A year out of this world

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A year out of this world

The world felt firmly stuck in 2020 but seen from afar, it was abuzz with activity. Space launchers, moon landers, telescopic probes were firing off beyond the Earth’s atmosphere and pushing humanity’s boundaries further.

The classic space race of the 1960s was a two-way competition between the Soviet Union and the United States. Today, the internation competition is still palpable, but the field has broadened significantly, and the challenge feels more like a multisport discipline than a straight sprint. Countries from India to South Korea to Canada have established successful space agencies and developed programmes from human spaceflight to space stations to extra-terrestrial probes.

Big steps for humankind were not only taken by governments but by commercial interests too. In May, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched two NASA astronauts into a 19-hour flight to the International Space Station. This was the first time in history that a commercial aerospace company carried humans into the orbit, paving the way for more space adventures in the future.

Meanwhile, SpaceX continues to launch satellites for its Starlink internet constellation and celebrated its 100th lift-off in June. In July, the US Federal Communications Commission has also approved Project Kuiper, a rival satellite internet network by Amazon. The tech giant is estimated to pour €10 billion into the initiative before the end of the decade and the first satellites are expected to be launched in January.

Amazon has not yet declared whether the constellation will be carried into orbit by Blue Origin, the aerospace company also owned by Jeff Bezos. The side venture is currently busy leading the

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effort on a lunar lander that plans to send the first woman to the moon by 2024.

Speaking of the moon, China’s unmanned Chang’e 5 made a landing in December on a mission to collect lunar samples for the first time since 1976. The lander was designed to live one lunar day – 14 Earth days – and when the sun finally set on the ‘Ocean of Storms’, radio enthusiasts detected no further signals from the robot. But the ascent vehicle took off successfully carrying the precious twokilogram delivery from space.

Another special package this year was Japan’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft which touched down in the Australian desert after a long journey through space. The capsule collected two layers of material from the Ryugu asteroid, believed to be one of the building blocks

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left over from the formation of the Solar System. The second layer is ‘pristine material’ retrieved from a deeper cut into the asteroid’s core and has not been in contact with the space environment like the outer layer.

Although there is an exciting mix of new players in aerospace, the original rivalries still surface between Russia and the United States. Roscosmos has in fact conducted a successful test of its new Angara rocket – the first range of launchers developed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. NASA celebrated the launch of Perseverance, the rover dispatched to look for signs of life on Mars.

Decades of experiments have generated millions of space debris, including over 34,000 pieces bigger than 10 centimetres. The European Space Agency has an ambitious plan for that and this year it has signed a deal with a Swiss operator to send out a space garbage collector by 2025.

Many of us could not leave their homes for long weeks in 2020, let alone the planet. But human curiosity and ingenuity is a hopeful force unbound by the immediate challenges, a defining trait that not even the pandemic could arrest.