Space Travel: Where do we go from here?

"Where do we go from here
Now that all of the children are growing up?"
                                           -Alan Parsons Project "Games People Play"




I saw the shuttle liftoff for the first time when I was 6. Little did I know that it was the first shuttle liftoff. I'm at the age in which the shuttle has always been the way to get to space, And seeing old Apollo launches with more traditional rocket-shapes brings thoughts of old, bad sci-fi movies. In July, the last-ever shuttle launch and the end of an era is upon us.

 For years I was disappointed. People walking on the effing Moon were before my time. Why are we spending our time in orbit? Then came Hubble. My dreams weren't limited to seeing people on the moon, or on Mars, or even where people go entirely. The universe, and how much we can learn, and how amazing what we learn is, were the boundaries of my dreams.

 Hubble was a miserable failure. They went back to not only fix it, they made it better. We can now see the edge of the Universe. The beginning of all existence. The images weren't as pretty as our more local Nebulae, But the beauty of what it means to be seeing the edge of the Universe. People have an innate need to know Why am I here? along with other questions people like to write nonsense that sounds good for now about. Seeing remnants of the Big Bang, the singularity from which everything came, helped me understand hippies. I felt like I was at one with everything. That goes along way toward having an understanding of our place in things.

  Technology exploded. Things got smaller and more impressive, in part from things learned from all these experiments in space no one every bothers to know about. We can see smaller. We've got subatomic things on film, breaking laws like the speed of light and time travel. At a certain size, the laws of  physics break down, and new ones take over. You can be in two places at once. You can be doing different things at the same time. Things only become "real" when observed. This lead to even more bizarre erratic behavior when you go smaller. The smallest point of existence is a quantum string. These can vibrate 6 ways in our three perceivable dimensions, plus apparently 8 others. (11 dimensions). This lead to the edge of understanding the nature of existence, and it blows my mind:

  The basis of everything is tiny strings that vibrate in certain patters. Exactly like our musical notes. The universe, time-space, everything, is an amazingly intricate Symphony of incredibly epic proportions.

  Understanding how small we are didn't make me feel insignificant. Every moment of our existence is a note in a Symphony of nearly infinite complexity, and no one note is more or less significant than any other.

  Humans have really stepped it up for one of two things: Exploration and Competition. We've advanced tons just in my own lifetime as our world and our part in it change. As a species, we like to know more, to add to our own lot in things. We find more of what there is so that we in turn have more, or we compete with others over what's there. Wars, the ultimate competitions, force us to improve and adapt. Just as much of what we take advantage of in our lives is from military research as it is the space program. Competition and Exploration, respectively.

Where am I going with this?


  The next step in space has already started. The privatization of space travel and research. People taking what's there for research, and improving on what's there for efficiency, driving the cost down to where space travel can be sold as a commodity. SpaceX winning the first ever "Space Prize" made me realize that we are on the edge of something big. There is even competition. Two companies.

  Normally, I'm not rooting for "The Corporations" any more than I am "Tha Gummyment". The government can get things done on a big scale, but they are criminally inefficient. Big companies want big bucks. This leads to bad things, but I think only when they run out of ideas. Space is so huge, there is going to be no end to improvement and new research to out-do the other guy, as much as make their own products more accessible and profitable. That's a motivation that will force at least these guys to do for the consumer for a loooong time.


  I see SpaceX and Virgin Galactic one-upping each other on what their ships can do, and NASA continuing development of the space elevator. You heard me right, at least if you read out loud.

  Graphene is a super-strong, super-light, nano-engineered form of carbon. There is to be a platform in fixed orbit around Earth, attached to the ground by a material like graphene. There will be an elevator that can ride this tether all the way into space, cutting costs from thousands of dollars per pound to about $150. Launching to space from the orbiting platform will be much easier and cost-effective.

  There's a huge amount of what we don't know out there, it's amazing just to learn some of the stuff we never even realized we didn't know.