21/28 December 2019 | New Scientist | 33T
HIS year marked the 50th
anniversary of the most
iconic moment of the space
race: Neil Armstrong’s “small step”
onto the moon on 21 July 1969.
Many of us who viewed those
grainy TV images live expected it
to be just a beginning, and that
there would have been footprints
on Mars long before now. But the
heroics of the Apollo missions are
ancient history to young people
today. After the US had beaten the
Soviet Union to the moon, there
was no call to sustain the huge
outlay on the space race, which
at its peak consumed 4 per cent
of the US federal budget. Since
1972, no one has got beyond the
International Space Station’s
JOSorbit, just 400 kilometres up.
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Comment essay
Cosmologist Martin Rees, at the
University of Cambridge, is the UK’s
Astronomer Royal and the author of
On The Future: Prospects for humanityViews
Aperture
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story from sci-fi author Cixin Liu p38Letters
Failure can be glorious,
so let’s teach children to
embrace it p42Yet a half century on, the next
instalment of the space race is
beginning. China, which landed
the first probe on the lunar far
side in January this year, plans to
send people to the moon. India,
which sent a rocket there this year,
dreams of doing likewise. The
Trump administration in the US
proposes creating a lunar base as
a step towards sending humans
to Mars. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos
are developing rockets to take
people to deep space through their
ventures SpaceX and Blue Origin.
If any of these plans come off,
the 2020s could be when Apollo’s
promise is finally fulfilled, and
humanity establishes its first
permanent presence beyond Earth
orbit. That raises wider questionsabout the motives and goals of
space exploration – and what the
ultimate destiny of our species
might be, here on Earth and
perhaps far beyond.Space exploration never really
went away, of course. We routinely
use satellites for communication,
navigation and environmental
monitoring. Rovers have been sent
to the surface of Mars, while the
European Space Agency’s Rosetta
mission put a lander on a comet.
NASA’s Cassini probe spent 13 yearsexploring Saturn and its moons.
NASA’s New Horizons mission
gave us our first glimpse of Pluto,
having travelled 13,000 times the
distance to the moon.
These craft were designed
and built in the 1990s. The
Hubble Space Telescope, which
has revolutionised our knowledge
of the cosmos, dates back further.
Advances in microelectronics,
computing, communication and
robotics have accelerated in the
past 20 years, so there is now huge
scope for more sophisticated craft.
The James Webb Space Telescope,
Hubble’s successor, will be
surveying the universe from far
beyond the moon by mid-decade.
Further ahead, we can expect
flotillas of miniaturised robotic
probes to swarm through our solar
system, communicating with each
other like a flock of birds.
How soon such projects are
implemented will depend on the
motivation and incentives. Apart
from national prestige, the main
reason for deep space exploration
so far has been scientific discovery.
Future space exploits are likely to
have a more commercial bent.
Robotic fabricators will be able
to assemble vast lightweight
structures in space, such as
mirrors for huge telescopes, or
solar-energy collectors. Rather
than being lifted from Earth, the
materials could be mined fromA second giant leap
Humanity is about to reach for deep space once more and this time
the implications are huge, argues astronomer royal Martin Rees“ The next decade could be
when Apollo’s promise is
fulfilled and we establish
a presence beyond Earth”>