COLLES ANGLAIS
TEXTE 1
SPACE: A sudden light THE ECONOMIST, September 1, 2016 New capabilities, new entrepreneurialism and rekindled dreams are making space exciting again, says Oliver Morton SHORTLY after sunset there had been juddering green stabs of lightning to the south, but by a quarter to one in the morning there is nothing in the warm, wet July air over Cape Canaveral but a thin patchwork of moonlit cloud. And then, precisely at the time it was meant to happen, there is a sudden light on the horizon, some 18km away. A light that rises. A 550-tonne machine taller than a 20-storey building is throwing itself into the sky. Its initially unhurried ascent burnishes the clouds bronze. As the rocket climbs above them, its pace quickening, the roar of its engines speaks to its power as the sharp line of its exhaust illustrates its precision. Two minutes and 21 seconds after launch, 61km above the Atlantic and still well in sight, the first-stage engines shut down. The two stages of the rocket—a Falcon 9, built by a company called SpaceX that is seeking to reinvent space travel—separate; the single engine of the second stage ignites, driving its cargo ever faster to the east where it is quickly lost to sight. When, nine minutes after departure, that engine is turned off, the rocket will be in orbit 240km above the Earth, travelling at 7.5km a second. Two days later its cargo of provisions and scientific experiments will be delivered to the International Space Station (ISS). The spectacle, though, is not over. Shortly after separation, at an altitude of more than 100km and while still climbing, the rocket’s first stage slews around before bringing three of its engines back to life to change its course. It reaches the highest point of its trajectory and starts to fall back to Earth, engine-end first. A bit more than halfway there, the engines fire again to cushion the shock of its re-entry. When it is about 10km up, and still falling at well over the speed of sound, the engines fire for the last time. The rocket’s return has none of the stateliness of its departure; the bright light plummets to the horizon with swift purpose. As it reaches the ground, a flat, fiery flower spreads out from its base. Four landing legs the size of oaks smack into the concrete pad. A second later the double whipcrack of its sonic boom signals the end of the eightminute journey.
COLLES ANGLAIS
TEXTE 1
Next year it will be 60 years since people first witnessed the majesty of a satellite being launched into orbit: Sputnik 1, hurled into the night sky in Kazakhstan early on October 5th 1957. Such knocking on heaven’s door remains a thrilling experience, and probably always will. The heavens themselves, though, have over that time become significantly more pedestrian. Just 15 years separated the launch of the first satellite and the return of the last man from the moon, years in which anything seemed possible. But having won the space race, America saw no benefit in carrying on. Instead it developed a space shuttle meant to make getting to orbit cheap, reliable and routine. More than 100 shuttle flights between 1981 to 2011 went some way to realising the last of those goals, despite two terrible accidents. The first two were never met. Getting into space remained a risky and hideously expensive proposition, taken up only by governments and communications companies, each for their own reasons. Now SpaceX, founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who around the same time also set up Tesla, a car company, is trying to provide the cheap, reliable, routine route to orbit that the shuttle could not. It is the first company since the 1980s to enter the launch business with newly designed rockets, and has developed some completely new tricks. Though the July lift-off of its ISS-resupply mission was the sort of thing Cape Canaveral has seen hundreds of times, the successful return of a rocket’s first stage had been witnessed there only once before, late last year. Mr Musk intends to keep up the pace of innovation. Late this year or early next his company will launch a rocket with three reusable stages, the Falcon Heavy, capable of handling bigger payloads than any other launcher working today. SpaceX is also developing a rocket engine more powerful than any previously developed for a commercial programme. More striking still, before the end of 2017 it is due to start delivering human space travellers to the ISS—the first private company to do so, unless Boeing, which has a similar contract with NASA, pips it to the post. Impressive as its prospects are, SpaceX is only one contender. Blue Origin, a company backed by Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, has a sub-orbital rocket, the New Shepard, that can come back from the edge of space to land under power in the same way the first stage of a Falcon 9 does. It may well take a capsule with people on board into space next year. A number of other new companies with unmanned rockets are entering the launch business, too. New rockets, though, are not the only exciting development. The expense of getting into space during the 1980s and 1990s led some manufacturers to start shrinking the satellites used for some sorts of mission, creating “smallsats”. Since then the amount a given size of satellite can do has been boosted by developments in computing and electronics. This has opened up both new ways of doing old jobs and completely novel opportunities. The 24 satellites of the American government’s Global Positioning System probably represent the world’s single most important space-based asset, vital to the American armed forces and tremendously useful to a couple of billion smartphone users. Building up the constellation to its current size took two decades. Now smallsat companies talk about launching constellations several times that size in just a year or two. Those satellites will be in low orbits, but not all small spacecraft will stay close to home. By the end of 2017 Moon Express, based in Florida, hopes to deliver a 10kg payload including a rover to the Moon, making it the first commercial company to land anywhere beyond Earth. Other companies are looking at smallsats as a way of prospecting asteroids for mining. No single technology ties together this splendid gaggle of ambitions. But there is a common technological approach that goes a long way to explaining it; that of Silicon Valley. Even if for now most of the money being spent in space remains with old government programmes and incumbent telecom providers, space travel is moving from the world of government procurement and aerospace engineering giants to the world of venturecapital-funded startups and business plans that rely on ever cheaper services provided to ever more customers. As they prove that they can make money, they will grow further, and fast. But in many cases money is not the only aim. Their founders are people who think that going into space can benefit the human race more broadly. Mr Musk wants to set up a permanent colony on Mars in a couple of decades. Mr Bezos hopes that millions of people will one day work in orbit. Neither of these aspirations seems likely to be realised. But the effort to get there may well re-establish space as a realm of possibility and inspiration. 1200 words (for reading, or khôlle preparation in about 40 minutes)
