Now, if Starship fails, NASA isn't going back to the Moon. NASA's human exploration program now has so much confidence in Starship that the space agency selected the vehicle to serve as the landing system of its Artemis Moon Program.
KERBAL SPACE PROGRAM GAME OF THE YEAR EDITION SERIES
But such a vehicle would have myriad other uses for science, exploration, and defense purposes.Ī highly reliable version of Starship likely remains several years away, but the vehicle could begin a series of orbital test flights in early 2022. SpaceX and its founder, Elon Musk, view Starship as the key rocket to take humans to Mars and eventually build a self-sustaining settlement there. Much technical work remains, but the company appears to be well on its way to delivering a superheavy-lift rocket that is fully reusable, low-cost, and potentially capable of delivering as much as 100 tons to the surface of most bodies in the Solar System. "It could provide a revolutionary new way of exploring these worlds." Starship’s originsĮngineers at SpaceX have been working seriously on the development of Starship for about five years, and over the last dozen months or so, they have completed several early test flights. "You can really take advantage of the Starship architecture and get to the outer Solar System in ways we haven't thought about before," Heldmann said. With Starship, by contrast, NASA might land a cache of scientific payloads the size of a single-story unfurnished house. At best, they were hoping to land a payload of science instruments about the size and mass of a mini-refrigerator there.
During recent NASA planning meetings, scientists contemplated sending a complex spacecraft, costing billions of dollars, to conduct science on Europa. Imagine sending a lander to Europa, which harbors a vast, warm, subsurface ocean. Some planetary scientists have started warming to the idea that SpaceX's new Starship rocket, with its unprecedented lift capabilities and potentially paradigm-shattering low costs, could open up the Solar System to a new era of exploration. Just as we're learning that the Solar System holds far more secrets than we might have imagined-which makes our inability to fly out there and unlock them especially frustrating. The ubiquity of water has only heightened scientists' desire to get robots out into the Solar System to definitively find ice deposits and subsurface oceans and to characterize them.
And there are always many more missions they want to fly than funds available to fly them. Advertisementįor scientists, there are always more questions than answers. Where there is water, there are the components for rocket fuel-liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. For human exploration, too, the proliferation of water offered a great opportunity. Scientists were therefore no longer just looking for fossils in long-dry lake beds on Mars they began seeking out living organisms in the large oceans of Europa, Enceladus, and elsewhere. Where there is water-or once was-life might have developed. These discoveries raised all manner of tantalizing prospects. As they looked beyond Earth, scientists discovered, water was nearly everywhere. The discovery of water ice on the Moon highlighted an era in which planetary scientists were finding ice and water all over the Solar System-on the ice-encrusted moons of Europa and Enceladus, on and beneath the surface of Mars, and potentially in even more far-flung locations, such as the interior of Pluto or Neptune's largest moon, Triton. "It is truly amazing how the results of that mission have been so profound," she said. The experience cemented her interest as a planetary scientist in following the water. Centaur's mission was to blast one of these craters and see if the scientists were right.Īfter poring over the data, NASA declared that it had indeed found water in the vapor plume kicked up by the Centaur impact, as well as material ejected by the blast.įor Heldmann, this was a pivotal moment in her career. Although the Apollo landings in the 1960s and early 1970s had found a gray and barren world, scientists had since come to believe that pockets of ice were trapped below the rims of craters in permanent darkness at the poles, the remnants of billions of years of cometary impacts. NASA sought to "touch the ice" with the LCROSS mission. As a 33-year-old planetary scientist, she was working her first major mission for NASA by coordinating observations of the impact with ground-based telescopes. It was October 2009, and Heldmann tracked the impact from inside the Science Operations Center at NASA Ames in California. In the name of science, a 2.3-ton chunk of steel struck the Moon with the force of 2 tons of TNT. Jennifer Heldmann stared at the computer screens on her desk, watching as a rocket's upper stage slammed into a crater near the South Pole of the Moon.
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