The history of human spaceflight marks a milestone at 3:33 p.m. Central Daylight Time on Wednesday, weather permitting.
That’s when SpaceX is set to send NASA astronauts to the International Space Station on the nation’s first crewed private spacecraft.
And the road to that achievement runs through the quaint prairie town of McGregor, population 5,200.
As Elon Musk’s space exploration company has shaken up the aerospace industry, McGregor’s SpaceX facility has been an essential part of every launch. It has tested the California-made engines and other components before shipping them to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the spacecraft are launched, including 21 unmanned trips to the International Space Station since 2012.
And when the rocket boosters are recovered on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, they are brought back to McGregor to be refurbished.
This launch is no different, except that the stakes are higher: This time the Dragon space capsule carried by the Falcon 9 rocket is holding two veteran astronauts who will then climb aboard the space station for a stay of an indeterminate length.
The mission, called Demo-2, was threatened by thunderstorm patterns near the launch site in Florida but appeared to be moving ahead late Tuesday.
The stakes are also high for McGregor and McLennan County, where SpaceX has become a major regional employer with some 500 workers.
Getting the spacecraft and astronauts safely home will boost the fortunes of the local aerospace industry and the SpaceX plant in general, said Andrew Smith, executive director of the McGregor Economic Development Corp.
“It’s huge,” he said of the mission. “There should be a sense of pride in people.”
He said Musk is doing for space travel what Henry Ford did for automobile transportation, bringing down the price and widely expanding its application.
“Reusing rockets brings the cost down significantly,” he said. “They’re doing it with technologies that are cheaper, faster and better.”
He said he expects SpaceX will continue to invest in the McGregor site where it has been since 2003, and that will open the door to more development on McGregor’s large industrial sites, which comprise thousands of acres.
He said McGregor will continue to play a key role as SpaceX begins launching its rockets from Boca Chica in South Texas and recovering the rocket stages in the Gulf of Mexico.
If SpaceX is successful in the Demo-2 mission, it will stand out as the private space company to beat, said Truell Hyde, a Baylor University physics professor and director of CASPER, which has NASA research contracts to prepare for moon travel.
“I think it’s really significant, if for no other reason that we haven’t been able to get our own people to the Space Station since 2011,” he said. “We’ve been depending on the Russians to get us there, and that’s not a good place to be. The fact that we’re flying an entirely new space vehicle with entire new spacesuits, that’s exciting.”
He said that SpaceX’s ability to retrieve and reuse rockets is “revolutionary” in making space travel affordable, and he thinks the company is well-positioned in its ambitions for missions to the moon and Mars.
He said he expects SpaceX to have a continued ripple effect in McGregor and Central Texas, drawing more aerospace businesses here, along with educated workers who will take an interest in the area’s education system.
It won’t be the first time rocketry has drawn people with aerospace skills to McGregor.
Gary Johnson moved to McGregor in 1975 to work at Rocketdyne, one of a series of rocket plants that operated on what used to be the 18,000-acre Bluebonnet Ordnance facility that the U.S. Navy used to make bombs during World War II.
Johnson had grown up with ambitions to be an astronaut and went to the U.S. Naval Academy to be a test pilot and get on track to go on a Mars mission then planned for 1983. By the time that program was canceled in 1972, his health problems forced him into civilian life, but at the McGregor plant he got to be on the cutting edge of aerospace, making components for the space shuttle.
He was laid off in 1992, and the plant, then owned by Hercules Inc., shut down two years later, leaving a gap that was filled by SpaceX in the next decade.
Johnson said that while he had to give up his dream of going to Mars, he follows SpaceX’s progress toward that end, and he’ll be watching the launch eagerly.
“I’ve been missing this too long,” he said. “We’ve been doddering along, hitching rides to our own space station for nine years.”
He said the new space race among private companies has energized the field and brought new innovation.
“I think the move to take over some of the functions that NASA used to do decades ago will let NASA focus on what its mission ought to be — on going where we haven’t gone before.”
—WACOTRIB