{"id":6484,"date":"2014-11-05T00:26:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-05T07:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=6484"},"modified":"2014-11-05T00:26:00","modified_gmt":"2014-11-05T07:26:00","slug":"space-is-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2014\/11\/05\/space-is-hard\/","title":{"rendered":"Space Is Hard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Space is hard – but worth it. We will persevere and move forward together.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

–Richard Branson, founder and CEO, Virgin Galactic<\/p>\n

Last week was a tough one for commercial spaceflight.<\/p>\n

Last Tuesday morning, an unmanned Antares rocket, operated by a company called Orbital Sciences Corporation and packed with supplies and experiments bound for the space station, exploded in a spectacular fireball<\/a> seconds after rising from its launch pad. The latest report<\/a> I’ve found indicates the launch safety officers deliberately detonated the rocket after its first-stage propulsion system failed, as a precaution to keep it from going down over a populated area. The cause of the failure is still under investigation. This was the third of eight cargo missions Orbital is contracted to perform for NASA; the company’s competitor SpaceX will reportedly fill the gap created in the resupply schedule. Also affected by the Antares disaster is Planetary Resources, the company that wants to mine the asteroids; its Arkyd 3 test platform was aboard the doomed rocket as well. You can read more about that here<\/a>, if you’re interested.<\/p>\n

As if losing the Antares wasn’t enough of a blow, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo then broke up during a test flight on Friday, resulting in the death of one of its pilots and serious injuries to the other. It appears<\/a> the rocket plane’s braking system somehow deployed earlier than it should have, although investigators still haven’t said conclusively that was the cause of the accident, or have any idea of why the system deployed.<\/p>\n

Predictably, there was an almost immediate torrent of op-eds and online commentary denouncing private space operations (Time<\/em> had a memorably galling headline, “Enough with Amateur-Hour Space Flight<\/a>“), and even calling for an end to manned spaceflight altogether. “People are dying!” the cries go. People could<\/em> die, if something like that Antares blast happens to, say, a crewed Dragon capsule. To which I reply, yes, they are. and they could, and that’s tragic… but how many sailors died during the Age of Exploration? How many would-be colonists did not survive the passage from the Old World to the New? How many pioneers fell while crossing the Great Plains, or didn’t make it through their first harsh winter of homesteading? How many early aviators died trying to figure out how those new-fangled (and by our standards, appallingly fragile) aeroplanes really behaved?<\/p>\n

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not heartless, and I certainly don’t mean to be glib about human lives. I regret and mourn every life lost in the cause of furthering a human presence in space. I certainly wouldn’t want to lose my own life in such an accident, or a friend or family member’s. But I firmly believe those deaths are honorable and meaningful. Because I believe passionately in the cause they died for.<\/p>\n

Whenever this subject comes up, I always think of a moment from the original Star Trek<\/em> series, a scene that’s come to be known to fans as the “risk speech”:<\/p>\n