Houston, we have a problem

Justo cuando se cumplen 48 años de aquella famosa frase pronunciada por Jack Swigert durante el accidentado viaje del Apolo 13, me encuentro en Houston....desde donde escribo estas lineas...

Esta frase tan celebre me trae a la memoria otra menos conocida pero igual de signaficativa prounciada años atrás por Guss Grisson, comandante del Apolo 

"Si morimos, queremos que la gente lo acepte. Este es un trabajo peligroso, y si algo nos sucediera, esperamos que eso no retrase el programa. La conquista del espacio merece arriesgar la vida". y es que como dice un dicho que aprendí mientras estudiaba en Inglaterra "quien no se arriesga no cruza el mar"...

The "Houston, we have a problem" became a cultural touchstone. Sportscasters say it. Politicians say it. In books, movies, plays, and music, it’s shorthand for saying something has gone awry, sometimes terribly.

As we have started the SXXI century, space exploration promises to reach new heights with many new and exciting missions.

NASA´s Space Shuttle fleet had successfully returned to flight operations, launching a backlog of satellites and probes to the planets grounded in the aftermath of the Challenger accident. The Soviet Union had tested its own space shuttle Buran in conjunction with the Energia booster, the most powerful rocket ever built. Soviet (and other countries) crews have lived an worked aboard the Mir space station for up to a year at a time. And even the western nations were ahead with plans to develop the international space station, Freedom.

It was a NASA project to construct a permanently manned Earth-orbiting space station in the 1980s. Although approved by then-president Ronald Reagan and announced in the 1984 State of the Union address, Freedom was never constructed or completed as originally designed, and after several cutbacks, the project evolved into the International Space Station program.

In August 1989, NASA´s Voyager 2 -after a twelve-year odyssey through the outer solar system - reached Neptune, signaling the end of the first wave of planetary exploration. The second wave has begun with the launch of the Magellan probe to Venus and the Galileo mission to Jupiter.

Space is no longer the preserve of the superpowers: Other nations are regularly launching rockets with commercial satellites as their payload. Nowadays satellite-launching is a big business. Europe´s Ariane launcher has been vying with Chinese, Japanese and "Soviet" launchers for their share of the world market. And all the spacefaring nations are developing advanced spaceplanes which promise to take the prohibitive costs out of space flight.

Just as Richard Branson says: "We are at the vanguard of a new industry determined to pioneer twenty-first-century spacecraft, which will open space to everybody — and change the world for good.

I do want to finish these lines with a quote of George Whitesides, CEO Virgin Galactic, and The Spaceship Company: "Space is not only important for the future of transportation, it's important for the future of imagination"

Houston, 13 April 2018... 48 years later of that famous sentence, " Houston, we have a problem"...