Orion: a last-ditch effort by a fading empire that will never strike back

If the new space race was like the movies, this week would be The Empires Strikes Back.

On Friday, after a weather delay, Nasa launched a very cool space capsule, in what at first blush looked like another Apollo mission. It rose on a massive rocket spewing superheated exhaust like some creature from a Peter Jackson movie. All went well just now – and given the expertise of engineers performing what was essentially an update of a 1970s Apollo mission, that much was expected: a four-seat capsule called Orion will detach any minute now, and soar around the Earth twice, then descend into the atmosphere and finally splash down under some parachutes. There are no people onboard.

Orion is a long-shot demonstration mission that is aimed at no celestial body, nor the moon, Mars or even an asteroid. The United States government’s attempt is aimed at space startups that are trying to muscle their way into the spaceflight industry – and budge NASA out for good.

In one corner is what’s now commonly called “private space”. It’s an odd coalition of billionaires, businessmen and engineers who want to build, launch and operate their own manned space vehicles. The proposed uses of these spacecraft range from profound (asteroid mining by Planetary Resources) to the banal (daredevil trips to sub-orbit for the wealthy, courtesy of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic).

These startups are, as startups are wont to do, upsetting the status quo, so they earn the Star Wars mantle of Rebels. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is the most successful of these companies – in fact, it is also making a capsule to carry people to and from space.

The Empire sits in the other corner. It’s a sprawling axis cobbled together over many years of hard battles for funding, for launches, for spaceflight in general. Until very recently, these were the true heroes who carried American spaceflight, of America as superpower. The Empire, of course, is Nasa, a once noble but now creaky agency that has devolved from moonshots to renting rides from the Russians, all in the span of Buzz Aldren’s adulthood.

The space-industrial complex serves as a kind of palace guard for Nasa. Talented, experienced and corporately shrewd, this group is headed by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and its love child, the United Launch Alliance. They launch the rockets tipped with the government’s defense and scientific satellites. Supporting these players are a bipartisan brigade of Congressmen, unified almost solely by their political willingness to use the space agency as a make-work program and a repository for pork.

Members of the US House and Senate don’t dream wistfully of space exploration or epic human achievement, of clinging on to an asteroid or visiting Mars. Politicians love whatever makes more jobs and gets them re-elected. What makes it even better for them is that they can steer federal cash to their districts and chalk it up to love of science and patriotic zeal.

Take that, Putin: We can launch our own manned spacecraft again! Who cares if they don’t go anywhere?

Friday’s Orion launch was a galvanizing moment for the traditional, government-led spacecraft movement in the United States. This Bush-era program was decried as wasteful and directionless spending – a “rocket to nowhere” – and cancelled four years ago. But the Empire rallied and revived Orion and the massive proposed rocket that’s supposed to propel it to deep space. After all, the Death Star wasn’t built in a day; it was devised by some very talented engineers. And from their point of view, it’s a shame anyone would blow it up.

But there are some people out there who say Orion is too big not to fail. Earlier this year, the US Government Accountability Office took Nasa to the woodpile for fuzzy math, and offered its own accounting of how much it costs to develop Orion and its rocket through its first two flight in 2017 and 2021: $20bn, with a full $9bn spent on Orion.

And of course there’s that other curse haunting Orion: It won’t carry actual people until around 2022.

And that’s if the budgets hold out. The incoming Congress may not shut down a program like Orion, but they can starve it of fuel until it enters a netherworld of delays, life-support funding and lethargy. When it flies on missions, it will be outdated. Orion is particularly vulnerable since, you know, Nasa has not set a destination for it to go. If the first manned test flight is in 2021, when will the actual mission to Mars be funded and staged? It takes a very optimistic person to think the funding and tech will be ready by 2022 – or even 2025.

The Orion launch has been be a triumph of engineering, hiccups and delays aside. But the Empire may not love the sequel. SpaceX is planning a historic launch of its own next year – the rocket is called the Falcon Heavy. Yes, Musk named his rocket after the Millennium Falcon of Star Wars, and he promises it will take twice as much payload into space as the one Nasa launched on Friday, and at one-third the cost. So far his claims about SpaceX have come true, and soon he’ll be fighting, with the lobbyists and the politicians who play favorites, for satellite contracts worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Combine that kind of force with Elon Musk’s capsule full of actual people returning to space – under a Nasa contract to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station – and you have a private startup that can beat Nasa or any other government agency back to the moon, if it so chooses.

Return of the Jedi, indeed.

• Follow live updates: Orion launches on first test for Mars