Gravity’s Rainbow: Standing on the Launchpads of Giants

For me one of the most exciting headlines of 2010 read: “First successful commercial space shuttle launched into orbit.” As the story went, Elon Musk and his SpaceX corporation was able to successfully launch their creation “Falcon 9” out of the Earth’s atmosphere and into orbit one hot June day from Cape Canaveral. Giddy with mental images of Richard Branson astride a rocketship a la Slim Pickens in “Dr. Strangelove,” I found myself pondering the state of the space program and rocketry in general.

As anyone who’s read Pynchon’s opus can tell you, the great path dependence that lead us to modern rocketry began in earnest when a genocidal Austrian dictator/mad man poured major government resources into Rocket research. In fact, the German V-2 rocket and later the monumental ICBM rocket developments of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War arose out of a desire to ballistically out-arm and out-perform.

Rockets have been made in much the same way ever since. These days we mostly use multi-stage rockets (familiar to any student of momentum in an introductory college Physics course) to launch communications satellites—of similar size and weight to the hydrogen bombs they were originally designed to deliver, as a matter of fact.

With the funds for the shuttle programs dwindling in the face of a tremendous recession, how can we afford to continue our reach toward the stars? One idea lies with U.S. based Alliant Techsystems. Their idea is to partner with Astrium, a European outfit that developed the Ariane 5 launcher, and develop a commercial rocket which incorporates many of the elements utilized in the Ares and Ariane designs.

By appropriating the technology already developed for these successful models, Alliant can essentially recycle what we already have in this so-called commercial “Liberty” rocket and save a great deal of money in engineering. Perhaps this will clear the way for government to fund the next great advances in space travel technology. With the impending federal budget on the horizon, let’s keep our fingers crossed!

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