ON FEBRUARY 6, 2018, I was sitting in the American Airlines Admirals Club at the Austin–Bergstrom International Airport, getting a snack prior to boarding a flight. CNN was playing on the club’s large TV screens.
When I looked up, I happened to see blastoff video of the first SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, capable of putting much larger pay-loads into orbit than the workhorse Falcon 9. That first launch was the one that sent into a solar orbit a Tesla convertible with a dummy astronaut sitting behind the wheel.
A bit later, when I looked up again, I saw two of the three Falcon first-stage boosters come in for perfect vertical landings at Cape Canaveral. I confess I had tears in my eyes, thinking, “Robert Heinlein, you should be alive to see this today.”
I grew up reading Heinlein’s science fiction, starting in fifth grade and continuing through my young adulthood. One of my favorites was his 1950 novella The Man Who Sold the Moon. To the best of my knowledge, it was the first time any mainstream science fiction author had portrayed a privately financed space venture. From the 1950s onward, respectable analysts took it for granted that space was far too expensive for anyone but tax-supported governments to explore.
The successful Apollo moon landing program seemed to confirm that assumption. NASA spent $25 billion, equivalent to roughly $177 billion today, on the seven Apollo missions. Sub-sequent NASA endeavors reinforced the idea that space travel had to be financed by the government.
Post-Apollo, a reusable launch vehicle sounded sensible. After all, we don’t build airliners for a single trip and then scrap them. So NASA created a new program to build and operate the space shuttle, intended as “the national launch vehicle”
