When I was growing up during the era of the space race, I clearly remember how it felt at the time that we were heading towards a revolution in space exploration. The film, 2001 – A Space Odyssey, neatly captured that vision...of an orbiting space station that you could take a domestic flight up to (courtesy of Pam Am – there was even an Airfix model of the craft) and then a shuttle from it on towards the moon base. And this really what we believed was just around the corner back then, but subsequent history, since those heady days of the 70s,  had other ideas.

A base on the moon rapidly became the stuff of dreams, the cost too great to be practical. As that dream and other crewed space exploration crashed around it, it wasn't long before some claimed that the moon landings were fake. But of course  there will always be a few who prefer to believe in conspiracies, rather than the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Regardless of the chequered past of human space exploration, we do now at last seem to be heading towards a new dawn. 

After my last blog in early December, that closing month turned out to be an epic one in space flight. Not only did British school children suddenly have somebody to aspire to be, namely our very own Tim Peake who was launched on a Soyuz rocket on the 15th December for his six month mission onboard the International Space Station, but there was also a major development in rocket technology that month that could have major implications for the future of space exploration.

In November, Blue Origin, the private space company, succeeded in the controlled landing of a rocket vertically. As impressive as this was, what then occurred in December, it could be argued, was even more incredible.

SpaceX succeeded where nobody else ever has before, in landing the first stage of an orbital rocket using its rockets just like they used to all those great old black and white sci-fi films. Not only was this an incredible achievement, it also potentially opens up a new era for humankind. 

Getting into space has always been an expensive business, so much so that our dreams of conquering space were severely hauled in from the heady days of the 60s and 70s. Back then everything seemed around the corner and nearly every child wanted to be an astronaut. But as the thrill of people walking on the moon receded, even to the point that a few claimed the whole thing was a hoax (the film Capricorn One, has a lot to answer for), the stark cost became far too apparent. Excluding the incredible expense of the Apollo research program where each launch cost in 1969 $375 million (you don’t want to know how much that would be in today’s money), the Space Shuttle was meant to be the answer. But it ended up costing $450 million to launch per mission and despite being an astonishing piece of engineering, there were serious reliability issues surrounding it. No wonder our grand space exploration dreams have faded so far.

However, against this background, SpaceX’s achievement is nothing short of astonishing. Their cost per mission of their Falcon 9 rocket is currently $60 million per mission. The other cost is $200,000 for fuel. In other words if SpaceX cracks be able to reuse a rocket there is potentially huge cost savings with just maintenance and fuel costs to consider per launch. Elon Musk has been quoted as saying that travelling into space could become a hundred times cheaper. If that aspiration becomes a reality it’s a huge game changer in every sense and suddenly everything becomes possible.

A manned base on the moon? Why not. The asteroid belt become the new mining frontier? Maybe. And what about a crewed mission to Mars? It’s that particular target that’s Musk has got in his sights and sees reusable rockets as a step towards realising that dream. And right there is what we’ve always needed. The dreamers who dare to try.

Click on the video below to see SpaceX's historic achievement.

This blog article was born out of something I’ve witnessed in the school writing workshops I run. It was also born out of a growing sense of sadness as the implications began to sink in. 

At the start of my workshops I ask the students a key question, “What’s your dream job?” Hands go up and I get answers from architects, to footballers, to even brain surgeons. What I never ever hear is, “I want to be an astronaut.” How is it in such a few generations we have lost this pioneering spirit?

There has always been something about the sky that has always fascinated me from a very young age; from flying kites as high as possible, to later flying light aircraft and even microlights. I have owned large telescopes and observatory, imaging far flung galaxies (these images can be seen on this website). I even wrote a story called Cloud Riders, a trilogy based on a group of people who understand all of the above. You see flight and exploration in all its forms has always pulled at my soul.

I big part of this was when I grew up and I count myself exceedingly fortunate to have grown up during the space race, to have watched those live images of Neil Armstrong taking those first historic footsteps on the moon. And like every child of my generation, we all yearned to travel into space ourselves. The future seemed so clear to us, to be out there somewhere in space.

It’s very hard to convey to those who weren’t around during the moon landings, as to how everything seemed just around the corner at the time, including a permanent base on the moon, and how that would act as a springboard for crewed missions to the planets and even beyond into the further reaches of deep space. At the time you could even buy Pam Am tickets to the moon! The film, 2001 – A Space Odyssey, neatly sums up where we really believed space exploration would be by the date in the film’s title…a date that is now 14 years ago. Obviously things didn’t turn out the way that everyone at the time envisaged.

So what went wrong? 

Ironically, in many ways it was actually the space race itself that seeded much of the problem. NASA threw countless billions into coming up with the Apollo program that would beat the Russians to the moon. But the problem with the result was a system that was extremely expensive and wasteful to run, and crucially created a huge rocket that couldn’t be reused. NASA’s subsequent answer, the Space Shuttle program, also had major maintenance costs issues, but even more crucially than this had serious reliability issues that resulted in terrible loss of life. I will be forever be haunted by the Challenger launch and the images of it as it tore itself apart shortly after take off and my thoughts flying to the fate of its crew. Particualry with that crash it felt like the dreams of a generations were clawed from the sky.

Is it any wonder that the dream of space exploration fell away from us for a while?

But pioneers are a resilient breed and also thankfully the world has moved on, and has grown wiser with the experience. Now, nimble private business is taking up the challenge. Companies such as Space X, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic, are blazing a new path. Space X specifically, a fully fledged space agency in its own right, is particularly impressive with its development of its reusable orbital system. Make no mistake that this marks a significant moment in space exploration. Get this right and this breakthrough will hugely reduce the cost for getting into space. And this is the real reason our dreams of space exploration have been on hold for so long. 

Once again our aspirations are being raised again…there’s even once again talk of a permanent base on the moon and even Mars. 

One thing is for sure. The Earth, as beautiful as it is, the cradle of all life that we know, is just one planet in an infinitely large universe. As pioneers have set out throughout our history, those restless few, it seems that there time is coming again as these new frontiers finally begin to open up to us. 

And I hope with all my heart that one day when I ask what the students what their dream jobs are, once again many hands will go up and say, “astronaut.”

Many people who stayed up last night may have been lucky enough to witness the blood moon of the spectacular full lunar eclipse. During the moment of maximum totality the moon turned a deep rusty red, but do you know what caused that colour?

To answer this you need to take a flight of the imagination... If you were an astronaut on the moon during the full eclipse in that moment you'd see Earth ringed with the red of all the sunsets and sunrises happening all around the planet. The Earth’s atmosphere bends that light and it falls across the moon... Our astronaut would see the moon’s surface bathed in ruby light. Now isn’t that a magical thought!

Maybe one day when we rediscover our pioneering spirit for human exploration and we will have a permanently crewed based on the moon, and someone will witness this for themselves. And maybe, just maybe it might be one of our children.