At 02:56 GMT on 21 July 1969, humanity first set foot on an extraterrestrial body, our own moon (Britannica). While some might believe that traveling to the moon is to an extent feasible, at the time, the majority of people believed that the mission was going to fail. Nowadays, scientists estimate that the success rate of the mission was at around 50%, surprising many enthusiasts. The intricate processes that needed to align perfectly with one another would even with modern technology prove difficult. Hence, lunar missions have been abandoned for many years.
However, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, has continued the quest for humans to settle on the moon. With their successful test mission, Artemis 1, NASA has once again proven to the world that landing on the moon is possible. Nevertheless, it still faces a wide range of challenges ranging from the Human Landing System (HLS), being developed by private company SpaceX, to the capabilities of the SLS, Space Launch System (SLS), successfully employed in the Artemis 1 mission, to transport large amounts of resources to the lunar space station. According to NASA, one can expect the launch of Artemis 3, landing astronauts on the south pole of the moon, to be executed no earlier than 2026, due to a variety of issues leading to a multitude of postponements (“Artemis 3.”).
From an ethical standpoint, one must consider the numerous life-threatening dangers that await astronauts who board this mission. One must value scientific progress against the possibility of losing a human life possibly by assessing whether the potential benefits of establishing a lunar base justify an invaluable human life. Whether this base would benefit humanity in the long term by providing a ground for further deep space research as well as a possible station for interplanetary missions, or simply be yet another hopeless attempt of humankind to expand beyond its reaches.
Yet it is not only the government agencies that aim to reach into the depths of space, but also privately owned enterprises that are testing their luck at building a sustainable means to enter space. Taking the well-known privately owned company SpaceX, owned and managed mostly by Elon Musk, as an example, their main target includes building a reusable rocket that is capable of transporting humans to Mars. This is none other than their Starship program, starting in early 2019, yielded impressive results in their 2 previous test flights. While to the public, both flights seemed to be a complete disaster, to Space X, they were unimaginable achievements. The dissatisfied public opinion likely originates from a biased view, through concrete achievements made by the national space agencies. This is the case because taxpayers would be highly outraged if their money was wasted on failing missions, putting immense pressure on these agencies to publicly perform well. This is less the case in the private sector allowing companies to grow from failure gaining valuable expertise in this growing field. SpaceX not only is developing the Starship program but also has a fully functioning Falcon program detailing reusable rockets that can reach lower earth orbits. While SpaceX is not a commercial space tourism company, its revolutionary technology in the field of reusable rockets is invaluable to companies that are currently planning to operate in the commercial space tourism industry.
There are a variety of different approaches to space tourism, one of them being a hybrid between a plane and a rocket, innovated by Virgin Galactic. Similarly to SpaceX, Virgin Galactic aimed to produce a reusable rocket that could reach a near-earth orbit state. Contrastingly, the capabilities of SpaceX’s rockets, far exceed the capabilities of the space shuttle by Virgin Galactic, being able to discover the mysteries of deeper space.
While the media commonly portrays Western-based aerospace companies and agencies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, NASA, the ESA, and more, there are a variety of other nations and companies participating in this modern space exploration race. Examples contradicting this assumption are the commercial aerospace company Galaxy Space, based in Beijing, and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which have both made notable achievements in terms of their space missions.
It is difficult to predict what the future holds for space industries due to the rapid progress of technology in this field facilitating different approaches to space exploration and tourism, each presenting its own benefits and drawbacks. It is not unreasonable to predict that in the future interplanetary travel could be compared to the affordability and simplicity of aeronautical travel on earth.
