The Shattered Sky

“The Eagle has landed” – Forty years ago the first human beings touched down on the surface of the Moon. You know; forty years is a lifetime.

No human being has set foot on the Moon since 1972. Since the retirement of Apollo we have not had a manned vehicle capable of making the trip. The Space Shuttle was a marvel of engineering; it is reusable, can carry huge loads into orbit and glide down to a conventional runway landing. The Shuttle retires next year after almost 30 years of service and only two vehicle losses.

Starting in 2015, for the first time in decades a space agency will once again fly a manned, Moon capable spacecraft. NASA returns to the capsule design with Orion and has planned a series of lunar landings with the aim of establishing a manned outpost on the Moon’s south pole. Eventually, the findings of that project are hoped to be put to use in finally landing a man on Mars.

This is great news of course, but it is shameful that t has taken us this long to get back there. In the 1960s pioneers envisioned a permanent human presence on Mars and manned trips to the asteroid belt and Jupiter’s moons. Ideas for advanced autonomous probes exploring neighboring star systems were on the table: see Project Daedalus and Project Longshot.

This is all just NASA. Over the years, the European and Russian space agencies have not fared much better. Only recently has China entered the fray but has only managed to send people into orbit. The visionaries of decades gone by are probably turning in their graves.

The one saving grace of this whole mess is that technology has come a very long way since the Apollo era. We know a great deal more today and in many ways the technologies are far more accessible. A few years ago the first privately funded spacecraft entered suborbital space and soon Virgin Galactic will be flying a fleet of SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplanes to paying customers. Initiatives are under way to encourage private advancements beyond suborbital trips: look up the Bigelow Prize and the Google Lunar X-Prize.

We may yet have a shot at that future of a spacefaring society. There are still the detractors of course; that we should fix all our problems here on Earth before venturing elsewhere. I find the proposition naive. There will always be problems to be fixed, but that has never stopped anyone from exploring and venturing into the unknown. Why should we stop that now? That apart, I wonder if the detractors of space exploration have ever looked up all the advancements in everything from kitchenware to medicine that developed out of the space programme?

The benefits of private enterprise getting involved in space are simple: There will always be an effort to get better for cheaper, it becomes available to the general public, and there are no political detractors for all that matters is that there is a market to sell it to.