Elon
Musk’s company, SpaceX, has now safely landed a rocket that was once in orbit,
which means that it can be used again. As Musk pointed out in a teleconference
after the successful mission, this reduces the cost of leaving our planet by a
significant amount. Not long before this, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin team
accomplished something similar with a suborbital flight and landing.
Musk,
Bezos, and their teams need to prove
that they can do it again and again, of course, but the key point is that we
now know it can be done, and this will encourage many private companies to
think about what they can do in orbit and beyond when the cost of access to
space is dramatically reduced.
Musk
says that it makes the building of a city on Mars far more feasible, while I
imagine many more people experiencing the Overview Effect, the experience of
seeing our home planet from space and in space. We have a long way to go from
the time when an unmanned rocket can morph into a spacecraft carrying human
beings, but we are getting there.
Over
a 50-year period, governments have managed to give some 550 people the Overview
experience, and it has already brought profound changes in how we see
ourselves, our planet, and our future.
As
private companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic compete to
multiply those numbers, we can expect even greater changes in human
consciousness and society—and that might be the most important outcome of the SpaceX
accomplishment.
