28.11.2023
Love and rockets: Space lovers MaryLiz and Ryan Chylinski took their engagement photo with Space's Starship in the background.
Courtesy MaryLiz Chylinski
The sun was not yet up Saturday, the second day of the New Worlds space conference in Austin, but already a dozen or so of us were in the conference room. The coffee hadn’t arrived yet, but nobody needed it; people were practically vibrating already. This was what they lived for.
SpaceX’s launch window would open at 7 a.m. People snagged seats in the front of the room, as close as possible to the big screens. I grabbed a doughnut and took a seat in the second row. That way, I could watch both the screens and the people watching the screens.
New Worlds’ founder, Rick Tumlinson, has described the conference as a “tribal campfire” where “tomorrow’s Space Tribes meet today,” and that sounds about right. “Spacers,” as the tribe members call themselves, are a diverse bunch — scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, technologists and sci-fi enthusiasts. What they share is a passion for space so intense that many organize their lives around it.
I’m both an observer of the tribe and a newcomer to it. As an evolutionary biologist, I’m interested in what would happen to human beings if people were to ever leave Earth to live in settlements on Mars or elsewhere. Many spacers think we’re now on the verge of that enormous leap: As wealthy tourists routinely make day trips to the edge of space, nations and corporations are vying to create permanent bases on the moon and Mars.
The sticking point? Access to space costs too much. And that’s why this morning’s launch attempt was as big as it gets.
On the projection screens, the “Everyday Astronaut” livestream showed the spacers’ best hope: Starship, the latest SpaceX rocket, sat majestically on its launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas.
If it managed to launch, Starship would be the most massive, most powerful rocket ever to fly. Still in the shakeout phase, it’s designed to ultimately be reusable, which means far cheaper than single-use rockets. NASA has contracted a Starship for its 2025 Artemis III mission to the Moon, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that Starship is designed to carry crew and cargo to Mars for a human settlement.
But first, of course, SpaceX has to get Starship to work. To make progress fast, the company embraces “iterative design” and “successive approximation” — which is to say, it tries stuff and learns from its mistakes. If a rocket blows up, no problem — as long as that rocket got further, performed better, than the one that blew up before it.
I could feel the nervous energy in the room as the countdown paused at T minus 40 seconds. Maybe this launch would be scrubbed at the last moment. Maybe the rocket would blow up on the launchpad. Or maybe humanity would get a little closer to its extraterrestrial destiny.
Suddenly the countdown on the big screen resumed. On the livestream, “Everyday Astronaut” producer MaryLiz Chylinski pumped her fist in the air. Something was definitely going to happen today.
The conference room fell silent. Everyone leaned forward: Here we go.
Quelle: Houston Chronicle