Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
'It is rare to read something that so closely mixes science fiction with reality, but Space 2069 does just that ... [It's] an intelligent portrait of where we may be in the next half-century. - BBC Sky at Night Nearing half a century since the last Apollo mission, mankind has yet to return to the Moon, but that is about to change. With NASA's Artemis program scheduled for this decade, astronomer David Whitehouse takes a timely look at what the next 50 years of space exploration have in store. The thirteenth man and the first woman to walk on the Moon will be the first to explore the lunar south pole - the prime site for a future Moon base thanks to its near-perpetual sunlight and the presence of nearby ice. The first crewed mission to Mars will briefly orbit the red planet in 2039, preparing the way for a future landing mission. Surviving the round trip will be the greatest challenge any astronaut has yet faced. In the 2050s, a lander will descend to the frozen surface of Jupiter's moon Europa and attempt to drill down to its subsurface ocean in search of life. Based on real-world information, up-to-date scientific findings and a healthy dose of realism, Space 2069 is a mind-expanding tour of humanity's future in space over the next 50 years.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 350
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
iii
v
For Jill
vi
vii
‘By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is the noblest; second, by imitation, which is the easiest; and the third by experience, which is the bitterest.’
—Confuciusviii
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I recall one Tuesday afternoon in the 1990s I was sitting at my desk in Broadcasting House, home of the BBC, and the phone rang.
‘Hello, it’s Arthur Clarke here. Have you seen the latest images from Mars? Most weird.’
Arthur C. Clarke wanted there to be life on Mars. He felt it would speed up getting humans there.
‘Dammit,’ he told me, ‘I thought we’d be at Jupiter by 2001, but I don’t think we will be back on the Moon by then.’
Those who know his works would say that Arthur was far too optimistic over timescales of decades and centuries, but far too pessimistic when looking thousands or millions of years into the future! It was one of Arthur’s books that really inspired me when I was barely in my teens. The Promise of Space, it was called. I still have it. I wonder what Arthur would have said if I had the chance to tell him that one day I would write a book about ‘only’ the next 50 years in space.
This book grew out of my previous book, Apollo 11: The Inside Story. It’s a kind of sequel. Having just looked back 50 years to the first lunar landing I thought it would be interesting to assess what we might have achieved 100 years xiiafter the ‘small step’. While writing it I realised what Arthur would have felt like when writing his profiles of the future. We will never know what we got right.
I recall talking with Carl Sagan in a hotel in London about the future of space and our discussion automatically moved to Mars. He also talked, in a typically Sagan way, of looking for a benign aperture through which to see the 21st century and a hopeful future for the human species. He was aware that we could take our Earthly troubles into space.
Then there was Patrick Moore, who wrote a fascinating book in the 1970s called The Next 50 Years in Space, with wonderful illustrations by David Hardy. It had spaceships landing on the moons of Jupiter and astronauts driving pressurised rovers on the moons of even more distant Saturn. The book is ever wonderful but I did feel regret on realising humanity would probably never do those things. Patrick’s response was to say, ‘Why don’t we get the telescope out and look for sunspots?’
I feel this book might disappoint Arthur, Carl and Patrick. Arthur would perhaps have me include a mysterious alien artefact travelling through the solar system as in his 1978 novel The Fountains of Paradise. Carl would be disappointed I didn’t tackle his favourite subject, the search for intelligent life in space, which I have left out to concentrate on the human story, knowing it’s a discovery that could be made tomorrow or never. It’s a subject for another book. Patrick, in a parallel universe, would have got his wish to present his TV show The Sky at Night from the surface of the Moon. This book explains why he sadly never got the chance.xiii
So many people over so many years have contributed to this book through correspondence and conversations. I would like to thank Nick Booth for valuable comments and Icon’s Robert Sharman for his expert editing that has significantly enhanced this book. My agent Laura Susijn has been a wonder, even though at times I must have driven her to distraction. My wife Jill has been as marvellous as ever, and my children Christopher, Lucy and Emily have been so enthusiastic. Lastly, thanks to Tobi our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel who has on long walks through the countryside helped me sort out many problems, and frequently brought me down to Earth.
David Whitehouse Hampshire June 2020xiv
PREFACE
In 2012 the Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner jumped from the stratosphere, launching himself from a capsule suspended from a helium balloon. Before he jumped, he looked at the Earth below him, its curvature clearly visible, the raw sunlight showing him and his capsule in a brutal light. His pressure suit was custom-made and had four layers to keep him protected from the harsh environment around him. He looked every inch a spaceman.
Baumgartner was at an altitude of 38,969 metres in the very upper reaches of the atmosphere, which was cold, thin and deadly. Yet as he contemplated the moment, the atmosphere around him was warmer and thicker than that found on the surface of Mars.xvi
PART 1
BACK TO THE MOON
EXILES
The Moon.
Shackleton crater.
Lunar latitude 90 degrees south.
Date: 2069.
At the exact moment of the centenary, the depths of Shackleton crater at the Moon’s south pole went dark, as they had been for billions of years before humans arrived. The eight giant mirrors on the crater’s rim – heliostats that rotated to keep the Sun’s light reflected into the crater – started to turn and the pools of light they cast moved swiftly across the crater’s floor, up its ramparts, disappearing into space. The mirrors turned to the precise orientation required to reflect the Sun’s light towards Earth: to a particular spot in North America. Millions on Earth were watching the southern region of the Moon’s grey disc, whether with the unaided eye, binoculars or telescope, hoping to catch the optical flare from the mirrors on the Moon.4
Wapakoneta had a population of 12,236 at the 2060 census but the town had swelled for the event. Teachers and students from the high school were waving their red-and-white school flags as well as the Stars and Stripes. All over the globe if people were not looking at the Moon, or couldn’t see it, they were watching the celebrations. They all cheered as they saw the flashes from the Moon, saluting the birthplace of the first man to walk on it, Neil Armstrong, 100 years ago. At the time of the 50th anniversary there were only four of the original moonwalkers alive and only 20 per cent of the population had been around at the time of the first Moon landing. Fifty years later no one who took part in the Apollo program was alive. Given the advances in medicine there were still many who recalled the event. But there was a letting it slip into history – the loss of the Apollo heroes and anyone who had ever known them personally. But there were moonwalkers at the centenary of Apollo 11. The thirteenth person on the Moon was in her eighties and just as sprightly as Buzz Aldrin had been in 2019.
A few minutes later attention turned to the screens and a large black-and-white image of the lunar surface. This was the view from the cameras positioned around the First Footprint sanctuary. The main cluster of cameras was stationed on the edge of West crater about 400 metres away. Nothing was allowed closer, but the view from the tower was clear. The desolate lower stage of the Apollo 11 lunar module and the flag lying on the ground. Floodlights highlighted with crisp shadows every footprint and scuff mark. The tracks leading towards Little West crater, 50 metres east of the 5lunar module, were visible. It was an unplanned excursion, when Armstrong had gone to get a look inside near the end of the two-and-a-half hours that he and Aldrin had spent on the surface. The image closed in on the lunar module leg where the very first footfall was made and mostly obliterated by subsequent boot marks. The site had been laser scanned and converted to virtual reality so anyone could walk up to the forlorn module and read the plaque: ‘Here men from the planet Earth …’
But not everyone celebrated the same way, and not everyone on the Moon was thinking back to Apollo 11. There were three sets of broadcasts from the Moon on that day of celebrations. Shackleton base scientists had answered questions from the world’s media and from schools around the world. The secondary lunar outpost positioned near the Moon’s equator took viewers on a tour of their strange underground habitat. The far larger Chinese base, in the northern polar region and as far away from Shackleton as it was possible to get on the Moon, made its contribution, but it was mainly for their own country, given the international tensions. There was no broadcast from their other base. It was also watched by the military space chiefs of both countries as they kept a watchful eye on the space around the Moon, for there had been times of conflict on and around the Moon.
The heliostats moved once more, this time to reflect the sunlight across the inner solar system towards Mars on a 28-minute journey to the red planet, and the Mars Optical Telescope – the only one on the red planet – turned its gaze towards the Moon from the dusty and desolate floor of the 6Valles Marineris. The Chinese base at Acidalia Planitia ignored the signal.
The celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon were subdued at the International Mars base despite the optimism on display in the Earth–Moon–Mars link-up and the messages from the world’s leaders. Events happening 500 million kilometres away inevitably seemed remote from the viewpoint of honorary Martians. For some it reminded them, as if they needed reminding, that they depended on Earth for their survival, being always just two resupply trips away from extinction. The Martians, eighteen of them in the International Mars Colony, eight at the Chinese base – many fewer than at the lunar colonies – called themselves Martians, though they had all been born on Earth and it was to Earth they would eventually return, even if they could never really feel at home there after their time on an alien planet. Privately some of them knew in their heart of hearts that they could not face the voyage home, and that eventually they would join the other sealed graves on Mars.
A hundred years after Apollo 11, mankind had journeyed into the solar system and faced a new barrier, one that would probably take another hundred years to overcome, if overcome it could be. From Mars we stared out towards the asteroid belt and beyond to the gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn, and the ice giants of Uranus and Neptune in the cold, dark outer reaches of the solar system beyond. Then in the century after the Apollo centenary we could imagine a voyage into the asteroid belt, perhaps overseeing the artificial-intelligence 7swarms that roamed among these rocky bodies. But we could go no further. The vast distances and the long durations of the flights were too much at present, let alone the radiation. The humans that would go out there would be different. Modified, enhanced, resilient and protected in a way that space travellers had thus far not been. A human voyage to Jupiter and its remarkable moons, to Saturn’s moon Titan and the beguiling Enceladus belong to the centuries to come, and to different people. Looking inward towards the Sun, we cannot live on Venus or Mercury. For humans Earth marks the inner boundary of our reach into the solar system.
The next 50 years will see the start of our divergence. By the end of it the Moon and Mars will have their own people for whom Earth has never been their home. Some will become exiles, unable to visit Earth because its gravity would kill them. Some will become a new branch of humanity, regarding themselves liberated from the confines of the planet of their predecessors.
Encompassing the Moon and Mars will not just be about the journey, the technology of travel and survival in space. It will include all of the science we will discover in the next five decades. Better control of our bodies and brains, our new attitudes, our new and ancient fears – which perhaps are the same. Space colonists will not be the Mayflower pilgrims of the 21st century, looking for release from old ways and oppression. We will take our tyrannies with us, along with our tragedies, fears and hopes. For the next 50 years we will take our Earth thinking with us, reflecting and amplifying the politics of our home planet, perhaps acting out its battles.8
We humans begin our expansion outwards, in the first phase to the Moon and Mars. This is what concerns us here.
It is now August 2024 and two astronauts are flying over the lunar surface for the first time in many decades, travelling a course long abandoned. Passing below them is the Moon’s most prominent crater, mostly covered in shadow as the morning Sun, striking its western rim, moves down its flanks, unveiling its jumbled floor of cracks, small hills and domes. Tycho is at a lunar latitude of 43° S and is 85 kilometres wide. Its signature streaks which span the entire Moon and which are so prominent at certain Sun angles are not easily seen by the crew. The last of the Surveyor soft landers is resting just 40 kilometres from the rim, having been there since 1968 when it was landed to test the stability of the surface. It didn’t disappear into dust. Sitting on what was technically called the impact melt ejecta blanket, its cameras could see Tycho on the horizon. Apollo 20 had been due to land next to it sometime in the mid-1970s, but had been cancelled before any detailed plans could be made.
Now, the radar registers the crater’s cliff faces that are higher than the Grand Canyon, as well as the terraced and slumped terrain that guards Tycho’s dramatic heart. Neither of the astronauts looks towards its dramatic central peak, six times the height of the Empire State Building, and the enormous boulder sitting on it – one of nature’s tricks played on the Moon – but they do reference it in passing.9
‘Site of TMA-1,’ says one. Both of them know she is referring to the black monolith left behind by enigmatic aliens in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
‘We are a little late getting here,’ says the other.
The pair are part of a team nicknamed the ‘Turtles’ – NASA’s 22nd astronaut selection: twelve Americans (one subsequently resigned) and two Canadians. They were chosen from over 18,000 applicants in June 2017 and started a two-year training course. In January 2020 they were assigned to NASA’s Artemis program. Most, perhaps all of them, will walk on the Moon.
To get there the two moonwalkers will, with two others, be launched into space using the super rocket of the US Space Launch System and the Orion capsule, which looks like the Apollo Command Module but is larger, more complicated and more capable. At one time it was planned to have them boosted out of Earth orbit for a five-day trip to the Lunar Gateway – a simple space station in a very elliptical orbit around the Moon. From there the chosen two would have entered the Lunar Descent Vehicle, undocked, fired its thrusters and begun a twelve-hour descent to the surface. In March 2020 NASA changed that plan. Although the Gateway project was still to go ahead, it was decided that the landing mission would not dock with it but would head directly to the lunar surface. The change was made to save money and time, given the uncertainties introduced into the project because of the coronavirus pandemic. But the astronauts will not be going back to an Apollo landing site, or anything like it.10
In the darkness of their capsule their eyes are on their dimly illuminated instruments: altitude, rate of descent, velocity, range, fuel. The infra-red laser radar picks up its reflection from the beacon on the lunar rover already placed at the landing site.
When he came in for the first landing on the Moon 55 years previously, Neil Armstrong had nothing like the information presented to this crew. They have screens showing all the spacecraft’s vital signs, a detailed map and profile of the Moon along with their trajectory, as well as excellent comms. Back then Armstrong’s hands had been curved around two joysticks as he leant forward, peering below through the overhanging window of the lunar module. He was flying for his life, calling from memory details of the terrain before him, looking to avoid boulders, hearing mission control through the static, monitoring the fuel supply: ‘Low level,’ they said. He had Buzz Aldrin next to him calling out their altitude and descent: ‘Four forward, four forward, drifting to the right a little.’
Armstrong was landing on a very different part of the Moon – the Plains of Tranquillity. The crew of Artemis 3 are flying over the Moon’s most rugged terrain. The ground underneath them is becoming darker, more shadowed as they head poleward, exactly the opposite of what Armstrong encountered. Artemis 3 is travelling yet deeper into the shadows beneath. No one has ever been this way before.
DRIFTING
Someone once said – exactly who is not known for sure; it’s been attributed to movie mogul Sam Goldwyn and the physicist Niels Bohr among others – that predictions are difficult, especially about the future! It’s true about space activity. If you were celebrating the first manned landing on the Moon in 1969 you would have not predicted where we are 50 years later, with no one having been to the Moon since 1972. Back then for some it was a time of optimism. Spiro Agnew, vice-president to President Nixon, said men would be on Mars by 1984. Instead we got the first untethered spacewalk, space shuttle Discovery’s maiden voyage and the release of The Terminator. The famous movie co-written by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke came out in 1968. It depicts a large spacecraft heading to Jupiter. You know when it was set – 2001. We haven’t come anywhere near where our space dreams once imagined we would be. The changes that have happened to our society, our technology and ourselves were poorly predicted. Changes have been faster in some areas, slower in many others.12
In another 50 years, many things will have changed: our environment will be different; our bodies will certainly change as the result of new medical technology; our reach may expand or contract; our optimism … well, we can hope.
When I was a schoolboy, around the time of the first Moon landing, I imagined that within a few years we would have space stations and fabulous vehicles that would make travelling to them routine, allowing many of us to become astronauts. Fifty years after Apollo we might have hotels in space, settlements on the Moon and colonies on Mars. Perhaps we would travel even further, to Jupiter and beyond, just like the Discovery One with Dr David Bowman and Dr Frank Poole, and their conscious artificial intelligence HAL. This was the future I anticipated and, as youthful optimism faded, watched slip away, my space dreams receding a little further each year.
Fifty years after Apollo fewer than 600 people had ventured into space and only 24 of them beyond Earth orbit. But there are signs that the stagnation is ending. We will be back on the Moon, tourists will dip their toes into space and the infrastructure of space will continue to grow and touch almost everyone on Earth with communications, navigation, transport.
Ever since the great speeches of President John F. Kennedy setting the US on course for the Moon before the 1960s were out, NASA – the US Space Agency – has wanted another JFK moment, another impetus to move outwards that the politicians who control the purse strings could get behind. Indeed, every subsequent president has wanted his own Kennedy moment, a speech as memorable and inspiring as JFK’s.13
Since the heady days of Apollo there have been three times when a US president has directed the nation to go back to the Moon, but none of them ever got anywhere. Presidential initiatives and administrations came and went. At times the goal was the Moon, then it was Mars, then back to the Moon, then an asteroid, and then back to the Moon again. It almost seemed as if we didn’t really want to go: we would go through the motions, make designs and spend billions building rockets and other things, but it never really felt that the end of the process would be footprints on the Moon. We resigned ourselves that each initiative would end in some sort of failure, consoling ourselves that starts and stops were part of the process, that future generations would benefit and that eventually the politicians would get it. Looking at why this happened is instructive and provides some idea of the problems those with moondust or Mars-dust in their eyes have when dealing with the political world. Neil Armstrong knew that you didn’t get to the Moon with rockets and willpower. Any Moon mission is launched from the real and messy world.
After the Apollo 11 landing a Space Task Group was created by President Nixon to look into what to do next. One thing was clear to Nixon: it had to be much cheaper than the Apollo program, in fact no more Apollos. It consisted of Vice-President Spiro Agnew, NASA Administrator Thomas Paine, and the Secretary of the Air Force Robert Seamans. They came up with a space station, a base on the Moon, further exploration of Mars and a space shuttle. It was a bold plan, but it went against the political climate of the time. 14These were the years of the poor people’s marches and the Tet offensive. Paine was worried by the view of the Nixon transition team on space, which wanted to limit NASA’s ambitions. They wanted NASA to continue exploring the Moon, but not Mars. Forget Mars. Paine wanted Vice-President Agnew to endorse his wider goals and thought that he could persuade Nixon. Paine was wrong: unlike his predecessor Lyndon B. Johnson, Nixon was not keen on space and to him Agnew’s views were irrelevant.
In retrospect, Nixon put his own political interests ahead of a Kennedyesque space goal. What could he direct NASA to do that was anywhere as good as getting to the Moon? A trip to Mars would only benefit future presidents. He would give speeches about space exploration, invite the returning lunar astronauts to receptions at the White House and toast them, but space was not important to him politically. He gave a speech that held out a promise of the future, and then took it away.
I have decided today that the United States should proceed at once with the development of systems and technologies designed to take American astronauts on landing missions to Mars. This system will center on a new generation of rockets, exploiting nuclear power, which will revolutionize and render routine long-haul interplanetary flights.
The year 1971 was a year of conclusion for America’s current series of manned flights to the Moon. Much was achieved in the three successful 15landing missions – in fact, the scientific results of the third mission have been shown to greatly outweigh the return from all earlier manned spaceflights, to Earth orbit or the Moon. But it also brought us to an important decision point – a point of assessing what our space horizons are as Apollo ends, and of determining where we go from here.
[…]
We will go to Mars because it is the one place other than our Earth where we expect human life to be sustainable, and where our colonies could flourish. We will go to Mars because an examination of its geology and history will reflect back on a greatly deepened understanding of our own precious Earth.
Above all, we will go to Mars because it will inspire us to clearly look beyond the difficulties and divisions of today, to a better future tomorrow.
‘We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,’ said Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.’ So with man’s epic voyage into space – a voyage the United States of America has led and still shall lead. Apollo has returned to harbor. Now it is time to swiftly build new ships, and to purposefully sail farther than our ancestors could ever have dreamed possible.
Throughout the triumph of Apollo there was never a time when the majority of Americans thought it was all worthwhile. Nixon knew that. He dismissed the Moon and Mars 16initiatives, and only endorsed the space station and the shuttle because he thought it would win him votes in California. Less than a year after the first footprint on the Moon, Nixon was even on the verge of cancelling Apollos 15, 16 and 17, which would have resulted in only six people walking on the Moon – half the eventual number. Despite Agnew’s public statements about sending humans to Mars by 1984, dreams of returning to the Moon and going on to Mars faded while NASA struggled to get the space shuttle flying on an inadequate budget, making compromises in its design that would come back to haunt them in the future. Even during the tenth anniversary celebrations of Apollo 11, the White House incumbent President Carter showed he wasn’t interested in the Moon and promoted his energy policy instead. He said it was ‘neither feasible nor necessary’ to commit to an Apollo-style space program, and his space policy included only limited, short-range goals.
In 1981 when the first space shuttle was launched, going back to the Moon, let alone to Mars, seemed a long way away. With each infrequent mission the gap between what the shuttle could do and what had been promised seemed to widen. I recall in the early years of the 1980s it was the shuttle or nothing. Moon return studies were discouraged, and Mars was almost a dirty word at NASA – or at least one seldom said, and then usually in hushed tones. But there was an undercurrent. Some scientists started to call themselves ‘Mars Underground’. Studies carried out on the sidelines fuelled the excitement. Off-budget meetings were held, questions formulated, and missions imagined. Some were vocal about 17going to Mars, especially Carl Sagan. Despite this, official talk of returning humans to the Moon and sending them to Mars disappeared for almost a decade as NASA concentrated on getting the shuttle operating.
In 1984 President Ronald Reagan, who mostly saw space in military, intelligence and national security terms – hence his Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) in 1983 – decided that the US needed to cooperate with its allies in space. That way costs would be saved, and risks shared, but years passed with very little happening. Eventually the US House of Congress got fed up with this and created a National Commission on Space to look at the impasse. Its chair was to be highly respected former NASA Deputy Administrator George Low, but he died before he could take up the post. Thomas Paine got the job, bringing with him his frustrations about Nixon’s Space Task Group. Paine used to say that the nation spent more on Space Invaders than the space shuttle, and more on pizza than the entire space program. But Paine was not a wily Washington political operator, as was obvious from his Nixon days, and the eventual report, ‘Pioneering the Space Frontier’, was predictable and not detailed enough. Sure, it talked about lunar bases, a large space station, missions to Mars and nuclear-powered spacecraft, but to the politicians it read more like science fiction than a reasonable way forward.
The House of Congress knew the National Commission on Space report was not politically or financially acceptable and asked the new NASA Administrator, James Fletcher, for a more realistic vision. Fletcher understood the political 18realities better than Paine and gave the task to former astronaut Sally Ride, who had recently worked on the investigation into the space shuttle Challenger accident. She produced another report, ‘Leadership and America’s Future in Space’, which this time addressed the differences between dreams and reality. She identified four possible directions for the United States: a human mission to Mars, a lunar base, robotic planetary exploration, and a ‘Mission to Planet Earth’, to study our home world. The one thing that caught on in Washington was the Mission to Planet Earth idea. Moon and Mars advocates were once again frustrated.
Ride worked in the Office of Exploration, which had very few staff. Soon Ride retired to private life and Aaron Cohen, from the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, took over. JSC had many studies for lunar bases and all sorts of future projects and so, for the next two years the office, known as ‘Code Z’, carried out its own studies of Moon and Mars missions. They included a large new booster based on the shuttle, known as ‘Shuttle Z’.
In February 1988, the Reagan administration called for the ‘expansion of human presence beyond Earth orbit’, but Reagan was leaving office that year and things stalled again under President George H.W. Bush. Eventually the new administration tried to get things moving with the creation of another new body, a National Space Council, which was overseen by Vice-President Dan Quayle. Quayle had a bad image and was often a figure of ridicule. His advisors suggested that backing a large-scale space initiative would be good for his image. The Space Council idea had 19been suggested before, but Reagan hated it, even vetoing it on one occasion. His space outlook was influenced by the Department of Defense and he didn’t want any Congressional interference. But President Bush was different and he liked the plan partly because it would give Quayle a public role in policy-making and help to dispel negative comments about his vice-president.
On the 20th anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon, President Bush, standing on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum with the crew of Apollo 11 by his side, proposed a long-range exploration plan encompassing a space station, a permanent return to the Moon, and a human mission to Mars. It became known as the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). President Bush said the newly recharged National Space Council would provide ways to meet these objectives. He later set a 30-year goal for a crewed landing on Mars. If it had been met, humans would have been walking on Mars by 2019, the recently passed 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.
But within a few short years even the SEI faded into history amid a bitter political war fought on many fronts. The failure of SEI, as well as the farce of the Hubble Space Telescope’s flawed mirror and the problems in operating the space shuttle, its delays and its staggering cost, tarnished NASA’s image. There were clashes both political and personal between the Space Council’s Dan Quayle and Mark Albrecht versus NASA and its Administrator, the former astronaut Richard Truly; also between the White House, Congress and the Johnson Space Center’s director Aaron 20Cohen against, well, almost everyone. It all did the space effort little good.
The Space Council’s real driving force was its secretary, Mark Albrecht who began looking for a new project to invigorate the civilian space program. Albrecht and the Space Council produced three proposals which looked just like the ones made before: a return to the Moon, a human mission to Mars, or both. But tension was building between the National Space Council and the astronaut-dominated NASA senior management. Richard Truly was not keen on such big programs given NASA’s struggles with the space shuttle and the International Space Station. Despite this Quayle took the proposals to Bush, who decided to pursue both the lunar and Mars goals simultaneously. In response NASA produced a preliminary estimate of the costs, $400 billion over 30 years. This sum included many unnecessary items that could be discarded, although the report did not say that. It was leaked to the press, the politics got nasty and the project collapsed. Richard Truly was fired and the National Space Council folded.
The next president, Bill Clinton, was not a great fan of space. After he left office, he produced a 100,000-word memoir that hardly mentioned space exploration at all. During the Clinton administration, space shuttle flights continued, and the construction of the International Space Station began.
The loss of space shuttle Columbia and its crew early in George W. Bush’s presidency changed everything.
GODDESS OF THE MOON
In the space age so far four crews have perished during a mission. Vladimir Komarov died when his Soyuz return capsule failed, and he plunged into the ground in 1967. The three-man crew of Soyuz 11 became the only people to have died in space when their capsule depressurised in 1971. Space shuttle Challenger exploded after lift-off in 1986, and then there was space shuttle Columbia. It will happen again. As we start being more adventurous, we will mourn the loss of a crew more than a few times in the next 50 years in space.
Columbia began its 28th return to Earth after sixteen days in space completing the STS-107 mission on 1 February 2003. It had been a wide-ranging science mission studying the atmosphere and microgravity. As they prepared to return to Earth, they did not know the peril they were in, but on Earth many suspected they were doomed.
About 82 seconds after launch, at an altitude of 20,000 metres, a suitcase-sized piece of thermal insulation 22foam had broken off the external fuel tank and struck the leading edge of Columbia’s left wing, creating a 10-centimetre hole. The same had occurred, to a lesser and non-fatal extent, on at least four previous shuttle flights.
Aware that something had happened, controllers looked at video taken of the launch and concluded that it was nothing unusual. But the day after, higher-resolution video revealed that the foam had struck the left wing; the extent of the damage, though, was not possible to ascertain. Engineers wanted to use top-secret spy satellites to look at Columbia, but officials did not think it was necessary. Another engineer requested that an astronaut visually inspect the area, but he was turned down. The subsequent accident report said that the engineers found themselves in the position of having to prove that the shuttle was unsafe – a reversal of the usual procedure.
At 2.30 a.m. ET on that awful morning, the Entry Flight Control Team began their shift at Houston’s Mission Control Center. It was a normal re-entry. The weather at the Kennedy Space Center landing site in Florida was good. At 8.00 a.m. Flight Director LeRoy Cain polled mission control for a go/no go. A few minutes later the capcom (capsule communicator) notified the crew that they were go for the de-orbit burn. Travelling upside-down, tail first over the Indian Ocean, they were on their 255th orbit. The two-minute 38-second burn slowed them to start their entry into the atmosphere. There was no turning back.
Commander Rick Husband turned Columbia around and pitched its nose up, allowing the heat-resistant tiles on its 23belly to face the heat of re-entry friction. At 8.44 Columbia reached 121,000 metres – the so-called entry interface when the first signs of the atmosphere are evident. They were over the Pacific Ocean.
Four minutes later a sensor on the left wing’s leading edge showed strains higher than those seen on previous re-entries, but the data was stored on the onboard recorder and not sent to ground controllers. Travelling at Mach 24.5, Columbia made a planned turn to the right. Then began the ten-minute-long period of peak heating. They were nearing the Californian coastline. Wing leading edge temperatures were approaching 1,450°C. Altitude was 70,500 metres.
People reported seeing debris from Columbia. Four hydraulic sensors in the left wing went ‘off-scale low’, indicating they had failed. Witnesses reported seeing a series of bright explosions. At 8.59 and 15 seconds pressure readings had been lost from both left-wing landing tyres. Rick Husband had been trying to say something. Seventeen seconds later he said, ‘Roger, uh, bu—’. He was cut off. Columbia was breaking up. Seven minutes later, flight controllers knew the crew had died.
The cabin remained intact as Columbia broke apart. Rick Husband would have worked the hand controller, trying to regain control, but the tumbling would have indicated to all that there was no shuttle left. We do not know how long they survived before the cabin disintegrated about 30 seconds later; certainly the crew understood their fate. The investigation concluded that they died due to ‘blunt trauma and hypoxia with no evidence of lethal injury from thermal effects’. Three 24of the crew were not wearing gloves at the time of the accident and one was not wearing a helmet.
A year later President George W. Bush unveiled plans for what he called a sustained and affordable space exploration program, beginning with returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020. NASA began developing a new manned spacecraft – the Crew Exploration Vehicle, later renamed Orion – and the Ares rocket, the world’s most powerful. Bush called it the Vision for Space Exploration. There was one crucial condition. The space shuttle had to retire. NASA’s Administrator Michael Griffin was keen on the plan and began a study called the Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS), looking at the details. The project became known as Constellation. It could have worked but Congress sliced some money from its request, so the project would do less and take longer, and next year some more money was removed. Eventually it was clear that the project was going nowhere with the resources it had left.
When he came into power, President Obama changed everything. If you could summarise his plans it would be: forget the Moon, send people to Mars instead – but not to land, just orbit and return. The Mars trip he envisioned for 2035. The centrepiece of his crewed space program was a mission to an asteroid that would probably take about two months if a suitable near-Earth passing asteroid could be found. Constellation was dead, although the Orion capsule program survived, and the House of Congress took over the big rocket which became the SLS – the Space Launch System. NASA later modified the plan to robotically bring 25a piece of an asteroid into lunar orbit and send astronauts there to examine it.
Moon supporters and many Apollo astronauts were not happy with Obama’s plan to bypass the Moon altogether. In May 2010 Neil Armstrong went before a Senate hearing to question Obama’s new vision. He said that he worried about the possibility that NASA would lose its edge in spaceflight: ‘If the leadership we have acquired through our investment is simply allowed to fade away, other nations will surely step in where we have faltered … I do not believe that this would be in our best interests.’ Armstrong, along with Eugene Cernan, the last astronaut on the Moon, said that the Obama plan was short on ambition. Cernan said that he, Armstrong and Apollo 13 Commander James Lovell agreed that the administration’s budget for human space exploration ‘presents no challenges, has no focus, and in fact is a blueprint for a mission to nowhere’. Buzz Aldrin, Armstrong’s partner in the Apollo 11 mission supported the president’s plan. At its unveiling at the Kennedy Space Center in April 2010 President Obama said of the Moon, ‘We’ve been there before. Buzz has been there.’
Armstrong said the Obama plan was ‘contrived by a very small group in secret’ who persuaded the president that this was the way to put his stamp on the space program. ‘I believe the president was poorly advised,’ he said, in what many regarded as a criticism of Aldrin. Cernan was even harsher, saying Obama’s space budget projects either show extreme naivety or a willingness to accept a ‘plan to dismantle America’s leadership in the world of human space 26
