On Space, the Next Frontier

A friend of mine emailed me last week to say that he'd been using the Astronomy Picture of the Day link on my site...and loved what he saw there.

This came as a real morale-boost to me, in my one-person crusade to persuade the world that space exploration and the colonisation of the solar system are exciting and thrilling things and not, er, dry, and boring, and stupid, and pointless, which I guess is how these topics are generally perceived. 

Also in my Blogroll is a link to the ISS Website - the log of the International Space Station, which I describe as 'an anti-celebrity reality show'.  This is, let's face it, a really boring site. The style of the entries is dry as Martian dust. There's an interview with some of the astronauts, including the loveable baldie Clay from Expedition 15, which has all the slick professionalism of early episodes of Blue Peter.  A female astronaut (Barbara Morgan, who is also a teacher) has hair that sticks up as if she's been electrocuted, the astronauts have fixed cheerful grins and stilted delivery, and Clay juggles with ping pong balls (which float in microgravity!) looking like a rabbit caught in headlights.  It's refreshing to see such total absence of PR skills and media spin in today's glossy, glitzy world; but it's still dull dull dull. And the truth of the matter is, a lot of the work those guys do up there is mind-numbingly tedious. 

But!!!!   They're still heroes!  And the very notion of a space station with American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts working in unity is extraordinary.  By any criteria, the existence of the ISS is one of the marvels of the modern age. 

But this continues to be is a media non-story; you never get news bulletins about the latest exciting space walk outside the ISS; no one knows the names of these people, or the details of the scientific work they've achieved; and no one much cares. 

And maybe this is a good thing...it shows that space exploration is becoming an accepted and normal thing.  But to me it's a shame that no one gets excited about space exploration until there's a disaster and people die, and politicians clamour to stop scientists spending so much money on stupid rockets. 

The wonder of it is that it's happening, and happening now.

My own daily hit of the Astronomy Picture of the Day has become a source of genuine compulsion and excitement. Today's photo shows the Mars Rover Opportunity about to enter Victoria Crater - and the image is amazing.  Click the links and you'll see an even more amazing photo of a robot shadow on Martian 'soil'.  Opportunity and its sister robot rover Spirit have been on Mars for more than 1000 Sols (a Sol is a Martian day).  They've survived dust devils, they've discovered clear evidence of the existence of water, and they have pluckily if robotically trudged from crater to crater on a rare voyage of discovery. 

Yesterday's space photo of the day is even more amazing - it shows an American astronaut floating free above the Earth. There's no tether, he's using a backpack with nitrogen thrusters - and it's the most beautiful image of man in space I have ever seen. To find it, go to APOTD in the Blogroll, click Archive, and click September 16; or just click here. 

A few days ago the Japanese launched a lunar probe called Selene (Selenological and Engineering Explorer) which consists of several satellites which will orbit the Moon using stereo cameras and x-ray spectrometers to map three-dimensional images of the lunar surface and study its dust.

Last week, also, Google launched a prize worth $30 M to the first private company which manages to land a robotic rover on the Moon and send back a gigabyte of video and images.  To be honest, this feels like a terrible deal, since you have to land your robot on the Moon first in order to be eligible (and if the camera doesn't work, you're $30 M out of pocket). But in principle, this is another indication of the imminence of the moment when space is no longer boring and nerdish, but is sexy and glamorous once again. 

Until that moment comes, I will continue to bang away about my neekish space obsession, and I'll continue to look at the Astronomy Photo of the Day, and I'll continue to read the ISS Website as Expedition 16 and Expedition 17 and Expedition 18 come, and inevitably go. 

At some point, I predict, the imagination of the world will be captured by space.  But what will it take? The first mission to put men and women on Mars? The first space tourist flight? The first Moon Colony?  The first multi-billion mission to mine an asteroid? 

It's probably the latter; if there's money in space, the world will start to pay attention. But in my view, the real reason to be excited about space is that it's a new horizon, a new frontier.  The human spirit needs those, from time to time; such things feed our souls.  But of course, colonising space and harvesting the energy and mineral resources of space don't help us solve our current and pressing problems - political corruption, wars of imperialist expansion, environmental degredation, and grotesque divide between rich and poor.  The exploration of space doesn't make the human race any nicer.

But it is, in my view, a worthy and a glorious cause, one of the better things that human beings can do. 

Photograph of sunset on earth as seen from space reproduced by kind permission of NASA.

On the Joy Of Space

I've just been reading Stephen Baxter's Deep Future, a book of essays about the future and what it may bring.   It's great stuff, and it has some excellent sections on the space race, and how and why we never landed humans on Mars (despite detailed and now yellowing documents planning every stage of that seemingly inevitable next venture.)

And the book contains a marvellous account by astronaut Charlie Duke of his experience of walking on the Moon:

You couldn't feel the texture of the rock.  You couldn't feel it under your feet either.  You sank into the dust.  In some areas you sank in half an inch, some were deeper than that.  There were no colours,  just shades of grey.  As you looked away from the sun, it was a very light grey.  The more you turned into the sun the darker the grey became.  The texture: if you've ever seen a freshly ploughed field, harrowed and very fine, and you know how when it it rains on it, it gives you that sort of pimply look...That was how it was. But it was dry as toast.

Duke also describes going on a space walk, on the journey home:

As I floated out, the Earth was off to the right, probably about a two-o'clock low, real low.  I could see it beyond the hatch, beyond the service Module.  And it was just a little thin sliver of blue and white.  and then I spun around this way and directly behind me there was this enormous full Moon, and it was, I mean it was overwhelming, that kind of feeling.  And you could see Descartes, you could see Tranquillity, all the major features, and it just felt you could reach out and touch 'em.  No sensation of motion at all. The sun was up above my eye line but it's so bright you don't look at it. And everything else was just black.

There was more of a feeling of being in an audience as you were floating.  Here was this big panorama in front of you, below - I just sort of felt detached, I was just enjoying the view, as if I was enjoying the play.

These days, space has lost its glamour.  The nation is glued to the TV set when there's a war in Iraq, or an eventful episode of Big Brother;  but no one pays too much attention to the launching of space stations and shuttles.  The exhilarating wonder of man's reaching for the stars feels like yesterday's news.

That will change, though.  In so many ways, the future is already upon us - we use mobile phones, we have a world wide web, we carry computers in our pockets and genetic engineering is a commonplace.  And thus it's the safest of bets to believe than in another ten years, or twenty, or even thirty years, space exploration will start becoming extraordinary again.  We will have space tourism.  Men and women will inhabit the Moon and scientific alchemy will conjure water out rocks.  New forms of space travel will be pioneered. We will travel to the stars.  This is all the staple stuff of science fiction, but after the long lull years following the Moon landing,  it's inevitable that space will start to be colonised.  There is money to be made out of space; there is energy out there (the Sun); there are minerals; and it's crazy for us not to explore our own cosmic backyard. 

As space travel becomes more frequent, science fiction will become the coolest genre, as the people of the world start marvelling en masse at the wonders of science and the solar system.  My agent will become rich. And in twenty years time, I confidently predict, the Book Swede and I will be having one of our never-ending annual lunches in the best restaurant on Mars.

History shows that the pace of change can sometimes be slow, and at other times can be bewilderingly fast.  And space travel is, I believe, emerging from the doldrums, and is about to catch the wind.

I want to go into space.  I want to float on a tether and marvel at the sight of the Earth floating in front of me, blue and green amd miraculous.  I want to spin around and see the stars blur.  I want to catch an easyJet to Saturn. 

This is all possible, and it's possible soon. 

I hope...

Top photograph: Space Shuttle launching.

Bottom photograph: Space seen from space.

Photographs reproduced by kind permission of NASA.