A global effort on the way to the stars?

You could be excused for not noticing, but there has been an awful lot going on in outer space these days.

Confrontations in the Middle East, Brexit and the antics of the man in the White House ensure these exciting developments get downgraded in news bulletins and relegated to the inside pages of newspapers.

To recap, the Chinese have landed a probe on the far side of the moon in the first step towards establishing a permanent lunar base; a Japanese probe has touched down on an asteroid and will return bits of it to Earth for analysis, and an Israeli spacecraft is heading for the moon in that country’s first venture of its kind.

Then there’s Russia, India and the European Union with varying space capabilities and projects. Even Australia has announced the creation of a space agency.

Meanwhile the daddy of them all, the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), continues its work with its InSight Lander just beginning and exploration of Mars as the Opportunity Rover completed a 15-year mission on the Red Planet — an incredible feat considering it was originally scheduled to work for just 60 days.

Finally NASA’s New Horizons probe has sent back pictures of the most distant object to be photographed — a snowman-shaped clump of ice and rock 33 kilometres in length and 6.4 billion kilometres from Earth.  

While a US President once inspired a generation with his vision of placing a man on the moon, the contribution of the present incumbent is a call to weaponise space with the creation of an armed space corps — a plan the Pentagon wants no part of and, thankfully, has little chance of being approved by Congress.

Most of the other world leaders look in other directions as the various national agencies concerned with space get on with their jobs as best they can, usually under the continuing threat of funding cutbacks.

There is no doubt that space exploration is a very costly business, and although I was one of millions around the world who thrilled to the moon landings of the 1960s and early 70s, I realise that they came about through the race to be ‘first’ between the US and the Soviet Union, a wasteful exercise in superpower rivalry.

I still believe that space holds a continuing fascination for millions of people, and further explorations are inevitable, but could these be done in a better, less wasteful way?

The key would be a truly international effort with nations contributing their current resources and expertise — no one would probably have to give any more to the field than they do now, but the pooled effort would have the ability to greatly accelerate the push into the cosmos.

With the International Space Station proof of what can be achieved, Luna bases and manned explorations of Mars could be a reality, not at some distant point in the future, but within the next decade.

This may seem like science fiction never to come close to reality in a world currently fraught with a groundswell of nationalist feeling in many countries, but when populism has run its course, and the bankruptcy of its philosophy exposed, the need for international cooperation in so many areas will be overwhelming.

Space exploration may not be high on any one nation’s ‘to-do’ list, but it should never be discounted as an inspiration to people everywhere and an opportunity for humankind to satisfy its noble desire to explore and do things that have never been done before.