Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Mission buzz

It has been a while since I posted. Without promising too much, I hope to make more time for this blog. One issue was that I focused on polished pieces (at least for me!), which take a while to do. From now on, I would like to also have normal posts too. What is funny is that I write every day in little notebooks that will never see the light of day--even I seldom read them again. These writings do, however, clear my head a bit and make it easier to focus on what I often consider my real work. There is no reason, however, that these daily writings (similar to Julia Cameron's "morning pages" in her book The Artist's Way) cannot be posted. Occasionally, they may even hold a real idea.

My main motivation to restart this is what seems to me to be a rise in excitement for space. Last fall's The Martian movie is part of it--as well as the prior year's Interstellar and Neil Degrasse Tyson's Cosmos series. But there is more than that. There has been a spate of discoveries and missions that are making space fun. Gravity waves are real and will soon be used in a new kind of observatory. There is a new fundamental particle that was hypothesized to exist and now is known to be real. Pluto and Charon no longer are simply a dwarf planet and its largest moon, but now are complex worlds. A couple rovers are chugging along on Mars; meanwhile, a spacecraft purposely crashed into Mercury last year, one has been tailing a comet, one is circling the dwarf planet Ceres (formally the largest asteroid), and one is preparing to dive in-between Saturn's rings. Meanwhile, Voyager 1 slipped out of the Solar System into interstellar space. All of this is happening while new companies are working with NASA to launch rockets into close, mundane orbits so that NASA can focus on heavy rockets and the exciting stuff. Or so we thought--now there are companies hoping to mine asteroids and one hoping to launch to Mars by 2018.

With all this buzz, space news can be seen everywhere. The magazine Glamour recently spotlighted four women astronaughts with their sights on Mars. The President is talking about Mars missions and flowing water on Mars. NASA just fielded its largest number of applications hoping  to become astronaughts ever.

It has become a thing.

Where it will lead and what the timelines are for our return to deep space (loosely being defined by me as being out of a close Earth orbit) are hard to define yet. But, it feels like we are building towards something big. And this time it isn't a simple military push to see who can build the biggest rocket*. This time, the excitement and expectations of society is pushing this. New missions, including a manned mission to Mars, are starting to feel inevitable.


* Here, I am being a little unfair--for instance, a huge amount of good science was done and continues to be done with samples returned from the Apollo missions.