Space Tourism, Star Trek and Captain Kirk

During the past few years, there has been a lot of publicity given to SpaceX’s plans to send humans to Mars—sooner rather than later. The idea of eventually colonizing the Red Planet has begun to take hold of the public’s imagination. I think we’re getting used to this previously outlandish notion.

The same can be said of the nascent space tourism industry, especially now after the successful exploits of Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin in sending tourists for a bit of weightless microgravity time in sub-orbit this past summer, as well as SpaceX’s three-day Inspiration4 space tourism mission to low Earth orbit.

Now, of course, many of us science fiction buffs are anxiously awaiting the launch of Captain Kirk in October. At 90 years of age, William Shatner would become the oldest person to reach the edge of space, surpassing 82-year-old Wally Funk, who flew on Blue Origin’s New Shepard sub-orbital rocket on July 20, 2021.

All this is good for the space industry because these programs are being led and promoted by private companies (with charismatic founders and chief executives) that want to create new interest in space and by infusing the market with the spirit of innovation and “can-do-ism” similar to that of the race to the Moon in the 1960s.

NASA has been attempting to replicate the spirit of the Apollo program for decades now, and it has largely been unsuccessful because somewhere along the line the agency got stuck and was unable to come up with goals that could maintain the public’s enthusiasm and continuously secure the needed funding from Congress that would allow it to reach those goals in a relatively short period of time so as not to drag things on so long as to lose the public’s attention and support.

As wonderful as they were in terms of engineering achievements, both the Space Shuttle and International Space Stations programs failed to match Apollo. Sending astronauts to the Moon set the bar so high that it’s been impossible to replicate, much less surpass, that feat. Interestingly, NASA will soon give it another shot by attempting to return astronauts to the Moon within the next three years as part of the Artemis program.

We will soon see if the first key milestone of Artemis comes to fruition—the launch of the uncrewed Artemis 1 Orion capsule aboard NASA’s untested Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which in itself has been a huge and extremely expensive engineering challenge. The launch is currently scheduled to take place this December, but I suspect that target time-frame will be delayed by at least a month or two and take place in early-2022. There is a lot riding on that mission. It may be NASA’s final attempt to remain relevant with regard to human spaceflight amidst everything that is going on within the commercial space launch sector.