Current Space
After a year orbiting the asteroid Vesta, the space probe Dawn is now on its way to the dwarf planet Ceres, slated to arrive there in 2015. In August, the car-sized Curiosity rover landed safely on Mars, joining the still functioning Opportunity rover and three satellites already in Martian orbit. Mercury is being circled by the Messenger spacecraft, which counter intuitively discovered water ice and organic compounds at its poles. Cassini continues orbiting Saturn.
The New Horizons probe is less than three years from Pluto. Launched in 2006, it passed the orbit of Uranus in 2011; that it is still years from Pluto, traveling at 34,000 mph (the circumference of the Earth is about 24,000 miles), gives you just a bit of a sense of how big our solar system is.
Of course, that pales in comparison to the distances to the stars. The next nearest star is Alpha Centauri, a bit more than 4 light years out; at the rate New Horizon is traveling, it would take it more than 30,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri.
Any technology that we currently have will not get us to any of the 800 worlds we know about circling the stars within a thousand light years of us. Even getting to the furthest reaches of this solar system is a multi-year process; the Juno probe on its way to Jupiter left in August 2011; it won’t get to Jupiter until 2016: a five year cruise.
But, maybe, just maybe, interstellar travel will not always be completely impossible. Harold White, a scientist at NASA, believes that warp drive has moved from being improbable to probable. He and his team are currently building an experimental device to generate a small warp bubble.
Meanwhile, much closer to home, the International Space Station has continued circling the globe. Most of the time it houses six astronauts, usually about evenly divided between Americans and Russians. Even though the Space Shuttle no longer flies, Americans regularly get into orbit by buying seats on the Russian’s Soyuz.
Our dependency on the Russians to get our astronauts into space will end by 2017. By that year, not only will SpaceX’s Dragon be able to haul cargo to and from the International Space Station (as it currently does), it will also carry American astronauts. But SpaceX will not be alone in ferrying people. By then, Boeing’s CST-100 should also be flying, along with Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser and even NASA’s Lockheed built Orion. The US will have gone from having only one way of getting astronauts to orbit, to having four different spaceships.
Additionally, SpaceX is expected to launch its first Falcon Heavy, a heavy lift vehicle derived from their successful Falcon 9. The Falcon 9 can lift thirteen metric tons into low Earth orbit; the Falcon Heavy, whose first launch from Vandenberg Air Force base is scheduled for late 2013 or early 2014, will be able to haul fifty-three metric tons up, making it the most powerful rocket on the planet—and the most powerful rocket since the Saturn V took people to the moon.
There have been four other interesting developments recently that demonstrate that we are most assuredly living in the future that was promised to us.
In June, 2012 Mars One, a Dutch company, announced its plans to start colonizing Mars in 2023, using SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy boosters and the Dragon capsule.
Planetary Resources has announced their intention to mine asteroids for precious minerals and water (which can be used to provide oxygen, drinking water, and rocket fuel). It has the financial backing of the CEOs of Google, as well as the requisite engineers and scientists with long experience with NASA and companies who build rockets, such as Lockheed and Boeing.
Paul Allen has started a new project called Stratolaunch Systems. Paul Allen, together with Bill Gates, founded Microsoft. In 2004 he bankrolled Scaled Composites, allowing it to win the Ansari X-Prize with SpaceShipOne. Stratolaunch, with Scaled Composites in Mojave, is currently constructing the world’s largest aircraft. It is designed to carry a large manned rocket that will be air launched to orbit.
The Golden Spike Company has announced their intention to begin human-crewed flights to the moon starting in 2020. They expect to send people there on a regular, ongoing basis and for much less than what NASA did back in the late 1960’s and early 1970s.
All four of these projects have skilled scientists and engineers with long experience with NASA and the aerospace industry. The question mark facing these new, proposed ventures is not technological. What each company proposes to do can in fact be done. But, and this is a big but: do they have the money to do it? Are their business plans workable? Can they be profitable enterprises? Only time will tell.
