The Rocket's Red Flare

Echoing faintly Francis Scott Key’s “The Star Spangled Banner” (“the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air”), Space Exploration Technology (SpaceX) managed something genuinely new yesterday. It sent a Falcon 9 rocket out into space carrying 11 satellites. After launching them up there, it fell back to Earth, in an orderly manner, righted itself in a neat vertical position, and slowed by its own flare landed standing up at Cape Canaveral, whence it had taken off.

A splendid time-exposure of the rocket’s landing is shown on today’s WSJ front page. It looks like a flame-sword from Star Wars. Right on time, you might say.

Bomb’s bursting in air is old stuff, going by the poem’s publication date, 1814. But a rocket returning for an upright landing, now that’s worth noting as an historic step in this galaxy, near at hand…

The Dragon Has Landed

In Ghulf Genes, the novel, two categories of spaceships come to be developed after the discovery of zerofric, the gravity-attenuating substance. The big ones are called Whales, and the biggest of them Leviathans, later SuperLevs. But a competing and much smaller spaceship comes to be developed and plays a major role throughout that history of the future. It is known as the Dragon.

Now for the history of the present. Today SpaceX Corporation’s first vehicle, the Dragon, has linked with the International Space Station! It is the first-ever privately developed space capsule. The image I’m showing, the dragon and its rocket, the dark band separates them, comes from a video simulation provided by the company (link). The vehicle is the Falcon 9. It was launched last Tuesday, May 22. Congratulations, folks. It feels like a new dawn, actually!

It gives me a kind of nostalgic pleasure to have lived long enough to see this. Nostalgia? In this context it is a genuine sci-fi phenomenon. I saw the future in the past. And now the presents projects the future I once saw. Okay. What were they going to call it—if not the Dragon? The Pigeon? But the Takashita mission is still ahead…