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November 2007

Space - The Next Fifty Years: Talk by Dr David Whitehouse

Written by John Axtell

A packed meeting of 61 were inspired by David's vision of the next 50 years. In a quick reprise of the Space Age to date he pointed out that "it had all been done" in the first 15 of those 50 years - the first artificial satellite, the first man into orbit, and Man had been to and finished with the Moon. Another salutary note was that out that the Shuttle had been around for 25 of the last 50 years. In retrospect the Shuttle had been a disappointing compromise with limited capability. David then introduced us to the Shuttle replacements, the Ares orbiter and the Orion launch vehicles. These were admittedly of Apollo philosophy, but with modern cutting edge technology.

The new Moon Race is already underway - Japan launched a Moon probe last month, China launched one only this week, and India will do the same sometime in 2009. NASA's Moon Reconnaissance Orbiter will search out potential landing sites. The Lunar Poles seem to be the favourite option, and David showed how this had been coincidentally predicted in a 1950s Dan Dare episode (two slides featuring Dan Dare spaceships certainly found favour with a certain age group within the audience). At the poles are craters whose floors are in permanent shadow. These are thought to contain ice deposited by comets and to be colder even that Pluto. Clearly this ice can be used for water, oxygen for life-support and hydrogen for fuel. Nearby are craters whose rims are in almost permanent sunlight (the Mountains of Eternal Light), and constitute an excellent place for a solar-powered Moon Base. David thinks that Man-on-the-Moon Part 2 will invigorate the take up of sciences in schools.

Going to the Moon is merely a dress rehearsal for going to Mars, which has the same land area as the whole of earth. One exciting possibility is a nuclear powered mission, which could cut the journey time to four months and the total mission duration to one year. David's best guess was that the manned Mars mission would be somewhere between 2020-2035.

After Mars the next goals would be Europa and Titan, the best possibilities for finding life elsewhere in our Solar System. David showed some wonderful slides depicting missions to these and other fascinating targets.

David finished by conjecturing that within the next 50 years we would indeed have developed instruments with the sophistication to detect the possibility of life elsewhere in the Universe. Are we rare? Will they want to talk to us? Fascinating times ahead indeed!