Trevor Mahlman
Last year was a momentous year for spaceflight, bringing to an end many of the most important events that have dominated the industry over the past 10 to 15 years.
Consider the situation in 2010: spaceflight activities were dominated by a few large government space agencies. NASA was still flying the venerable space shuttle without a clear plan for deep space exploration. The James Webb Space Telescope is in development hell. Russia was the dominant launch provider in the world, putting as many rockets into space that year as the United States and China combined. At that time, China’s longest human spaceflight took four days. A lot has changed in the past decade or so.
The year 2022 was a turning point because many important stories since 2010 have come to an end. In this sense, it looks like the end of an era and the opening of a new one in spaceflight. So this story is going to take a look at five of the most important space stories and then try to predict what some of the dominant stories will be for the remainder of the next decade.
We have an exciting but uncertain road ahead.
Looking back
James Webb Space Telescope. NASA spent nearly two decades and $10 billion developing this huge and complex space telescope. It’s been the subject of countless articles describing all the potential hacks, but also going over the endless costs and delays.
The telescope was finally launched on Christmas Day 2021 and has spent the first half of 2022 widely deploying and operating its science instruments. But when astronomers finally pointed him skyward, Wonderland web delivery.
It took so much time and money to design, build and test this telescope on Earth that we may never see such a telescope again. The next group can be assembled in space, not on Earth. Regardless, the era of Webb’s development is over. The age of discovery has begun.
May he live long and prosper.
Space launch system. This was another major NASA development program in 2010, when the space agency sought to build a very heavy rocket. The program consumed about 20 billion US dollars. But while the Webb Space Telescope has many new elements and represents the latest technology, the SLS rocket does not.
The rocket was controversial from the start because the SLS reconfigured parts of the shuttle—its main engines, solid rocket boosters, and even its initial stage’s diameter was nearly identical to the shuttle’s external fuel tank. This rocket was seen as a congressional-mandated program to keep NASA workers and its prime contractors, such as Boeing and Northrop, in paid jobs. The rationale for this decision became increasingly unacceptable as the year 2000 wore on, and private launch companies like SpaceX proved to be more efficient than the government.
Another sore point is that while the missile was originally launched in late 2016, it wasn’t launched until November 2022.
However, once the SLS missile was launched, it performed its task flawlessly. The Artemis I mission got off to a great start with the SLS rocket bringing Orion into its target orbit, a historic achievement for an unprecedented launch. This is how the “Block 1” saga ends the development of the SLS missile. It’s nice when space stories have a happy ending.
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