The Age Of Private Commercial Space Exploration Has Finally Arrived

Update As Of 5/20/2014

Now that private enterprises really get involved in developing space opportunities, we read almost daily about amazing new advances. See e.g. here an article in the MIT Technology Review.

To The Moon And Beyond

Today (7/20/2013), I read here that Moon Express Inc. is carrying out a major new mission to the moon. I remember other news in recent years about significant progress was being made by commercial spaceflight etc.

Finally and long overdue, private initiative and enterprise is taking over from inflexible, risk averse government bureaucracies to advance human understanding of space and to commercialize space.

Big Government Retarded Civilian Space Research & Exploration

President Eisenhower’s NASA of 1958 was a big mistake copying the Soviet Union in light of the Sputnik shock. The Europeans copied this mistake in 1975 with ESA (European Space Agency). I would argue that this route taken by the USA has unnecessarily slowed down progress in this area perhaps by decades. This was an unjustified government takeover.

Well, NASA had a predecessor called NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) established in 1915 as an emergency measure during World War I. The Wikipedia entry mentions: “On the other hand, NACA's 1941 refusal to increase airspeed in their wind tunnels set Lockheed back a year in their quest to solve the problem of compressibility in the P-38.” I would bet that this earlier federal agency had more bad influences on the development of civilian aircraft and spacecraft. This could be a research topic for the future.

More About NACA

NASA has a webpage on the history of its predecessor here. Why this page is formatted as if written with an old typewriter on wrinkled paper is a mystery to me, it reduces legibility.

Excerpts and [comments]:

1.       “Throughout the next three decades [1930s-1950s], NACA continued to expand its influence in the field of aviation by recruiting top notch engineers and scientists to work in ever larger and more [government run] advanced technological facilities.”

[Here we have a government agency competing with private enterprises for top notch engineers by offering state of the art, tax payer financed research facilities approved by government officials.]

2.       “After World War II, NACA began to work on the goal of supersonic flight.”

[Is it possible that because of NACA and the New Deal such research was delayed by years?]

3.       “NACAs efforts were in a large part responsible for turning the American airplane from slow cloth-and-wood biplanes of the World War I era into the jets of today.”

[This self congratulation of a government agency is how big government would like to be perceived. Had the private sector played a larger role progress would have been faster and better.]

Still Waiting On Supersonic Transportation

In my view it is also quite possible that too much government intervention killed commercial adoption of supersonic transportation or even hypersonic transportation. How I wish I could fly in a few hours from my home in Phoenix, AZ to my hometown Frankfurt am Main, Germany at an affordable price.

I would argue that human ingenuity would by now have overcome most technical problems and it would have developed solutions to the noise pollution.