AS THE BATTLE between Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson to be the first billionaire to conquer space travel heats up, keeping up with the latest terminology in the new-age space race is not always easy for the rest of us.
This month, we’re taking a deep dive into all things space as part of The Good Information Project.
From the mysterious dark matter to the prospect of space colonisation, this glossary has all the terms you will need to keep up with the 21st century space race.
The Artemis Program is the name of Nasa’s initiative that aims to return humans to the moon with the long-term goal of manning missions to Mars. The program was signed off on by then-President Donald Trump in 2017 and has since set an ambitious deadline to land astronauts on the lunar south pole by 2024.
Nasa is currently building new technologies in preparation for the mission, including the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, Orion spacecraft and Exploration Ground Systems, and is working with both commercial and international partners to establish sustainable structures on and around the moon. They recently selected Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build a lunar lander that will take their astronauts to the moon’s surface in 2024.
An astronaut by definition is someone who is trained and deployed by a human spaceflight program to travel aboard a spacecraft. Astronauts usually have a background in science, engineering, mathematics or piloting and have years of experience in their respective fields before having to undergo years of extensive training in order to prepare to go into space.
While this may seem simplistic, the term ‘astronaut’ was recently updated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the US, the first changes since their Commercial Astronaut Wings programme began in 2004.
The changes were announced on the same day as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos flew to the edge of space aboard his Blue Origin rocket, and disqualified him from being awarded his wings.
The rules state that to qualify as commercial astronauts, space-goers must astronaut hopefuls must be part of the flight crew and must travel 80km above the Earth’s surface.
While Bezos actually travelled 100km above Earth’s surface, the changes also state that would-be astronauts must have also “demonstrated activities during flight that were essential to public safety, or contributed to human space flight safety”.
According to Nasa, a black hole is “a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light can not get out”. This occurs when a large amount of matter is squeezed into a very small space.
Black holes are made when the center of a very big star reaches the end of its life and implodes, or collapses. When the star dies, it causes a supernova, an exploding star that blasts part of the star into space. Due to the lack of light, scientists can’t actually see black holes, but they know they’re there by studying how their strong gravity affects the stars and gas around them.
Black holes get “bigger”, or more massive, as they consume matter near them. Some are tiny, but have the mass of a large mountain. A “stellar” black hole can have a mass of up to 20 times more than the mass of the sun, while the largest black holes are called “supermassive”. These have masses that are more than 1 million suns together. Scientists have found proof that every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its centre. The bigger the black hole, the larger a zone of “no return” they have, where anything entering their territory is irrevocably lost to the black hole. This is called the event horizon.
Blue Origin is the private space company owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The billionaire founded the company in 2000 with the goal of one day bringing people to live and work in space through artificial gravity. After a slow growth, it successfully flew its first-stage reusable rocket, New Shepard, around 100km above Earth in 2015. In July, Bezos successfully rode the rocket into space for ten minutes to coincide with the 52nd anniversary of the first Moon landing.
However, the company has had its fair share of controversy. Blue Origin recently filed a civil lawsuit against Nasa after it chose rival company SpaceX to build its lunar lander, stating the process behind the decision “had flaws.” Around 17 key leaders and senior engineers have left Blue Origin in the last few months, many of whom were connected to the company’s lunar landing program.
Everything we know about space – planets, stars, galaxies – only makes up 5% of the universe. Dark matter is the name given to the mass in the universe that remains invisible.
According to Nasa, around 68% of the universe is a compound of dark energy, with the remaining 27% known as dark matter. It is so called because it’s invisible, and we have no way of seeing it.
We know it exists because of its strong gravitational force, and because it distorts light from distant stars. The greater the distortion, the greater the concentration of dark matter. Recently, scientists have been trying to come up with the technology to enable them to be able to actually identify dark matter in the universe.
While there is no universally accepted definition of where the edge of space begins, the World Air Sports Federation (FAI) uses the Karman line to define the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. This defines the edge of space as beginning around 100km (62 miles, or 330,000 feet) above sea level.
However, Astronomy Ireland’s David Moore told The Journal last month that this figure is much debated, and that the real limit “probably is closer to 80km” above sea level.
Educational Irish Research Satellite 1, or EIRSAT-1, is Ireland’s first satellite. Announced in 2017, it is being developed by a team of postgraduate students and professors at University College Dublin (UCD) as part of the European Space Agency’s ‘Fly Your Satellite!’ programme. At just 22 by 10 by 10 cm, the ‘CubeSat’ is smaller than a shoebox, but is still equivalent in complexity to a standard space mission. When it is completed, it will carry three experiments on its Low Earth Orbit at an altitude of 400km. Final tests for the satellite will be carried out in Belgium next month, bringing it one step closer to a 2022 launch into low Earth orbit.
An orbit is the gravitationally curved trajectory of an object in space. In short, it is a repeating circular motion that one object in space takes around another object due to gravity’s pull. An object in an orbit is called a satellite. A satellite can be natural, like Earth or the moon, or it can be man-made, like the International Space Station. The time it takes a satellite to make one full orbit is called its period.
For example, Earth has an orbital period of one year. All satellites travel on or near the orbital plane, an imaginary disk-shaped surface in space that connects the center of the object being orbited with the center of the orbiting object.
The Perseverance rover was launched by Nasa last year as part of its Mars 2020 mission. It successfully landed on Mars in February. Nicknamed Percy, the car-sized rover was designed to explore a crater on the red planet called Jezero, which contained a lake 3.5 billion years ago.
Its mission is to search for signs of ancient life, and explore and collect samples for future return to Earth from diverse environments on Mars. Rock and soil samples that it gathers with its drill will be stored in tubes on the Martian surface ready for a return mission to bring around 30 samples to Earth in the early 2030s.
SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, is a private spaceflight company owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk founded the company in 2002 with the hope of revolutionising the aerospace industry and making affordable spaceflight a reality. In 2012, it became the first private company to send a cargo ship to the International Space Station (ISS). It sent its first two astronauts to the ISS in May 2020 aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon, and followed that test flight with the successful launch of four astronauts in November 2020. In May, it successfully launched and landed its Starship rocket ship, bringing Musk’s dream of orbital and then interplanetary travel one step closer.
Space colonisation refers to the hypothetical concept of humans permanently living outside of Earth. While this was once just the subject of science fiction books and Hollywood films, the idea that we could live in space has moved several steps closer to becoming a reality.
Nasahas said that the urgency to allow humans to live on other planets “has been re-validated by the emergence of a worldwide pandemic” and that the long-term habitation of the International Space Station by rotating teams of astronauts, scientists and medical professionals “has provided us with a wealth of data to establish parameters for keeping humans alive and healthy for long periods in the harsh environment of space”.
While there is no clear indication as to when this might happen, the moon looks set to be the starting point, with Nasa saying it will develop the ability to establish a lunar colony within six years, though it currently has no plans to do so. Russia and China have also revealed their respective roadmaps for establishing a moon base, but both say they are not planning to send astronauts to the moon within the next decade.
Space law is the body of regulations in international law that governs conduct in and related to outer space. It is made up of a framework of treaties, agreements and principles first developed by the United Nations in the 1960s at the beginning of the ‘Space Race’ between the United States and the Soviet Union. It also involves other fields of law, from criminal, commercial and insurance law to property and environmental law.
The Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space is the forum for the development of international space law. The Committee has established five international space-related treaties. The Outer Space Treaty was adopted in 1967 and is the foundation of international space law. It outlines how to peacefully explore space, affirms fair use of outer space and prohibits any nation from “appropriation” of outer space “by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means”.
The Rescue Agreement outlines that if a nation comes across an astronaut in distress, they must rescue them. The Liability Convention states that a country is liable for damage if its space object harms someone else’s.
Under The Registration Convention, countries are required to register with the United Nations before they send something into space, and The Moon Agreement states that the moon and other celestial bodies should be used exclusively for peaceful purposes, that their environments should not be disrupted, and that the UN should be informed of the location and purpose of any station established on those bodies.
According to the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, each treaty stresses the notion that outer space, the activities carried out in outer space and whatever benefits might be accrued from outer space “should be devoted to enhancing the well-being of all countries and humankind, with an emphasis on promoting international cooperation.”
The effects of zero gravity, or weightlessness, happens when the effects of gravity are not felt. Many people believe that there is no gravity in space, but this is a common misconception.
While we can’t exactly feel gravity on Earth, we can feel the force of the ground pushing our feet upwards. This is how we are able to perceive the force of gravity as weight. When we jump, gravity is still acting upon us – we just can’t feel it. We feel weightless.
Therefore, an astronaut orbiting the Earth in space feels weightless for the exact same reason. Due to there being no ground or normal force to counteract the force of gravity, they are continuously falling towards Earth. As the spaceship is traveling so quickly in the forward direction, it curves away from them, and they end up orbiting around the earth in a circular pattern, just like the moon does.
This work is co-funded by Journal Media and a grant programme from the European Parliament. Any opinions or conclusions expressed in this work is the author’s own. The European Parliament has no involvement in nor responsibility for the editorial content published by the project. For more information, see here.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say