NASA has not been sending their astronauts up for a while. Thanks to a combination of budget cuts and tragedy, they’ve largely been relying on the Russian space program to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. But a combination of political tensions and desire to put spaceflight back on American soil has led to Cape Canaveral opening as a commercial spaceport. Oh yeah, you read that right.
According to Boing Boing, NASA will run Cape Canaveral, but the rockets and equipment will be provided by Boeing and Space X in a $6.8 billion set of contracts that will see rockets launching from America by 2017. America and Russia aren’t on the best of terms right now, what with Putin invading a country while pretending it’s just volunteers you guys and generally acting like a dick, which helped, but what’s more important than politics is the fact that this is a key step towards opening space to the larger market.
Despite what people might insist, we need NASA; it’s one of the most important government organizations to our future and is on the cutting edge of a number of important disciplines, ranging from materials science to robotics. But we also need more commercial spaceflight. The more money there is in figuring out the problems of going to, traveling through, and living in space, the more people are going to seek it out as a career and the more talent will be thrown at these problems.
Going to space is the next step of the human species, and the more people we have pushing that step, the more the human race can advance. And, of course, NASA’s going to be sending up more rockets, and that’s the best news of all.