What is the point of sending people into space? Ever since the crew of Apollo 17 returned home in 1972, those who hold the purse strings have seemed unsure of the worth of space flight – and a look at New Scientist in Januaries past shows that we have too.
The Challenger shuttle disaster on 28 January 1986 brought the question brutally to the fore. New Scientist‘s 28 January 1989 edition covered the second successful shuttle flight since the tragedy, but still we asked, “Where does it lead?” Well, to a crewed US space station, we were told – something that had been envisaged by president Ronald Reagan five years earlier and was still, we reported, “coming down the track. A new Cadillac of the US space programme.”
Unfortunately, our 25 January 1997 edition told a rather different tale. A US astronaut, John Blaha, had tried to grow fertile dwarf wheat plants while in space. Hurray for NASA. But the experiment had failed, and it had taken place on board Mir, a Russian station.
Even more worryingly, the following month we explained that lack of money was jeopardising the planned International Space Station, due to start construction the following year.
By 2009, with humans still not venturing beyond Earth orbit, we were getting excited about plucky robots instead. Our 3 January issue reported that five years after landing on Mars, NASA’s twin rovers Opportunity and Spirit had outlasted their expected lifetimes by four years and nine months. We put this down to an excellent choice of landing sites, which allowed the rovers’ “solar arrays to tilt towards the sun and increase their power output”. After some dispiriting decades, this was an amazing success, although we did also report that Spirit was showing signs of “ailing”.
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