The Second Space Age: An Overview

Whether the general public knows it or not, we're in the middle of something amazing. We're living through a "Second Space Age." These past couple years, new rockets and new spacecraft have been coming online and entering service as spaceflight in the United States shifts from government-based to commercially-operated. During the Space Shuttle era, NASA owned and operated their fleet of vehicles and over the shuttle's 30-year history that ownership and operation proved to be more costly than anticipated. While it allowed us to build the International Space Station, the next necessary step to permanent human habitation off this planet, the complex and maintenance-heavy shuttle fleet also drained funding away from new vehicle development. So many people were screaming out to the whole of the internet when the shuttle fleet was retired, fearing that NASA was closing up shop, giving up on sending people into space...but the reality is the exact opposite. NASA had cleared up an immense portion of their ever-declining budget to move on to the next target: exploration beyond Earth orbit.

NASA's new capsule, the Orion, has been making steady progress towards providing us with a vehicle that can take us to asteroids, the moon, and beyond. Most people seem to think it's still just an idea, a concept on a drawing board, but in September of this year the Orion is scheduled to make its first unmanned trip into space. Several years from now it will ride skyward with a crew atop one of the newest and largest rockets in the world: the Space Launch System (SLS).

This rocket makes use of flight-proven hardware such as solid rocket boosters and Space Shuttle main engines (which were so reliable that they were reusable) while also adding in 21st century technology such as composite structure fuel tanks that will be lighter and stronger than the old aluminum alloy tanks. Less weight there means more weight that can go into space. More bang for the buck, figuratively and literally.

But what about the Station? It's still there and still needs to be resupplied and crews exchanged every few months, right? Of course, and this is where the Second Space Age really comes into being. In the short term we've been able to ride with our partners from Russia, who took up the task of manned flight with their Soyuz spacecraft, a vehicle with an impressive safety record over its nearly 50 years of operation. (Don't worry, it's had many upgrades and modifications since the old days!) That's the beauty of an International Space Station, you can work with others to assure continued service.

A lot of people in this country, however, disapprove of sending astronauts (and dollars) to another country to get to space. The long-term side of the plan has been for NASA to work with private corporations to develop several different spacecraft and rockets that will be able to deliver crew and cargo to the ISS, in a way handing over the "routine" aspect of space to private companies that can compete to do it efficiently and at competitive costs. NASA has shared its vast technical knowledge with US-based aerospace corporations and some of those companies are already providing results. 

SpaceX's Dragon and Orbital Sciences' Cygnus have already made trips to the ISS under cargo resupply contracts and may just be a few years until we see private companies operating crewed spacecraft. And the day that a commercially operated, manned vehicle makes it to space will be a VERY big day.

So to summarize the future: private companies operate the rockets that put people into earth orbit and send cargo to the ISS, leaving NASA a bigger chunk of budget to do the bolder, more ambitious projects that take us away from Earth.


There's an impressive collection of companies and individual that are doing amazing things now and in the near-future. Through this "Second Space Age" series you'll be introduced to the new rockets, the new spacecraft, the companies that are building/operating them, and the amazing way it all fits together to expand humanity's ability to understand and navigate through our universe.

Any questions or feedback will be much appreciated. I want to write what you want to read about so let your opinions be known!

A Return to American Independence

We have reached the end a two-year gap in America's ability to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) from our own soil. With the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet in 2011 we lost our ability to regularly loft supplies and new experiments to the space station, leaving us no options but to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to companies and agencies across the planet to do our work for us. But that is now a thing of the past.

Yesterday NASA held a press conference to officially and successfully conclude the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program that created a partnership between NASA and private aerospace corporations to develop rockets and spacecraft that would meet NASA's technical, performance, and safety standards. NASA set the guidelines and the private companies entered into competition to build what they thought would be the best vehicle at the best price.

Several companies made efforts to enter this new space race and in the end Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Orbital Sciences Corporation were selected to fly demonstration flights. The selection of multiple companies will ensure that the market for NASA resupply missions will remain competitive, controlling costs and incentivizing increased performance. Both companies have had great successes with their rockets, the SpaceX Falcon 9 and the Orbital Sciences Antares and both vehicles, the SpaceX Dragon (above) and the Orbital Sciences Cygnus (right) have now successfully hauled cargo safely and efficiently to the ISS and Dragon is even able to bring cargo back for further scientific investigation after time in orbit.
 
The successful conclusion of this project is exciting, in part, because it certainly bodes well for NASA's other major vehicle initiative,  the Commercial Crew Program (CCP). A parallel to COTS, CCP is an effort to develop, with industry cooperation, safe and reliable manned spaceflight vehicles to transport crews routinely to and from the ISS. Initial test flights for some of those commercial systems are scheduled for 2017 and upon their successful completion NASA would no longer have to sink a major portion of its budget into low-Earth orbit flights and can focus its time, efforts, and funding on sending manned missions to the moon, asteroids, and beyond.