Decades after the Moon landings, the stars look very different for explorers, and the crews of the International Space Station are as much entertainers as they are space scientists.
So there you are, zooming along at 27,600 kilometres an hour in the International Space Station, poised to take a photograph of Dubai as seen from more than 400 kilometres above the Earth, when along comes another spacecraft and photobombs your snap.
What are the chances of that happening?
Well, next to none. But the wholly implausible conceit was happily swallowed whole by the world’s media last week when British astronaut Tim Peake tweeted a photograph of the coastline of Dubai, partially obscured by the unmanned SpaceX Dragon spaceship.
Of course, Peake and his fellow astronauts knew all about the much-anticipated arrival of Dragon, a moment that had been years in the planning.
Minutes after he claimed on Twitter to have been photobombed, he was busy with the real job in hand, deploying a robotic arm to grab and dock Dragon, the latest cargo ship to arrive at the space station.
Dragon brings to six the number of craft docked at the space station, and its arrival, a triumph of engineering and a remarkable new chapter in the commercial exploration of space, is the real story.
For a start, Dragon delivered the most recent component of the space station. The Bigelow expandable activity module is an experimental inflatable habitat regarded by many as a central part of Nasa’s Mars ambitions.
But a more significant technical first was all but overlooked in the hyperbole surrounding Peake’s snap. Dragon was shot into space by the world’s first reusable rocket, the SpaceX Falcon 9, which returned to Earth to touch down on an unmanned, autonomous barge at sea.
This, concluded Universe Today website, was a moment that “chang[ed] the face and future of space exploration and travel”. But 47 years after half the world gathered around television sets to stare in awe at grainy footage of mankind taking its first giant step onto the Moon, for most of us space travel has become a humdrum business.
Not for the first time, US space agency Nasa and its Canadian, Russian, Japanese and European partners were reduced to party tricks to keep their grip on the public imagination and taxpayer funding.
At the start of the space race, monkeys were trained to perform like astronauts. Now astronauts are expected to behave like performing monkeys.
“From a US perspective, politics is the cornerstone of the space programme,” says Camille Alleyne, a space station programme scientist at Nasa’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas.
“It is funded by taxpayers’ dollars and appropriations of the US congress, so every year we are having to justify why we need the money we request to do the things we think we need to do to fulfil the mission of Nasa, which is to foster space exploration.”
Which means that occasionally the astronauts have to sing for their supper.
In 2013, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield hit public relations gold with a social media-friendly rendition of the David Bowie song, Space Oddity. It may have been corny, but it worked: all eyes turned to space and the YouTube video has garnered 31 million views and counting.
Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly’s record 340-day mission on board the space station, which ended in March, had a vital purpose – studying the long-term effects of microgravity on the human body as part of America’s plans to send people to Mars. But nothing he did generated as much coverage as the selfie he posted on social media during his first spacewalk in October last year.
Nasa “has really adopted all varieties of social media, because we have found it very effective”, says Alleyne.
“It’s the way we communicate in today’s society and so Nasa is very much on board with using Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram to communicate what we are doing on the space station.”
The reality Nasa faces is that for Joe Public the truly exciting era of space exploration ended when America made it to the Moon in 1969. Everyone has heard of Neil Armstrong, but who could name the 12th and, so far, last man to leave his boot prints in the lunar dust? For the record, it was Harrison Schmitt, who touched down in Apollo 17 on December 11, 1972.
“We do have a challenge, especially in the US, with capturing the imagination of the public when it comes to space flight, because we’ve been doing it so long,” says Alleyne.
Yet the International Space Station, an continuing experiment in technological innovation and international cooperation, is probably humankind’s most impressive achievement to date.
The third-brightest object in the night sky, the space station is visible several times a week from most places on Earth. Look up at the night sky, between 10 and 17 degrees above the northern horizon, at 7.05pm on a recent Wednesday from anywhere in the UAE, for example, and it would have been visible for four or five minutes before disappearing into the east.
Yet how many of us ever bother to raise our eyes from our earthbound concerns and wonder what it took to put that thing up there, what it’s really for and exactly what the rotating crew of six human beings orbiting the Earth 16 times every day actually do – besides taking selfies and strumming guitars?
Nasa, whose mission remains in part to “pioneer the future in space exploration”, harbours the ultimate ambition of kicking up dust on Mars, and much of the activity on the space station is geared towards that end.
But Nasa is also keen to stress how much good the space station is doing us down here on Earth.
It is, says Alleyne, first and foremost “a unique science laboratory”, capable of hosting studies impossible in Earth’s gravity, and since 1998 more than 2,500 researchers from more than 80 countries have conducted 1,700 experiments managed on board by the astronauts.
What has the space station ever done for us? Plenty, says Nasa, which made the point last year in a book published jointly with its Canadian, Japanese, Russian and European partners.
“We may not know yet what will be the most important discovery gained from the space station,” begins the book, Benefits for Humanity, “but we already have some amazing breakthroughs.”
In the areas of “human health, innovative technology, education and observations of Earth from space … lives have been saved, station-generated images assist with disaster relief, new materials improve products, and education programmes inspire future scientists, engineers and space explorers”.
Nasa and its partners put the cost of developing, building and running the space station at US$100 billion (Dh367bn) over 10 years, and the European Space Agency is bullish about what a bargain that represents to its taxpayers.
The European share, €8bn (Dh33bn), “amounts to just one euro spent by every European every year … less than the price of a cup of coffee in most of our big cities”.
For that, we get our first permanent outpost in space, the launch platform from which humankind’s imagination will take flight on the next stage of our journey to explore the universe.
Last week, Peake gazed down at the UAE.
At 7.05pm tonight, return the favour. Take a moment to step outside, gaze up in wonder at the comet trail of humankind’s ambition, and ponder on how far we have come, and how much farther we could go.
newsdesk@thenational.ae
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