almost lucid thoughts

A comparison of AR3053 and AR3052 between July 10 and July 5 when they rotated into view on the Eastern limb of the Sun. The active regions on both dates captured in Ca II K, H alpha and white light. 

AR3053 (centre) and AR3052 (small spot on RHS of image) in Ca II K light (363.3nm) on July 10.

AR3053 (left near E solar limb) and AR3052 (small spot(s) nearer centre of image) in Ca II K light (363.3nm) on July 5. AR3051 is just visible in top RH corner of the image.

AR3053 (centre) and AR3052 (small spot on RHS of image) in H alpha light (656.5nm) on July 10.

AR3053 (left near E solar limb) and AR3052 (small spot(s) nearer centre of image) in H alpha light (656.5nm) on July 5. AR3051 is just visible in top RH corner of the image. 

The change in 3053 is majestic while 3052 has dissipated over the course of the five days. looking forward to a few more cloud free days to follow groups across the solar disk on a daily basis!

AR3053 (centre) and AR3052 (small spot on RHS of image) in white light (solar continuum) on July 10.

AR3053 (left near E solar limb) and AR3052 (small spot(s) nearer centre of image) in white light (solar continuum) on July 5. AR3051 is just visible in top RH corner of the image. 

Images taken from a cloud free Albert Park in inner Melbourne VIC, AUS. Lunt130MT scope on an iOptron CEM70G mount and ZWO ASI174MM camera. H alpha images (656.5nm) Lunt double-stacked 130mm etalons. Ca II K images (393.3nm) using a Lunt rear mounted Ca K filter and white light using a Lunt Herschel wedge and Baader planetarium 3.0 neutral filter. Images captured using Firecapture, and processed in AutoStakkert!3, RegiStax6 and Photoshop.

China and the U.S. both have big plans for the Moon, but there are a number of reasons why no country could actually claim ownership of any land there. 3dScultor/iStock via Getty Images

Svetla Ben-Itzhak

Air University

and

R. Lincoln Hines

Air University

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson recently expressed concerns over China’s aims in space, and in particular, that China would, in some way, claim ownership over the Moon and stop other countries from exploring it. In an interview with a German newspaper, Nelson cautioned, “We must be very concerned that China is landing on the Moon and saying: ‘It’s ours now and you stay out.‘” China immediately denounced the claims as a “lie”.

This spat between the administrator of NASA and Chinese government officials comes at a time when both nations are actively working on missions to the Moon – and China has not been shy about its lunar aspirations.

In 2019, China became the first country to land a spacecraft on the far side of the Moon. That same year, China and Russia announced joint plans to reach the South Pole of the Moon by 2026. And some Chinese officials and government documents have expressed intentions to build a permanent, crewed International Lunar Research Station by 2027.

There is big difference between China – or any state for that matter – setting up a lunar base and actually “taking over” the Moon. As two scholars who study space security and China’s space program, we believe that neither China nor any other nation is likely to take over the Moon in the near future. It is not only illegal, it is also technologically daunting – the costs of such an endeavor would be extremely high, while the potential payoffs would be uncertain.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, signed into law by the United Nations, seen here, says that the Moon cannot be claimed by any nation. Patrick Gruban/Flickr, CC BY-SA

China is limited by international space law

Legally, China cannot take over the Moon because it is against current international space law. The Outer Space Treaty, adopted in 1967 and signed by 134 countries, including China, explicitly states that “Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means” (Article II). Legal scholars have debated the exact meaning of “appropriation”, but under a literal interpretation, the treaty indicates that no country can take possession of the Moon and declare it an extension of its national aspirations and prerogatives. If China tried to do this, it would risk international condemnation and a potential international retaliatory response.

While no country can claim ownership of the Moon, Article I of the Outer Space Treaty allows any state to explore and use outer space and celestial bodies. China will not be the only visitor to the South Pole of the Moon in the near future. The U.S.-led Artemis Accords is a group of 20 countries that has plans to return humans to the Moon by 2025, which will include the establishment of a research station on the lunar surface and a supporting space station in orbit called the Gateway with a planned launch in November 2024.

Even if no country can legally claim sovereignty over the Moon, it is possible that China, or any other country, would attempt to gradually establish de facto control over strategically important areas through a strategy known as “salami slicing.” This practice involves taking small, incremental steps to achieve a big change: Individually, those steps do not warrant a strong response, but their cumulative effect adds up to significant developments and increased control. China has recently been using this strategy in the South and East China seas. Still, such a strategy takes time and can be addressed.

Controlling the Moon is difficult

With a surface area of nearly 14.6 million square miles (39 million square kilometers) – or almost five times the area of Australia – any control of the Moon would be temporary and localized.

More plausibly, China could attempt to secure control of specific lunar areas that are strategically valuable, such as lunar craters with higher concentrations of water ice. Ice on the Moon is important because it will provide water to humans that wouldn’t need to be shipped from Earth. Ice can also serve as a vital source of oxygen and hydrogen, which could be used as rocket fuel. In short, water ice is essential for ensuring the long-term sustainability and survivability of any mission to the Moon or beyond.

Securing and enforcing control of strategic lunar areas would require substantial financial investments and long-term efforts. And no country could do this without everyone noticing.

Does China have the resources and capabilities?

China is investing heavily in space. In 2021, it led in number of orbital launches with a total of 55 compared to the U.S.’s 51. China is also in the top three in spacecraft deployment for 2021. China’s state-owned StarNet space company is planning a megaconstellation of 12,992 satellites, and the country has nearly finished building the Tiangong space station.

Going to the Moon is expensive; “taking over” the Moon would be much more so. China’s space budget – an estimated US$13 billion in 2020 – is only around half that of NASA’s. Both the U.S. and China increased their space budgets in 2020, the U.S. by 5.6% and China by 17.1% compared to the previous year. But even with the increased spending, China does not seem to be investing the money needed to carry out the expensive, daring and uncertain mission of “taking over” the Moon.

If China assumes control over some part of the moon, it would be a risky, expensive and extremely provocative action. China would risk further tarnishing its international image by breaking international law, and it may invite retaliation. All this for uncertain payoffs that remain to be determined.

Svetla Ben-Itzhak, Assistant Professor of Space and International Relations, Air University and R. Lincoln Hines, Assistant Professor, West Space Seminar, Air University, Air University

Extraterrestrial, by Harvard theoretical physicist Avi Loeb, is certainly provocative. But perhaps not entirely in the way the author intended. While the subject is fascinating, the style and manner of the writing is irksome, replete with faux humility, and arrogant - a book I would only recommend to a science communication class as an example of how not to write. 

The science provocation is simple, and perhaps impossible to answer - at least it presents a high degree of difficulty. Avi Loeb argues that in 2017, starting on October 19, 2017, and for 11 consecutive days scientists observed an interstellar object that was created by a civilisation not of this Earth. The object in question is I1/2017 U1, commonly called ‘Oumuamua, discovered by the astronomer Robert Weryk at the Haleakalā Observatory in data collected by the Pan-STARRS telescope,was undoubtedly the first interstellar object ever detected in our solar system. For the record a second interstellar object, 2I/Borisov, was discovered in August 2019. It displays none of the anomalous behaviour of ‘Oumuamua and is described as a rogue comet. The astronomy community agree that ‘Oumuamua was on an extreme hyperbolic trajectory, coming from the direction of the star Vega, reached closest approach to the Sun on September 9, 2017. Loeb’s extraterrestrial thesis rests on data that shows that ‘when ‘Oumuamua sped part way round the Sun, its trajectory deviated from what was expected based on the Sun’s gravitational force alone.’ Loeb hypothesised that ‘Oumuamua was an artificial thin solar sail accelerated by solar radiation pressure. This claim is bolstered, in Loeb’s mind, by the anomalous shape and spin profiles of  ‘Oumuamua. There is scientific consensus that the appearance, shape and composition of the object are interesting - modelling of the light curves suggest that it is tumbling and either of a cigar-shape or disc-shape. These are conjectures as the object was ever only seen as a single pixel - it was a point of light even in the most powerful telescopes. In addition, and not mentioned or referenced in this book, spectra from various telescopes show it as a ‘red’ colour, and emitted no radio signals as observed with limited scanning by either the SETI Allen telescope Array or the Green Bank radio Telescope. So the science is inconclusive, despite Loeb’s strident claim. Without further data, it is not possible to argues further - other than as ill-informed speculation.

The most interesting provocation in this book is then what should we do, or how should we respond to this object. Loeb lambasts the conservatism of the scientific community for their lame acceptance, ‘dangerous, most worrisome choice’, of ‘Oumuamua as 'nothing to see here, time to move along, we’ve learned what we can and we’d best just go back to our old preoccupations’.  In one sense this could be a valid criticism, the current funding of grants favours the conservative over the truly unusual. However, Loeb’s arguments are glib and superficial rehashes of history of science tropes - comparing his reception of the extraterrestrial origins of ‘Oumuamua to the reception of the heliocentric model of Copernicus or Galileo’s telescopic observations of sunspots and the moons of Jupiter demonstrate Loeb’s arrogance and misunderstanding of history and philosophy of science. Arguing that ‘your’ specific hypothesis is worth consideration and by ignoring it scientists are guilty of a category blindspot requires more work than just glibly claiming to be ‘in all humility’ misunderstood. 

That brings me to one of the largest criticisms of the book. It is replete with faux humility. We are treated to continual self-aggrandisement of Loeb’s achievements, academic credentials and connections all the while self-proclaiming his humility about his achievements, academic credentials and connections. Included is his claim to inventing there and then the discipline of astro-archeology, ignoring that it, and the closely related topic space-archeology, is an already (approximately 20 years-old) discipline that already has many fine exponents of this in both the academic and public spaces, Dr Space junk vs. the Universe by Alice Gorman, would be a good place for Loeb to start - for many reasons. This is demonstrated in that the only research and researchers mentioned are his own and his research students. The further reading section, which is in any reasonable book and opportunity to point a reader to expanding their reading horizons, contains, in Loeb’s book, nothing but his own first-author and co-authored papers - not a single reference to any other scientist - such crass intellectual arrogance and faux humility. This is an interesting topic, this books fails to bring it justly into the public arena, leaving those without specialist backgrounds to navigate their own way through the specialist and generalist articles. This book reflects poorly on Loeb, Harvard University and the publishers.

Avi Loeb | Extraterrestrial: The first signs of intelligent life beyond Earth | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Boston | 2021 | AUS$38.25 | ISBN: 978 0 358 27814 6 | 222 pages | Hardback

Elsie Passi, Author provided

When Uncle Segar Passi watches the position of the setting Sun from his front patio, he notes its location and relates that to the time of year and changes in seasonal cycles.

What he sees translates into his artworks. They are visually stunning, a rich tapestry of colours jumping off the frame with a palate that easily rivals Vincent van Gogh. This is reflected in the many awards he has garnered over the years.

Lidlid by Segar Passi (2011) Queensland Art Gallery

His artistic talent is matched only by the depth of his wisdom and cultural knowledge, which he teaches through his practice.

An island home

Turning 79 this year, Uncle Segar is a senior Meriam elder and a Dauareb man, meaning his community is originally from Dauar, the larger of the two small islands off the coast of Mer (the other being Waier) in the eastern Torres Strait.

The volcanic trio of islands are collectively known as the Murray Island group, and sit at the very tip of the Great Barrier Reef.

The Murray Island group in the eastern Torres Strait: Mer (foreground), Dauar (upper right) and Waier (upper left). Duane Hamacher

Professor Martin Nakata, a Torres Strait Islander and Pro-Vice Chancellor at James Cook University, brought me to Mer years ago to help the community document its star knowledge for education and community programs.

We stood on the beach near Uncle Segar’s house, watching the sunset near the double-hilled island of Dauar when he told me:

That place has powerful magic. If you want to learn about traditional star knowledge, you ask those elders. They’re the big dogs.

Looking to the artworks on the wall in Uncle Segar’s workshop, I noticed a plethora of subtle characteristics encoded within each one.

I know his artistic style is unique and aesthetically gorgeous, but I also know that every colour, brushstroke, motif and design has meaning. I see a painting showing a crescent Moon with the cusps pointing up. Above it are puffy cumulus clouds and the moonlight reflected in the choppy waters.

Kerkar Meb I (Left) and II (right), 2011. These paintings by Segar Passi show the changing orientation of the crescent Moon, which informs seasonal weather patterns. Segar Passi. QAGOMA, Brisbane.

Another painting, which looks nearly identical from a distance, shows the Moon tilted at an angle. The clouds above are cirrus, and the reflection of moonlight is clear and strong on the calm, still water.

In his characteristic soft voice, Uncle Segar explained the meaning behind this pair of paintings.

Every month there is a New Moon at a different angle. Did you ever notice this?

He explained how the New Moon (kerker meb) can tell you about the changing seasons if you look at the angle of its tilt. When the cusps are pointing up (Meb metalug em), it is the dry season, the Sager.

You will see large cumulus clouds in the evening sky and the water is choppy. When the cusps point at an angle (Meb uag em), the water is calm and you see cirrus clouds. This is the wet monsoon season, the Kuki. He pointed to the painting:

If the water looks rough and the Moon is pointed up, you know the winds will die down and the next day the water will be fine.

The art of knowledge

The paintings are a medium through which complex systems of knowledge are passed down. These systems are based on generations of collective observation, deduction and interconnection – a longstanding system of science.

Read more: The Moon plays an important role in Indigenous culture and helped win a battle over sea rights

Uncle Segar is an expert on clouds and weather, the plants and animals, the sea, land, and the sky. His knowledge is as deep as his artworks are captivating.

The self-taught artist developed his style in the 1960s and has since won several major awards for his work, gaining an international profile through his raw talent, complex works and lovely personality. But his passion is for local community, both on Mer and across the Torres Strait.

Uncle Segar’s work has appeared in local school books and seasonal calendars about traditional knowledge. He has also worked closely with me and other academics over the years, sharing Meriam Star Knowledge and co-authoring several research papers.

These include publications about traditional ways of interpreting the twinkling stars, the role of astronomy in song and dance, and the relationship between bright meteors and death rites in the Torres Strait.

Uncle Segar is currently contributing to a major book on Indigenous astronomy for a global audience and has been featured in recent Indigenous astronomy articles in Cosmos magazine. His knowledge has even been written into the Australian National Curriculum for schools across the country.

The flying spirits

This knowledge has found its way into films by some of the world’s most critically acclaimed directors. Members of the Mer community performed the Maier (Shooting Star) dance for the 2020 Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer film Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds.

Fireball, Visitors from Darker Worlds.

Maier is a term from the Meriam Mir language referring to fireballs (exceptionally bright meteors), which are seen as a celestial personification of a recently deceased person’s spirit flying to Beig, the land of the dead.

The brightness, trajectory and sound of a Maier all have special meaning. If the Maier breaks into fragments and you see sparks fall (uir-uir), you know that person left behind a large family.

The trajectory of the Maier tells you where that person is from. And when you hear the booming sound (dum) as the fireball explodes, it tells you that person has arrived at their destination.

The Maier dance is originally from Mer but had not been performed on the island since 1969. In late 2019, the community approved Herzog and Oppenheimer to film the dance on Mer.

Led by Meriam elder Alo Tapim, four local dancers were taught the kab kar (sacred dance) and performed it on the beach at sunset just hours later, with cameras rolling. The segment you see at the end of the film is the first time the dance had been performed on Mer in 50 years.

A ‘Behind-the-Scenes’ photo of the community performing the Maier Dance on Mer at dusk for the film ‘Fireball’ in 2019. Duane Hamacher

Name in the stars

In 2020, his lifetime of work and his contributions to astronomy were recognised when the International Astronomical Union renamed the asteroid “1979 MH4” as “7733 Segarpassi”.

This is a 1.9km-wide asteroid in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is 2.4 times farther from the Sun than Earth is, and takes 3.7 years to orbit the Sun.

Read more: From 7809 Marcialangton to 7630 Yidumduma: 5 asteroids named after Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

Uncle Segar’s important contributions to culture and science are also encapsulated in the newly released commemorative coin “The Shark in the Stars”.

Released on March 4, 2021 by the Royal Australian Mint, this non-circulating coin features Uncle Segar’s artwork. It is the third and final instalment of the Star Dreaming series, and was so popular all 5,000 coins sold out within two hours.

Beizam, the Shark in the Stars. Uncirculated $1 coin released by the Royal Australian Mint. Royal Australian Mint

The celestial shark is called Beizam, a Meriam constellation formed by the bright stars of the Big Dipper (part of the Western constellation Ursa Major, the Big Bear). It traces out the head, body, fins and tail of the shark.

The changing position of the shark in the northern skies throughout the year is a seasonal marker that notes shifting seasons, when to hunt turtle, when to harvest yams, and informs the observer about the behaviour of the shark itself.

Read more: New coins celebrate Indigenous astronomy, the stars, and the dark spaces between them

When the nose of Beizam touches the horizon at sunset, sharks are feeding on sardines that swim in tight ribbons close to the shore. This occurs during the Sager, which can be a dangerous time to go for a dip.

Later in the year, as the shark dives below the horizon at dusk, you will see the first lightning of the coming monsoon.

Meriam people teach that water rushes through Beizam’s gills as it dives into the sea on the horizon, casting water into the sky which falls as the rains of the wet season, the Kuki.

Uncle Segar Passi continues to share his knowledge with the world, benefiting his community and the next generation of Meriam scholars. And we are exceptionally lucky and honoured to continue learning from Elders like him.

Read more: A shark in the stars: astronomy and culture in the Torres Strait

Duane W. Hamacher, Associate Professor, The University of Melbourne

It is more than fifty years since NASA placed men, twelve in total, 'for all mankind' on the Moon. Since the heady days of the Apollo missions humans have not set foot on another celestial body. We have sent robotic missions to many parts of the solar system, including numerous rovers to Mars. Yes we have a presence on the International Space Station, orbiting some 400 kilometres above the earth's surface. But astronauts orbiting in microgravity in a near earth orbit is a far cry from habitations on the Moon or Mars or the asteroids. Why is this? More particularly what will it take to become a spacefaring society? In Spacefarers, science writer, Christopher Wanjek tackles the first question, while answering the second question, in a clear, pragmatic and interesting style.

Wanjek starts by challenging us to answer the question 'What's the reason for human space exploration celestial bodies?' the trite response that exploration is part of the human spirit will not suffice. Probing this critical question provides a sound start to exploring what next. the past was driven by national pride and the threat of war - leading to landings but no settlement. In the future, he argues, 'a war may get us to Moon or Mars; economic sustainability will keep us there.' This may sound trite but Wanjek explores it in detail and returns to these points in each successive chapter on living on the Moon, asteroids, Mars and the inner and outer solar system and beyond. Asking and answering this critical question also leads him to see what he sees as the failure of the ISS.

Wanjek has his preferences and ideas clear from the start, he does not find much merit in the ISS, if its intention, as is often stated, is to prepare us for habitation on any celestial bodies. Microgravity he states clearly is not an environment for humans at all. Living in orbit yes, but under artificial gravity, not the microgravity of the ISS. Wanjek is all for space exploration, Spacefarers, as he unambiguously states, is about space settlements - which he clearly defines as habitats in which humans can successfully have babies and rear them to being functional adults. Wanjek does explore, very adequately, the benefits that commercial 'space tourism' will provide as an interim and possibly ongoing part of space exploration. But he maintains it will always be a modest input into the commercial viability of settlements. The viability will be from mining and/or the provision, directly or indirectly of energy to either earth or the off-Earth settlements. Without this there will be no settlements, there may be scientific stations - similar to what is currently on Antarctica - but no settlements.

He questions the ludicrous health-focussed efforts on the ISS which make no attempts to understand the health effects of low gravity, the 0.16G of the Moon or 0.38G of Mars, in comparison to the (almost) zero gravity on the ISS, on the human body. There have been no attempts to test artificial gravity to understand whether we could survive without the 1.0G of earth - microgravity provides no indication of that - other than it is detrimental to humans.

Gravity is a key for human settlement, next is understanding the impacts of temperature, pressure and radiation on the ability of humans to have babies and rear children. The book is very strong on assessing these factors - something that the more fanciful 'space is our destiny' type of writing under-play or glibly misrepresent. There are a number of specific books that provide well-researched and worthwhile reading that support aspects of human settlement on the Moon and Mars - I recommend Harrison Schmitt's Return to the Moon, Robert Zubrin's The case for Mars, and Buzz Aldrin's Mission to Mars, particularly. Spacefarers is an imaginatively written, well-researched and very accessible broad-brush perspective on the next steps in human space exploration with the intent to settle.

Christopher Wanjek | Spacefarers: How humans will settle the Moon, Mars and beyond | Harvard University Press: Cambridge | 2020 | AUS$49.95 | ISBN: 978 0 674 98448 6 | 389 pages | Hardback

Is there such a place as a Nobel prize factory? By this I mean are there places, universities or other research organisations where discoveries or inventions have consistently led to a Nobel prize? Recent research published in the history of science journal of the Royal Society has measured the success for the Nobel prize in physics since its inception in 1901 through to the most recent award in 2019. The author did find a ranking (which is shown as a table in the publication) which has some surprises.

The surprises are due to two aspects of the award. The most obvious is that when the awards are made the recipients have a sparse number of ‘facts’ about them presented: (1) their name, 92) where and when they were born, (3) their affiliation at the time of the award, (4) the prize motivation, and finally (5) their prize share. It is (3) and (5) that provide the most interest according to this paper.

The affiliation at the time of award is just that; where were they working when the prize was announced, not where were they working WHEN they did the research that they received the award for. Subtle but important distinction! each award can only go to three people, who must be alive at the time of the award (this has led to many rivers of ink bemoaning many reasonable and unreasonable claims of bias and prejudice which we can leave for another time). This means if there is one recipient they are awarded a full share, two recipients they receive equal half shares, three recipients either receive equal third shares or one receives half and two others a quarter share of the prize. This all becomes important in allocating shares of an award to the place where the discoveries or inventions were made.

The paper goes into a lot more explanation of discovery and invention, well worth the read, and comes up with a full listing which i am only going to show the top 10: University of Cambridge (1, 5), Bell Labs (2, 12), Columbia University (3, 12), Harvard University (4, 4), Cornell University (5, 12), University of California (6, 1), Sorbonne (Paris) (7,8), leiden University (7, 18) University of Copenhagen (7, 25) and the University of Chicago (10, 8). Here the second number is the ranking if ‘affiliations at the time of award’ were take. It shows that many organisations are not rewarded (by association) for providing institutional support for great science that led to Nobel prizes - this becomes very apparent when you see the number of Universities that appear on one list but not the other. In addition it demonstrates the contribution made by non-University organisations to an award that - certainly in physics - is seen as the pinnacle of scientific achievement a Nobel prize.

Image 1. Announcement of the Nobel Prize for Physics 2009. From left Anne L'Huillier, Joseph Nordgren, Gunnar Öquist and Ingemar Lundström: By Prolineserver (talk) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7999846

The ISS is a collaboration between the space agencies of Canada, Russia, Japan, Europe and the United States. www.shuttershock.com , CC BY

Kevin Orrman-Rossiter, University of Melbourne

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected].

How big is the International Space Station? - Isla, aged 7, Killarney, Australia.

The International Space Station (ISS) is the biggest human-made thing in space and the third-brightest object in the sky.

It’s so big you can see it in the night sky without a telescope or binoculars. It’s 109 metres long and 75 metres wide – about the same size as a soccer field. It weighs 420 tonnes, about the same as 280 cars.

The space station has 932 cubic metres of total space, with about two-thirds used for equipment and storage. Only one-third of it is “habitable”, meaning it can be used for humans to live in.

All that may sound big for only six astronauts to live in, but it’s actually quite cramped.

Read more: Curious Kids: Where does the oxygen come from in the International Space Station, and why don’t they run out of air?

Itty bitty living space

The bedroom for each astronaut is a small cabin, with a sleeping bag clipped into the cabin wall to stop them floating around when they sleep. The cabin also holds their computer and has room for a few other personal items.

There are also science labs where the crew can do research. There are up to 2,400 research investigations going on during an expedition so the labs can get very crowded. The crew members have to make room for each other and all their equipment.

Inside a lab on the ISS. NASA

Made in space

Did you know it took 42 space flights to assemble the main pieces of the space station?

On the outside there are eight solar panels that power the space station. Together, they create up to 90 kilowatts of electricity – enough to power 13 Australian houses!

The space station also allows six spaceships to be connected to it at once. These spaceships bring people and supplies from either Russia, Japan or the United States of America.

You can read more facts and figures about the ISS here.

There are currently six crew members on board the International Space Station. www.shuttershock.com, CC BY

Watching the Earth

The view from inside the space station is spectacular. There is a special viewing window called a cupola. It allows one astronaut at a time to view and take photographs of Earth.

The station orbits Earth 16 times every 24 hours. Imagine being able to see 16 sunrises and sunsets every 24 hours. What an amazing sight it would be.

Read more: Curious Kids: can people live in space?

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to [email protected] Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

Kevin Orrman-Rossiter, PhD Research Student, History & Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne

Flight Engineer Peggy Whitson suits up ahead of a spacewalk. Vomiting inside a spacesuit during a spacewalk could be fatal for astronauts. NASA, CC BY

Kevin Orrman-Rossiter

University of Melbourne

This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome – serious, weird or wacky!

Do astronauts get space sick when they travel from Earth to the International Space Station? – The students of class 3E, Ferny Grove State School, Brisbane.

This is a great question. If any of the students of class 3E get the opportunity to fly in space, just slap on an anti-nausea skin patch and go for it! Space sickness discomfort is real but if it happens to you, it will be short and you will remember the space voyage experience forever.

Yes, astronauts can get space sick travelling to the International Space Station. It is less likely travelling in the cramped Russian Soyuz spacecraft used to transport astronauts there now, than the old Space Shuttle that was used until 2011. The ability to move around in the Space Shuttle increased the chance of space sickness happening. Space sickness affects up to half of the astronauts during their first few days on the space station.

The idea of an astronaut barfing into their space helmet sounds funny, or embarrassing, at first. However, as astronaut Mike Mullane has said in his biography, it could be fatal - particularly if the astronaut was spacewalking. The vomit could smear the inside of the helmet, blinding the astronaut. And because it could not be removed, it could be inhaled or clog their oxygen circulation system.

These days astronauts travel to the International Space Station via the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Flickr/NASA, CC BY

Read more: Curious Kids: Do bees ever accidentally sting other bees?

What causes space sickness?

As you probably know, gravity is lower inside the International Space Station. Gravity is the force that pulls us down to the ground. The low gravity in space allows astronauts to float around, which looks very fun, but it can help cause space sickness.

Space sickness is nausea and disorientation felt by many astronauts. NASA uses the term “space adaptation syndrome” instead of space sickness. It more closely describes the problem because it is an issue of the astronaut struggling to adapt to weightlessness in space. The cause of space sickness is still not fully understood.

Recent experiments show that space sickness is related to our inner ear. Two separate parts of the inner ear respond to rotation and sudden changes in direction. If you shake or move your head very quickly, you can get dizzy and some people may even feel sick. However, this normally passes very quickly.

Read more: Australia’s back in the satellite business with a new launch

This normal response is upset under low gravity - your inner ear thinks you are constantly moving. It takes some time to adapt to the new condition of weightlessness. It is made worse if you move your head while your body is still adapting. This is why previous astronauts travelling in the larger Space Shuttle were prone to space sickness more than the current astronauts travelling in the cramped Soyuz spacecraft – because in a confined space, the astronauts were less likely to move their heads around very much.

Space sickness affects many, possibly up to half, of the astronauts the first few days on the space station. NASA/Bill Ingalls

Space sickness was not talked about in the early space missions. The original Mercury and Gemini spacecraft were, like the current Soyuz, cramped. It wasn’t until the Apollo and later missions that space sickness became of concern to NASA.

In 1983 the first detailed study was carried out aboard a Space Shuttle flight (STS-7) by astronaut-doctor Norm Thagard. His and all later studies were hampered by the astronauts themselves. None of them wanted to admit to being space sick. They were worried that mission control might remove them from space walking opportunities, or even worse, that they might not get included on later space missions.

Read more: Curious Kids: What started the Big Bang?

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. You can:

* Email your question to [email protected] * Tell us on Twitter by tagging @ConversationEDU with the hashtag #curiouskids, or * Tell us on Facebook

CC BY-ND

Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. You can send an audio recording of your question too, if you want. Send as many questions as you like! We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

Kevin Orrman-Rossiter, PhD Research Student, History & Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne

A view from the ‘Kimberley’ formation on Mars taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover. The strata in the foreground dip towards the base of Mount Sharp, indicating flow of water toward a basin that existed before the larger bulk of the mountain formed. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

If we want to know whether there is life beyond Earth then the quickest way to answer that question is to explore Mars. That exploration is currently being done by remote space probes sent from Earth.

The race is on though to send human explorers to Mars and a number of Earth-bound projects are trying to learn what life would be like on the red planet.

But the notion of any one-way human mission to Mars is nonsensical, as is the thought that we should colonise Mars simply because we are making a mess of Earth.

The first suggestion is pointless and unethical – we would be sending astronauts to their certain death – while the second would be a licence for us to continue polluting our home planet.

I believe we should go to Mars because of what we can learn from the red planet, and from developing the technologies to get people there safely.

The SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk last September outlined his vision for a mission to send people to Mars by 2022. But first he is planning to send people around the Moon.

I think Musk will send two space tourists around the Moon and back to Earth, not in 2018 as he has predicted, but probably within a decade. He has not yet experimented with having passengers aboard a rocket.

Our journey into space

It’s worth looking at how we got to where we are now in terms of humans in space and space exploration.

More than a billion people watched Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong take humankind’s first step on another world. NASA

The first footprint on another world was made by US astronaut Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969 (US time) when he left the Eagle lunar lander and stepped onto the Moon.

One small step…

The Moon is as far as humans have explored in space but we’ve sent probes to explore the other planets in our Solar system, including Mars.

Several failed attempts were made to send a probe to Mars but the US Mariner 4 was the first to successfully photograph another planet from space when it made a flyby of Mars in July 1965.

The red planet Mars. NASA

The USSR’s Mars 2 orbited Mars for three months in 1971 but its lander module crashed onto the planet. The lander of the Mars 3 mission also failed.

NASA’s Viking 1 performed the first successful landing on Mars, on July 20, 1976, followed by Viking 2 on September 3, 1976.

The dunes of Mars as seen by Viking 1. NASA/JPL

The Viking missions were the first to search for life on that planet, since when others such as the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed days apart in January 2004, have looked to see if Mars could have had life in the past.

No evidence of life has been found so far, but the techniques available now are far more advanced and we know much more about the planet. We do have abundant evidence of water on Mars.

The benefits of space exploration

Apart from looking for life, why bother with a mission to send humans to Mars? Many aspects of our modern lives would not be possible if it were not for our interest in space.

We rely on satellites for communication, timing and positioning. Satellites help to keep us safe from severe weather, especially in Australia.

The Apollo and other NASA missions led to developments in micro-electronincs that later made it into household devices such as calculators and home computers.

NASA has detailed many of the spinoffs it says stem from its research for exploration of space, which even include the dustbuster.

The modern household dustbuster has its origins in the Apollo Moon missions. Shutterstock/Sergey Mironov

Intangible, but critical nonetheless, is the inspiration we derive from space exploration. It can be very significant in attracting young people to science and engineering, something needed more and more as our economies continue to transition to an ever higher-tech future.

In the US there was a large spike in tertiary enrolments in science and engineering during the Apollo missions to the Moon.

A new space race

We are using more and more sophisticated craft to explore Mars. It is a broadly international venture involving NASA, the European Space Agency (22 member nations), the Russian Federal Space Agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation, the China National Space Administration, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

We are witnessing not only collaboration but competition. Which nation (or company?) will first return to the Moon and then land astronauts on Mars? It is beginning to look like a new space race.

Why focus on Mars? We already know that early in its history, more than three billion years ago, Mars had a surface environment much like that of Earth at the same time, featuring volcanoes, lakes, hot springs, and perhaps even an ocean in the northern hemisphere.

This animation shows how the surface of Mars might have appeared billions of years ago.

Life on Earth then was microbial, the evidence for which is preserved in 3.5 billion year old rocks in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.

So we are searching for microbes on Mars. Despite being microscopic, bacteria and their cousins the Archaea are complex organisms. Methane already discovered in the atmosphere of Mars hints at the presence of such life but is not definitive.

If there ever was life on Mars it may still be there, underground where it will be protected from cosmic and ultraviolet radiation. From time to time it might emerge on the surface in some of the gullies that seem to result from the breaching of underground aquifers.

It might not seem exciting to discover former or living microbes, but if we can demonstrate that they represent an independent origin of life the consequences will be profound.

We will be able to predict confidently that there will be life all over the universe. Somewhere out there will be intelligent beings. What might happen then currently lies in the realm of science fiction.

The future lies in more missions to Mars. So far all missions have been one-way and robotic, but plans are underway for a mission to return samples from Mars, and sometime this century there will be astronauts on Mars, not in “colonies” but in research bases like those in Antarctica. It is inevitable.

Malcolm Walter, Professor of Astrobiology, UNSW

Humans are fascinated by potential disasters, legends or prophecies that promise the end of the world. There is even a word for the study of such things: eschatology, from the Greek eschatos for “last” and -ology “to speak” or “to study”.

There is also something about the grandeur of such claims that makes them magnets for conspiracy theorists and religious fanatics.

But just because this fascination exists, it doesn’t mean it’s desirable to pander to it. Not when it’s without reason, and especially not in the name of science.

Alt-journalism

Recently the UK’s The Sun newspaper demonstrated a spectacular jettisoning of journalistic rigour to report that Earth was about to be struck by a giant rock and that the results of this collision would be catastrophic.

Now, this is disturbing for three reasons, none of which are do do with the possible consequences of such an impact.

Leaving aside appeals to alternative facts, the first reason this is disturbing is that this claim was published at all.

While there is indeed an object meandering in our general direction, it will pass us at a distance that is further than the closest approach of the planet Venus.

If you manage to sleep well with Venus in such proximity, this new body need not disturb you either. This bit of information is so easily found that ignoring it in the article speaks volumes about the intent of the piece.

And that’s leaving aside nonsensical sentences such as “it’s so huge you’ll be able to see it from Britain”, because seeing something from Britain seems more of an issue of positioning than size.

The second reason is that this tenuous thread of hysteria was linked to wider conspiracy theories, an act one can only assume was intended to give it more popular appeal, if not actual credibility.

One of those theories is that the object is a segment of the fabled planet Nibiru, long held to be the doom of humanity by an impressive array of crackpots.

Why such theories are so popular is an interesting question, but that they proliferate is beyond doubt.

A NASA scientist talks about the mythical planet Nibiru.

An unethical appeal to science

The third disturbing reason is that the heading ended with the tag “according to this scientist”. Except there is no evidence for the existence of the “scientist” mentioned in the article, neither in academic literature or in university records.

Google seems to find no trace of his name prior to it appearing in a “news” story on a conspiracy theory website. And, of course, on the many Murdoch media outlets that picked up the The Sun’s story.

The phrasing of this headline implies this is a scientific claim, or at least a claim made by someone accepted into the community of scientists. As such, it seeks a justification in the rationality of science and taps into the public respect for scientists as agents of this collective rationality.

To make matters worse, The Sun is lending what residual respect it has as a newspaper to this supposed link. One can only imagine that in future articles it will be scientists, not The Sun, that will suffer the eye-rolling and tutting once this farcical prediction fails to materialise.

The intent of the article, therefore, is to produce unease at best, and panic at worst, by buttressing the claims of a clutch of hysterical conspiracy theorists through an appeal to the credibility of science and scientists and to deliberately conflate an actual event with an apocalyptic prediction.

This is as questionable a use of science as a doctor claiming that vaccines cause autism, or using scientific-sounding piffle to sell health products. The unethical use of science is not restricted to scientists.

It is true that the article calls this a belief held by “crackpot theorists”, but a lot of space is spent outlining this theory and weaving in some factual data. And this and an earlier article work up some dire consequences and a “warning” from NASA (not to mention some lovely graphics).

Credibility in freefall

By reporting unsubstantiated claims, by promoting potential narratives linking these claims to conspiracy theories and by suggesting that any or all of these have scientific credibility, The Sun shows its value, or lack thereof, as a source of news (though perhaps it sees a new market emerging in fake news).

It, along with the other media outlets who publish this dross, is the Ancient Aliens of the History Channel in print.

What else could it be?

The Sun is crossing the line that divides the reporting of conspiracy theories and the promotion of them. As the piece in question shows, it’s certainly not in the business of debunking them. As a news article, it represents the sloppiest of standards. In its willingness to degrade the credibility of science in an attempt to induce profitable hysteria, it is lamentable.

I can only imagine that, given the attitude of The Sun to climate scientists, diminishing public faith in science is to their advantage. Now there’s a conspiracy theory to get behind.

Peter Ellerton, Lecturer in Critical Thinking, The University of Queensland

I haven’t got time for science, or at least not all of it. I cannot read 9,000 astrophysics papers every year. No way.

And I have little patience for bad science, which gets more media attention than it deserves. Even the bad science is overwhelming. 700 papers are retracted annually, and that’s a gross underestimate of the bad science in circulation.

I, like most scientists, filter what I read using a few tricks for quickly rejecting bad science. Each trick isn’t foolproof, but in combination they’re rather useful. They can help identify bad science in just minutes rather than hours.

Okay, this looks bad

Good science is often meticulous and somewhat anxious. You discover something new or find something unexpected, and frankly you worry a lot about screwing up. Identifying and addressing what could plausibly go wrong, and then writing that up succinctly, takes time. Lots of time. Months. Even years.

If you’re taking the time to do meticulous science, why not take the time to prepare a good manuscript? Make nice-looking figures, proofread it a couple of times, and the like. It seems obvious enough, which is why a sloppy manuscript or poor grammar can be a warning sign of bad science.

Recently, Ermanno Borra and Eric Trottier claimed to have detected “signals probably from extraterrestrial intelligence”. I thought this was far-fetched, but still worth looking at the paper preprint. An immediate red flag for me was some blurry graphs, and figures with captions that weren’t on the same page.

Was my caution justified? Well, as I dug into the paper more there were other warning signs. For example, the results relied on Fourier analysis, a mathematical method that can be powerful but is also notorious for picking up artefacts from scientific instruments and data processing.

Furthermore, the surprising conclusions relied on a tiny subset of data, and there was no attempt to confirm the conclusions with additional observations. If they were being meticulous, wouldn’t they have taken the time to collect more data and properly format their manuscript? I’m very sceptical of Borra and Trottier’s aliens, as are many of my colleagues.

Of course, there are exceptions to good-looking good science. The announcement of the Higgs boson, which featured fantastic science, included slide designs that did not impress Vincent Connare, the creator of Comic Sans.

To be honest, I’m with Connare on the slides. However, this is a reminder that tricks for quickly flagging bad science are imperfect shortcuts, not absolute rules.

Obviously

“That’s obvious, why didn’t someone think of that before?”

Well, perhaps someone did.

It has recently been claimed that the expansion of the universe may not be accelerating, which seems at odds with some Nobel Prizewinning research. That claim relies on a statistical analysis of supernova data. However, such analyses are nothing new.

Enter keywords into a search engine, and you find many previous studies, but without the unexpected conclusions. That’s a red flag right there.

So what happened? Well, one can study up on supernovae or cosmology, but there are experts on Twitter providing succinct explanations and informed responses.

In plain English, you can only claim that evidence for the accelerating expansion of the universe is marginal if you make make incorrect assumptions about supernova properties and brush aside other key observations. And thus facepalm.

Cosmologist Tamara Davis has noted that such omissions, accompanied by emphasis on a contrarian conclusion, tend to be misleading spin. Unfortunately, such omissions and erroneous assumptions turn up elsewhere too.

Did they just brush aside two decades of cosmology? Paramout

Rank Journals

You may be aware that some scientific journals come with a certain prestige. There are journal rankings, which typically place the journals Nature and Science near the top, and university rankings often use papers in prestigious journals as a proxy for quality.

I don’t care much for journal rankings myself. Nature and Science chase blockbuster results, but this leads to them publishing a few too many wrong and even fraudulent results. For example, the contrarian supernova paper was published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, which is an online, open access, multidisciplinary journal that is published by the same group as Nature.

How do you tell which of these journal articles can be trusted? Shutterstock

While I don’t care for journal rankings, I do care about rank journals. If you submit your research to a decent journal, you have to assume you will (or could) get a meticulous editor and referee. That should force you to take some care with your research. However, if you know your paper will be accepted without proper peer review, then anything goes.

University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall maintains a list of “predatory publishers”, which includes vanity academic publishers that provide a veneer of peer review. Effectively, it is Beall’s list of rank journals, and I treat papers in those journals with suspicion.

So I wasn’t too surprised when a journal on Beall’s list published a paper promoting the chemtrails conspiracy theory. And I wasn’t surprised to find that the paper had serious failings. For better and worse, my cynicism is justified all too often.

Michael J. I. Brown, Associate professor, Monash University

It is an exciting time to be a physicist, particularly in Australia. In mid-2012, the Higgs boson was discovered at CERN, and physicists from Melbourne contributed to the development of the ATLAS detector that participated in the discovery.

Then came the first direct detection of gravitational waves in early 2016, with Australian contributors from the University of Adelaide, the Australian National University and the University of Western Australia.

Now, just reported in Nature, is another breakthrough in fundamental physics, this time concerning antimatter. And this is another area where Australian researchers have been very active.

The researchers at CERN managed to isolate several atoms of antihydrogen – the antimatter analogue of hydrogen – and measure its properties with unprecedented accuracy.

While Australian researchers were not formally part of this experimental program, we have been providing calculations that show how to increase substantially the number of antihydrogen atoms made.

Mysterious matter

Why the interest in antihydrogen, or antimatter in general? It turns out that along with dark energy and dark matter, the existence of antimatter is quite a mystery to physicists.

The biggest puzzle is why there is so much matter in the universe, and so little antimatter. It would have been much easier to explain if there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the universe, or none at all.

The Standard Model predicts equal amounts of antimatter and matter being created by the Big Bang, but in reality there is a tiny amount of antimatter compared to matter. Why is this so? No one knows, and a Nobel Prize awaits whoever solves this problem.

It gets even more interesting, though. As there is no unification between quantum mechanics and general relativity, we have no reason to believe that antimatter will behave in a gravitational field in the same way as does matter.

This is something that physicists would very much like to test. But to do so, we need to create a substantial quantity of antimatter.

It also needs to be electrically neutral, so that any effect of gravity on the antimatter isn’t overwhelmed by the far more powerful electromagnetic force. Antihydrogen is a great candidate for this experiment because it has no electric charge.

The interest of the Gravitational Behaviour of Antihydrogen at Rest (GBAR) group at CERN is observing how antihydrogen behaves under gravity. If it falls, just like ordinary hydrogen, not much will be learned regarding the asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the universe. On the other hand, if it goes up, the foundation of physics will need a rethink!

The ALPHA2 apparatus at CERN is helping to understand antimatter. CERN

Elusive anti-atoms

Another way to study antimatter is to examine its structure.

We already know a lot about the behaviour of matter, such as the way electrons move between the shells around the nucleus. We have measured the amount of energy required to bump an electron from the innermost, 1 shell, and the next, 2 shell, with startling precision – out to 15 significant figures.

If the same transition can be measured in antihydrogen to a similar level of precision, then perhaps we will gain a clue to matter-antimatter asymmetry for the first time.

In physics, when we perform experiments, the measurements are repeated many times to ensure that the results are statistically significant. This is not so easy when it comes to working with antihydrogen.

When matter and antimatter come together they annihilate, creating a massive amount of energy (as described by Einstein’s famous E=mc² formula). One practical benefit is in positron emission tomography (PET) scans for cancer detection.

PET uses the annihilation of positrons (antielectrons) with electrons to create gamma rays that we can use to determine the position of the cancer in the body.

In the new experiment at CERN, the number of antihydrogen atoms initially created is around 25,000. But only about a dozen of these were trapped and could be examined closely.

Nevertheless, that was sufficient to measure the 1 shell to 2 shell transition of an electron to an accuracy of 10 significant figures, all of which agree with the ordinary hydrogen case.

Antimatter downunder

Though there have not been any surprises thus far, the next goal is to increase substantially the number of trapped antihydrogen atoms so we can form the gravitational and spectroscopic experiments with considerably improved precision.

This is where our research on how to produce more antihydrogen atoms comes in. Antihydrogen is typically made by bringing together positronium – a short-lived bound state of a positron and an electron – together with antiprotons that are chilled to less than a degree above absolute zero.

We showed that if the positronium is initially prepared in a more electrically excited state, as can be routinely done with modern lasers, then the number of antihydrogen atoms created will increase by several orders of magnitude.

This process is currently under development at CERN, and we look forward to seeing one of the longstanding problems in physics – matter-antimmatter asymmetry – being tackled head-on by the teamwork of experimental and theoretical physicists.

Igor Bray, Head of Physics, Astronomy and Medical Radiation Science, Curtin University

One solitary asteroid might be worth trillions of dollars in platinum and other metals. Exploiting these resources could lead to a global boom in wealth, which could raise living standards worldwide and potentially benefit all of humanity.

There are already companies, such as Planetary Resources, hoping to make mining in space a reality.

Peter Diamondis, co-founder of Planetary Resources and founder of the XPrize Grand Challenges, believes that the benefits to humanity give us a moral imperative to explore and utilise space. He has also declared “there are twenty-trillion-dollar checks up there, waiting to be cashed!"

Planetary Resources co-founder Peter Diamandis on the virtues of space mining.

However, behind the utopian rhetoric and dazzling dreams of riches lie some very real problems.

Ownership and the Outer Space Treaty

The framework of international space law is given by the Outer Space Treaty (OST), which entered into force in 1967. Among its main principals, the OST includes these statements:

the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind

and,

outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means

Because the OST is generally interpreted as preventing anything like private fee-simple ownership, it is sometimes claimed to be an obstacle to commercial ventures in space. But such claims simply do not hold water.

There are numerous terrestrial examples where resources are profitably exploited in the absence of fee-simple ownership. Governments routinely licence companies to engage in timber extraction, mining, offshore oil exploration and other activities, receiving royalties payments on production.

In the United States, revenues from such royalties totalled some US$13.5 billion dollars in 2014 from federally owned or managed lands alone.

Nevertheless, some proponents of mining in outer space argue for serious modification or an end to the Outer Space Treaty and claim, against the evidence, that without fee-simple ownership, there is no incentive for commercial exploitation.

The Unites States' Space Act of 2015 was just one volley – and a deliberately vague one at that – in this ongoing international debate.

A balanced approach?

The riches exist, but how will humanity benefit from mining in outer space, or for that matter, other global commons such as the deep sea floor?

Behind the lofty rhetoric of benefits to humanity, there is a dark shadow of voodoo economics, the shambling, walking dead figure of trickle down economics– and the possibility of a world where a few trillionaires enjoy the view from space while others barely eke a living on its surface.

Yet we do suggest that commercial interests and profit seeking can be a healthy part of the exploration of outer space. Yet outer space is not the Wild West frontier of Frederick Jackson Turner, nor do we live in the Gold Rush days of Jack London’s tale of greed and death.

In the common heritage of space, with multiple state and private actors engaging in exploration and potentially exploitation, international cooperation and oversight will benefit all.

The next mining boom could happen in space. NASA

The Alaskan model

There is a balanced, pragmatic approach that will promote commercial and profit driven activities, while also producing tangible benefits to all of humanity.

Importantly, this pragmatic approach has a well established precedent that has existed for nearly 40 years. And this comes not from a social democracy or left-wing ideology, but was the brainchild of a libertarian, Republican governor of Alaska, Jay Hammond.

That model is the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (APFC) created in 1976, and its unique “citizen’s dividend”. The APF is a resource wealth fund, which derives its revenue primarily from leases on oil fields.

In 1977, Hammond suggested that “rather than permitting government to spend all public monies earned through the exploitation of the public’s resources for what government thinks best, let’s grant shares to Alaskans.”

The first dividend payment was made in 1982, and in 2015 that payment amounted to US$2,072.

Linking a citizen’s dividend to a sovereign wealth fund was unique, but the idea of a citizen’s dividend has a long and venerable tradition. One of the earliest advocates was no less than the political theorist and American Revolutionary, Thomas Paine.

International body

How would this work for outer space?

We need an international body similar to the International Seabed Authority, which was established by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or the International Telecommunications Union, which allocates satellite orbits.

This would provide the stable business and investment environment that entrepreneurs seek by ensuring international law and obligations are met. This body could license outer space resources and levy a royalty on production, which is part of standard business practice between petroleum and other mining companies and governments here on Earth.

In turn, these revenues, or a significant portion thereof, would be deposited in a Space Resource Fund, possibly under the aegis of the World Bank. And every single citizen on Earth, say aged 18 or above, would receive a dividend on a yearly basis as their rightful share as owners of the common province of humankind.

Crucially, we are not suggesting redistribution, which has been an obstacle to the International Seabed Authority and the Moon Treaty in the past, but a fair share dividend of wealth that truly belongs to everyone.

Our model doesn’t provide a handout, or a welfare cheque, or charity from a trillionaire philanthopist; it pays every owner in a global commons a share of what is rightfully theirs.

Even tiny dividends by the standards of the world’s wealthy nations would make a difference for some developing world farmers. If there truly are trillions of dollars out there, then this might be something fundamentally world changing.

We accept that Larry Page and Sir Richard Branson – founding investors and advisors in Planetary Resources – and its founders Eric Anderson and Peter Diamandis, truly want humanity to benefit from outer space, and that they truly believe in corporate social responsibility and a sustainable future. We would encourage them to embrace the idea that the sky really does belong to all of us, as the common “province of all mankind”.

By paying rent for the right to exploit resources in space and royalties on production, the same way oil companies pay to exploit oil in the Gulf of Mexico, they’ll be engaging in business as usual.

They will have bought the right to make a potentially enormous profit and prove they really are responsible global citizens. And they’d get a citizen’s dividend cheque too.

Morgan Saletta, PhD, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne and Kevin Orrman-Rossiter, Graduate Student, History & Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne

It’s an ambitious plan to launch a series of micro-spaceships to our stellar neighbours but that’s what Russian billion Yuri Miller has announced this week. The US$100-million Breakthrough Starshot project aims to send the probes out at speeds up to about one fifth the speed of light.

British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have backed the project to see what is around our nearest stars.

But is this possible with today’s technology or even technology in the near future?

‘Challenges’

The Breakthrough Starshot project admits there are a “number of hard engineering challenges” but it adds:

In the last decade and a half, rapid technological advances have opened up the possibility of light-powered space travel at a significant fraction of light speed. This involves a ground-based light beamer pushing ultra-light nanocrafts – miniature space probes attached to lightsails – to speeds of up to 100 million miles an hour.

Such a system would allow a flyby mission to reach Alpha Centauri in just over 20 years from launch, and beam home images of possible planets, as well as other scientific data such as analysis of magnetic fields.

The nearest star to our sun is Alpha Centauri, which is just over four light years away (about 40 trillion km). It would take 70,000 years to reach that star system at the speeds of current spacecraft like NASA’s Voyager, which left our solar system in 2012.

But then each of the two Voyager probes are about the size of a small car with a mass of more than 700kg.

The idea behind an interstellar micro-spaceship is that it is very light, so the overall energy required to accelerate it to 20% of the speed of light is relatively small.

Modern miniaturisation of electronics makes it possible to fit much of what is needed for an unmanned spaceship in a very small volume.

These craft would be too small to carry their own engine and propellant tank. Hence the idea to accelerate them on their journey using a series of lasers on earth with a small solar sail on each craft to capture the laser energy.

But the jury is out on whether this is physically achievable.

Hurdles

There are still many technical hurdles to overcome. For one, the laser propulsion system is yet to be developed.

The plan is to have a kilometre-sized array of lasers pointing up into space and all focused on the gossamer thin solar-sails. But how much laser power are we really talking about?

Let’s do some simply numbers. The power required to accelerate a 1 gram spaceship to 20% of the speed of light in two minutes is 15 gigawatts. This is 30 times the power output of a typical terrestrial power station.

What about acceleration? We all know the feeling of a car accelerating quickly. We usually compare the level of acceleration to that of gravity, which is the acceleration we see when an object is dropped from a tower.

The acceleration needed for the microships is 25,000 times gravity. The loads from this acceleration would break apart even the strongest space capsule, let alone a gossamer thin solar sail.

Another issue is how to make sure the microship goes where you want it to – in this case towards Alpha Centauri.

But there would be no onboard propulsion system, so no corrections to the flight direction can be made along the way. The initial laser push would need to be very accurate and would need to account for many affects, just like a golfer trying to hit a hole-in-one must account for the wind.

Then there would be the very harsh interstellar environment between Earth and the final destination. So the onboard electronics would have to be tough enough to survive this environment for at least 20 years.

What about when it gets there? As the micro-spaceships will be so far away, the engineers on earth will have to wait years to make contact with it. So it would have to be autonomous and be able to make its own decisions.

I am sure the planners have also thought about what the ship should do if it encounters another civilisation!

Despite all the challenges and technical difficulties, who knows what human ingenuity can create when given a challenge.

Michael Smart, Professor of Hypersonic Aerodynamics, The University of Queensland

On Friday 8 April 2016, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched a mission to deliver a spacecraft called Dragon with its payload of supplies and experiments into a trajectory towards the International Space Station (ISS). Most remarkably, the first-stage booster then landed on a ship (see below).

Landing: how it’s done.

This is no easy task. Think back to 1969 when the Apollo 11 mission delivered three astronauts to the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon while Michael Collins piloted the command module in lunar orbit. All three returned safely to Earth.

The first stage of the huge Saturn V rocket that launched them into space burned for about three minutes and then crashed into the ocean. The second stage burned for a further six minutes, taking the craft into near-Earth orbit. It too was jettisoned and then burned up during its descent to Earth. The third stage burned for nine more minutes to send the astronauts towards the moon – again burning up on re-entry. The Saturn V rocket, at a cost of US$6 billion in 1969, was completely lost.

On the astronauts' return, only the command module splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Of the 140 tonnes of metal that were launched, only five tonnes returned to earth. And at launch, the mission carried a staggering 3,000 tonnes of fuel … more on this later. Just imagine the cost saving if the Saturn V had been able to return to Earth almost intact – and then land itself to be used on another mission. Well, as the latest SpaceX landing proves – along with the reusable technology being developed by Blue Origin – that dream is becoming reality.

Of course, there have been reusable spacecraft before. The space shuttle was intended as a reusable spacecraft. The orbiter returned to Earth landing like a conventional aircraft, and the two solid rocket boosters could be recovered from the sea. Only the huge orange external tank would burn up, but getting the spacecraft ready for the next flight was slow and expensive.

The SpaceX philosophy is that the majority of the rocket can be rapidly recovered, refuelled and reflown, making for significant cost savings. Fuel is less than half a percent of the cost of the mission, so there is potential to decrease the cost of getting to space dramatically.

The rocket science bit

But what of the rocket science? Well, the ISS is in “near-Earth orbit”, at an altitude of about 400km. This is less than the distance from London to Paris, albeit straight up. It is orbiting at a speed of about 7.7km/s – it only takes about 90 minutes to go once around the Earth.

The SpaceX rocket comes in to land on the drone ship. SpaceX/flickr

So how much energy does it take to deliver 1kg of payload to the ISS? First, think of kinetic energy (KE) – yes, you learned this at school. At 7.7km/s, the KE per kilogram works out at about 30MJ (megajoules). But you also need to consider gravitational potential energy (GPE) – yes, you did this at school, too. The force of the Earth’s gravity doesn’t change very much over this short distance upwards given that the Earth’s radius is 6,400km. So it’s easy to work out that the GPE needed to lift 1kg up to 400km is only about 4MJ. This is small compared with the 30MJ of KE required.

But not only do you need to get your payload to 7.7km/s, you have to carry the fuel in your tanks as well. Thanks to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s “ideal rocket equation”, however, we know that liquid fuels, which have a faster gas jet speed, are more efficient than solid fuels. Essentially, by using liquid fuel, each 1kg of payload needs a minimum of 4.5kg of fuel to reach a speed of 7.7km/s, while with solid fuel, you’d need more than 20kg – and this is before taking the rocket mass into account. This is a very good reason why rocketeers, including SpaceX, prefer to use liquid fuels; with a high gas jet speed, the launch mass is much less.

The secret of SpaceX

So how does SpaceX’s rocket work? The Falcon 9 is a two-stage launch vehicle. Each stage uses a liquid fuel with liquid oxygen (very similar to the kerosene and liquid oxygen fuel used in the Saturn V – chemistry hasn’t changed in 50 years). Falcon 9’s first stage “booster” is by far the largest and most expensive component of the launch mass and it makes sense to try to recover it for reuse – it’s no good to have it splash into the sea because the resulting damage and corrosion would render it useless.

And so SpaceX has developed the Falcon 9 booster so that it can land on a ship. The idea is that shortly after main engine cutoff and stage separation, the booster flips over and directs itself towards an unmanned drone ship that is waiting as a landing pad.

The ideal trajectory. SpaceX, Author provided

During its descent, the booster reaches speeds of around 1,000m/s (double this after more adventurous geostationary missions) but its fins and engines control the speed and direction of the Falcon, slowing it down as it approaches the Earth. At the last minute, four legs then deploy – and it makes a soft landing at a speed of less than 6m/s. All of this delicate navigation is performed by onboard computers and inertial navigation systems. The landing is so fast that no human could react quickly enough to ensure a smooth touchdown.

To make things trickier, the ship is pitching, rolling and heaving in the sea. It’s hard enough for pilots to land on an aircraft carrier – Falcon is a tall slender column some 20 storeys high. Once the Falcon has landed, the legs lock out rigidly. In one of the earlier Falcon missions, one of the legs failed so even though the landing was a success the Falcon fell over shortly after, resulting in a huge conflagration. But that’s why they use an unmanned drone ship as a landing platform – no-one gets hurt. Of course, it’s easier to land on land – and the Falcon does this if the mission flies over land. But the ability to land at sea adds flexibility.

The SpaceX rocket approaching the landing platform. SpaceX/flickr

What next?

Falcon 9 and Dragon are paving the way for a new generation of low-cost reusable spacecraft – and SpaceX is already developing Dragon to launch and return up to seven astronauts into orbit and beyond. Perhaps next, there’ll be a refuelling base on the moon? Then Mars is an awful lot closer.

The flexibility offered by reusable vehicles is the stuff of science fiction – the classic movie Star Wars and more recently The Martian and Interstellar are nothing without space ships that launch at the push of a button. We’re not there yet, but with spacecraft that can hop around like aircraft, then anything is possible.

The author wrote this piece with the assistance of one of his former Trinity students, Lars Blackmore, who now works for SpaceX as Principal Rocket Landing Engineer. Lars graduated with his MEng from Cambridge in 2003 and a PhD from MIT in 2007. He is now responsible for landing Falcon 9.

Hugh Hunt, Reader in Engineering Dynamics and Vibration, University of Cambridge