2021 - Another Turning Point for Spaceflight?

The year 2020 saw the end of the long gap between launches of crewed spacecraft from American soil when the first Crew Dragon spacecraft departed Kennedy Space Center for the International Space Station nearly nine years after end of the Space Shuttle program.

This year is heralding the end of an even longer gap in human spaceflight – the decades that have passed since anyone has flown beyond low Earth orbit.

That began when Apollo 17 returned home from the Moon in December 1972, and NASA’s sights shifted to LEO with Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, the Space Shuttle, and then what became the International Space Station.

There was no serious talk of humans going beyond LEO until the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 1989, when President George H.W. Bush announced his Space Exploration Initiative, which called for permanent occupation of the Moon and a human voyage to Mars. The initiative met a hostile reception in Congress and little enthusiasm from NASA, then still recovering from the Challenger disaster.

The initiative’s failure and the effort involved in getting the ISS into space squelched further talk of escaping near-Earth space until 2004, when President George W. Bush announced his Vision for Space Exploration, which led to the end of the Space Shuttle and the beginning of the Constellation program that targeted a return to the Moon and eventual exploration of Mars.

When Barack Obama became president five years later, his administration proceeded to terminate the shuttle. Constellation was wound down, although Congress retained parts of it in the form of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, which is still being built today. During that time, Orion was targeted for missions to asteroids, a goal that had little support outside the administration.

The signature space effort of the Obama years became the Commercial Crew program that built on a smaller initiative from the George W. Bush years, which began bearing fruit with last year’s first SpaceX Crew Dragon missions. While the Ares rockets from Constellation were cancelled, the Space Launch System replaced Ares at the insistence of Congress.

President Donald Trump’s administration became well-known for working hard to overturn Obama administration policies and having the compliment returned starting this year by the administration of President Joe Biden. The big exception to this rule is turning out to be space, including Trump’s creation of the U.S. Space Force.

Commercial Crew continued without interruption through the Trump years, and Trump and his NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine launched the Artemis program with the goal of landing humans on the Moon, including the first woman, no later than 2024. Like earlier NASA human exploration proposals, Artemis envisions a long-term human presence on the Moon and expeditions to Mars. With the exception of the 2024 deadline, Artemis survived intact through the transition to the Biden administration.

The Biden administration’s endorsement of Artemis in February broke the pattern of short-lived NASA programs aimed at sending humans beyond LEO that didn’t survive the administration that created them. A common thread between Artemis and the programs that preceded it, starting with Constellation, is the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System to carry it to space.

The new administration’s decision to continue with Artemis, which greatly increases the likelihood of new human flights to the Moon, could make 2021 a turning point in the history of space exploration. Most of the story of Artemis remains to be told, including its first test flight, scheduled for late this year. And questions still remain over major elements of the program, notably the Lunar Gateway and the Human Landing System.

With Artemis nearing the launch pad, there will be work for historians examining the lengthy roots of that program and the complicated politics over the past two decades that led to today’s U.S. human space exploration programs.

This is also the year when long promised and long delayed advances in space tourism are becoming reality, in the form of suborbital flights by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin spacecraft and the first purely private flight of the SpaceX Crew Dragon. The seventh decade of the era of human spaceflight holds potential unseen since its first decade.