"Then two decades from Gagarin, twenty years to the day.
Came a shuttle named Columbia, to open up the way.
And they said she's just a truck,
but she's a truck that's aiming high.
See her big jets burning, see her fire in the sky."- Lyrics from "Fire in the Sky" by Kristoph Klover
Today's photo is of course, not of Columbia, which was lost during re-entry, along with her crew of seven, but rather of her younger sister, Atlantis. Retired along with the rest of the surviving space shuttles, Atlantis today rests on a plinth inside a purpose-built exhibition hall at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, where I took this photo.
As a child of the 80s and 90s, the Space Transportation System (STS), better known as the Space Shuttle, was the lens through which space exploration was viewed in my formative years. Though lacking the earth-shattering newness of Apollo, the shuttles still provided plenty to be excited for. They were critical to building the International Space Station, humanity's lone outpost beyond our home world's atmosphere, as well as delivering (and servicing) the Hubble Space Telescope and other critical pieces of orbital infrastructure that have helped define our world, and shape our understanding of our place in the universe.
Sony A7iii w/Sony 24mm f1.4 GM | ISO640, 1/60, f1.6 | Processed in Capture One Pro 12
Despite two extremely high profile, utterly avoidable, fatal disasters, Challenger in January 1986 and the aforementioned Columbia in February of 2003, on a simple miles-traveled-per-fatality basis, no class of vehicle has ever been safer. That said, the STS program never lived up to its promises, and the retirement of the shuttles was an understandable decision.
Visiting Kennedy wasn't the end of my space-oriented day though. That evening, my father and I watched from his back porch in Poiciana, FL as SpaceX's Starlink 2 mission roared into the heavens atop a Falcon 9 rocket that was launching for its fourth time. It was the first time I ever witnessed a rocket launch in person, and even from just over fifty miles away (as the crow flies) it was an incredible sight.
If the shuttle was the defining space vehicle of my childhood, the Falcon has become that of my adulthood. With their stunning live streams, elegant vertical landings, and the kind of launch tempo that the STS program envisioned by achieved, it's hard not to be inspired by what SpaceX, and to a lesser extent their competitors in Rocket Lab and Blue Origin, have accomplished.
Yet, even among the excitement, the fact that space flight is being driven today by corporations rather than the government leaves me conflicted. I am not the biggest fan of our government, and even I know that NASA's scientific and exploratory mission was always paired with advancing the development of military technology. At the same time, nothing I've seen in the last twenty years has led me to be overly trusting of private industry either. Whether by malice, incompetence, or both, modern technology companies have shown themselves to have no compunctions around screwing over their customers in nearly uncountable ways.
The SpaceX mission dad and I watched launch is a great example of my conflicted feelings.
SpaceX's Starlink project aims to create a global network of high-speed, low-latency, satellites capable of providing internet service anywhere on earth. In the process, they will more than double the total number of objects in low earth orbit, and there are already concerns that Starlink satellites could disrupt astronomical observations and the tracking of potentially earth-impacting asteroids. Though SpaceX is taking a variety of steps to try and ameliorate those issues.
Beyond those concerns, one corporation controlling a global internet network would wield an incredible amount of power. In a world without anything resembling global net neutrality, they could shape everything from politics, to health, to people's fundamental understanding of the world and their place in it. This is especially true in parts of the world where today there is no internet access at all.
But then I look at Kashmir in India, where the government shut down all internet access, as part of their ongoing legal and societal oppression of that country's Muslim minority. Starlink couldn't be shut down by any one government or entity, unless they could convince Starlink's owners (presumably SpaceX) to do so. Additionally, as someone privileged to have reliable internet most places I go, it's arrogant as hell for me to now say that a project to bring access to such an incredible and life-changing resource, might not be a good idea.
When I was a kid watching on TV as Space Shuttles roared into space, my feelings of wonder were untainted by such nuanced concerns, and that gives me a certain nostalgia for the lovely Atlantis. But nostalgia is inherently a thing oriented to the past, and when it comes to human endeavors in space, there's plenty of excitement, albeit with a healthy dose of trepidation, on the horizon.
And yes, I appreciate the irony of using Klover's lyrics, with their reference Columbia's first flight, for a post featuring a picture of Atlantis. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board determined that given the chance, Atlantis could have rescued the Columbia's crew, had NASA been willing to acknowledge that Columbia's launch went awry, and devoted her mission to investigating the extent of the damage.