UNSPECIFIED: In this concept a photo provided by NASA, NASA’s Perseverance rover fires up … [+]
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One of the things that surprised me is that someone told me a few years ago that ‘Ireland has a reasonable space industry’. The fact that the idea came from the head of the space agency in a large European country, and we were sitting together in a bus in the Middle East adds a little light to the view.
Ireland has a new space industry, similar to its large aircraft division and this made me wonder if Ireland would send a man or woman to Mars someday!
The images that NASA’s Stability probe put back to earth reinforce the wonder created by previous probes (about ten trades or probes have landed on Mars) and remind us both the power of technology and the opportunities that space opens up.
Ireland to the moon!
While a total ‘endurance’ trip ‘would cost almost USD 3bn and the trip lasted around seven months, a human trip to Mars is estimated to cost closer to USD 500bn and according to the earth’s corresponding orbits and Mars, between seven and nine months.
It was thought that the mental charge of spending seven months would be limited in too much spacecraft for well-trained astronauts, but following the limitation of COVID-19, you could say that we are all astronauts now! So that someone can be confident enough to make the trip, we will see more and more robots visiting Mars, and more exciting experiments such as efforts to grow plants on Mars and develop oxygen devices that will be suitable for use on Mars. Mars.
With NASA at the forefront of landings on Mars, a number of countries are also implementing or planning missions to Mars – Japan, India, the EU in particular. Russia first devised plans to send humans to Mars in the 1960s, and China is expected to probe Mars in May while the UAE becomes a new player with its Amal probe. A number of private companies – most notably SpaceX – are also getting into the space exploration (and trade) game.
Scramble
The race for space is probably part of a bigger movement I call the ‘scramble for rare places’. This comes in different forms – a race for safe parts of the planet such as New Zealand’s observational mountain mare (please watch the film ‘Goodbye to 2020’… and New Zealand also has a space industry), a race for space and the scientific benefits this is a mineral that could be achieved, a race for the deep oceans and a race associated with the Arctic.
The Arctic is particularly interesting – it is being monitored by the Arctic Council (Canada, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Russia, the United States and Denmark) for its strategic position, its role as a measure of climate damage and associated with the opening up of shipping lanes by melting ice.
Russian Games
Geopolitically it is a crucial place – a Russian submarine launched a Russian flag under the Arctic in 2007 (interestingly Russia’s leading Arctic scientist was accused of spying for China), and more recently Denmark has worked to maintain its military presence in the Faroe Islands and Greenland.
Featuring Thomas Pakenham’s book ‘The Scramble for Africa’ (which happens again along the way) the scramble has a strong strategic impetus for rare places, has suspicious ecological side effects and eventually it could have negative side effects (again, an understatement in the case of Africa).
This ‘scramble’ reveals a world of co-operation between countries, where large lumps of economic activity depend on selected natural resources (rare soils) and where, in some cases. of parts, the rules of the game (space and the Arctic) without being open to explanation.
To pull in last week’s note thread, it also highlights the great power of ‘Big Games’ on steroids. In the Big Game of the 19thth Century British and Russian spies have crossed paths in Isfahan and Bukhara, now orbiting Mars, glistening past each other in miniature ships under the Arctic submarine, or meet specific areas on Argentine flat fields.
Like the Big Game, it seems interesting but expensive too.