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Back in the day, this was the hottest topic of discussion: who can get to the Moon first? The Americans were engaged in a time-restricted race with the Soviets. On September 13, 1939, the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 unmanned rocket made a hard landing on the surface of the moon-i.e., crashed into the moon. The Americans mirrored this in 1962 with their Ranger 4 rocket but ultimately took the cake on July 20, 1969, with the Apollo 11 mission successfully getting two astronauts to the surface of the Earth’s only natural satellite. This “Golden Age” of space exploration eventually died down and although there were plenty of missions after that, none had the social resonance of the first ones. America had won, the Soviets were defeated and everybody could go to sleep all relaxed knowing that the world was in order.
Space exploration continued after that with a few highlights sprinkled across the decades but nothing could reach the hype of those early years. Our dreams of living in a super advanced, interplanetary travel society when we grow up were met with the hardly satisfying truth of smartphones, slightly better cars and hoverboards that don’t really hover. I guess Marty and Doc from “Back to the future” got it wrong. Still, hope remains in the form of a new generation of space explorers. If until now, only big countries could afford a space program there seems to be a surge of new and talented minds gathering under the banners of private, commercial companies, giving the established authorities a run for their money.
Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin spearhead this movement and bring the once exclusivist endeavor closer to the people. The recent successes of these companies have propelled them to the forefront of space exploration and given them equal status to behemoths of the business with decades more experience, like NASA. The story that I want to talk about the most is the Falcon Heavy reusable rocket. The idea has been in development for several years now but the partly successful test made on the 6th of February, 2018 has sparked a great deal of interest in the media, giving us hope that space flight might become a reality in the near future.
Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX has been circulating the idea of reusable rockets for a long time, stating that building these incredibly complicated pieces of high-tech machinery only to crash them during their maiden voyage is a real waste. His company has tested reusable rockets that have landing capacities, for a number of years. Musk publicly announced the program in 2011 but started working on it sooner than that, maybe even as early as 2004.
The Falcon Heavy rocket launched on the 6th of February, 2018, at 3:45 pm EST. The mission went smoothly up to a point, with the payload, consisting of a Tesla Roadster, being launched into space, the two side boosters successfully landing back to earth while the center booster had an engine malfunction, causing it to miss the drone-ship it was supposed to land on. Most of the rocket made it back to Earth safely allowing for reusability, thus considerably lowering the costs of space flight and proving that the concept is practical.
This opens up a whole new stage in the race for affordable, safe, space flight and gives people courage to dream and work toward accomplishing this goal. Apparently, this sparked a fire under the American administration derrière, because Trump announced that he plans to send an astronaut back to the Moon during his first term as president, possibly to upstage the Chinese, who have similar plans, all of which were sparked by technical advances made in the private sector.
Elon Musk has made the plans for his rockets available to everybody, challenging the world to work together in advancing technology. This is an unprecedented way of thinking that completely contrasts the secrecy that preceded the Musk era. Elon explained his choice by stating: “if we are all on a ship together, and there’s some holes in the ship, and we’re bailing water out, and we have a great design for a bucket, and even if we are bailing out way better than everybody else, we should probably still share the bucket design. Because we are all going to sink.”
Although this is still very much a race due to the egos of some very influential people, the space race is finally a real thing again. The collaboration between the various companies and governments exists, since using private companies is cost-efficient for the governments of the world. In the end, we shouldn’t really care who gets to Mars first, we should just make sure that somebody does. This is the direction that the space programs around the world seem to take and personally, I am very happy that I get to live in this thrilling time. I hope that I will get to fly to space although I am not holding my breath because regular commercial fights have a long way to go before becoming a reality.

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