Moon, Mars and Artemis: Space Exploration in the 2020s
CJ Cowan, Editor
November 22, 2019
Curiosity, the bravest robot in the universe, has sent breathtaking pictures of stunning, red desolation back from our sister planet. The Mars rover has made profound discoveries like evidence of liquid water in Gale Crater while also being a scientific marvel in its own right. A lot of people think that space exploration is a waste of money and a distraction from pressing concerns like climate change, but I feel this is a shortsighted and cynical approach to an upcoming adventure and the ultimate birthright of the human race.
Space has been back in the headlines in recent years in a big way, as President Donald Trump has made grand gestures in the realm of space exploration. From Trump’s widely mocked ‘space force’ to declaring new missions to the Moon and Mars, this may be just another attempt to harken back to better, bygone days of American innovation. However, there is substantial value in human-led space exploration beyond ingratiating the president’s ravenous ego.
NASA’s long-term aspirations in human-led space exploration are centred around the Artemis program. This program encompasses several interrelated, lunar initiatives that aim to make the Moon the technological and scientific proving ground in preparation for a manned mission to Mars. The Space Launch System (SLS) is a highly advanced rocket that is designed for deep space missions to the Moon and Mars. It offers more payload mass, volume capability and energy than any other vehicle of its kind. It is built to be evolvable and flexible, so it can serve in a myriad of possible mission profiles like taking astronauts to and from the moon or robotic explorations of planets as far as Saturn and Jupiter. There are also projects like the Orion Multipurpose Crew Vehicle, a cutting edge spacecraft designed the European Space Agency that will accompany the SLS, and Gateway, a spaceship that will orbit the moon and provide living quarters, research facilities and docking stations for astronauts commuting five days, or 250,000 miles from home.
A surprisingly poignant feature of this program is its name. Artemis, in Greek mythology, was the goddess of the Moon and the sister of Apollo. So, it is an apt name for a program that closely mirrors its predecessor, the Apollo’s missions of the 1960s and 1970s, and will see the first woman to land on the moon and the exploration of the Lunar south pole. It is NASA’s expressed intention to have a woman walk on the moon to inspire a generation of girls to pursue careers in STEM. This is a sure sign of the growing recognition of women in the sciences in the decades since the first moon race.
Vice President Mike Pence announced in March 2019 at a meeting of the National Space Council that the United States would land astronauts on the Moon by 2024. He called on experts to, “think bigger, fail smarter and work harder than ever before.” He also expressed that the need for NASA to pursue faster, more cost-effective commercial avenues for technological development , rather than rely solely on in-house designed rockets and spacecraft. This could entail purchasing rocket technology from private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, as the SpaceX Falcon heavy, even though less capable, costs 150 Million USD in comparison to SLS’s 2 Billion USD per launch. However, there is concern among experts that this is an unrealistic timeline because of NASA’s meagre budget and them being behind schedule, but there is further concern because of China’s recently successful lunar landing and its ambitious plans for the Moon in the 2020s.
This concern is not unjustified, as the People’s Republic of China unsurprisingly refuses to be outdone by the United States. So, in yet another throwback to the 1960s, there very well could be another space race between two rival superpowers. China’s premier space contractor, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, proclaimed China’s intention to not only to go to the Moon, but to establish habitable bases on the surface to gain the experience and expertise necessary for their own Mars mission.
Captain James T. Kirk was right when he said, at the beginning of every Star Trek episode, that space was the final frontier. There are numerous problems on Earth that are innumerably complex, but this should not mean we should lose sight of our better nature. Humans have always implicitly known that our destinies reside among the stars, so it should be no surprise that even in pessimistic times,people are still looking skyward. Even if we avert the crises that currently challenge us, this planet remains too small for us rambunctious primates. We need to become a multi-planet species if we are going to survive the next two millennia. Further, we need to forgo the instincts that mire us in immediate concerns, that arguably got us in this mess in the first place, and think and plan on a grand scale if we are to thrive as a species.