There was a time when the phrase ‘failure is not an option’ was often used in the control rooms of the world’s space missions.
After the explosion of Elon Musk’s Starship spacecraft in 2023, ‘Rapid Random Disassembly’ has come into widespread use.
Critics say the word was used to downplay the seriousness of the spaceship ‘exploding’ and that the incident happened not once, but twice.
The spaceship being developed by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX contains the most powerful rockets in history. It is 397 feet long and 29.5 feet wide and has a total of 39 engines. It has two launch stages and weighs 150 tonnes and can carry 100 people into space and later bring them back to Earth.
SpaceX plans to use Starships to launch multiple satellites into space. NASA has commissioned another version of the same spacecraft to take its astronauts to the Moon and maybe one day even the first inhabitants of Mars.
Atrium Space Consortium of London insures commercial satellites and launchers. “The idea of completely reusing such a launch vehicle is very exciting and on this scale,” says its underwriter David Wade.
In April, the first Starship launched in the US state of Texas, the rocket crashed four minutes into the flight and its debris fell over the Gulf of Mexico, damaging the spacecraft’s launch pad.
It underwent thousands of modifications, and in November a second flight lasted eight minutes before it too crashed. Despite this, SpaceX declared the flight a success.
David Wade says that the second Starship flight was better than he expected, “They’re doing incredibly well.”
When Elon Musk founded the company in the early 2000s, the company promised to revolutionize the space rocket business. But his Falcon One flight was also unsuccessful and people were not very positive about the idea of his reusable launchers.
20 years later, some of their rockets have flown 18 times and SpaceX completely dominates the launcher market. In addition, SpaceX regularly transports astronauts to the International Space Station from its Dragon spacecraft.
The Space Coast is the part of the US state of Florida from where NASA has been sending its astronauts into space. “The Space Coast was dead 10 years ago when 10,000 people lost their jobs when the shuttle retired,” says Ken Kramer, managing editor of the website SpaceUpclose, which also covered the launch in Florida. But in the last four to five years it has been recovering and space companies are coming back. Now there is excitement here and it has happened because of SpaceX.
Today there are once a week launches from Cape Canaveral. But despite the success and determination of SpaceX, Ken Cramer is skeptical of NASA’s plan to use the Starship as a giant lunar lander.
“It’s going to take a lot of work and it’s quite complicated,” he says. They have to land straight, if they land crooked, the astronauts will be killed. A Starship will be launched 16 times before it reaches the Moon.
And 51 years after Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan left his final footprints, the moon is back in the headlines. Perhaps surprisingly, the most ambitious mission in decades was led not by traditional space superpowers but by India. On August 23, Chandrayaan 3 made history by becoming the first mission to reach the Moon’s south pole.
“It was of global importance,” says Malla Mitra, a former NASA scientist and co-founder of Delhi-based education company Steam and Space. Landing on the south pole of the moon was more difficult because it has more craters. So India has proved that it can build this mission and the related technology and build it at a low cost.
Live coverage of the landing was full of patriotic fervor, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi being shown waving the country’s flag as the lander touched down on the lunar surface. The mission rover’s six wheels were embossed with the logo and emblem of the Indian space agency ISRO, due to which its wheels left a mark on the lunar surface.
Scientists and engineers working on Chandrayaan 3 can be proud of this achievement. Despite only 14 days of charging, the rover performed major scientific operations. He found sulfur on the surface of the moon, registered earthquakes and discovered a 60 degree Celsius difference between the surface and a few centimeters below.
“This potentially indicates that the lunar surface soil can be a very good insulator,” says Mitra. This is promising in terms of finding underground water that could be in the form of ice.
Confirming the presence of readily available ice would allow future missions to use this water to extract oxygen for air and hydrogen for fuel. This is also one of the reasons why NASA wants to go to the south pole of the moon for the mission ‘Artmus 3′ to send its people back to the moon.
Russia is no longer as active in the space race as it was in the 1960s. His attempt to defeat India at the Moon’s south pole, Luna 25, crashed into the Moon, and his Soyuz spacecraft became too old.
But China is closing in on the US in this race. In May, China’s Tiangong Space Station had six astronauts on board, before there were 11 Chinese astronauts on the International Space Station, a record 17 Chinese astronauts in space at the same time. China is quietly developing advanced next-generation rockets and space planes.
Ken Cramer warns that if lawmakers continue to cut NASA’s budget, Project Artemis will be delayed, and so will Starship and the Blue Origin lander. China can reach the moon before us, they can reach the north pole of the moon before us. And it will be very bad, very bad.’
As the space race heats up, there are some fundamental questions that bypass politics between countries. For example, NASA’s Osiris Rex mission may look for clues about the origin of life. It collected rock samples from asteroid Bennu and brought a capsule of its contents back to Earth in September.
Scientists hope the 500-meter-wide (1,650-foot) asteroid will provide new insights into the formation of the Solar System about 4.6 billion years ago and possibly explain how we humans got here.
In the final days of 2023, NASA has announced that it will send the Osiris Rex spacecraft on a new mission to study the asteroid Apophis.
On the other hand, the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope is probing the nature of the universe. Euclid’s first images were published in November, showing the vast expanse of the sky in detail.
However, cosmologists using telescopes are more interested in what is not visible than what is visible.
Only five percent of the universe is made up of atoms that we can detect. The rest we call ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’.
Dark matter helps hold everything in place and dark energy is the mysterious energy that causes the universe to expand.
Isobel Hook, a professor of astrophysics at Lancaster University in the UK, says that this is the biggest problem in physics.
“It’s very frustrating that we don’t know what it is and there’s certainly no real theoretical explanation for dark energy that can convince us.”
“If you just look at the number of people involved in a mission like Euclid, you can see how important it is,” she says. Thousands of people around the world are involved in it, who want to know the answer to these questions.
In April, scientists produced a new map of the distribution of dark matter using the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile. This telescope is now decommissioned.
Over the next six years, Euclid would observe billions of galaxies to map at least one-third of the visible universe.
Although it would not be able to see the missing matter, Euclid could detect its effect by seeing how its gravity bends and distorts light. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing.
“Regarding dark matter, it will tell us where it is and give us a map of it,” says Isobel Hook. What is dark matter and dark energy, we will see its effects and see the possibilities.
The end of the year is a time when we think about our loved ones so how can we forget our robots sent to a distant world.
The Curiosity and Preservation rovers are still working on Mars, Juno is exploring Jupiter’s swirling clouds, the Solar Orbiter is close to the Sun and, perhaps most importantly, Voyager One and Two are heading deep into space. And it’s never coming back.
As for 2024, we’ll eagerly see more robotic lunar missions this year. Europa Clipper will be sent on a journey to Jupiter’s ice-covered moon, and Europe’s new Irene 6 will also make its flyby.
The new year will also see the most exciting human space mission in decades, NASA’s Artemis 2. The Artemis 2 mission will send four astronauts into deep space and around the Moon for 21 days.
If the mission is successful, it would make possible the first manned visit to the Moon since 1972, but it depends on the success of Starship. Maybe the third time it will succeed?