Elon Musk wanted to go to space.
So a few years ago, he sold the web startup he had founded (it was called PayPal; you may have heard of it) and started a new company to build spacecraft. And today, that company, SpaceX, just launched the first ever commercial spacecraft to reach orbit and return safely to the earth.
This means that after next year, NASA will probably never fly another astronaut to the International Space Station again—they will pay SpaceX to do it for them. The future starts today: for the first time ever in our history as a species, space is open for business.
In the movie Apollo 13, astronaut Jim Lovell, played by Tom Hanks, is asked by a Congressman why, having already beaten the Russians to the moon, we were bothering to go back. Hanks replies, “Imagine if Christopher Columbus had come back from the New World and no one returned in his footsteps.”
If the Apollo program was the equivalent of Columbus reaching the New World, then today was the day the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock. We’re going back to space, but not this time for king or country. We’re moving out, as we always have: for ourselves, to find new lives, new ways of living, to extend the bounds of our presence. Today was the day that all begins.
It could be argued that comparing today’s successful test flight to a moment such as the Pilgrims’ arrival is hyperbole, but I contend it is not. True, the path of human history lies ahead of us, uncertain and unobserved. But it was the same for the Pilgrims. When they stepped off the Mayflower, there was no way for them to know that that day would be remembered the way it is today. There was no guarantee that they would be remembered at all. They couldn’t know if they would survive the winter, let alone that one day, a nation would appear on those shores that would become so capable that it could do things like send people to walk on that cratered ball hanging in the night sky called the moon.
But it did.
And so if you believe, as I do, that humankind will one day move to new worlds, that men and women and children will take up new lives on other planets, and that we will live and work and play and love and die and stay among the stars, then today is that day that we will look back on and say, This is when we left; this is when the journey began.
So if you’re still awake tonight, before you fall asleep, just think of how lucky we are to have lived and seen this day. When you wake up, it will be the dawn of a new era. The sun has set and risen on this small rock 93 million miles away for 4 billion years. But for the first time, it will rise on life that is moving out.
And then, the earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet, and sun from sun. The earth will become a holy land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds.
—Winwood Reade, 1872
ZastrowPhysics 