NASA Will Lead
Before this spring is out, NASA and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), will begin flying astronauts to the International Space Station, instead of paying the Russian Space Agency (ROSCOSMOS).
NASA will lead again, as they did in the days of the Apollo Moon missions and in the days of the Space Shuttle when the Space Station was built. Right?
Wrong.
Even while President Bush was cancelled the Space Shuttle program after the Columbia disaster while the President Obama implemented the planned cancellation after the Space Station was completed, NASA led. SpaceX grew into the COTs and CCDev programs…that were lead by NASA to begin spinning off space flight to truly independent contractors, first to support the Space Station…but intended to grow a new space industry.
NASA built the Hubble Space Telescope, the greatest robotic space craft humanity has ever devised. NASA became the only organization that ever successfully landed probes on Mars, and everyone who seeks to land on Mars partners with NASA to be successful. Throughout the period after the Space Shuttle NASA astronauts led the world in research aboard the Space Station. The list goes on. For more than fifty years, scores of scientific achievements, both in space and Earth-bound, have relied and still rely on the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration for leadership…far more than any other organization on the globe.
NASA never stopped leading.
You don’t believe me? Check out this list of other things NASA has planned for 2021-2022 besides (maybe) launching an empty capsule around the Moon and paying a high-tech shuttle service to move people to orbit and back.
- Joint Polar Satellite System-2 (JPSS-2) NOAA, Polar orbit, Atlas V
- Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) NASA Inflatable Decelerator, Atlas V
- Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites-T (GOES-T)
NOAA Weather Satellite, Atlas V - JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) ESA mission to Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, Arian 5
- Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) NASA, Asteroid Defense, Falcon 9
- Psyche. NASA, Metallic Asteroid, Falcon Heavy
- Lucy NASA, Jupiter Trojans, Atlas V
- NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) NASA Environmental science radar, ISRO GSLV
- Sentinel-6a. ESA Radar Ocean Topography, Falcon 9
- Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) NASA, France, Canada Ocean Topography, Falcon 9
- Landsat-9. NASA, USGS, Atlas V
- Galactic/Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory (GUSTO) NASA, Balloon Infrared Telescope
- X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) JAXA, ESA, JAXA H2A launcher
- Euclid. ESA, Soyuz-2.1B or Ariane 62
- Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) NASA, Falcon 9
Some of the above partner with other nations and agencies on their projects, but most of the list are NASA missions. Also, if you clicked the links and read about them, you’d see that SpaceX is only sending five of these missions missions to space. All of these projects are envelope-stretching, cutting edge research. Some of them aid in seriously important climate science, while others bring in data on the cosmos in support of the efforts of scientists the world over.
Do not think that SpaceX or anyone else competes with or in anyway equals NASA. SpaceX will never equal the accomplishments of NASA, even if they work at it for a hundred years. This is what your half a penny per Federal dollar buys…an endless list of science.
Bill Housley 