Lore Sjoberg, writing in Wired, has some good commentary about the spacecraft Dragon visiting the International Space Station and delivering food and computers to astronauts. The Dragon is a privately built and funded vehicle. This, Sjoberg notes, means the function is becoming routine; aside from the whole vacuum of space business, it’s like a long-haul trucker delivering goods to a government warehouse. He looks forward to the day it becomes so routine we have a corrupt and inefficient Space Docker’s union and we get maudlin country-western songs about the lonely but honest life of a geosynchronous cargo handler.
That said, I agree with Neil Degrasse Tyson who said that what makes many of us sad about the retirement of the space shuttle Discovery is that it was done without something else ready to go. We didn’t bemoan the end of the Mercury program when you had Gemini and Apollo ready to go. And, make no mistake, private enterprise will not forge new ground in this area. It might perfect and improve the ground already covered, but you won’t see private business pioneering planetary colonization or interstellar flight. Profit in those areas are far too uncertain. You needed Prince Henry the Navigator to get the Portuguese moving, you needed Queen Isabella for Columbus, and you needed the British Navy to get Captain Cook plying the Pacific. Once the exploration is done, private business will come along after to develop things, but you need a sovereign with something other than a spreadsheet in mind to jump start the project.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Telstar, the first communications satellite and perhaps the first commercial space launch.