1:29 The Birth of Innovation and Commercialization 2:59 The Great War & The Airplane
3:18 Commercialization of the Airplane and Raymond Orteig Prize
4:47 Commercial Airline Industry is born
5:43 Invention of the Jet Airplane
7:02 Invention of the Guided Rocket
8:49 International Geophysical Year- Satellite Launch Challenge
9:10 Birth of NASA
9:52 JFK - "We Choose to Go to the Moon"
11:10 The Moon Landing - Neil Armstrong
11:51 The Space Shuttle Program
12:54 NASA's Robotic Missions
15:02 Hitchhiking our Way to the ISS
16:05 A New Chapter in the Space Race- Commercial Space Flight & Commercial Crew
18:27 The Dawn of a New Space Race
Since pre-historic times humans have had an enduring curiosity to understand what lay beyond. What is over that next ridge? What is beyond that grove of trees? What is at the bottom of that waterfall? What land is on the opposite side of that ocean? This curiosity and the resulting exploration tested humanity in ways that required innovation.
After nearly a decade of human spaceflight delays, a new chapter in our story is upon us. Only one year after the retiring of the space shuttle, NASA decided to start a public-private partnership through the creation of the commercial space flight program. The commercial spaceflight industry started to make resupply missions to the ISS, as well as launch US government satellites. These early missions sparked interest in the private sector, and almost immediately, multiple startup rocket companies were born. Today, NASA has doubled down on the commercial spaceflight industry with the addition of the Commercial Crew program. The commercial crew program is planned to take over the role of launching US Astronauts to the ISS from US soil. This marks a turning point in history. For the first time ever, human spaceflight will be a for-profit industry. Already, these rockets have advanced significantly. The primary difference is in the re-usability of the rockets, rather than the single-use model employed by NASA for all spacecraft with the exception of the partial re-usability of the Space Shuttle. A second major difference in these rocket designs is their ability to do vertical takeoff and landing, as demonstrated by both the Space X Falcon 9 rocket and Blue Origin’s New Shepard Rocket. At this point, two companies have made the cut for the first round of the commercial crew program, Space X and Boeing. Space X’s Dragon 2 (Crew Dragon) has conducted the first test (Demo 1) of the spacecraft in early May 2019 and astronauts could potentially ride on board the craft as early as July 2019.
The next generation of spaceflight beyond Earth orbit is also starting to take hold. NASA as well as the commercial programs have plans to launch space-based internet networks, rovers to the moon, asteroid mining companies to utilize space-based resources such as water, iron, and platinum-group metals, space tourism industries, and even the colonization of the planet Mars. If history is any indication, we are on the cusp of a new era, where the boundless curiosity and enthusiasm for exploration of humanity will once again flourish on a new ocean, as we sail the open seas of interplanetary space.
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