A myriad of new nations and non-public firms are getting in on the quest to mail people to orbit
We are entering a new period in sending folks over and above Earth. Right after the Apollo moon software, U.S. house shuttles and Russian Soyuz flights had been the only video game in town. People ferries carried astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit, in which space stations Skylab, Mir and the ISS hung about the world. Now there is significantly additional variety among launchers and locations, suggests astronomer Jonathan C. McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Middle for Astrophysics. SpaceX, Boeing and other non-public corporations are obtaining off the floor and plan the two astronaut flights and area tourism. Deep-space journey is once again on NASA’s horizon. “For a lengthy time, U.S. human spaceflight was in postshuttle doldrums,” McDowell suggests. “That’s undoubtedly more than now.”
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This report was originally printed with the title “The New Final Frontier” in Scientific American 324, 6, 84 (June 2021)
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0621-84
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