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n June 2011, The Economist ran a headline that it claimed summed up a sense of international despair. ‘The End of the Space Age’ was a withering obituary on what it saw as the mortified remains of space exploration. The Space Shuttle, which would complete its final mission the following month, had been ‘nothing but trouble’; the ‘benighted’ International Space Station (ISS) was ‘the biggest waste of money, at $100 billion and counting, that has ever been built in the name of Science.’ China might still be talking about a manned mission to Mars sometime before 2060, but for the western powers at least, the lure of the stars had lost its lustre. Such accusations rest on any number of factors: some believe that federal-sponsored space exploration is too bound up by bureaucratic red tape; others blame the politicisation of space travel or the monstrous costs involved in sending men and women beyond Earth’s atmosphere. But underneath it all lies a more serious claim – that the ancient hunger for exploring worlds beyond our own no longer exists. It might be less than 40-years-old, but John F Kennedy’s rousing speech about choosing to go to the moon ‘because new hopes for knowledge and peace are there’ is of another age entirely. Buoyed by Cold War politics and the spread of science-fiction, the astronauts of the ’60s and ’70s were popular heroes, their achievements seeming to momentarily unify humanity as it reached for the stars.
No more. Instead, many believe that we’ve learned nothing in the subsequent decades but our own limitations; that we’ve blanched at the empty expanse surrounding Earth and rushed home, tails between our legs, fulfilling a prophecy envisioned in 1959 by Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, in which astronauts flung ‘like stones’ into space found only ‘what had already been found in abundance on Earth: a nightmare of meaninglessness without end.’ It’s a view given short shrift at the California offices of Space Exploration Technologies Corp, or SpaceX, set up by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk in 2002 – the same year his online payment
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provider was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. In less than a decade, SpaceX has positioned itself at the forefront of a raft of private space exploration companies vying for both commercial and federal contracts. In June 2010, it inked a $492 million deal to deploy Iridium telecommunications satellites with its Falcon rockets and it will soon begin running cargo missions to and from the ISS via its Dragon spacecraft as part of a 12-mission, $1.6 billion contract with NASA, filling the hole left by the retired Shuttle in the process. For SpaceX, at least, the end of the space age is nowhere in sight. “It’s the absolute opposite,” says spokeswoman Kirstin Brost Grantham. “It’s the end of one era, but it’s the necessary end of that era if we’re going to move forward. NASA has always hired private companies to build its craft; the difference now is in contracting. We’re looking to have a private partnership where we bring in private investment and free market principles. And when you bring in competition, that forces every company to compete on cost, reliability and safety. It may start as a race for Earth’s orbit, but it’s going to expand opportunities for space travel that we’ve never seen before.” The cost issue is a critical one. Despite the enormous sums being signed away by federal and commercial contracts, SpaceX’s success over its competitors is largely due to its ability to reduce prices. It has been the expense of space exploration, rather than technological limitations, that has stalled progress in the past. The iPhone may be a billion times more powerful per unit currency than the roomfilling supercomputers in operation around the time man first stepped on the Moon, but the amount of fuel needed to break out of the atmosphere means that a similar upscaling of efficiency has so far proved impossible in space travel. Yet through a willingness to experiment with new designs and invest in new materials and fuels, SpaceX is managing to offer comparatively cutprice flights. Its forthcoming Falcon Heavy rocket is expected to carry up to 53,000kg payloads for $100 million per launch – one third the cost of the Delta IV rocket being sold by major competitor United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Cheaper launches mean more missions; more missions mean mankind can progress faster and go further. Ultimately, however, all companies circle the somewhat mythological idea that a craft will