One Small Blue Planet, Spinning in the Black
The first photograph of Earth from space was taken on 24 October 1946, from a rocket 105 kilometres above the ground, launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, USA.
It was a German V2 rocket, captured by the Americans at the end of World War II. The United States and the Soviet Union both recruited hundreds of scientists and engineers from the Nazi rocket program. The early space ventures were built using the V2 rockets that had bombed London and other cities in World War II.
To get this first photograph of Earth from space, the explosive warhead was removed and replaced with a package of scientific instruments, including a 35 mm motion-picture camera. The film was dropped back to Earth in a tough steel canister.
While not dramatic, these photos were useful for mapping — before that, the highest vantage point from which photos of parts of our planet had been taken was from a high-altitude balloon, only about 22 kilometres high.
The heart of the world was captured by what is now known as The Blue Marble, an extraordinary shot of our planet taken on 7 December 1972 by the crew of Apollo 17, who were 29,000 kilometres above us. It is one of the most copied photos in all history.
It is beautiful. For the first time, we saw our blue and white planet spinning in the vast darkness of space. Every person who has seen it recognises, however briefly, that we are not nations, cultures or countries, but members of one species — humanity — with one home, this miraculous planet Earth.
Back in 1972, humanity was only just beginning to realise that, far from turning our world into a technological paradise, we were devastating it — not just by exterminating most of the other creatures who share our planet with us, but by destroying the ozone layer that protected us (and the natural world on which we depend) from the dangers of the Sun’s radiation. We are coming to the slow realisation that the possible warming of Earth, due to our increased emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon monoxide and methane, was heating Earth to such a degree that, by the end of the century, the sea level could rise at least 35 metres, inundating the world’s most populated areas and causing heatwaves of more than 50ºC, temperatures in which humans can only survive if protected.
SURVIVING THE SIXTH GREAT EXTINCTION
Even with satellites such as NASA’s ICESat-2, launched in 2018, we still don’t know how much of Earth’s ice is melting, at what rate and how much it will speed up — or by how much heating the oceans will cause the sea levels to rise, too. Each new discovery predicts higher sea level rises than what have been predicted before.
The sea won’t rise evenly, however. As the weight of the ice melts, the land masses (10–30 kilometres of Earth’s crust floating on a mantle of molten iron) under that vast weight of ice will rise too. The North American continent may rise enough to counteract much of the rise in sea level — unless the Antarctic ice cap melts first.
We are only beginning to understand our planet, and how our actions affect it. But we are also beginning to see the devastation our actions have wreaked: the storms, the storm surges, the fires, the heat deaths, the death of coral reefs, the extinction of over 40 per cent of Earth’s species in a few decades, vast areas of ocean where nothing lives, or other creatures choke on plastic.
Our cities — even our railway lines, power stations and power transmission lines — have not been designed or built to withstand temperatures of more than 50ºC. Bitumen melts and power lines fuse, meaning air conditioning and other vital services can fail. Even aircraft cannot take off, as the air becomes too thin.
One of the largest migrations in the history of the United States is happening. People are moving from low-lying land, or from what were once prized coastal streets in Florida. Every week, another ecological disaster makes headlines. As the jet stream — a fast-flowing air current high in the atmosphere that drives much of our climate — slows, storms, hurricanes and cyclones become more violent, and cold snaps and heatwaves stay in one place longer, thus becoming more vicious.
As I write this in the winter of 2018, bushfires blaze along the NSW south coast, as one also rages 20 kilometres down our valley. Australia is a land shaped by fire – but not by bushfires in winter.
We watch our world
How much did that single photograph inspire us to look at our planet as a whole, not just at our own backyards?
If the Apollo program inspired us to think of ourselves as citizens of Earth, it also gave us some of the tools to do so.
Apollo gave us multi-spectral terrain photography, which uses combinations of different types of light, like infrared and ultraviolet, to show things we can’t otherwise see, such as diseased or dying trees or crops.
As the world becomes hotter and more polluted, this way of scanning vast parts of Earth for the damage humanity has caused — and helping to correct it — has become vitally important. During the 1965 Gemini program, astronauts took hundreds of high-resolution colour photos of Earth with 70 mm cameras, as part of experiments in terrain and weather photography. This, and the advances in remote sensing from the Apollo program, led to Landsat and its foreign counterparts like France’s SPOT (Satellite pour l’Observation de la Terre). They also led to Skylab’s ability to monitor both the sea surface and sea floor of Earth via radar surveys, to make global maps that would be impossible using any other method. The Apollo program helped us to explore parts of our own planet hidden by the oceans, as well as to measure and predict sea level rises, gather more accurate weather data and predict the increasing changes wrought by climate change.
Perhaps, just perhaps, humanity’s ‘outward urge’ to explore beyond our own backyard may have given us the technology to survive the increasing global disasters that humanity has created.
Beyond this world . . .
That remote sensing also allows us to dream. Remote sensing has shown us that the Moon has vast reserves of frozen water in its craters, and massive tunnels created by long-extinct volcanoes that were once active in the Moon’s youth. Could the Moon create a haven for a remnant of humanity if Earth is — again — devastated by a direct hit from a massive asteroid or maybe a recurrence of disease such as the plague? Will the Moon’s clear skies be the perfect place for an observatory to explore the universe? Will its low gravity prove more suitable than Earth’s to launch spaceships travelling to Mars . . . and beyond?
We do know that the Moon and many asteroids contain valuable minerals that are scarce on Earth. We could use Earth’s gravity to pull shipments back to our planet. No one has done this yet, but companies across the world are working on how to do it. Could space become our ‘dirty backyard’, where industries that pollute Earth can be located without further harming our planet? Increasingly, space exploitation is seen as an opportunity for private investment and companies, not just for governments.
But who owns space? The Moon? The asteroids? What laws govern what can be done there? Valuable minerals from an asteroid might be brought to Earth — but what if there is a wobble in its orbit and it crashes into a city? We are still only at the beginning of the space age, and we can only glimpse vaguely at both the opportunities and the problems.
Australia and the space age
Once, we were among the leaders as humanity gazed into space. In 1947, under the Anglo-Australian Joint Project, a guided weapons development and test facility was developed at Woomera in outback South Australia.
The weapons testing undertaken there left a lethal radioactive legacy at Maralinga, with thousands of square kilometres still too dangerous for the local Indigenous nations to be allowed to live there. The scientists, civilians and defence personnel exposed to the radiation are at risk of developing lethal cancers. But it also left valuable infrastructure and developed Australian expertise.
In 1967, Australia was the third nation in the world, behind the United States and the USSR, to build and launch its own satellite, the WRESAT (Weapons Research Establishment Satellite) at the Woomera test range. It weighed 45 kilograms and circled Earth 642 times before burning up in the atmosphere somewhere over Ireland. WRESAT helped us to understand the effect of the upper atmosphere on climate and weather, and it provided information to the United States on other (classified) matters.
The prototype for WRESAT was exhibited at the London Trade Fair in 1968.
Honeysuckle Creek and Australia were vital to the Apollo program. Alone among the tracking stations globally, the Australian facilities were the only ones that managed themselves and developed major elements of space technology. The government of the day, however, didn’t bother to save records or equipment from Honeysuckle Creek, much less try to maintain and build on the expertise gained there.
We have kept only fragments of our space expertise in remote sensing, satellite communication and navigation, through the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex. This is one of NASA’s three major tracking stations worldwide.
Plans for an Australian Space Agency have been repeatedly promised, but have never come to light. In 1987, the Hawke government established the Australian Space Office (ASO), which was disbanded by a later government in 1996, when the Liberal– National Coalition proposed a new national space agency that might launch satellites from Cape York in Far North Queensland.
By 2008, however, with no new space agency taking the place of the ASO, Australia was the only OECD country without a space agency. In 2009, the Space Policy Unit funded the Australian Space Research Program for three years, and it did . . . nothing much. Australia seemed to be lost in space.
On 25 September 2017, at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Senator Simon Birmingham announced that the Australian government would launch a national space agency. The 2018 Budget promised $26 million in seed funding over four years, with a further $15 million for international space investment starting from 2019. It is aimed to make Australia part of the global space economy and bring back the expertise lost when the scientists and technicians who look to the stars headed overseas to find jobs.
The latest 2018 plan, under the Turnbull then Morrison governments, is to attract large and small businesses to operate and cooperate under the program. It will be vastly smaller than the NASA, Russian, Japanese and European space agency organisations. At the moment, it has only 20 people pulled from different parts of government — the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, Prime Minister and Cabinet, CSIRO, Austrade and the Royal Australian Air Force. In September 2018, the agency signed a memorandum of understanding with the French space agency, CNES, to collaborate on space programs, and has been in talks with the United States about NASA’s plans for a manned international space station orbiting the Moon.
In 2018, South Australia earmarked $1 million in its budget for a campaign to attract the space agency to the state, and hopes to develop the old Royal Adelaide Hospital site into an innovation hub for tech start-ups. The Queensland government has also launched a parliamentary inquiry to explore how the state could become the home of research, design and manufacturing for Australia’s future space program.
Possibly — just possibly — in this era when major inventions and programs are almost entirely being developed by private companies, a small new agency like Australia’s will be better placed to make partnerships with private enterprise so that, once again, Australia can be a major base for reaching out to space.
The question is: have we already lost too much expertise and given too little encouragement to inventors or small business, which then took their ideas and eventual profits overseas? By the time you read this book, you may know if Australia’s latest space ambitions or whether, like the many others, were a dream that never had enough funding or government foresight to enable Australia to claim a share of the space economy.