Today spaceflight and human history was made by the very first private citizens, traveling to a distance of about 53 miles above the Earth’s surface in a private space plane built by Virgin Galactic.
I grew up watching Alan Shepard fly to sub-orbital space and all of the other Mercury flights. Then came the Gemini Program that gave NASA the techniques necessary for the Apollo Program to land Neil Armstrong and 11 other Americans on the Moon. After the Moon came Skylab, America’s first space station. NASA then concentrated on Low Earth Orbit (LEO) missions for 30 years with the Space Shuttle and construction of the International Space Station (ISS) which has been continuously crewed for almost 21 years. NASA is returning astronauts to the Moon and eventually Mars with its Artemis Program. The inaugural mission of NASA’s Space Launch System with an un-crewed Orion spacecraft, Artemis 1, is scheduled for later this year. Artemis 1 will fly a 21-day mission 280,000 miles from Earth — designed to test all systems. If successful, Artemis 2 will fly a probable repeat mission with four astronauts. Artemis 3 is scheduled for a crewed Moon landing carrying the first woman and the next man to set foot on the lunar surface. The launch dates for each of these missions are very fluid. Billionaires have invested in access to space as Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic, Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin and Elon Musk of SpaceX have all built space travel machines and the complex infrastructure necessary not only to access space but to promote and profit by space tourism. Each of these men envision selling seats to private citizens, allowing them to access space in the near future either at the fringes of space in a Virgin Galactic space plane, sub-orbitally in a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket and capsule, or LEO via a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket.
