Meier Wright is a retired CEO of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation. She lives in La Jolla.
As I watched the news coverage of the Virgin Galactic spaceplane, I heard the word “billionaire” dozens of times. I didn’t hear the words “entrepreneur” or “pioneer” at all. The historic test flight of the VSS Unity — where founder Sir Richard Branson not only fulfilled a lifelong dream but demonstrated his confidence in the idea that space travel will become accessible to many — was an important step on that journey. Following the fight, Branson announced a partnership with Omaze, Virgin Galactic’s plan to “make history and help expand access to space for all.”
I bought 2,000 entries and, if I were to be so fortunate to win, would donate the two slots to a teacher and a student who have made a difference in STEM. Branson and I are close in age — he’s younger — and Sunday’s incredible flight took me back to my childhood when the nation held its collective breath in 1961, as Alan Shepard became the first American to be launched into space, and 1962, when John Glenn followed, both in one-time use capsules that splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean. This pioneering American effort to put humans in space led to the Apollo program that took us to the moon and, on one fateful mission, brought astronauts safely back to Earth after an oxygen explosion ended the mission and endangered the lives of the crew.
Apollo inspired an entire generation of young people to pursue careers in math and science — something badly needed today. It won’t be achieved by pundits talking about billionaires instead of the magic of entrepreneurs and pioneers. During my years at TRW, an advanced technology company, I served as spokesperson for shuttle launches carrying TRW payloads and for some of the company’s singular accomplishments in space.
A highlight was Pioneer 10, an unmanned space probe with a history of firsts: traversing the asteroid belt on its 21-month mission to Jupiter, where its 11 instruments did the earliest studies of the largest planet in our solar system, and thanks to a trajectory planned by NASA, the slingshot effect that set the hardy little spacecraft on a path to the edge of our solar system and beyond. I was lucky to be there to celebrate the day — June 13, 1983 — when Pioneer 10 ed the outer boundary of our solar system 21 years after its launch. Later, NASA’s Deep Space Tracking Network tracked its faint signal until 2003 — when this pioneering spacecraft was nearly 7.5 billion miles from Earth and its signal took nearly 18 hours at the speed of light to reach Earth. Just magical!
I attended many shuttle launches and over time saw the media’s interest and the public’s interest wane. I measured it in the time it took to get from my hotel to the launch site. And by the number of reporters at the launch site. America had decided shuttle launches were routine, but they were always high-risk, high-reward endeavors ed by a unique and vitally important agency of the federal government, NASA. I experienced that firsthand on a stunningly clear but cold day at Cape Canaveral when the Challenger, its crew and the teacher participating in the mission were lost due to a faulty O-ring that caused the explosion of the liquid-fuel tanks. No one should think that Virgin Galactic’s manned flights — or Blue Origin’s to come very soon — are routine either.
The space program and the pioneers willing to be in it for the long term and take unknown risks to advance knowledge are unique in our society. I met some of these pioneers, from Mercury to Apollo to the space shuttle. I don’t want to see these important programs, and the people who made them possible, trivialized by media pundits. On all of the major cable channels, the media and those they interviewed were talking more about billionaires than about pioneers. More about a “gilded age” for the rich than about risk-takers or those willing to invest in high-risk ventures to establish a commercial space age. One said, “Is this a manifestation of the entitlement mentality taken to a whole new altitude?”
Please! Check out the track record of the leading commercial space pioneers in investing in the environment and education. For Richard Branson and his team, the 17 years of hard work, research, attention to detail and, yes, money that led to this success is what should be celebrated! Sunday’s milestone, preceded by Elon Musk’s reusable rockets that can land on a small floating platform and succeeded by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin mission, will be viewed like the accomplishments of Orville and Wilbur Wright, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs and so many other entrepreneurs with a big dream: They were willing to take the risks to reap the rewards and, in the process, bring science and technology and its many wonders to the rest of us. That is what we should be celebrating and using to inspire the dreams of future generations.
