Tag Archives: Space Exploration

Artemis

NASA’s SLS and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 at Launch Complex 39A & 39B. NASA Images Library.

Artemis – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some exciting news about the upcoming launch of Artemis 1. The audio clips used today come from the NASA Audio and Ringtones Library. You can learn more at http://www.nasa.gov/connect/sounds.
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As long as I can remember I’ve known Neil Armstrong’s now immortal words “It’s one small step for Man, one giant leap for Mankind.” They were spoken a couple decades before I was born at a time when my parents were themselves children. I think I may have recognized Armstrong’s voice earlier than many other public figures. Then again, Space exploration has always been a big deal in my life, from the endless sci-fi novels that lined the shelves of our basement library in our suburban Chicago home to the Hubble pictures that adorned the walls of many of my classrooms through the years.

Looking back at a lot of those novels and hopeful calls for future Space exploration and settlement, like Gerard K. O’Neill’s The High Frontier or Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey it’s striking how far we are now today in 2022 from where we hoped we’d be over the last 60 years. Our last lunar mission ended 20 years to the day before my own birth in December 1972, and besides the odd Chinese robotic mission we humans haven’t been back to our largest satellite since.

So, in December 2017 when NASA announced the beginning of the Artemis program I was thrilled. Artemis, like its twin Apollo, will take humans back to the Moon at some point later this decade or in the early 2030s. Not only that, but Artemis is supposed to be the beginning of the first permanent human outpost on the lunar surface, the beginning of a new stage of human settlement. Since that announcement I’ve enjoyed the thought that in future when I look up at the Moon, I’ll be able to see from a very great distance places where other humans will be living.

The troubles of the last few years, the great crises we’ve been living in with the pandemic and all its associated problems, have certainly contributed to delays in the launch of Artemis 1, an uncrewed mission that will orbit the Moon and lay the groundwork for future crewed missions in the Artemis program. There were even moments when I admit I worried that Artemis 1 would never leave the ground, like the Constellation program that Artemis replaced.

Many of those worries were relieved a few weeks ago when Artemis 1 was moved onto its launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rocket, the first launch of the Space Launch System (SLS), a 365 ft (111.25 m) tall super-heavy lift expendable launch vehicle, now waits for its date on the same Pad 39B where the Apollo missions left Earth five decades ago. Only in the last few weeks has NASA given a deadline for this momentous launch: at some point between 29 August and 6 September 2022.

We stand at a point on the verge of entering a new generation in our exploration of Space, a generation when our horizons are far greater than ever before. The dreams of the 1960s haven’t been forgotten entirely, in many ways the Artemis missions to the Moon and the future Martian landings evoke those dreams best expressed in our stories. What’s more, we have a real opportunity here to make a difference through these missions, to let them inspire us to make our lives better here on Earth. I’ve often heard it said from astronauts that seeing Earth from orbit is a humbling experience, because it demonstrates just how interconnected we all are. 

It really brings home what Carl Sagan wrote in his book Pale Blue Dot that we are capable of doing so much more if we recognize our common stewardship of this our home, the only home we’ve ever known. We certainly can use Space exploration in the long term to try to find another home, if we continue to mistreat this one so badly that we need to look for a new one, but it would be far better of us if we use these experiences of visiting strange new worlds to use those experiences to appreciate what we have here even more deeply.

My hope is that Artemis will be a beacon of light in an ever-turbulent period in our history, and that it will be remembered as a moment when humanity came together to achieve a common goal for the benefit of all of us.

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To Gaze into the Past

“Cosmic Cliffs” on the Carina Nebula, NASA JWST, Public Domain.
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To Gaze into the Past – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some inspiration from the first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. You can view all of these images at: https://webbtelescope.org/news/first-images/gallery

Historians like me spend our working days trying to understand past generations, to see their worlds through their eyes and to interpret that world in a way that’s understandable to our modern audiences. I for one would love to see the sloths that my dissertation focuses on as they lived in their own time and place 467 years ago. Better yet, I would love the opportunity to sit down and chat with such greats as Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Hypatia of Alexandria just to hear these great minds of their own times speak as regular people without all the pretenses, titles, and theories that we frame their lives within our histories.

Unfortunately, as far as I know the time machine hasn’t been successfully built yet, and time travel even by slingshoting an object around a sun hasn’t been attempted yet. Give it a few centuries, maybe. My conversation with Mr. Lincoln will have to wait. Yet there are ways we can gaze back into the past that are possible today. If you’re reading or listening to this at night go outside and look up at the stars and see what you can find up there. Maybe even use a star chart app on your phone to figure out which stars you’re looking at. Once you’ve done that see how many light years distant they are from us on Earth. That light took quite some time to reach us, meaning that that light left those distant stars years, decades, or even centuries or millennia ago.

Last summer I wrote about my profound sense of awe at gazing up towards the light radiating out from the star Vega while sitting on the rim of the Split Mountain Canyon in the Utah side of Dinosaur National Monument. What struck me most was that Vega is 25 light-years away from Earth, meaning that that light left that star when I was still a small child in a moment of my life I look back on quite fondly. What’s more, I knew I could return to the same spot 25 years later in 2046 with my children, if I’m so lucky in the future, and show them the light that left that star on the night when I went up there with my Dad back in 2021.

The same idea is central to how we ought to understand the immensity of space. Einstein is responsible for the development of the idea of spacetime, that time itself is a dimension alongside the others we might already recognize. I often think about this when I’m daydreaming, imagining observing the passage of time in a very small scale by watching the light move across the walls of a room however slowly as the day goes by. This past Halloween evening I sat with a fellow sixteenth-century historian in San Diego’s Waterfront Park and looking out towards San Diego Harbor to the west stared at the sunset as it seemed to almost faintly radiate up and down as it slowly set below the horizon. In that moment I knew I could begin to understand the passage of time just as I learned at a young age to comprehend the passage of space in the form of physical objects moving across the landscape, like cars driving along an open highway.

So, this week’s breaking news from NASA Goddard of the reveal of the first five images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope out in orbit of the Earth was a profoundly beautiful moment for me. Webb captured our first images of galaxies as they existed a mere 4.6 billion years ago. Those same galaxies could look very different today, yet their light has only just reached us across the vastness of Space. That image, Webb’s First Deep Field, was released on Monday evening by the White House after NASA offered a preview of the five images to the President and Vice President. Lucky them!

Webb’s First Deep Field, NASA JWST, Public Domain.

As profound as that deep field is, I was struck more by the potential offered by another one of Webb’s images, the second image released to the public which shows the atmospheric composition of an exoplanet called WASP-96 b, which is about 1,120 light-years from Earth. WASP-96b’s atmosphere confirms the presence of water on that planet’s surface, a sign of potential life on that planet’s surface. This is the part of Webb’s mission I’m the most excited about, its potential to help us in our endeavors to find out whether we’re alone in this vast Universe of ours, or if we’re one planet among many populated and teeming with intelligent, thinking, and innovative people.

I can’t help but mention the picture, which is probably my favorite on an aesthetic level, that being the image of the “Cosmic Cliffs” of the Carina Nebula, a stellar nursery located roughly 7,600 light-years distant from Earth. The vibrant colors of the Carina Nebula even unseated Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s 1904 painting The Lute from the coveted role of my computer’s background, at least for now.  A closer nebula to Earth, the Southern Ring Nebula, was also photographed. This time though instead of a stellar nursery this nebula surrounds a dying star in its cloudy sphere. Even more profound are the quintet of galaxies captured by Webb from some 290 million light-years away, old enough that its light was contemporaneous with the end of the Carboniferous Period and beginning of the Permian Period here on Earth, well before even the evolution of the first dinosaurs.

On a side note: the Carboniferous room in the Evolving Planet exhibit at the Field Museum remains my favorite room in that collection; I’ve always loved those trees.

The images released by the Webb team and broadcast Tuesday from NASA Goddard represent 25 years of combined efforts from a whole host of scientists and engineers at space agencies around the globe working together to achieve a common goal. By expanding our knowledge of the universe around us we are also demonstrating to ourselves and our descendants that it is possible to work across national divides, to achieve common goals. When we do pull ourselves out of our current string of interrelated crises and societal problems it will be because we’ve finally decided to work together as one humanity for the betterment of all of us.

We have an opportunity now to gaze into the past, to see light coming from stars that may well have died long ago. Yet with their light memories of their existence remains. With that light we’re reminded not only of what once was both out there and here on our home planet, but also of what could be in our future, of a time when maybe we will explore further afield, spread out from our home not as conquerors but as explorers. Stay curious.

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How Space Exploration Can Unite Us

Credit: NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez

How Space Exploration Can Unite Us – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

In this episode I argue that we should consider Space exploration as a way of uniting humanity around a common cause in what otherwise is a time when we seem far more divided.

My Dad woke me up just before 6 am on Christmas morning to watch the long-anticipated launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) from the European Space Agency’s spaceport in French Guiana. Over the past few months, I’d heard and read a great deal about Webb, the engineering behind it, and the mission it has been sent on to travel to the Lagrange 2 point about 1 million miles, or 1.5 million kilometers, from Earth. Once there, Webb will serve as our newest set of eyes on the stars and planets far removed from our own. It will even be able to detect the chemical composition of the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, which could provide us with far better leads than ever before to finding life on distant worlds.

In this last week of 2021, during the Christmas season, a generally happy time of the year, I’ve got to admit there are a lot of problems facing us that are sure to dominate the year to come. The COVID pandemic continues and has recently flooded humanity with a new wave powered by the omicron variant, leaving us scared and worried during the holiday season. The tensions that have boiled over in the last few years in this country, social unrest born out of decades of dissatisfaction, disenchantment, and the pressures of our lives in this Second Gilded Age have brought we Americans closer to the brink than we’ve been in quite some time. Globally, we can’t bring ourselves to do enough to combat climate change, the greatest existential threat humanity has yet faced. Still, the familiar tempo of the drumbeats rises quicker and quicker as the Ukrainians prepare for a potential invasion from Russia, and tensions continue to simmer in the waters between China and Taiwan. Both of these regional wars could well draw my country, the United States, and our allies in, cycling further and further until that simmering pot comes to a boil in the form of another world war.

Meanwhile civil wars, famines, and the other children of fear torment people around the globe in nearly every country, some worse than others. The 2020s have thus far proven to be one of the darkest decades in recent memory, with many of its woes being fruits born from the troubles of the 2010s, 2000s, and the century prior.

Yet alongside all of this, I still have hope that we, humanity, will see ourselves through these threats, that somehow, someway we’ll survive as we have now for so long. It’s interesting to me how the same story, human history, can be told in so many different ways. I was brought up learning the story of human progress, of ingenuity and invention from the Promethean discovery of fire to the digital age in which we now live. It’s a story that has a happy ending, that believes we will eventually overcome our sins and the ghosts that have haunted our waking days as much as our dreams of a better tomorrow. The question I’m left with now, as an adult prone to daydreaming rather than a child without a responsibility to make something of myself, is how do we achieve that future? How do we make tomorrow better than today or all the yesterdays in our collective memory ever have been?

I suggest we look to the potential of what Webb can tell us about the Universe around us. We are after all made of stardust, as Carl Sagan was famous for saying, and at the end of the day it is to that stardust that we will return. The exploration of Space has the potential to be truly revolutionary to our story. If done right, it could be the catalyst that pushes our boulder over the hill, letting us the eternal Sisypheans we are, out of the Hadean turmoil we’ve been in for as long as we can remember. By realizing we are not alone in the Universe, that there are others out there who like us have struggled and fallen time and time again yet still found the strength within them to rise up and build civilizations in their own images, to leave legacies for others to remember them by. We have the potential to overcome our troubles: war, hunger, poverty, ignorance. Let’s set those drums aside and sit down and talk to one another, get to know one another, and learn from each other. Let’s realize that we’re more alike than different, no matter who we are, where we’re from. We may speak different languages, and by extension think in slightly different ways, we may have different incentives for our actions, but at the end of the day we’re all still human.

On the Sunday of Christmas weekend, a date I know as St. Stephen’s Day, I read a thoughtful editorial in the Washington Post by the conservative columnist George Will called “National conservatives and racial identitarians have a common enemy: Individualism”. While I didn’t agree entirely with his argument, and while in general Mr. Will and I only agree on a small number of things (in particular our mutual love of baseball) the main thesis of this column made good sense to me, that here in the United States individuality and the ability of the individual to express their self has fallen by the wayside in many circles in favor of a degree of collective identity on both sides of the political spectrum. The focus has fallen so much on what divides us that we’ve lost sight of how we are really so alike. 

We are all Scrooges as long as we stay in our camps and refuse to venture out into the no man’s land between them. There are past wrongs that need to be delt with, crimes that have yet to be punished, I would be naïve to deny that. At the same time, we need something to bring us together, to break these circles of violence that have been carried out since the time immemorial, embodied in stories like the primordial Fall from Paradise described in the Abrahamic religions. At this point, it’s fair to say we’re in a time when revolutions and counterrevolutions born out of a spirit of vengeance are far more in vogue than any belief in a common humanity. Yet through the fog of war that we allow the dragons of our imagination to breathe out into our world, there are still those among us who send missions beyond Earth with hopes that knowledge will broaden our horizons and increase our knowledge of not only the Universe around us but of ourselves as well. This Second Age of Exploration offers us the chance to unite around a common purpose of bettering ourselves, of elevating humanity above that fog and into a new age in our history when we can achieve all those lofty ideals we continue to set ourselves from each generation to the next.