Whew. After two bigtime setbacks in space flight earlier this year — both by commercial companies — another misstep could have been catastrophic for public confidence.
Fortunately, NASA’s unmanned Orion spacecraft completed its relatively shor t maiden voyage Friday — two orbits around Earth — without a significant hitch. The allure of future manned trips into deep space is back.
And when we say deep space, we don’t mean a few thousand miles above our planet. “Orion is the exploration spacecraft for NASA, and paired with the Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket it will allow us to explore the solar system,” says Orion’s program manager, Mark Geyer, on NASA’s website.
Indeed, NASA believes a manned trip to Mars on Orion could be in the offing as soon as the 2030s, and a trip to an asteroid even before that. Orion is the first deep space vehicle built for humans since Apollo, and the first ever designed to go beyond the moon.
But is it worth the investment in a world with so many competing needs?
Absolutely, and not just because Colorado-based companies such as Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton are set to benefit from the project. Space exploration remains one of those rare investments that extends human knowledge even as it inspires us to lift our sights beyond the often grubby obsessions of everyday existence.
That’s why, by the way, we have been heartened to see Virgin Galactic stick to its goal of “democratizing access to space” through commercial space flights even after the catastrophic destruction in October of its SpaceShipTwo and the death of a test pilot.
On its website, Virgin Galactic provides one rationale for its resolution that could just as easily apply to NASA and all the other government and private space projects around the world: “we humans seem hardwired to explore. Not all of us feel it, but so many people today and in the past have felt an irresistible urge to see for themselves what lies just beyond the horizon.”
Public or private, scientific or commercial, the future of spaceflight appears remarkably bright even after a year of mixed results. And Orion is now at the center of the excitement.
