On February 1st year 2003, space shuttle Columbia had left for its 28th flight. It never comes back. After completing the orbital mission, the crew re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, where a large piece of insulating foam fell from the space shuttle’s outer crate and struck its left wing, causing the entire spacecraft to fall. broken universe. All seven NASA astronauts on board died.
As a result of the disaster, NASA and the US government made the painful decision to cancel the space shuttle program. At the same time, little known billionaire and founder of Paypal Elon Musk launched a space exploration startup. In an industry dominated by heavyweights like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, the company has struggled for years, especially after its first three rockets all failed.
However, despite the long odds, Musk and SpaceX succeeded, developing a lower-cost, reusable rocket that could be safely brought back to the ground and into space again. In 2020, SpaceX launched a Dragon capsule carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station, marking the first time a commercial spacecraft has completed a mission to the ISS.
Or, at least, that’s the story told in the new Netflix documentary, Back to space. In the documentary, today, directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solos) goes a long way to show how SpaceX is bringing crews back to the US, nearly a decade after its last space shuttle flight in 2011. As SpaceX marks its 20th anniversary, the film paints a picture. competing for the company as a necessity for the future, as Russia cuts off most of the world from using the Soyuz spacecraft and more and more customers need cheaper services like Uber or FedEx into space. It’s a good movie, but it’s not the whole story.
Musk’s rhetoric could lead SpaceX to usher in a new era of spaceflight and save humanity by building colonies on Mars and other inhospitable worlds, but his company and the Such another person would not exist without the contract between NASA and NASA. When it became clear that the space agency could not achieve its grand ambitions without delegating some missions to others, NASA played a fundamental role in supporting the nascent industry, one that it is still closed to this day.
Regardless of who drives the space taxi, the real action happens in orbit and beyond. SpaceX is currently providing critical services, putting astronauts into orbit, and completing deliveries, but it is NASA and other space agencies who are supporting the ISS, developing critical research into the impact The health effects of space radiation and life in zero gravity and the maintenance of critical infrastructure on the ground . In the years after the space shuttle and before the Dragon, NASA developed a new crew capsule and dozens of groundbreaking unmanned spacecraft, including those that flew into deep space, heading for the sun. , Mars, asteroids, Jupiter and Pluto, to name a few. Despite Musk’s claims, NASA still leads in space exploration.
It is true that SpaceX’s efforts to reduce the cost of sending equipment and crew into space have changed the game. In an interview with WIRED, Chin went as far as to say that the company is “just in another stratosphere”. However, when praising the company, Back to space largely ignores a lot of shortcomings, such as environmental concerns about SpaceX’s launch websites and Starlink satellite. While the two-hour film spends a lot of time with the charismatic astronauts, it does little to mention Musk’s erratic and agile behavior. It mentioned his tweets about flamethrowers and featured him on Joe Rogan’s podcast, but it removed his Twitter attack journalistshis cavalier lay off concerns of Covid-19 and short relationship with former President Donald Trump. Vasarhelyi said that she and the editor wanted to show Musk “his intricacies” but that “the story isn’t about Elon.” Perhaps, but when the two are so closely intertwined in the public consciousness, it feels comfortable to delve into one and not the other.
