The Hard Road Uphill
Oct. 31st, 2014 07:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerNoticing a reference in a comic strip to the anniversary of a Mars probe, I thought of Mariner 4 and decided, one evening early in the week, to look at the official NASA site to see if there would be a feature there. Instead, I saw a news item about investigations beginning about an anomaly of some kind with a supply rocket to the space station. A bit more looking revealed something had exploded in the Antares rocket just moments after lift-off, and the whole thing had dropped back down on the launch pad in flames.
Having paid close attention to the first few "commercial" supply launches to the space station, this news of something not running smoothly did jolt me a bit. I told myself that this wasn't one of the rockets that would be lifting the space capsules announced to carry astronauts; the question was whether this would somehow get associated with them. There seemed some reassurance anyway in bits of news I noticed suggesting the people on the space station weren't living hand-to-mouth and could deal with something like this going wrong as I set my thoughts in order.
Today, though, I heard the breaking news in the afternoon that the suborbital rocket plane Spaceship Two had crashed in the desert on a test flight, and as the story developed I saw that one of the pilots had been killed. I'd been thinking a bit of how it had been ten years already since Spaceship One had rocketed above the arbitrary line that marks "space" and then turned around soon enough to win the prize for doing that, and then, after a great deal of back-slapping about this accomplishment of private endeavour at a time when the surviving space shuttles were still grounded, it went straight to the National Air and Space Museum, apparently having had a few flight problems that made flights with actual passengers on them risky. For this new thing to happen not that long before the promise of passenger rocket flights is, of course, a hard blow, and one I'm sure will have a lot of people watching and worrying about what might happen next for a while to come.
Having paid close attention to the first few "commercial" supply launches to the space station, this news of something not running smoothly did jolt me a bit. I told myself that this wasn't one of the rockets that would be lifting the space capsules announced to carry astronauts; the question was whether this would somehow get associated with them. There seemed some reassurance anyway in bits of news I noticed suggesting the people on the space station weren't living hand-to-mouth and could deal with something like this going wrong as I set my thoughts in order.
Today, though, I heard the breaking news in the afternoon that the suborbital rocket plane Spaceship Two had crashed in the desert on a test flight, and as the story developed I saw that one of the pilots had been killed. I'd been thinking a bit of how it had been ten years already since Spaceship One had rocketed above the arbitrary line that marks "space" and then turned around soon enough to win the prize for doing that, and then, after a great deal of back-slapping about this accomplishment of private endeavour at a time when the surviving space shuttles were still grounded, it went straight to the National Air and Space Museum, apparently having had a few flight problems that made flights with actual passengers on them risky. For this new thing to happen not that long before the promise of passenger rocket flights is, of course, a hard blow, and one I'm sure will have a lot of people watching and worrying about what might happen next for a while to come.
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Date: 2014-11-01 01:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-11-01 08:55 pm (UTC)