The SpaceX Rocket Launch Is a Really Big Deal - And Here's Why
So this is what it’s like to be excited about the future.
That was the prevailing sentiment among everyone who watched on Thursday as Elon Musk’s SpaceX took another giant leap forward in the history of exploration, launching one of their previously-flown Falcon 9 rockets into orbit.
It has been called a “Wright Brothers moment”, and its importance is hard to overstate. Until Thursday, reusable rockets like this one did not exist.
Historically, orbital-class rockets have always been single use. They launch into space, drop their payloads off somewhere, and then crash back down into the ocean. This model has worked, but using up sophisticated equipment like Kleenex in this way is colossally expensive. Musk likens it to scrapping an airplane after every flight, or setting a pallet of money on fire. If progress in space travel is going to make sense, reusability is a must. The primary booster can be as much as 80% of the overall launch cost. Save that, as SpaceX just proved they can, and getting into space can become downright affordable.
Reusable rockets are a key part of making space travel affordable for human beings. It helps with launch costs for satellites too, but we’ve been getting along without reusability so far on that front. So who then, apart from space nerds and Elon Musk acolytes, should care about all this? Well, everyone.
When people question the point of space exploration, it’s usually in terms of concrete payoff. “Why are we doing this?” is a reasonable thing to ask, especially when it comes to strapping people into these things. It’s expensive, it’s dangerous, and it doesn’t look like there’s anything out there anyway other than rocks and dust.
Framed this way, the argument makes sense. We only have so much time and money to spend, and there is plenty of suffering right here at home that could be helped with the resources we’re spending on getting to the barren surface of Mars.
What this kind of thinking misses is the impact that exploration has on our outlook. The benefit we get from living with the expectation that we will, as a country and as a people, be further tomorrow that we are today. It might be hard to quantify, but it matters.
Since the 60’s, space has gotten pretty dull. Our sense of adventure started to fade when the American flag beat the Soviet one to the lunar surface, and we’ve largely slid backwards since then. Most of NASA’s budget is spent on projects that seem hardly removed from the world of academia, and our astronauts never go further than the International Space Station. Very few people who grew up in the last 40 years got to experience the inspiration that the space program once offered.
With the emergence of SpaceX, that sense of complacency has started to recede. This is company whose stated goal is to colonize Mars. That would have been a punchline ten years ago, but Musk and his team have developed a habit of quieting critics with a series of dramatic leaps forward in rocket capability. Ambition at this scale is what makes for inspiration. Doing the impossible on live TV is coming back into fashion, and it’s bringing with it a kind of national pride that’s been lacking in recent decades.
The sheer boldness of the company alone has been captivating. Far from the ultra-conservative mentality of traditional industry players, the SpaceX team has seemed to harken back to the gritty days of the early space pioneers. They’ve had spectacular failures, as when their first three launch attempts ending in costly fireworks shows, but failures add meaning to success because it shows us what needed to be overcome in order to get there.
Continuing to push past our current horizons is a crucial part of maintaining hope for the future. As is fairly obvious when you take a look at our society, wealth alone won’t generate sustained contentment. Rich or poor, optimism doesn’t last if we’re just spinning our wheels. We need to believe that things are getting better than they are right now. It’s forward motion that matters - entrepreneurs sit around and reminisce about the days when they were building their businesses in a garage, not about the yachts they were later able to afford.
What happened Thursday made history, and there’s every indication that it’s only going to get better from here. The thought of human beings walking on other planets used to be a joke. It isn’t anymore. Many people who watched the first moon landing in 1969 said it made it seem like anything was possible. We could use a bit of that right now. Among the mud-slinging and rancor that will dominate the rest of the news, this is something that everyone can look forward to watching.
