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It was quite a weekend for space fans. On Sunday SpaceX made
a spectacular first-ever catch
of the lower stage of its giant Starship rocket. The very next day another SpaceX rocket—a Falcon Heavy this time—launched Europa Clipper, a space probe bound for the Jovian moon of the same name. Its mission is to check whether the vast ocean thought to exist under Europa’s icy crust is the sort of place that
might be capable of supporting life
(if any exists, it might resemble the chemically-powered ecosystems
found on, and beneath, Earth’s seabed).
The two launches offered a nice juxtaposition of what you might call the new and old approaches to space. Europa Clipper is a $5.2bn NASA flagship mission. It is a custom-built technological marvel that has been on the drawing board for decades, and which has fought off dozens of other missions in a Darwinian struggle to secure its funding. With so much money, and so many scientific careers, riding on its success, failure was unthinkable.
Starship, by contrast, has failed several times already—blowing up, wrecking its launch site and pinwheeling uncontrollably through the sky. SpaceX’s existing Falcon 9 rockets had a similar string of spectacular failures (it even released
a blooper reel).
But there was a method behind all the explosions. The idea is that flying lots of hardware, and failing rapidly, lets you learn from reality, which is the best teacher of all. That sort of mindset, best-known in Silicon Valley, is not how the rocket business has traditionally worked. But it is hard to argue with the results: SpaceX’s Falcon rockets have now made more than 350 successful landings. That has helped the firm cut the cost of getting a tonne of payload into space by perhaps a factor of ten. It now dominates the launch industry.
Some think that space exploration could benefit from copying SpaceX’s move-fast-and-break-things approach. Casey Handmer used to work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built Europa Clipper. He has advocated an approach he dubs “bombard all the planets”. Instead of occasional, multi-billion-dollar flagship missions, the idea would be to spend NASA’s science budget launching cheap rockets full of cheap probes towards every planet in the solar system every time a launch window is available.
If a few of those cheap-and-cheerful probes fail to work, then never mind: scientists can learn from their failures, and anyway, there will be plenty more on the way. The ones that do work will transmit data back to inform the design of the next batch. Lowering the stakes of each individual mission in that way could allow for more creative or long-shot ideas.
It is an intriguing idea. With any luck next year will see a modest test run with the launch of Venus Life Finder. A joint venture between Rocket Lab, a rocket startup founded in New Zealand, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the probe will carry just one simple instrument, designed to look for phosphine—a potential biomarker—in Venus’s atmosphere. MIT and Rocket Lab are hoping the whole thing will cost less than $10m. Europa Clipper will do some spectacular science. But will it do 520 times as much as Venus Life Finder?
Elsewhere in The Economist:
Should we adopt a move-fast-and-break-things approach to space exploration, or should we take a calm and considered path? Send your thoughts to
sciencenewsletter@economist.com.
Our readers certainly had views on last week’s newsletter about the Nobel prizes. Thanks for sending them in. Claire Max, a professor emerita of astronomy and astrophysics, laments the “overwhelming omission of women” in recent years. And several of you disagreed with my views that this year’s chemistry prize was awarded for work that counted as biology. Claire O’Hanlon, a reader from Los Angeles, said: “The most interesting problems in science always cross multiple domains, but predicting protein structures and figuring out how to use them to catalyse other reactions fits pretty neatly in chemistry departments these days.” |
