MOON STILL DAUNTING
INCREDIBLE, isn’t it, that after sending 24 astronauts into lunar orbit and landing 12 of them on the moon between 1969-72, NASA has not sent a single manned mission back.
Cost has been a huge factor. The outlay for the Apollo program was daunting then and trying to do it again now remains so. In today’s dollars, the program was $US220 billion ($A311 billion), employing about 400,000 at its peak.
Despite the huge advances in space, computer and materials technology that was kickstarted by the research and development to fulfil US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s pledge in 1961 to land a crew on the moon before the decade was out, cost remains a massive obstacle.
But so too is the technology that is still needed, and the political will and available budgets in the small handful of nations that might achieve such a feat now, even though 50 years have passed – this weekend – since the historic first landing.
Realising that demonstrates the huge risks and enormity of the Apollo 11 mission’s achievement when the lunar landing module Eagle almost ran out of fuel as it descended to the moon surface, and the defining moment in human history when Neil Armstrong stepped down and uttered the famous words about one small step and a giant leap.
In contrast to the hi-tech equipment available now and the relative reliability of the International Space Station, Apollo 11 was little more than a tin-can command module attached to a lander that resembled an ungainly, flimsy box with spindly, insect-like legs. Apollo guidance computers were millions of times less powerful than a modern smartphone.
Half a century later, the moon is back in favour – but for President Donald Trump’s America, it is just one small step, probably around 2024, as its space program looks to Mars. For China, which landed a small, unmanned rover on the far side of the moon in January, sending a manned mission could still be 25 years away.
Enter private enterprise – and Gold Coast interests.
The race is on worldwide to develop cost-effective technology to be used by either private companies or the huge national space agencies like NASA in putting satellites and astronauts into orbit or beyond, and to find ways to mine resources on the moon or on asteroids to fuel craft for missions into deep space.
The Gold Coast has at least one private company that is looking to the stars.
Gilmour Space Technologies plans to launch small satellites weighing up to 100kg into low earth orbits soon and up to 400kg from 2021. Director James Gilmour has advocated development of launch sites in Queensland, saying coastal locations offer fuel-efficient orbital choices.
The city’s universities have a substantial number of academics and researchers capable of making their mark.
Taking the next giant leap is incredibly daunting.
But as JFK said at the height of the Cold War in 1961 when he announced the US was going all out into space, “we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard...’’