Posted on 12/28/2003 2:46:47 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
The problems that befell the Mars mission won’t stop the dawning of a new era in the space race. Iain S Bruce explains why
Hurtling through time and space, the Mars probe landed, bounced and rolled to a stop. Waiting back on earth for robotic arms to crank into life, extend four delicate solar panels towards the stars and begin broadcasting a signal of success, mission control stopped, the world held its breath, and then nothing happened at all.
It was no way for a 93 million mile journey to end, but even as Beagle 2’s British launch team bravely struggles to conceal its disappointment beneath a veil of public optimism there is a growing realisation that in reality, their deep-space adventure has only just begun. An off-course landing into terrain where radio transmission is difficult could explain the unit’s eerie silence; one of many possible hitches, from faulty internal clocks to malfunctioning springs, that its internal systems could yet identify and overcome, but even ultimate failure will merely mark the conclusion of the project’s opening phases.
“This isn’t over by a long shot and it’s far too early for anyone to assume that Beagle 2 is lost forever. Obviously it was an anticlimax not to begin receiving its signals immediately but if we can make contact any time during the next two months we can still pull this off,” said Colin Pillinger, the project’s chief scientist. “It’s very much like sending somebody a love letter: once you know they’ve got it you can only wait for their response.
“Even should the worst happen, we would take the lessons Beagle provides and continue reaching for Mars. It is a relatively minor scientific hiccup, and in reality its eventual success or failure will mean little to mankind’s accelerating space race.”
If the crushing disappointment looming over Britain’s £40 million mission to search for evidence of life on the red planet hangs heavily over the festive season, the scientific gloom cannot last long.
That the race into space is back on may surprise those who assumed that it was won sometime back in the 60s, but this time round it is no longer the subject of an intergalactic, cold war power play between ideolo gical giants vying for propaganda points.
This time out of the traps, teams from the US, Russia, China and Japan are leading a galactic scramble for precedence on a frontier tipped to become the next great economic and military battleground.
Even as an international network searches for signs of life from Beagle 2 , space exploration itself is entering a bold new phase of evolution. Commercial interests are eyeing the moon with increasing enthusiasm, and the potential for profit looks set to be the driving force behind the cosmonauts of the 21st century.
“This time the space race is being fought out by private industry, not superpower nations, and it is already underway below the threshold of the general public’s awareness. All of these companies intend to return healthy profits from their projects, and all of them want the notoriety that will come with success as the first private commercial venture to the moon,” said Gregory Nemitz, president of TransOrbital.
Nemitz’s Virginia-based company, which plans to launch an orbiting spacecraft – TrailBlazer – designed to broadcast high-definition TV video back to ground control for use in commercial products, is one of at least five companies currently mounting serious attempts to glean an income from products that are, literally, out of this world.
Applied Space Resources Inc of New York proposes a robot-lander that would bring back samples of lunar rock and soil for sale, an ambition they share with Californian internet business developer Idealab. LunaCorp of Virginia, meanwhile, is in the advanced stages of planning a remote-controlled rover that would carry high-resolution digital cameras for the entertainment market. It intends to follow this up by using similar remote vehicles to mine the moon’s frozen water deposits.
Recently, water-ice deposits were discovered in permanently dark areas near the moon’s poles. The surrounding mountain peaks are bathed in near-constant sunlight, making this terrain one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the solar system as the polar ice is capable of supporting human life, both as water and as breathable oxygen derived from it. Hydrogen and oxygen extracted from the water could also be used as rocket propellant, a fact which – with it costing approximately $50,000 (£28,000) per pound to launch anything from Earth and into orbit – would drastically reduce the fuel costs of further exploration.
Unsurprisingly, businesses are now waking up fast to the potentially staggering implications of this resource for economic explosion, scientific discovery and national security. So keen is the interest, some companies are looking elsewhere for target properties, with the Pasadena-based SpaceDev, the first commercial space exploration company to open its doors, planning the launch of a small satellite to the near-Earth asteroid Nereus in late 2004.
Convinced that a profit will be made on this expedition by selling space on the orbiting craft to companies, academic institutions and the US government, SpaceDev’s president Jim Benson plans to land the satellite on the asteroid’s surface after its scientific contracts are complete, giving him a legal foundation on which to stake his claim to the rock. He will then begin a mining operation for the water also believed to be available on Nereus and remains convinced that it is a viable commercial proposition.
He said: “For right now, the only value of the moon is entertainment, but there are serious business opportunities to be had outside the Earth’s orbit and we intend to exploit them. I would not, believe me, have invested millions of my own money in the project if I were not certain that this were the case.”
There are those, however, even from within the ranks of the space community itself, who express reservations over whether it is yet possible to mount a credible business venture that involves lunar exploration. The principal investigator for Nasa’s $63m (£35.5m) Lunar Prospector mission himself would like to be optimistic that a private return to the moon can happen but insists on hedging his bets.
“We’re all hopeful that each of us somehow succeeds and that will get the whole thing going,” says Alan Binder, now director of the Lunar Research Institute in Tucson, Arizona. “But my view is that talk is cheap. It takes money to buy beer. When somebody actually starts putting their spacecraft together, I’ll believe it.”
Most of the companies involved in this latest moon race admit that they are as yet only in the theoretical stages of their business development, though each remains steadfastly optimistic about their chances of success. Scientifically, their plans are feasible, but proving that they are commercially so to sceptical venture capitalists is the big breakthrough the industry is waiting for: “The actual contest is the race to secure the required funding. The companies are all working as hard as they can to convince major investors that the next hot stock opportunity is not an internet company but the new and emerging space companies,” says Nemitz.
David Gump, president of LunaCorp, has been developing his company’s strategy for a moon launch for over 10 years without actually leaving the Earth’s surface. While the enormous costs of any space launch are a major stumbling block, as they fall on a yearly basis and creep ever closer to the identified cost-effective point of $20,000 (£11,300) per person this will soon cease to be a major problem. The real issue, he says, is that space ventures will have to clearly identify the existence of a real market for their wares.
“Things are becoming more possible now than they have been ever before, and the believability of going back to the moon with robots has certainly increased and gained credibility. The problem is that you’ve got to prove that the customers exist before you can go to the investment community and get any substantial amount of money, and that is proving harder to do than most of us expected.”
Setting up shop on the moon, even in these technologically enlightened times, will appear to many to smack of starry-eyed romanticism and scientific ambition more than it does cold-blooded business acumen.
Recent movement has awoken the concerns of some, however, and California has already spawned a lunar ecology group campaigning to ensure that commercial activity does not disturb the satellite’s natural environment or destroy historic landmarks such as the footprint left by Neil Armstrong following the first landing in 1967. With the support, among others, of Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the campaign’s existence would seem to indicate that in the space community at least, the belief is burgeoning that doing business on the moon is only a matter of years away.
“The fact that there are at least five companies that are serious about the prospects for completely commercial lunar projects surely indicates that the technology required is well within the grasp of non-government organisations,” says Nemitz.
“All of these companies intend to return healthy profits from their projects and all of them want the notoriety that will accompany that, but none of them are fools ready to throw their money away, and the sceptics should be well aware of that.”
No less keen is the interest exhibited in space by military strategists. Calls for the creation of “US Space Forces”, to dominate space were first raised in a consultation blueprint commissioned by President George Bush’s team in September 2000, and recent weeks have seen discussions over the potential to use the multi billion dollar International Space Station as a tool providing surveillance, intelligence-gathering and global navigation capabilities to the American military.
“We’re still looking for that definitive mission, but space control is becoming more important as we have very high-value assets in orbit. We depend on these assets and are interested in protecting them,” Air Force Lt Col Steve Davis told a recent meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “There is increasing reliance on using space for national needs.”
It is not unique to include space-based assets as part of military strategy. The August 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq saw the US make great use of space-borne hardware, earning it the label of the world’s first space war, while rapid-fire cannons were installed onboard some of the Soviet Union’s early orbital piloted stations in order that they could defend themselves from any hostile intercepts.
The scientists currently glued to monitors awaiting the detection of a signal from Beagle 2 express reservations over the idea that their research might be exploited by businessmen and armies, but remain grimly resigned to the possibility. Their subject of study represents the last great unclaimed territory known to man, they believe, and like any frontier will attract its share of opportunists.
“My only interest in space is founded upon a desire to understand it, but it would be naive to assume this is an ethos universally shared,” said Pillinger. “The world has been dreaming of what opportunities the great unknown might hold for decades now and whatever the motivation behind it, the race will not stop until we’ve got there.”
Wilbur and Orville spent $1K of their own money ($20K 2003 -- not too staggering an amount, for two bachelors to spend on a hobby over the course of 5 years) -- and succeeded.
Given the 80/1 effectiveness ratio, my hopes for the future of manned space remain bouyant.
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