IAC 2025 If the USA’s space strategy succeeds, it will run a “village” on the moon in a decade, NASA administrator Sean Duffy told the International Aeronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney today.
Duffy appeared in a session featuring the heads of space agencies from the USA, China, Japan, India, Europe, and Canada. Readers will likely have noted the absence of Russia, a longtime space player, from that list.
The NASA boss seemingly hinted at one reason Russia’s space boss is not at the Congress when he said the USA “comes in peace” to space. “We have not been in the business of taking people’s land,” Duffy said.
Asked what success looks like for NASA in a decade, Duffy said “We are going to have sustained human life on the moon. Not just an outpost, but a village.” And a nuclear-powered village at that after NASA recently issued an RFI seeking commercial help to build a nuclear reactor on Luna
Duffy also predicted that a decade from now NASA will also have “made leaps and bounds on our mission to get to Mars” and “be on the cusp of putting human boots on Mars.”
The theme for this year’s IAC is “Sustainable Space: Resilient Earth”. Duffy’s take on that is how to sustain human life in space, an objective he said is NASA’s prerogative because it alone among US government agencies has a remit for exploration. He pointed out that other US government agencies have the job of considering terrestrial stability and earthly resilience, and that NASA must focus on exploration,
The other space agency heads at the event took a different view.
When European Space Agency (ESA) director general Josef Ashbacher had his turn on stage, he offered a very different vision of sustainability by pointing out that the agency he leads freely shares data from its earth observation satellites. “I am glad that we at ESA are working for the betterment of the planet,” he said.
V Narayanan, the chair of India’s Space Research Organization (ISRO) said ensuring food and water resources is his agency’s top goal in space. Lisa Campbell, the President of the Canadian Space Agency said that when her country first orbited an earth observation satellite it had to pay private sector organizations to use its data. “Now they want it,” she said, before announcing CA$5 million ($3.6 million) to fund studies on biodiversity from space. The president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Dr Hiroshi Yamakawa, reminded attendees that Japan recently launched its third greenhouse gas observation satellite.
The deputy administrator of China’s National Space Agency (CNSA) Zhigang Bian said his country has launched 500 earth observation satellites. He sent a little murmur around the auditorium when he said China participates in a constellation of such sats shared by members of the BRICS bloc – a loose alliance that recently expanded its membership beyond Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. Diplomatic types see BRICS expansion as China developing institutions that rival existing blocs – on Earth and in space.
Zhigang also said China is working to make space sustainable with new measures to track orbiting debris, manage traffic in space, and provide alerts to warn if spacecraft are at risk. He said China believes those measures are necessary because the growing mega-constellations of broadband satellites increases risks for all users of space.
“China is currently researching active removal of space debris,” he said.
JAXA’s Dr Yamakawa said Japan’s private sector outfit Astroscale is probably three years away from capturing and de-orbiting a satellite, but that doing so won’t solve the space junk problem.
“We think the debris issue is one we must cope with,” he said. “There is not enough time to solve for this.”
Dr Yamakawa also suggested collaboration between spacefaring nations makes extraterrestrial exploration more sustainable, and pointed to the forthcoming JAXA/ISRO collaboration on the Lunar Polar Exploration (LUPEX) mission that will see a Japanese H3 rocket carry an Indian lander and a Japanese rover.
ISRO’s V Narayanan said the mission will supersize India’s previous Chandrayaan moon missions, by sending a 6,800kg lander and 300kg rover, up from the 600kgs and 25kgs sent by 2023’s Chandrayaan-3 mission. ®
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