Most people have no idea what is happening in space right now.
Let me be clear, we all hear echoes about space every now and then, right? Elon Musk planning to colonize Mars with his big Starship, Chinese rover landing on the hidden side of the Moon, Astronauts sending cool “no gravity” images from the International Space Station, etc…
But I always feel like the press or even my non-spacey friends, when they dare mention space, they talk about it from a very futuristic, very distant perspective. It’s one of those things that not only feels so far away and kind of always unclear, but it also immediately ends up with long distant dreams and futuristic questions.
(Not to mention the classic “Do you really think we went to the Moon?” one, YES WE DID, for the love of God please stop with that question)
A big part of the content I see on space is always talking about either pretty far future space plans: humans colonising the system, contacting aliens, crafting lightsabers etc… Or pretty fascinating, mystical (aaand not very useful?) questions like what happens if I drift into a black hole, what happens if we get hit by a meteor, what does space sound like, you name it.
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But what is actually happening in space right now? At this moment? Where are we exactly and what’s the actual progress? Let’s have a look.
Humans in Space
So, we all know the basics, right? USA and USSR had that whole race about who’s going to send a human to space first. This whole phase ends with the Americans reaching the Moon and Soviets kind of falling apart. Anyway, long history chat for another time maybe.
But this is all in the past now. The question here is where are we with human presence in space right now?
Well first of all, these days humans are simply not going outside of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) anymore. There are plans to go further of course but the actual human presence in space hasn’t breached the immediate Earth proximity for the past few decades.
The main active highlights of human presence in space right now are in two places.
- The International Space Station
- Tiangong Space Station
The World’s space lab
The ISS is a cooperative project between mainly the USA, Russia, Japan, Europe and Canada (although there have been visits of astronauts from other nationalities).
The project has started 25 years ago but the station is still operational with a plan to decommission it in 2031…. So, it’s getting closer.
It is currently hosting 7 astronauts (3 Russians and 4 Americans) in its Expedition 71. This crew started around early April 2024 and is expected to stay until around September 2024 which makes this mission relatively long compared to others.
What are they doing up there? Their main jobs would typically be:
- Spacewalks to install or repair some equipment on the outside part of the station
- Packing some frozen research samples to send them back to Earth
- Testing the resistance of microbes to antibiotics in space
- Trying a to print organ like tissues in microgravity using an experimental 3D printer
- Releasing small universities’ CubeSats from the station to orbit
But apart from the daily really cool work being done there you can probably guess this station is considered a very important and strategic asset for the participating countries. I mean the ISS is literally the most expensive thing ever built by humans, we’re talking 100 – 150 billion $ of total cost estimated in 2023, not to mention the 3 – 4 billion $ of yearly bills to keep it running. It’s also the largest thing ever put in space by humans, technically they didn’t put it there in one go, they assembled modules together one by one, but the result is huge.
And all those costs and efforts gave humanity a very special scientific research and technology development place where we can test and validate complex orbital mechanics manoeuvres, check the impact of space on the human body and do tons of research on a very wide area of topics that simply couldn’t be possible on Earth simply because of … well gravity.
But above all the ISS is simply the only permanent station human beings currently have in space right now. Or it was until recently.
The Sky palace
In 2011 the US Congress passes the “Wolf Amendment” which is basically a law preventing NASA from cooperating directly with China on any of its activities. That includes, you guessed it, the International Space Station. Bear in mind that in 1998 when the ISS project was coming together China did express its desire to join the cooperation, but it was rejected.
To make it simple, that unique place where humans can be stationed in space simply became inaccessible for the Chinese, which is why not a single Chinese astronaut has ever set foot on the ISS.
What does China do? Easy. Start their own China Manned Space Program (definitely not easy by the way). The program is also known as Project 921 and the Third step is mainly revolving around putting together their own station called Tiangong which means something like the “Sky Palace”.
This project is the second permanent space station that is currently operational. The first Module was launched in 2021 and they have added two other modules since then which brings the total volume of the station 3 times smaller than the ISS. There are plans of still expanding it though and the Chinese pride themselves in the way the space inside Tiangong is used much more efficiently than in the ISS. Which is, to be fair, a bit overcrowded and messy inside.
Tiangong is also much cheaper than the ISS with an estimated 60 million CNY or 8 billion $ of cost in 2021.
Anyway, the station can accommodate 6 people max and depending on when you’re reading this it is currently hosting at least three taikonauts, if not six.
Again, what are they doing? So recently the station had some trouble with space debris, basically some very small pieces of junk floating in space hit the station and degraded some of its equipment so there are some spacewalks happening to install new equipment, like solar panels for example, or to fix the old one.
One of the big goals of the station is to help improve Chinese experience in human operations in orbit, including both life in Space and orbital maneuvers of their modules. There are some things that you simply have to try and learn from in space and since no Chinese capsule can go and dock on the ISS, well they practice on their own.
The station has also been used for research in microgravity just like the ISS. Basically, all sorts of experiments for academic and educational goals in disciplines like Physics, Material science, agriculture in space. It’s a wide spectrum.
Coming soon
Ok so now we know the current space stations but there are plans coming relatively soon for more human presence in space, especially with the ISS ending service in 2031.
I’m not listing the more long-term human space missions here, like the Mars colony for example where we’re optimistically talking about a mission in the 2030s. But let’s look at sooner and more accessible plans.
Russia announced its plans for its own station called the Russian Orbital Service Station (ROSS) and they’re aiming to send the first bits around 2028.
India is also planning for its own station. They call it Bharatiya Antariksha station and the plan is to send the first module sometime in 2028
Obviously, NASA is on the list but the plans are more ambitious with the Artemis Programme aiming for a space station on the Moon. For that mission they are using a very big rocket called the SLS and the flight module is called Orion. The first Artemis flight happened in 2022 and it was a confirmed success despite being very late and costly. Basically, they sent the Orion capsule to the moon with no crew onboard, manoeuvred to come back to Earth after reaching the Moon and landed the capsule.
After Artemis I’s complete success, the plans are still aiming to send people to the Moon in 2025 but just to do one orbit around it, not land. And finally the target is to send a crew of four astronauts again in 2026 but this time the plan is:
- Reach Moon orbit
- Attach Orion to a “Human Landing System” orbiting the Moon
- Get two of the astronauts to get in it
- Descend to the Moon
- Stay on the surface for around six days with two actual moonwalks
- Climb back up to meet with Orion
- And go back to Earth
Space Exploration
So, we looked at where humans were in space, physically speaking, but what about where we are in exploring the universe. Now it’s a bit complicated to draw a clear boundary between how well we understand the universe because we measured stuff and how well we understand with trying theoretical interpretations of that stuff.
To avoid that weird area let’s just try and focus on where we have directly sent stuff for now. The question is which parts of the solar system have received actual man-made objects that were sent there to take a closer look?
Well, the answer is basically many places but remember that because the trajectories are sometimes very long some of our probes are still on their way and will take years to reach their targets.
Earth
Obviously, there are many satellites currently looking at Earth from every angle, checking the weather, geology, oceans, agriculture, temperatures, you name it. So let’s start this part by saying we have “space explored” all Earth.
Sun
The Sun is also an interesting destination as it has quite a big impact on our lives, more than we realize it sometimes. NASA launched a probe called the Parker Solar Probe in 2018 to look at the external surface of the Sun and do some measurements, and its expected to reach the surface (and burn) around 2025.
Moon
Also, in the last few years there have been several missions that successfully landed equipment on the Moon:
- Japan for example landed SLIM in 2024 carrying two rovers to explore the surface. They initially had a few issues the solar panels of the SLIM lander not looking in the right direction and actually thought the mission was lost but after surviving three freezing lunar nights the lander somehow woke up and became operational again.
- China has also returned 2 kg of samples from the Moon in 2020 with the Chang’e 5 mission, it’s the first time lunar samples were returned since 1976 and the USSR
- India landed a small scientific rover on the moon too in 2023 with the Chandrayaan 3 mission
- South Korea launched an orbiter around the moon in 2022 with some instrumentation looking at lunar resources and at the moon’s topography
Obviously in terms of future Moon plans we talked about the Artemis program already, and there are a number of commercial missions too but we will address the private sector a bit later.
Mars
Of course, it’s very hard to talk about rovers and exploration without mentioning everyone’s little red favourite: Mars.
There are literally dozens of rovers and probes that have been launched to Mars since the dawn of Space times. And reaching the red gem is so hard that roughly two thirds of Mars spacecrafts fail before reaching it.
The two rovers currently operational on Mars are both NASA projects, called Curiosity (deployed in 2012) and Perseverance (in 2021). Now both these rovers are still functional and are driving over Mars, taking pictures, samples etc.. but Perseverance is also equipped with a mini-helicopter called Ingenuity. I’m sorry I find this absolutely brilliant, Ingenuity made 72 flights on Mars and it’s the first man-made object to fly in an atmosphere other than Earth’s.
The Chinese are not very far away but they were slightly less successful. So they managed to land the Zhurong rover on Mars in 2021 and it stayed active until May 2022 but it entered hibernation around that time to prepare for Martian winter and a coming sandstorm. Unfortunately, the plan was to reactivate the rover in December 2022 but as of now it is still inactive most likely because the sandstorm deposited too much sand on the solar panels, making the energy insufficient to restart the system. To be fair though it’s a very big accomplishment just landing the thing and the rover gathered a lot of very useful data.
Now around Mars we also have today seven orbiters that are still actively surveying it today: three of those are NASA projects, two of them are ESA, one is Chinese and one is owned by the UAE and is called the Hope Mars Mission. Yes, the UAE has an active successful Mars mission running, yes it was a partnership with the US but I’ll talk more about this another time.
There are still many other plans for Mars exploration missions, and it would take too long to talk about all of them so let’s go to the next destination for now and we’ll come back to this another time.
Now I could spend time mentioning all the different missions aiming for planets or moons across the system (and there are quite a few) but I think the main message here is that the big step at which we are in terms of exploration today is basically Mars.
Mars is the closest planet to us, it’s kind of the obvious challenge now that orbiting and landing on the Moon is starting to become more achievable let’s say. Don’t get me wrong the Moon is still very hard to reach, and not only for human spaceflight. There are very few countries or even private institutions that have actually managed to get there but space is all about looking far isn’t it. And right now many people have their eyes on Mars and are actively working to make rockets and spacecrafts to reach it.
And since we’re talking making space systems I suggest we now take a quick look at the Space Industry itself.
Space Industry
The past few decades many rules of the game changed really. Initially space was really a governments thing, the space race was quite obviously a political race. Even when private companies were involved they were very often just supporting government programs. But the cost of going to space and commercial benefit from it were not really a big thing.
This has changed a lot. Space was estimated to be a more 420 billion $ industry in 2022 and it’s expected to grow up to 840 billion $ by 2032. Just as a comparison the smartphone market was somewhere around 570 billion $ in 2023.
Why the change? Well, there are several factors really.
The demand for space data has increased a lot which means space is becoming an increasingly strategic resource. All around the world people are now using space images, GPS, satellite telecoms, weather monitoring.
At the same time access to space is actually becoming easier and cheaper than before especially with a big development in space technologies and a lower cost for satellite development and manufacturing.
Can you see the trend here? More people want space services, it’s cheaper and less risky to invest in space. It just makes sense for private investors to get in that gap and try to make some profit.
Now I will most probably prepare a dedicated talk about the space industry and what is referred to as “Newspace” but to stay on what we’re doing here let’s just highlight the main steps we’ve reached recently or are aiming to reach soon.
Rockets booming
Absolutely everyone is talking about Elon Musk and SpaceX. But apart from the whole personality cult part (which I really don’t enjoy to be honest) you have to realise that SpaceX as a company definitely changed the game with Falcon 9.
It takes a good understanding of how hard rockets actually are to realize what SpaceX has achieved when it successfully made Falcon 9 reusable. Now this is definitely extremely hard technically speaking and it required a lot of investment, dedication and failures from SpaceX teams. But it’s also very hard to actually make this cost effective.
The Space Shuttle for example was reusable but one of the reasons of its decommissioning was the cost of repairing it after landing to make it ready to fly again. Also, yes Falcon 9’s first stage can land but it uses fuel to do so, and more fuel carried just for landing means less fuel dedicated to bringing satellites in orbit which in turn means extra cost.
The fact that SpaceX succeeded in its formula, has simply proven to the global space industry that this can actually be a good idea and now that this is installed, we are seeing a boom in the number of new rocket companies.
Now of course SpaceX has all lights on it but there is now a big race around the world between different private companies that plan to offer different types of launch vehicles. Small ones, bigger ones, targeting different types of orbits etc… and as in any growing industry not everyone will have a seat.
What’s certain though is that there is a demand for launches and some companies have already secured their positions in the market like RocketLab for example who’s getting closer to reusing a full stage too (for now they’ve been able to recover boosters and reuse an engine).
Satellites for all uses
As I mentioned earlier it is actually getting cheaper to get to space. But it’s also getting more and more important too. Satellites are being used for many things today (more details here: Your daily Satellites routine).
From military uses like spying, navigation to telecoms, to even in-space manufacturing, the importance and opportunities of space are just constantly growing.
Space data, in particular, whether it’s observation or telecoms, is now possible with constellations of very small and quite simple satellites like CubeSats which makes sending a satellite in orbit just for experimenting even accessible to university students.
Ok now this all sounds very positive and all but don’t forget, there’s always a dark side. So let’s talk politics.
Space Politics
We kind of touched on that topic a little during this talk. So, it’s true, the days of the big political Space Race where the two biggest superpowers were just competing to show who had the biggest rocket are behind us. Space today involves much more cooperation and many missions that I described as made by the US, Russia, Europe, China, India etc… are often in fact cooperations between different teams internationally.
The private investments also create a new dynamic in the Space Race, it’s not politicians who are driving all space projects anymore, it’s profit.
But space is a strategic resource now, right? I mean from space, you can spy on your rivals, you can direct your missiles, you can provide telecoms for your allies like SpaceX did with Ukraine after the Russian invasion. You can literally dig precious resources on the Moon or on Mars or reach a crater and flag it as part of your territory. And there were attempts at trying to prevent this type of conflicts before they happen like the Outer Space treaty or the Artemis accords (which we will come back to later).
But Space just like any resource is very much first comes first served, especially since it’s a new territory with very few enforced rules for now. Space is becoming an extension of our geography and anyone who can race for it, should be.
And today the US is certainly dominating this race. For example, of the 5 465 active satellites currently in orbit there are 3 433 that are owned by the USA and only 541 by China, the nearest competitor.
But is it set in stone? It’s very hard to tell. There are many geopolitical factors involved here and the later a nation enters the space race the less chances it gets at securing its position there, which basically means it becomes dependent on others for all its increasing space needs. You can imagine it very much like the maritime powers in the past. If you can’t navigate the ocean by yourself, you simply become reliant on others for trading, military defence or access to critical resources. Only this time it’s just bigger and further.
