UAE plays an uplifting role in 'big league' of space race, says ex-Nasa director

As the US phases down its space stations role, the opportunity for Gulf-backed commercial outposts is emerging

Dr Charles Elachi. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Collaboration on building Nasa’s lunar orbit station has launched the UAE into the “big league’’ of spacefaring nations, the former director of the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Charles Elachi, has said.

Dr Elachi, 77, who said he called for the Emirates Mars Mission to go ahead as a member of the country’s space advisory committee, credited such investments in exploration for making the country a major player in the sector.

The Hope probe, which has been studying the atmospheric layers of the Red Planet since 2021, was a “huge undertaking because only a handful of countries have been able to put orbiters around Mars’’ but the commitment to supply an airlock module for Gateway, the planned lunar orbit station, had earned the UAE a seat at the top table.

“It really put the UAE effectively into what I call the big league,” the Lebanese-American professor emeritus of electrical engineering and planetary science at the California Institute of Technology told The National. “Considering the size of the country, that's a major step forward.

“What the UAE has done is very uplifting. I went to some of the events before the Mars launch and it really engaged young people, who were very excited to go into science and technology.”

As chair of the advisory board at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dr Elachi visited Dhahran last month, where he witnessed more evidence that similar efforts in Saudi Arabia in the space and satellite sector and stratospheric tourism were playing a vital role in inspiring young Middle Eastern students.

“By the end of this decade, it’s likely that the US government will be phasing down involvement in space stations and pushing commercial companies to build and operate them,” he said. “I know that both the UAE and Saudi Arabia are thinking as part of their strategic plan to be involved in some of the commercial space stations, and both have, of course, already sent astronauts to the International Space Station.’’

The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre is developing the Emirates Airlock that will enable astronauts to safely enter and exit the staging post as part of Nasa’s Artemis Programme to put a human presence on the Moon for the first time since 1972 in preparation for crewed expeditions to Mars. In return, the UAE will send an astronaut to the Gateway for a future mission.

But Dr Elachi, who presided over 24 launches including the Mars rover Curiosity from 2001 to 2016 while at the helm of JPL during “the golden age of space exploration”, said that manned spacecraft to Earth’s nearest planetary neighbour were unlikely any time sooner than early next decade.

He described statements made by SpaceX founder Elon Musk setting 2029 for a crewed mission to the Martian surface as a prelude to humans living there in a self-sustaining metropolis in 20 years as “optimistic’’.

“Elon Musk is an ambitious guy. It’s great to have people like him who are visionaries, who are pushing the limits but we also have to be realistic. I had many discussions with Elon in the early days and kept saying that we at JPL know how hard it is to land things on Mars – and that was robotics, not humans.

“Technologically, we know how to do it but it’s still a major engineering endeavour, and expensive. It’s also a question of psychological and medical issues because the journey is a two-year round trip. So I don’t think that will happen in the next four years or so.

“We don’t want to mislead people that within the next two decades, we are going to have a city on Mars. I would like to see that but, realistically, it’s not going to happen. We will be lucky if in the next 20 years we have a number of astronauts on the planet but it is not going to be a broad-scale population, unfortunately.”

Dr Elachi praised the progress made by Mr Musk in developing a reusable Moon and Mars vehicle through recent efforts – one successful, one failed – to catch Starship’s towering first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, with mechanical “chopstick'' arms.

Reusing launch vehicles was a goal in making space more accessible and affordable, he said, and taking risks to achieve what others think of as impossible defined the spirit of space exploration.

“That’s pretty impressive. You don’t want to dump your rocket every time you launch it so SpaceX is leading in the area of being able to capture it, bring it back and reuse it. I think it’s great. I can envision that in 10 to 15 years from now space travel will be like airlines – you fly, you land, you refill with fuel, and you fly again. Now Europe is planning to do the same. China is planning to do the same. I’m absolutely delighted that it’s happening.’’

Contributions from “astropreneurs’’ and commercial companies were welcome not only to Artemis through the awarding of contracts like those to SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin for Nasa’s Human Landing System but also in the wider context of the sector.

He sees the role of JPL, which is managed for Nasa by the private university CalTech but is funded by the US government, as exploring and developing new technology before turning it over to a commercial space industry estimated to be worth $546bn and projected to climb to $1.1tn by 2030.

“Once we demonstrate the capability, we ought to move on to the next frontier and have industry and other organisations capitalise on what we developed, what we discovered.

“They are entrepreneurs so they do it very efficiently, and we love that. The discoveries Nasa and JPL made and the technology we developed is now being used broadly for the benefit of humanity not just in rockets but the GPS on smartphones and all kinds of stuff.”

He acknowledges that amid the healthy competition an element of a new space race has emerged. Unlike the one in the 1960s when US president John F Kennedy challenged the nation to put a man on the Moon and bring him back safely by the end of the decade, it is now more with China than Russia.

China's National Space Administration has ambitions to send astronauts to the Moon and establish lunar bases. Its attempt to make history by bringing back samples from Mars to Earth could launch in four years while Nasa’s rival Mars-sample return mission is over budget and, slated for 2030, behind schedule.

“There is a kind of space race which has two aspects. On the one hand, I wish that countries would work together in a peaceful way. On the other hand, having a race is not bad because that creates more fuel for innovation and funding for space activity.”

Multinational collaborations, such as the partnerships between Nasa and the space agencies of the UAE, Canada, Japan and Europe to assemble Gateway as a year-round deep space laboratory in orbit around the Moon are critical, he says.

Every mission Dr Elachi was involved in at JPL and all the experiments for which he was a principal investigator had international input for two reasons. “One, there are smart people everywhere, and a lot of people contribute to human knowledge and to the technology. Two, I think space is a platform for building relationships between different countries and different people. Even during the Cold War, we had collaboration with the Soviet Union and today there is collaboration on the International Space Station.’’

Dr Elachi expressed sadness about the war in parts of the Middle East, Ukraine and other conflicts around the world, lamenting that constructive solutions to the continuing violence have yet to be found.

He takes hope from the breathtaking pictures captured by the James Webb Space Telescope such as those of Saturn’s delicate ring system, a high-speed jet stream on Jupiter or early supermassive black holes.

“I lived through a career in what I call the golden age of space exploration. It’s amazing what we’ve accomplished by working together.

“Look at the fascinating things that we have been able to do and the positive impact we have had on our lives. That hopefully should reflect that we can use our energy to solve our problems here on Earth if we put our minds to it. Space is a forum for peace.’’