Gordon Cooper died last night.
For those of a certain age who grew up in a certain time, that news makes us feel very old indeed.
Gordon Cooper was one of Tom Wolfe’s “single combat warriors” described so eloquently in “The Right Stuff”. Wolfe compared the 7 Mercury astronauts to the “King’s Champions” of old who would venture forth before a battle to engage in single combat with his counterpart from the enemy. The winner of the contest would sometimes so discourage the enemy that they would quit the field of battle.
Alone, sitting atop the Atlas rocket (a midget compared to today’s mighty boosters) Cooper and the other Mercury astronauts took part in, what looking back on today, seems like a foolhardy venture. With no on board computer to speak of and an unproven rocket and space capsule Cooper and his fellow Mercury astronauts flung themselves into the unknown in, what Wolfe described as “The greatest death-defying stunt ever broadcast.”
Cooper was the last American to orbit the earth alone. Lt. Col Yang Liwei of China made a solo orbital flight in April of 2003.
The juxtaposition of Gordon Cooper’s death and the successful launch of Spaceship One is too perfect, too poetically just to simply pass off as one of those strange coincidences that life offers up now and then. It makes one realize that yes, perhaps there is order to the universe, a “grand design” as my fellow agnostics might speculate about. While at the same time-like the passing of other heroes from our childhood-it reminds us of our own mortality and allows for an introspection that we take advantage of far less often than we should.
For now, the future belongs to space ventures like Spaceship One. For a measly $200,000, you’ll be able to take a 20 minute sub-orbital flight and experience the thrill of weightlessness for 5-8 minutes.(I hope Richard Branson, who’s backing the space tourism venture, supplies plenty of vomit bags for the 50% of people who throw up when experiencing weightlessness!)
And what about the X-Prize? The $10 million won by Spaceship One designer Burt Ruttan and his company Mojave Aerospace Ventures covers less than half of the $25 million in development costs for the vehicle. While technically a brilliant achievement, the spacecraft falls short of revolutionizing space travel. It’s not launched from the ground but rather dropped from a plane. And being limited to suborbital flights of less than 20 minutes, it will for the forseeable future, be little more than a novelty, garnering headlines but not making much money.
Before dismissing the venture out of hand there are other, more exciting possibilities just beyond the horizon. Bill Sprague’s American Astronautics is building a larger vehicle that may, someday, achieve orbit. Sprague’s 30 years as an aerospace R&D engineer has investors interested…but not ready to commit. And that’s where the value of Spaceship One can be found.
If there is ever going to be a private sector manned space flight industry, there’s going to have to be some kind of track record for investors to have confidence in. Perhaps the value of space tourism will be to show venture capitalists that a market exists beyond tourism for manned spaceflight. Medical research, metallurgical breakthroughs, even something as pie-in-the-sky as mining asteroids could all be huge moneymakers by the middle of this century. This will not be acheived by government owned space programs which are, by their very nature, “risk averse” but by private companies whose desire to make a profit will lead to the next great leap forward in man’s quest to explore the unknown.
UPDATE:In an interview with Newsmax, Yossef Bodansky, director of research at the International Strategic Studies Association and director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as best-selling author of “Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America,”says we’re losing the war on terror.
“Despite the formulation of a correct policy by the Bush Administration, the war is in a dire state primarily because the U.S. intelligence community has repeatedly failed the White House by providing scant concrete data and wrong threat analysis.”
He cites the “institutional culture that taints and tilts analysis” for this failure.
Here’s the interview.
10/5/2004
SPACESHIP ONE…AND ONE FOR THE AGES
CATEGORY: General
By: Rick Moran at 4:45 am
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