Why SpaceX Gives Me Hope

Falcon Heavy boosters landing after helping to launch Starman

Over the past year or so, I have gradually become what could be accurately described as a SpaceX fan. Not only that, I have discovered that Elon Musk’s rocketry company possesses a surprisingly extensive fandom. SpaceX has an active subreddit with hundreds of thousands of members, and its orbital launches can draw millions of viewers on YouTube. So, what is it that has given a private spaceflight corporation the sort of following typically reserved for TV shows and sports teams? I can't fully answer this question in the broad, societal sense, but I can analyze what makes SpaceX so inspiring to me personally.

First, it's useful to understand why I find space exploration in general so interesting and important. One factor is that establishing a human presence outside of Earth is vital to our species' long-term survival. Relying on a single fragile planet to house all of humanity is a risky choice in a world where our capacity for destruction increases exponentially as our technology advances. But this does not entirely account for the appeal of space. After all, fighting global warming is an even more important task in the fight to prolong humanity's lifespan. The answer lies in the fact that space exploration is a positive endeavor. It seeks to discover and create, not simply to correct mistakes and avert catastrophe. The preservation of Earth is at least as important as expanding off of it, but it is difficult (for me, at least) to be excited about such a reactive effort. Space exploration, on the other hand, is proactively pushing the boundaries of human achievement.

Beyond the overarching goal of human self-preservation, space exploration also offers an endless supply of new challenges which can only be overcome by ever more advanced technology. Even with a minuscule percentage of Earth's resources devoted to the task, it has been the arena for some of humanity's greatest engineering accomplishments. When one considers just how much more there is to explore and build in our solar system alone, it injects a dose of optimism into visions of the future so often focused on human shortcomings. Not only is it a great technological challenge, space is particularly easy to be passionate about because of how much of humanity's recent popular culture has been devoted to fantasizing about it. The opportunity to make real the dreams of science fiction is yet another contributor to the allure of the cosmos.

My enthusiasm for the astronautical has been explained, but the question remains: why SpaceX in particular? Is not NASA a better standard-bearer for humanity's journey beyond Earth? Unfortunately, while NASA is central to human space exploration (and was the organization which enabled SpaceX's rise to prominence in the first place), it is no longer the agency that landed humans on Luna and returned them to Earth barely more than a decade after its creation. Since the days of Apollo, NASA devoted most of its efforts to the Space Shuttle, an unsafe and enormously expensive system which completely failed to live up to its promise of revolutionizing access to space. This decline has a host of causes, from extremely limited funding to constantly shifting political directives to increased monopolization in the aerospace industry, but it boils down to the fact that NASA is no longer always the go-to space organization, particularly when it comes to orbital launch technology. SpaceX, on the other hand, is revolutionizing the launch industry and developing vehicles which may allow for the practical colonization of other worlds.

Since its very beginning, SpaceX has been rapidly making useful advances in the otherwise rather stagnant field of orbital launch. It was the first private company to develop and launch a liquid-fueled orbital rocket (the Falcon 1), and soon after built on this success with the much more powerful Falcon 9. SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft quickly became the first private vehicle to resupply a space station, and with the Space Shuttle’s retirement was (and still is) the only operational craft capable of returning significant amounts of cargo from space to Earth. However, in the grand scheme these early developments are the least of SpaceX’s successes. With later versions of the Falcon 9, it has succeeded where NASA failed, creating a partially reusable orbital launch system which has actually brought down costs.

A Dragon spacecraft being grappled by the International Space Station's Canadarm2 prior to berthing

In order to fully comprehend the magnitude of this advance, it is important to understand the state of the American orbital launch industry before SpaceX entered the scene. Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the two aerospace titans who manufactured the Atlas and Delta rockets which served as the core of American launch capabilities, had formed a joint venture know as United Launch Alliance which gave them an almost complete monopoly on government launches. ULA made no effort to replace its completely expendable rockets with more advanced designs, or even to enter into the commercial satellite launch market. Instead, it took advantage of the lack of competition to charge hundreds of millions of dollars for every government launch (since SpaceX entered the market, ULA’s prices have dropped dramatically). In lieu of this complacent approach, SpaceX chose to devote the effort necessary to make the first useful advances in humanity’s ability to move payloads into orbit since the end of the Space Race.

Despite being a fraction of the size of either Lockheed or Boeing alone, SpaceX has created what is without a doubt the world’s most advanced orbital launch system: the Falcon 9 Block 5. This rocket incorporates a number of innovations, from engines with the highest thrust-to-weight ratio of any in the world to cryogenically compressed fuel and oxidizer, but its real advantage is its reusability. The Falcon 9’s capability to propulsively land its first stage after boosting its second stage much of the way to orbit is unprecedented, and it promises to make the Falcon 9 significantly cheaper than rockets which are thrown away after a single use. Already, a majority of SpaceX’s launches use previously-flown stages, and now that the Block 5 improvements have been fully implemented individual stages should be able to last for dozens of launches. These capabilities have given SpaceX lower prices than any other launch provider in the same weight class and forced the rest of the industry back into innovation. Even beyond reusability, the Falcon Heavy variant of SpaceX’s flagship rocket is currently the most powerful orbital launch system in operation.

Falcon Heavy's maiden launch

SpaceX’s past achievements and current capabilities are impressive, but its plans for the future are even more inspiring. Later this year, SpaceX will likely use its new Dragon 2 spacecraft to launch astronauts from American soil for the first time since the retirement of the Space Shuttle. Starship (formerly BFR, previously ITS, and originally MCT), the company’s next major project, is an ingenious design which will make clever use of methane propellant, orbital refueling, reusability, in-situ resource utilization, and aerobraking to create an interplanetary vehicle capable of supporting major colonization efforts at relatively low cost without employing politically difficult technologies like nuclear thermal rockets. This may sound far-fetched, but at this very moment SpaceX is assembling  prototype hardware with which to conduct suborbital hop tests as early as March of this year. It’s also useful to remember that the sort of propulsive recovery and reuse of first stages which is now routine was considered impractical by many in the years before it was accomplished. SpaceX has an established track record of achieving the previously-thought-impossible (if usually a few years behind schedule), and if it does succeed, Starship has the potential to revolutionize interplanetary exploration in the same way Falcon 9 is disrupting the launch industry today.

There is one more vital element to consider if my admiration of SpaceX is to be fully understood: its sense of humor. Essentially alone among space companies (and major corporations in general, not to mention government agencies), SpaceX possesses a real sense of fun and self-deprecation. Before being dubbed Starship, its interplanetary spacecraft was known as BFR, in which the B stood for Big and the R for Rocket (the word symbolized by the F is left to the reader’s imagination). The SpaceX YouTube channel contains a video entitled “How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster” which is made up primarily of footage of the countless landing failures which proceeded Falcon 9’s eventual success, all set to the same music used in the opening of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Most infamously, SpaceX used a rather unorthodox dummy payload on the test flight of Falcon Heavy. It is standard practice in the industry for rockets to carry large hunks of iron or similar ballast on their first flight, in order to simulate the weight of a payload without jeopardizing valuable hardware on an untested system. SpaceX, however, decided to use Elon Musk’s cherry red Tesla Roadster, with a dummy in a spacesuit nicknamed “Starman” slouched in a driver’s seat and a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the glove compartment. Launched into a heliocentric orbit, cameras on the car broadcast hours of stunning live footage of Starman casually drifting far above Earth. In a field so often dominated by stodgy officials and earnest narratives, it’s hard not to find such antics on the part of a company which is also making major advances at least a little endearing.

Much of the historical verdict on SpaceX will depend on the final outcome of its current grand plans. It has achieved the seemingly impossible in the past, but establishing a viable human presence on Mars is quite a few steps beyond anything it has attempted before. Even if its dreams of interplanetary colonization end in failure, SpaceX will have revolutionized the way humanity gets to space and injected a welcome dose of whimsy into the astronautical industry.