For years, government funding for NASA has been decreasing, to the point where President Obama has announced that the lunar launches will be ended and all research will be strictly focused on getting humans to Mars. There are many privately funded space-research programs. However, there have been few successes in the past. Recently, the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX, completed a successful launch, orbit, and safe return on December 1, 2010.
SpaceX is a space research company that is privately funded by Elon Musk, the co-founder of Pay-Pal. The goal of SpaceX is to create efficient and reusable spacecrafts. With about a three and a half hour flight time, the Falcon 9 rocket fulfilled all of the expectations that scientists had created for it. Musk, the founder of SpaceX, stated in a recent news conference that, “It’s actually almost too good, we didn’t have to go to backup systems at any point.” The purpose of the Falcon 9 launch was to demonstrate a spacecraft that could shuttle cargo and possibly astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
This seems to be nothing but help for NASA, because it clears out the major project of finding quick, reusable, and most importantly safe transportation for astronauts and cargo to get to the space station. Taking a closer look, one might notice that this just further reinforces President Obama’s plans of almost completely shutting down the NASA program. Everyone is stunned by the fact that there weren’t any abnormalities during the launch.
Many major supporters of NASA have already begun to look into the SpaceX project, which is already extremely well-endowed. They have a contract worth $1.6 billion for 12 shuttle launches to the space station and back. When the United States Army found out that the Falcon 9 carries eight tiny satellites, they immediately wanted to test the new communications technology.
Orion, one of NASA’s most recent rockets, has been compared to the “Dragon Capsule” that was attached to the Falcon 9 rocket. The way it was described, it seemed to be that anything Orion can do, the Dragon can do better. Even NASA has fallen back on SpaceX, investing $253 million in the development of their Falcon transport systems. William H. Gerstenmaier recently spoke of the donations to SpaceX on behalf of NASA, stating that, “[This] gives us a little bit of margin there to make sure that station isn’t in dire circumstances before the commercial providers come fully online”. Some may view the wild success of SpaceX to be harmful and depreciating of the distinguished NASA program, however some of the most powerful executives at NASA view this as an opportunity to save the International Space Station program before the government completely stops funding and retires the space station and lunar program.
