Meanwhile, another exciting launch is not far away and this is the Starship spacecraft of the SpaceX company founded by Elon Musk, who did his matric at Pretoria Boys High School.
The spacecraft figures are mind-boggling; Starship is designed to take 100 people to Mars. It has 40 cabins that can each take three or four people.
Starship is so large that in cargo mode it can take 150 tonnes of cargo to Mars, or carry half a dozen municipal buses.
A new era of space travel has definitely dawned.
The Starship craft has been designed to land on the moon or Mars and then to take off again. Starship is boosted into space on top of a huge booster rocket.
The Musk rockets are amazing. They roar up towards outer space and then reverse down to Earth and land on the launch pad standing vertically, ready to be refuelled for another flight.
This reusability means that launch costs have come down dramatically.
The reliability and safety of a launch are now so much better than ever. This means that space customers who want to launch GPS satellites or commercial satellites of any type are virtually guaranteed a successful launch. Such advances mean a great deal for business development, which Musk had in mind from the outset.
The penetration of space is undoubtedly not any more merely a case of adventure and scientific exploration, space is a marvellous realm of potential business development. In due course there will be factories on the moon and Mars. There certainly are some major advantages to being up there. A major expense on Earth with hi-tech industries, such as microchip manufacture, is maintaining a sterile and dust-free environment, or maintaining a good vacuum. On the moon there is no air and it is totally sterile, so all these expenses can be avoided, opening significant possibilities for building specialist manufacturing facilities.
SA must not view space as just scientific exploration, we must continue to view it as critical to national development. SA has been using space surveillance productively for many years, to monitor the ground and for other applications.
Artemis, Starship and other missions are dramatically expanding the horizons of mankind's existence.
Dr Kemm is a nuclear physicist and chair of Stratek Global, an energy development company in Pretoria
KELVIN KEMM | Moon, Mars missions herald new era in space exploration
Space critical to national and business development
The moon goddess Artemis is travelling to the moon in Women's Month. Not only is Artemis the name of the goddess of the moon from ancient mythology, it is also the name of the new spacecraft that will fly to the moon, opening a new era in space exploration.
In mythology Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo, the name of the moon landings of half a century ago when mankind first walked on the moon. Astronauts last walked on the moon in 1972.
The modern Artemis spacecraft is advanced and is huge in comparison to the Apollo spacecraft. When Apollo 11 landed on the moon it had much less on-board computing power than a modern cellphone. Just imagine!
Artemis 1 will not carry a crew and it will not land on the moon. It will travel to the moon and back to prove the technological system. But the total journey will last for about two months, and the spacecraft will orbit the moon an amazing 141 times. During this time Artemis will launch other small satellites to perform specialist tasks, such as mapping ice on the moon because finding where ice and water are will be most important for humans to live there in moon bases in the future. We already know that there is water there. That was a dramatic discovery.
The folks back on Earth in mission Control will be checking everything that they possibly can. They have big dreams, along with many other people around the world.
Missions Artemis 2 and Artemis 3 have already been planned. But we will have to wait a bit for these. Artemis 2 will carry a crew but is only scheduled to launch in 2024. It will spend a week in orbit around the moon. Just imagine the beautiful full-colour TV pictures which will be beamed back to us. When Apollo 11 landed the first astronauts on the moon in 1969 we received low quality fuzzy black and white TV images, because that was all that the technology of the time could do.
In 2025 Artemis 3 is planned to land astronauts near the moon's south pole. That will be a most interesting area to study. Polar exploration will certainly take on a new meaning.
Debris from Russian space rocket seen falling to earth over Johannesburg
Meanwhile, another exciting launch is not far away and this is the Starship spacecraft of the SpaceX company founded by Elon Musk, who did his matric at Pretoria Boys High School.
The spacecraft figures are mind-boggling; Starship is designed to take 100 people to Mars. It has 40 cabins that can each take three or four people.
Starship is so large that in cargo mode it can take 150 tonnes of cargo to Mars, or carry half a dozen municipal buses.
A new era of space travel has definitely dawned.
The Starship craft has been designed to land on the moon or Mars and then to take off again. Starship is boosted into space on top of a huge booster rocket.
The Musk rockets are amazing. They roar up towards outer space and then reverse down to Earth and land on the launch pad standing vertically, ready to be refuelled for another flight.
This reusability means that launch costs have come down dramatically.
The reliability and safety of a launch are now so much better than ever. This means that space customers who want to launch GPS satellites or commercial satellites of any type are virtually guaranteed a successful launch. Such advances mean a great deal for business development, which Musk had in mind from the outset.
The penetration of space is undoubtedly not any more merely a case of adventure and scientific exploration, space is a marvellous realm of potential business development. In due course there will be factories on the moon and Mars. There certainly are some major advantages to being up there. A major expense on Earth with hi-tech industries, such as microchip manufacture, is maintaining a sterile and dust-free environment, or maintaining a good vacuum. On the moon there is no air and it is totally sterile, so all these expenses can be avoided, opening significant possibilities for building specialist manufacturing facilities.
SA must not view space as just scientific exploration, we must continue to view it as critical to national development. SA has been using space surveillance productively for many years, to monitor the ground and for other applications.
Artemis, Starship and other missions are dramatically expanding the horizons of mankind's existence.
Dr Kemm is a nuclear physicist and chair of Stratek Global, an energy development company in Pretoria
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