Tuesday's launch of the first private-sector funded orbiting rocket destined to dock with the space station may not have inspired the kind of national pride that Alan Shepard's flight did on a similar day in May 51 years ago, but it was a momentous milestone in the history of space exploration.
While the Falcon 9 rocket was unmanned, the SpaceX company that designed it plans to have manned rockets available within three years. Several other companies also are busy at work on the same project. If the private sector can successfully design and operate manned rockets to service the space station and perform other low-orbit functions, that would free NASA to use its resources for more deep-space exploration.
If this becomes reality, it would be good news not just for the United States, but for the world, which has benefitted richly from the many practical discoveries attributed to NASA space exploration, as well as from its policy, stated in its charter, of sharing technology with the public.
This successful launch came only weeks after the space shuttle made a final aerial tour of the east coast atop a specially designed aircraft, causing some pundits to lament bitterly that the New Frontier's torch of leadership was being passed symbolically to other nations that still had the will to devote public money toward space. While the Falcon 9 mission still has many hurdles to jump, including a scheduled dock with the space station on Friday, the timing of the launch was good in terms of diverting the nation's attention to its strategy for the future.
We were among the skeptics of President Obama's decision to scuttle the Constellation program, which would have returned astronauts to the moon as a step toward an eventual Mars mission. Our reason was that the plan was short on specifics and seemed little more than an empty hope that the private sector would step up. Meanwhile, having U.S. astronauts rely on Russia to shuttle them back and forth to the international space station has always sounded unworthy of a nation that historically led the world in space exploration.
We still have questions about how planned missions to an asteroid and, eventually, Mars, would take place. We have larger questions about the nation's ability to fund such a program amid a mounting national debt. In that sense, the future of space travel in this country rests on the shoulders of all politicians in Washington, not just on the president.
It would be foolish, however, to underestimate the private sector and its determination and motivation to produce reliable and relatively cost-efficient vehicles for low-orbit travel. A successful private program would save taxpayers money while keeping the nation from squandering the expertise it has spent decades accumulating.
The United States already has celebrated its brave and heroic pioneers of low-orbit flight. After 51 years, it seems right to turn that aspect on space over to the private sector, letting the new pioneers of deeper space travel focus on their missions — whenever the nation musters the collective will to adequately fund them, that is.