47 years to the day after Sputnik, SpaceShipOne touches down in Mojave and wins the X-Prize. Though the prize is no longer in contention, others, such as the Da Vinci Project, plan to follow, making the dream of regular, cheap non-government spaceflight many more steps closer to reality.

To place what has happened today in context, the Mercury missions in the early 60s cost $1.5 billion in 1994 dollars. SpaceShipOne’s flight, on the other hand, cost just under $25 million.

On the X-Prize webcast, I’m listening to Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X-Prize Foundation who’s talking about how one spaceship is not enough, how real space travel will depend on having a fleet of ships, each with competing designs offer the public increasingly lower costs. Right on. In fact, to keep the spirit of competition in space alive, the Foundation is planning an annual spaceflight grand prix called the X-Prize Cup that should become to space vehicles what the F1 Grand Prix circuit is to automobiles.

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Woohoo! SpaceShipOne flew - and landed! They are now preparing for another flight that, if successful, would mean they win the X Prize. Great news for all of us who believe that there’s more to our future than quarrelling over dwindling resources on one increasingly overcrowded planet.

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Did you know that the NASA outspends the rest of the civilian world put together? It had a $15bn budget for 2003, and that’s not counting the $12bn forked out to the US military for its space applications. China apparently spent something around $1.5-3bn a year on its civilian+military space programs combined (source: BBC World). If I were a betting man, there’d be no doubt which one I’d bet on to accomplish more.

To be fair, NASA spends a lot of money on deep space research, with no one else does; however the point of this is that NASA’s manned space programmes have been so ossified by bureaucracy that they are no longer efficient.

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Amidst China’s successful launch of its first taikonaut, there have been persistent questions — why space? why now? how can you justify the expense? Patience, grasshopper, there are answers, but they are more apparent to those who take the long view than those who are more worried about their quarterly P&L sheets.

Why Space? If you’re a nation of one billion plus, on a land with diminishing resources, you have only one real option: conquest. Thanks to the vice-like grip the US holds over the rest of the planet militarily (outspending Russia and Europe put together if I recall right), that one is a fool’s errand. The second option is to think out of the box, or in this case out of the geoid.

Why Now? The plan was actually hatched more than 10 years ago, and it was scheduled to come to fruition around now, and that was a very good idea, because it happened around a local maxima for the Chinese economy. This
is not to say that the Chinese economy will tank in the next few years, but the going may not be as good as previous years have been, what with the weak dollar, their dollar-pegged exchange rate, and a hurting US economy.

How can you justify the Cost? Besides the usual blather about minerals and terraforming in space, there is one other clincher. Space Program: $3bn/year. Manned Space Flight: (out of my hat) $400mn. Putting a PLA base where the Americanos find it impossible to touch cleanly: priceless. ‘Nuff said.

Of course, I hope that whoever sets up Earth’s first extraterrestrial colonies is rather more interested in minerals and terraforming than military bases. Earth looks much too beautiful from space, whatever script you use and whatever language you speak. But if it’ll take Star Wars to put man into space, I’ll take it over Star Trek anyday.

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Re China’s first manned space flight: Travel agent leaks State secret. The date seems to be 6am local time on October 15.

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Three Arrive for China’s Spaceflight: Three final candidates to be China’s first astronaut in space have arrived at the spacecraft’s desert launch pad, the government said Monday, and suggested that only one will make the trip.

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Via CNN.

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Here’s an old article about Kalpana Chawla, the Indian American astronaut who was on board Columbia, from India’s The Week. Space.com has a recent bio.

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Glenn Reynolds covers the shock of the crash, as well as an excellent response to the tasteless ‘arrogance‘ mudfling from the CBC. It comes, surprisely enough, from a weblog called Moderate Left:

Well, if this is arrogance–exploring space for science, pushing the envelope of the human experience, doing what our species has always done–then I support it. If it is arrogant to want to learn, we are arrogant. If it is arrogant to want to explore, we are arrogant. If it is arrogant to risk our lives for the possibility of a better future for all mankind, we are arrogant.

Mankind is arrogant. We believe foolish things–that we may one day cure cancer, that we may one day develop new forms of energy, that we may one day walk on Mars. We believe these foolish things, and we dedicate ourselves to achieving them. How ridiculous. How arrogant.

And people die for these things. And people are injured for life. The astronauts of Apollo 1, and the Challenger, and now, sadly, the Columbia have died for the arrogant belief that we can be more than we are, that we can walk on the moon, that we can touch the stars.

So call us arrogant for building the space shuttle. Call the men and woman who gave their lives today arrogant for believing they could fly to space and return to tell about it. But don’t call us wrong. For this arrogance defines humanity. And I would rather our species be arrogant than afraid.

Yes!

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Columbia breaks up over Texas. This thread (via Scripting News) probably captures the horror of those tracking the shuttle best.

RIP, Columbia. Someday flights into Earth orbit will be routine (and as safe as a airline trip today), and that will be the most fitting tribute to the heroes who lost their lives today.

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