil during the pandemic. I’m not convinced that it will make a difference from an electoral point of view, because the country is so polarized. Up to one-third of the population sides with the president and is unlikely to be influenced not to. Another third strongly dislikes the president and will never vote for him. The final third tends to be critical of Bolsonaro but may, in a runoff against Lula [former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva], reluctantly vote for Bolsonaro again. Bolsonaro’s fairly high rejection rates in polls don’t guarantee Lula’s election. Bolsonaro could still get re-elected, in part thanks to large cash-transfer programs to the poor, which have been quite popular. I expect them to boost his approval ratings in the coming months. The fact that this final report doesn’t really threaten Bolsonaro is a sign of how deeply in trouble Brazilian democracy is. It normalizes a situation in which the president has impunity as long as he’s aligned with the head of Congress and the prosecutor general. You no longer have Congress and the attorney general playing the role that the authors of Brazil’s Constitution had in mind. It all sets a very worrisome precedent for future leaders, who will see that, under certain circumstances, the president can engage in all kinds of criminal activity without having to fear impeachment. For more from Oliver Stuenkel on authoritarian populism in Brazil … ——— This Week From The Signal [Nothing Left]( Why is the far right becoming so influential in France? Marc Weitzmann on how immigration, identity, and Islamism are shaping the politics of the Republic. [Trade Secrets]( Why aren’t Covid-19 vaccine makers allowing other manufacturers to produce more doses? James Love on the hype and reality of the new drug technology, messenger RNA. [Changing of the Guard]( What’s happening with police reform in America? Ed Maguire on how cities across the country are navigating between abolition and immunity. ——— Meanwhile - Rick Hess on how [cultural conflicts over education]( are influencing U.S. elections - Brian Rosenwald on why [a wild conspiracy theory has gotten so much play]( on a prominent U.S. TV network - Jonathan Tepperman on why [the U.S. and China have been sparring]( over the idea of another country joining the UN ——— ——— [The Signal]( is a new digital publication exploring urgent questions in democratic life and the human world—sustained entirely by readers like you. To support The Signal and for full access: © 2021 The Signal The Signal | 717 N St. NW, Ste. 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