Space: so many milestones ahead!

Space is looking up. In that more eyes appear to be turing skyward in tentative optimism. A few days ago I participated in a pair of events in Los Angeles, hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and NASA and Fox Studios. The morning event featured Ridley Scott, Adam Savage, Bill Nye, Andy Weir and scientists and screenwriters discussing how the film The Martian may be a harbinger of much more about bold exploration.  The smaller afternoon event, at UCLA put scientists and Hollywood myth-makers together in workshops.  Maybe we'll get more hopeful tales!

== What's Just Ahead...? ==

Following up on my popular essay in Nautilus on “2015: our best year in space, ever”… here's a brief rundown of the biggest spaceflight milestones to keep an eye out for in 2016, from a NASA probe's arrival at Jupiter to the highly anticipated maiden flight of SpaceX's huge new rocket.  

See a video preview of the Juno mission to Jupiter, which will arrive and get to work just about the same time that the Saturn Cassini mission winds up. Also this year... sending a probe to sample an asteroid and returning bits to Earth!  Elon launches Falcon Heavy. Earth-sensing satellites that will nail down the climate. 

2016 will see testing of future crewed vehicles, from SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, XCOR and Blue Origin. Europe's own version of the United States' Global Positioning System (GPS) should be operational by the end of the year. 

"Suborbital vehicles such as Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, XCOR Aerospace's Lynx rocket plane and Blue Origin's New Shepard system will be put through their paces, as will orbital craft such as Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser space plane, SpaceX's Dragon V2 capsule and Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule,” reports Space.com.   And so on.  

2016 might (just maybe) be almost as great a year as 2015 was!

This year -end review of NASA accomplishments shows that even if we leave out the great accomplishments of European, Japanese, Chinese, Indian and other agencies -- and prodigiously impressive private ventures -- 2015 was by far our best ever at stepping forth into the cosmos. See this awesome visual timeline of space exploration, charting missions into our solar system -- from Pioneer to Mariner, Cassini to Galileo, Juno to New Horizons (created by Olaf Frohn). Scroll down to explore the entire graphic. 

How many planetary missions are currently out there exploring on our behalf... and where are they? So many that Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society has made a timeline chart to track them.  She writes, "We are entering 2016 with 15 spacecraft probably actively returning science data from planets, moons, and smaller bodies in the solar system. (I say "probably" because I don't know for sure what the Chinese lunar spacecraft are doing.)"

Lakdawalla continues..."So what's the tally? Akatsuki is at Venus, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and two Chang'e missions at the Moon, two rovers and five orbiters are active at Mars, Dawn is at Ceres, Rosetta is at 67P (soon hopefully to do a soft landing), Cassini is at Saturn, and although New Horizons is far past Pluto, it'll be sending back new Pluto science data for most of the year, so I'm counting that as still doing science. Another two missions (Hayabusa2 and Juno) are in their cruise phase; Juno arrives at Jupiter in August. Two (ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and OSIRIS-Rex) or three (if you count the Schiaparelli lander separately) will launch this year, with their science starting after 2016. The Voyagers and other heliophysics missions don't show up on this chart."

You are a member of a civilization that does this -- from pennies per citizen.  We are sending out feelers.  We are growing, at last. Wake up enough to be proud!

 And let it motivate you to make others believe, this coming year.

Believe that we are a mighty folk.  Who can.

== Looking back at Earth ==

Most apropos for this time of year? I have oft marveled that the greatest gift of the Apollo Program came not from the landings but from the earlier Apollo 8 mission, the first in which humans broke the bonds of Earth.  It happened in December of 1968 - twelve crazed and frenetic months that brought most Americans -- and most of the world -- to the brink of exhaustion and despair. Yes, great music washed over us in a veritable tsunami... as did tragedies, war, invasions, assassinations, riots, betrayals, and fed-up demands for transformation.

Only then, at the very end of that awful year, a final token arrived -- like a gleam of hope shining at the bottom of Pandora’s Box...when the Apollo 8 astronauts brought home that first perfect image of the Earth, floating as a blue marble in the vast desert of space. A picture that moved all but the most cynical hearts and changed forever our outlook towards this fragile oasis world.

Now that image has been surpassed in beauty (an we can hope – effectiveness.) Even more gorgeous in contrast — and almost the final space news of a spectacular year — is the composite image that NASA released on December 19, taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, as it passed about 83 miles above a lunar crater. Same theme, but a timely reminder.

== More space updates ==

See this: the recent SpaceX feat put to music by Incubus. 

Curiosity is the first spacecraft to study active sand dunes on another planet. Amazing images of the next milestone as our robot envoy climbs the slopes of immense Mount Sharp.  Be careful in there.

A panorama taken by Curiosity Rover from atop a Martian dune, is enthralling in many ways, not least of which is the Dali-like surrealistic warping of the probe itself. 

 Cassini snapped Saturn’s moon Enceladus drift in front of the larger moon Tethys in near-perfect alignment.  See the gorgeous photos. Plus a great shot of the Hexagon at Saturn’s pole, and of Titan’s black, organic sand dunes.  Now known to contain a sub-surface ocean beneath an icy crust, the small moon is thought to possess the ingredients for life. Cassini had its last ever flyby of Enceladus on Dec 19.

NASA's New Horizons mission sends back images of icebergs on Pluto -- floating atop a sea of frozen nitrogen!

Important News.  The US Department of Energy is cautiously and carefully, for the first time in 30 years, again making Plutonium 238, the chief ingredient not of bombs, but of the best power systems for long range NASA interplanetary probes.

An ambitious future for human exploration of the solar system and beyond is explored in a new book by Louis Friedman, co-founder of The Planetary Society: Human Spaceflight: From Mars to the Stars. 

This should have made my list of spectacular space accomplishments in 2015.  Phil Plait waxes poetical and gushes about the way scientists have used tiny variations in ocean surface gravity to map in great detail the topography of mountains, chasms and spreading ridges along the ocean bottoms. 

And finally...

While NASA's new Planetary Defense Office will protect earth from asteroids....see this response from the B6-12 Foundation.

... the Hypersonic Nuclear Arms Race is on, as world powers develop boost-and-glide entry vehicles that can dodge and evade and accurately target sites across the globe.  The Cold War Era statesmen and Gorbachev gave us a breather but the doom foreseen at Trinity Site in 1945 still lurks.  We have to grow up. 

Oh, and while we're at it. The best way to build a Death Star... is to construct one out of an already-existing asteroid.

Let's keep it all in the open, boys 'n girls.  Play nice.  There's candy - and much-needed vitamin-science - for everyone.

== PS... ==

Not to jinx it... but could this be the 'fifteenth year' thing I referred to here?