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‘I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.’ Susan Sontag
It’s no surprise, then, that we are in a new Space Race. To the victor the spoils. The challenge will be to ensure that humanity is the victor.
Several countries are working on ways to deflect huge asteroids, capable of destroying the world, off a collision course – and it doesn’t get more common property than that. As the science-fiction writer Larry Niven said, ‘The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space programme.’
This is the cosmic microwave background, which scientists can see through modern space telescopes – all the way back, almost to the very beginning. You can see it for yourself in the static fuzz between channels when you tune an old analogue TV.
Proxima Centauri, our closest star apart from the Sun, is almost 40 trillion kilometres away. The fastest-travelling spaceship so far built would take 18,000 years to get there.
In 1992, 359 years after his trial, the Vatican finally admitted it was wrong.
This is what Newton meant when he said, ‘What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.’
Formula One engineers can soup up their car engines as much as they like, but they won’t top out at the 7.9-kilometres-a-second required to leave Earth’s surface and go into orbit.
Tsiolkovsky’s most famous quote: ‘Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot stay in the cradle forever.’
von Braun joined the Nazi Party and became a major in the SS. In 1942 he oversaw the first launch of a rocket into sub-orbital space, about 100 kilometres up,
In what became known as ‘Operation Paperclip’, von Braun and about 120 other German scientists were secretly flown to the USA to develop America’s ballistic missile programme. The scientists’ pasts were covered up.
programme. He was said to have remarked about his V-2 rockets that they had worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet.
Faustian pact,
The media had a field day with headlines such as ‘Kaputnik!’ and ‘Flopnik’. The Soviets offered the USA help under their ‘programme of technical assistance to backward nations’.
A few months earlier, in his inaugural address, President Kennedy had said, ‘We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to ensure the survival and success of liberty.’
‘We choose to go to the Moon in this decade, and do the other things – not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’
Anders took the famous ‘Earthrise’ photograph and said later they’d gone to the Moon but discovered Earth. The image of our planet hanging precariously in the void, with its thin atmospheric layer protecting it, had a huge psychological effect on many people who saw it and is credited with giving a great boost to the fledgling environmentalist movement.
One day, perhaps, they will be in a museum on the Moon, along with many of the other objects littering the surface. There are several US flags, and a plaque from the Apollo 11 mission that reads: ‘Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.’
As he dropped a feather and a hammer onto the lunar surface, a television audience watched as they fell at the same speed.
America’s Global Positioning System (GPS) system uses a minimum of twenty-four satellites distributed equally around the planet to achieve this.
Theoretically, helium-3 can be used to create nuclear fusion – the Holy Grail of energy production as it would produce higher amounts of energy than nuclear fission but is non-radioactive. On Earth only about 0.0001 per cent of helium is helium-3, but on the Moon there may be a million tonnes of the stuff.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX (full name Space Exploration Technologies Corp), says he intends to send humans to the surface of the planet in this decade and that the journey time will be eighty days or less.
The closest possible distance is about 54.6 million kilometres, the furthest 400 million.
If a space superpower could dominate the exit points from Earth and the routes out from the atmosphere, it could prevent other nations from engaging in space travel. If it dominates the Moon it can keep its riches and be the only power using it to travel further. And if it dominates low Earth orbit, it could command the satellite belt and use it to control the world.
The Moon Agreement (1979) is similarly outdated and has too few signatories to be effective – it’s worth noting that it hasn’t been ratified by the USA, China or Russia.
During the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the city of Irpin lost connection to the internet when all twenty-four of its base stations went offline after most were hit by missiles. Two days later connection was restored. Elon Musk’s SpaceX company had sent Starlink high-speed terminals to the city to connect with the advanced Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit.
Another realistic current scenario: what would China do if the Communist Party was facing a potentially successful uprising against it and Starlink beamed down internet links bypassing the Great Firewall and allowing citizens to organize at a national level?
Scientists on board the ISS have already created living tissue using a 3D printer and bio-ink while working in the Bio Fabrication Facility.
Analysts noted that during the Second World War, 4,500 air sorties had been required to drop 9,000 bombs to destroy a railway bridge. In Vietnam the figure was 190 bombs; in Kosovo it required only one to three cruise missiles. By the time of the invasion of Iraq, a single missile guided by satellite could do the job. Moscow realized it had fallen behind the USA’s space-based military assets and set about trying to catch up.
Instead of staying close to other Russian satellites, 2543 then approached an American military reconnaissance vehicle. More alarming still, it went on to fire a high-velocity projectile into outer space.
millions of ordinary Iranians turn to satellites for information, meaning the government is in a constant battle to find and block the signals coming from outside the country.
Djibouti is close to the equator, which lowers launch costs. It is also home to a Chinese naval base, giving China access to the Red Sea, right at the choke point where the sea narrows
‘Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.’ Albert Einstein
EACH TIME HUMANITY HAS VENTURED INTO A NEW DOMAIN IT has brought war with it. Shipbuilding resulted in warships. Aeroplanes brought fighter jets and bombers. Space is no different and the potential battlefield is beginning to take shape.
‘The ability of the USA to project military power today is based almost entirely on space support. This includes precision guidance, intelligence and surveillance, and the political will to act that comes from the illusion of perfect knowledge of enemy deployments and intentions. It is therefore a tremendous advantage for China to take out US space support prior to initiating a terrestrial military action that would be opposed by the USA.’
most of the technology in it already exists. Space Force has Space Systems Operators; France has developed bodyguard satellites that could carry weapons for ‘active defence’ purposes; dazzling and spoofing equipment is already available; the Wuchiu self-firing artillery has been deployed by Taiwan; and there is an X-37 spaceplane.
ASATs are a constant threat for all satellites, but a major issue is the security of satellites that are crucial for the nuclear-armed countries’ early-warning systems. Some of them warn about the launch of what might be a nuclear missile, while others (e.g. within the USA’s Advanced Extremely High Frequency network) are for use in communications in the aftermath of a nuclear strike. Each costs north of a billion dollars, is the size of a small house, and any sign of them being threatened makes those who own them very, very twitchy.
In 1962 the USA launched a military project code-named Starfish Prime. They detonated a thermonuclear warhead 400 kilometres above the Pacific Ocean – just to see what would happen. The device was 100 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. Within seconds an electromagnetic pulse knocked out electricity in Hawaii, and from Hawaii to New Zealand the night sky lit up in a carnival of colour, a man-made aurora. An artificial radiation belt formed around Earth, lasting a decade before dissipating. At least seven satellites were damaged or destroyed, including the Telstar
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There will also be the defence of commercial interests to consider. For centuries we have seen how the flag follows the trade. A recent example on Earth is the 2022 agreement between China and the Solomon Islands, by which if Chinese interests on the islands are endangered (as they were during the 2021 riots that targeted Chinese property and people) Chinese government ‘forces’ can come to their aid. States will take similar views of their commercial enterprises in space – the flag will follow the trade.
Raymond Aron may have died forty years ago, before some of our modern technological wonders, but even then he recognized our oldest problem: ‘Short of a revolution in the heart of man and the nature of states, by what miracle could interplanetary space be preserved from military use?’
‘For I dipped into the Future, Far as human eye could see; Saw the vision of the world, And all the wonder that would be.’ Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
Contrast two beliefs. First Leonardo da Vinci: ‘I have always felt it is my destiny to build a machine that would allow man to fly.’ And now the eminent Canadian-American astronomer Simon Newcomb, who in 1902 said: ‘Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.’ The following year Orville Wright took off in Kitty Hawk and flew into the future that da Vinci had imagined.
new technology, such as Techshot’s BioFabrication Facility, which it hopes will be used to print human organs in low Earth orbit, thus bypassing the problem of gravity encountered on Earth, the pressure of which restricts the natural growth of cells and tissues.
The pioneers are already scouting the terrain. The early Apollo missions landed near the Moon’s equator for many reasons, among them that on the journey home, in the event of a systems failure after lift-off, an equator launch allows a ‘free-return’ trajectory – the craft loops around the Moon using its gravity and slingshots back to Earth.
‘Freezing the balls off a brass monkey’. As you may be aware, the latter is an English idiom rooted in the myth that Royal Navy cannonballs were stacked in pyramids in a brass tray known as a monkey. When the temperature dropped dramatically, the brass contracted and the pyramid collapsed.
Bake regolith at a very high heat in a container, add hydrogen gas, plus a pinch of scientific knowledge, and water vapour forms which can be separated into oxygen and hydrogen.
astronauts’ breath can also be tapped to produce oxygen, as indeed can their sweat and urine, using technology already developed for the ISS.
Musk is an optimist. He’s set himself the deadline of 2050 to have built a city on Mars for a million people. That’s not a misprint. One million people.
Ernest Shackleton is said to have issued for his exploration of Antarctica: ‘Men wanted for Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.’