To L2, and Beyond!

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. NASA is planning to use its new Orion spacecraft to send astronauts to L2 as a staging ground for deeper exploration.While some mourned the loss of the Space Shuttle program last year, I celebrated it. Because I think it’s irresponsible to spend government money on ego-boosting projects like sending people into space when we’re trying to fight off systematic unemployment, a double-dip recession, and multiple wars? Nope.

I don’t care about the Space Shuttle because it wasn’t ambitious enough. After the Apollo program was cancelled in the mid 1970s, the government wanted to cut back NASA funding but knew the public would get upset if it eliminated the program completely. So it compromised and birthed the Shuttle Program. Ostensibly, the Shuttle’s goal was to make space flight cheap and routine, which is slightly less sexy than the Kennedy-era ambitions. However, the real goal was much worse even than that: NASA needed to spend enough money to seem like it was doing something.

With slightly more funds or even less frequent but more ambitious trips, we could easily have sent someone to Mars by now. Instead, we sent people up all the time to do experiments thought up by elementary school kids (often literally). “But we learned about the effects of long term space flight.” You mean when you don’t use your muscles at all for six months you’re liable to get a little weaker? No way!

To be fair, we’ve learned about some problems, especially relating to solar radiation, that we haven’t figured out how to solve yet, and would be a prerequisite for any trip to Mars that wouldn’t inflict permanent harm on all the astronauts. However, it isn’t surprising that we haven’t solved the problems, since we haven’t really tried. And if you honestly don’t think there are lots of qualified candidates who would risk cancer for a chance to be the first person on Mars, then, well, you and I disagree. People shorten their lifespan all the time to hit a ball with a stick or win a bicycle race. I think we could find somebody willing to risk it for eternal glory.

This weekend, NASA unveiled ideas to make manned trips to “L2,” the point almost one million miles from earth (in the direction opposite the sun) at which the combined gravity of the earth and the moon, would essentially keep a spacecraft in orbit around the sun with the earth. The idea is exciting because it merges NASA’s manned and unmanned ambitions. L2 would be a relatively ambitious challenge for manned spaceflight, testing whether NASA’s new Orion spacecraft can shield astronauts from the increased radiation beyond the  while simultaneously being an excellent place for a telescope and a phenomenal staging ground to put a telescope on the far side of the moon, which would be constantly shielded from earth’s light pollution.

Photo courtesy of NASAblueshift’s photostream on flickr.com. Could Kepler-22b be a real-life Pandora?In December, NASA’s Kepler mission discovered a new planet, Kepler-22b, which orbits its star in the “Goldilocks Zone.” The Goldilocks Zone is the area around a star in which the surface temperature of a planet could support organic life of the type we know on Earth (it’s called the Goldilocks Zone because it’s not too hot or too cold, it’s just right). The Kepler mission also identified more than 1000 potential planets, 54 of which may be in their respective Goldilocks Zones (Kepler-22b is the only one confirmed so far).

With the flood of planets now being discovered, the likelihood that we are truly alone in the universe is shrinking rapidly. Someday, very possibly in our lifetimes, we will learn that is a planet similar to ours that is home to a species with which we could probably communicate. When that day comes, we will have to ask ourselves if we want to knock on our neighbor’s door with a batch of cookies or close the blinds and pretend we’re not home.

Furthermore, the Earth will not be a habitable planet forever. Whether through our own stupidity, an asteroid collision, some unforeseen event, or the death cycle of the sun, the survival of our species will eventually depend on our ability to relocate.

But the best reason for continuing to explore space is the one given by the immortal Sir Edmund Hillary: “Because it is there.”