To launch or not to launch. Is space exploration a necessity?

On September 7, Boeing’s Starliner, a vehicle developed specifically for space travel returned to the earth without its original passengers. Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, who were supposed to be in space for only a week, will now be returning in February of 2025. At least, it’s the timeline Boeing - with egg-on-face - has claimed after repeated attempts to sidestep, what is a certain PR disaster for the company. It’s probably a bit sadistic, to seek comedy in what must be an ordeal for the astronauts – both of them retired by the way – but it’s an equally embarrassing spectacle for institutions (NASA for one) considered synonymous with space travel. To sceptics, or maybe ‘grounded’ people like me, it also evokes the age-old question: why do we travel into space??

Almost all of us, at some point in school, probably stood up in class and claimed ‘we want to become astronauts’. Space travel is not only elusive, it’s also wildly expensive. Tantamount to a kind of class distinction itself. Which explains why the millennial urge to colonise space, is being largely targeted at the rich and the well-heeled. Other than Musk-ian visions of space colonies and inter-planetary conquests, the reality is far more granular, humbling and maybe even unflattering.?

Mars, for example, remains this unicorn. Fancied but ungettable, tantalisingly close in the imagination - remember Matt Damon’s The Martian - but painfully distant as a practicality. NASA has set 2030, as a sort of deadline for the first manned mission. It has even started simulations here on earth to prepare astronauts for Mars-like circumstances. But to what end? Can humanity domesticate a planet of scarcity, if it couldn't pull its weight on one of green and blue abundance? Writer David Von Drehle goes as far as to argue “The Red Planet has the best PR in the solar system.”?

Columnist Michale Hiltzik believes there are, instead, more critical things to be solved here on the earth. “In the current political climate, the biggest threat is to Earth science, which is increasingly devoted to climate change,” he writes. The lure of space exploration, the author reasons, is powered by the drama and romance of it. Inspired and egged-on by pop culture phenomena - science fiction, cinema, comic books etc. A relationship that most misinterpret for being the other way round.?

NASA’s own website intuitively lists a section to explain, ‘why we must go to space’. “In a way, space exploration provides us with opportunities to respond to urgent needs on Earth,” it says. At the height of the space race, roughly 4 percent of the US's budget was allocated to space exploration. Heady days that are unlikely to ever return. There is the obvious argument that a lot of research that goes into putting and keeping people alive in space trickles down to innovations on the ground. There is also the romantic view that ‘humans are by nature curious’, ‘migrants by birth’ and hence ‘we must travel’. Surely, though, exorbitantly arranged spacewalks, like the one orchestrated by SpaceX with the Polaris mission, and baroque celestial suppers (closer to reality than we think) aren’t part of the same manifesto. Are we chasing value here or vanity?

In some sense, innovation in the service of curiosity, remains central to the idea of ‘exploration’. In 2022, the team behind the Event Horizon telescope revealed the first fuzzy image of a black hole; a scientific deep end that we ought to keep studying to reveal things about the universe, the planet and so much more. At Synapse 2024, Mark McCaughrean, Senior Scientific Advisor at European Space Agency and co-founder of Space Rocks, spoke about the recently installed James Webb telescope and why it’s ‘looking back into spacetime’ to answer questions about ‘where we come from and where we are going’.?

Further, technologies developed for space have made their way to everyday life. Air filtration, frozen dried food, photovoltaic cells etc are all commoditized goods. From developing drugs for space, we have now moved to developing drugs in space. The International Space Station, for example, has helmed breakthroughs in Protein crystal growth and Monoclonal Antibody research.? Of course, satellites remain essential to connectivity, with Starlink-like projects, using space to democratise access to the web. There are clear benefits to our presence in space. But few of them warrant being driven by human touch.?

It maybe makes sense, for bespoke instruments and the long arms of tech to dive into philosophical questions, but might there be something closer, in our line of sight, ‘to solve’, than risk lives and eye-watering money on something that still seems like a process, seeking a purpose? By all means look into and at space as a sort of humanitarian utility. But do we really need to risk bone, limb and the sanctity of life, to bust mysteries about what a stroll in the atmosphere above the earth would feel like??

-Manik Sharma, Deputy Editor, Lucid Lines Productions.