Space invader

Soon we will live on Mars. There is no doubt about that. Space is the great adventure of this millennium. It’s growing more rapidly as a place of business than China or India. It just needs its Damien Hirst. One peerless and fearless luminary who can make us all realise how much we need a piece of it: someone who can take command of the heavens and sell them to us.

We are already in a golden age of planetary science. Since the Apollo moon landings nearly 40 years ago there have been missions to every planet and most of the interesting moons in the solar system. All of these voyages have been unmanned, and, although a machine landing on Venus doesn’t generate the press coverage that a human presence would, unmanned space travel has so far been the best approach to exploring the rest of the universe. There is very little to be gained scientifically from having a person on board a spacecraft at this stage, as instruments can be operated from mission control back here on the deck and the results are the same whether gathered by a man or a machine. The cost and risk of flying humans around in space would have been, well, astronomical.

There are plenty of people flying around in space as I write this, but they are all in Earth orbit. The Apollo astronauts are still the only people ever to have left the Earth’s magnetic field. Looking back, that was quite a risky thing to do.

The main problems facing astronauts beyond near-Earth orbit are the vagaries and violence of space weather. The sun is an unimaginably aggressive place, a constant colossal nuclear explosion strapped to a sphere by immense gravity.