Space Race

Imagine few centuries down the line, the human race is packing bags and moving to outerspace, to other habitable planets- a scenario depicted in the movie interstellar! The Humans would have advanced, if not perfected the technology, processes required for space travel by that time. What would necessitate such a revolutionary-evolutionary move ? Many scenarios come to mind:-

• Population explosion and not much resources available to be shared by each one of us – this is the precise reason given by Jeff Bezos in one of his talks
• Drastic Climate change making our planet inhabitable
• A Rogue planet (yes they exist) or comet making a collusionary trajectory towards earth
• Simply because humans become capable of settling in other planets

And preparations for such a scenario has just begun or say it has come into being. How eerie is that? What if someone says the First commercial space flight launched by Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is beginning of that possibility. It has just begun. Followed by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin commercial space flight launch and then SpaceX! This commercial space flight race would only accelerate the possibility. It’s like some higher dimensional power is waiting for human race to develop just the right amount of technology for space travel and then the heat would be turned on. Jeff Bezos candidly admitted that in the grand scheme of things, if you want to do philanthropy, then profitable ventures is the way. The profits from commercial space flight business would be ploughed back to funding more research into space travel. Elon Musk has the same plan.

Couple of tangential points that come to mind

• All the three companies are from US
• 600 people have already booked $250K tickets on Virgin Galacti
• NASA has selected Blue origin and GE to develop nuclear fueled space flights for longer travel

All the above point towards neck break speed of activity happening in that area. Whatever it is, man’s relentless efforts to push the boundaries of understanding of space, technology and applications is exciting, surreal, eerie at the same time.