But NASA astronauts risk getting stuck on Earth forever. Due to financial difficulties, a difficult situation has developed around the "flagship program" of the American space agency. The situation is complicated by the lack of NASA and any intelligible strategy for space exploration: after the termination of the Shuttle flights, experts have not come to a common decision on the topic of manned space flights. Who will be bringing American astronauts into orbit in the near future? The promising Orion program, commercial projects such as the Dragon cargo spacecraft or the aging Soyuz-TMA of Roscosmos? Or maybe it is worth abandoning manned launches altogether - objectively, at the current stage of technical development, there is no need for a person to be in space, automatic machines cope with all tasks perfectly.
For 55 years of its existence NASA manages to spend 800 billion dollars on space research, a significant part of which went to the so-called "flagship program". The flagship program is a reason for pride for all of Mankind. Over the years, under its auspices, the missions Voyager (outer regions of the solar system), Galileo (work in orbit of Jupiter), Cassini (study of the Saturn system) were carried out - flagship missions are complex and extremely expensive, therefore such launches are carried out no more often once a decade. In recent years, the "flagship" has been the heavy rover MSL (Mars Science Laboratory, also known as Curiosity). On August 6, 2012, the "jet crane" gently lowered the MSL to the surface of the Red Planet, and NASA experts wondered what to do next?
So, so … next year we are allocated 17 billion … You can drill the ice shell of Europa to find out if there is a warm ocean with extraterrestrial life forms under the 100-kilometer layer of ice on the surface of Jupiter's moon. Or launch another heavy rover? Or maybe by the end of this decade send a mission to distant Uranus?
The research fervor of NASA scientists and specialists quickly cooled the Appropriations Committee of the House of Representatives of the Congress. US space agency executives were tactfully reminded that they "are" unable to ensure that schedules are met within the allocated budget. " Most of the questions were raised by the project of the orbital observatory. James Webb is a space super-telescope with a composite mirror with a diameter of 6.5 meters, remote from the Earth at a distance of five times the Moon (in open space, it is not afraid of distortions arising from the effects of the atmosphere and thermal radiation of our planet). In the late 90s, it was planned that the telescope will start working in 2011, and its cost will be $ 1.6 billion. According to modern estimates, "James Webb" will be launched no earlier than 2018, and the cost of its life cycle has increased to $ 8, 7 billion!
There are no funds, it is impossible to close it - this is the aphorism that can be used to describe the events associated with the Webb project. During a heated debate, the congressmen nevertheless agreed to allocate the required amount, but forced the NASA leadership to abandon the "flagship" walks along the "paths of distant planets" - first, the orbital observatory should be completed and launched. As a result, "James Webb", actually not being an interplanetary mission, became NASA's "flagship project" for the coming years.
Nevertheless, NASA has retained two cheaper, but no less interesting programs for the study of the solar system - "Discovery" and "New Frontiers". Every few years, NASA announces a competition for a new interplanetary mission, in which leading US universities and research centers participate. Based on the requirements of the competition (usually the cost limit and launch date are agreed in advance), the participants present their projects of interplanetary missions and explain to NASA specialists the need to study the selected celestial body. The winner gets the right to build and launch his own vehicle into space and satisfy his curiosity.
For example, in December 2009, the launch of an interplanetary mission under the New Frontiers program was played out, tentatively scheduled for 2015-2020. Three interesting projects fought in the final: the MoonRise mission to deliver matter to Earth from the South Pole basin - Aitken on the far side of the Moon (a proposal from the University of Washington, St. Louis), the OSIRIS-Rex mission to deliver matter to Earth from the asteroid surface (101955) 1999 RQ36 (University of Arizona, Tucson) and SAGE mission to explore the surface of Venus (University of Colorado, Boulder). The victory was awarded to the OSIRIS-Rex mission, which will travel to the asteroid in 2016.
In addition to "New Frontiers", there is an even simpler and "cheaper" program "Discovery" costing no more than $ 500 million (for comparison, the "flagship" MSL rover cost the US budget $ 2.5 billion).
Most of NASA's research missions are carried out within the framework of Discovery. For example, in the summer of last year, launches for 2016 were raffled off. In total, 28 applications were received, among which were proposals for the landing of the descent module on Titan (the largest satellite of Saturn) and the launch of a spacecraft to study the evolution of comets. Alas, the victory went to a rather "banal" and, at first glance, less interesting mission InSight - "just" another apparatus for exploring Mars. The Americans send spacecraft in this direction every year, it looks like they have big plans for the Red Planet.
In total, as of February 2013, there are a galaxy of 10 active NASA missions in outer space and in the vicinity of other planets of the solar system:
- MESSENGER is studying the vicinity of Mercury. Despite the apparent proximity of this planet, it took the station six years of endless gravitational maneuvers to pick up a speed of 48 km / s and finally catch up with the elusive little Mercury (for comparison: the Earth's orbital speed is 29 km / s).
- the surface of Mars is diligently picking buckets by the rovers Opportunity and Curiosity (MSL). The first one just a couple of days ago celebrated its anniversary - 9 Earth years on the surface of the Red Planet. During this time, "Opportunity" crawled through the crater-strewn desert for 36 kilometers.
- Communication with rovers is helped by the spacecraft Odysseus (11 years in Mars orbit) and Mars Orbital Reconnaissance (7 years on the front line), as well as the Mars-Express research station of the European Space Agency.
- in 2009 in the vicinity of Mars there was an automatic interplanetary station "Rassvet", heading towards the Asteroid Belt. In 2011, her rendezvous with the dwarf planet Vesta took place. Now the device is slowly catching up with its next target - the dwarf planet Ceres, which is scheduled to meet in 2015.
- somewhere in the black hole between Mars and Jupiter a billion kilometers wide, the interplanetary station "Juno" is rushing. The planned date for entering Jupiter's orbit is 2016.
- the interplanetary station Cassini has been surfing the vastness of space for 15 years (since July 2004 it has been orbiting Saturn, the mission has been extended until 2017).
- For 7 long years the interplanetary probe "New Horizons" rushes in the icy void. In 2011, he left the orbit of Uranus astern and is now "only" at a distance of 10 astronomical units (≈150 million.km, as the average distance from the Earth to the Sun) from its target - the planet Pluto, the arrival is scheduled for 2015. 9 years of flight and only 2 days for a close acquaintance with the distant cold world. What an injustice! "New Horizons" will fly past Pluto at a speed of 15 km / s and leave the solar system forever. Further only the stars.
- the Voyager 2 starship. Thirty-five years of flight, behind the back - a path of 15 billion kilometers. Now the device is 100 times farther from the Sun than Earth - Voyager radio signals traveling at a speed of 300,000 km / s take 17 hours to reach long-range space communications antennas in California. On August 30, 2007, the device suddenly felt that the “solar wind” (the flow of charged particles from the Sun) died around it, but the intensity of galactic radiation increased sharply. Voyager 2 has reached the boundaries of the solar system.
In 40,000 years, the spaceship will travel 1.7 light-years from the star Ross248, and in 296,000 years it will reach the vicinity of Sirius. The numbers of hundreds of thousands of years do not scare Voyager 2, because time has stopped forever for him. In a million years, the spacecraft's hull will be twisted by cosmic particles, but it will still continue on its lonely journey across the Galaxy. In total, according to the assumptions of scientists, Voyager-2 will exist in space for about 1 billion years and, by that time, will probably remain the only monument of Human civilization.
About those who were the first in space
Despite the incomparable scale of the problems, the situation in Roscosmos is exactly the same as the NASA systemic crisis. And it's not even about the loss of reliability when launching spacecraft, the problem lies much deeper - no one knows why we need to fly into space at all. Space technologies for Russia are like an old suitcase without a handle: it's hard to drag and throw away.
Explanations in the style “this is necessary to strengthen the country's prestige” do not stand up to criticism: there are more pressing problems here on Earth, the solution of which is much more important for raising the prestige of Russia than the notorious space flights.
Commercial launches and space tourism? Also by. The annual demand for commercial launches is no more than two dozen per year.
The cost of the launch vehicle and the maintenance of the launch pad is hard to pay off.
International Space Station? I beg of you! For 10 years these guys have been able to invent only new diapers. To date, a sufficient amount of knowledge on space biomedicine has been accumulated, all possible and impossible experiments have been carried out in low-earth orbit, we have learned everything we wanted to know. There is nothing more to do to a person in near-earth orbit. We need to boldly move forward, but for this there are no clear goals, no means, no necessary technologies.
We (in the sense of human civilization at the beginning of the 21st century) fly into Space on the same jet engines that Gagarin flew, no other promising space engines have yet been created. The ion thrusters that are fashionable now (in fact, they were used back in the 60s in the attitude control systems of Soviet satellites) have negligible thrust (less than 1 newton!) And, despite some gain in flights to distant planets, they are not able to radically improve the situation. Until now, a payload of 1% of the launch mass of the rocket and space system is considered an excellent result! - therefore, any talk about the industrial exploration of Space, as well as about the bases for the extraction of ore on the Moon, do not make sense.
Military spy satellites, satellites of global positioning systems, scientific and practical devices for studying the Earth, studying the climate and geology of our planet, commercial telecommunication relay satellites … that's, perhaps, all we need Astronautics for. And, of course, the exploration of distant worlds. What for? Probably, this is the purpose of Humanity.
