The Eagle and the Falcon ... and the Rest

Now that NASA is apparently giving up on the human spaceflight business and turning it over to private industry, it bears questioning how some of our most promising aerospace companies are actually faring.

I have long held a fascination for Boeing, whose 747 (originally developed in anticipation of an order for a large military airlifter) long held the title, "Queen of the Skies." Before that, its 707 revolutionized air travel. How is Boeing doing these days?

The picture is decidedly mixed. Boeing's 787, the Dreamliner, is a success -- thus far. It is the most successful new airliner model in recent memory, with over eight hundred orders to date. Airbus's proposed competitor, the A350, was beaten -- badly -- and the European consortium has had to redesign it into the A350XWB. The latter is, at best, a "paper airplane," and Airbus, knee-deep in its A400 airlifter fiasco, simply doesn't have the funds to assure its success. However, the Dreamliner's introduction has been beset with delays which have cost Boeing billions.

Furthermore, Boeing's other new aircraft, the 747-8 Intercontinental, is underperforming in its passenger version. Boeing's corporate blogger, Randy Tinseth, has admitted that the business case for the Intercontinental is not what was anticipated. Airbus's A380 may have its problems, but beating the Intercontinental in orders is not one of them. The superjumbo already has over 200 orders. The Intercontinental has 32. It's the freighter version of the 747-8 that's garnered the lion's share of orders, and it's the freighter version that can be deemed successful. But the passenger version is a great disappointment, and up until recently, it had had only one customer.

What about Lockheed Martin? One would think that America's largest defense contractor and the prime contractor for Project Constellation's Orion spaceship must benefit from privatization? But in fact, one of its officials has castigated the cancellation of Project Constellation, whose test flight of Ares I, which was to have carried Orion into space, was recently hailed as a great success.

SpaceX, a newcomer to the industry, has potential. It's sent an unmanned rocket into low-Earth orbit. And yet, the company's most promising design, the Falcon 9, is unproven. Even were it to launch successfully, the best the booster could currently do is loft a pressurized cargo container into space to supply the International Space Station. The capsule, known as the Dragon, would require extensive modifications and testing in order to carry astronauts -- akin to transforming a semi trailer into a bus, except that the bus would have to fly in space.

The Europeans and the Japanese can build orbital cargo ships, and, what's more, they have flown them. America has stood for far more, and it seems clear that it ought not abdicate its key responsibility to keep pushing the envelope of manned spaceflight. But now, under President Obama's plan, it has.

Some say that private space stations are the wave of the future, and to this effect, Bigelow Aerospace has sent a gigantic pressurized balloon into orbit, and has the video of floating ephemera within to prove it. That "space station," however, is far from having been proved habitable.

Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is often cited as the model of private space development. Although I never doubted that SpaceShipOne, the prototype for its tourist ships, could achieve suborbital flight, orbital spaceflight is far beyond its ken. The company's partner, Scaled Composites, deserves praise for its success, but in fairness, NASA and the Soviet Union did much the same thing in the early 1960's. Virgin Galactic is merely a sad reminder that if President Obama has his way, the 21st Century version of NASA would no longer be able to do even this, since the NASA spacecraft capable of such flight would no longer exist.

No private spacecraft has ever achieved manned orbital flight and no private designs capable of such flight have ever left the drawing boards, let alone Earth.

To justify cancelling NASA's existing programs, the President's plan offers vague promises that the agency will seed technologies that will shorten travel time among the stars. But no such technologies are on the horizon. Breakthroughs rarely obey the requirements of political rhetoric: King Canute cannot command the invention of hyperdrive and physical reality is no respecter of hot air. In the field of manned spaceflight, President Obama's "vision" for NASA is amounts to throwing away billions in sunk funds in order to chase a dream amounting to nothing we can reliably foresee. The odds are that his latest proposal will result in little other than years or decades of delay -- all while the rest of the world races ahead.