Trevor Mahlman
Last year was a big one for spaceflight, ending many of the major events that have dominated the industry for the past 10-15 years.
Consider the situation in 2010: spaceflight activities were dominated by a handful of large government space agencies. NASA was still flying the venerable space shuttle with no clear plan for deep space exploration. The James Webb Space Telescope is under development. Russia was the world’s dominant launch provider, launching as many rockets into space that year as the United States and China combined. At the time, China’s longest manned spaceflight lasted four days. A lot has changed in the last decade or so.
The year 2022 was a watershed as many notable stories from 2010 came to a close. In that sense, it feels like the end of an era and the opening of a new one in spaceflight. So this story will take a look at five of those best space stories and then try to predict what some of the dominant stories will be for the rest of the 2020s.
We have an exciting but uncertain road ahead of us.
Looking back
James Webb Space Telescope. NASA has spent nearly two decades and $10 billion developing this huge and complex space telescope. It has been the subject of countless articles detailing all the possible hacks, but also cost overruns and endless delays.
The telescope was finally launched on Christmas Day 2021 and spent the first half of 2022 deploying and using its scientific instruments extensively. But when astronomers finally pointed it skyward, Wonderland Web Delivery.
The process of designing, building and testing this telescope on Earth took so much time and money that we may never see a telescope like it again. The next batch can be assembled in space, not on Earth. Regardless, Webb’s development era is over. The age of discovery has begun.
May he live long and prosper.
space launch system. This was another big development program by NASA in 2010, when the space agency tried to build a very heavy rocket. The program consumed about $20 billion. But while the Webb Space Telescope includes many new elements and represents the latest technology, the SLS rocket does not.
The rocket was controversial from the outset because the SLS reconfigured parts of the shuttle: its main engines, solid rocket boosters, and even the diameter of its primary stage was nearly identical to the shuttle’s external fuel tank. This rocket was seen as a congressionally mandated program to keep workers at NASA and its major contractors, such as Boeing and Northrop, in paid employment. The rationale for this decision became increasingly untenable as the 2000s wore on, and private launch companies like SpaceX proved more efficient than the government.
An additional pain point is that while the missile was originally launched in late 2016, it wasn’t launched until November 2022.
However, once the SLS missile was launched, it performed its job flawlessly. The Artemis I mission got off to a stellar start with the SLS rocket carrying Orion into its target orbit, a historic achievement for an unprecedented launch. This is how the “Block 1” saga concludes the development of the SLS missile. It’s nice when space stories have a happy ending.
