Joshua Colwell doesn’t bother to watch the giant feats of engineering—the demonstrations of the human spirit—that happen right outside his window anymore. “Rocket launches are so frequent now you forget to look,” says the professor of physics at the Florida Space Institute. “We get launches on consecutive days. It’s become routine”.
Indeed, he not alone among space enthusiasts—he’s a self-confessed ‘Trekkie’ —who reckon we’re facing a golden age of space travel and exploration. “As a space nerd I have to say that we’re in a really exciting period,” agrees Simonetta di Pippo, astro-physicist, former director of human spaceflight for the European Space Agency and former director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. “Of course, we’re working here with frontier technologies, but it’s a new Space Race”.
It’s easy to see how they reach this conclusion.
This year—all well and good—sees the maiden flight of Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket and NASA’s launch of the Europa Clipper to Jupiter. NASA’s Artemis II mission—powered by its gigantic new SLS rocket—is scheduled to get people back orbiting the Moon ahead of a landing in just two years’ time. And the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency plans a robotic mission to the Moon’s moons, Phobos and Deimos.
And it’s been a busy few years prior too. China is building its own space station. NASA’s DART mission landed on asteroids and successfully altered the trajectory of one of them too, a promising test case for when the big one comes hurtling towards us some day. New space telescopes—the James Webb and Euclid—are telling us more about the fundamental stuff of the universe. Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are still wandering Mars, Juno is orbiting Jupiter, the Solar Orbiter is as close as any man-made object has got to the Sun and even contact with Voyager—the furthest any man-made object as travelled, right to the edge of the solar system—has been re-established. No wonder “space travel is in better shape now than it has been for the past 30 to 40 years,” reckons Daniel Britt, professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the University of Florida.
Beyond the 21st century space exploration front-runners, US, China and an increasingly hamstrung Russia, more and more nations are looking to the stars too, among them Taiwan and South Korea. India has landed a probe and rover at the lunar south pole—complete with tyres that leave the Indian Space Agency’s logo imprinted into the lunar regolith—and Israel has crashed one there.
The UAE, of course, has its bold mission to put a lander on the Asteroid belt, preliminary designs for which were unveiled earlier this year, and its Emirates Mars Mission, is the first interplanetary exploration undertaken by an Arab nation. Its Hope probe—the size of a small SUV—recently provided the first year-round measurements of the Martian atmosphere. Indeed, more than a dozen countries are now capable of launching rockets into Earth orbit. And on it goes, to infinity and beyond…
But while there has been a rapid expansion in the number of countries that have launched national space programmes—positively so, “because there’s nothing good about access to space being the purview of just two or three countries,” Colwell notes—it’s big business that is in the driving seat. The first private commercial spacecraft landed on the Moon in February, while private company Axiom plans to launch its own operational space station by 2028. And, notwithstanding the occasional major malfunction—what Elon Musk’s wonderfully calls “rapid unscheduled disassembly”—Space X’s Starship and Super Heavy programme is developing bigger and more powerful rockets than the Saturn 5 that took man to the Moon 55 years ago.
Indeed, national programmes increasingly partner with private enterprise to get into space. In terms of launch vehicles and delivering payloads to space, its companies the likes of Space X that have been transformative, says Colwell; more than half of the functional satellites now in low Earth orbit were put there by the company. Commercial efforts—not least the miniaturisation of satellites and Musk’s development of re-useable rockets, some of which have flown 18 times now—have massively lowered the cost of getting stuff, and people, into space, be that for scientific, exploratory and, increasingly, commercial purposes. “You can see a number of other rocket projects ramping up for what is very much a proven market now,” says Colwell.
Certainly the benefits that might be reaped could be immense, not least from mining and returning to Earth the many valuable rare earth metals found on passing asteroids and the Moon, where there are also reserves of silicon, titanium and, it’s believed, millions of tonnes of Helium-3—necessary, in theory, to make nuclear fission feasible. In contrast, only about 0.0001% of helium on Earth is helium-3. Tapping reserves out there may be necessary to counter their shortage down here, where they are needed to drive the digital and green economies of the future. Huge solar arrays in space, or on the Moon, have been proposed as a solution to our green energy crisis.
But hang on: not every promise made about the future of space is without its skeptics, or its headaches. Colwell, for example, notes how a few years ago he was optimistic about tourism in space—Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic was among several companies promising frequent rides into low Earth orbit, there were no real technical challenges to this and, as Colwell notes “there’s enough people with enough money”. But not enough, he adds,
to make it profitable it seems.
“That’s somehow emblematic of the whole commercial space push—while it’s good there are so many companies pursuing [space travel] all that healthy competition is up against the reality of capital costs to make it happen”. Not for nothing has spaceflight historically been subsidised by governments, a paradigm arguably shifting as private enterprise in space scales up and is prepared to—as the Facebook mantra had it—‘move fast and break things’.
And then there is the geo-political turbulence to come. Not all will be well beyond Earth’s atmosphere suggests Tim Marshall, author of The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics In Space Will Change Our World. The good news, he says, is that space exploration is growing and accelerating —“and if you take the view that our future is inextricably linked to what’s out there, that’s a positive,” he says. “The negative is that we’re starting to project our earthly rivalries beyond the planet now. We did that with Space Race 1.0
but the stakes for Space Race 2.0 are much higher”.
There is, he posits, the likelihood of the increased weaponisation of space. Marshall argues that the war between Russia and Ukraine is—since both sides use satellites in the conflict—the first ‘space war’ and, “for all that when you say ‘space war’ people think of starships and photon torpedoes”, by the 2030s satellites will have laser guns able to destroy other satellites, including those used for early warning missile defence. Russia recently demonstrated its use of satellite technology to jam Ukrainian GPS systems. Indeed, good satellite health is vital to the function of the modern world economy.
And what too of the colonisation of space? Britt draws an analogy between the growing discord in space and the world of 16th century explorer-cum-privateer Francis Drake, “a national hero in England, a pirate to [rival] Spain, who through force was able to impose England’s regulations on everybody else, who made the idea of sovereignty pliable,” he says. “Much as then we’re going to see varying definitions of sovereignty in space. It’s easy to see that the US might claim parts of the Moon and tell everybody else to stay out. And that the Chinese will ignore that. So do I foresee tensions? Oh yes”.
That’s why Di Pippo says that while space exploration can be a platform for diplomacy—take the multi-nation joint-effort of the International Space Station, for example—multi-lateral agreements will be needed to prevent a Rock Rush (the space equivalent of the Gold Rush) tipping over into territorial disputes. That’s particularly around the lunar south pole, where that helium-3, as well as the water necessary to sustain habitation on the Moon, are believed to be most abundant. Open access to space has been agreed on since 1967. A UN Moon Agreement of 1979 stated that space should not be commercially exploited—the US and China refused to sign. More recently the US’s Artemis Accords outlined a collaborative way to exploit the Moon’s resources, but Russia and China wouldn’t sign that. Another treaty calling on nations to simply share their intentions in space has been proposed but goes unsigned too.
“We need to be proactive,” she warns suggesting that the UN should take the lead in this. “The extraction of resources and returning them to Earth requires technology that could be developed quickly with the right funding, but that means you’re appropriating something [and claiming ownership] of course. The argument put is that if you’re bringing back, say, essential rare earth metals then that looks to support the entire global economy.
It’s helping humanity. The sceptical view is that in bringing such resources back you’re changing the current geo-political balance of power in a big way. It’s why we need strong global governance for space, especially as more and more states get involved”.
She is hopeful this can happen, not least because of pressure from the commercial operations increasingly at the forefront of space exploration—they won’t want their assets jeopardised by some astro Wild West. Not for nothing is the title of her latest book The Moon As a Lab for Peace.
For all of the complexities of managing national interests Colwell argues that what’s needed is precisely that—a greater emphasis on getting to the Moon and building something permanent there. As he points out, Earth is lucky to have such a satellite—ideal as it would be, thanks to its low gravity, as a launchpad for exploration of deeper space. He worries that all of the space community’s excitement around a Mars mission—if it takes three days to get to the Moon, it will take nine months, one way, to get to Mars with current tech—just detracts from what could be the building of a more sustainable presence on our closest neighbour.
That distance to Mars isn’t nothing, either. It raises a question of whether humanity is likely to get much beyond Mars, save the invention of some form of transport—among many other technologies—as yet only imagined in science fiction. That isn’t to say we won’t explore deep space, only that it may prove to be done more by AI-embodied robotics than by people.
That may come as a considerable cost to the advancement of knowledge: what the Insight lander on Mars took two years trying to do (dig a 17 inch deep hole) would take an astronaut just a few minutes. NASA’s Curiosity rover is faster than previous rovers but still moves 13 times slower than a crawling human. Bringing back the right samples are crucial too—it was only last year that on-going study of samples returned by Apollo 17 52 year ago has allowed us to work out that the Moon is, in fact, 40 million years older than previously understood. Humans have agency, in the way robots do not – yet.
“There is simply no comparison in terms of what people can achieve relative to robots,” insists Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, which operates a research facility deep in the Utah Desert to work out what it would take to live on the red planet: so far it has circulated over 270 crews through the station, simulating 7.5 years of living on Mars.
“Look at what the crew of Apollo 17 achieved in three days [of work on the surface of the Moon] relative to what the Mars landers have done in a decade and I don’t think there’s an argument,” he adds. “I live in Colorado in one of the most famous locations for dinosaur fossil finds.
And you could parachute a hundred rovers into the area and they wouldn’t find one. To speak of robots that can do anything like the things people can do is to be in the realms of science fiction”.
Yet, for all that robotics is advancing all the time, it’s nonetheless true that humans and space are not a good mix, and not just because of the immense cost of the engineering required to sustain their lives in space; another reason why tourism is likely to be limited. Continued exposure to micro-gravity, unpredictable solar flares and radiation makes space deadly: an astronaut going to Mars will be subject to around 60 percent of the radiation dose recommended for their entire space-faring career. A 2023 study has shown that spaceflight can trigger widespread changes in the human brain.
“It’s not at all clear that humans can survive in space —it’s just so extremely inhospitable. Nor is it certain that the argument we should back the future of humanity as a multi-planet civilisation is the right step either” points out Avi Loeb, professor of science at Harvard University and author of Interstellar and Extraterrestrial, a man not shy of serious scientific investigation of arguably outlandish ideas, not least that the first interstellar object to come within range of Earth’s telescopes, in 2017, was possibly of intelligent alien origin.
“We’re looking to Mars when perhaps we should be thinking more about building space stations—designed from scratch for human needs,” he suggests. “We have yet to send autonomous AI systems and so can’t gauge how successful they would be in sending postcards back to Earth, like kids do when they leave home. That all said, I’d take a one-way ticket into space in a heartbeat. The more I read the news lately the more I’m ready to get
off this muddy rock”.
Perhaps space’s challenges to our fragile and needy human form is why Martin Rees, the cosmologist and UK’s Astronomer Royal, argues that—at least until humans are genetically modified for deep spaceflight—we are, as the title of his latest co-authored book suggests, at The End of the Astronaut. He suggests that our perception of what is possible has been somewhat skewed by our constant exposure to science fiction in the six decades since Armstrong first stepped out of the LEM.
“I think human space travel will be left to the billionaires and sponsors who can launch those people who are ready to take that very high risk,” says Rees. “The idea of mass emigration to Mars is delusional. But there will always be those crazy adventurers—it’s
those who will be the first people on Mars later this century —and we should cheer them on because it’s in the spirit of that human desire to explore”.
“I think it would be terribly sad if human space exploration ceased and the only thing going on was satellite launches and bringing some minerals back to Earth,” agrees Colwell. “I can’t think of any discovery that would be more transformational for human civilisation [than contact with life on other planets], for example”.
Yet even he has proposed the idea that the answer to the Fermi Paradox—if the universe is full of life, where is everybody?—is that space travel is simply too inhospitable to all life. “Maybe we’re not alone in the universe, but nonetheless we’re condemned to be alone,” he laments.
Is there even an appetite to find out? Colwell reckons that for all that “it would benefit humanity hugely if it was to become a space-faring species, and we’d really hurt without the benefits it brings [from medicine to telecommunications, agricultural planning to weather forecasting], the vast majority of people on the planet just don’t care about it”. And as for those that are in favour, many are hampered by being too risk-averse. Daniel Britt notes the “vastly disproportionate” negative public reaction to the two Space Shuttle crashes that effectively saw the Shuttle programme mothballed—despite this being a less than a two percent failure rate.
“Probably governments’ risk aversion is a recipe for doing very little actual exploration,” he worries. “The whole NASA ‘failure is not an option’ credo is total BS. When you do new stuff you get it wrong all the time”. It’s an idea, he says, that the public will need to embrace.
Tim Marshall is hopeful that, as the big one—the Artemis lunar landing—draws nearer it will “put a rocket booster under global interest”. Space may look to become a hotbed—or rather a freezing cold bed—of commercial, political and military interests, but he’s adamant that we should not lose sight of the positives, “for all that the idea that space as a universal commons—for all humanity—is at least fraying at the edges”.
After all, he says, would we rather the advances that are being made in space, such as they are, for good and sometimes for ill, weren’t being made because they’re a mixed bag? “Would we want the industrial revolution not to have happened because it brought the machine gun as well as the steam engine?” he asks.
“Given our recent history it appears inevitable that we’ll take all of the problems we have down here on Earth into space. But that’s part and parcel of what we do as we become more technologically advanced,” he adds. “It’s always an unholy trade-off. The Space Race 1.0 divided people too. But it did capture the world’s imagination.
And without question we’re seeing that again with Space Race 2.0. There’s a growing realisation of how central space is and is going to be to all of our lives”.