Flying the Dragon

SpaceX successfully launched their Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the Dragon spacecraft into orbit. With all due respect to Burt Rutan and the folks at Scaled Composites, this is a much more significant event, as putting a craft into orbit and successfully recovering it is a much more difficult task than a sub-orbital hop.

What is interesting to me is that the next flight is scheduled for 12 April 2011, which will be the fiftieth anniversary of the first manned flight and the thirtieth anniversary of the first flight of the space shuttle.

It's hard to believe that it's been thirty years for the shuttle. Many of my coworkers weren't even born when it first flew, yet for me it seems to be only a moment. What's even harder (and more painful) to believe is that it only took twenty years to go from Vostok 1 to Columbia, but that the last thirty years has taken us from Columbia to soon to be nothing at all.

The darkness of space is nothing more than the veil of willful ignorance. How many of today's engineers and scientists were inspired by watching those early launches? What will inspire the builders of the future?

For Elon Musk and his crew, I congratulate and thank you. In your honor, I think that I'll break open my copy of Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon.

Godspeed, Falcon.