From the moon to Mars: Space exploration is about satisfying a human curiosity – Editorial

Mars Dune Alpha is designed to simulate living conditions on Mars. Photo / Nasa

THE FACTS

• Four research volunteers will participate in Nasa’s year-long simulation of a Mars mission.
• They will spend 378 days in Mars Dune Alpha, a 3D printed Martian habitat inside Johnson Space Centre.
• The volunteers will experience a space voyage, complete with spacewalks.

The US space agency Nasa this month announced it had chosen a crew for its second year-long simulation of a Mars mission.

The four paid volunteers will live and work like astronauts for 378 days in Mars Dune Alpha, a 3D-printed Martian habitat inside Houston’s Johnson Space Centre.

Inside, the volunteers will experience a space voyage, complete with spacewalks. They will have limited communications home, restricted food and resources.

There will even be some equipment failures thrown in for good measure.

Nasa hopes to send a human mission to the Red Planet as early as the 2030s.

Space travel has always captured people’s imagination.

The first moon landing in 1969 was watched by an estimated 600 million people, from a world population of about 3.5 billion.

For decades, Hollywood has used the stars for inspiration. 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Martian, Star Wars, and Star Trek all explored the possibilities of space travel.

All of them, in one way or another, sought to address the question: Are we alone in the universe?

During the Cold War, the space race was primarily between the US and the Soviet Union.

From the 1980s to the 2000s, space became about communications, satellites, GPS and weather monitoring. It was a more collaborative time, with the construction of the International Space Station, which involved the US, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada.

Today, Governments continue to be involved, but private companies are fast becoming major players.

SpaceX, Blue Origin and our own Rocket Lab are building spacecraft and trialling space tourism.

If there is one downside to this extraterrestrial entrepreneurship, it is that space travel risks being seen as a luxury; a frivolity for those wealthy enough to afford it.

A case in point is singer Katy Perry and television personality Gayle King joining an all-female party that included Lauren Sanchez, the spouse of one of the world’s richest men, Jeff Bezos, in a suborbital space flight aboard Bezos’ Blue Origin New Shepard rocket.

But space travel is vastly more than that. Curiosity and exploration are part of our human condition.

Trying to peer beyond our short horizon is how we humans have advanced. We have made scientific and medical breakthroughs, found new ways to communicate and learned more about our planet and ourselves.

So, as those four people enter their on-Earth Martian environment, they will become part of a wider picture of human exploration.

Many people may think it a waste of time and money to further explore the final frontier, when there are more pressing concerns here on planet Earth.

But exploration at its core is about more than meeting the requirements of everyday life; it is about satisfying a human curiosity that took root in our earliest ancestors and continues, multiple millennia later.

If Abel Tasman, Sir Edmund Hillary, Sir Ernest Shackleton or Amelia Earhart hadn’t taken their first steps, chapters of our history – from charting the Pacific, reaching the highest peak, exploring our poles and skies – may never have been written.