Mars 2033: Can We Do It?

Mars 2033: can we do this?

by Jeff Foust
Monday, June 12, 2023

It’s a slogan that not only could fit on a bumper sticker, it was a bumper sticker.

For several years, Ed Perlmutter, a congressman who served on the House Science Committee, pushed NASA and others to accelerate plans for a human mission to Mars. At many hearings, the Colorado Democrat would brandish a bumper sticker with an image of Mars and the words “2033: We Can Do This,” the “this” being a human mission to Mars.

“2033 is really ideal from an engineering and design point of view,” said Duggan.

“It will give us a goal and a point to work towards. And if you have that, things start moving,” Perlmutter said at the Humans to Mars Summit conference in 2018, where attendees received their own bumper sticker (see “Martian deadlines”, The Space Review, May 21, 2018).

That year was not picked at random. The 2033 launch window happens to be particularly favorable in terms of energy required to make the transit from Earth to Mars. It was also, at the time it was being promoted, well in the future: plenty of time to make decisions on how to design the mission, secure funding, and develop the hardware needed to carry it out.

Time, though, is running short: 2033 is now just a decade away, and NASA, focused on returning humans to the Moon, has shown little public interest in a 2033 crewed Mars mission. Has the door closed on that launch window?

A few advocates are holding out hope, arguing that, at least technically, a 2033 or 2035 human mission to fly by or orbit—but not land on—Mars is still in the cards.

“2033 is really ideal from an engineering and design point of view,” said Matthew Duggan, manager for exploration at Boeing, during a panel at the 2023 edition of the Humans to Mars Summit last month in Washington. “Yes, I would be in a hurry to get there. That makes the mission the easiest it can be with the least risk to the mission overall.”

Hoppy Price, chief engineer for the robotic Mars exploration program at JPL, agreed. He argued that most of the capabilities needed for a flyby or orbital mission were already available except for a transit habitat. “Is nine years or ten years a big rush to develop and test the transit habitat? I don’t think so,” he said. “I think that’s enough time to pull that off.”

Both Duggan and Price offered concepts for such missions in their presentations at the panel. One by Price would enable a mission launching in 2033, sending a four-person crew to Mars. They would spend 30 days orbiting Mars before returning to Earth (via a flyby of Venus), for a total mission duration of 570 days.

“Is this something that would be doable by 2033? I think so, but it’s big investment,” Price said.

That concept would require a lot of launches: four of the Space Launch System and 13 of commercial vehicles in the class of Falcon Heavy. Most would carry propulsion stages using hypergolic propellants needed for sending the spacecraft to Mars, inserting it into Mars orbit, and sending it back to Earth. One of the SLS launches would ferry the crew to the transit habit on Orion, which would also bring the crew back to Earth vis direct entry at the end of the mission.

“Is this something that would be doable by 2033? I think so, but it’s big investment,” Price said. The launch number of launches “might be daunting,” he acknowledged.

A flyby mission would be considerably simpler. “That further reduces the mission complexity and the amount of elements that you have to have in play to get humans to Mars and get them safely back,” said Duggan. One flyby option, launching in 2035, would require three SLS launches, including one ferrying the crew on Orion, and two Falcon Heavy-class commercial launches.

Former Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) showing off a bumper sticker promoting a 2033 Mars mission at a hearing several years ago. (credit: House Science Committee webcast)

“An easy way to criticize a flyby is to say, ‘Well, that’s just a stunt. You don’t gain anything from it,’” he said. “That doesn’t look at it in the big picture, which is the flyby is just the first step towards a landing.”

However, just because a mission concept seems feasible or doable doesn’t mean it will be easy. Other panelists at the conference noted that trajectories and launch vehicles aren’t the only things that need to be considered for such a mission.

“I want to get to Mars, and I want to get there as soon as possible,” said Phil Hattis, a fellow at Draper. He was concerned about radiation exposure, both from solar storms and galactic cosmic radiation, as well as the engineering challenges of in-space assembly of all the elements needed for a Mars mission.

“Our biggest concern right now is the food. How are we going to be able to bring enough food for a year and a half or two and a half years, given our engineering status, and make sure that it’s stable and safe and provides the adequate nutrition?” said Jancy McPhee, associate chief scientist of NASA’s Human Research Program. “This is not just a two-week trip where you can eat chicken nuggets and everything’s going to be fine.”

There was no consensus from the discussion whether any of those challenges were insurmountable for a mission launching in a decade or so. McPhee, though, urged caution. “I think we want to get humans to Mars quickly, but we also want to get them back again,” she said. “I think it is worth it to pause a little bit and make sure we’ve done our diligence, to make sure we really think it’s going to be a successful mission.”

Price warned of competition for going to Mars. “I can think of one other country that I think could pull off a 2033 or 2035 flyby mission,” he said, an obvious reference to China, whose government has not publicly talked about a human Mars mission in that time frame.

SpaceX, of course, has also talked about sending humans to Mars—to land rather than orbit or flyby—on similar or earlier timescales, with the usual caveats about schedules. “I wish them the best of luck,” Price said. “It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a private company could send humans to Mars before NASA or other international space agencies.”

NASA has not indicated any interest in a human Mars mission of any kind in that 2033 opportunity. NASA administrator Bill Nelson has stated several times that the agency could be ready to send humans to Mars around 2039.

Even that might be stretching it. During another panel at the Humans to Mars Summit, agency leaders were cautious when asked if a human Mars landing by 2040 was feasible. “We’re very supportive of doing it,” Nicola Fox, associate administrator for science, said. “I think that would be a bit ambitious.”

“I think we want to get humans to Mars quickly, but we also want to get them back again,” McPhee said. “I think it is worth it to pause a little bit and make sure we’ve done our diligence, to make sure we really think it’s going to be a successful mission.”

“That is going to be tough,” said Jim Free, associate administrator for exploration systems development. A landing at the end of the 2030s would require launches as early as 2032 to start prepositioning elements needed for the mission, he said. “It absolutely is aggressive to do that.”

“That is an audacious goal,” added Jim Reuter, associate administrator for space technology.

There is also no longer a congressional backer for an early human Mars mission. Ed Perlmutter retired from Congress at the end of last year, and no one on Capitol Hill has, so far, taken up the mantle or waved the bumper sticker calling for humans to Mars in 2033.

Advocates were undeterred. “I don’t want to make it sound like it’s easy,” Price said. “A 2033 orbit-only or flyby mission could be feasible, and there could be fallback options if the schedule couldn’t be met. But it would be a very bold mission to pull off.”

The panel’s moderator, Beth Mund, even suggested a new bumper sticker: “2035: totally doable.”

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Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

Who Says That The Government Is Hiding Alien Technology?

Are We Alone In The Universe?

Are we alone in the universe? Is life unique to earth or does it exist elsewhere in the universe? This question has haunted me for 70 years. In the 1950s I was mesmerized by movies like “War of the Worlds,” Earth vs the Flying Saucers,” Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” “The Mysterians,” etc. As a young man, I had no doubt that aliens had visited our world.

    My interest in this subject has not declined over the decades. I have been a great supporter of The SETI Institute (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and Dr. Seth Shostak for 15 years.

      The news network News Nation broke an incredible story yesterday. A former US Air Force officer and intelligence agency operative with the highest security clearances went public yesterday. He claimed that the US government knew of visits by UFOs or UAPs for decades. He claimed that his former employer had alien spacecraft hidden. He claimed that the bodies of alien spacecraft crew members were stored at secret locations. For those of you curious, here are two links to look at:

      We have been hearing these stories since an unexplained object crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. What is so new about this story? It is the bonafide credentials of the person now making the allegations. Do I believe what this man is saying?

     As the old saying goes: “The jury is still out.” However, another saying comes into play: “Where there is this much smoke there has to be some fire.”

     The distances between solar systems and star systems are beyond comprehension in the normal sense. The nearest star system to our world is Proxima Centauri. A spacecraft would have to fly at the speed of light for over 4.22 years to reach this celestial body. It would take us 73,000 years to travel this distance with the current chemical rockets that we explore space with.

    It would take a society or civilization with incredibly advanced technology to produce a spacecraft capable of attaining the speed of light. An actual journey at that speed would require a long time for the spacecraft to reach the speed of light. It would take a long time for the spacecraft to slow down as it neared a target solar system or planet. I doubt that we would see a scenario like Star Trek with large star ships full of human occupants. I see a craft with Artificial Intelligence that we could not imagine. Any scout ship deployed from this vessel would have the most advanced Artificial Intelligence.

    Would there be biological beings on board? I am going to say perhaps. A television show ran for one season in 2005. It was called “Threshold.” The aliens did not come as little gray beings with big eyes and high foreheads. They did not come as hideous-looking monsters. They came as DNA molecules that entered human hosts and took over their being. It would be easy to keep DNA frozen for decades or centuries.

    At the end of the process, I believe that the US government does have some ultra-advanced technology aircraft. Most are from countries like Russia and China. It is not impossible to imagine that in this group of high technology platforms, there is one spacecraft that came to us from light years away. More will be revealed.

The Soviet Union’s Failed Attempt To Knock Out Reagan’s Star Wars Program

Barbarian in space: the secret space-laser battle station of the Cold War

by Dwayne A. Day and Robert Kennedy
Monday, June 5, 2023

The night skies over Kazakhstan lit up on May 15, 1987 as a powerful rocket roared off its pad at the Soviet launch complex at Baikonur. The Energia launch vehicle consisted of a core stage with four engines and four liquid-fueled strap-on booster rockets. A long cylinder mounted on the side of the rocket contained the payload, a massive spacecraft with “Polyus,” or “pole”—as in north or south pole—painted in Russian on its side, and “Mir-2” painted on its front. “Mir” means “peace” in Russian, a name that was possibly advertising, a cover story, or an ironic joke.

The spacecraft’s secret name was “Skif,” which referred to the Scythians, an ancient warrior tribe in central Asia—and the European equivalent of “barbarian.” It was the name the program had used for years.

Skif was certainly not peaceful. It contained prototype systems for a powerful orbiting laser intended to burn American satellites out of the sky.

Skif and Kaskad

Asif Siddiqi, a historian at Fordham University who has written extensively about the Soviet space program, explained that Skif dated from mid-1970s space weapons studies which focused on systems to attack satellites in space, ballistic missiles in flight, and ground targets. Two anti-satellite weapon concepts emerged from these studies: Skif and Kaskad (“Cascade”). Skif would be an orbital station using a laser to target lower orbiting satellites, and Kaskad would use missiles to attack satellites in medium and geostationary orbits. The Soviet Union already had an operational ASAT system, but it was limited, and Skif and Kaskad would be far more capable.

Skif was certainly not peaceful. It contained prototype systems for a powerful orbiting laser intended to burn American satellites out of the sky.

Although some details about these concepts leaked out in the mid-1990s, it was not until the 2000s, says Siddiqi, that the full extent of the programs finally became known, even in Russia. A former press officer in the Russian space industry, Konstantin Lantratov, pieced together the history of Skif. “Lantratov managed to dig deep into the story, and his research clearly shows the enormous scale of these battle station projects,” Siddiqi says. “These were not sideline efforts—this was a real space weapons program.” In the past decade, even more information on Skif has emerged.

Design work began in the 1970s, not long after the symbolic 1975 Apollo-Soyuz “handshake in space” between NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, and while the two countries were negotiating future cooperation, such as a space shuttle visit to a Salyut space station. The famed Energia organization, which had built the Salyut space stations as well as the ill-fated N-1 moon rocket, a giant that exploded four times between 1969 and 1972, started studying both the Skif and Kaskad ASAT concepts in 1976.

The Salyut space stations, the first of which was launched in 1971, would serve as the core for both the laser-equipped Skif spacecraft and the missile-armed Kaskad. Both would be launched by the workhorse Proton rocket. The Salyut-based weapons stations could be refueled in orbit and could house a crew of two. Skif and Kaskad remained study projects into the early 1980s. But that’s when international politics changed, and made new space weapons more attractive to the Soviet leadership.

Stills from an animated video produced around 1980 proposing a constellation of orbiting missile launchers for destroying Soviet ICBMs in flight. This concept was rejected in favor of directed energy weapons when Ronald Reagan approved the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. Later, after directed energy weapons proved difficult to develop, SDI focused on the “Brilliant Pebbles” concept that was similar to this one.

The quest for an anti-ballistic missile shield

Although the United States had spent considerable amounts of money in the 1950s and 1960s trying to develop a missile defense system, the difficulty of the task proved too daunting. In 1972, the United States and Soviet Union signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which forbade the deployment of new anti-missile systems. The United States completed a single system in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and immediately shut it down. The Soviets had a limited system surrounding Moscow.

Some Soviet military leaders believed that the Americans would nevertheless develop a new ABM system despite the treaty. But after signing the ABM Treaty, the United States largely gave up on ABM technology development. By the mid-1970s ABM development was coming to a halt, with decreasing funding, and progress on anti-missile systems was minimal during President Jimmy Carter’s administration.

The ABM Treaty only forbade the deployment of anti-missile weapons—it did not prohibit testing or development (with some caveats), a loophole both sides exploited. In the United States, some former military and government officials began advocating for space-based anti-missile defenses involving orbiting interceptor weapons (see “Forces of darkness and light,” The Space Review, December 10, 2018.)

In 1982, a non-government group attached to the Heritage Foundation produced a report advocating for space-based missile defense. (credit: Heritage Foundation)

Around 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (among them physicist Edward Teller, the so-called “father of the H-bomb”), along with researchers at other federal labs and a handful of military and civilian policymakers, began looking at “directed energy” weapons—which shoot beams instead of bullets—as a way to neutralize an increasing Soviet advantage in launchers and missiles. A space activist even publicly advocated this approach in a 1981 article titled “Lase the Nukes.” In American national security circles, directed energy weapons soon began to eclipse the concept of orbiting interceptor missiles.

Reagan liked the idea, and in a televised speech on national security in March 1983, he announced his plan to build a “defensive shield” to “make nuclear weapons obsolete,” essentially changing the nation’s strategic posture from offense to defense. The proposal was immediately attacked by Democrats in Congress, who called it unworkable, and Senator Ted Kennedy who tagged it with the moniker “Star Wars.” Despite the skeptics, funding for missile defense increased dramatically, amounting to nearly $3 billion a year by 1986.

President Ronald Reagan delivered a speech from the Oval Office in March 1983 announcing what became the Strategic Defense Initiative.

At the time, Allen Thomson was a senior analyst working for the CIA’s Office of Scientific and Weapons Research. He had studied other Soviet military research programs, including efforts to develop directed energy weapons and sensors for space-based submarine detection. In the summer after Reagan’s Star Wars speech, Undersecretary of Defense Fred Iklé requested a CIA study on how the Soviets might respond. The work fell to Thomson and two other analysts.

“The resulting study,” he recalls, “basically said that both politically and technically, the Soviets had a very wide range of options for responding to foreseeable U.S. SDI developments.” They could build more ICBMs, seek to thwart the American missile shield, or try to drum up international opposition to the American plan. “There was some recognition that the USSR might be financially strapped if it had to initiate new major weapons systems. But there was no indication that it would be unable to respond,” Thomson says.

Notably, the Soviet Union did not respond to the American SDI program with a space-based anti-missile program of their own. Bart Hendrickx points out that the Soviets did consider an orbiting ABM system similar to an American program of the late 1980s known as Brilliant Pebbles, but they rejected the concept. “It looks like the Russians concluded well before the start of SDI that a space-based missile shield was unrealistic… and unaffordable as well,” Hendrickx explained. This conclusion created problems for the Soviet leadership. Why did the Americans pursue a space-based anti-missile shield that Soviet scientists and engineers believed was impossible?

As the prominent planetary scientist and Mikhail Gorbachev advisor Roald Sagdeev wrote in his 1994 memoir The Making of a Soviet Scientist, “If Americans oversold [the Strategic Defense Initiative], we Russians overbought it.”

Lieutenant General James Abrahamson, who ran the SDI program showing President Ronald Reagan projects to protect SDI satellites from attack. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Misread intentions

From the perspective of many Soviet scientists and military and political leaders, for the second time in a little over a decade the Americans seemed to be pursuing a nonsensical space program, and Soviet military and political leaders sought to make sense of it. Their conclusions were not always rational. Paranoid fantasies weren’t uncommon among senior Soviet generals, according to Peter Westwick, a history professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara who has written about science during the Cold War. “They thought that maybe the [US] space shuttle was going to be doing shallow dives into the atmosphere and deploying hydrogen bombs,” he says (see “Target Moscow: Soviet suspicions about the military use of the American Space Shuttle (part 1),” The Space Review, January 27, 2020, and part 2, February 3, 2020.)

“The shuttle really scared the Soviets big-time because they couldn’t figure why you would need a vehicle like that, one that made no economic sense,” Siddiqi explains. “So they figured that there must be some unstated military rationale for the vehicle.”

Asif Siddiqi agrees that the Soviets misinterpreted US intentions for the space shuttle: “To the Soviets, the shuttle was the big thing. It was a sign to them that the Americans were about to move war into space.” Never mind the official explanation—that the spaceplane, which made its debut in 1981, was meant to provide routine access to orbit. It could also be used to launch classified satellites for US defense agencies.

“The shuttle really scared the Soviets big-time because they couldn’t figure why you would need a vehicle like that, one that made no economic sense,” Siddiqi explains. “So they figured that there must be some unstated military rationale for the vehicle, for example, to deliver and recover large space-based weapons platforms, or to bomb Moscow.” The Soviets responded to the perceived threat by building their own space shuttle, Buran, which ended up being retired in 1993 after just one flight.

Shortly after Reagan’s speech, the Soviet Academy of Sciences was asked to assess whether a space-based missile shield was feasible. Evgeny Velikhov, a prominent physicist, led the study group. Their conclusion, according to Westwick, was, “We looked at it, we studied it, we determined that it wouldn’t work.” But other Soviet scientists were more alarmist, and succeeded in convincing military and political leaders that even if the SDI wasn’t an effective missile shield, it could be used offensively to hit targets on the ground.

The idea of lasers shooting down at Soviet territory from orbit was truly terrifying. According to Westwick, the theories that floated through the Kremlin about the real purpose of the SDI got batty: “Selective political assassination. Say the Politburo is standing outside on May Day and a single laser could take them all out… These things are overhead, they’re invisible, but with zero warning they could zap you.”

President Ronald Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative program in March 1983. The proponents for the Skif weapons system used this announcement to gain approval for Skif development. Skif was intended to shoot down American SDI satellites from orbit.

Skif shifts into high gear

In 1981, the KB Salyut design bureau had been transferred to Energia from Chelomei’s design bureau. Skif and Kaskad were already underway at Energia, which was also developing a space shuttle and a large rocket to put it in orbit. Now that KB Salyut was part of Energia, the Skif and Kaskad projects were shifted internally to KB Salyut. (In 1993 KB Salyut became part of Khrunichev.)

Reagan’s 1983 SDI announcement was an instant kick in the pants for the Soviet space weapons program, giving bureaucrats in the aerospace design bureaus the political ammunition they needed to convince the Politburo to increase funding for Skif and Kaskad, which could be used to target the space-based elements of Reagan’s missile shield. Skif and Kaskad would be capable of going after American orbiting anti-ballistic missile satellites. “These were just two of a plethora of ASAT systems that the USSR worked on in the 1980s,” Hendrickx explained, and other ASAT weapons were also proposed to attack SDI satellites. In 2016 he published a paper in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society outlining the many Soviet anti-satellite programs of that era titled “Naryad-V and the Soviet Anti-Satellite Fleet.”

The rubles started flowing for actual flight hardware, but Kaskad never left the drawing board. Skif, however, shifted into high gear. Soviet engineers working on Skif now found themselves like the dog that finally catches the car—what does he do with it? Skif was going to be an incredibly complicated spacecraft. According to a 2015 Russian space encyclopedia with new information on Skif:

In the course of the work [engineers] had to face significant technical difficulties. So, for example, all the “regular” target equipment (laser and supporting and control systems) existed only in the form of “mock-ups,” [or] at best – experimental ground samples. All electrical systems had to be created from scratch, because the requirements for speed and accuracy were an order of magnitude, or even two, higher than for the systems that existed at that time. The main developers were clearly not ready to create such a complex spacecraft. Over time, the understanding came that the creation of such complexes must begin with the solution of simpler fundamental tasks.

According to the 2015 encyclopedia, the original plan had been to use a “continuous-wave gas laser” built by NPO Energomash, whose core business was the production of powerful liquid-fuel rocket engines. Presumably, this was a hydrogen fluoride laser, the only type of laser that Energomash worked on, drawing from its experience in developing fluorine-based rocket engines. A history of Energomash published in 2004 said it had done its laser work as a subcontractor to NPO Astrofizika, a major Soviet laser design bureau that most likely was the prime contractor for the Skif laser.

However, the hydrogen fluoride laser turned out to be too complex, and it was abandoned in favor of two alternatives. One was a CO2 laser developed for a system called “Dreif,” a nautical term meaning “drift” or “drifting.” Dreif was originally designed to be mounted in a modified Il-76MD cargo aircraft to shoot down American reconnaissance balloons. “Dreif” was also a term applied to balloons drifting across the sky, hence its use for the airborne anti-balloon program. The laser for Skif was apparently developed by NPO Astrofizika with KMZ Soyuz serving as a subcontractor.

Another option was a laser developed by the Central Design Bureau of Chemical Automatics (KBKhA), which also manufactured rocket engines. Sources disagree on some of the details, such as whether it was a CO or CO2 laser, although it was probably CO2, like Dreif.

Skif-D grew into a Frankenstein’s monster of a spacecraft: 40 meters long, more than 4 meters in diameter, and weighing 95 metric tons, more massive than NASA’s Skylab space station.

According to the encyclopedia of Soviet and Russian space systems, the plan was to fly both of these lasers on a Skif demonstration mission, with the Dreif laser as the main one, and KBKhA’s as an “auxiliary laser.” The two-laser combination was too heavy for a Proton rocket and was apparently the reason why designers switched to the much more powerful Energia. The need to operate the Dreif laser both automatically and in a space environment prompted substantial redesign. It also required the construction of extensive testing infrastructure.

In August 1984, the new spacecraft was approved and designated “Skif-D,” with the “D” standing for “demonstration.” This approval came only from the Ministry of General Machine Building, which oversaw the space and missile industry, and approval from the Central Committee of the Communist Party did not come until January 1986.

Meanwhile, US scientists and engineers were having their own problems with space-based lasers. As research proceeded on projects like Zenith Star, which investigated the problems of placing a two-megawatt chemical laser in orbit, the challenges of building and launching such systems became clearer. SDI funded studies of particle beams and an X-ray laser that would use a nuclear explosion to set it off, but none of these projects ever came close to being deployed. By 1986, the SDI leadership was already shifting its attention away from lasers and toward small “kinetic kill vehicles” that could bring down enemy missiles by crashing into them—a more conventional interceptor concept that had predated Reagan’s 1983 speech.

The American shift from fewer, large satellites with directed energy weapons to many small satellites equipped with interceptor missiles undercut the justification for the Soviet Skif system. The Soviets, though, stayed the course, and kept working on the demonstration version of their space-based laser, with a target launch date of early 1987.

The Energia rocket, named after its design bureau, was being built to carry the new Buran space shuttle into orbit, meaning that two big projects were now directly competing for resources and launch vehicles. Energia could carry 95 tons to space, enough to lift Skif-D. To keep costs down, engineers looked for other existing hardware designs to modify and incorporate, including a so-called “functional block,” the main section of the TKS spacecraft, which had originally been designed to carry crews and cargo to the canceled Almaz military space stations and would later also serve as the basis for the add-on modules of the Mir space station (as well as the the Zarya/FGB module of the ISS.) They also borrowed a payload module from the TKS.

Skif-D grew into a Frankenstein’s monster of a spacecraft: 40 meters (131 feet) long, more than 4 meters (13 feet) in diameter, and weighing 95 metric tons (210,000 pounds), more massive than NASA’s Skylab space station. The system consisted of what the Russians called a functional block and a payload module. The functional block—what Americans might refer to as a spacecraft bus—was equipped with small rocket engines to place the vehicle into its final orbit. It also included a power system using solar panels borrowed from the TKS spacecraft. The payload module carried carbon dioxide tanks and two 1.2-megawatt turbogenerators to produce the laser’s power, as well as the heavy rotating turret that pointed the beam. The spacecraft was built long and thin so that it could fit on the side of the Energia, attached to its central fuel tank.

Designing a laser to work in orbit was a major engineering challenge. A handheld laser pointer is a relatively simple, static device, but a big gas-powered laser is like a roaring locomotive. Powerful turbogenerators “pump” the carbon dioxide to the point where its atoms become excited and emit light at a specific wavelength. Not only do the turbogenerators have large moving parts, the gas used in the formation of the laser beam gets very hot and has to be vented. Moving parts and exhaust gases pose problems for spacecraft—particularly one that has to be pointed very precisely—because they induce motion. The Skif engineers developed a system to minimize the force of the expelled gas by sending it through deflector vanes, which they referred to as “trousers.” But the vehicle still required a complex control system to damp out motions caused by the exhaust gases, the turbogenerator, and the moving laser turret. When firing, the entire spacecraft would point at the target, with the turret making fine adjustments.

The system was complicated enough that by 1985 the designers knew they would need more than one launch to test its components. Skif-D1 would prove out the basic spacecraft structure in 1987, while the laser itself wouldn’t fly until Skif-D2 in 1988. Around the same time, another, related spacecraft went into development. Designated Skif-Stilet (“Scythian-Stiletto”), it was to be equipped with another existing, less powerful, infrared laser based on an operational ground system. Skif-Stilet would only be able to blind the optics of enemy satellites, but Skif would have enough energy to destroy them.

Artist impression of the Skif spacecraft in orbit. The “functional block” containing propulsion, power, and guidance systems, is on the left. The payload module with the lasers is on the right. Also visible at left are the targets that would be deployed and tracked in orbit.

From Skif-D to Skif-DM

Work on these projects was proceeding at a furious pace throughout 1985 when an unexpected opportunity arose. The Buran shuttle had fallen behind schedule, and wouldn’t be ready in time for the planned first launch of the Energia rocket in 1986. The rocket’s designers were considering launching a dummy Skif payload instead. Launch was scheduled for fall 1986, and the plan was that this would not impact the planned launch of Skif-D1 in summer 1987. According to the encyclopedia, everybody involved in the project did not believe that the 1986 deadline was achievable.

According to Westwick, Gorbachev began challenging his advisers: “Maybe we shouldn’t be so afraid of SDI.”

The space encyclopedia states that this change in plans quickly got worse. A week after the announcement about launching a dummy payload, Minister of General Machine Building Oleg Baklanov showed up at KB Salyut and said that just launching a “blank” on the first Energia would not be enough, that they had to demonstrate something more “meaty,” something that would operate for a week in orbit, otherwise it would be “undignified for such a space power as the USSR.” Although those working on the project did not believe they could assemble a “serious” payload in such a short period, work continued. A week later they were told that the payload now had to operate for one month in orbit.

They quickly drew up plans for a vehicle that would test the functional block’s control system and additional components, like the gas ejection vents and a targeting system consisting of a radar and a low-power fine pointing laser that was separate from the big chemical laser. They labeled the spacecraft Skif-DM for “demonstration modification.” It was significantly lighter than Skif-D1, at only 80 metric tons, and did not carry the primary lasers. Despite the orders that the new vehicle not affect the work on the pre-existing planned vehicle, it inevitably led to a slowdown of Skif-D1.

Video screenshot of the Skif-DM spacecraft. The “functional block” is at front, serving as what American space engineers usually refer to as a spacecraft bus. It was adapted from existing space hardware and provided propulsion, power, and guidance in orbit. The lasers would be mounted in the long cylindrical payload module but were not included in the Skif-DM version. During the first and only launch, the functional block was supposed to flip the entire spacecraft 180 degrees so that it was pointed up and the engines were pointed down. However, a software error led to the spacecraft flipping end over end several times before pointing down, and its engines forced it into the atmosphere. (credit: buranarchive.space)

Racing the clock

Meeting such a tight deadline had a human cost. At one point, more than 70 firms within the Soviet aerospace industry were working on Skif. In his history of the project, Lantratov quotes from an article by Yuri Kornilov, the lead designer for Skif-DM at the Khrunichev Machine Building Factory: “As a rule, no excuses were accepted—not even the fact that it was almost the same group of people who, at that time, were performing the grandiose work associated with the creation of Buran. Everything took a back seat to meeting the deadlines assigned from the top.”

The designers realized that if they launched this huge craft into space, then expelled large amounts of carbon dioxide, American intelligence analysts would quickly figure out that the gas was intended for a laser. So they switched to a combination of xenon and krypton for the Skif-DM venting test. These gases would interact with ionospheric plasma around the Earth, and the spacecraft would appear to be part of a civilian geophysics experiment. Skif-DM would also be equipped with small inflatable balloon targets, mimicking enemy satellites, that would be jettisoned in flight and tracked with the radar and the pointing laser.

The launch of the demonstration satellite slipped to 1987, partly because the pad facility had to be modified from a test stand to a full-up launch pad for the Energia. In addition, the rocket assigned to the flight (designated 6S) had originally only been built for test firings and had to be modified to an operational launch vehicle designated 6SL. The delay had a critical impact on the project’s political fortunes.

In 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been General Secretary of the Communist Party for only a year, was already advocating the sweeping economic and bureaucratic reforms that would come to be known as perestroika, or “restructuring.” He and his allies in the government were intent on reining in what they saw as ruinous levels of military spending, and had become increasingly opposed to expensive military space projects. According to Westwick, Gorbachev began challenging his advisers: “Maybe we shouldn’t be so afraid of SDI.” The Soviet leader acknowledged that the American SDI plan was dangerous, says Westwick, but warned that his country was becoming obsessed with it.

Lantratov originally wrote that in January 1987, with Skif-DM’s launch just weeks away, Gorbachev’s allies in the Politburo pushed through an order limiting what could be done during the demonstration flight. The spacecraft could be launched into orbit, but could not test the gas venting system or deploy any of the tracking targets. The number of experiments was reduced. However, the 2015 encyclopedia claims that the order forbade any experiments at all to prevent the spacecraft from being interpreted as a space weapon.

In February 1987, the Skif-DM was mated to its Energia rocket as the booster lay horizontally inside a vast assembly building at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. At the factory in Moscow, technicians had painted “Mir-2” onto the front, facing outward from the launch vehicle. At Baikonur, technicians also painted “Polyus” onto the side of the spacecraft. “Polyus” was a late name for the program, and was intended for public consumption when the spacecraft was in orbit—a cover story for the weapon. Hendrickx notes that the plan at that time was to use Energia to build a follow-on space station after Mir. According to Lantratov, Mir-2 may have been less an attempt to fool foreign spies about the mission’s true purpose than it was an advertisement for the new project they wanted to build.

The massive spacecraft tumbled end over end for two full revolutions, then stopped with its nose pointing down toward Earth. In the rush to launch such a complicated spacecraft, the designers had missed a tiny software error.

The big launch vehicle and payload was rolled out to the launch pad in late February and spent three months there undergoing checks. Hendrickx wrote about this in detail in his history of Buran. A late order came down from leadership for several of the targets to be removed while the vehicle was on the pad, but spacecraft engineers pointed out the dangers of interacting with a fueled rocket, and the order was canceled.

If the skies were clear at any point during this time, American reconnaissance satellites certainly photographed the big rocket and maybe even gathered enough detail for American intelligence analysts to read the words on the spacecraft.

The Skif-DM was launched in May 1987 and failed to reach orbit. It was to be followed by the Skif-D1 and Skif-D2 spacecraft about a year apart. However, the program was canceled after this failure. (credit: buranarchive.space)

Launching the monster

On the night of May 15, 1987, Energia’s engines lit and the giant rocket climbed into the sky. Whereas most launches from Baikonur head for an orbit inclined 52 degrees to the equator, Skif traveled farther north, on a 65-degree inclination. If the worst happened, this heading would keep rocket stages or pieces of debris—or the Skif-DM itself—from falling on foreign territory. The goal was for a 64.6 degree, 280-kilometer orbit.

The Energia rocket performed flawlessly on its first flight, gaining speed as it rose and arced out toward the northern Pacific. But the kluged nature of the Skif–DM test spacecraft, along with all the compromises and shortcuts, had ordained its doom. The satellite’s functional block had originally been designed for a Proton launcher, where it would be mounted under a payload shroud, so for aerodynamic reasons it was mounted near the top of the payload attached to the Energia. It would jettison its protective shroud before separating from the rocket. Once the spacecraft separated from its booster, it was supposed to flip around to point toward space, with the control block’s engines facing downward toward Earth, ready to fire and push it into orbit. It would also roll 90 degrees as well. Payload fairing separation occurred as planned at 3 minutes and 32 seconds into the flight, at an altitude of 90 kilometers.

After continuing its ascent, Skif-DM separated on cue and the spent Energia fell away. Then the entire 40-meter-long spacecraft began its gentle pitch maneuver. Its tail end—actually the front of the spacecraft—swung up through 90 degrees, through 180 degrees…then kept going. The massive spacecraft tumbled end over end for two full revolutions, then stopped with its nose pointing down toward Earth. In the rush to launch such a complicated spacecraft, the designers had missed a tiny software error. The engines fired, and Skif-DM headed back into the atmosphere it had just escaped, quickly overheating and breaking into burning pieces over the Pacific Ocean. The Soviet press agency TASS reported the loss of a “dummy satellite.”

In the West, the debut of the Energia super-rocket was reported as a partial success, since the launcher itself operated perfectly; it was the satellite that had failed. The US government almost certainly had intelligence sensors pointed at the rocket as it flew, but what the CIA or other agencies concluded about the payload remains classified.

The failure of the Skif program, combined with its immense expense, gave opponents in Gorbachev’s government the ammunition they needed to kill it. Further Skif flights were summarily canceled. Hardware already being prepared on the ground was either scrapped or shoved to the sides of giant warehouses.

In his history of the project, Lantratov quoted Yuri Kornilov, the Skif-DM lead designer: “Of course, no one received any prizes or awards for their feverish, two-year-long, under-the-deadline work. The hundreds of teams that had created Skif were not given an award or a word of thanks.” In fact, some were reprimanded or demoted after the Skif-DM failure.

The Strategic Defense Initiative became a contentious topic during arms control negotiations in the 1980s. Many Soviet scientists—like their Western counterparts—believed that it was unworkable. But the official Soviet government position was to oppose SDI.

Skif’s legacy

We still don’t know the entire story. “Even today there’s a lot of sensitivity about the whole program,” says Siddiqi, who has recently written a paper about how various parts of the Soviet government responded to SDI. “Russians don’t like to talk too much about it. And our understanding of Soviet responses to SDI still remains murky. It’s clear that there was a lot of internal debate within the Soviet military-industrial elite about the effectiveness of space weapons. And the fact that the Soviets came so close to actually launching a weapon platform suggests that the hardliners were in the driver’s seat. It’s scary to think what might have happened if Polyus had actually made it to orbit.”

Another interesting thought experiment is to posit what might have happened had Reagan never announced the SDI, which had derailed arms control negotiations. Would the two leaders have gone further than they did if SDI had not become a point of contention?

SDI did not help bankrupt the Soviet Union, which was already bankrupting itself.

CIA analyst Allen Thomson’s 1983 report on possible Soviet responses to SDI accurately predicted several of the actions that the Soviet Union ultimately took, including the Soviet diplomatic offensive against it as well as the possibility that the Soviets would develop systems to attack American SDI satellites. The paranoid fantasies of some Soviet military and political leaders about what SDI could do, such as destroying targets on the ground using lasers, were the kinds of reactions that only became clearer after the end of the Cold War. (The CIA report can be downloaded here.)

Historian Pavel Podvig has tried to determine SDI’s ultimate impact on the Soviet Union and the Cold War. According to a 2017 paper by Podvig, SDI did not deter the Soviet Union from fielding more ICBMs; if they thought that SDI would have worked, they would have shifted their weapons to other systems, like cruise missiles. Skif was already in the works before SDI, and Podvig argues that it was an extension of existing programs rather than a clear response to Reagan’s program. Nevertheless, it failed to reach orbit and there was no follow-on anti-SDI space program, and no clear indication that Soviet weapons or space spending increased as a result of SDI. SDI did not help bankrupt the Soviet Union, which was already bankrupting itself. The Soviet response to SDI was primarily diplomatic and in the realm of arms control rather than military, Podvig wrote.

Skif was an ambitious project, but never accomplished its mission, and was quickly canceled and suppressed, unknown until decades later. Given the current state of Russian politics, it will likely be decades until we can learn even more about this period when the superpowers planned to put weapons in the skies above.

The authors would like to thank Bart Hendrickx and Asif Siddiqi for their extensive help.

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Dwayne Day is interested in hearing from an

Japan’s Space Policy After The H3 Launch Failure

A review of Japan’s space policy after the H3 launch vehicle failure

by Junji Miyazawa
Monday, June 5, 2023

On March 7, 2023, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) tried and failed to launch the first H3 launch vehicle. The H3 is Japan’s first new major rocket in 12 years and is expected to replace the current H-2A launch vehicle in terms of high-cost performance and flexibility. The main reason for its failure was that the second-stage engine did not ignite due to electrical problems. JAXA is working to determine the problem’s cause and resolve it immediately. However, the next launch date has yet to be set. This article discusses the losses suffered by Japan due to this failure and some of the contributing causes of these losses. Finally, a mechanism for ensuring a better balance of costs and risks for all Japanese space stakeholders is discussed for a positive way ahead.

The losses to Japan caused by this failure are immeasurable. The satellite on the H3 was JAXA’s Advanced Land Observing Satellite-3 (ALOS-3). The ALOS-3 satellite was developed and manufactured at a total cost of about 28 billion yen (about $208 million). JAXA’s ALOS series has alternated between optical and synthetic aperture radar imaging satellites. ALOS-3 was the first advanced optical satellite for land observation since 2011, when the ALOS-1 satellite mission was completed. The ALOS-4 satellite, currently in the manufacturing and testing phase, is a synthetic aperture radar satellite. Therefore, JAXA is not expected to have an optical satellite for land observations until 2028 or later.

The losses to Japan caused by this failure are immeasurable.

In addition, the current ALOS-2 satellite is about to complete its mission and enter its late operational phase. Japan frequently experiences natural disasters such as earthquakes, heavy rains, and typhoons, and the loss of domestic remote sensing capability will be severe. For example, in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011, the ALOS-1 satellite was used for emergency observations to assess the extent of the damage. In addition, JAXA is leading Sentinel Asia, an international cooperative project that aims to contribute to disaster management in the Asia-Pacific region by utilizing space technology. ALOS-3 was expected to contribute to Sentinel Asia and other international cooperative efforts. Japan’s loss will affect disaster prevention, security, and space exploration in the Asia-Pacific region.

According to the latest Implementation Plan of the Space Basic Plan published by the Government of Japan (GoJ) in December 2022, the Ministry of Defense’s X-band communications satellite is scheduled to be launched by the H3 vehicle at the end of Japan’s Fiscal Year (JFY) 2023, which will be March 2024. The influence of the H3 failure on the implementation plan is being reviewed within the GoJ. However, the launch date of the next H3 launch vehicle will likely be delayed for an unknown amount of time. Some estimates suggest a delay of a year or more. This situation will hinder the Ministry of Defense’s ability to obtain a new communications satellite on-orbit.

In addition, the launch of the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX), which aims to be the first sample return from Martian orbit; the Lunar Polar Exploration Mission (LUPEX), which is a joint mission with India; and the HTV-X, which is the new space station cargo resupply vehicle, are all scheduled to use the H3 launch vehicle after the end of JFY 2023. The ALOS-4 satellite and the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System MICHIBIKI-5 are scheduled to be launched by the H3 launch vehicle after JFY 2023.

It will be difficult to switch payloads to the proven H-IIA launch vehicle despite the failure of the H3 launch vehicle because satellites are designed for the specific conditions and capabilities of their launch vehicle. Therefore, Japan’s disaster risk reduction and security efforts will only produce the expected results once the causes of this launch failure are identified and remedied and the H3 launch vehicle returns to flight. Still, in light of the increased risk of disasters due to climate change and heightened political tensions among Japan’s neighboring countries, this is not a time to be leisurely. Therefore, until the H3 launch vehicle technology is proven, the GoJ should have planned to launch practical satellites for disaster risk reduction and security purposes on the more reliable H-2A launch vehicle. An alternative idea would be to use SpaceX’s Falcon 9, but that idea is unlikely to be adopted because the Basic Space Plan states that government satellites must be launched on Japan’s primary launch vehicles (either the H-IIA, the H3, or the Epsilon launch vehicle). This policy is to support Japan’s domestic space industries.

So why did Japan launch the ALOS-3 satellite on an H3 launch vehicle instead of an H-2A launch vehicle? Reasons for this include the budgetary constraints placed on JAXA.

Previous first flights of NASA’s, ESA’s, and Japan’s launch vehicles proceeded in different ways. The first flight of NASA’s Space Launch System, Artemis 1, was done at the same time as the test of the Orion spacecraft. The first flight of Japan’s H-2B launch vehicle was also done with the H-2 Transfer Vehicle (HTV) testing. However, Delta 4 Heavy, Antares, Falcon Heavy, and ESA’s Ariane 6 each carried, or will carry, dummy payloads or sets of small satellite as payloads on their first flights. In addition, in the case of the H-2A launch vehicle, there was a history of launching a payload for performance verification, which was affected by launch vehicle development delays. Based on these circumstances, it is not unusual for a launch vehicle’s first flight to carry a dummy payload.

If the first flight launch vehicle carries a test satellite, the budget for that satellite can be reduced. On the other hand, if not, the budget will inevitably grow because of the separate cost of launching that satellite on another launch vehicle. The launch cost of the H-2A is about 10 billion yen (about $75 million), which is inexpensive compared to the development cost of the ALOS-3 satellite. Although cost reduction sounds good, Japan has suffered a more significant loss.

So why did Japan launch the ALOS-3 satellite on an H3 launch vehicle instead of an H-2A launch vehicle? Reasons for this include the budgetary constraints placed on JAXA. The ALOS-3 satellite was initially planned to cost about 38 billion yen to develop, and the H-2A was scheduled to be its launch vehicle. Therefore, the launch cost was included in the 38-billion-yen estimate. However, the final development cost was about 28 billion yen, and the launch vehicle was changed to the H3. JAXA explained in March 2020 that the reason for choosing the H3 launch vehicle for launching the ALOS-3 satellite was “a business decision” based on the number of the H-2A vehicles remaining and other various circumstances. Among the other various circumstances, there may have been a diversion of costs associated with the delay in the development of the H3. In other words, by shifting the H-2A from the ALOS-3 satellite to launch other government satellites and placing the ALOS-3 satellite on the H3, the development cost of the H3 was increased by about 10 billion yen.

The graph below shows the budgets of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), the Ministry of Defense (MOD), the Cabinet Office (CAO), and the Cabinet Secretariat (CAS) and the total budget of other ministries (in billions of yen) since JFY 2015. Since the budget provided to JAXA is almost entirely through MEXT, its budget is used in this review. And the total budget of other ministries consists of the budgets of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT), the Ministry of Environment (MOE), the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), and the National Police Agency (NPA). MEXT’s budget has shown that it has remained essentially flat through JFY 2019. And CAS’s budget, which covers expenses related to developing and operating information-gathering satellites, has remained largely unchanged. On the other hand, other ministries’ budgets are increasing. For example, CAO’s budget doubled in JFY 2019. This increase was due to the cost of developing, maintaining, and operating the MICHIBIKI series. Also, MOD’s budget has increased by 20 to 30 billion yen annually since 2021 (the JFY 2023 budget is about four times the JFY 2020 budget) due to the strengthening of space situational awareness capabilities.

The budgets for various Japanese agencies working on space programs, in billions of yen.

Additionally, the total budget of other ministries has increased sevenfold between JFY 2019 and 2023. The overall budget increase from JFY 2020 onward can be attributed to the decision to participate in the Artemis program in October 2019 and the government’s policy of significant increases in other space-related budgets. This increase means that the GoJ is becoming more active in space utilization.

Five launches of the H-IIA launch vehicles are scheduled in the future: three Information Gathering Satellites, the Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle (GOSAT-GW), and the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) with the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM). Given the reasons mentioned above for JAXA’s decision to launch the ALOS-3 satellite on the H3, it is clear that the more essential satellites were assigned to the H-2A; that is, the ALOS-3 satellite had less policy importance compared to intelligence gathering satellites, SLIM, and others. It is clear that security and international space exploration are a focus of the GoJ, even from a non-budgetary perspective.

For Japan to be a leading spacefaring nation, it is crucial to develop cutting-edge space technology and make greater efforts to utilize space for practical applications.

The reason why the H-2A was assigned to the GOSAT-GW satellite instead of the ALOS-3 satellite may be because the ALOS-3 satellite was developed solely by MEXT/JAXA. On the other hand, the GOSAT-GW satellite is being developed under shared responsibility with MOE. The GOSAT-GW satellite is also expected to contribute to the global stocktaking of the Paris Agreement. This means that, unlike the ALOS-3 satellite, it is difficult for the GOSAT-GW satellite to divert budgets or change transport vehicles at the sole discretion of MEXT/JAXA. JAXA’s activities are not necessarily funded only by the operating budget from MEXT but can also be financed by commissioned contracts and grants from other ministries. For example, in the case of the ALOS-3 satellite, these ministries include MLIT from the perspective of disaster risk reduction and national land management and MAFF from the perspective of agricultural fields and forest management. Both MLIT and MAFF are expected to use the satellite’s data.

To this end, the Consortium for Satellite Earth Observation (CONSEO), led by JAXA, was established in September 2022. This consortium is intended to provide a framework for discussions that will lead to overall strategies and policy proposals for future earth observation satellites in Japan, with participation from industry, academia, and government. The CONSEO also published its first proposal in March 2023.

In its first proposal, the consortium states that government Earth observation missions are indispensable for promoting data utilization and social applications, maintaining and developing industrial infrastructure, and promoting international cooperation. Therefore, predictability and continuity of the missions must be ensured. In other words, the consortium seeks to develop an infrastructure of governmental Earth observation satellites. In addition, it requires the GoJ to establish a new strategic earth observation program to contribute to foreign policy, such as strengthening the Japan-US alliance, the Quad (US, Japan, India, and Australia), and economic security. At the same time, it also calls for Japan to acquire global strategic indispensability in the Earth observation fields of greenhouse gases, the water cycle, forests, and other areas. If the GoJ takes up this proposal, it will no longer be allowed to have gaps in Earth observations. The GoJ should positively consider accepting the proposal and continue to devote sufficient resources to the field of Earth observation, bearing in mind that the proposal reflects the firm opinions of industry and academia.

For Japan to be a leading spacefaring nation, it is crucial to develop cutting-edge space technology and make greater efforts to utilize space for practical applications. Earth observation satellites are in increasing demand for disaster risk reduction, security, and international cooperation and diplomacy. Therefore, the CONSEO seeks continuous acquisition of Earth observation data through the infrastructure of governmental satellites. However, with the failure of the H3 launch, the Japanese government faces a significant gap in optical land observation data. This review suggests two ways that the GoJ can avoid such a situation in the future, based on the above discussion of how current situation came about. The first is that a dummy payload should be used for the first flight test of a new launch vehicle. For this purpose, it is necessary to allocate a sufficient budget to put a dummy payload on board. The second is that not only MEXT/JAXA, but also the relevant ministries and agencies that will use satellite data and services, should actively participate in the development process and equitably bear the development costs and risks when developing and manufacturing new governmental satellites in the future.

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Junji Miyazawa is a Visiting Scholar at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute.

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Book Review-For Love Of Mars

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Review: For the Love of Marsby Jeff Foust Monday, June 5, 2023 For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet by Matthew Shindell University of Chicago Press, 2023 hardcover, 248 pp., illus. ISBN 978-0-226-82189-4 US$27.50It should be little surprise that humanity’s perceptions of Mars have changed over the years, centuries, and millennia. Our knowledge of the planet has changed, from a wandering red star in the night sky to a world with its own geological history and potential for life. At the same time, humanity’s knowledge of the broader universe, and the place of Mars within it, has changed.Those evolving perceptions of Mars are at the heart of For the Love of Mars, a new book by Matthew Shindell, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum. The book, he explains in the prologue, had originally planned to focus on the modern Mars as studied by robotic spacecraft. But during the pandemic, he plunged into reading about how Mars was considered in earlier societies, shifting the book’s focus from the “why” of Mars exploration to one of who was interested in Mars in the past and present. “The ‘who’ question—how we understand ourselves, our place in the universe and what we hope to become—will shape why we go to Mars and what we do there,” he writes.“The ‘who’ question—how we understand ourselves, our place in the universe and what we hope to become—will shape why we go to Mars and what we do there,” Shindell writes.The book covers that shifting interest in, and perceptions of, Mars over human history. Many early societies associated Mars with war and destruction, but that association was not universal. Shindell notes that the Mayans appear to have linked Mars to tropical weather patterns. In Mesopotamia, Mars could be a good or bad omen, depending on where the sky it reached opposition.For the Love of Mars leaps ahead to medieval times, the Renaissance, and soon is at “modern” Mars, although those perceptions continue to shift, particularly as telescopic observations and then spacecraft missions cause the prospects of a habitable Mars to rise and fall. Geologist Tim Mutch compared the daily images returned from Mariner 9, the first NASA Mars orbiter, to a field geologist’s traverse across new terrain, eliminating “the ‘old’ Mars as through the countless hours of previous speculation had been little more than science fiction.” (There had, of course, been plenty of science fiction about Mars, which the book also discusses.)The book, though, comes up a little short near the present day, when examining the prospects of human exploration of Mars. After reviewing the history of robotic exploration, he turns at the end of the book to potential human missions, including the desire to avoid carrying with us to Mars problems (environmental and cultural) from Earth. There is more discussion, though, of science fiction, like The Expanse and The Martian, that of actual planning of human missions and how that has evolved in recent decades. Robert Zubrin, whose Mars Direct architecture reshaped thinking about human Mars missions and helped catalyze new interest in such missions nearly three decades ago, and Elon Musk, who has made human settlement on Mars a central goal of his work at SpaceX, get only brief mentions in the book.Our thinking of Mars will evolve over time thanks to both scientific and cultural changes, and despite the optimism of advocates like Musk and Zubrin it may still be decades before the first human sets foot on the Red Planet. When that does finally happen, Shindell writes, it will be “such a massive undertaking that it will become one of the largest technical and cultural projects of its time.” That prompts a question he uses to conclude the book: “Who do we want to be when we become Martians?”Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.Note: we are using a new commenting system, which may require you to create a new account.

Some Observations On The Coming Artemis Moon Mission

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The Artemis 2 astronauts will see things through their own eyes that no human has since the last Apollo mission to the Moon. (credit: NASA/James Blair)Cultural considerations in space exploration: Insights for NASA’s Artemis 2 missionby Deana L. Weibel Monday, June 5, 2023 NASA missions tend to be thought of as celebrations of hardware and technology but those missions that include crews also, and unavoidably, contain a human element. As a cultural anthropologist who has spent many years studying the human aspects of space exploration, including religion, socialization, and other astronaut perspectives and experiences, I have a few suggestions for things that NASA personnel and the people journeying to the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years should keep in mind.Some of this is obvious. Since the last Apollo mission in 1972, Apollo 17, the American space program has changed in very dramatic ways. Every human spaceflight since Apollo has taken place in low Earth orbit (LEO). Astronauts circling the Earth in a space shuttle or living for prolonged periods of time in the International Space Station (ISS), as well as prior space stations like Skylab, had Earth right below them and always in view.Seeing the Earth from LEO and seeing the Earth from thousands of kilometers away are completely different experiences.Heading to the Moon is an entirely different proposition. The ISS generally travels about 420 kilometers above the surface of the Earth. The Moon itself is about 400,000 kilometers away from the Earth and Artemis 2 is expected to go beyond the Moon by up to 7,500 kilometers. When Artemis 2 heads to the Moon, then, it will be nearly 1,000 time further away than a space station or spacecraft in LEO. Communications will be slow compared to what Earth-orbiting astronauts are used to. The isolation will also be much greater, which can have a negative psychological impact, as can the knowledge that the Earth (and any rescue) is much farther away if a dangerous situation were to develop.Another area where a type of distance is important for Artemis 2 is with respect to time. The oldest person on the Artemis 2 crew is Reid Wiseman, who was born in 1975, almost a full three years after Apollo 17 returned in December 1972. This makes a huge difference in terms of what the current crew can learn from prior crews. Skylab astronauts could talk very easily to astronauts from previous programs who had orbited the Earth. Shuttle astronauts could always communicate with their predecessors who had taken similar journeys into space. The ISS was built during the shuttle era and there was a natural transition from shuttle-only astronauts to shuttle-and-ISS astronauts and then to ISS-only astronauts. In all of these cases, there was a direct link from the experiences of recent astronauts to the innovations being undertaken by newer astronauts.Challenges for enculturationIn the case of Artemis 2, though, given that more than 50 years have passed since any prior mission to the Moon, there are far fewer people to learn from who have had any kind of like experience. What happens on the ISS is a good example. When a new crew arrives on the space station, they are greeted and acculturated by the previous crew. Acculturation is the experience of learning about and adapting to a new community. Children acculturate into their society very naturally, learning from parents, teachers, and even other children. Adults acculturate when they move to a new country or join a new family or workspace. The ISS has its own ever-changing culture and after astronauts dock they have to adjust to the new culture as well as physical differences like microgravity. As a retired astronaut I will refer to as “Alan” told me during an interview:The training does a really good job preparing you for almost everything, but there’s some mundane things… Like where exactly do we put different kinds of trash, you know, or little tricks to preparing the food so it doesn’t make a mess, and where we keep the wrenches when we’re not using them… It changes over time because every crew does things slightly differently, too, with these things. It’s kind of like if you ever visit, if you’re going to be a house guest for a while in somebody else’s home, you’ve got to learn like, OK, where do they keep the towels you know, what if I run out of clean ones where do I get more? It’s stuff like that that gets passed down informally when you’re starting, when you first arrive. It’s not like tips on how to run the emergency procedures, it’s more of the day-to-day life kind of stuff.As seasoned space station astronauts, Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch will all have some experience to draw on, and will certainly help acculturate rookie Jeremy Hansen, but what they can bring to a lunar flight from ISS experience will be limited in many ways.These limitations may be, in fact, beneficial, since research has been done that indicates the routine and sameness of ISS life can contribute to negative moods in astronauts. Anthropologist Jack Stuster wrote a NASA report (2010) in which he analyzed anonymized astronauts’ diary entries and discovered that surprises and breaks in routine made their experience much more positive. At the same time, the novelty of the lunar flight experience may be unsettling since, even with training, no active astronaut has ever been outside of Earth orbit. The retired astronauts who have traveled to the Moon previously are very few in number and made the trip using distinctly different technology in a distinctly different social setting. The Artemis 2 crew will have to learn on the job, adjusting and adapting the way the first Mercury astronauts did, although with a much longer mission, making some things up as they go.The Artemis 2 astronauts will get perspectives of the Moon possible only for the last half-century from robotic spacecraft like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. (credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University)Strange VisionsAnother important thing to keep in mind is that astronauts in recent years have not had the ability to see the same things that the Apollo astronauts did during NASA’s last lunar missions. I mean this quite literally. While a lot has been said about the “Overview Effect,” and while many astronauts who have been interviewed clearly understand it as a cultural phenomenon (like learning where to throw away garbage on the ISS, the Overview Effect seems to be something astronauts sometimes prepare each other for), seeing the Earth from LEO and seeing the Earth from thousands of kilometers away are completely different experiences.Astronauts since the shuttle era have often become amateur photographers, taking stunning shots of islands and deserts, cityscapes and giant storms. They have recorded sunrises and sunsets and have talked about the amazing experience of hanging in space over a living blue planet. None of the current crop of astronauts, however, has ever seen the Earth recede into the distance, becoming so small that it can be covered with a single thumb. This view of the Earth is something that many Apollo astronauts have described, written about, or recorded on film. It is one thing to see pictures of that distant Earth, an experience that I am sure everyone reading this article has shared. Seeing your home planet so far away with your own eyes is a completely different experience.“I think the most profound thing I witnessed was seeing the Moon up close… The Moon’s very unfriendly, it’s very unforgiving. Very, very difficult.”Apollo astronauts described this experience as one of intense awe, particularly as one becomes aware of the increasing distance from one’s home world. In his memoir Never Panic Early, for example, Fred Haise discusses taking photographs of the Earth as the Apollo 13 crew moved away from the planet toward the Moon, writing, “It was surreal to shoot stills of the shrinking Earth for several hours. I have found it hard to describe the deep emotion I felt viewing these out-of-this-world scenes.” (Haise 2022, p. 107) Michael Collins memorably referred to it as, “the vision that I summon over and over again of the itsy-bitsy sphere just outside my window, motionless, cradled in black velvet.” (Collins 2019, p. xvii) The life of an astronaut is incredibly busy, so while multiple astronauts have described this view, others have noted that they were unable to fully experience it because of the never-ceasing flow of work that needed to be done during their missions. My guess is that during Artemis 2, the crew will be unimaginably busy, but will actually be expected, perhaps unfairly, to observe and report on the sensation of seeing Earth from an incredible distance. The public will be living vicariously through the return to the Moon and will want lots of details.Another experience the Artemis 2 astronauts will have, one that does not get a lot of attention, is seeing the Moon from lunar orbit. Some of the best descriptions of this panorama have come from Command Module Pilots and other astronauts who took missions where landing wasn’t a possibility. Command Module Pilot Michael Collins’ memoir Carrying the Fire provides an excellent description of this phenomenon as the Apollo 11 crew approached Earth’s biggest satellite. He writes:Our first shock comes as we stop our spinning motion and swing ourselves around so as to bring the moon into view. We have not been able to see the moon for nearly a day now, and the change in its appearance is dramatic, spectacular, and electrifying. The moon I have known all my life, that two-dimensional, small yellow disk in the sky, has gone away somewhere, to be replaced by the most awesome sphere I have ever seen. To begin with, it is huge, completely filling our window. Second, it is three-dimensional. The belly of it bulges out toward us in such a pronounced fashion that I almost feel I can reach out and touch it. (Collins 2019, p. 387)Lunar Module Pilot Fred Haise of Apollo 13, whose opportunity to walk on the surface of the Moon was lost to the mission’s famous accident, still found himself impressed with the sight, writing that he:…felt strange and lucky to have a firsthand look at this landscape that could only be seen from the vantage point of a spacecraft orbiting the Moon. The back side differed from the front side that we are familiar with from Earth – it was rougher looking, with craters upon craters. The primary colors were shades of gray and a few white areas that I assumed were newer craters. Just as when I witnessed the shrinking Earth, these novel aspects of the Moon made me question whether I was really seeing what I was seeing. (Haise 2022, p. 116)In another example, the astronaut I refer to in my research as “Zack” spoke to me about how unwelcoming the Moon looked from his position as someone who orbited the great orb but had no plans to land. He told me in one of our interviews, “I think the most profound thing I witnessed was seeing the Moon up close… The Moon’s very unfriendly, it’s very unforgiving. Very, very difficult. I think you look at a scene and you kind of decide in your mind whether it’s hostile or not, you know, that it’s not something you want to step out into…the Moon is so stark, so sharp, so forbidding, that you still have the impression, even inside the spacecraft, that it’s a pretty hostile place.”He explained further, “You are so cut off from everything…and here all of a sudden you’re looking at the Moon that you probably looked at thousands of times growing up, and here you are, anywhere from 16 to 10 miles away from it, and it’s different… You can look at the Moon and see the dark circles and all that, but [when] you get close to it, and you see the smaller craters, and you see how sharply defined they are, and you see the very sharp shadow patterns caused by the Sun, well, you’re seeing it for the first time.”I suspect that looking at the Moon knowing that you will not land there during your mission is quite different from knowing you’ll be touching down in a few hours, and perhaps, despite what Zack felt, less nerve-wracking. Still, the celestial body Buzz Aldrin characterized as a place of “magnificent desolation,” will be sterile, unearthly, and still. Astronauts who have orbited our colorful planet will be, no doubt, impressed by the Moon’s distinctly different appearance.So far I have discussed looking at the Earth from space and looking at the Moon from lunar orbit, two experiences that can evoke awe and that certainly hold cultural importance as unusual sights that lunar astronauts have described in detail because they were, as Fred Haise said, “novel.” Frank White has done a lot of research on what he termed the “Overview Effect,” and there are indications that this view of the Earth from space, including views from LEO, sometimes have a personal impact on astronauts that changes their understanding of life on the planet. Very little research has been done at all, however, on psychological, cognitive, or cultural impact of seeing the Moon from close proximity, even though the memoirs and interviews I have discussed make it clear that the experience is strange and illuminating, causing the satellite to go from seeming flat and mirror-like to becoming overwhelmingly real and three-dimensional.It is not hard to imagine an astronaut in lunar orbit being captivated by the enormous Moon or by a “wall” of stars in space and becoming unresponsive for a few moments. It would be wise to anticipate this scenario so that it won’t interfere with crucial time-based operations.Another type of strange perception from space occurs when astronauts are able to look into the Milky Way galaxy from a spacecraft or during a spacewalk, particularly in situations where they are dark-adapted and, ideally, in complete shadow. A shuttle-era astronaut I’ve interviewed, whom I refer to as Theo, made sure to take in views of not just Earth but also open space during his multiple missions. Why? As Theo explained about the experience, “You were looking at galaxies with the naked eye. You were in the heavens. Holy shit. You’re in a place that will increase spirituality. You’ll do the checklist a hell of a lot better if you’re on top of your spirituality than if you’re not. It’s the same as goddamn water or food.”He described situations to me where, when the crew was asleep and the lights were off in the spacecraft, he would intentionally go to the windows and look out into space, in order to see the stars in as close to total darkness as he could get. Interestingly, as a child he would also look out the window at the stars, although the circumstances were very different. As he told it: “I knelt in front of the window going to bed and I would look at the heavens and pray… and the prayer, I don’t know if it was [a formal prayer]. I [was] just talking to the heavens.” Clearly, it was a lifelong spiritual practice for him, and one that he continued in space. It was also evident that he felt that the context of being in space could enhance a person’s spirituality, an understanding that drove him to stargaze from space or undertake religious rituals (he described a few) when the unobstructed Milky Way was in view.A Hubble image of a dense portion of the Milky Way, a view astronauts on the way to the Moon might experience with their own eyes. (credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Brammer)The shock of aweNASA and the Artemis 2 crew should also know that the impact of seeing the stars from space appears to be intensified from lunar orbit. Like Theo, Zack took the time to become dark adapted and look out into space, but unlike Theo, he was in much deeper space, in a far darker place than LEO, which is impacted by the reflected light of the Sun on the Earth’s surface. I have written about this in more detail before, coining the term the “ultraview effect” (to both acknowledge and contrast with White’s more established overview effect) to describe intense feelings of awe and insignificance astronauts have described when looking out into an overwhelming thickness of stars (see Weibel, 2020). Theo told me that “the Milky Way is a hard white wall,” while Zack, whose experience of the ultraview effect was arguably greater, said, “All of a sudden, the star patterns out there became something that I was not ready for. So many stars I couldn’t see one. It was just a sheet of light.” Zack found the experience to be one that altered his sense of reality and human destiny in a way that I can only characterize as spiritual, as his mind struggled to make sense of something incomprehensible.The work that Timothy Morton has done on “hyperobjects” probably plays a role here. I have written about this previously, discussing Morton’s work on these “huge objects or systems,” that are not easy to understand without the use of technology. For Morton, the “reality of a thing exists apart from our piecemeal impressions of the reality of things, and at this point in time we are starting, slowly, to comprehend them in their entirety.” (Weibel, 2020) Essentially, hyperobjects are phenomena that are so grand in scale that they are impossible to comprehend without technological help, and that humans find overwhelming when they finally realize their scope. In Zack’s case, for instance, he was unable to see the unbelievable view of the Milky Way he experienced without the technical assistance of a spacecraft that put him into lunar orbit.I argued previously that while Morton expects human contact with and increased knowledge of hyperobjects to be “difficult” and “painful,” astronauts, who have real-life encounters seeing these objects in ways that other humans cannot, often react with more optimism than Morton would suggest. The Moon may align better with what Morton predicts, but few astronauts have responded to seeing the Earth from space with anything like the “disgust” and “pain” that Morton considers likely (Weibel 2020). One exception may be actor and spaceflight participant William Shatner, whose encounter with the reality of the relationship between Earth and space was clearly frightening and unpleasant (see Weibel, 2021).There actually may be behavioral implications to this experience of “starstruck” awe. Yannick Joye and Siegfried Dewitte have done some fascinating psychological research on the way that human beings react to objects perceived as “vast,” focusing primarily on huge buildings and other architectural features. They argue that one predictable reaction to large buildings and other sources of awe (one would assume the first glimpses of the nearby Moon or a clear view of the Milky Way from a shadowed spot would count as well) may be what they call “freezing.” They explain, “Within the recent literature on awe, different researchers have hinted at the immobilizing potential of awe and awe-evoking stimuli. In particular, awe has been linked to a state of ‘freezing’, ‘paralysis’, ‘stillness’, ‘passivity’, and ‘immobility’. Recent linguistic research also shows that old English notions for awe have been metonymically used to express ‘sluggishness’ and ‘physical paralysis’. Inasmuch as emotion labels can be diagnostic of the emotion’s associated behavioral response, this tentatively suggests that (at least in earlier times) people experienced immobility as part and parcel of awe episodes.” (Joye and Dewitte 2016)From an evolutionary perspective, animals may fight, flee, or freeze when faced with danger. An amusing example of this can be found in this compilation of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World scenes where Dr. Alan Grant (played by Sam Neill) tells companions inclined to panic or flee, “Don’t move…” when confronted with various deadly dinosaurs. Freezing in response to certain predators under specific circumstances may make sense and can occur even without a reminder from a helpful paleontologist. As Joye and Dewitte explain, “Freezing prepares the organism for escape or defensive fighting by optimizing visual and attentional processes to the threat. Freezing is typically characterized by hyper-vigilance towards a threatening stimulus or environment, and crucially implies a state of general immobility, evident from a tense body posture and muscle stiffness. In addition, by staying immobile, the threatened organism avoids being discovered, or further drawing the threatening agent’s attention, thereby reducing the risk of being captured and killed.” (Joye and Dewitte 2016)This “freezing” isn’t based in logic but is instinctive. Surprise and awe may evoke it even if the trigger isn’t actually a threat: Joye and Dewitte have studied how large buildings and “religious monumental architecture” like giant pyramids and cathedrals may have the same effect of causing a person to stop or slow down until the perceived “threat” is assessed. It is not hard to imagine an astronaut in lunar orbit being captivated by the enormous Moon or by a “wall” of stars in space and becoming unresponsive for a few moments. It would be wise to anticipate this scenario so that it won’t interfere with crucial time-based operations. In a largely automated spacecraft, though, astronauts may be free to surrender to this short-term “paralysis.”Putting context in contextWhile it is probable, then, that all crewmembers of Artemis 2 will experience some kind of awe in response to the visions they see on their journey, it is less likely that they will all process or experience this awe in similar ways. Travel to a culturally significant, awe-inspiring site like the Moon resembles religious pilgrimage in many ways, and years of anthropological research on the experiences of pilgrims demonstrate that who you are matters just as much as where you go.The Artemis 2 mission will be our first chance to see a diversity of reactions that we can so clearly connect to a diversity of cultural and religious backgrounds.Anthropologist Glenn Bowman spent months in Jerusalem participating in the visits of Catholic, Protestant, and Greek Orthodox visitors engaged in pilgrimage and found distinct patterns. The Greek Orthodox pilgrims treated the city as an icon and kissing the walls of buildings; the Protestant visitors focused on sites where Jesus had walked or preached, imagining themselves in those scenes; and pious Catholics sought to receive Mass in one of the holiest places on the planet (Catholic astronauts also like to receive Mass in outer space, when circumstances permit.) The cultural values and beliefs the Jerusalem pilgrims brought with them shaped the journey (Bowman 1991). I found similarities in my work at the French shrine Rocamadour, where atheists, Catholics, and NeoPagans intermingled but had dissimilar experiences: many atheists appreciated the site as an architectural marvel, the Catholics focused on the centuries of Christian worship that had taken place there, and the NeoPagans concentrated instead on the site’s innate “energy” or the goddesses that had been worshipped there before Christian missionaries arrived (Weibel 2021).The first visitors to the Moon did not have this type of diversity among their ranks. They were uniformly of European ancestry, were almost all Christian, and (except for Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmitt) shared a military background. This is not to say that there were not distinctions among them, but it’s true that they had comparable cultural backgrounds and had been trained in largely similar ways. An emphasis on sameness was an important part of military training, and worked to create cohesion and predictability during times of war when soldiers were expected to act first and ask questions later.With the space shuttle program in the late 1970s, NASA began to permit more cultural differences among their recruits, welcoming scientists in larger numbers than ever before, and inviting applicants from a wide array of ethnic, religious, and other backgrounds. Women were included for the first time. Among other benefits, this variation has given researchers in NASA’s human space program better and clearer data about what it’s like to have a range of different types of people under conditions of microgravity, radiation exposure, and the like.Artemis 2, however, will be the first time there has been clear cultural variation in astronauts heading to lunar orbit. The first non-United States citizen, for instance, will head to the Moon: mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Royal Canadian Air Force. He will be joined by two members of the US Navy, commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover, who will be the first Black person to ever travel to the Moon. Christina Koch will be the first woman and only the second person without a military background to travel to the Moon, after Harrison Schmitt.While some might be dismayed at the lack of uniformity among the crew, fretting that diversity is only sought for suspect reasons, for those of us who study culture and spiritually significant forms of travel, Artemis 2’s astronauts are especially interesting. Glover, for instance is a devout Christian whose religious beliefs have already been an important part of his prior experiences as an astronaut. In an interview with Christianity Today, he expressed concern that any emphasis on his being the first Black person to go to the Moon could be divisive, but he was much less hesitant to serve as a representative of his Christian faith. Like other Christian astronauts before him, he brought communion with him to space (Buzz Aldrin and Tom Jones are two well-known examples), and, in his statement during the press conference that introduced the Artemis 2 crew, he “very intentionally put God at the front, in the very first comment, and at the end.” (Silliman 2023)It is probable that Glover’s experience seeing the Moon and looking from a shadowed spot into the Milky Way, perhaps experiencing the “ultraview effect,” will be, because of the specific cultural and religious experiences he brings into space, different from what Koch experiences, and that her experiences will be different from those of Hansen, whose experiences will be different from those of Wiseman. The Apollo astronauts responded differently from each other, of course, too. But the Artemis 2 mission will be our first chance to see a diversity of reactions that we can so clearly connect to a diversity of cultural and religious backgrounds.Telling the taleWhat’s more, we are living during a time where people are quite open to describing their subjective experiences in outer space. The NASA web series Down To Earth features an array of astronauts talking about experiencing the overview effect from the International Space Station. Many of them become visibly and audibly moved by what they describe. Conversely, the stereotypical “steely-eyed missile man” of the mid-20th century was expected to keep his emotions in check and maintain a calm exterior at all costs. Astronauts of the 21st century have adapted to longer spaceflights and a more casual lifestyle in space, cultural changes that, given the shared ISS experiences of Koch, Wiseman, and Glover, make it extremely likely that we will hear very candid personal descriptions of their Artemis 2 journey. In addition, the rapid increase in space tourism in recent years has made it common to hear about space travel from celebrities, for instance, who tend to talk more freely. These changed expectations will certainly influence the questions the Artemis 2 astronauts will answer from the press and from the public after they return or even during their lunar mission.It’s likely, then, that the first crew to return to the Moon will have a lot to say about their experience. They will share what they felt and saw with future crews, who will then journey to the Moon themselves following the advice of the Artemis II crew. The Artemis III crew will enculturate the Artemis IV crew next, and so on, until a Moon-going astronaut culture is back in place. There has been a LEO astronaut culture in place for decades. Shuttle and ISS astronauts have told me they were told about the overview effect from more experienced astronauts before their own first flight – getting tips and receiving wisdom from those who proceeded you is one of the most common ways that culture is shared (this is one of the reasons why space tourists on the longer Axiom flights fly with astronaut “guides” like Michael López-Alegría and Peggy Whitson.)Perhaps the Artemis 3 crew will get advice from Wiseman, Koch, Glover, and Hansen about how to deal with that first glimpse of the Moon or the Milky Way without “freezing,” or how to dark-adapt to have the absolute best experience of the ultraview effect, one that will change them forever. Whatever happens, NASA and the Artemis 2 crew should be aware that the resumption of lunar missions will have a significant impact on astronaut culture and, in turn, on the rest of us.ReferencesBowman, Glenn. “Christian ideology and the image of a holy land.” Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, edited by John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow (1991): 98-121.Collins, Michael. Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys: 50th Anniversary Edition. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.Haise, Fred, and Bill Moore. Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut’s Journey. Smithsonian Books, 2022.Joye, Yannick, and Siegfried Dewitte. “Up Speeds You down. Awe-Evoking Monumental Buildings Trigger Behavioral and Perceived Freezing.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 47 (2016): 112–25.Morton, Timothy. “Poisoned ground.” symplokē 21, no. 1-2 (2013): 37-50.Silliman, Daniel. “NASA Astronaut Asks for Prayer for Moon Mission.” News & Reporting, April 6, 2023.Stuster, Jack. Behavioral issues associated with long-duration space expeditions: review and analysis of astronaut journals: experiment 01-E104 (Journals). Houston, TX: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Johnson Space Center, 2010.Weibel, Deana L. “The overview effect and the ultraview effect: How extreme experiences in/of outer space influence religious beliefs in astronauts.” Religions 11, no. 8 (2020): 418.Weibel, Deana L. “Black Ugliness and the Covering of Blue: William Shatner’s Suborbital Flight to ‘Death.’” The Space Review. October 18, 2021.Weibel, Deana L. A Sacred Vertigo: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Rocamadour, France. Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.Deana L. Weibel, Ph.D. is a Professor of Anthropology at Grand Valley State University with a joint appointment in GVSU’s Brooks College Religious Studies program. She has held a lifelong interest in voyages, studying pilgrimage, tourism, and scientific expeditions and the religious and spiritual meanings they, and the places visited, hold for those who travel. A member of both the American Anthropological Association and the Explorers Club (and current chair of the Chicago/Great Lakes Chapter of the latter), Weibel has conducted ethnographic field research in a number of settings, including the Black Madonna shrine of Rocamadour, France; Spaceport America; and the Vatican Observatory. Her website is http://www.deanaweibel.space.Note: we are using a new commenting system, which may require you to create a new account.

A Former High-Level US Intelligence Officer Goes Public About UAPs And Aliens From Other Planets

Are we alone in the universe? Is life unique to earth or does it exist elsewhere in the universe? This question has haunted me for 70 years. In the 1950s I was mesmerized by movies like “War of the Worlds,” Earth vs the Flying Saucers,” Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” “The Mysterians,” etc. As a young man, I had no doubt that aliens had visited our world.

    My interest in this subject has not declined over the decades. I have been a great supporter of The SETI Institute (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and Dr. Seth Shostak for 15 years.

      The news network News Nation broke an incredible story yesterday. A former US Air Force officer and intelligence agency operative with the highest security clearances went public yesterday. He claimed that the US government knew of visits by UFOs or UAPs for decades. He claimed that his former employer had alien spacecraft hidden. He claimed that the bodies of alien spacecraft crew members were stored at secret locations. For those of you curious, here are two links to look at:

      We have been hearing these stories since an unexplained object crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. What is so new about this story? It is the bonafide credentials of the person now making the allegations. Do I believe what this man is saying?

     As the old saying goes: “The jury is still out.” However, another saying comes into play: “Where there is this much smoke there has to be some fire.”

     The distances between solar systems and star systems are beyond comprehension in the normal sense. The nearest star system to our world is Proxima Centauri. A spacecraft would have to fly at the speed of light for over 4.22 years to reach this celestial body. It would take us 73,000 years to travel this distance with the current chemical rockets that we explore space with.

    It would take a society or civilization with incredibly advanced technology to produce a spacecraft capable of attaining the speed of light. An actual journey at that speed would require a long time for the spacecraft to reach the speed of light. It would take a long time for the spacecraft to slow down as it neared a target solar system or planet. I doubt that we would see a scenario like Star Trek with large star ships full of human occupants. I see a craft with Artificial Intelligence that we could not imagine. Any scout ship deployed from this vessel would have the most advanced Artificial Intelligence.

    Would there be biological beings on board? I am going to say perhaps. A television show ran for one season in 2005. It was called “Threshold.” The aliens did not come as little gray beings with big eyes and high foreheads. They did not come as hideous-looking monsters. They came as DNA molecules that entered human hosts and took over their being. It would be easy to keep DNA frozen for decades or centuries.

    At the end of the process, I believe that the US government does have some ultra-advanced technology aircraft. Most are from countries like Russia and China. It is not impossible to imagine that in this group of high technology platforms, there is one spacecraft that came to us from light years away. More will be revealed.

Saturn Has Over 100 Moons

DISCOVERIES

Take That, Jupiter

Saturn now reigns supreme after astronomers discovered an additional 62 new moons orbiting the sixth planet from the sun, Mashable reported.

The new tally puts the total number of moons to 145, making Saturn the first known planet in space to have more than 100 satellites.

Researcher Edward Ashton and his team explained in their study that the new findings were possible thanks to a new detection technique that involves stacking photos to capture more details in a single frame.

The novel method helps reveal fainter and smaller cosmic objects. It was previously used in finding moons around Neptune and Uranus.

The researchers explained that they had to closely monitor these celestial bodies to determine whether they were actual moons or just asteroids.

“Tracking these moons makes me recall playing the kid’s game Dot-to-Dot,” Ashton quipped. “But with about 100 different games on the same page and you don’t know which dot belongs to which puzzle.”

The new satellites are remnants of collisions that shattered a bigger moon or moons into pieces, they suggested. Many of them are considered “irregular” because of their tipped, oval-shaped orbits.

Before the new findings, Jupiter claimed the title of most moons in our solar system after scientists came across new satellites around the gas giant back in February – taking the total to 95 moons.