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Glenn Reynolds: Amidst turmoil, a victory for the future

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin launch and landing signals a step forward for private spaceflight, reusable rockets.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Blue Origin rocket launch in Texas on Nov. 23, 2015.

So the news this week has been mostly disturbing: Terror plots, war, a Russian plane shot down by Turkey leading to World War III talk — it got so bad Red State Contributing Editor Ben Howe tweeted "The only thing missing now is a global pandemic." To which someone responded that, well, Ebola is back in Africa.

But it wasn’t all bad news. And, in fact, the bad news helps underscore why the good news was good.

The good news was that Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, launched a fully reusable spacecraft to the edge of space and recovered it after it landed under its own power. Other fully reusable craft have flown — going all the way back to the McDonnell Douglas Delta Clipper back in the 1990s — but none have passed the 62-mile/100-kilometer mark widely considered to be the threshold altitude for true space flight.

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Plenty of rockets have flown past that altitude before, but this is a first for a fully-reusable rocket — and one that took off vertically and also landed vertically, under its own power, as "God and Robert Heinlein intended," to use a phrase popular in the space business. SpaceX’s Grasshopper took off and landed vertically too, but never flew anywhere near the edge of space.

Being fully-reusable matters because rockets are expensive, and existing rockets are thrown away after a single use. You can imagine how much a flight to Europe would cost if your 747 was scrapped after making a single trip.

Of course, as Bezos’ competitor Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, commented after congratulating Blue Origin, there’s a big difference between reaching the edge of space — what’s called a “suborbital” flight — and reaching orbit, which requires a substantially more powerful rocket, and a top speed several times the Mach 3.72 achieved by Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, which was named for America’s first suborbital astronaut, Alan Shepard. Still, this is a big step forward in an industry that’s quietly revolutionizing spaceflight.

And I thinkscience fiction writer Robert Heinlein would approve, and not just because the rocket took off and landed vertically. In his stories, as with much mid-20th Century science fiction, the conquest of space was undertaken not by massive government programs like Apollo, but by wealthy industrialists with a dream.

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It didn’t turn out that way, of course, because the Apollo program got us to the Moon much faster, via a space program on steroids. But the trouble with steroids is that while they give you fast gains, they also shrink your testicles, and, in a way, that’s what Apollo did to space exploration. We became excessively risk-averse, as Rand Simberg has pointed out, and we lost our space mojo for a generation. Now that’s changing, and it’s a good thing.

As Bezos blogged right after the launch, “We are building Blue Origin to seed an enduring human presence in space, to help us move beyond this blue planet that is the origin of all we know."

And as the talk of wars, terrorism and pandemics suggests, that’s a good idea. Robert Heinlein also once said that the Earth is too fragile a basket to hold all of humanity’s eggs. The sooner humanity spreads elsewhere, to a point where no single disaster can wipe out our species, the better. I’m glad Jeff Bezos and his private-space competitors are working to move that day closer. “Ad astra, per aspera” — to the stars through hardship (or hard work) — is an old Latin phrase. Bezos, Musk, et al., are doing the hard work, and I’m grateful.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors.To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page.

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