Beginning with the launch of Sputnik half a century ago, our scientists and engineers have pushed the limits of what is possible. A lucky few have orbited our planet, experiencing a chance to marvel at the natural beauty of our home from a height of 60 miles. Some have even walked on our moon a quarter million miles away.
The moon is hardly the limit of our interplanetary reach; this September the Voyager 1 probe ventured beyond the solar system and into interstellar space after traveling for 36 years. The spacecraft carries a gold plated copper record engraved with greetings in fifty five languages as well as culturally significant sounds and sights from Earth. Most of us benefit from the fruits of the Space Race when we check the weather, which is forecast with the help of satellites, or when we use the Global Positioning System chips in our phones to map our position and get directions.
Progress seems to have ground to a halt since the bright dawn of the space age. Sure, we have an International Space Station and nice toys like the Hubble Telescope in orbit out there. On the other hand, no one has gone to the moon for over 40 years. A mission to Mars has been in the planning stages forever. The truth is that the nuclear threat that drove these advances has fizzled. NASA's funding has shriveled tenfold to a meager 0.5 percent of the national budget. Russia and the United States are no longer vying for technological supremacy or actively menacing each other - the two nations even share their latest spacecraft.
As detailed in a Washington Post article last Friday, older aeronautic companies such as Lockheed, Boeing and Northrop Grumman are experiencing difficulties with respect to funding. Luckily, this instability has created an opportunity for newcomers in the race to private space travel. Over the last five years, a handful of companies developing new technology that will enable humans to visit space have sprung up.
The most mature of these is SpaceX. Founded by serial-entrepreneur Elon Musk, who also established PayPal and Tesla Motors, the company has already built its own spacecraft and rocket and used them to deliver supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). Orbital, another promising space startup, has also resupplied the ISS as of this September using a craft of its own design.
Other newcomers have set their sights on space planes instead of rockets and capsules. For example, Virgin Galactic, belonging to Sir Richard Branson, is concentrated on bringing tourists to the edges of the atmosphere where they can ogle the Earth and experience weightlessness for a few minutes before landing again. As one might expect, a ticket on this amusement ride is not cheap: the cost is $250,000 per person. In addition, Virgin Galactic has a competitor, XCOR, whose engineers are building a smaller space plane that seats only two people. This petite craft called the Lynx has not flown yet, but tickets to ride it are on sale for $100,000, including the requisite medical examinations and training.
Although space appears to be opening up, the majority of checks are written by governments, scientific organizations and large corporations. The cost of placing material into orbit, at $5,000 per pound, makes it prohibitively expensive to launch anything but space station supplies, scientific instrumentation or commercial satellites. However, new actors are entering space, including a diverse crowd spanning from rich private citizens who can afford to do so to groups of high school students launching their own experiments to the ends of our atmosphere. This is just the beginning of a more democratic, private exploration of outer space as humans move towards becoming an interplanetary civilization.
PetarTodorov is a senior majoring in chemistry. He can be reached at Petar.Todorov@tufts.edu.
