I heard an interview this afternoon on NPR with a NASA expert who scoffed at the flight of SpaceShipOne this morning. “What use is it?”, he said. “Here they’ve spent $20 million to win a $10 million prize. Unless they can develop a new technology for doing the things we do in space—deploying satellites and delivering heavy equipment—it’s just not interesting.”
Not interesting to NASA, perhaps. But think about this. It was more than one hundred years between Columbus’s first voyages to the New World and Henry Hudson’s voyage of 1609—the first privately financed voyage to the New World financed in this case by the Muscovy Company. It’s only been a little more than forty years between Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space on April 12, 1961 and the flight of the SpaceShipOne.
There have been more voyages to the Western Hemisphere, more goods shipped, more people and lives and dreams transported by private companies than all of the world’s governments put together.
I firmly believe that the dreamers who launched SpaceShipOne and their successors will, like the dreamers who came to the New World, do more to explore the universe than the bureaucrats at NASA can even imagine.
Amazing the NASA gent thinks “they” lift heavy payloads and equipment. That’s been a majority commercial (non-shuttle) business since the Challenger. And the space station is more last century politics than science. gEye is right, innovation is less about a “claimed” invention than delivering something of great value (that was previously reserved for the elites) to the average person.