Good Things Happening with Fast Transportation, But Will We Allow Success?

Despite the pandemic, we’ve had a going-places-quickly news flurry.  But will our overall problem stop these worthy efforts in their metaphorical tracks?

We start with space tourism, in “Virgin Galactic set to begin multimillion-dollar star trek from Spaceport America,” by Paul Best in the November 9^th Fox Business.  The actual commercial facility for launching spacecraft, in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, will be used for this company’s “first human test spaceflight,” though confusingly not the first time it has sent people up, within the next two weeks.  It “has already sold 600 tickets to people from 60 different countries at a cost of roughly $250,000 a pop,” and hopes to build up to 400 annual flights and $1 billion annual revenue.  Virgin Galactic does seem to have the capability to fulfill this fine business idea, catering to owners of the trillions of piling-up dollars, and gets points for helping people achieve long-time dreams.  However…

Next, “A Step Forward in the Promise of Ultrafast ‘Hyperloops,’” by Eric A. Taub in the November 8^th New York Times, was a successful Virgin Hyperloop test of volunteers “wearing casual street clothes” reaching 107 miles per hour “in a pod levitated by magnets inside a vacuum tube” on the company’s Nevada test track.  One described it as “not that much different than accelerating in a sports car,” and indeed that speed is trivial for today’s vehicles.  In some ways safer, as without “lateral forces,” hyperloops are planned to go almost six times as fast.  We should be glad it worked with no stated problems, so, when the next, six-mile, course is finished, let’s see people go 200 or 300.  All could be clear for this second Virgin venture to achieve commercial viability, but…

An old expected future way of getting around, though not as far along as Galactic or Hyperloop, got notice in “Meet George Jetson?  Orlando Unveils Plans for First Flying-Car Hub in U.S.” (Neil Vigdor, The New York Times, November 11^th).  The subairport of sorts, called a vertiport, would be located next to Orlando’s international one, be finished by 2025, and would accommodate “electric-powered aircraft” with about the speed and size of Cessnas, but also, presumably, highway capability.  The project, a joint venture of German aviation firm Lilium and an Orlando development company, has already attracted “more than $800,000 in potential tax rebates” from that city.  Here it’s hard to see how the planes would not fly, so we can forecast success, unless…

Although the moon landing and what led up to it was a great success, there are good reasons why the only agency doing space research and exploration, and moving on to industrialization and colonization, should not be run by the government.  A de facto replacement reached its own milestone last week, as described in “’One Heck of a Ride’:  SpaceX Launches Astronauts into Space,” by Andrea Shalal and Joey Roulette on November 15^th by Reuters.  This Elon Musk company is now not only a future thing, as it took  “four astronauts on a flight to the International Space Station,” just what NASA has been unable to do for eight years.  We now have the capability within this country again, and can keep using it, except that…

What are my reservations?  For any of these four to succeed long-term, their developers, the United States people, and our federal and state governments must prove wrong what I wrote here two months ago:

For whatever reason, Americans no longer have what it takes to complete large technical projects.  It’s an exaggeration to say that over the past 20 years the only trappings of American life which have changed are software and telephones, but not much of one.  Until we understand and fix our will problem, nothing big and good will happen.

Here’s where the rubber may meet the road.  When a space tourist dies, whether through misbehavior or a technical problem, will that end Virgin Galactic?  As Taub pointed out, a truck hitting a Virgin Hyperloop fixture could prevent it from working – if that happens and passengers are injured or worse, will that company be banned or ostracized into termination?  For flying cars to become widespread, there will be pilots not as capable as the highly-trained ones Lilium will introduce – how many crashes can they have before heeding calls for requiring standards too high for the masses prevents the technology’s wide use?  Eighteen astronauts and cosmonauts have died in spaceflight missions – will the first SpaceX crew that achieves that cause a return to full NASA control?  Reactions to the single Uber driverless-car pedestrian death, which had a highly culpable victim, was probably the largest factor in the collapsing of efforts not only from that company but everywhere.   

We do not need to go back to the days of 96 people dying, as happened while building Hoover Dam.  Yet with huge, ambitious, and frankly dangerous projects, we must accept that sometimes things will go severely wrong.  That means understanding and continuing work when small numbers of accidents occur.  How many is acceptable?  I cannot answer that, but the right figure is more than zero.  Our future prosperity has value, and the prospect of greeting 2050 with few life improvements beyond even better electronic devices is depressing also.  We must decide – the choice is up to us.