2016: The Year We Began Mining the Moon

 

Now that Elon Musk’s SpaceX has managed to land upright, the future of travel and commerce in outer space is bright.

It came streaking down from the night sky over Cape Canaveral, Florida, late on Dec. 21—the booster stage of a 224-foot-tall Falcon 9 rocket belonging to SpaceX, the California-based space company founded by tech billionaire Elon Musk.
Blasting orange fire from its tail, the Falcon 9 booster—which had just delivered a cluster of communication satellites to low orbit—did what no spacefaring rocket before it had ever done. Steered by special fins, it landed upright, coming to rest on four insect-like metal legs.
Mostly intact despite its harrowing journey, the Falcon 9 can now be refurbished and reused. “Welcome back, baby,” Musk tweeted in celebration.

Musk has called reusability “the fundamental breakthrough needed to revolutionize access to space.” For decades, government and private space organizations have dreamed of possessing such a multiple-use rocket, believing it will cut down on the high cost—hundreds of millions of dollars per launch—of getting to, and beyond, Earth’s orbit.
Governments have repeatedly tried and failed to design a launch-and-land rocket. It took a private company headed by an eccentric billionaire inventor to actually get it done following years of experimentation and one high-profile crash in April. Musk and SpaceX’s December feat was more than just a technological milestone—it also signaled the coming of age of private space exploration.
If 2015 was the year private space firms such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and lunar mining concern Moon Express blasted into the headlines, 2016 could be the year these extraterrestrial companies make substantial progress toward reaching, exploring, and profiting from space.
Orbital taxis
SpaceX’s next goal is to go bigger, and debut a much more powerful rocket to complement the current Falcon 9. Long in development, Falcon Heavy is basically three Falcon 9s strapped together, boosting to an impressive 53 tons the new triple rocket’s capacity to low orbit. By contrast, a basic Falcon 9 can lift just 13 tons of space-station supplies, satellites, or other large cargo to the same altitude.
Lee Rosen, SpaceX’s vice president of mission and launch operations, told Space News that Falcon Heavy would fly for the first time in late April or early May. “It’s going to be a great day when we launch that.”


Falcon Heavy could be one of the most powerful rockets ever deployed, trailing behind just NASA’s Cold War-vintage Saturn V and its contemporary, Soviet Energia. But Falcon Heavy might rule the roost only briefly. NASA’s new Space Launch System, which bundles together old Space Shuttle rockets into a new, super-powerful booster, could carry as much as 145 tons to low orbit after it launches for the first time in 2018.
The Space Launch System is the heart of NASA’s plan to eventually put astronauts on Mars. Likewise, Falcon Heavy is the key to SpaceX’s own—and somewhat more nebulous—scheme to explore the solar system as far away as the Red Planet. “Falcon Heavy was designed from the outset to carry humans into space and restores the possibility of flying missions with crew to the moon or Mars,” the company explains on its website.
SpaceX’s theoretical human explorers would ride in the firm’s Dragon capsule, robotic versions of which fly cargo runs to the International Space Station as part of a $1.6 billion contract NASA signed with SpaceX in 2006. In November, NASA hired SpaceX and rival Boeing to prep for manned flights to the space station starting in 2017, each with its own capsules and rockets.