16 July 2015
To boldly go… in the starship Free Enterprise
by Neil Tidmarsh
It’s been a good week for space exploration. NASA scored an impressive double whammy: its New Horizons probe began to send back stunning photos of Pluto from the outer reaches of the solar system; and it announced that it has begun training astronauts for expeditions to be launched from US soil after a hiatus of four years.
Pluto is the most distant member of our solar system, and the last to be explored by craft from earth. It’s forty times further away from the sun than we are; it has five moons; a day on Pluto lasts 153 earth hours; a year on Pluto is 248 years on earth. New Horizons was launched on 19 January 2006 from Cape Canaveral on an Atlas V rocket and has travelled three billion miles on its nine year voyage. The close-range pictures it has already sent back are clear, detailed and beautiful, and the information transmitted is fascinating (nitrogen snow, ice caps of frozen nitrogen, new measurements indicating that Pluto is bigger than we thought and so might be promoted back to full ‘planet’ status, having been demoted to ‘dwarf planet’ in 2006). But we’ll have to wait another two or three months before the bulk of its harvest has been collected and analysed. In the meantime, this tiny craft no bigger than a washing-machine will continue on its incredible voyage, unmanned but with a handful of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930, stashed safely on board.
Only days before NASA released the first pictures of Pluto, it announced that it has selected four former military test pilots to be trained as astronauts to travel to and from the International Space Station on crafts built in and launched from the USA for the first time in four years. The USA has had to rely on Russian rockets to get its astronauts into space since the Space Shuttle’s final flight four years ago, but now plans to be independent again by 2017. This new venture is part of NASA’s Mars program, which intends to land men on the Red Planet in the 2030’s. In recent weeks, NASA has been launching test flights simulating Mars landings.
Is it a coincidence that this activity is taking place as a new cold war with Russia seems to be developing? The last space race (culminating in the Moon landings) took place in the depths of the last cold war, after all. America’s reliance on Russian craft to get American astronauts to and from the International Space Station has been humiliating. While the US space programme slumbered, the Russians forged ahead and established a big lead, cornering the market in commercial satellite launching. And when the Ukraine crisis prompted NASA to cut all other ties with Russia, NASA had no choice but to carry on co-operating over the ISS.
Things are looking rather different now, though. This week’s good news from NASA has come hard on the heels of bad news from Russia. Russia’s Audit Chamber (state auditor) recently uncovered 92 billion roubles (more than one billion pounds) of financial irregularities at Roscosmos, the national space agency. Most of these relate to the building of the new space centre, Vostochny Cosmodrome, in Russia’s far eastern Amur region. This centre was intended to secure and further Russia’s lead in the satellite-launching field; but in the past year the head of the project’s main contractor was arrested for stealing £23 million of state funds, building workers have gone on hunger strike over unpaid wages, and twenty criminal cases involving over 220 officials have been initiated. At the same time, Roscosmos has more or less ground to a halt operationally through catastrophic technical failures; its Proton rocket crashed last month (the seventh time in five years) and its Progress space craft crashed the month before.
The only good news to come out of Roscosmos recently was the cosmonaut Gennadi Padalka’s record-breaking 804 days away from earth. The figure is cumulative, built up over spaceflights in 1999, 2004, 2009, 2012 and his current stay on the International Space Station, where he celebrated his 57 birthday last month. He will return to Earth in September, by which time his total will be 877 days – unless, of course, Roscosmos has no functioning craft to bring him back, in which case his total will be even more impressive.
If space exploration is a political competition, where does Europe stand? More or less where one would expect it to, as it happens; on the one hand, scraping by on endearing but comparatively small-scale projects with complete disaster ever-present, and on the other indulging in theoretically sound, idealogically impressive but unlikely and impractical projects. An example of the first is Philae’s adventure on comet 67P, Churyumov-Gerasimenko; the European Space Agency managed to land this craft on the comet’s surface, but it bounced into deep shadow and so fell asleep when its solar-powered batteries ran out. It woke up for a moment last month and it is hoped that its batteries may be recharging. An example of the second is the recent comment by Professor Johann-Dietrich Worner, the ESA’s new director general, who expressed the hope that European governments will fund the building of a village on the Moon to replace the International Space Station when it is decommissioned in 2024. Hasn’t it occurred to him that governments which still haven’t yet worked out how to fund the survival of Greece, a state which has been up and running for two centuries, are hardly likely to be able to work out how to fund a completely new community on a previously uninhabited satellite?
But the most interesting thing about these recent developments in space programmes isn’t that they seem to be replicating existing political rivalries and reflecting existing political identities, but that they seem to be breaking away from them. The chaos of Roscosmos’s planned new space centre suggests that the most advanced space programme is beyond the capacity of the modern state. The most significant part of NASA’s announcement this week suggests that the USA has grasped this emerging notion. NASA’s new space program – its plan to have American-built and American-launched rockets taking American astronauts to the ISS by 2017 and to Mars by 2040 – does not involve NASA-made space-craft; the space craft will be designed and built not by the public-sector but by the private sector, by Boeing and SpaceX.
There are big cost savings involved; public-sector craft cost an estimated $1 billion per launch; travel in private-sector crafts is estimated at less than $60 million per astronaut. And private space companies have forged ahead in recent years, leading the field with research and development and new technologies. Satellite-technology is ubiquitous in our lives these days, after all, and satellite-launching rockets are big business. The four new NASA astronauts will work at Boeing and SpaceX with those companies’ test pilots in those companies’ CST-100 and Dragon spacecraft.
There was another sign recently that space-travel will become a commercial venture rather than a political one. Last month, the House of Representatives passed a bill recognising space property rights under federal law, giving ownership of asteroid resources to whoever mines them. Although it will probably be challenged and amended in the Senate, it is nevertheless considered to be the first step towards a new industry of harvesting the mineral resources of asteroids. These resources are of immense value, and the incentive to be the first in the field is sure to spur the private sector on to make massive quantum leaps in space travel.
The opening-up and exploitation of space by commercial entities may not match the ideal of an altruistic United Nations-type enterprise conducted in the spirit of common humanity, but it has to be preferable to the old sci-fi nightmare of space conquest by rival states prepared to export their political conflicts to the far reaches of the galaxy.
