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From Sputnik to a new space age

It was 50 years ago that a small metal sphere about the size of a basketball stunned the world. The launch of Sputnik-I, the world’s first artificial satellite, by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics marked the beginning of the space age. Sputnik was the forerunner of countless satellites launched since then for everything from relaying television signals and telephone conversations to studying the earth itself. It also blazed the trail for the manned exploration of space. Four years later, Yuri Gagarin, an officer in the Soviet Air Force, became the first human spacefarer. Soon afterwards, President John F. Kennedy made his famous speech committing the United States to landing man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, thus setting off a space race between the two Cold War rivals. Then on July 20, 1969, in “one small step for [a] man; one giant leap for mankind,” Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon. It seemed that the Apollo moon-landing programme would be the forerunner of human exploration of the solar system. But that was not to be. Humans would thereafter travel no further than to space stations just a few hundred kilometres from Earth.

Why is space travel nowhere near as common as it ought to have been by now? An important reason is that the sort of technological revolution necessary to make space transportation safe and affordable has not occurred yet. Contrast this with what happened in aviation. Fifty years after the Wright Flyer, a rickety contraption of wood and cloth, got off the ground (in December 1903), large all-metal, multi-engine aircraft were routinely transporting people and goods across vast distances and the age of jet airliners was about to begin. But in the space arena, expendable launch vehicles of the kind that launched Sputnik carried Gagarin into space and took men to the moon are still very much the workhorses. These launch vehicles can be used just once and can deliver just a small percentage of their launch weight in orbit. The Space Shuttle was a major step towards creating a reusable launch system. But the extensive and costly refurbishment required after each Shuttle flight and the Shuttle’s vulnerability to falling debris during launch have meant that the U.S. is going back to Apollo-like hardware for its next generation space transportation system. That is a step backward, not forward. The need is for more advanced reusable launch vehicles, a possibility that several countries, including India, have been studying. Only with adequate investments in making such reusable vehicles a reality can a new age of space exploration begin — when humans will be able to set out to explore other worlds.

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