The year 2021 ushered in an exciting new era of human spaceflight and exploration. NASA had been laying low since the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011. Then Elon Musk’s SpaceX appeared out of the blue with the first commercial mission for a private customer in 2013. Since then, SpaceX has sent astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), launched over 1,700 satellites into orbit, and put civilians into a higher orbit than the ISS for three days (September 16-18, 2021). Elon Musk virtually singlehandedly transformed the launch industry, with his vision to make Mars colonization a reality.
Two more high-profile flyers in the billionaire space race are Richard Branson at Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin. They both sent civilians up for brief sub-orbital hops to the edge of space and back in July 2021. We’ve seen the youngest person in space (18-year-old Oliver Daemon) and the oldest person in space (90-year-old William Shatner of Star Trek fame). Hayley Arceneaux, a childhood cancer survivor, became the first person to venture into space with a prosthetic implant, and Dr. Sian Proctor from South Mountain Community College became the first black woman to pilot a spacecraft.
Shatner waxed poetic about his 10 minutes in space being a profound transformational experience:
“It was unbelievable. Unbelievable… To see the blue color go right by you and now you see the black darkness. The covering of blue, this sheet, this blanket, this comforter blue that we have around us. We think oh that’s blue sky. And suddenly you shoot through it all as if you are ripping the sheet off you after you sleep and you’re looking into blackness and ugliness. There’s the blue down there and as we look down, [Earth] is life and nurturing [but] the black up there… is it death? I don’t know.”
Even with all of the successful civilian launches so far, space travel is still inherently risky. Ramping up enough speed and power to defy gravity requires rockets to use powerful, controlled explosions and complex technology that always involves some uncertainties. But these civilian missions are proving that non-professional astronauts with proper training can safely venture into space, bringing us closer to seeing what future space travel to Mars might look like.
“I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species than if we’re or not. You want to be inspired by things. You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great.” – Elon Musk, Founder, SpaceX
“We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space. And keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is.” – Jeff Bezos, Founder, Blue Origin
“I really hope that there will be millions of kids all over the world who will be captivated and inspired about the possibility of them going to space one day.” – Richard Branson, Founder, Virgin Galactic
Model Rockets
Hands-on learning is the most effective way for the next generation of rocket scientists, aerospace engineers, and astronauts to gain an in-depth understanding of rocketry concepts. Model rockets provide a scaled-down sense of the challenges involved in rocket construction, launching and recovery operations. Estes Education offers lesson plans on model rocketry basics, principles of flight, aerodynamics, pioneers of spaceflight, and more: https://estesrockets.com/edu-curricula
