Rockets: The Only Viable Way To Reach Outer Space?

From Robert H. Goddard’s first working prototypes to the Apollo’s Saturn V to the current SpaceX Crew Dragon, are rockets the only viable conveyance to reach outer space?

By: Ringo Bones

A few months before the Wright Brother’s first successful flight back in December 17, 1903 at Kitty Hawk, space travel visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published his work – including the pertinent mathematics - detailing how rockets would be necessary in space exploration. Fast forward to the successful SpaceX Crew Dragon docking with the International Space Station and the Falcon 9 rocket’s lower section successfully landing for reuse to slash the cost of reaching low earth orbit, are “Goddard style rockets” currently the only viable vehicles for space exploration in the foreseeable future?

Anyone old enough to remember the early successes of the McDonnell Douglas Delta Clipper Experimental DC-X single stage to orbit launch system would probably think that this kind of space vehicle – as in the classic “rocketship” – is the only viable way to explore space for the foreseeable future – that is until we can create a working Alcubierre style warp drive used by Zefram Cochran in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek. I mean, around the early 1990s when a suitable replacement for the NASA Space Shuttle fleet was already sought due to its cost and safety issues, it seems that the upstart DC-X single stage to orbit upstart was seen as the most promising replacement for the NASA Space Shuttle fleet – that any potential space vehicle that’s a cross between an airplane and a rocketship – i.e. a space vehicle that can reach low earth orbit but can take-off and land on a conventional 10,000-foot runaway like a passenger jet – was inevitably seen as a “technological dead end”. I mean probably anyone old enough to remember the successes of the McDonnell Douglas DCX single stage to orbit launch vehicle back in the first half of the 1990s would probably state that the design is probably what “influenced” Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon combo.

Then came 9/11 and in the intervening years on what rogue states are capable of or are willing to do. Imagine a crew of astronauts landing in hostile territory and eventually taken hostage by a terror group or a rogue state just because a ballistic computer malfunction had sent them to land in “unfriendly territory”. Such a nightmare scenario gained an air of plausibility when back in April 19, 2008 a Soyuz TMA capsule carrying South Korea’s first astronaut Yi So-yeon, Commander Peggy Whitson and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenachenko got almost 300 miles off course due to a malfunctioning ballistic computer.

Maybe NASA should work with Richard Branson in order to make a version of the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo that could reach the International Space Station given that the SpaceShipOne can be controlled aerodynamically to land in a more or less conventional airport runway. I mean a design like the SpaceShipTwo is less likely to get off course and crash in a Taliban controlled territory in Afghanistan compared to the Soyuz TMA capsule returning from the International Space Station.