This weekend, I covered the fantastic accomplishment of the SpaceX team’s fifth Starship test launch, as the spacecraft’s 232-foot Falcon Super Heavy booster rocket returned to the launchpad and was “caught” by a pair of enormous mechanical arms nicknamed “Mechazilla.”
SpaceX is adding another win this week. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying NASA’s Europa mission successfully launched from the Kennedy Space Center(KSC), kicking off a highly anticipated astrobiology mission to the Jupiter ocean moon Europa. NASA’s Europa is slated to arrive at the Jovian moon in 2030.
A powerful SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carried the spacecraft from Earth into an orbit around the sun. A flyby of Mars next February will give it a gravitational boost, and then it will swing back around Earth in December 2026 for an additional slingshot acceleration toward its destination.After a journey of five and a half years and 1.8 billion miles, Europa Clipper is scheduled to enter orbit around Jupiter on April 11, 2030. It will then make 49 flybys of Europa over four years.
An hour after the launch, the NASA spacecraft separated from the upper stage and started its journey to its destination.
The Europa mission is an intriguing one. It is attempting to determine if life can exist somewhere else in the Solar System outside of Earth and mankind’s spacecraft. The project’s goal is to determine if the conditions to sustain life exist on the frozen moon and to determine if traces of such compounds essential for life can be detected.
Scientists are almost certain a deep, global ocean exists beneath Europa’s icy crust. And where there is water, there could be life, making the moon one of the most promising places out there to hunt for it.Europa Clipper won’t look for life; it has no life detectors. Instead, the spacecraft will zero in on the ingredients necessary to sustain life, searching for organic compounds and other clues as it peers beneath the ice for suitable conditions.
The Europa Clipper also takes a little human culture with it.
Clipper is also carrying some culture from Earth to the Jupiter system — “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. The poem is engraved, in her own handwriting, on a metal plate that serves as a seal for the probe’s “vault,” which helps protect its instruments and key electronics against radiation.The poem is part of NASA’s “Message in a Bottle” outreach campaign, which also features a dime-sized chip engraved with the names of 2.6 million people who wanted a piece of themselves to fly to Europa.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, CEO Elon Musk and his company are attacked by naysayers, haters, academics, and bureaucrats.
To begin with, a scientist has warned that Musk’s plan to create a Mars colony could….ruin Mars.
Professor Andrew Coates, a physicist and Mars researcher from UCL, argues that human settlers would contaminate the planet and jeopardise the search for alien life.He claims humanity should only send a single astronaut to Mars if we ever want to learn the truth about life in our solar system.Speaking on the Today Programme, Professor Coates said: ‘The last thing we need to be doing is taking life from Earth to Mars. Robotic exploration is the way to go.’
And Texas environmental groups and members of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe are complaining the Starship launches are ruining Texas.
“This is the last untouched piece of the Texas coast, essentially,” says Joyce Hamilton, a member of the board of Save RGV, a local environmental group that is part of the lawsuit. For Save RGV, the wastewater issue has become emblematic of how SpaceX treats the environment. “This is potentially really damaging,” Hamilton says.“Everything you see out here doesn’t exist on Mars,” adds Jim Chapman, another board member. Musk “seems to care a lot more about 100,000 years from now than now here on Earth.”
Earth’s history is filled with catastrophic, extinction-level events (5 of them at least). Musk’s vision is to increase our chances of long-term survival.
What are the chances of a Mars colony in my lifetime? It’s hard to predict. But I can comfortably foresee that the more success Musk and SpaceX has, the more bitter under-achievers will be.
I remember how excited I was when the Voyager mission visited Jupiter in 1979. Fun Fact: Some of my first science stories focused on those missions. I sure hope I’m around to enjoy the data collected by the Europa Clipper in 2030.
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