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Since then, more than 550 people have blasted themselves into the deep black abyss, although not all agree on how far
up you need to go until you hit space, so there is no internationally accepted figure. Only a 10th of those have been
women, in big part due to sexist policies by Nasa and Russia’s Roscosmos space agency.
A total of 12 men walked on the moon over the next few years, all Americans, but no one has been back there since
1972. In fact, no one has left the outskirts of the Earth since then.
We imagine astronauts floating in free space or bouncing in moon craters, yet the majority of those lucky enough have
instead spun around in low Earth’s orbit – between 99 and a few hundred miles high. That’s where the vast array of
communications and navigation satellites live, speeding at thousands of miles an hour to avoid plummeting back to
earth.
What do we do there?
Even though we did not go back to deep space, humans have begun to live and work outside the Earth’s atmosphere,
often conducting experiments on themselves to determine the effects of weightlessness, or microgravity, on the
human body.
By 1986, the Soviet Union had launched the Mir space station. When it eventually fell to Earth (thankfully unoccupied)
and burned up, our current space outpost, the International Space Station (ISS), was launched. Since 2000, humans
have been living in space constantly. There are three up there at the moment, speeding around the globe once every 90
minutes.
Comparing their bodies throughout, scientists were able to assess how bones, muscles and other parts of the body
deteriorate in space. There is even a gym on the ISS where astronauts can keep their muscles – no longer needed to
prop them up – from slowly wasting away. But they need to wear a harness to keep them from floating off the
treadmill. One big issue is that eye problems develop, but Kelly found his body recovered fast on return. He and his
twin seemed in similar shape – good news for future deep space missions.
Following the big fight over the shuttle, which looked fantastic but also restricted space adventuring to Earth’s orbit as
well as costing a fortune, the US took a side seat in launches. Most astronauts are now sent by the Russian space
agency, which sells round-trip rides on its Soyuz spacecraft for between $21m and $82m.
Others say paying for human space flight pumps money into the economy, arguing that spin-off companies from space
research and a growing commercial space industry generates seven to 14 times the cost of missions. And Nasa, the
most significant global player, is not spending nearly as much as it used to. About $19bn is spent by the US government
on its budget, roughly half a percent of all federal spending. During the early Apollo programme, that was between 4%
and 5%.
A big exception to this is China, which has gone it alone with its space ambitions, never sending an astronaut to the
ISS. In 2006, Beijing reportedly tested lasers against US imaging satellites in what appeared to be an attempt to blind or
damage them, and US lawmakers later banned cooperation between Nasa and China’s state agency.
However, the future of any effective human space flight is certainly likely to be cooperative rather than antagonistic.
Since 2011, national spaces agencies in 14 countries have attempted to coordinate their dreams into a single vision. The
most recent plan, published in January this year, said they had agreed to “expand human presence into the solar
system, with the surface of Mars as a common driving goal”.
The moon has several advantages. It’s only three days away, rather than a several-month round trip to Mars, and has
been touted as a location for a research station similar to the one in Antarctica. From their celestial laboratory,
scientists could study the impact of radiation exposure and near-weightlessness on the body at a closer distance to
Earth, but still within deep space, all while preparing for trips further afield.
In what is being coined the “billionaire’s space race”, Elon Musk, founder of Telsa electric cars, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos
and Virgin boss Richard Branson all want to send private citizens to space. Their companies, SpaceX, Blue Origin and
Virgin Galactic, are set on making human space travel cheaper.
They join a handful of commercial space flight companies that already work as contractors for national space agencies.
Aerospace industry titans Boeing and Lockheed Martin send heavy launchers into space, but that costs at least $350m
per launch – several times more expensive than SpaceX’s new $90m Falcon Heavy system.
SpaceX has around $10bn worth of launches already booked and saves costs through reusable spacecraft, where even
the rocket boosters land themselves back on the ground and can be dusted off for reuse.
And while it is looking increasingly likely that the ISS will be defunded in the next decade, several private ventures are
considering either taking over or rebuilding their own space stations.
What’s next?
As government agencies prioritise the moon, others are looking straight at Mars. Musk has said his life goal is to create
a thriving Mars colony as a fail-safe for humanity in case of a catastrophic event on Earth, such as a nuclear war or
Terminator-style artificial intelligence coup. For this, SpaceX is developing the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), which he
claims could send crewed flights to the red planet by mid-2020.
Musk says the BFR is partly inspired by Tintin’s rocket and will be the biggest ever made at close to 40 storeys high and
capable of ferrying as many as 100 passengers per trip, depending on how much luggage they want to put in the hold.
As well as a healthy satellite launch business, SpaceX is raising money by selling tickets on the BFR for a trip, some
would say a jolly, around the moon. Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese fashion billionaire and art collector, is funding such a
mission slated for 2023 and says he is going to invite artists with him for the week-long trip to re-engage the public in
the wonder of our universe.
Further reading
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