Many people still have no real appreciation of the importance of Space policy, or how vital it is that the United States continues to invest in it. Darksyde's Week In Science mentioned the historic SpaceX test flight that lofted a prototype human and/or cargo capsule to orbit and returned it successfully, a first for a commercial company.
Attracting less attention was the successful completion of a months-long test by the Air Force of the X-37 experimental vehicle. Launched from Cape Canaveral 244 days earlier, it successfully flew itself to a landing at Vandenberg Air Force Base on December 3. About a quarter the size of the space shuttle but unmanned, it was able to maneuver in orbit several times before landing like an airplane.
Why all this matters below.
The X-37 represents something that should have happened years ago; building on the technology developed for the shuttle and improving on it. This is something that started as a NASA project that got defunded and transferred to the Pentagon.
While the Air Force is being close-mouthed about what its mission is, it represents a reusable vehicle that can: be launched by conventional boosters (possibly also reusable someday), perform tasks in orbit, rendezvous with other things in orbit, carry a variety of payloads, perhaps even retrieve items from orbit, and be recovered and prepped for another mission in a relatively short time. It's a big advance in capability - and needed.
The Dragon capsule may or may not be quite the advance in technology the X-37 is, but it's still a step forward. It too is intended to be reusable, can maneuver in orbit, rendezvous and dock with the I.S.S. while carrying up to 7 humans, a cargo load, or a mix. More important, it is a non-governmental program outside of NASA - though still dependent on federal funding. Theoretically it means the technology could be available to anyone willing to pay for it. It's a start on making commercial access to space both cheaper and more readily available - and a lot more frequent.
And this matters because Space is already commercially important and vital to military strategy - and to human survival. This is technology being developed largely in and by the U.S. It's an area where we still retain technological advantages over the rest of the world. It creates good high-paying jobs. It gives our best and brightest students something better to do than go to work for Wall Street designing systems to gimmick trading on the stock market or computer models to 'innovate' financial dealing.
The capability to put satellites in space - and humans as needed - is worth billions of dollars. Without weather satellites for example, tracking hurricanes and forecasting would be far more difficult. That's information that saves lives. Being able to lift new ones to orbit quickly if older ones wear out or fail is like having good insurance. When you need it, you need it bad. Communications satellites are just as vital - being able to connect video, audio, and data links around the globe keeps a lot of business ticking away, brings the world closer together, and makes it possible to respond far more quickly to natural or man-made disasters. Being able to see the earth from space is vital if we are to keep track of what we're doing to the earth - climate change science would be orders of magnitude harder to do without access to space. Monitoring deforestation or oil spills in the gulf - all of that is vital to informing public debate and crafting sound policies.
The I.S.S. is at a critical stage right now. After years of construction, it's finally big enough and can support a large enough crew to allow real science to be done in micro gravity and develop new technologies for things we can't even dream of yet - but that could become vitally important. Along with the I.S.S. science tools like the Hubble Space Telescope and like missions have pushed our understanding of the universe ever farther outward - and advanced our understanding of the physics that underlies it. More immediately, platforms in space to keep track of the Sun not only advance science, they could save our civilization if they can give us advance warning of the next Carrington event in time to protect the power grid and everything running off of it.
I shouldn't have to spell out the military aspects. While it has gone largely unremarked, the Air Force has been working hard to develop interlinked networks for reconnaissance, signals interception, weapons targeting, communications, data exchange, and so forth, so that every element of the potential battle field can be linked, from troops on the ground, to aircraft and their sensor platforms overhead, to command and control facilities around the world, to platforms operating in space. A lot of these links go through space based systems at some point. The ability to protect, expand, and replace the space-based elements of this web of information is critical for war-fighting - but also for peace keeping. It's even more important than sea power and control of the oceans in some respects - because there is no place on the surface of the earth that is more than 100 miles from space.
Being able to lift payloads and people to orbit on a reliable, frequent basis is vital to all of this and more. It's a rare bit of good news that we're still capable of doing this.
UPDATE: Thanks for the rescue! Ad astra!