I ran off this weekend to celebrate our anniversary (Thirty-nine. How can it possibly be thirty-nine?) and I did so without putting together Popular Science, Abbreviated Science Round-up, This Week in Space, or the Sunday morning Abbreviated Pundit Round-up. I also did so without stopping to think about getting anyone to fill in this weekend … which is probably just as well, as most folks are heavily engaged in either being at, or coming home from, Netroots Nation.
So please, accept this brief “There should be an Abbreviated Pundit Round-up in this space, how dare you leave us high and dry on a Sunday morning?” spot for making comments … just like that.
But just so it’s not completely empty, here’s another big number: 37. As in thirty-seven years. That’s how long it has been since the United States commissioned a new manned launch system. On April 12, 1981 the Shuttle Columbia roared off the pad at Kennedy with astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen on board. The last shuttle flew in 2011. Since then, every American astronaut on their way to space has had to thumb a ride on a Russian Soyuz.
Thirty seven years is more than a decade longer than the span between Alan Shepard’s Mercury-Redstone launch in 1961, and that first Shuttle launch. In that time, the US also put humans on the Mercury-Atlas, Gemini-Titan II, Apollo-Saturn IB, Apollo Saturn V. That’s six different launchers over a twenty year span. And since then … nothing. In fact, even the humans going to space on Soyuz are riding on a launcher and in a craft derived from versions that are only mildly updated forms of rockets that have been around since that initial “Space Race.” The last time a human being left the planet on anything genuinely new was 2003, when China launched its first taikonaut on a Long March 2.
That makes this a very big week for the space program, and for the business of going to space in general. This week, NASA named nine astronauts who will be taking not one, but two, new vehicles into space in the next year. Five of the folks above will be lofted on an Atlas V, riding in Boeing’s new Starliner capsule. The other four will be taking the SpaceX Crew Dragon, on top of a Falcon 9. And even if they’re not going anywhere new at the moment—both craft are meant primarily for delivering crew to the International Space Station—this is some of the first genuinely new hardware for putting people in space in a generation. Maybe two.
Okay, you can now return to roundly thumping me for not being there. Hey, how about that racist bastard Trump, eh? Man. He’s … a racist bastard.