Space

Dr. Jonathan Jiang dreams of beaming an easy-to-read message into space before civilization collapses. He’s run the simulations to test humanity’s self-destruction rate. According to his computers, there’s a 0.1 percent chance that humanity destroys itself in the not-so-distant future. He’s even more pessimistic than Stephen Hawking, who bowed out of public life saying, “I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.” Jiang, who works for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, co-authored the 2022 paper “A Beacon in the Galaxy,” which argues for the importance of streamlining the communications we send into space hoping they might be intercepted by an interplanetary species.

Some time soon we will have to say farewell to our most distant emissary – the Voyager 1 spacecraft. After almost 50 years in space, it’s 15 billion miles away and showing signs of wear and could soon stop transmitting. Late last year, Voyager 1 began to decline, sending back spools of gibberish to its handlers on this planet. A few days ago, Nasa engineers finally traced the problem back to a single chip but it’s clear that Voyager 1 will shortly have to cut contact and make its way out across the universe on its own. It’s strange to think that it will be exploring on out into deep space long after its makers – humans – have become extinct.

The recent spate of articles about attempts by different countries to land vehicles on the Moon make it clear that a new space race is on. Just last month, Russia launched its first mission there in forty-seven years. And although the automated Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and crashed at the last minute, India’s heavily-instrumented Chandrayaan-3 landed successfully just four days later. NASA itself aims to return humans to the lunar surface in 2025 with its Artemis program. Remarkably, more than eighty countries, including Israel and the United Arab Emirates, have thus far established some kind of presence in space.

Articles about the future and “progress” have been popping up a lot lately, with conversations revolving around the inevitable advancements in technology and automation. Where we should head next is the collective theme. To the metaverse? To outer space itself? But instead of setting our sights on colonizing Mars or creating a perfect alternate reality, we should slow our roll, focus on the here and now and consider whether the frenzied “progress” we’re in such a rush to make has demonstrated any benefit to real-life people. Manufacturing is a good place to start. Let this startling reality sink in, reported in 2017 by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development: Between 2000 and 2010, US manufacturing experienced a nightmare.

I’m old enough to have viewed the grainy TV images of the first Moon landings by Apollo 11 in 1969. I can never look at the Moon without recalling Neil Armstrong’s ‘One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind’. It seems even more heroic in retrospect, considering how they depended on primitive computing and untested equipment. 20 July 1969 (NASA/AFP via Getty Images) Once the race to the Moon was won, there was no motivation for continuing with the space race and the gargantuan costs involved. No human since 1972 has travelled more than a few hundred miles from the Earth. Hundreds have ventured into space, but they have done no more than circle the Earth in low orbit.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos joined the billionaire space race today in his suitably phallic looking New Shepard rocket. Bezos successfully travelled to just beyond the Karman Line: the official boundary between the earth’s atmosphere and the rest of the universe. So what sage words did the billionaire have for the rest of us as he looked out of the window at a sight that only 556 other humans have had the privilege to witness? A philosophical thought perhaps? A rumination on our planet’s beauty or fragility? Or maybe an assertion of mankind’s technical prowess? Alas, we were given none of this. According to the entrepreneur, as he descended on a rocket-powered air cloud, it was the ‘Best. Day. Ever.

I have just applied to fly around the moon. My chances of being selected are slim, but is it impossible? Hopefully the explosion of Elon Musk’s test rocket shortly after landing in Texas last week may have winnowed down the competition for a place on Yusaku Maezawa’s flight to the moon and back, scheduled for 2023. That Texas landing was in fact a success, proving it’s possible for a rocket of this size to launch and return intact: third time lucky, the first two rockets tested having exploded on impact.

The American businessman and astronomer Percival Lowell first popularized the notion of life on Mars in 1906 when he described vast canals observed on the planet, some spanning the equivalent distance of Boston to San Francisco. He believed an intelligent Martian civilization was in peril, their world drying out and dying, and they had constructed as a planet-wide irrigation system to move water from Mars’s polar ice caps to the rest of the planet.American folklore has it that the idea of Martian intelligent life was so pervasive that a 1938 radio drama of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, about a Martian invasion, ignited mass panic when millions of people believed it was a real newscast.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. You have no phone service, no television, no GPS for the car and no road atlas because you threw it out in 2009. Planes aren’t flying, and that spinning sound you can’t hear is the sound of space hardware floating out of our control. So dependent have we become on satellites for everything from communications to traffic control that a day without them would mean catastrophe. In the new space race, victory won’t mean landing on the moon or sending a rocket to Mars, but developing a new arsenal to wage and win war in space.

If you do ever find yourself in Moscow with a spare morning or afternoon to discharge, might I recommend a visit to the Museum of Cosmonautics? Roosting below the grandly named ‘Monument to the Conquerors of Space’, the frigid, rather shabby rooms of this museum contain exhibits that are as moving as anything that’s ever been placed in a glass box for tourists to gawp at. When you consider that Soviet Cosmonauts ‘touched the face of God’ using crude, dangerous technology that contained less processing power than the average contemporary fridge – when you consider the sheer bravery of men like Gagarin, Belyayev and Komarov – the major response is (and ought to be) pride. Pride on a human level, that is to say, a species-level pride.