Gwynne Dyer: After 40 years, the only way is up

Columnist·Whanganui Chronicle·

11 Jan, 2018 07:10 PM4 mins to read

Ambitious aim: Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft is scheduled to take rock samples from the asteroid 162173 Ryugu in July.

It's going to be a good year in space, and the new players are aiming high. The Indian Space Research Organisation intends to send Chandrayaan-2, an uncrewed orbiter, lander and rover, to the moon in March.

In July, Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft will arrive at its target, the asteroid 162173 Ryugu, in an effort to return samples of this space rock to Earth.

And in June, China will launch the first part of its mission to the "dark side" of the Moon, Chang'e 4, which will position a communications satellite 60,000km beyond the moon to provide a link with Earth. That 425kg relay satellite will also guide the second element of the mission, a lander and rover, down to a soft landing on the far side of the moon, where nobody has gone before.

One benefit of being on the far side is that the moon blocks out stray radio signals from Earth, so the view of the radio spectrum of the universe is far better. But the Chang'e 4 lander will also carry seeds and insects to test whether plants and animals can be grown there.

The older space powers are also breaking new ground. Russia is testing a nuclear engine this year that could cut travel time to Mars from 18 months to just six weeks. In October the European Space Agency will launch a mission to Mercury.

Nasa's InSight Mars lander will launch in May, and the American agency's OSIRIS-REx vehicle will rendezvous with near-Earth asteroid Bennu in August and start taking samples for return to Earth.

But the main event of the year, beyond doubt, is the planned launch of Elon Musk's Falcon Heavy vehicle from Cape Canaveral. (The launch window opens on Tuesday.) "It's guaranteed to be exciting," said Musk last July. "There's a real good chance that it doesn't make it into orbit ... I hope it makes it far enough from the pad that it doesn't cause pad damage. I would consider even that a win. Major pucker factor."

It almost certainly will all work eventually, but this is effectively a new design, not just an upgrade, and there are many elements in a big vehicle such as Falcon Heavy that cannot be tested on the ground. The aerodynamics are different, the stresses are different, and nobody has launched a vehicle with 27 rockets before. The old adage applies: Anything Can Happen And Probably Will.

Yet Elon Musk is also one of the greatest showmen and self-publicists of our time, so he's an inveterate optimist. In early December he tweeted: "Payload will be my midnight cherry Tesla Roadster playing Space Oddity. Destination is Mars orbit. Will be in deep space for a billion years or so if it doesn't blow up on ascent." (That is, a solar orbit like that of Mars, not an orbit around Mars. But everybody knows he does intend to go to Mars eventually.)

It's easy to get carried away by hope, of course, but after Falcon Heavy comes Nasa's Space Launch System vehicle, which is designed to put 70 tonnes into Low Earth Orbit, with a follow-on version capable of 130 tonnes (although its rockets will not be reusable). And Musk's future plans include the BFR (Big F***king Rocket) that would really go to Mars.

These are the sorts of vehicles we need if we are serious about getting out into space in a big way. When I watched the last of the Apollo moon landings on TV in 1972, I assumed we would be seeing rockets like this by the early 1980s. (See Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968, for a reasonable vision of where we could have been in space technology by the turn of the century.)

Instead, the money was cut, and then the Cold War ended. The whole enterprise was mothballed for 40 years, except for unmanned interplanetary missions and a low-orbit International Space Station. But this year it does feel like we are back on track and going somewhere. Forty wasted years, but better late than never.