Mad about Science: Space in 2024

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

2024 is set to be a landmark year when it comes to scientific pursuits. Fusion energy is racing toward reality with multiple repeated ignitions from around the globe. Electric vehicles are leapfrogging battery capacity and racing toward a complete overhaul of transportation for both people and cargo. Artificial intelligence is making astounding, albeit terrifying, gains that could completely redefine what it means to be human.

All of these exciting developments make it easy to miss a lot of exciting things happening above our heads.

This year will be the first time since 1972 that humans orbit the moon. The Artemis II mission seeks to expand on the success of Artemis I in 2022, when an unmanned spacecraft took off from Earth, whipped around the moon and returned safely home. This time, a crew of four — including the first woman to orbit the moon, astronaut Christina Koch — will make the trip around the moon and back. If the mission is as successful as Artemis I, it will lay the foundation for Artemis III in 2025, when humans will set foot on the lunar surface once again — a generational first.

The goals of the Artemis missions are far greater than NASA simply showing off. These missions seek to explore the viability of long-term human habitation on the moon. Earth’s gravitational field, while keeping us safe and sound from all sorts of non-Lovecraftian cosmic terrors, also creates a number of difficulties when trying to travel to other places in the solar system. 

Trying to pull mineral-rich asteroids to Earth without accidentally leveling a city or wiping out an entire ecosystem also becomes tricky when taking gravity into account. Luckily for us, we have a low-gravity neighbor that sports virtually zero risk of collateral damage. Additionally, the low gravity of the moon also means we need considerably less energy to move a payload from the lunar surface than we would from Earth.

Using the moon as a sort of truck stop from deeper in the solar system gives us the ability to safely quarantine potentially hazardous materials, minimize polluting our own environment on Earth and gives us the opportunity to use less fuel to travel much farther.

NASA isn’t the only entity pushing limits in 2024. SpaceX will continue testing Starship, which it tested twice in 2023. You may remember news of both tests ending in explosions, which sounds much more dramatic and terrible than it actually was. The data collected by these missions — explosions and all — was above and beyond what the engineers had hoped to acquire from the tests.

In 2025, SpaceX will be assisting NASA in the Artemis III launch as Starship carries the Orion spacecraft and astronauts central to the mission. This year, SpaceX will be working to learn how to refuel Starship in orbit as well as on the lunar surface. The strides already made by SpaceX regarding its reusable rockets and boosters will go a long way when it comes to setting up an orbital and lunar refuel. This will be the first time in human history that anything like this has ever been attempted.

This year, NASA has its sights set on targets much farther than our nearest celestial neighbor. Europa Clipper will be departing from Earth this year and is set to make nearly 50 passes by Jupiter’s icy ocean moon, Europa. The nearest approach the craft is set to make will be 16 miles above the icy crust.

This mission is big for a lot of reasons. The first is that it is literally the biggest planetary mission spacecraft NASA has ever developed. Once the solar arrays have deployed, the craft will stretch nearly one-third the length of a football field, while its core will be 16 feet high. In the case of this mission, size matters. Jupiter emits a tremendous amount of radiation, which can easily fry sensitive electronic equipment. The guts of Europa Clipper will be well armored to prevent that from happening. The gas giant is also at least five times the distance from the sun as Earth, so powering those electronics will require the massive 100-foot array in order to capture enough sunlight to continue working.

The mission’s primary goals are to try and glimpse the ocean beneath the moon’s massive ice sheets. It’s the second-most likely body in our solar system to support life after Earth, and being able to confirm the presence of microbial life could tell us a lot about life in general — for better or worse.

There exists an idea called “The Great Filter,” which could explain why we have yet to find any intelligent life outside of Earth. The idea of The Great Filter is that something prevents life from evolving past a certain stage — at the moment, that appears to be abiogenesis, or the transition from chemicals into organic life. Finding actual microbial life on another planet that, until 2024, has had absolutely no contact with life from Earth, could mean that life is not that rare and that we as a species have not yet bumped into The Great Filter.

Sounds exciting, right?

Finding evidence of living microbes outside of Earth would actually mean that abiogenesis isn’t that rare, and that instead we’re much more likely to face the cause of our extinction as a species at any moment.

Of course, it’s also possible that we’re just the metaphorical bison in an interstellar Yellowstone preserve, left to our own devices until some starfaring tourist decides to get too close with a selfie stick and catch a nuclear hoof to the face.

Stay curious, 7B.