A Lot Rides on Upcoming Launch of Private Spacecraft

(Dec. 5) -- For the first time in history, a private spaceship is scheduled to orbit the planet and return to Earth, in a risky endeavor that's key to the White House's plans for space exploration.

Both the rocket and the spaceship scheduled to blast off Tuesday from Cape Canaveral in Florida are the property of a private space company funded in part by multimillionaire Elon Musk, who made a fortune off the online payment system PayPal.

The flight is "a huge thing, gigantic, historic," TV science host Bill Nye told AOL News. He heads the nonprofit space group The Planetary Society, which includes Musk on its board. "It may very well lead to everyday people having access to space."

The spaceship, known as Dragon, won't carry a crew during its first flight, and it isn't expected to do so for at least several years. But already it has NASA's hopes riding on it. Last spring, the Obama administration scuttled the new rocket and spaceship NASA was building to replace the space shuttle, which retires in 2011. Instead, the administration wants to rely on space vehicles provided by private companies.

Musk's company SpaceX is at the forefront of the administration's plans. NASA has a contract to pay SpaceX $1.6 billion for 12 Dragon flights to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. Eventually NASA also wants to ferry astronauts to the space station, a live-in laboratory that orbits the Earth, on private spaceships. Dragon is a leading candidate for the job.

"From a political standpoint, it's very important that everything go smoothly" on Tuesday, Eric Perrell of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University told AOL News. The flight "is a credibility test for the decision by the president."

In June, SpaceX's rocket reached orbit for the first time, an important milestone in itself. That doesn't mean Dragon will have a smooth ride to space and back. Unlike the space shuttle, which glides to a landing on a runway, Dragon is a squat, pod-shaped vehicle that is supposed to splash down in the ocean, as did the Apollo capsules of 40 years ago.

A spacecraft returning to Earth must survive a super-heated trip through the Earth's atmosphere. It's no coincidence, space experts say, that many of the world's fatal space missions have gone awry on the way back to Earth. Most recently, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003 while returning home. All seven crew members died.

"The issues of re-entry are not trivial," Erika Wagner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told AOL News. "After launch, the next step when you hold your breath is when you're coming back to Earth."

If things do go wrong for Dragon on Tuesday, critics will be waiting to pounce. Obama's plans to turn to the private sector drew condemnation from many members of Congress, especially those from districts that include large NASA campuses.The home state of Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., includes NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, which had an important role in developing the new space rockets Obama canceled.

"Today, the commercial providers that NASA has contracted with cannot even carry the trash back from the space station, much less carry humans to or from space safely," Shelby said in April in a thinly veiled jab at SpaceX.

SpaceX has "become the poster child or in some cases the target" for those who don't want NASA to rely on private spaceships, said Jeff Foust, senior analyst at the Futron Corporation, a technology consulting firm. Opponents "have turned SpaceX into this warning of the bad things that can happen."

Yet NASA may very well overlook big problems with Dragon's first flight. That's because SpaceX carries a trump card: Dragon is designed to return to Earth intact. All other cargo spaceships, including those now carrying supplies to the space station, are designed to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. After the shuttle retires, Dragon will be the sole spacecraft that can return big items and research samples to Earth.

"We have no other choices at the moment," said Henry Hertzfeld of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute. "So we'll have patience with them."