Elon Musk cannot take too much recognition to bring NASA astronauts home

After nine months in space, the NASA astronauts came back to earth on Tuesday. Your return from the international space station marks a near a trip that should take a week. Her odyssey emphasized how unnecessarily dependent the United States came from private companies to bring courageous American scientists and discoverers back into space and back.

The policy of space financing has shifted over the decades because the enthusiasm for a cheaper solution for the start is growing. However, we have reached a point where the private property of American spatial flight skills has become a serious national security risk that threatens future projects.

In June, Williams and Wilmore ventured the Boeing Starliner capsule on board the first flight tested by Crew, but two editions made it uncertain to deliver them home. They returned to a SpaceX kite capsule that has been used in most manned NASA space aircraft in recent years. Boeing, a venerable aviation institution, and SpaceX, a pre -launch of Elon Musk, now mainly serve as the NASA Astronauts and freight delivers in low earth orbit.

NASA was not as dependent on private companies when it designed Project Mercury, the country’s first human space flight program. In view of the pressure of the space race against the Soviet Union, there was no question that the new civilian program would have and operate its rockets and capsules. Like all military aircraft, the work for the construction of the Mercury room vehicle was awarded to companies in order to carry out engineers. But NASA controlled the starts and crews.

This remained for the Gemini and Apollo programs and the later development of the Space Shuttle, a reusable spaceship that could glide into a landing and could not be restored from the ocean. However, the program was much more expensive than expected, and the prediction that companies that use satellites would prefer NASA to commercial rockets.

Challenger exploded seconds after the start in 1986, and Columbia exploded shortly after the earth’s atmosphere was re -entered in 2003. These two disasters gave the impression that the shuttle would never be really safe. The 30-year-old shuttle program ended in 2011 when Atlantis landed in the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There was no clear idea of ​​what would come next, and by 2013, American astronauts had to drive Russian rockets into space at the expense of over 70 million US dollars per seat.

It makes sense that NASA would prefer a local alternative, and as NBC News reported in 2011, the agency “to the private industry with fixed prices, contracts and profit margins” turned as a solution, in an agreement in which the “spatial trip agency will be the customer”.

Since then, companies such as SpaceX, Boeing and Jeff Bezos’ blue origins have been elected as part of the Commercial Crew program for contracts for the use of people as an international space station. In the meantime there were many ways to start satellites and other loads. It has proven in particular to be a lucrative market for SpaceX, which has concluded NASA contracts worth $ 13 billion in the past decade.

In August, NASA announced that in February a SpaceCraft of the Dragon crew was launched by Musk in February in order to recall Williams and Wilmore as part of a planned return mission for two other astronauts. But last month, Musk, who thrown his lot with President Donald Trump, claimed wrongly that for “political reasons” he had previously been sent by “political reasons” to recall Williams and Wilmore. Musk had lied that Trump had clarified SpaceX Recovery mission when it was President Joe Biden to do it.

Musk, who already benefits from NASA’s inability to start her own flights from NASA, is positioned in such a way that she stays more business to herself and from his competitors. We should all be grateful that Williams and Wilmore are back home, but I am frustrated that they will continue to bring the bags from Musk back.

NASA should demand that Musk from SpaceX and everyone that they achieve from government contracts will sell as long as it serves in the government. This would most likely bring a damper for further crew missions until his competitors have the chance to catch up, but in the long run it would be better for the stability of the America’s space program. But the thought that Trump puts SpaceX restrictions on SpaceX, as long as he and Muschus are friendly, has been brought as far as Musk’s dreams of colonizing Mars.