SPACEFLIGHT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Adjunct Professor Keith Gottschalk, University of the Western Cape
Monday 20 January 1.00 pm COURSE FEES R110; Staff and students R55
The previous century saw the dawn of the space age when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin in 1961. Since then the space age has evolved in the USA from Wernher von Braun to Elon Musk – from armed forces and government agencies to private sector space corporations, most famously SpaceX. China and India have followed suit, encouraging entrepreneurs to build rockets to launch satellites. Europe shows such a plethora of space rocket companies and spaceport companies that a market shakedown is inevitable.
Russia and the USA have been joined in human spaceflight by China, with India scheduled to follow within three years. Japan and the European Space Agency are also prominent in both astronomy and spaceflight. The United Arab Emirates has sent a space probe orbiting Mars, while the African Union has founded an African Space Agency (AfSA), headquartered in Cairo.
Today’s space literature is filled with proposals, from mining asteroids for platinum, to building space elevators. Space tourism has started – with nine digit figures per ticket. When will the prices fall?
Elon Musk is popularising sending one million emigrants to found towns on Mars. The British Interplanetary Society has for decades advocated building 500 billion-ton ‘wet world ships’, flying on multi-generational voyages to planets around other stars.
United States space enthusiasts periodically propose extrapolating their history of 1776 vertically into the sky – that residents of space stations should issue a Declaration of Independence and branch out to found new nations in orbiting cities, on the Moon and on Mars.
How likely are all these variegated proposals to be implemented? And which shall we see in our lifetime? What of the perennial talk of extra-terrestrial beings?
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