Back to the Moon and Beyond
Rockets, tools, or software we all have the opportunity to support the world's effort to land again on the moon and make it a space base for reaching Mars not to show that we human beings are the smartest and most powerful living creatures but for understanding our universe and the many threats and opportunities that can come far from our beloved earth base.
On November 16m 2022, NASA and its ecosystem of partners like ESA performed a successful orbiting test launch to the moon from Kennedy Space Center making us more confident that Artemis 2 will pave the way back to the moon by sending four astronauts into the first crewed Orion MPCV spacecraft into a lunar flyby for a maximum of 21 days. Billions of dollars spent for such a short experiment may have said a space pessimist like the one I was but if we look closely we can see the many positive outcomes that space exploration brought to humanity and with this new challenge of climate change I think we need to understand more not only the earth but all the planets and stars around us because the event that will cause a dramatic change to our world climate could come from entities that are millions of light years from us. if we consider the butterfly effect that is part of the chaos theory we can understand why it is important to care much about environments that we take as far from us because the complexity of the interactions between entities and their reaction chains makes them very close entities. Distance is a mathematical concept that depends on the space in which it is defined have you ever thought of measuring the distance from California to Dakar using network latency instead of kilometers?
We should not forget that our world is filled with problems to solve, poverty being one of them and climate change the most important one as this former problem could aggravate all the other problems that we have been wondering about. So what I hope and wish for is for our space exploration initiatives to always have at their roots this goal of trying to understand the universe for first solving problems on earth and not for showing our supremacy in terms of creativity and technology. As space is starting to be democratized many space startups are yearning toward the polar star but in my perspective, most of these space startups are first fuelled by this tech supremacy feeling of being able to dominate gravity and to play with it but not by this ambitious and scientific quest of understanding our universe and using our space knowledge as a tool for solving problems on earth.
It’s not worth recalling the space runs between the soviet union and the United States that were rooted in political tentatives of showing power and technological supremacy because these space runs have turned into the now big and science-driven space industry made of many government-based space organizations like NASA, ESA and their Asian counterparts which have been studying space ever since. Now that some private initiatives like SpaceX and others are successfully heading to space I think it is important to set space for learning, understanding, and solving problems before eying the many economic opportunities that could come from it because exploring these opportunities without understanding could lead us to the same problems we got from blind exploitation of earth mineral resources.
If I had to say what I was willing to say in one sentence I would say that Space for knowledge is better than space for profit but the question that keeps coming into my mind while writing this is where Africa stands in this coming and booming space activities?
