Cosmologist and astrophysicist Royal Martin Rees at the Commonwealth Science Conference in Bengaluru on November 26, 2014.
Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash/The Hindu
| Photo Credit: K. Bhagya Prakash/The Hindu

Britain’s Astronomer Royal Martin Rees said sending people into space when robots could do the job just as effectively was a waste of public money, and space exploration should be left to billionaires and those willing to pay for trips themselves.

“I’m sceptical about the idea of a human space flight being worthwhile,” Rees told the Lord Speaker’s Corner podcast, which features members of Britain’s upper house of parliament.

“Now that robots can do the things that humans were needed for 50 years ago, the case for sending people is getting weaker all the time.”

Astronomer Royal is now a largely honorary title. It was established by King Charles II in 1675 to advise the monarch and has previously been held by some of Britain’s most pre-eminent scientists.

Rees said space travel should only be for those prepared to accept a “very high level of risk”, and it should be paid for privately rather than by the taxpayer.

Britain’s space programmes have traditionally focused on space research rather than crewed missions.

Helen Sharman was the first Briton to go into space when she joined the Soviet Union’s 1991 Soyus TM-12 mission.

She was followed 24 years later by Tim Peake, who flew to the International Space Station as a member of the European Space Agency astronaut corps.

Four U.S. citizens who flew NASA missions were also born in Britain.

Rees, who was appointed Astronomer Royal in 1995, said he didn’t agree with Elon Musk’s ambition to colonise Mars, but he hailed his achievements in both rockets and electric cars.

“He has done a much better job than the big conglomerates that used to work for NASA in producing efficient rockets, which can be reused, and that will make it cheaper to actually send stuff into space,” he said.

Axiom Space chief engineer Jim Stein demonstrates a prototype spacesuit, Wednesday, March 15, 2023, in Houston. NASA selected Axiom Space to design the spacesuits that its moonwalking astronauts will wear when they step onto the lunar surface later this decade.
| Photo Credit: AP

Humans have long dreamed of setting foot on the Moon and other planetary bodies such as Mars. Since the 1960s, space travellers have donned suits designed to protect them from the vacuum of space and stepped out into the unknown.

However, the Polaris Dawn mission, which is to include the first spacewalk organised by a private company, has been delayed. This is due to complications with the design and development of a suitable spacesuit.

Moon suits are also one of the key elements of Nasa’s Artemis lunar programme that have yet to be delivered. A report released in November 2023 said that the contractor making the suits is having to revisit aspects of the design provided by Nasa, which could introduce delays.

Yet the first spacewalk, by the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, took place in 1965. Later, 12 Nasa astronauts would walk on the lunar surface, between 1969 and 1972, using technology that would be eclipsed by today’s smartphones. So it’s not unreasonable to ask why it can still be difficult to design and build spacesuits to do the same thing.

Much has changed since the Apollo missions planted flags on the Moon. The geopolitics driving space travel have shifted, and spacesuits are no longer expected to be just a form of protection. Instead, they are a critical way to improve the productivity of astronauts. This involves a rethink of not just the suits themselves, but the technology that supports them.

An array of powerful telecommunications technologies to connect astronauts with space stations and ground control sits alongside multisensory cameras, temperature readers and proximity sensors in present-day spacesuits.

Situational awareness – understanding key elements in the environment, such as the health of an astronaut – is a core tenet for modern spacesuit design and critical for the operator’s safety. The ability of a suit to track heart rate and other vital signs is important in a vacuum, where levels of oxygen need constant monitoring.

Expectations around the risks astronauts take have changed for the better. And the level of investment it takes to produce a spacesuit necessitates that it can be used for future tasks that may include lunar settlement in the next few decades.

The trade off that engineers must make when incorporating wearable technology like those already mentioned is weight. Will greater situational awareness result in a spacesuit that is too heavy to move in effectively?

When Elon Musk first hinted at challenges with the extravehicular activity spacesuit for Polaris Dawn in a presentation to SpaceX employees in January, it was not difficulties with connected technology that he discussed, but of redesigning “the suit so that you actually move around in it”.

Situational awareness

However, when talking about mobility in a spacesuit, you need to consider the tasks that you want that mobility to support.

Before the advent of modern spacesuits, Apollo astronauts struggled to carry out missions. When drilling into the surface of the Moon with a hand drill to collect samples, astronauts found it difficult to provide enough downwards force to counteract the Moon’s weaker gravity. It was not until the invention of a zero-gravity drill, decades later, that this problem would be addressed.

The current exploration of pneumatic exoskeletons, providing the support necessary for movement in low gravity could be part of a solution. However, newer spacesuits may also need to interface with hardware, like robotic drills that exist outside the suit. This will also necessitate more mobility in spacesuits.

Working with robots

Offloading tasks, previously carried out by humans, to robots will be part of the future of space exploration. It’s a primary way that engineers will also be able to enhance the mobility of astronauts in spacesuits.

For example, when an astronaut goes on a spacewalk to inspect the condition of part of a space station and make any possible repairs, they are supported by a robotic arm that ensures they don’t float off into space. While jointed, this arm is rigid and can limit an astronaut’s movement.

An approach currently being explored to extend this range of movement is a climbing robot, that is attached to both the astronaut and the space station, that an individual can control through their spacesuit. This would allow the astronaut to move around the space station faster and with a greater range of movement than before, allowing them to reach and repair hard-to-access areas like corners.

While the eventual hope is that robots themselves can assess any damage to the space station and repair it, due to possible disruptions in normal operations, humans must be ready to step in. Possible disruptions could be natural, like a small meteor shower damaging the robot, or human-made, like hacking carried by a hostile group or state.

For the types of activities we want to accomplish in the future, this human-robot collaboration will be instrumental. Building a base on the Moon, as both the US and China plan to do, will involve construction work and drilling, which humans will not be able to accomplish alone. Modern spacesuits will need to provide an interface to work with this new technology, and we can expect the suits to evolve in step with robotics.

The relationship between humans and robots is changing. It will go beyond spacewalks and robots’ previous uses as limited tools, to a situation where they are cooperative partners in space. The objectives of ten or 20 years from now, like building lunar settlements, exploring mineral deposits on the Moon and efficiently repairing space station modules can only be achieved using robotics.

Modern spacesuits will be a key foundation of this collaborative relationship, forming the interface where astronauts and robots can work together to achieve shared goals. So when we do once again leave our footprints on other worlds, we will no longer be alone.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on February 15, 2024. The mission’s goal is to deliver science payloads to the surface of the moon
| Photo Credit: AP

A moon lander built by Houston-based aerospace company Intuitive Machines was launched from Florida early on Thursday on a mission to conduct the first U.S. lunar touchdown in more than a half century and the first by a privately owned spacecraft.

The company’s Nova-C lander, dubbed Odysseus, lifted off shortly after 1 a.m. EST (0600 GMT) atop a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket flown by Elon Musk’ SpaceX from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.

A live NASA-SpaceX online video feed showed the two-stage, 25-story rocket roaring off the launch pad and streaking into the dark sky over Florida’s Atlantic coast, trailed by a fiery yellowish plume of exhaust.

About 48 minutes after launch, the six-legged lander was shown being released from Falcon 9’s upper stage about 139 miles above Earth and drifting away on its voyage to the moon.

“IM-1 Odysseus lunar lander separation confirmed,” a mission controller was heard saying.

Moments later, mission operations in Houston received its first radio signals from Odysseus as the lander began an automated process of powering on its systems and orienting itself in space, according to webcast commentators.

Although considered an Intuitive Machines mission, the IM-1 flight is carrying six NASA payloads of instruments designed to gather data about the lunar environment ahead of NASA’s planned return of astronauts to the moon later this decade.

Thursday’s launch came a month after the lunar lander of another private firm, Astrobotic Technology, suffered a propulsion system leak on its way to the moon shortly after being placed in orbit on January 8 by a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan rocket making its debut flight.

The failure of Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, which was also flying NASA payloads to the moon, marked the third time a private company had been unable to achieve a “soft landing” on the lunar surface, following ill-fated efforts by companies from Israel and Japan.

Those mishaps illustrated the risks NASA faces in leaning more heavily on the commercial sector than it had in the past to realize its spaceflight goals.

Plans call for Odysseus to reach its destination after a weeklong flight, with a February 22 landing at crater Malapert A near the moon’s south pole.

First since 1972

If successful, the flight would represent the first controlled descent to the lunar surface by a U.S. spacecraft since the final Apollo crewed moon mission in 1972, and the first by a private company.

The feat also would mark the first journey to the lunar surface under NASA’s Artemis moon program, as the U.S. races to return astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite before China lands its own crewed spacecraft there.

IM-1 is the latest test of NASA’s strategy of paying for the use of spacecraft built and owned by private companies to slash the cost of the Artemis missions, envisioned as precursors to human exploration of Mars.

By contrast, during the Apollo era, NASA bought rockets and other technology from the private sector, but owned and operated them itself.

NASA announced last month that it was delaying its target date for a first crewed Artemis moon landing from 2025 to late 2026, while China has said it was aiming for 2030.

Small landers such as Nova-C are expected to get there first, carrying instruments to closely survey the lunar landscape, its resources and potential hazards. Odysseus will focus on space weather interactions with the moon’s surface, radio astronomy, precision landing technologies and navigation.

Intuitive Machine’s IM-2 mission is scheduled to land at the lunar south pole in 2024, followed by an IM-3 mission later in the year with several small rovers.

Last month, Japan became the fifth country to place a lander on the moon, with its space agency JAXA achieving an unusually precise “pinpoint” touchdown of its SLIM probe last month. Last year, India became the fourth nation to land on the moon, after Russia failed in an attempt the same month.

The United States, the former Soviet Union and China are the only other countries that have carried out successful soft lunar touchdowns. China scored a world first in 2019 by achieving the first landing on the far side of the moon.

The Lunar Resources Registry, a private business that locates valuable resources on the moon and helps investors conduct the required exploration and extraction operations, notes: “The space race is evolving into space industrialization.” Image for Representation.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Humans have always looked at the sky, using the stars as navigation guides or for spiritual storytelling. Every human civilization has looked to the stars and used celestial movements to measure time and find meaning.

This insatiable thirst for knowledge combined with technological advancements have made it possible for us to dream of travelling in space. These dreams became more and more real after the Second World War, the Industrial Revolution, the Cold War and the large-scale exploitation of the Earth’s resources.

Dreams of space travel started small with the launch of Sputnik-1 by the Soviet Union, and escalated with the U.S. Apollo landing on the moon in 1969.

Six decades later, plans are ramping up for space tourism, missions to the moon and Mars, and mining on the moon.

The Lunar Resources Registry, a private business that locates valuable resources on the moon and helps investors conduct the required exploration and extraction operations, notes: “The space race is evolving into space industrialization.”

According to NASA, “the moon holds hundreds of billions of dollars of untapped resources,” including water, helium-3 and rare earth metals used in electronics.

The dawn of the Anthropocene

As a group of academics researching various aspects of environmental sustainability on Earth, we are alarmed at the speed of these developments and the impacts resource exploitation will have on lunar and space environments.

There is a movement among the international geologic scientific community calling for a new epoch — the Anthropocene — reflecting the enormous extent to which human activity has altered the planet since the end of the Second World War.

Stratigraphers — geologists who study the layers of rock and sediment — look for measurable global impact of human activities in the geologic record. According to their research, the starting point for the Anthropocene has been identified as beginning in the 1950s, and the fallout from nuclear testing.

To shock humankind into preventing the extensive destruction in space that we have wrought on Earth, it may be effective to add a “lunar Anthropocene” to the moon’s geologic time scale.

The case for a lunar Anthropocene is interesting. It can be argued that since the first human contact with the moon’s surface, we have seen anthropogenic impact. This impact is likely to increase dramatically. This is presented as justification for a new geologic epoch for the moon.

Damaging the Earth

This new “human epoch” is hotly debated among stratigraphers as well as researchers in other disciplines. For humanities researchers and artists, the importance of the Anthropocene lies in the power the concept has to evoke human responsibility for bringing the Earth’s system to a tipping point.

In The Shock of the Anthropocene, historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argue that the new human epoch entails recognizing that technoscientific advances — which have driven socio-political economies relying on extractivism, consumption and waste — have led to the extent of damage we measure on Earth at present.

For millenia, most societies understood the importance of their relationship with the natural world for survival. But industrialization and the endlessly growing economy in developed countries has destroyed this relationship.

For example, trees used to be respected for providing timber, food, shade and more. But our industrial growth changed all that; in the past 100 years, more trees have been cut than had been felled in the preceding 9,000 years.

A lunar Anthropocene

And now the Anthropocene, this age of human impact, is also arriving on the moon.

NASA estimates there are already 227,000 kilos of human garbage littering the moon, mostly from space explorations, including moon buggies and other equipment, excrement, statues, golf balls, human ashes and flags, among other objects.

An increasing number of moon missions and extracting resources from the moon could destroy lunar environments. This mirrors what has happened on our planet: humans have used this collection of “natural resources” and produced enough waste and degradation to bring us to the current sixth mass extinction precipice.

Our throwaway society leads to not only habitat destruction on Earth, but also now on the moon and in space. We must rethink what we really need. Without a fully functional Earth system, including biodiversity and nature’s contribution to life, we will be unable to survive.

If the intent is to issue a word of caution and pre-emptively shock and elicit a feeling of responsibility on the part of those actors likely to impact the moon’s surface, it may very well be the right time to name a lunar Anthropocene. This may help prevent the kind of extensive and careless destruction we have caused and continue to witness on Earth.