Space Exploration

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Space Exploration

On July 20, 1969, the people of Earth looked up and saw the Moon in a way they had never seen it before. It was the same Moon that humans had been observing in the sky since the dawn of their existence, but on that July evening, for the first time in history, two members of their own species walked on its surface. At that time it seemed that Neil Armstrong's "giant leap for mankind" would mark the beginning of a bold new era in the exploration of other worlds by humans.

In 1969, some people believed that human scientific colonies would be established on the lunar surface by the 1980s, and that a manned mission to Mars would surely be completed before the turn of the twenty-first century. By the end of 1972, a dozen humans would explore the surface of the Moon. However, 28 years later, as revelers around the world greeted the new millenium, the number of lunar visitors remained at twelve, and a manned mission to Mars seemed farther away than it did in the summer of 1969. How is it that the United States could arguably produce the greatest engineering feat in human history in less than a decade and then fail to follow through with what seemed to be the next logical steps? The answers are complex, but have mostly to do with the tremendous costs of human missions and the American public's willingness to pay for them.

The Space Race Fuels Space Exploration

The Apollo program, which sent humans to the Moon, was hugely expensive. At its peak in 1965, 0.8 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States was spent on the program. In 2000, the budget for all of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was about0.25 percent of GDP, with little public support for increased spending on space programs. The huge budgets for the Apollo program were made palatable to Americans in the 1960s because of ongoing competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States had been humiliated by the early successes of the Soviet Union's space program, including the launch of Sputnik.

The Soviet launch of Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, in 1957, and the early failures of American rockets put the United States well behind its greatest rival in what is now commonly known as the "space race." In 1961, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to ride a spacecraft into orbit around the Earth, the leaders of the United States felt the need to respond in a very dramatic way. In less than a year, then-President John F. Kennedy set a national goal of sending a man to the Moon and returning him safely to Earth by the end of the decade.

The American public, feeling increasingly anxious about perceived Soviet superiority in science and engineering, gave their support to gigantic spending increases for NASA to fund the race to the Moon. Neil Armstrong's first footprint in the lunar dust on July 20, 1969, achieved the first half of Kennedy's goal. Four days later, splashdown in the Pacific Ocean of the Apollo 11 capsule carrying Armstrong, fellow Moon-walker Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, and command pilot Michael Collins completed the achievement.

Americans were jubilant over this success but growing increasingly weary of spending such huge sums of money on the space program when there were pressing needs at home. By 1972, with the United States mired in an unpopular war in Vietnam, the public's willingness to fund any more forays, whether to the Moon or southeast Asia, had been exhausted. On December 14, 1972, astronaut Eugene Cernan stepped onto the ladder of the lunar module Challenger, leaving the twentieth century's final human footprint on the lunar surface.

Robotic Exploration of Space

Some scientists contend that the same amount of scientific data could have been obtained from the Moon by robotic missions costing a tenth as much as the Apollo missions. As the twenty-first century dawns, the enormous expense and complexity of human space flight to other worlds has scientists relying almost solely on robotic space missions to explore the solar system and beyond. Many scientists believe that the robotic exploration of space will lead to more discoveries than human missions since many robotic missions may be launched for the cost of a single human mission. NASA's current estimate of the cost of a single human mission to Mars is about $55 billion, more than the cost of the entire Apollo program. In the early-twenty-first century, human space travel is limited to flights of NASA's fleet of space shuttles, which carry satellites, space telescopes, and other scientific instruments to be placed in Earth's orbit. The shuttles also ferry astronaut-scientists to and from the Earth-orbiting International Space Station.

Numerous robotic missions are either in progress or are being planned for launch through the year 2010. In October of 1997, the Cassini mission to Saturn was launched. Cassini flew by Jupiter in December of 2000 and will reach Saturn in July of 2004. Cassini is the best instrumented spacecraft ever sent to another planet. It carries the European built Huygens probe, which will be launched from Cassini to land on Saturn's giant moon, Titan. The probe carries an entire scientific laboratory, which will make measurements of the atmospheric structure and composition, wind and weather, energy flux, and surface characteristics of Titan. It will transmit its findings to the Cassini orbiter, which will relay them back to Earth. The orbiter will continue its four-year tour of Saturn and its moons, measuring the system's magnetosphere and its interaction with the moons, rings, and the solar wind ; the internal structure and atmosphere of Saturn; the rings; the atmosphere and surface of Titan; and the surface and internal structure of the other moons of Saturn.

In April, 2001, NASA launched the Mars 2001 Odyssey with a scheduled arrival in October of 2001. Odyssey carries instruments to study the mineralogy and structure of the Martian surface, the abundance of hydrogen, and the levels of radiation that may pose a danger to future human explorers of Mars. NASA's Genesis mission launched on August 8, 2001. This spacecraft was sent to study the solar wind, collecting data for two years. This information will help scientists understand more about the composition of the Sun. In July of 2002, Contour is scheduled to launch with the purpose of flying by and taking high-resolution pictures of the nucleus and coma of at least two comets as they make their periodic visits to the inner solar system.

In November of 2002, the Japanese Institute of Space and Aeronautical Science is scheduled to launch the MUSES-C spacecraft, which will bring back surface samples from an asteroid. The European Space Agency will launch Rosetta in January of 2003 for an eight-year journey to rendezvous with the comet 46 P/Wirtanen. Rosetta will spend two years studying the comet's nucleus and environment and will make observations from as close as one kilometer. Six international robotic missions to Mars, one to Mercury, one to Jupiter's moons Europa and Io, and one to the comet P/Tempel 1 are planned for the period between 2003–2004. Scheduled for an early 2007 launch will be the Solar Probe, which will fly through the Sun's corona sending back information about its structure and dynamics. The Solar Probe is the last launch currently scheduled for the decade 2001–2010, although this could change as scientists propose new missions and governments grant funding for these missions.

The Future of Space Exploration

Beyond the first decade of the twenty-first century, plans for the exploration of space remain in the "dream" stage. Scientists at the world's major space facilities, universities, and other scientific laboratories are working to find breakthroughs that will make space travel faster, less expensive, and more hospitable to humans. One technology that is being met with some enthusiasm in the space science community is the "solar sail," which works somewhat like the wind sail on a sailboat except that it gets its propulsion from continuous sunlight. A spacecraft propelled by a solar sail would need no rockets, engines, or fuel, making it significantly lighter than rocket-propelled crafts. It could be steered in space in the same manner as a sailboat is steered in water, by tilting the sail at the correct angle. The sail itself would be a thin aluminized sheet. Powered by continuous sunlight, the solar sailcraft could cruise to the outermost reaches of the solar system and even into interstellar space. Estimates are that this technology will not be fully developed until sometime near the end of 2010.

In January of 2001, scientists at Israel's Ben Gurion University reported that they had shown that the rare nuclear material americium-242m (Am-242m) could sustain a nuclear fission reaction as a thin metallic film less than a thousandth of a millimeter thick. If true, this could enable Am-242m to act as a nuclear fuel propellant for a relatively lightweight spacecraft that could reach Mars in as little as two weeks instead of the six to eight months required for current spacecraft. However, like the solar sail, this method of propulsion is also far from the implementation stage. Producing enough of it to power spacecraft will be difficult and expensive, and no designs for the type of reactor necessary for this type of nuclear fission have even been proposed. Other scientists are looking into the possibility that antimatter could be harnessed and used in jet propulsion, but the research is still in the very early stages. It may be that one or more of these technologies will propel spacecraft around the solar system in the decades ahead, but none of them hold the promise of reaching the holy grail of interstellar travel at near light speed.

Moving at the Speed of Light. The difficulty with interstellar space travel is the almost incomprehensible vastness of space. If, at some future time, scientists and engineers could build a spacecraft that could travel at light speed, it would still require more than four years to reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system. Consequently, to achieve the kind of travel among the stars made popular in science fiction works, such as Star Trek or Star Wars, an entirely different level of technology than any we have yet seen is required. The Pioneer 10 and Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in the 1970s have traveled more than 6.5 billion miles and are on their way out of our solar system, but at the speed they are traveling it would take them tens of thousands of years to reach Proxima Centauri.

Incremental increases in speed, while helpful within the solar system, will not enable interstellar travel. That will require a major breakthrough in science and technology. Einstein's relativity theory excludes bodies traveling at or beyond the speed of light. As a result, scientists are looking for ways to circumvent this barrier by distorting the fabric of spacetime itself to create wormholes, which are shortcuts in space-time, or by using warp drives, which are moving segments of space-time. These would require the expenditure of enormous amounts of energy. To study the feasibility of such seemingly far-fetched proposals, NASA, in 1996, established the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program. It may seem to the people of Earth, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that these dreams of creating reality from science fiction are next to impossible—but we should remember that sending humans to the Moon was nothing more than science fiction at the turn of the twentieth century.

see also Light Speed; Space, Growing Old in; Spaceflight, History of; Spaceflight, Mathematics of.

Stephen Robinson