On July 20, 1969, NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong, who commanded the Apollo 11 mission, made history with his “little step for a man, but a big leap for mankind.” He had stepped on the moon . More than fifty years have passed since that feat, but today, in 2020, we do not have a rocket capable of sending a crew to the satellite. What’s more, the splendid plans that half a century ago contemplated sending explorers to Mars or beyond were left in a drawer and, since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, no one has left Earth’s orbit.
However, everything is about to change. “I am convinced that a new era of space exploration will take shape in the remainder of my life,” writes Buzz Aldrin – Neil Armstrong’s travel companion – in Space 2.0 , an essay in which writer Rod Pyle addresses this affair. NASA is working hard on the Artemis (Apollo’s sister) program, which aims to send a woman and a man to the Moon in 2024 . This time around, the idea is not just to tread on its dusty surface, but to stay, fetch water, and lay the groundwork to launch an even more ambitious endeavor: send humans to Mars sometime in the 2030s . Ahead, there are many unknowns and technical challenges; between them, preparing the members of that expedition to spend several years isolated in space.
Meanwhile, several robotic missions are being completed that will allow us to scrutinize the universe like never before . With the new generation of space telescopes, we may finally be able to determine the existence of life on other worlds, within our neighborhood or outside of it (since the first exoplanets were located in 1992, almost 4,200 of them have been detected). Today we suspect that microscopic life may have thrived in the subsoil of Mars and in the oceans beneath the icy crusts of some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn . “We have more and more evidence confirming that life can arise in harsh environments – explains Günther Hasinger, Director of Science at the European Space Agency (ESA) -. In the next two or three decades, we will discover evidence of its existence far from Earth, surely without leaving our solar system. “
Before, the heads of this agency, as well as their colleagues from NASA, will have to decide which missions will be definitively launched. “We are at a crossroads,” says Didier Schmitt, director of ESA’s robotics and human exploration program. This institution, which approved the largest increase in its budget in its recent history in 2019, up to 14,388 million euros, this year will address its Voyage 2050 strategic plan, where its scientific program will be set between 2035 and mid-century.
