Race to space at lower prices – Daily News – Lisbon

Private are developing new technologies that will make the flights more accessible to orbit. Come space tourism there

After the space shuttle NASA have taken to the museums at the end of 2011, the US space agency has to rely on ships and Russian rockets to put their astronauts in orbit but will not be for much longer. The new space race to provide this service is under way, this time, the competition is between private US who see space as a business full of potential. The immediate goal is to take astronauts and equipment to the space station ISS, perhaps as early as 2017, but in the medium term, the ambition is to develop space tourism, and go further.

For young people billionaires who are the faces of the super high-tech companies in this race, the sky is not the limit, but the starting point. In these times of fierce competition, in which almost every month there is news of new tests and spacecraft and rocket launches, the bosses of two of the best placed companies to win the competition space, Elon Musk, SpaceX and Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin, appear to be equally engaged in Despique to see who wins the title of the most visionary -. or more eccentric

Taco the bat, the two men have alternating in statements at least extraordinary . On Wednesday, for example, Bezos argued that the best way to solve the problem of environmental pressure caused by the growing population on the planet would be put in orbit factories, to stop polluting the Earth.

Yesterday, it was the turn of Elon Musk SpaceX announce that, in addition to round-trips to orbit, plans to take humans to Mars in 2025. if so, SpaceX will hit NASA itself, which still did not commit to any deadline safe for a manned mission to the Red Planet – the 2030s is the horizon. But, at the same conference in which he spoke of this Martian adventure, the owner of SpaceX ventured a more extraterrestrial taken, puts forward the hypothesis that human beings are characters of any video game … (see box). That earned him an instant media frenzy and, therefore, SpaceX won a little more visibility, but maybe that was the goal. The day before, space plants of the Blue Origin boss had fulfilled the same role.

reduce the cost of space

One thing is certain, the race it is red hot and all competitors are fighting for the future contract with NASA for the outward and return flights to ISS. For this, you will use these services, the essential is that the missions are successful and take place in safety, so the space agency is financing some of these companies for the development of its technologies.

The SpaceX, since then, it has this financing and is one of the best positioned. But there are other very strong, such as Boeing, Sierra Nevada and Blue Origin own. Who will win the race is still unknown, but the competition and the business model will permit a reduction in the cost space missions, which will be a small fraction of what NASA has spent on its shuttle program. As Robert Cabana, Kennedy Space Center, NASA, commercial spaceflight are now in the pipeline, “a bit like it was in the early days of commercial aviation in the 20s and 30s of the twentieth century.”