The past 12 months have been the most dramatic year in the history of space exploration since the 1969 Apollo lunar landing, throwing up events whose importance will resound for decades to come.
This year saw the catastrophic loss of the United States shuttle Columbia, China’s spectacular emergence as a space power, the growing doubts over the International Space Station (ISS), the dispatch of a trio of unmanned missions to explore Mars and some sparkling successes in deep-space astronomy.
These ingredients — touching on national self-esteem, strategic reach and billion-dollar budgets — will be thrown into the cauldron of ideas that will determine when, where and how Man will take his next steps in space.
”We are at an important time,” says Doug Millard, curator of space technology at Britain’s Science Museum.
”Positions that are taken in the years to come may well be traced back to 2003.”
The strategic rethink applies especially to Nasa, the 300kg gorilla of space, which is in the grip of a traumatic self-appraisal following the loss of Columbia and its seven crew on February 1.
The shuttle’s destruction was blamed specifically on foam insulation that had smacked into the leading edge of its left wing upon launch, exposing the craft to the mortal heat of re-entry.
But much darker questions arising from the tragedy — the second shuttle loss in 17 years — were directed at Nasa’s very identity.
For some, Nasa may have lost its culture of engineering, for the middle-ranking technicians who have driven the agency’s history of excellence were overruled when they voiced concerns about the launch impact.
Nasa faces a bigger dilemma in 2004 as it ponders what to do with a shuttle fleet that, far from being a cheap, frequent and reliable means of putting people and freight into orbit has become outrageously expensive and infrequent because it is so swathed in safety regimes.
Hanging on the fate of the shuttle is the ISS, an orbital outpost in which the US is by far the biggest partner.
The ISS has long been derided by scientists as a money muncher that offers nothing new in terms of research and devours cash from projects that could be done more effectively, and at no risk, by robots.
The ISS assembly programme has been put on hold, and its staffing reduced to a skeleton crew who carry out essential maintenance, while Nasa gingerly prepares the next shuttle mission — tentatively put for September 2004 — and ponders how, or even whether, to replace the lost Columbia.
The pendulum of debate in space exploration has always swung between manned and unmanned missions, and the Columbia-ISS debacle would seem to have nudged preference towards unmanned exploration.
But the US manned programme may yet be given a fillip by Yang Liwei, who on October 15 became China’s first man in space.
Eager to oust Russia, its budget crippled by economic decline, as the world’s number-two space power, Beijing has sketched projects such as building its own space station, sending a spacecraft to orbit the moon within three years and an unmanned lunar landing in 2010.
The challenge is obvious, say experts.
”Until the early 15th century, China was at the top of the world in terms of science and technology, but then there was a sharp decline,” said Joseph Cheng, a China expert at City University of Hong Kong.
”There is a feeling that China should catch up in terms of science and technology,” he said.
In scientific terms, China’s manned programme ”is repeating types of activity which we’ve now been doing for 40 years”, said Millard.
”However, its achievements will be considered significant in the eyes of the US, and not just for space. America is looking at where it stands in the world.”
Almost unseen in this turbulent year was some great news on the astronomy front.
British and Australian astronomers issued the most accurate calculation to date of how many stars shine in the visible universe — About 70-sextillion, or seventy thousand million million million or more, apparently, than the number of grains of sand in all the world’s beaches and deserts.
The last of Nasa’s ”great observatories,” the Spitzer infra-red telescope, was launched in August, and there is serene confidence that it will be as remarkable as the Hubble, the Chandra and Europe’s XMM-Newton in peering into deep space.
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), launched in 2001, produced the sharpest image to date of the infant universe, 400 000 years after the Big Bang.
And, to the delight of soccer fans, according to one analysis of WMAP’s data, the universe is not flat — but shaped like a football. — Sapa-AFP
Still no news from Beagle on Mars