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The international space community lamented the death this week of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who quietly funded the development of private spaceships, the search for intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations and conservation programs on Earth. His vision has paved the way for inexpensive access to space, while NASA has no way to enter space at the moment and has a confused vision for the future.
Paul Allen, who died October 15 at the age of 65 years of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, did not attract media attention as another billionaire rocket builder Elon Musk , known for the dramatic unveiling of his latest projects. Instead, Allen quietly funded creative inventors such as aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, who designed and built the world's first private rocket, SpaceShipOne, which flew twice a week to to win the sub-orbital space, winning the Ansari X Award. This vehicle is now suspended in the Smithsonian and has provided the basic design of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, which will send paying passengers into space in the next months to the next years.
Allen has funded many space-related companies
Allen has also sponsored the construction of the world's largest aircraft called Stratolaunch, which will carry rockets at high altitude, where they will be launched in space, which will be less expensive than launching from the ground up. He is currently testing the tracks.
Rather than taking off from a launch pad, the Stratolaunch rockets will fall at high altitude from beneath the company's six-jet and double-fuselage aircraft, the largest ever built. (Stratolaunch Systems Corp.)
The SETI Institute also benefited from Allen's donation of a series of 42 telescopes dedicated to the search for intelligent radio signals from other civilizations of our galaxy. Prior to the construction of the Allen Network, the institute supported on a few smaller telescopes or borrowed time on larger ones.
While philanthropists such as Paul Allen, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson were funding the construction of real low-cost spacecraft, NASA found itself in the embarrassing situation of being stranded in the face of the recent failure of a Russian Soyuz launch. , Which is their only way to send astronauts to the space station. In the meantime, their next big rocket, the SLS, in development since 2011, has fallen behind schedule. Even the legendary Hubble Space Telescope has no gyroscope problems, just like its companion, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, before its repair this week.
Even NASA's future plans are uncertain as the International Space Station approaches the end of its life in 2024. The agency hopes private interests will prevail, but so far no one has made the tail at the door. Finally, the Deep Space Gateway, a new, smaller version of the space station planned for lunar orbit, has been criticized by some as a useless waste. It is cheaper to land directly on the moon than to stop at a crossing point.
NASA Animation of the Deep Space Gateway Space Station Proposal Orbiting the Moon (NASA)
The early successes of NASA have created jobs for many
NASA 's early successes, which placed human beings on the moon in the late 1960s, were a political model designed to employ people from all states of the union for the national purpose of defeating the United States. Soviet Union. In the end, 400,000 people from across the country participated in the Apollo lunar missions. A similar model was used to build space shuttles and the space station, where components were built in different parts of the country and assembled in Florida for launch.
But if this approach offers huge employment opportunities, it is very expensive. President Kennedy basically wrote a blank check for the Moon program because national pride was at stake. Towards the end of the space shuttle program, it cost more than a billion dollars every time they were leaving the ground. The new SLS rocket is the result of shuttle technology and will probably cost even more for each flight. Perhaps the disproportionate model of NASA to reach space has become more of a job creation program than a means of exploration.
Spaceflight must not be so expensive
Private companies show that spaceflight can be much cheaper if everything is done under one roof. The SpaceX Falcon Heavy, currently the world's most powerful rocket, costs less than a tenth ($ 90 million) of NASA's projected SLS cost per flight. Blue Origin is building a new facility on the Kennedy Space Center site for its new rocket, while Moon Express has resumed an abandoned launch pad to send its new robotic missions directly to the moon.
Paul Allen was part of a new generation of visionary entrepreneurs who have the means to concretize their visions effectively. He will be remembered for his generosity and support for a new era of commercial space exploration.
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