Gods, it feels good to see the future finally arrive. It's been a long time coming.
Growing up in the 80s, I became quite bitter about the pace of technological change. Sure, personal computers were nifty, but the heroic age of spaceflight was really what the future should've been about. That age had ended with Apollo 17, three years before I was born. Everything since then looked like a shambolic shuffle into a new dark age.
One insane coincidence in the late 80s gave me some remarkable perspective on this. I was taking the train down the coast of California, around the horn of Vandenberg Airforce Base. The train was the only place from which civilians could see the Vandenberg Launch Complex, including the SLC-6 Shuttle launch site[1]. Nasa had spent over $4 Billion preparing it for shuttle launches which would never come. The Challenger disaster had ended all hopes for that; the complex had been mothballed and was already starting to rust. Seeing this made my 13-year-old-self angry. I started ranting to the poor gentleman sitting next to me about how my grandmother hand grown up with horses and buggies yet got to see men walking on the moon; my generation, on the other hand, had seen nothing but decline.
As I ranted, the gentleman slumped in his seat. At the end of my rant, he gave a long sigh and said "tell me about it." Then he introduced himself. He was Deke Slayton, a Mercury and Apollo astronaut[2]. He'd retired from NASA in 1982, frustrated with its bureaucracy, and tried to start a private space-launch company. It hadn't gone well.[3] I wish I could say that our conversation gave me hope for the future, but it didn't.
Later, my hopes were raised by the DC-X[4], then dashed by the subsequent (insanely corrupt) X-33 fiasco, and the failure of Beal Aerospace[5]. Raised again when I stood on the flight line at Mojave and watched SpaceShipOne take its first space shot[6], then dashed again when that program seemed to fly into molasses. Throughout, there was the sense that the future was possible, but by no means inevitable. There was no guarantee that it would arrive in my lifetime.
But now here it is. This time it's real, this time it'll work, and nobody will have to get nailed to anything. I couldn't be happier!
The company I used to work for (EER) bought his company to get the IP to his rocket (Conestoga) and tried to go into private space launches, but the single launch in 1995 was a failure. It ended up getting sold to L-3.
Growing up in the 80s, I became quite bitter about the pace of technological change. Sure, personal computers were nifty, but the heroic age of spaceflight was really what the future should've been about. That age had ended with Apollo 17, three years before I was born. Everything since then looked like a shambolic shuffle into a new dark age.
One insane coincidence in the late 80s gave me some remarkable perspective on this. I was taking the train down the coast of California, around the horn of Vandenberg Airforce Base. The train was the only place from which civilians could see the Vandenberg Launch Complex, including the SLC-6 Shuttle launch site[1]. Nasa had spent over $4 Billion preparing it for shuttle launches which would never come. The Challenger disaster had ended all hopes for that; the complex had been mothballed and was already starting to rust. Seeing this made my 13-year-old-self angry. I started ranting to the poor gentleman sitting next to me about how my grandmother hand grown up with horses and buggies yet got to see men walking on the moon; my generation, on the other hand, had seen nothing but decline.
As I ranted, the gentleman slumped in his seat. At the end of my rant, he gave a long sigh and said "tell me about it." Then he introduced himself. He was Deke Slayton, a Mercury and Apollo astronaut[2]. He'd retired from NASA in 1982, frustrated with its bureaucracy, and tried to start a private space-launch company. It hadn't gone well.[3] I wish I could say that our conversation gave me hope for the future, but it didn't.
Later, my hopes were raised by the DC-X[4], then dashed by the subsequent (insanely corrupt) X-33 fiasco, and the failure of Beal Aerospace[5]. Raised again when I stood on the flight line at Mojave and watched SpaceShipOne take its first space shot[6], then dashed again when that program seemed to fly into molasses. Throughout, there was the sense that the future was possible, but by no means inevitable. There was no guarantee that it would arrive in my lifetime.
But now here it is. This time it's real, this time it'll work, and nobody will have to get nailed to anything. I couldn't be happier!
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_AFB_Space_Launch_Co...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deke_Slayton
3: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevefrancis/sets/721576293246...
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beal_Aerospace
6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne_flight_15P