Artemis’s Orion spacecraft and the far side of the Moon. Photo: NASA.
For a confessed sci-fi, space opera nut who grew up watching the Apollo missions and devouring Asimov, Clarke and Bradbury, the realisation that the space program is a futile and colossal waste of resources has not come easily.
I still watched the launch of the Artemis mission to the Moon and its progress, and I can admire the technical genius of sending a human crew in a tin can around our only satellite.
But the notion of this being part of humanity’s destined march to the stars, the final frontier and all that, rings as hollow as an empty space capsule.
It’s so seductive, raised as we are on the great (European) explorers ‘discovering’ new oceans and lands, but at least that was within our own bespoke biosphere.
The Artemis mission is pitched as a return to the Moon, where humans will establish a permanent base, from which to mount the really big voyage to Mars, and back, presumably.
Not much is said of the obstacles to achieving this – these are put on the shelf as engineering problems that human ingenuity will eventually solve.
For many, thanks to the boundaryless expanse of imagination, they have already been solved.
In fact, part of the ho-hum response to the ‘primitive’ Artemis mission is probably due to the proliferation of books and movies where gravity, radiation and faster-than-light travel have all been mastered with a great deal of literary licence.
They have set the bar so high that in our own minds, we instinctively feel let down when the reality of space travel intrudes.
Humans are unlikely to ever be able to survive lengthy deep space voyages, given that zero gravity and radiation would ravage their bodies with degraded skeletons and cancers. Not to mention the psychological challenges.
If humans managed to set up a base on Mars, their bodies would adapt to 38 per cent of Earth’s gravity, making them Martians who would be crushed in 1G.
Even if new propulsion technologies were invented to reduce the length of time it would take to reach the outer planets, the bottom line is that without faster-than-light warp speed, hyperspace jumps, wormholes or whatever, the stars and any Earth-like planets there may be are simply out of reach.
It is only when you take a look at some of the images from Artemis that you can appreciate just how vast the void is. It is not called space for nothing, and there is a lot of it.
Elon Musk can fantasise all he likes about Mars, but there is no Plan B. Earth is the only real home we have, and by design or otherwise, it is the one we are finely attuned to living on.
In fact, there is no guarantee that we would be able to survive on any other planet, even if it were like Earth, with similar gravity and a comparable atmosphere. More likely, its microbial defences would go to work eradicating such an invasion, as H G Wells theorised in War of the Worlds.
And the Earth is where we should focus our powerful imaginations and resources to solve the existential threats humans have created and refuse to confront.
War, hunger, poverty, pollution, and the biggie, global heating, are all there to be dealt with.
So why are we trying to run away to a place that holds no future for us?
Some talk about the human drive to explore being part of the human makeup as if it were a universal truth, but that can be self-serving.
The space industry asserts that it has delivered a basket of technological advances to humanity, although much of it is used for military means.
They are also meaningless if the very basics of human life continue to be threatened.
If we must continue to go into space, use robots, not humans, but still, the bill for such vanity projects remains astronomical.
Congratulations to the Artemis team, but the limits of physics, biology and human endeavour must be accepted. Leave the rest to art and our imaginations, where all things really are possible.
Original Article published by Ian Bushnell on Region Canberra.
