Free | 23/6
Posted: 5/30/2012
A very important mission is about to wind up. The first private spacecraft to visit the International Space Station, from California's SpaceX Corp., has already achieved very notable historical firsts, successfully matching orbits with the ISS at 17,500 miles per hour, performing a series of complex maneuvers in close proximity to the station in the course of that rendezvous, and at last docking with it, bringing the first supplies for the ISS carried aloft by a private vehicle.Till now, only governments -- US, Russia, Europe and Japan -- have sent missions to the space station. All that is changing in the post-space shuttle era. The US is dependent on Russia for getting astronauts to the ISS. But private enterprise is beginning to pick up the slack for orbital missions, with LA-based SpaceX, more formally Space Exploration Technologies Corp., leading the way with other companies rushing to compete. As private enterprise emerges, NASA is turning its focus to deep space, continuing with unmanned missions run out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in the LA area, and developing ambitious new manned missions to the asteroids and to Mars.But that's mostly in the future. On Thursday, the SpaceX Dragon capsule, which is slated to carry astronauts to the ISS in a few years but will perform re-supply missions in the meantime, will return to Earth, carrying the take from scientific experiments, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast. Other supply vessels burn up in the atmosphere, but Dragon, designed from the outset for human orbital voyages in a few years, is reusable, like the old shuttles but without their complications and expense.These accomplishments are building on existing technology developed for NASA. The success of their applications here in private enterprise form for missions around the Earth frees up NASA to focus on research and development for outward bound missions. And it paves the way for further development of a th