Sean Kelly is a writer who contributed to The Weekly Standard in 2018, covering commercial spaceflight and the private space industry. His articles examined the emerging role of billionaire-funded ventures like SpaceX in advancing space exploration.
By January 2009, nearly a half century had passed since the Soviet Union sent cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit. In the midst of the handoff from the Bush administration to the Obama administration, a member of the incoming transition team at NASA, frustrated by how static the agency had become,…
The successful launch on Tuesday of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket—“the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two,” as the company is proud of saying—marked an important milestone for the entrepreneurial space company and for the overall U.S. launch industry.