The Year in Space and Physics
Promises, in the space industry at least, sometimes seem to count for little. How often have bold entrepreneurs claimed to be mere years from mining asteroids, or walking on Mars? Space agencies and governments do little better: pouring billions into rockets that rarely fly or Moon programmes that never lift off.
Annual reviews of our progress in space often, then, take on a repetitive nature. The maiden launch of NASA’s Space Launch System – the mammoth SLS rocket – has been forecast for launch in every year since 2016. The James Webb was delayed so frequently that it became a joke, mocked in comics. Partly, of course, that is because space is hard. Innovative projects often run far beyond budget and schedule. But it is also because of needless inefficiencies, of political decisions and over ambition.
This year, however, things look a little different. Several long promised events – from the birth of true space tourism to the launch of the James Webb – have finally come to pass. A larger shift, too, is taking place in the space industry. A plethora of new rockets promises to make space easier and cheaper to access. Governments, too, are changing – as China rises and NASA makes room for commercial partners.
This week our newsletter takes a look back at the year that has been, at the triumphs and failures in both space and physics. Not everything, of course, can be covered, but I hope to capture the larger trends, the signal, if you will, against the noise.
Space Tourism
Thirteen years ago, Richard Branson predicted he would fly tourists into space within eighteen months. Hotels in space would follow, and trips to the Moon. Thousands of people, he claimed, would have reached orbit by 2021. Perhaps that was merely a ploy to raise funds – he was already collecting deposits for future tickets – or perhaps it was overconfidence. Either way, Branson missed his deadline by more than a decade.
The repeated series of missed predictions made space tourism look rather like nuclear fusion: a promised utopia hovering forever a few years ahead. Gradually, however, the idea firmed and came closer to reality. Competition sprung up – notably Blue Origin, who had a working spaceship by 2015 – and with that the race finally started to heat up.
Still, it was not until last summer that space tourism finally became a reality. Two launches took place within weeks of each other, each carrying crews close to, or just beyond, the official boundary of space. Whether those crews really count as astronauts, though, is debatable. They spent at most a few seconds in space, on voyages that lasted ten minutes or less.
Regardless, space tourism seems set to stick around for a while. Blue Origin have now sent three sets of tourists to the edge of space. More will follow in the year to come.
James Webb, Perseverance and Artemis
For NASA, too, this was a successful year. Back in February the agency landed yet another rover – Perseverance – on Mars. It is the most advanced machine to ever visit another world, one that promises to reveal much about the ancient history of the Red Planet. Already scientists have reconstructed some of the history of Jezero Crater – its landing site – and found it once held a landscape full of lakes and rivers.
Perseverance also carried a small helicopter – Ingenuity – to Mars. Shortly after arriving, Ingenuity took to the Martian skies, becoming the first flying machine on an alien world. Though intended as a simple demonstrator, proving the viability of flight on Mars, Ingenuity has since made eighteen flights across the crater.
NASA’s most recent triumph, however, was the flawless launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. After decades of work and billions of dollars in funding, the advanced telescope finally took flight on Christmas Day. So far the complex task of unfolding the telescope seems to have gone without a hitch. Planners now even think the telescope will function for years longer than the decade originally predicted.
America’s return to the Moon, however, has not carried the same air of triumph. Though the program survived the change in presidents – a transition that hobbled many previous plans – the landing date has been pushed years into the future. Originally NASA planned to put astronauts on the surface in 2024; it now looks unlikely to happen before 2026.
China’s Growing Space Program
Though America remains the undisputed superpower in space, China is rapidly expanding its capabilities. The nation achieved two key milestones this year: landing a rover on Mars, and launching a space station into orbit.
China’s Mars rover – Zhurong – successfully touched down on the planet early in May. The importance of this achievement should not be understated. Only two other countries – Russia and America – have ever managed to land on Mars, and only America still has a major presence there. Though Zhurong is small compared to Perseverance, the ability to land on a distant planet is a major technical accomplishment.
The new Tiangong space station, too, shows the progress of China’s engineering abilities. The station, still under construction, is far smaller than the International Space Station (ISS). Yet it supports a crew of several astronauts and may – if the ISS is decommissioned at the end of this decade – one day be the most capable facility in orbit.
SpaceX
No review of the space industry could be complete without acknowledging the achievements of SpaceX. Elon Musk and his company have continued to dream – and act – big. This year alone SpaceX has ticked off a list of achievements that superpowers would struggle to match: building and testing an enormous new rocket, sending a crew of four tourists to orbit the Earth and – by launching thousands of satellites – becoming by far the biggest owner of orbital hardware.
Not all of this is without controversy. The Starlink constellation – a system that will soon offer high speed internet across the planet – now contains almost two thousand satellites. That means SpaceX now own and operate more than a third of all active satellites in orbit. Though surely an impressive achievement, this rapid rise in the number of satellites does raise serious concerns.
Some are coming from astronomers, fearful that streaks of light from Starlink satellites will ruin detailed observations of the night sky. That is indeed a legitimate fear, and one that SpaceX have taken some steps to address. Even so, the issue remains unresolved, and some astronomers are starting to wonder if this will mean the death of ground based astronomy.
Other concerns are raised by fellow satellite operators, worried by the growing dangers of space debris. Most Starlink satellites are in highly inclined orbits; meaning their paths cross over with many other satellites roughly once per hour. Indeed, the risk of collisions is increasing rapidly, a concern not helped by a foolish Russian anti-satellite test in November.
A Search for New Physics
This newsletter, of course, covers more than just the space industry. Indeed, this year has been an intriguing – if not quite revolutionary – one for physics. The trouble has been brewing for decades, as a deep and fundamental incompatibility between two key theories – Einstein’s relativity and quantum theory – remains unresolved.
No experiment has ever disproved either theory. Worse, no experimental data has ever hinted at a theory that could resolve their inherent contradictions. That has left physicists at something of a loose end, building mathematical theories with little real world evidence to work with.
This year, however, a pair of experiments hinted at possible cracks in our models. One – carried out in America – suggested that the magnetism of muons, a subatomic particle, does not quite follow the predictions of theorists. Another, at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, seemed to spot quarks – another subatomic particle – breaking apart in odd ways.
Neither set of evidence is yet strong enough for scientists to be sure of what they are seeing. But if the results do hold out – as more experiments due in the months to come should show – physicists will finally have a chance to probe the laws of nature at a deeper level. After years in the wilderness, that will be welcome news.