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Curiosity
Many famous speakers have talked about curiosity, some call it the spark that leads to the fire, while others say curiosity is dangerous shown in the phrase, ‘curiosity killed the cat’. In many ways, curiosity is a coping mechanism. A curious individual is more capable of handling unwanted emotions or thoughts, as they are simply the start to questions and new discoveries. A curious person is also more likely to seek out the new, and is more accepting of conflict between what they know and contradictions against what they think they know. Curiosity is nature’s built-in exploration skill, it’s in every single one of us. It is a cheat code that has allowed us to advance to the stage we are now. Think about it, without curiosity our cavemen ancestors wouldn’t have made the difficult journey of exploring the different continents, we would have no story without curiosity. There would have been no World Wars, no Hiroshima incidences, no terrorism. Depression stories would have not even existed. Life would have been easy. We would have been living exactly like animals do. There would have been no questions like, who am I? What is my purpose of life here? What is the significance of living? People would have never felt the need for satellites, mobile phones, computers or to sum it all the ‘technology’ we use every day in these modern times. Curiosity is why there are footprints on the moon and rovers moving about on Mars. We need this critical ingredient to enlighten everyone before mankind can think about exploring the stars.
Why did Columbus travel west? Why did we go to the moon? Because it is attraction of the unknown, the prospect of adventure that drive humans to seek new frontiers to explore. There are a number of reasons to go to Mars. The first is as I have discussed about above, is curiosity. The craving of knowing the answers to the questions: Is Mars the key to finding our purpose? Can it teach us about Earth’s history? Is there life on Mars? These questions are just samples out of hundreds of hungry questions for scientists all over the world. The second reason is the need for adventure and the realization of the impossible dream. The third reason is progress. Mars One, (a private organization that was founded in 2012 with the aim of landing the first humans on Mars and leaving them there to establish a permanent human colony in the coming decades), stated that “Sending people to Mars is ‘the next giant leap for mankind’. This mission will jumpstart massive developments in all kinds of areas, a few examples being in recycling, solar energy, food production and the advancement of medical technology.” This statement is understandable, as, if we have the ability to get to Mars, it would mean that our own perspective knowledge on technology would have to improve greatly and advance. By using this new knowledge, we could solve global warming problems here on earth and many other perceived problems. X Prize Foundation founder, Peter Diamandis, stated, “We humans love a target, we love to have something to shoot for, to aim for and to build a plan to make happen. Mars has that sexiness, that romance, that I think is galvanising a lot of people right here, right now.”
Money
The second ingredient required to become a spacefaring civilization is money. Money has an enormous part to play before we set one foot in space. Therefore, most scientists have discussed that the most direct and efficient way to start to this journey into exploration, is by making the top priority to colonize Mars. By doing this we would have a direct path out of our inner solar system. This is because establishing a colony on Mars will result in us having a higher success rate of travel as we have done it already and it shortens the travelling distance to other planets in the outer solar system. Lastly by the time we reach Mars and create a colony, the engineers and scientists would have figured out new ways to make space travel easier and cheaper. Therefore, every time we send a rocket off, the total cost would get lower and lower with each journey. This is because progress is inevitable. However, before we reach the stage of going to Mars, we have to come up with the most effectual financial plan that gets the cost as low as possible while maintaining the bare minimum requirements of safety and transport for passengers and cargo on the ship.
The current launch and manufacturing process cost of rockets is outstanding. But there has been progress, this is evident from past missions into space. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. NASA was established in 1958, and since then they have successfully launched over 200 manned flights. Two have ended in failure, causing the death of the entire crew: STS-51-L (the Challenger disaster) in 1986, and STS-107 (the Columbia disaster) in 2003. (Apollo 1 in 1967 lost three crew members but never launched).
Because of this, NASA has maintained a remarkable 98% success rate, which stands at the top of the space industry. The very first manned/crewed flight by NASA was the Mercury program (1959-1963), the objective was to put an astronaut into Earth’s orbit and return safely back to earth. The whole process cost and $277 million in 1965 dollars, which translate into $1.6 billion in 2010 dollars . And the more famous mission, the Apollo program (1960–1972) cost an even greater amount, however this was to be expected as the national goal of the mission, which was landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth, was many times more difficult than just sending a rocket into earth’s atmosphere. The Apollo program cost $20 billion in then-year dollars or $110 billion in today’s money, to the public eye this was an astronomical amount of money and some believed it to be a waste but I will get to that later on. The Apollo program consisted of 12 manned missions to the moon, and only three of the missions failed to fulfil the mission criteria. However, with each mission, the overall cost was lower than the previous, this shows the advancement of knowledge as after each launch, the scientists and engineers managed to find cheaper ways to get an object into space. For example, scientist have realised that they could shorten the travel distance to the moon and into Low earth orbit (LEO), by launching at a time where the earth has aligned to a position, where the distance to the moon is shortest.
By doing this they cut down on fuel costs. There is an alternative method called the geosynchronous orbit (a high Earth orbit that allows satellites to match Earth’s rotation, this is because of the effect of Earth’s gravity; it pulls more strongly at satellites that are closer to its centre than satellites that are farther away). This technique is used currently with the GOES 13 satellite, which is an American weather satellite. Another example is when they use the earth’s orbit to keep an object moving, which saves fuel, there are currently loads of satellite that have been left in Low earth orbit which saves millions of dollars each year. These are all methods that lower the cost of fuel, which results in lighter cargo thus less thrust is needed to get the rocket off the ground and into space.
However, Nasa is not the only space company that has made advancements of space travel. There is another company called SpaceX which had made large strides in the field on engineering. SpaceX, is a private American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company. It was founded in 2002 by entrepreneur Elon Musk with the goal of reducing space transportation costs and enabling the colonization of Mars SpaceX has since developed the Falcon launch vehicle family and the Dragon spacecraft family, which both currently deliver payloads into Earth orbit. It’s not just noteworthy that SpaceX is launching rockets so quickly, the fact is it’s doing them well. Out of the Falcon 9’s 50 missions, 48 have been successful. That’s a 96 percent success rate a track record that would make any company proud and more so for Space X considering they are new to the space race. The main reason why SpaceX has become such a headliner however these days is because of the new reusable rocket that they manufactured, and this innovation has revolutionised space travel. SpaceX announced in 2011 that it was beginning a reusable launch system technology development program.
In December 2015, the first Falcon 9 was flown back to a landing pad near the launch site, where it successfully accomplished a propulsive vertical landing. This was the first such achievement by a rocket for orbital spaceflight . In April 2016, with the launch of CRS-8, SpaceX successfully vertically landed a first stage on an ocean drone ship landing platform. In May 2016, in another first, SpaceX again landed a first stage, but during a significantly more energetic geostationary transfer orbit mission. In March 2017, SpaceX became the first to successfully re-launch and land the first stage of an orbital rocket. SpaceX plans to launch its Dragon 2 spacecraft in January 2019 and to launch its first crewed spacecraft Dragon 2 in June 2019. In September 2016, CEO Elon Musk unveiled the mission architecture of the Interplanetary Transport System program, an ambitious privately funded initiative to develop spaceflight technology for use in crewed interplanetary spaceflight. In 2017, Musk unveiled an updated configuration of the system, now named the BFR (Big Falcon Rocket), which is planned to be fully reusable and will be the largest rocket ever on its debut, currently scheduled for the early 2020s .
The rocket launch is important not only because the Falcon Heavy is the world’s most powerful rocket, but also because the SpaceX rocket’s cost structure is far cheaper than the competition. The Falcon Heavy could revolutionize space travel as a result and perhaps one day fulfil Musk’s dream of sending people to Mars.
Thanks partially to the fact that SpaceX can retrieve and reuse rocket boosters in multiple launches, the privately-funded company founded by Musk, who also owns Tesla, is able to keep its rocket costs relatively low. SpaceX says that it costs $62 million every time its Falcon 9 rocket is launched, while the more powerful Falcon Heavy costs an estimated $90 million per launch. (SpaceX even says customers can get cheaper rates if they buy in bulk: “Modest discounts are available, for contractually committed, multi-launch purchases.”) .If space travel can cost less while still being reliable and safe, then Musk is all the closer to realizing his long term goal of sending humans to colonize Mars.
However, there are some Cons on spending so much money on Space exploration. For example, because of the large amount of funds going into the space program it means we’re leaving a lot of litter behind. According to information provided by NASA, there are more than 500,000 items of debris that are currently being tracked as they orbit our planet. This space junk is litter that is flying at a speed of over 17,500 miles per hour, which means an impact could do great damage. Now expand the amount of space junk that exists to other planets or solar systems and the amount of litter we would leave behind is quite enormous, this has created large problems with activists. Another example is the loss of money, up to now there have been no agreements in place for rich resources that may exist in space. The current treaties which govern space exploration forbid governments from appropriating territories in space. The amount of materials in a single asteroid could be more than $100 billion. Planetary Resources has evaluated an asteroid called “Davida” to be worth $100 trillion or more. Although the US has brought back hundreds of pounds of rocks from the moon without litigation, there would be a greater fight in grabbing resources that are in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. If those profits can be funnelled toward a mutual good, then humanity can do more than just survive. It could thrive however that is not the case, so for the meantime we are spending millions of dollars on space travel while purposely ignoring potential goldmines that could benefit the whole planet.
Global Agreement and Ethics
Space exploration is an exciting and constantly progressing field. Fulfilling natural human curiosity about worlds other than our own, exploration of our solar system and beyond is generally met with support by people from all walks of life. While the majority of our effort is put into allowing both objects and humans to survive safely on other planets and moons, there is also a need to protect other environments from us. The potential contamination and destruction of other worlds and other life is both a practical and an ethical problem. Contamination is generally categorized as forward or backward (Rummel, 2001). Backward contamination is contamination of Earth by substances that have been to other planets in the solar system, and is generally of minor concern. Few objects that we send to other planets or moons ever return to Earth, and thus far no other life or transferrable hazards have been found. Forward contamination, on the other hand, has been a concern since the first voyages to Mars by the Viking spacecraft in 1976 (Rummel, 2001). Forward contamination is the contamination of other worlds, and any potential indigenous life, by Earth. We can’t know what effect Earth-based life might have on alien life, but the legacy of invasive species and pathogens wreaking havoc on native species on Earth suggests great harm could come of contamination.
Nonetheless various organizations exist to develop guidelines and rules for preventing forward contamination, including NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection and COSPAR, the International Counsel of Science’s Committee on Space Research. Since the 1960s these organizations have set rules about the sterilization of spacecraft and tools sent to other planets, with particular focus on Mars and Europa, two of the most promising and accessible locations for potential alien life. Unfortunately, their guidelines are often based on outdated or theoretical values of the probability of contamination and damage to alien environments and life (Greenberg & Tufts, 2001). Additionally, it is nearly impossible to completely sterilize a spacecraft leaving Earth. When humans travel in those spacecraft, contamination is almost certain (McKay, 2009). Beyond contamination, ethical questions must also be considered about human intervention and research of potential alien life.
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