Stumbling toward the stars

The big aerospace news this past weekend was focused like a laser on Sir Richard Branson and VSS Unity as Virgin Galactic launched a fully staffed passenger flight into space.

Later this month there will be a similar flurry of media coverage as Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin carry their first paying passenger on a sub-orbital launch. Perhaps even more notable will be the presence of Wally Funk on board, a woman who could well have been one of the Mercury astronauts had society been more open to the legitimate capabilities of women back in the early 1960s. 

For all the ballyhoo and brouhaha, I take a somewhat different view of these remarkable events. Yes, they are incredible. Not so much for what they are, but for what they will inspire. What it is not nearly as important as what will be. 

I haven’t seen a bit of media coverage on that topic. So, I’ll dive in and give it a go. As far as I’m concerned, this is the really big story.

First, let’s consider what was momentous about Sir Richard and his crew riding a rocket to 282,000 feet. Converted to a more easily recognizable distance, that’s 53.41 miles. Alan Shepard flew twice as high, way back in May of 1961. But he did it in a ballistic rocket while wearing a silver space suit, his head encased in a quite substantial helmet. He launched from the beaches of Florida, came back to Earth under a parachute, and was ultimately plucked from the Atlantic Ocean by a helicopter.

It’s true, Branson and crew didn’t fly as high, but they launched from a runway. They landed on that same runway. In between they flew in a shirt-sleeve environment that required no bulky suits. No specialized personal environmental systems. Yet they experienced weightlessness, and demonstrated a safe, fully controllable air/spacecraft that can be used again, and again, and again.

Freedom 7 was developed during the Bic lighter phase of space exploration. Build it, fly it, throw it away. A pivotal step in the development process. But that time has passed, as Space X, Virgin Galactic, and soon, Blue Origin will demonstrate.

While no scientific barriers were breached on this jaunt into sub-orbit, the thrill of space flight was clearly evident and highly contagious. Perhaps that’s the missing piece. The mysterious element that spurs humans on to greater and greater accomplishment. 

In recent years spaceflight has come to be seen as mundane by the wider public. It’s not interesting to them. The news barely covers the missions or what they hope to accomplish. It’s ironic but in a time when the world population has come to depend on space-borne technologies to track weather systems, facilitate communication on a global scale, explore the heavens and the earth with increasingly capable equipment, the public is more and more detached from the events happening right above our heads. 

It may seem hyperbolic to suggest that such a short flight in terms of distance and time could be of importance in the wider scheme of things, but I assure you, it is not hyperbolic in the least. We are one step closer to the necessary goal of taking our place as a space-borne species. If we continue on this path we will one day populate the stars, or more accurately, planets that orbit stars other than our own.

That’s crazy, you say. Out of the realm of possibility. This was a stunt and nothing more, just as Bezos, his brother, and Wally Funk will be stunting for the cameras for no better reason than to to boost Amazon’s stock price.

Well, not only is that way off base, it’s also an attitude that is out of touch with the history of flight.

The Wright brothers flew four times in December 1903. Their first flight covered a distance of only 120 feet. Their last and longest stretched that record to 852 feet. Wilbur was in the air for nearly a minute. A full minute!

So what, say the unimaginative. What good is a machine that requires a small crew of laborers to assemble and move and launch when on its best effort it can’t even fly the length of four New York City blocks?

That’s a fair question. And the criticism is valid. The Wright Flyer was an impractical aircraft for any purpose other than the one for which it was intended — as a test vehicle. When viewed from that perspective it was a wildly successful machine that validated a theory, exposed its own weaknesses, and led to an ever-improving series of designs and engineering breakthroughs that led directly to Sir Richard’s ride into space.

If you doubt the solidity of the connection, consider this historical tidbit. Only 11 years after Orville and Wilbur spent a winter day playing in the North Carolina sands, Tony Janus loaded former St. Petersburg major Abram Pheil into The Lark of Duluth and carried him on the first regularly scheduled passenger flight across Tampa Bay. Pheil paid $400 for the privilege of being the first commercial air traveler, an amount equivalent to $10,800 today.

That flight cut the transit time between the two cities from 12 hours down to 21 minutes. The air age had begun.

Thanks to visionaries like Branson and Bezos, along with the thousands of engineers working with them, the day will come when it won’t cost half a million dollars or more to put a human into space. And as was the case with fixed wing aircraft, the utility of those flights and their benefit will have a decidedly positive effect on humanity here on Earth, and wherever else we might roam.

Make no mistake about it. We are stumbling toward the stars. Just as our ancestors experimented with wood and sail to venture further and further from land, we are taking the early critical steps to assure the continued existence of the human race — via spaceflight.  

And here you were thinking space flight was old news.