SPACE IN 2021
Next year will see more people heading into space than ever before and three different missions arriving at Mars. Ben Evans looks into why 2021 is shaping up to be a great year in space
ixty years ago, with Russia and the United States at each other’s throats, space exploration was a pawn in a wider campaign for geopolitical and ideological supremacy. When Yuri Gagarin travelled into Earth orbit in April 1961, the rockets
Sof his day were little more than converted weapons of war. Today, problems between nations remain fraught, but against many odds space exploration has thrived. Countries which once aimed rockets at each other now use the descendants of those rockets for peaceable ends. Former enemies work side by side on the International Space Station, sending missions to Mars seems almost commonplace and our tiny position in the cosmos has been revealed as never before. Having endured one of our worst years in recent memory, space exploration stands apart as a sphere where 2021 has a truly optimistic outlook.
A rocket larger and more powerful than any in the world will open a new chapter in human spaceflight in 2021, as Florida reverberates under 39 million Newtons of thrust. NASA’s mighty Space Launch System (SLS), fitted with four refurbished Space Shuttle engines and a pair of five-segment solidfuelled boosters, will roar aloft from Pad 39B of the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for Artemis-1, the inaugural flight of an Orion crew capsule to the Moon. It will mark the first time that a ship built to carry people has crossed the 384,400km gulf to our closest celestial neighbour in almost half a century. And if all goes well, another hurdle will be cleared as NASA aims to plant human boots on lunar soil by 2024.
With Orion already in Florida and deep into processing for its two million-kilometre journey, the launch date hinges on the progress of the SLS itself. Its boosters arrived at KSC in June 2020, to be joined by the 21-storey core stage after it completes a lengthy bout of testing. These gargantuan rocket parts will be fitted to an interim cryogenic propulsion stage to push Orion out of Earth orbit and onward to the Moon. It promises to be nothing short of a game-changer in our exploration of deep space.