n 2015, the movie The Martian imagined what it would be like if an American astronaut became trapped on Mars during an exploration mission. Though the movie sparked scientific evaluations, which noted that Martian windstorms aren’t really as violent as the movie portrayed, the 2015 work of science fiction hints at circumstances that are inching closer and closer to reality. Specifically, the possibility that human life may soon thrive on Mars is looking more and more likely. In October 2020, several countries, including Japan and the UK, signed on to a NASA agreement to build a permanent station on the moon and eventually get to Mars. And NASA itself wants to start flying missions to Mars in the 2030s.
However, Mars colonization isn’t the only out-of-this world advance expected to occur in the next several years. CubeSats promise to reduce launch costs and make collecting data in space easier. Interstellar travel is becoming less of a sci-fi fantasy and more of a distinct possibility. And a promising series of research problems seeks to find the evidence that might disprove Fermi’s theory about the nonexistence of extraterrestrial life once and for all. In the years to come, it looks like the stories that dazzled our imaginations in science fiction movies are coming closer to reality.
Human Life on Mars?
Ultimately, human bodies did not evolve to live beyond earth. There are many challenges that humans need to overcome if they are to colonize Mars, including a need to prime humans against radiation and ways to help human bones adjust to microgravity. In 2015, an American astronaut helped scientists learn some of what it takes to survive in space. Though astronaut Scott Kelley was not on Mars, he lived for almost a year at the International Space Station (ISS), the international laboratory orbiting space and housing astronauts from around the world. During his time at the ISS, Kelley’s body was put under intense stress. Researchers at NASA had a unique opportunity to compare Scott Kelley’s experiences to those of his identical twin brother, astronaut Mark Kelley. Compared to Mark, Scott’s immune system went into overdrive while he was in space. Fluids filled his upper body and head, his major blood vessels swelled, and his genes activated differently. Though most of the bodily changes Scott Kelley experienced while he was in space had reverted back to normal within a few months, his experiences speak to the need to prepare humans extensively for life on Mars.
Genetic engineering is one technology researchers think humans will need if they hope to successfully colonize Mars. Such genetic tweaking can harness the abilities of organisms who are already outfitted to survive extreme environments. Scientists have already conducted experiments where they have inserted genes from tardigrades into human cells. Tardigrades, almost microscopic creatures that resemble bears in miniature, are notoriously tough and can even survive in space. In the experimentation with tardigrade genes, the genetically engineered cells had greater resistance to radiation than normal human cells. Similar benefits can be reaped from “extremophile” microbes with similar radiation-adverse properties.
Further, outside of countering the human challenges of living in space, some organizations are countering the economic challenges of moving to Mars. SpaceX is one company that is leading the way to Mars colonization with its Starship rocket system. The Starship consists of a large spaceship capable of transporting 100 people attached to a massive rocket named Super Heavy. Both the rocket and the spaceship will be reusable, cutting the cost of spaceflight and making the expedition to Mars more economically feasible. In October 2020, SpaceX founder Elon Musk claimed that the company will make its first Starship voyage to Mars in 2024.
However, there is much doubt about the viability of Musk’s plans. For one thing, the SpaceX founder is notorious for offering “overly ambitious timelines.” In one of Musk’s other companies (Tesla), shareholders have commented that they operate on “Elon time” with unrealistic and overly optimistic predictions of when new products might roll out. Additionally, though SpaceX claims that the reusable components of the Starship rocket system will help cut the costs of spaceflight, the mission is still expected to be tremendously expensive. SpaceX hasn’t ever given an estimate for how much its planned settlement on Mars might cost. Further, though NASA is plotting an eventual path to Mars, the agency has also not indicated how much such a mission will cost. During the mid-20th century, when the agency launched the Apollo missions to explore the moon, the cost of such space exploration exceed $280 billion, and in some years, NASA received more than 4% of the American national budget. Outside of the obvious scientific challenges of preparing humans for life on a foreign planet, the economic costs of a Mars venture must be seriously considered if such a program is ever to take off.
Interstellar Travel
Of course, one of the other large challenges to Martian travel is how long the journey would take. Depending on how the red planet’s orbit lines up with ours on Earth, the voyage could take nine months, even under ideal conditions when the two orbits are lined up for optimal travel time. However, to achieve even more ambitious goals, space travel will need to become much faster. To literally reach the stars, for example, the nearest neighbor to Earth (Proximus Centauri) is four lightyears away. The current interstellar probes that we have exploring beyond the reaches of our solar system would reach Proximus Centauri in a whopping 80,000 years if they traveled at current speeds.
The vehicle used to achieve interstellar travel would thus need to go much faster than any space vehicle is currently capable of moving. The extra speed requires extra energy, which creates additional engineering challenges. One idea is to contain the extra fuel on board the space craft, but this adds mass, making the vehicle even more difficult to propel through space quickly. The Breakthrough Starshot project has an innovative way to tackle this problem, aiming to transport a spacecraft into the stars with lasers. Breakthrough Starshot wants to use a giant 100-gigawatt array of lasers to shoot laser blasts from earth at the reflective sail of what the project is calling an ultra-light nanocraft. The sail captures these laser blasts and propels the nanocraft forward.
There are many questions about the Breakthrough Starshot project that need to be answered to assess its viability. First of all, the laser array itself would have to generate an amount of power equivalent to what is needed to power 70,000,000 homes. Additionally, the laser array would potentially need many lasers—maybe even hundreds of millions. A single lightbeam firing that produces this much energy might cost as much as $70,000, though the Breakthrough Starshot project notes that laser amplification costs “declined exponentially” between 1990 and 2015. Further, the size of the nanocraft in and of itself is cause for concern. The crafts are only supposed to be a few hundred atoms thick and weighing just one gram. Since the nanocrafts are small, they can avoid much of the debris floating in space. If they are struck by an unluckily positioned dust particle, however, the whole nanocraft could be destroyed. Clearly, these concerns must all be address before Breakthrough Starshot is launched towards another star.
Even Smaller Satellites
However, one element of the Breakthrough Starshot project that looks much less concerning than it might have twenty years ago is the size of the nanocraft—and for that, the initiative can thank satellite technology. Inverse reports that nanocraft technology is derived from the rise in CubeSats, miniature satellites which have shown efficiency in research due to their small size. The tiny technology was inspired in part by Beanie Babies. Thinking of the small stuffed animals which inspired the hottest toy craze of the 1990s, two American professors (Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University and Bob Twiggs of Stanford University) proposed that their students design miniature satellites for a classroom assignment. The project gave students the chance to earn satellite engineering experience with a smaller model, since regular satellites were typically expensive to build.
What was once just a classroom project has really taken off in a variety of applications, both within the atmosphere and outside of Earth’s orbit. CubeSat’s are generally 10 cm cubes that weigh less that 1.33 kg (2.93 lbs). For more complicated missions, multiple CubeSat units can be stacked together. Over the last 15 years, CubeSats have been used to help researchers working on a variety of projects. On Earth, CubeSats can help meteorologists predict storms, and in the atmosphere, NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative is launching student-built satellites for young researchers who say their project can help the agency learn more about space. The satellites reduce launch costs since they’re lightweight (requiring less fuel to launch) and oftentimes rocket into space alongside a larger satellite. This makes CubeSats an ideal vessel for many research opportunities.
CubeSats, however, have also been an ideal vessel for a variety of commercial space endeavors. Working with NASA, companies such as SpaceX and the company formerly known as Orbital ATK have allowed commercial companies to send CubeSats into space as part of auxiliary payloads on cargo resupply trips to the ISS. NASA has also offered companies like Rocket Lab and Virgin Galactic the opportunity to send CubeSats into lower orbit through their Venture Class Launch Services contracts. And when Northop Grumman’s (the company that ultimately acquired Orbital ATK) Cygnus spacecraft left the ISS in 2018, it deployed six CubeSats into orbit before re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. In the years to come, CubeSat missions are expected to increase in frequency and technological sophistication. With their affordability and multiple purposes, it certainly seems like CubeSats are a crucial element of future space exploration.
Where Are the Aliens?
However impressive technologies like CubeSats and nanocrafts might be, one future element of space exploration remains very much unresolved: where are the aliens? The famed Fermi Paradox (attributed to remarks made by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi at a 1950 lunch but solidified by later thinkers such as astronomer Michael Hart and physicist Frank Tipler) posits that aliens can’t exist because no one on earth has ever seen them. According to legend, in 1950, Fermi remarked that any civilization with modest rocket power and large imperialist incentives could colonize the entire galaxy. Since Earth and our solar system is within a relatively new part of the solar system, some argue that it’s odd that we haven’t been visited yet by lifeforms from older parts of the universe, which have had much more time than we have to develop interstellar travel. Thus, thinkers like Hart and Tipler argued that since other intelligent beings haven’t visited earth, they mustn’t exist.
Future research is slowly providing evidence to doubt Fermi’s age-old paradox. In 2014, scientists using the NASA Kepler Space Telescoped reported 715 newly discovered planets, a so-called “planet bonanza.” The planets discovered within the planet bonanza were reported to be more like Earth than other planets previously found outside of the solar system. The Kepler scientists found these 715 planets using a new statistical method called verification by multiplicity. Verification by multiplicity is expected to accelerate the discovery of additional planets outside of our solar system.
Additionally, more research into extraterrestrial life is expected to be conducted within the next few years. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which will “examine planets for the chemical makeup of their atmospheres,” is expected to launch in 2021. In 2026, the European Space Agency is hoping to launch the PLATO (Planetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars) telescope, which will seek to figure out the conditions under which planets are formed and whether those conditions are conducive to life. And at the University of California, Berkeley, the Breakthrough Listen project is putting $100 million in researching funding towards the subject, intending to put in thousands of hours of telescope time into searching for extraterrestrial life.
The space exploration technology that is going to become available in the next several years is proving to be out of this world. For the first time, we may no longer have to dream of living on Mars, meeting extraterrestrials, or collecting star dust from other solar systems. If the recent advances in satellite technology, planet discovery, and interstellar travel are any indication, our next generation’s moonshots will happen further out of this world than ever before.
a global affairs media network
Further Out of This World Than Ever Before
December 26, 2020
Advancements in spaceflight are accelerating humanity faster and farther than ever before. From commercial companies offering vacations in space to the innovations that are shaping us into a multi-planetary species, we look at the missions and milestones that are leading us into the final frontier.
I
n 2015, the movie The Martian imagined what it would be like if an American astronaut became trapped on Mars during an exploration mission. Though the movie sparked scientific evaluations, which noted that Martian windstorms aren’t really as violent as the movie portrayed, the 2015 work of science fiction hints at circumstances that are inching closer and closer to reality. Specifically, the possibility that human life may soon thrive on Mars is looking more and more likely. In October 2020, several countries, including Japan and the UK, signed on to a NASA agreement to build a permanent station on the moon and eventually get to Mars. And NASA itself wants to start flying missions to Mars in the 2030s.
However, Mars colonization isn’t the only out-of-this world advance expected to occur in the next several years. CubeSats promise to reduce launch costs and make collecting data in space easier. Interstellar travel is becoming less of a sci-fi fantasy and more of a distinct possibility. And a promising series of research problems seeks to find the evidence that might disprove Fermi’s theory about the nonexistence of extraterrestrial life once and for all. In the years to come, it looks like the stories that dazzled our imaginations in science fiction movies are coming closer to reality.
Human Life on Mars?
Ultimately, human bodies did not evolve to live beyond earth. There are many challenges that humans need to overcome if they are to colonize Mars, including a need to prime humans against radiation and ways to help human bones adjust to microgravity. In 2015, an American astronaut helped scientists learn some of what it takes to survive in space. Though astronaut Scott Kelley was not on Mars, he lived for almost a year at the International Space Station (ISS), the international laboratory orbiting space and housing astronauts from around the world. During his time at the ISS, Kelley’s body was put under intense stress. Researchers at NASA had a unique opportunity to compare Scott Kelley’s experiences to those of his identical twin brother, astronaut Mark Kelley. Compared to Mark, Scott’s immune system went into overdrive while he was in space. Fluids filled his upper body and head, his major blood vessels swelled, and his genes activated differently. Though most of the bodily changes Scott Kelley experienced while he was in space had reverted back to normal within a few months, his experiences speak to the need to prepare humans extensively for life on Mars.
Genetic engineering is one technology researchers think humans will need if they hope to successfully colonize Mars. Such genetic tweaking can harness the abilities of organisms who are already outfitted to survive extreme environments. Scientists have already conducted experiments where they have inserted genes from tardigrades into human cells. Tardigrades, almost microscopic creatures that resemble bears in miniature, are notoriously tough and can even survive in space. In the experimentation with tardigrade genes, the genetically engineered cells had greater resistance to radiation than normal human cells. Similar benefits can be reaped from “extremophile” microbes with similar radiation-adverse properties.
Further, outside of countering the human challenges of living in space, some organizations are countering the economic challenges of moving to Mars. SpaceX is one company that is leading the way to Mars colonization with its Starship rocket system. The Starship consists of a large spaceship capable of transporting 100 people attached to a massive rocket named Super Heavy. Both the rocket and the spaceship will be reusable, cutting the cost of spaceflight and making the expedition to Mars more economically feasible. In October 2020, SpaceX founder Elon Musk claimed that the company will make its first Starship voyage to Mars in 2024.
However, there is much doubt about the viability of Musk’s plans. For one thing, the SpaceX founder is notorious for offering “overly ambitious timelines.” In one of Musk’s other companies (Tesla), shareholders have commented that they operate on “Elon time” with unrealistic and overly optimistic predictions of when new products might roll out. Additionally, though SpaceX claims that the reusable components of the Starship rocket system will help cut the costs of spaceflight, the mission is still expected to be tremendously expensive. SpaceX hasn’t ever given an estimate for how much its planned settlement on Mars might cost. Further, though NASA is plotting an eventual path to Mars, the agency has also not indicated how much such a mission will cost. During the mid-20th century, when the agency launched the Apollo missions to explore the moon, the cost of such space exploration exceed $280 billion, and in some years, NASA received more than 4% of the American national budget. Outside of the obvious scientific challenges of preparing humans for life on a foreign planet, the economic costs of a Mars venture must be seriously considered if such a program is ever to take off.
Interstellar Travel
Of course, one of the other large challenges to Martian travel is how long the journey would take. Depending on how the red planet’s orbit lines up with ours on Earth, the voyage could take nine months, even under ideal conditions when the two orbits are lined up for optimal travel time. However, to achieve even more ambitious goals, space travel will need to become much faster. To literally reach the stars, for example, the nearest neighbor to Earth (Proximus Centauri) is four lightyears away. The current interstellar probes that we have exploring beyond the reaches of our solar system would reach Proximus Centauri in a whopping 80,000 years if they traveled at current speeds.
The vehicle used to achieve interstellar travel would thus need to go much faster than any space vehicle is currently capable of moving. The extra speed requires extra energy, which creates additional engineering challenges. One idea is to contain the extra fuel on board the space craft, but this adds mass, making the vehicle even more difficult to propel through space quickly. The Breakthrough Starshot project has an innovative way to tackle this problem, aiming to transport a spacecraft into the stars with lasers. Breakthrough Starshot wants to use a giant 100-gigawatt array of lasers to shoot laser blasts from earth at the reflective sail of what the project is calling an ultra-light nanocraft. The sail captures these laser blasts and propels the nanocraft forward.
There are many questions about the Breakthrough Starshot project that need to be answered to assess its viability. First of all, the laser array itself would have to generate an amount of power equivalent to what is needed to power 70,000,000 homes. Additionally, the laser array would potentially need many lasers—maybe even hundreds of millions. A single lightbeam firing that produces this much energy might cost as much as $70,000, though the Breakthrough Starshot project notes that laser amplification costs “declined exponentially” between 1990 and 2015. Further, the size of the nanocraft in and of itself is cause for concern. The crafts are only supposed to be a few hundred atoms thick and weighing just one gram. Since the nanocrafts are small, they can avoid much of the debris floating in space. If they are struck by an unluckily positioned dust particle, however, the whole nanocraft could be destroyed. Clearly, these concerns must all be address before Breakthrough Starshot is launched towards another star.
Even Smaller Satellites
However, one element of the Breakthrough Starshot project that looks much less concerning than it might have twenty years ago is the size of the nanocraft—and for that, the initiative can thank satellite technology. Inverse reports that nanocraft technology is derived from the rise in CubeSats, miniature satellites which have shown efficiency in research due to their small size. The tiny technology was inspired in part by Beanie Babies. Thinking of the small stuffed animals which inspired the hottest toy craze of the 1990s, two American professors (Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University and Bob Twiggs of Stanford University) proposed that their students design miniature satellites for a classroom assignment. The project gave students the chance to earn satellite engineering experience with a smaller model, since regular satellites were typically expensive to build.
What was once just a classroom project has really taken off in a variety of applications, both within the atmosphere and outside of Earth’s orbit. CubeSat’s are generally 10 cm cubes that weigh less that 1.33 kg (2.93 lbs). For more complicated missions, multiple CubeSat units can be stacked together. Over the last 15 years, CubeSats have been used to help researchers working on a variety of projects. On Earth, CubeSats can help meteorologists predict storms, and in the atmosphere, NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative is launching student-built satellites for young researchers who say their project can help the agency learn more about space. The satellites reduce launch costs since they’re lightweight (requiring less fuel to launch) and oftentimes rocket into space alongside a larger satellite. This makes CubeSats an ideal vessel for many research opportunities.
CubeSats, however, have also been an ideal vessel for a variety of commercial space endeavors. Working with NASA, companies such as SpaceX and the company formerly known as Orbital ATK have allowed commercial companies to send CubeSats into space as part of auxiliary payloads on cargo resupply trips to the ISS. NASA has also offered companies like Rocket Lab and Virgin Galactic the opportunity to send CubeSats into lower orbit through their Venture Class Launch Services contracts. And when Northop Grumman’s (the company that ultimately acquired Orbital ATK) Cygnus spacecraft left the ISS in 2018, it deployed six CubeSats into orbit before re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. In the years to come, CubeSat missions are expected to increase in frequency and technological sophistication. With their affordability and multiple purposes, it certainly seems like CubeSats are a crucial element of future space exploration.
Where Are the Aliens?
However impressive technologies like CubeSats and nanocrafts might be, one future element of space exploration remains very much unresolved: where are the aliens? The famed Fermi Paradox (attributed to remarks made by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi at a 1950 lunch but solidified by later thinkers such as astronomer Michael Hart and physicist Frank Tipler) posits that aliens can’t exist because no one on earth has ever seen them. According to legend, in 1950, Fermi remarked that any civilization with modest rocket power and large imperialist incentives could colonize the entire galaxy. Since Earth and our solar system is within a relatively new part of the solar system, some argue that it’s odd that we haven’t been visited yet by lifeforms from older parts of the universe, which have had much more time than we have to develop interstellar travel. Thus, thinkers like Hart and Tipler argued that since other intelligent beings haven’t visited earth, they mustn’t exist.
Future research is slowly providing evidence to doubt Fermi’s age-old paradox. In 2014, scientists using the NASA Kepler Space Telescoped reported 715 newly discovered planets, a so-called “planet bonanza.” The planets discovered within the planet bonanza were reported to be more like Earth than other planets previously found outside of the solar system. The Kepler scientists found these 715 planets using a new statistical method called verification by multiplicity. Verification by multiplicity is expected to accelerate the discovery of additional planets outside of our solar system.
Additionally, more research into extraterrestrial life is expected to be conducted within the next few years. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which will “examine planets for the chemical makeup of their atmospheres,” is expected to launch in 2021. In 2026, the European Space Agency is hoping to launch the PLATO (Planetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars) telescope, which will seek to figure out the conditions under which planets are formed and whether those conditions are conducive to life. And at the University of California, Berkeley, the Breakthrough Listen project is putting $100 million in researching funding towards the subject, intending to put in thousands of hours of telescope time into searching for extraterrestrial life.
The space exploration technology that is going to become available in the next several years is proving to be out of this world. For the first time, we may no longer have to dream of living on Mars, meeting extraterrestrials, or collecting star dust from other solar systems. If the recent advances in satellite technology, planet discovery, and interstellar travel are any indication, our next generation’s moonshots will happen further out of this world than ever before.
