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The future of space travel is starting right now | Garrett Reisman | Big Think
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April 6, 2020
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April 6, 2020
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2020 is off to a rocky start, but there are some exciting things happening on the space travel front.
Private companies like SpaceX and Boeing have partnered with NASA to get American spacecrafts into space, back to the moon, and onwards to Mars.
"I think in a hundred years, first of all, we're going to be celebrating 2020, so 2120 get ready for a big party," says Reisman.
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GARRETT REISMAN:
Dr. Reisman was selected by NASA in 1998. His first mission was aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, in 2008, with a 95-day mission aboard the International Space Station. His second mission was aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis, in 2010. During these missions, Dr. Reisman performed 3 spacewalks, operated the Space Station Robot Arm and was a flight engineer aboard the Space Shuttle. He served as a technical consultant for the film Ad Astra and is currently a technical advisor for the TV Show For All Mankind. At present he is a Professor of Astronautical Engineering at USC, Motivational Speaker and Senior Advisor at SpaceX.
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TRANSCRIPT:
GARRETT REISMAN: A hundred years from now I think we'll be celebrating the centennial of 2020 and all the stuff that's going to happen in 2020. Not just this crazy pandemic and all this stuff that's happening but as far as space goes 2020 is going to be a really good year. I know 2020, I'll admit 2020 so far has not been one of my more favorite years. In fact, it's pretty terrible. It's been pretty awful. But I can also tell you that there's going to be something really, really amazing that happens in 2020 which is that we're finally going to see the true launch, no pun intended, of this whole new era of space exploration led by a lot of private companies working in partnership with NASA that are going to take us back to space using American rockets, launching from American soil.
And it's going to happen first by SpaceX and SpaceX we've been working on the Crew Dragon vehicle for a long time now. This is the year it's going to fly. We have a date actually scheduled only two months from now is when we plan to do the first flight with people and it's going to be Bob Behnken, Doug Hurley, two former colleagues of mine, two friends of mine are going to be the first test pilots to fly Dragon up to the space station. And so we're finally going to get to the point in SpaceX where we're launching people on our rockets which is what the company was founded for.
But it's not just SpaceX. It's also Boeing is not that far behind on their spacecraft, the Starliner. And then we have two other private companies that are doing suborbital flights purely for space tourism. But they also, both these companies have plans and ambitions to go beyond that. And that is Blue Origin. It has a New Shepard vehicle that's going to go straight up. Like I was saying before it's going to go straight up and straight back down but you'll get high enough to see the curvature of the Earth. You'll experience about five minutes of floating in zero gravity and look, it's going to be an incredible ride. If I hadn't have already gone myself I would totally be buying a ticket right now.
And so Elon, Jeff Bezos they put a lot of their effort had money and resources into jumpstarting this whole, to get us back on that trajectory to where we're headed toward having a colony on Mars or in the case of Jeff Bezos he wants to have massive space stations where millions of people can live in space and do all the manufacturing. He wants to basically turn Earth into a national park kind of thing where you can come and visit but let's get all the factories off of this planet so we stop polluting it. They have these incredibly grand visions, so that's going to change everything. The access to space for humans is going to drastically expand this year in 2020.
I think in a hundred years first of all we're going to be celebrating 2020, so 2120 get ready for a big party. Just like we had all theses great events to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of landing on the moon, Apollo 11 and the Apollo program, we're going to be celebrating 2020 I think in the same way.
Because this is just the start. All those things I just described as wonderful as they are and as big of a step as they are it's just the first step because all these companies and all these projects that we're talking about is just the beginning. The next step and the things that they have on the drawing boards, the things not just...
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