The future of private space
After two recent high profile accidents: the crash of Virgin Galactic’s spaceshiptwo, which killed the pilot and injured the copilot, and the explosion of Orbital Sciences Antares rocket, we wanted to know more about the future of commercial space.
Mike Gold, the chairman of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee also works extensively with Bigelow Aerospace as their Director of DC Operations. Bigelow is a space start-up planning to launch their own space station in the future.
“I don’t think anybody sees these failures and says, ‘Well, that’s a great thing.’ I can certainly assure you it wasn’t beneficial. But what was extraordinary to us was the success, the amazing consecutive successes that the Falcon 9 and the Antares had up to this point,” Gold says. “Not that there was a failure. So if anything the performance, particularly of the pace X systems, have exceeded our expectations.”
“We hear far too often that commercial entities will be less safe than government programs when exactly the opposite is the case. You talk about Mercury and Apollo and other programs. They to an extent could suffer failure more easily than a commercial program because if you look at the activities of these purely commercial entities, such as Virgin Galactic, it’s their own money, their own investors, and they don’t necessarily have the depth of resources,” Gold says. “Which is why, quite frankly I think there is at least an equal if not a stronger focus by these commercial and private sector companies on safety and success because if we fail, our jobs go away, the programs go away. And that’s not necessarily the cause with government programs.”
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