by Chris Impey
Figure 31. The habitable zones of Alpha Centauri A and B, shown as the pale wide rings. The exoplanet found around B is too close to the star to be habitable, but a habitable world might still be found. Earth’s orbit is shown as a dashed circle for reference.
Intriguingly, the best prospect for finding Earth 2.0 may be around the nearest star to the Sun.
In 2012, researchers at the European Southern Observatory caused a stir when they claimed the detection of a planet 20 percent more massive than the Earth orbiting Alpha Centauri B, the closest Sun-like star to us at a distance of only 4.37 light years (Figure 31). The team that found the planet was part of the Mayor and Queloz group that discovered 51 Peg, the first exoplanet, in 1995, and they made the discovery while pushing the limits of the Doppler method, trying to measure a motion of half a meter per second instead of 50 meters per second for 51 Peg. Other groups have questioned the detection, so it remains in doubt.20
But even if the Alpha Centauri B planet is real, this Earth-like planet isn’t habitable. It’s twenty-five times closer to its dim red star than the Earth is to the Sun, traveling on a three-day orbit that’s probably tidally locked. More distant Earth-like planets at more temperate locations aren’t ruled out, but they’re below the detection limit of the best planet-hunting gear available. In another few years, the tools will be sophisticated enough to detect them. If there’s an Earth so close, we will put an enormous effort into characterizing it and seeing whether it could host life. And if it’s habitable, won’t it be tempting to take the next logical step by sending robotic probes and then people to explore it?
PART III
FUTURE
My heart is palpitating and my skin is clammy. It’s all I can do not to bolt, but of course there’s nowhere to run. Josefina rests her hand gently on my shoulder. I take a deep breath and steady myself.
Minutes earlier we’d ziplined over from the station to Ark 1. I watched the Earth slide under my feet like I was skating on blue-white ice. As the ark approached, there was no sense of scale; its surface was black and seamless, reflecting no light. There would be no Hub in our next home, and no recreation—the ark was a high-tech sarcophagus.
Going through the air lock, I get a sense of the mass of this monolith. Its beryllium and carbyne laminate is designed to quench cosmic rays and stop meteorites up to the size of a pea. Inside, there are soft lights and soothing bot voices guiding us around and explaining the guidance and life-support systems, but all I can think of is the narrow long corridor shrinking to a vanishing point in front of me and the stacked translucent boxes on either side as I float by. Frosties, the people down below call us. We’ll be taken to the edge of death, left there for a century, then reeled back into consciousness to explore a new world.
It’s quixotic, even preposterous. But that isn’t what gives me a panic attack. It’s the uncompromising vessel. The ark is utilitarian, Spartan, with no grace notes. It’s designed with only one thing in mind: to shield its human cargo from the indignities of space. To close on a more positive note, the bot guides us to the one common area where we’ll be able to eat and rest before taking pods down to the surface.
I want to be with Josefina but the Overseers are calling the shots. Ark assignments are done by lottery. She was picked for number one and I got number two. Keeping focus in the station is harder and harder. All the tasks they design to keep us busy seem meaningless. There are more defections and ejections. The churn is so great that we speculate that there might be a second, “shadow” Academy on a neighboring lake in Switzerland. How appropriate that the Overseers would plan a larger pool so that natural selection on the station will increase the chances of mission success.
Nina. Pinta. Santa Maria. From an earlier age, small ships setting out on a vast ocean to an unknown fate.
We spend a last precious hour in the Hub on her last day. Ark 1 is completing deployment of its solar sail. The gossamer-thin membrane has unfurled on all sides to span a square kilometer; the spaceship is dwarfed by it like a stick of charcoal on a silver carpet. The sail will harness the solar breeze to accelerate the ark to the edge of the Solar System and then pulsed fusion of hydrogen atoms snatched from space will propel it to its destination. Not good-bye, she says, it’s au revoir, but we both cry.
Ark 1 departs the next morning. I keep busy with my studies. There’s plenty to learn to be ready to handle the rigors of the pioneer life. I stay fit. I keep mostly to myself. I’m focused. So maybe I’m not paying attention one evening at dinner when the voice over the PA says that there’s been an incident on Ark 1. That a design flaw has eluded the corrective capability of the neural net. That the life-support protocol has been compromised. That it’s a freak occurrence, one never seen in the sims. That in the judgment of the project office Ark 1 has been lost with all hands.
Numb. I stay that way for weeks. I’ve no idea why the Overseers don’t pull me. They have every reason to. Maybe many others are in nearly as bad a shape. Gradually I bottom out and join in training and social activities. I become resolute. There’s nowhere to go but up. After all, that’s why I’m here.
Ark 2 is poised for launch. Ark 3 will follow in a few months. Its solar sail is transparent, so sunlight streams through it untouched. With one command, a weak electric current can be applied, the polarization in the thin film will shift, the material will become opaque, and Newton’s laws—which killed my father—will push me away from home. As we wait for our turn in the air lock to leave the station, we all pass through anxiety into a kind of delirious anticipation. We laugh and chatter, giddy with excitement.
I have a tinge of panic as the lid clicks shut. Then I watch with mild interest as clamps cinch my wrists and ankles. The needle drops down and I feel very little pain when the IV starts to replace my blood with glycerol. As the nitrogen vents open and the lid frosts white, I keep a single thought in view: I exist.
8
The Next Space Race
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China Makes Its Move
Wan Hu would have been proud. Late in 2013, China sent a rocket to the Moon carrying the Jade Rabbit probe to place in the Bay of Rainbows. Despite the lyrical names, Jade Rabbit (“Yutu”) is a protean and workmanlike six-wheeled rover and the Bay of Rainbows is an arid volcanic plain (Figure 32). The mission is a major landmark for the world’s newest superpower; it’s been thirty-seven years since any country soft-landed a probe on the Moon.
The first space race was spawned by a rivalry that cast its shadow over most of the twentieth century, cleaving the world into capitalism and communism and pitting free markets against command-and-control economies. Orbital flight was the by-product of a ruinously expensive arms buildup that took the world to the brink of nuclear war. Surely the days of space travel orchestrated by governments and colored by military aspirations are over?
Not yet, and we may be witnessing a new space race.
Here’s a snapshot of current international space activity. Spending on government space programs dropped in 2013, for the first time in two decades, as budget cuts in the United States offset rising investment by emerging space powers.1 The United States still has just over half of the total of $72 billion annual spending, but it has declined by 20 percent from its peak of $47.5 billion in 2009. Until relatively recently, Russia has been using buoyant oil revenues to pump lots of extra money into its space program. It’s the only other country spending more than $10 billion. China is in eighth place but moving up fast; relative to GDP, its spending is still modest. That means it has the capacity to make even greater strides in space.
Figure 32. China is the third nation to land a wheeled rover on the Moon, after the Soviet Union and the United States. The Jade Rabbit, or Yutu, rover reached the Moon in December 2013. It has a plutonium-powered nuclear reactor.
China is a rapidly emerging superpower, with a GDP per capita (scaled to purchasing-power parity) that will exceed that of the United States in about five years. The purchasing-
power-parity comparison makes sense, since goods and services are cheaper in China and they get a lot more bang for their yuan. Chinese spending in space matches the growth rate of the economy, which has been averaging 10 percent per year for the past two decades. It makes a dramatic contrast with Europe and the United States, where inflation-corrected spending has been flat or declining over the past two decades.2
China’s rank of eighth in the space league is misleading. As you know from your car, objects in the rearview mirror may be closer than they appear. Let’s see how they got to where they are today.
The father of the Chinese space program is Qian Xuesen. He left Shanghai to study at MIT at the same time that Mao Zedong began the Long March, a bloody retreat from the Nationalist forces that helped cement his grip on the Communist Party. Qian then worked at Caltech, where he helped famed rocket scientist Theodore von Kármán found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. At the end of World War II, Qian and von Kármán went to Germany and helped coordinate “Operation Paperclip,” which brought Wernher von Braun and other Nazi rocket experts to the United States. Qian became the foremost theorist on rocket propulsion in the country.
Then seismic forces of politics intervened. In 1950, Korea became a bloody battleground, with the United Nations and the United States supporting the South and China and the Soviet Union supporting the North. Mao felt that the world’s superpowers didn’t respect him, and he was convinced that only a nuclear deterrent would guarantee the security of the new People’s Republic of China. Meanwhile, the “Red Scare” was sweeping the United States; Qian Xuesen was stripped of his security clearance and placed under house arrest. In 1955, he was allowed to leave the country in exchange for American pilots captured during the Korean War. Mao was delighted. He had once lamented that his country couldn’t launch a potato into space, so he welcomed Qian back as a hero and put him in charge of China’s ballistic missile program.3
China was a poor country and progress was very slow. For a while, China benefited from Soviet expertise and hardware, but in 1960, Mao accused the Soviets of backsliding on communism and of ideological impurity. So China chose to go it alone—just when the turbulence and uncertainty of the Cultural Revolution was damaging to all scientific and technical activities. As a result, China launched its first guided missile in 1966, twenty years after the United States, and its first satellite in 1970, twenty-three years after the Soviets launched Sputnik. Then came major setbacks in the mid-1990s. In 1995, a Long March 2E rocket exploded shortly after launch, killing six and injuring twenty-three. A year later, a Long March 3B rocket blew up twenty-two seconds after launch and crashed into a nearby village, with a death toll of more than two hundred.
But years of patient, well-funded work paid off. Half a millennium after Wan Hu’s minions lit the forty-seven rockets that probably incinerated the Ming Dynasty official, China became the third nation to launch people into orbit using its own vehicle. Yang Liwei was dubbed a taikonaut—a purely invented English word designed to give China’s spacefarers an equal footing with America’s astronauts and Russia’s cosmonauts. Since then it’s been a steady upward arc. By the end of 2013, ten taikonauts had orbited the Earth in five launches. Between 2008 and 2012, China launched an average of twenty spacecraft a year. Most are doing mundane but essential work carrying telecommunications satellites into orbit.
The Chinese are acutely aware of their place in history and the way others perceive them. They also value ceremonial landmarks. So state media loudly trumpeted the launch of Shenzhou 10 in 2013, ten years after the first Chinese man traveled to Earth orbit. The crew included the second female taikonaut, Wang Yaping. She broadcast a live physics lesson to Chinese schoolchildren, joking, “We haven’t seen any UFOs.” As PR for the space program, it rivaled the efforts of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who played guitar and sang David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on the International Space Station.4 Shenzhou 10 also tested the docking capabilities of the spacecraft with a module that’s a precursor to China’s own full-size space station.
Wang Yaping has a light touch but the general tone of the Chinese taikonaut corps is earnest and patriotic. At the Shenzhou 10 launch, President Xi Jinping told the crew: “You make all the Chinese people feel proud. Your mission is both glorious and sacred.” Commander Xie Haisheng responded in kind: “We will certainly obey orders, comply with commands, be steady and calm, work with utmost care, and perfectly complete the Shenzhou 10 mission.” Wang Yaping was on message as well, saying that during parachute exercises with the Air Force, “We girls all cried while singing an inspiring song ‘A Hero Never Dies’ on our way back after the training.”5
It’s not all been smooth sailing, however. The Chang’e 3 lunar probe was the first Chinese soft landing on an extraterrestrial body, but the Jade Rabbit rover only traveled 100 meters across the Moon before it was immobilized by mechanical failure. Engineers had not anticipated the demands of the harsh, fourteen-day-long lunar nights, and they declared that the problem was electrical not mechanical, with components suffering from “frostbite.” As of late 2014, the rover was sending back limited data and was alive, but only barely.
Meanwhile, China has sent a rocket to the Moon and will bring back a lunar sample in 2017. China is also drawing up plans for a manned Moon-launch rocket that will be more powerful than the Saturn V.6 By 2020, China could launch its own space station, just as the International Space Station is being decommissioned and crashing into the ocean. By then, it could also be in a position to land taikonauts on the Moon, half a century after the Americans abandoned such efforts. The Chinese took advantage of not having to develop a lot of space technology first. Russia was cash-strapped in the 1990s and sold its technology to the Chinese, who reverse engineered and copied it. As a result, Shenzhou looks like the Soyuz capsule and Jade Rabbit looks like the Lunokhod rover. But now the Chinese are innovating and vaulting ahead. Their Long March rocket is original and has quickly eclipsed Russian rockets.
The average age of employees in the Chinese space program is twenty-seven, less than half the age of NASA employees. A decade from now, when that youthful energy is matched by experience, China will be a formidable player.
None of this makes officials in the United States very happy.
Suspicions of Chinese motives in space run deep in American political circles. NASA officials are barred from working with Chinese nationals and Congress has barred Chinese from visiting NASA facilities without a special waiver. The ban extends to the International Space Station, even though many of the partners in that project would like to draw China into collaboration rather than treat it like an adversary. US lawmakers were incensed by a 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test that created the largest space debris cloud in history when it pulverized one of its own aging satellites. Ironically, the ITAR legislation that so frustrates American space entrepreneurs was designed to stop “unfriendly” countries from acquiring technology with military applications, but hasn’t slowed the Chinese at all. Most of what they want, they build; what they can’t build, they buy from other countries.
The Chinese space program is ascendant in part because they have followed the example set by the United States in the 1960s: healthy funding and a single-minded purpose. In addition, because China is a tightly controlled society run by a government with limited accountability, the People’s Liberation Army is able to have a huge influence on the space program. Since its controversial 2007 test, China has continued to develop its antisatellite capabilities, and it’s also within reach of having its own network of GPS satellites, which could have military as well as civilian uses. In April 2014, President Xi ordered his air force to speed up the integration of air and space capabilities.7 China is even developing its own spaceplane, a “black project” called Shenlong, or “Divine Dragon.”
For those who worry about the militarization of space, this all brings to mind the purported Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”
Edge of the Law
Dennis M. Hope is Overlord of the Solar System.
The sixty-five-year-old Nevada resident has used celestial property as his sole source of income since 1995. He’s sold 600 million acres on the Moon, 300 million acres on Mars, and a combined 120 million acres on Mercury, Venus, and Io. He’s had customers in 193 countries, with the youngest a newborn and the oldest ninety-seven. The Hilton and Marriott hotel chains have bought plots of space land. The biggest parcel is continent-size, for a cost of $13,331,000 (none sold yet), but he’s moved a lot of 2,000-acre plots. An acre is a steal at $19.99 (plus $1.51 “lunar tax” and $10 for shipping and handling of the ownership certificate). He’s had more than half a million customers.8
Surely the man is a charlatan and selling extraterrestrial real estate is forbidden by international law? Well . . . not exactly. Hope was going through a divorce and needed money. Looking out the window at the Moon, he suddenly thought, That’s a lot of vacant property. At the library, he read Article II of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and interpreted it as saying that no nation has sovereignty or control over any of the satellite bodies. Since the treaty made no mention of property rights of individuals, he saw his opening. He claimed ownership of all the planets and moons in the Solar System and sent the United Nations a note saying that he intended to subdivide them and sell off lots. Hearing nothing back, he set up his business.9
So what is the legal status of objects in space?
In 1958, the same year that NASA was formed by an act of Congress, the United Nations formed the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to oversee subsequent agreements.10 The cornerstone of space law is the Outer Space Treaty, which came into force in 1967. It’s been signed by more than 100 countries, including all the major players in space exploration. The treaty was triggered by the tensions of the Cold War and it bars countries from putting nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction into Earth orbit, into deep space, or on the Moon or any other celestial body. It also forbids any government from claiming ownership or jurisdiction over the Moon or any other celestial body. Countries own anything they put into orbit or launch into space, but they’re responsible for any damages caused by those objects. The utopian ideal encapsulated by the Outer Space Treaty is that space exists for the “common heritage of mankind.”