I have been thinking more about how exciting the aerospace industry has gotten in my lifetime. I remember the last shuttle flight when I was very young, then it was kind of quiet at least in cool launches and innovation of space travel. Obviously there was the ISS and plenty of missions for scientific discovery, but I have always been fascinated in the rocketry and infrastructure side of space travel, clearly with some bias being a part of that industry now. What really got me thinking about this lately is finding a paper I wrote for the interview of my current job, about why I am interested in space. Now being on the inside of what feels like a new space race it is kind of fun to look at what is going on around me the past decade or so.
I followed new rockets on and off for years, front of mind for everyone these days is SpaceX, and has been what excitement in space for me for most of my life honestly. Watching Falcon 9 is a large part of what got me so interested in rocket flight specifically. Having a company providing more views and trying to make space exciting to the general population was something we needed, and a reason many people are interested what’s going on in space now. Obviously they have done really cool things, landing rockets, reusing boosters tens of times, launches humans, developing some of the most out there ambitious vehicles space has seen yet, but really what stands out is how their Falcon launches have become side news. They launch so often its just a common activity. It’s cool to see that, space becoming non-news means we are normalizing some aspects of it.
They are just a part of what is a larger effort of many countries, not just the USA investing more and more into their space programs, and beyond that private entities are getting in on it more than ever. Other countries launching more than ever and doing the hard things like China catching their first booster is more and more increasing the competition. This pushes countries, companies to do better, increase their cadence, do the harder things and push the envelope more. It’s exciting!
I watched a NASA rocket and astronauts launch to the moon earlier this year, something I have only gotten to experience through word of mouth of my grandparents. Historically of course, this was a part of the cold war, and again it seems like we are trying to do some dominance in space type actions, I promise that’s the only mildly political thing I will mention. The competition is back, or at least we are pushing towards old goals again, relearning how to do the hard things and building upon them. I am excited to see what happens in the coming years, if NASA follows through, we will see more people going toward the moon, and on it in the not so distant future, even if schedules slip this is closer than I have ever felt to living in an Apollo-ish era of space travel.
I don’t really have a strong point to make here, it is just cool to see humans going beyond earth again, the lessons we learn will be invaluable, and just be exciting. From that paper I wrote during my interviews “Space is the answer, space can unite us, bring us closer to solving problems in our world, build onto others, and become our full potential.” I hope that this backing and effort going back into space does what Apollo, the ISS, and countless scientific experiments did and more for us as the world seems to be focusing beyond earth more than ever.