Future of Space Travel

  

Welcome to the 21st-century space race – one that could potentially lead to recycled rockets, 10-minute space vacations, and humans on Mars.

PRIVATE SPACEFLIGHT

Private spaceflight is not exactly a new concept. Private companies have played a part in the industry since 1962, when NASA launched the first privately-built satellite.

In recent years, companies such as SpaceX and Boeing have started vying for more large-scale government contracts. The launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy this February aims to demonstrate the world's most powerful rocket since the Saturn V by placing SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's very own Tesla roadster in the Sun's orbit.

Others, such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, have shown interest in specializing in space tourism. Test launch video from inside the cabinof Blue Origin’s New Shepard shows off breathtaking views of our planet and a relatively calm journey for its first passenger, a test dummy cleverly dubbed “Mannequin Skywalker.” The New Shepard is expected to have its first manned launch later this year.

Countless dreams of zero-gravity somersaults could soon become a reality. With the possibility of low-cost, reusable rockets and ambitious NASA plans for exploration on Mars, the coming years are set to be a major turning point in the history of spaceflight.

LOOKING TO THE MOON

Moon missions are essential to the exploration of more distant worlds. Extended lunar stays build the experience and expertise needed for the long-term space missions required to visit other planets. The moon may also be used as a forward base of operations on which humans learn how to replenish essential supplies, such as rocket fuel and oxygen, by creating them from local material.

             ARCHIVAL PHOTOS OF SPACEFLIGHT

Aeronaut John Steiner inflates his hot air balloon at Erie, Pennsylvania, as seen in the oldest known photograph of an aircraft, a quarter-plate ambrotype taken in June 1857.

 

Physicist Robert Goddard, rocketry pioneer, stands next to one of his experimental A-series rockets in front of his workshop in Roswell, New Mexico, in the 1930s.

The seeds of this transformation are being sown now, as private companies ramp up their spaceflight capabilities and start finding ways to make money in Earth orbit and beyond. 

"We're in the midst of a paradigm shift right now," said scientist Alan Stern, vice president of the space division of the Southwest Research Institute, a nonprofit organization based in San Antonio. "In 15 years we'll likely look back and say, 'That was a special time. That was pivotal.'"

Private spaceflight taking off

Since Gagarin's historic achievement, human spaceflight has been the province of nations, with government agencies such as NASA launching people into space for scientific reasons, or as expressions of national pride.

But that's all about to change, because private spaceflight is set to take off, making access to space far cheaper than it's ever been. 

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo private suborbital spacecraft makes its first solo test flight on October 10, 2010.

Credit: Mark Greenberg

Multiple companies are developing their own spaceships and their own plans for making money in space. Virgin Galactic, for example, could start taking tourists on suborbital joyrides as early as 2012, at $200,000 per seat. More than 400 people have already bought down payments for such a trip, according to company officials.

Other firms are jockeying for position in the suborbital-tourism race, including Blue Origins, Masten Space Systems, XCOR Aerospace and Armadillo Aerospace.

Orbital tourist trips might not be far behind suborbital jaunts. Various companies — including Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX for short) — are developing crewed vehicles that could take paying customers to the International Space Station, or perhaps the commercial space station under development by Bigelow Aerospace, which is helmed by hotel tycoon Bob Bigelow.

And spaceflight might become a regular part of our day-to-day travel around the planet within the next 50 years, some space industry insiders say. Vehicles that rocket through space on their way from San Francisco to Sydney, for example, could turn a taxing 14-hour trip into a short jaunt.

"In 50 years, companies and government agencies may have tackled the technological challenges that will enable point-to-point rocket or hypersonic transportation," said Virgin Galactic president and CEO George Whitesides. "For the last 50 years, the average speed of air travel has not changed — we are certainly overdue for a significant major advance." 

More than tourism needed

Tourism is the leading edge of the commercial push into space. But for humanity to really establish a presence in Earth orbit and beyond, other space-based industries must be developed as well, experts say. [Vote Now! The Best Spaceships of All Time]

"People need to figure out business models by which you can monetize other aspects of human spaceflight beyond tourism," Stern told SPACE.com. "Bob Bigelow has one, with his space station. We need 50 Bob Bigelows."

Those other commercial opportunities may include mining asteroids for precious metals, or extracting the moon's ample water stores to produce rocket fuel, which would be sold to spaceships at orbiting filling stations.

Indeed, some businesses are already planning out such ventures. The private firm Shackleton Energy Company, for example, plans to send robotic scouts to the moon in the next four years and hopes to be selling propellant in low-Earth orbit by the end of the decade.

If some of these ideas pan out, more and more entrepreneurs and companies might see business opportunities in space. The effects could snowball, and the proverbial heavens could soon open up.

"Fifty years in the future, I would hope that millions of people have had the opportunity to travel to space, and that thousands of people live there," Whitesides told SPACE.com. "I think outposts on the moon and Mars are entirely possible, with tourism to the lunar surface an expensive but possible activity."

Freeing NASA up to explore

The coming explosion in commercial spaceflight capabilities should free up NASA to explore farther afield than it ever has before.

NASA is retiring its space shuttle program later this year after three decades of service. The agency is counting on companies such as SpaceX to take up the burden of ferrying astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit over the long haul.

"If others are able to take that on, then we can concentrate on exploration and discovery, which are really what we're here for," said Doug Cooke, associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate.

NASA is already eyeing destinations beyond low-Earth orbit and the moon. President Barack Obama's vision for the nation's human spaceflight future calls for NASA to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, and then on to Mars by the 2030s.

NASA has many reasons to send astronauts to Mars — chief among them to search for evidence of life on the Red Planet, be it past or present. And astronauts could well be looking for microbes in the Martian dirt before 2061 rolls around.

"I think in this timeframe, we could easily have sent people to Mars," Cooke told SPACE.com. "We may have gone there repeatedly."

Excursions to the moon or asteroids would likely come first, Cooke added, to help astronauts and scientists map out a Mars trip. And a journey to the Martian moon Phobos is another potential intermediary step.

This NASA illustration shows a moon base concept that uses both fixed and inflatable habitat elements to support astronauts living on the lunar surface.

Credit: NASA.

"You'd be right at Mars, and you could teleoperate [robots] on the surface," Cooke said. "Yet you wouldn't have to take the full step of landing on Mars, which is a big deal."

Making it happen: NASA

NASA is on its way toward developing the capability to get beyond low-Earth orbit. But the space agency isn't quite ready to launch astronauts to the Red Planet yet.

Among other things, NASA needs to develop larger spaceships that can accommodate crew on a potential six-month trip to Mars, for example. And it must come up with a heavy-lift rocket, Cooke said.

"The biggest first step is a heavy-lift vehicle," Cooke said. "It's incredibly important. We're going to have to launch the equivalent of the full-up space station that we currently have in orbit to get to the Martian surface and back."

New entry and landing systems would also be needed for a manned Mars mission, as would effective ways to protect journeying astronauts from dangerous space radiation.

The scale and cost of such a mission mean that NASA likely wouldn't be going it alone.

"We will probably do this in an international effort, which will benefit all of the world," Cooke said.

Making it happen: Private spaceflight

For the commercial human spaceflight revolution to really take hold, companies must find a variety of ways to make money in space, Stern said. And they must increase the safety of human spaceflight. [10 Private Spaceships Headed for Reality]

NASA's space shuttle has had two fatal accidents in 133 manned missions. The safety record of Russia's Soyuz vehicle is comparable. Private companies will probably have to do better than that, or tourists, scientists, educators and anyone else won't risk flying with them regularly.

"The trick is to have the fatalities be rare enough to be acceptable," Stern said. "Currently they are not, because the shuttle and similar systems have fatalities too often on a per-flight basis."

Stern thinks an order of magnitude improvement in the safety of commercial human spaceflight — one accident every 500 or 1,000 flights, say — might be enough to get people taking to the heavens regularly.

For his part, Whitesides thinks that human spaceflight might make huge safety strides in the next half-century, perhaps becoming as reliable and routine as plane travel is now.

"I think travel to LEO [low-Earth orbit] could approach the safety of commercial airplane travel in that timeframe, if not much sooner," Whitesides said. "Through the use of new technologies and safety systems, we should be able to make significant advancements in space safety, as we are doing today at Virgin Galactic."

If all of these factors line up, humanity could escape from the boundaries of its home planet as never before by 2061. We could establish an extensive and protracted presence in Earth orbit, on the moon and beyond, experts say.

Stern is optimistic that this push into space is under way, facilitated by the improving capabilities of private spaceflight.

"We're seeing that the private sector can do human spaceflight, and do it at radically less expensive price points," he said. "I believe in 200 years, when people look back, they will see this as the pivotal breakout in human spaceflight."

NASA’s Orion spacecraft is designed to carry humans farther than ever before — to asteroids or even Mars — and bring them back to Earth. Sending astronauts into deep space is radically different from maintaining a presence in low Earth orbit. Once Earth no longer is in reach, space travelers must rely on new technology to keep them alive and healthy. Credit: NASA

The Physician on Your Wrist

A research team led by Esther Sternberg and Perry Skeath of the UA's Center for Integrative Medicine, or UACIM, is developing the next generation of wearable devices that can keep tabs on a person's health status by measuring biomarkers: particular biochemicals in blood, saliva, urine or sweat that indicate how a body system is functioning. After discovering that cortisol, a stress hormone, is secreted in sweat, the researchers are combining expertise in medicine, chemistry, engineering and data management to design a patch sensor to monitor stress and many other biomarker molecules.

Combined with other sensors that keep tabs on other vitals such as heart rate, blood pressure and sweat responses, such technology could, in principle, be advanced further to ensure the long-term health of astronauts on deep space missions. Obviously, possibilities abound for earthly applications, as well, such as monitoring patients who are at risk of stroke or heart attack.

"The devices we are developing are basically microchemistry labs, so they can be used for many applications," says Skeath, assistant research director at UACIM and assistant professor at the UA College of Medicine – Tucson. "The tricky part is tailoring the sensor suite to the task, whether that's an astronaut going to Mars or a soldier on the battlefield."

While a wearable, cortisol-measuring device potentially could measure stress in real time, the data it generates can be ambiguous because other, non-stress-related factors come into play and change the reading. It is critical that scientists first have a solid understanding of what exactly constitutes stress and define a precise set of measures that capture that condition.

When astronauts are sent into deep space, the crew has to be autonomous — and so does health care. Credit: NASA

To study this, the team has set up a lab dedicated to tracking various physiological and molecular responses to stress challenges in volunteers.

"We expose them to controlled stress challenges while performing a host of measurements," says Sternberg, research director at UACIM and professor in the College of Medicine – Tucson. "Then we look at what the minimal set of measurements is that captures the condition."

Once the researchers know that, they need to make each measurement reliable and accurate, so that the set of biomarker changes will zero in on the specific challenge rather than giving a reading that's driven by unrelated factors.

"For example, when we look at cortisol in sweat, we have to ask important questions about the physiology involved," Skeath says. "Does cortisol degrade over time? Do other substances dilute it? Do we lose it before it gets from the pore to the sensor? Once we have those questions answered, then it's time for the engineers."

Teaching Machines to Expect the Unexpected

As machines become smarter, efforts are underway to endow them with enough autonomy and learning capabilities to work without any human oversight. Such robots could operate in environments too hazardous for humans to venture into—for example, natural disaster zones such as the tsunami-stricken nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan, or beyond the reach of Earth-based mission control centers.

In his Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory, Fink and his team are working on building a robotic field geologist. Unlike traditional planetary missions that focus on, say, a spacecraft studying a planetary body from a high orbit, or a rover analyzing features of the landscape at close range, his concept of tier-scalable reconnaissance mimics the approach a human explorer would take by first surveying global features, then homing in on the lay of the land in a certain region, and finally investigating interesting features at close range.

"Instead of putting all the smarts on one system, you distribute them among several different and spatially distributed systems," Fink explains, "and that creates the redundancy and robustness you need for a critical mission like planetary exploration."

In this scenario, an orbiter would oversee one or more aerial vehicles such as blimps or quadcopters hovering in the atmosphere (on planets that have one), which in turn would command a fleet of miniaturized rovers, directing them to various points of scientific interest. Having such a team of artificial scientists working autonomously on different levels also would enhance the overall intelligence inherent to the mission, Fink says.

Wolfgang Fink and his team, including student Alex Brooks (left), are working on building a robotic field geologist. Credit: Bob Demers/UANews

"Especially for planets or moons in the outer solar system, where the distance to Earth prohibits real-time commanding, you can have such a system conduct its own science, deploy and redirect its agents as needed to obtain the results, and decide which are interesting enough to be sent back to Earth," he says.

In a shift away from current paradigms, which typically center around one highly sophisticated robot, the tiered payload would involve less complex, less expensive and more expendable units, creating redundancy, according to Fink.

"If you only have one rover, you're not going to deploy it to an area where it might get stuck or suffer damage," he says, "but if you have several at your disposal, you might want to risk sacrificing a few, if that would help you answer the question whether there was life on Mars, for example."

Because these robotic explorers will have to make decisions on their own, they will need cognitive abilities that until now have been unique to humans, such as curiosity.

As opposed to artificial intelligence, or AI, Fink's research team is developing reasoning algorithms that are not rule-based to teach machines to recognize features in a landscape that—for one reason or another—a human explorer would classify as "interesting." In Fink's lab, a small fleet of track-bearing rovers serves as testing platforms: They learn to explore a landscape by roaming freely, avoiding obstacles and paying attention to what is in front of them.

"Equipped with our Automated Global Feature Analyzer software package, an orbiter or blimp would try to identify anomalies on the ground using a set of purely mathematical, unbiased algorithms," Fink explains. "It would then transfer that information to the rovers on the ground, so they can go investigate up close. No longer would humans be the ones pushing the buttons."

The challenging work is hard to beat for students such as Alex Brooks.

"What's unique about working in Dr. Fink's lab is that you really get the opportunity to do a lot of the actual work on the projects," Brooks says. "For example, on the rovers, for the autonomy part, I'm really the primary developer for the software that helps them navigate. ... In his lab, if you demonstrate that you're capable of handling advanced work, you can explore that."

From Cyborgs to Superhumans

One could see how the lines between "human" and "artificial" start to blur in a future where humans and machines interface and work together ever more closely, and machines execute complex missions with minimal or no human oversight.

Take the booming field of bioengineering, especially neuroprosthetics, where implantable technology is used to prevent bouts of depression and epileptic seizures, suppress tremors caused by Parkinson's disease, or restore hearing or vision.

Fink's work on image processing and neural stimulation algorithms has dramatically improved the performance of the only FDA-approved retinal implant, and has paved the way to enhancing its resolution such that the wearer has a chance of seeing more than just facial features and reading large-font lettering.

Giving vision back to the blind through artificial vision implants or replacing stroke-damaged brain tissue with biomimetic devices are premier flagship examples of a human brain/machine interface. But one can see how it may only take a small step to "improving" otherwise healthy individuals with technology.

It might sound like the stuff of sci-fi novels and movies to go from systems monitoring the health of astronauts, pilots, soldiers or athletes to creating some kind of "superhuman." But in a way, that's exactly where things are going, according to Fink.

"There is a critical ethical boundary that needs to be considered," he says. "Where do you stop helping humanity and enter the realm of the supranatural where nothing is wrong with a human, but you try to go on top of that?

"Where does the human end, and the machine begin? Should robots have rights? This is what we will run into eventually."

What's Next For NASA?

NASA's vision: We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit 

of humankind.

Thousands of people have been working around the world -- and off of it -- 

for decades, trying to answer some basic questions. What's out there? How 

do we get there? What will we find? What can we learn there, or learn just by

 trying to get there, that will make life better here on Earth?

Explore our history, see who we are and how we work, check the list of 

current missions, and find out what we're launching next.  Here’s a look at 

some of the big things coming up.

This is NASA's 2018 'To Do' list. The work we do, which will continue in 2018, helps the United States maintain its world leadership in space exploration and scientific discovery. Launches, discoveries and more exploration await in the year ahead.

SOURCE:- SPACE.COM, GOOGLE,WIKIPEDIA, PHYS.ORG, NASA.COM,