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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020

Copyright © Sarah Cruddas 2020

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For Agatha Reeves, the brightest star in the sky.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Foreword by Michael Collins

Introduction

Prologue: Daring to Dream

Chapter One: The Space Race

Chapter Two: Dedication, Determination and Sacrifice

Chapter Three: Space on Earth

Chapter Four: Where Next?

Chapter Five: Look Back

About the Publisher

Foreword

In 1969, when I went to the Moon as part of the crew of Apollo 11, it was a dream come true. I had somehow lucked into being one third of the team that was going to do this wonderful thing. I had stumbled in at the right time, at the cusp between the old and the new.

We crew felt the weight of the world on our shoulders. We knew that everybody – friend or foe – would be looking at us. We wanted to do the best we possibly could. I wasn’t scared, but I was worried. How could you fail to be, when you are undertaking something so extraordinary?

I always think of a flight to the Moon as being a long and fragile daisy chain of events. No matter how well things were going, I couldn’t just relax and pat myself on the back. The flight was a question of being under constant tension, worried about what’s coming next, and asking ourselves, what do I have to do now to keep this daisy chain intact? There were so many people involved in this mission, so many people counting on us and working for that same goal.

As I reflect on the work of a new generation of space technology, and the story that Look Up tells us, I feel the sense of that daisy chain still. It’s our responsibility to keep that mission – that daisy chain – intact and moving forward; inspiring the next generation of adventurers.

As we prepared for Apollo 11, we spent a lot of time in simulators to be as ready as we could be for what we’d encounter. These simulators were at the heart and soul of our training. They were very powerful instruments and we couldn’t have made it to the moon without them. But their one failing? They couldn’t duplicate the view that we saw out of the window. To see the Moon up close is indescribable. It filled our window with its gigantic presence. Its belly bulging out towards us, bigger than you thought possible. Sunlight cascaded around its rim. The dark was somehow darker. The light was lighter. It was a magnificent spectacle. One few of us have had the honor to see.

If our story with the stars has taught us anything, it’s that humankind has an innate desire to be outward bound, to continue traveling. People don’t want to live in a box. They want to look up into the sky. They want to see things that they do not understand, to come to know them better, perhaps even physically go there and examine them. To see, to smell, to touch, to feel. We are wanderers. And eventually humans are going to leave and go places and live there. When I look up to the sky, I see all these miraculous, marvelous things. All I can think is we ought to lift the lid of that box and get going. On the occasions when I look at the Moon, I think, been there, done that! I regard the Moon, not so much as a destination, but as a direction for humanity’s migration.

It’s Mars that excites me the most, now. It was my favorite as a child, and still is today. When I came back from the Moon, I joked that NASA sent me to the wrong planet. Mars is the one we should have our eye on. Though it is inhospitable, it is the closest thing in our solar system that we have to a sister planet and going there would be a fascinating new frontier.

After the flight of Apollo 11, I remember so vividly the around the world trip that the three of us – Neil, Buzz and myself – took. We were surprised that everywhere we went, every city we visited, we were greeted not with ‘oh well you Americans finally did it’. But we were greeted with we did it. We humanity. We human beings. I think we have to build on that spirit as we continue to explore.

Because if there is one thing more extraordinary even than seeing the Moon, it is seeing the Earth. As Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders pointed out, when you are up there, if you put your thumbnail in front of Earth, you could totally obscure it. But I found every time I removed my thumb, the Earth popped back into my view. It wanted to be seen. It was the whole show. It was my home, everything I knew. The white clouds and blue of the ocean. Background totally black. I will remember that all my life. It leaves one to consider, well, is it really so pretty? Is it as quiet as it looks? Is it really so pristine? As I looked at it, the word ‘fragile’ came up out of the murk somehow. I thought, it’s a fragile little thing, isn’t it?

And I don’t think we are treating its fragility properly. Technology has brought us great benefits, but it has also come at a cost. We are using the Earth’s resources at a rate unseen before. It seems that nearly every advance in our civilization has had some undesirable side effects, and it’s up to the next generation of engineers, explorers, and thinkers, to forge a path that will help our planet, so that it can truly become the beautiful, tranquil gem it seems to be when viewed from the Moon.

During Apollo, the words of JFK helped us so much in our preparation for the first lunar landing. We had these succinct, wonderful instructions. And I’d like to transfer the spirit of President Kennedy’s words from where we are today, to where we might go. The simplicity of his mandate of ‘landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth’ motivated those of us working to get to that goal. Future spaceflight can be limitless; using Kennedy’s model, the What, When, and How will be determined by new generations. Whether that’s a flight to Mars to take our next steps to the frontier, or to meet that challenge of climate change and our planet’s finite resources head on, more people should be privileged to fly in space and get the chance to see the fragile earth as it appears from afar. I am happy to see the younger generation’s excitement at continuing the legacy of outward bound. Sarah Cruddas is a gifted writer and Look Up is an inspired book. I am hopeful that we will never stop looking up.

Michael Collins, Gemini 10 and Apollo 11 astronaut, July 2020

Introduction

‘I am tormented by an everlasting itch for things remote.’

Herman Melville

I have never been to space. And it is most likely that neither have you. In fact, of the more than 100 billion humans that are estimated to have ever existed, fewer than 600 have made the journey away from our planet. Of those 600, only 24 have ventured as far as the Moon, with just 12 walking on its surface.

Before the middle of the twentieth century, the entire history of our species played out on a world that for so long was grand and full of mystery to us, but on a cosmic scale is frighteningly small – our home and everything we hold dear is but a speck in the vastness of the unknown. That is not to say that we are insignificant per se, merely that we are a mindbogglingly tiny part of something that we are yet to fully understand.

However, all of us alive today are living in a time when going to space is no longer a fantasy. In fact, it is something that has been proven to be possible; something that we perhaps even take for granted; and something that is rapidly developing and becoming an increasingly important part of our lives – often without us realising. We are part of a small but ever-growing fraction of our species that exists in a time when we are able to step outside our Earthly home and begin to explore the unknowns of the universe.

The exploration of space is the most significant thing we will ever do collectively as a species. That might sound like a bold statement to make, but in setting foot into the grandeur of the universe, we are beginning to explore what it is that our planet is a part of. In doing so, we are pursuing answers to profound questions; ones that have been pondered by great minds throughout human existence.

Why do we exist? Where do we come from? Where are we heading? Are we alone? It is in our DNA to seek these answers. The same curiosity that has driven us to explore our Earth is now taking us to space. But in many ways, space exploration is as much about philosophy and a search for meaning as it is science. It is only by continuing to explore our surroundings that we can continue to find out more about ourselves.

Of course, sending humans and machines into space has brought many practical benefits, as well as literally changing our point of view of Earth. In space, we can conduct science experiments to help us better understand everything from the smallest cells in our body to the entire ecosystem of our planet. And it has shown us just how fragile our home really is. Astronauts can look back at Earth and see the thin blue line of our atmosphere; all that protects us and keeps us safe, we now know is overwhelmingly fragile.

It is one thing to say this, it is another thing to experience this first-hand, and to see Earth from space – a fragile marble hanging in the void, a long way from anything else. Seeing our home from this new vantage point has enabled us to gain knowledge about changes to our climate that are taking place and the inevitable problems we face should we not take action to limit them.

Most of all, the reason why space exploration is so significant is because it is our future. We cannot and should not remain still on our planet when we have the capabilities to leave it and see what is out there beyond the ‘horizon’. It is that innate curiosity and yearning to push the boundaries of what is possible that has given us the world of today. And it is by continuing to explore our universe that we can give a future to generations to come – a future that perhaps we cannot quite imagine, just as previous generations could not have imagined the world we live in today. We owe it to them to keep moving. There is more to this universe than our Earthly home. In many ways, our survival as the human race is intrinsically linked to our curiosity and our ability to keep exploring.

But with all that is wrong in the world today, why should we focus our resources on space? Are there not more pressing needs here on Earth? There are so many problems facing us – from climate change, to political corruption, social injustice and the fact that the richest eight people on the planet have more wealth than the poorest three and a half billion. But the argument made by some that we shouldn’t go to space and should instead look to the issues on Earth is misguided. I want to show you how so much of what we do in space is really about Earth, and how science conducted in space really does benefit every single person on the planet. Space is for everyone.

I have always been fascinated by space. One of my first memories is of looking up at the Moon and the night sky, using a pair of children’s binoculars to stare at the lunar surface. I didn’t know anyone who was a scientist, or an astronomer, but for as long as I can remember, space has been my passion.

When I was around eight years old, we learnt about the planets at school. I can vividly remember finding out about Venus and how it had this choking thick atmosphere. I was in awe of the different places that existed within our solar system – these worlds that were so strange and alien compared with our Earth. I consumed books, magazines and television documentaries about space, often ones far too advanced for my age. I had an insatiable appetite for learning more about this universe that we are a part of.

I spent my paper-round money on Glowstars that I arranged into the shapes of the constellations on my bedroom ceiling and I put up maps of the Moon’s surface on my wall. I had a telescope and binoculars which I would use to explore the lunar surface, imagining what it must have been like for the astronauts who went there. I spent hours thinking about the possibility of one day going to space myself – what it would be like to ride a rocket, to float free in the microgravity environment, perhaps even to walk on the surface of Mars. Looking up filled me with wonder and gave me purpose.

My childhood was spent living on the outskirts of Hull. We had little money, but the stories I read about astronauts showed me that so much was possible through hard work and determination. My love of space became my driving force to work hard at my studies. I would constantly dream about the possibilities to come in the future – seeing humans travelling further away from Earth and setting foot on Mars.

As a teenager, I worked in a factory packing fruit so that I could pay to attend a space summer school in the UK and self-fund a GCSE in astronomy, which I taught myself at home. I just wanted to learn as much as possible. The more I learnt, the more questions I was left with. Everything fascinated me – from the origins of the universe to the wonders of the planets in our solar system.

In the year 2000, I entered a competition called the Young Scientist Award; the prize was a week at NASA’s International Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. I can still remember the feeling of the knot in my stomach as I stepped out on stage to give my science presentation to an audience of hundreds of children and adults. My talk – which teenage me had smugly titled ‘Where do babies come from?’ – was the story of how you and I and everything we know of all come from stardust. The very atoms in your body were once part of a star. We are all part of the universe.

You can never underestimate the impact that giving an opportunity to a child can have on their future. I won the competition and travelled to NASA’s Space Camp, a place that had previously seemed as far removed from the reality of my childhood as the Moon. It was an opportunity that taught me more about the value of hard work – that if you work hard, it doesn’t matter where you come from, you can succeed. I would later go on to study Physics with Astrophysics at university, with ambitions of doing a PhD.

But somewhere along the line I got sidetracked. Instead of starting a PhD, after university I found myself training to become a journalist. My love of exploring the stars now sat alongside my newfound love of travel. As a student I had roamed around South America and it had opened my eyes to just how much inequality existed. I now wanted to show people the world, what I had seen. I wanted to tell stories. However, as any young person with big plans knows, you’ve got to start somewhere, and after stints as a freelance radio reporter, my first job was working for the BBC as a weather presenter for regional news.

But my passion for space stayed with me and so, alongside my day job, I decided to try to cover stories about space exploration in my free time. I interviewed astronauts and reported on the latest events, from meteor showers to missions to the planet Jupiter. Often I would get up at 3.30am to work an early presenting shift, then travel in the afternoon to interview someone. For a long time, it was only the overnight radio shows that would take my pieces about space, so I would find myself doing a pre-recorded broadcast at 10pm, before getting up in the early hours for my main job.

In July 2011, the Space Shuttle was scheduled to launch for the final time. I had never seen a rocket launch, but I knew I had to be there. I took three weeks’ leave from the BBC and bought a flight to Florida. There wasn’t really the need for an extra reporter, and I had no commissions, but I reasoned if I ‘just happened to be there’ they might use me. It was a gamble that paid off: not only did I witness the launch, but thirteen days later I found myself sat with my broadcast kit talking live on the radio as Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down in front of me – a defining moment for human spaceflight, the end of the shuttle programme.

Those three weeks in Florida changed me. I lived in a house on Cocoa Beach (not far from the Kennedy Space Center) with strangers who would become friends. I met scientists and experts within the industry. My days were spent at NASA and my nights in bars that were once frequented by America’s first astronauts. The ‘welcome home’ banner for Atlantis that hangs at the Kennedy Space Center and that is covered in autographs includes my name. I felt like I was no longer an observer or a fan of the space industry, but that I was a part of it. And I learnt that if you really want something, you have to go after it. Life is not a dress rehearsal.

I ended up leaving my weather presenting job in 2012 to follow my dreams. I wanted to be part of the space industry, to tell stories about space exploration and show people the possibilities of our future. I wanted to use tales of those pioneers who helped us reach beyond Earth to show why space matters, and to inspire as many people as possible in their own lives. Through social media I saw how much enthusiasm there is for space – even though, at the time, the media appetite for it had waned.

The end of the Space Shuttle programme brought redundancies for many who had worked on it. NASA astronauts were no longer launching from American soil, and for a time, there was an uncertainty about what would happen next. The area around the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, once so busy and energised, felt eerily quiet. But in this lull, things started to change, and the commercial space industry, backed by private companies and entrepreneurs, started to grow. It was this new approach to space exploration that really captured my imagination.

Today, my job is a mix of working within the commercial space industry and with the public on television and radio, and by giving talks around the world. I have worked with and shared stages with astronauts, famous entrepreneurs, business leaders and politicians, travelling the globe and sharing my passion for space and how we can shape our future away from Earth. I have chased rocket launches and hosted TV shows on both sides of the Atlantic. My love of travel now forms part of my work, too.

My career has seen successes and moments that my younger self could have only dreamed of, but also many failures. It is one thing that my love of space and, particularly, my knowledge of the story of space exploration taught me as a child: you will probably fail, but you have to keep going. You won’t get everything right, and you can’t control all that happens to you, but it is how you deal with failing that matters most.

Today, NASA – which I so nervously walked into as a teenager – is a place I know well. I have been lucky enough to watch countless sunsets from Cocoa Beach in Florida, and this area around the Kennedy Space Center is one of my favourite places in the world. Not only is it full of history that dates back to when we first stepped away from Earth, but it is also a place full of possibility, and history yet to be written. Happily, it is also now once again thriving with many new space companies, as space slowly becomes more accessible to us all.

When people ask me why I care so much, my answer is always the same: why would you not be interested in space? It is the story of who we are. There is so much to explore and discover. Why wouldn’t you want to be a part of finding out what is out there?

Wherever I go and whatever I do, I always remember to look up at the stars – be that insisting on taking the window seat on a night flight so I can glimpse the Moon, or simply stepping outside of wherever I happen to be staying in a far-flung corner of the world. Those moments spent looking up continue to inspire me and to fuel my passion as to why exploring space matters so much. A human lifetime is so terrifyingly short, but I hope that I can use my time to play a small part in advancing humanity into space. You never know who you might end up inspiring. My contribution to our species’ future is to play a tiny part in the space industry – this great adventure into the universe that is only just beginning.

A lot of the time, space exploration can seem far removed from our day-to-day lives. But the reality is that it is far closer than you perhaps realise. According to NASA, space begins at just 50 miles up – though there is some dispute about this, with other international organisations saying space begins at just over 60 miles. The discrepancy is because the Earth’s atmosphere does not end abruptly, instead slowly thinning. There is no sign announcing, ‘You are now leaving Earth’.

The distance from where you are now ‘up’ to the International Space Station – our ‘off-world’ outpost and home to normally six astronauts at any one time – is less than the distance between Newcastle and London: roughly 250 miles. Anyone born after November 2000 has never known a time when humans haven’t been living and working in space, as the International Space Station has been permanently crewed by a rotation of astronauts since then.

A journey from launch to orbit, though, is shorter than to the docking stations at the ISS, taking just eight and a half minutes. So not only is space far closer that you might realise, but today it doesn’t even take very long to get there. Yet making this journey ‘up’ just a matter of miles is something that would take humankind until the last century to be able to achieve.

Since 1957 – when Sputnik became the first human-made object to travel to space – we have been incrementally pushing the limits of how far we can go and what we can do beyond Earth. Our knowledge and understanding of space – along with our place within it – has increased exponentially over these past six decades. And even though the furthest that humans have travelled is to the Moon, we have sent robotic craft out beyond that to begin to explore the other worlds with whom we share our cosmic address.

Spacecraft have studied our Sun, trying to make sense of the complex relationship we have with the star that gives us life. They have orbited and mapped out Mercury and landed on Venus, sending back images and scientific details before being crushed and melted under the intense heat and pressure. On Mars, we have sent rovers to roam the surface. Operated from Earth, they conduct experiments in search of signs of past and present life and send back images of the arid, rocky Martian landscape with its milky pink sky, where hopefully one day humans will walk. And in other explorations we have orbited the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and flown by the ice giants Uranus and Neptune – frigidly cold worlds where scientists suspect diamonds may rain from the clouds.

At the far reaches of the solar system we have visited Pluto. When the New Horizons mission launched from Earth in 2006, Pluto was still known as the ‘ninth planet’. By the time the spacecraft arrived, in 2015 – giving us our first ever view of this distant, frozen world where volcanos may spew ice – Pluto had been reclassified as a dwarf planet. It is now known to be the first of many dwarf planets that exist in our solar system, worlds that are essentially round like a planet, but not massive enough to dominate their orbital paths. While we think we know much about the universe around us, we actually know so little – our understanding is constantly evolving.

Step by step, we are slowly peering out into our cosmic surroundings. We have gained a view of our solar system that even a matter of a century ago would have seemed impossible. We have studied asteroids and chased and landed on a comet. Each robotic space mission brings about new surprises as we explore further than ever before, watching as the mysteries of space begin to unravel before us.

We have also begun to understand the inconceivable enormity of the universe, where our own Sun is just one of many billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. And our Milky Way galaxy is one of many billions of galaxies that exist in the universe. There are trillions of stars and probably many more planets. Thanks to advances in our understanding of space – helped by telescopes in orbit – we now have a high degree of confidence that for pretty much every star you can see in the night sky, there is at least one planet orbiting around it. Our solar system is one of many.

Just think about that next time you look up. Think about how weird and wonderful the planets in our own solar system are, then, looking at those stars in the night sky, just imagine – if you can – what could possibly be out there, orbiting those many, many other suns. So far, we have discovered rocky worlds orbiting stars at just the right distance to have the conditions needed for liquid water. There are planets so close to their sun that they zip around it in a matter of days, and we have even discovered a world which scientists believe is made largely of diamond. Whenever I write about other planets, it often seems like science fiction to talk of how alien these worlds are compared with our own. The reality of what we keep discovering is often stranger than any fiction.

At the moment, though, the only place in this impossibly vast universe full of trillions of stars and planets where we know for sure life exists is here, on planet Earth. Proving there is life elsewhere in the solar system has so far evaded our greatest technology and our brightest minds. The universe could be teaming with life; there could even be life on a simple scale within our own solar system. Or we could be totally alone, the sole inhabitants of an impossible, unforgiving universe – our existence and ability to question it down to pure chance. Looking at the numbers, that is highly unlikely, but not impossible. We just don’t know yet. But I for one hope that we are not all alone.

We have studied the formation of planets and conducted research that is helping us to begin to piece together how our own existence came to be. We have photographed the birth of stars and distant galaxies and looked back billions of years into the universe, helped by powerful space-based telescopes, free from the disturbance of our Earth’s atmosphere.

However, compared with how big the universe is (some 93 billion light years in diameter, according to current thinking), we have barely begun to scratch the surface of what is out there. For each new discovery, we are often left with more questions than answers. But all of that possibility and all of those things that we can’t yet explain are what make going to space so exciting; the unknowns, and all the unimaginable things to come. It allows us to dream and wonder what else is out there, what we are a part of. Best of all, this ability to wonder about space is accessible to every single one of us – all you have to do is look up.

Of course, this ability to look up won’t by itself solve many of the immediate or pressing problems that we now face, but it does bring about a sense of belonging and wonder, which I think we all so desperately need now, more than ever. When we look up at the night sky, it is like we are peering out of a window of our Earthly home and out into the universe. We are a part of something greater, though we can’t quite fully comprehend what it is. No matter what we face on Earth, knowing that we are all in this together offers a notion of comfort. What divides us on Earth – borders, class, race – means nothing in the universe. We all call the same planet home. The borders we use to divide us on Earth are meaningless when we leave.

The year 2019 was an incredible one for space exploration. All over the world, people celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of when humans first landed on the Moon, but they also looked to the possibilities that lie before us over the next 50 years. Though we haven’t been back to the Moon since December 1972 – when Apollo 17 became the last lunar landing – the fiftieth anniversary of the first landing came at a time when there was a renewed drive to keep exploring space. And the greatest way to honour those first pioneers of space was to look to the future.

On 20 July 2019, I sat on the National Mall in Washington, DC, not far from the Washington Monument, on a humid summer evening as a sea of people counted down to the exact moment when humans first set foot on the Moon. As video screens played out that historic footage of Neil Armstrong walking down the ladder of the Lunar Module, the crowd around me cheered. At that moment I felt more than ever that space mattered and I was so proud to play my small part in the industry.

Space exploration was getting the public attention it deserves and many – not just those within the niche bubble of the industry – were talking enthusiastically about what was next; people from all walks of life were beginning to get excited about continuing to explore space. At the same time, government agencies such as NASA, along with the many new private companies, were talking of bold plans for our space future, including returning humans to the Moon under the Artemis Program. It felt like a new era in space was opening up.

I started writing this book in that summer of 2019, not just because I wanted to inspire as many people as possible about why space matters, but also to try to explain the importance of this new era in space exploration that we are entering. I wanted to share not only the passion that has defined my entire life, but also the hope and possibility that space gives us. To encourage all of us to step away from our smartphones and technology, and look up with a knowledge of why we explore space, how it has shaped our lives and how it will transform those of generations to come. No matter where you are from, who you are, or what you do, space is for all of us – and we all use space technology far more than you probably think.

There are so many amazing stories to tell of the people who made our journey into space possible. I have chosen the ones that inspire me – some well known, others less so. Of course, no book about space exploration would be complete without the story of how we first took to the stars. The space race took place in the shadow of the Cold War, and in that sense it was fuelled by darkness and fear, and yet it ultimately showed us what could be achieved when we united towards a huge, audacious goal.

Today, what many call the Apollo Generation – those who made the Apollo Moon landings possible – are almost gone. We have lost nearly all of those who enabled us to go to the Moon. But their work laid the foundations for everything we do in space. That is why it is important that their story continues to be told. Within the space industry, the phrase ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ is often used to refer to the work we have done since we first left Earth. Nothing we do in space would be possible without those early pioneers.

But behind every endeavour in space exploration are tales of ordinary people who have done extraordinary things. It is these tales that helped to inspire my lifelong love of space. Leaving Earth is not just about science or wonder, but it is also a very human story – one of dedication, determination and sacrifice. In the face of great losses and personal risk, people still choose to travel to space, drawn to it as if to a higher calling.

And, despite the incredible achievements of the Apollo generation, the world we live in today is not what we expected it to be back in the 1960s. But the reality is that we are living in a space age of a different kind. It might not look how we imagined, but we use space technology every single day. In fact, the many satellites in orbit which look back at Earth have helped transform all of our lives.

In many ways, we are now entering an entrepreneurial space age, which is helping to shape our future. Today, going to space is no longer just about governments, but also private companies and individuals. These investors are changing how we get to space and what we can achieve once we are there. Humans will return to the Moon, they will go onwards to Mars and beyond, and they will continue to use space to benefit us all, thanks in part to these entrepreneurs. Though some of their visions and ambitions might seem bold, it is the ability of these people to go against the status quo and their willingness to embrace failure that are helping us to go further than ever before.

If you look back to the beginning of the last century and see just how much we have achieved in little more than one human lifetime, you can begin to realise how far we will go in this century. My hope is that one day our knowledge of science and technology will have advanced to the point where we can grasp more comprehensively our place within the universe and explore all the untold possibilities that lie before us. Though those stars you can see when you look up are too far for us to reach now, perhaps one day we will find a way.

And finally, of all the things we are doing and have done in space, the greatest achievement is the new perspective we have gained. It is a shift in perspective so powerful that it has reduced to tears some who have experienced it for themselves and given all a newfound love of our planet. Images of our world, showing us as a fragile blue marble with swirls of white clouds set against an ink-black backdrop, seemingly floating in nothingness, are perhaps more poignant and profound today than ever before. In space we are united; we all call the same world home. And in order to continue to explore and to go further, we will need to work together. Exploring beyond Earth is bigger than any one nation or individual.

All of us alive today are part of the privileged few, those who live in a time when humans are no longer confined to one planet, but have the ability to step beyond and begin to discover what is out there. We are all part of the Space Age and the pursuit of knowledge beyond our planet will benefit all of us.

Space exploration teaches us that we are all interconnected, and that when we come together we are capable of great things – a lesson that speaks volumes for us right now. It also shows us the value of science, and that scientific research into every aspect of our being is imperative for our ability to survive the great challenges that we face as a species. But perhaps most importantly, space gives us hope. It gives us the ability to dream, to wonder and to understand that we are all in this together. The possibilities to come from the unknowns of the universe and the sense of wonder gained from looking up at the stars fill me with optimism.

I am finishing writing this book in the spring of 2020, in lockdown. A time when the world has been changed by a global pandemic, but the value of science has never been so abundantly clear. Recently, I have found myself looking up at the stars more than ever. Doing so is a reminder of how tiny we are compared with the vastness of what is out there. It is a notion that has helped me to deal with the various hurdles and problems I have faced in my own life, and it continues to do so in the challenging moments of our current existence. There is still beauty in all of this chaos.

So, on that note, I want to finish with a story about two spacecraft. You may have heard of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, the twin robotic spacecraft that launched 16 days apart from each other in 1977. Their mission was a journey across our solar system, initially to explore the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, studying Saturn’s rings and learning about some of the moons of the two planets. They were designed to last for five years – long enough so they could complete their mission.

The initial stages of their journey saw the spacecraft study Jupiter’s atmosphere, uncovering many hurricane-like storms and photographing up close the Great Red Spot – a storm almost three times larger than our Earth that has raged on the planet for centuries. They discovered active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon, Io, and indications of a liquid ocean beneath the icy surface of another moon, Europa. At Saturn, they sent back close-up images of the planet’s rings and found frozen moons shaped by ice volcanoes.

At this point, NASA extended the missions of the two little Voyagers, to keep on exploring. Their five-year lifetimes were stretched out to twelve years and remote programming from Earth allowed the craft to be updated with more modern capabilities. Voyager 1 studied the deep smoggy atmosphere of Saturn’s moon, Titan – the only moon in our solar system that has its own atmosphere, whilst Voyager 2 travelled to the planets Uranus and Neptune. At Uranus it discovered ten new moons orbiting the planet. And at Neptune it discovered a dark spot where winds rage at over one thousand miles per hour and geysers erupt from the poles of the planet’s largest moon, Triton. To date, Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to ever visit these two giant icy balls of gas billions of miles away from us.

With their respective missions complete, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 continued travelling further away from Earth and to the far reaches of our solar system. Even though they were well beyond their expected lifetimes they were still able to communicate via radio signal to scientists back on Earth.

On Valentine’s Day 1990 – at the insistence of the famed cosmologist Carl Sagan – Voyager 1 turned its camera around and pointed it back at Earth. From a distance of four billion miles away, the spacecraft took a photograph. The image, even after being magnified, shows a small pale speck in a corner. The speck is so tiny that if nobody pointed it out, you would probably not notice it. But that tiny speck is all of us. And it is where Sagan’s name for our Earth, ‘The Pale Blue Dot’, came from.

That day, Voyager 1 collected many more photographs that showed six of the other planets in our solar system – Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. All vast unexplored worlds but, from the edge of our solar system, they too looked like tiny bright specks. Stitched together as a mosaic, this became our ‘family portrait’. It will most likely take many human lifetimes to even begin to complete our exploration of what lies within this mosaic.

In 2012, almost 35 years since its launch, Voyager 1 left the solar system and became the first human-made object to reach what is known as interstellar space – the region of space that is beyond the influence and protective bubble of our own Sun or any other star systems. Six years later, in 2018, Voyager 2 followed suit. To save power, the cameras on both spacecraft have been turned off and slowly their instruments will be shut down by scientists. At the moment, the twin craft can still communicate with Earth – a round trip to send and receive data takes more than a day. It is hoped that the spacecraft will be able to transmit signals back to Earth until 2036.

Heading in different directions, when transmissions finally stop, the two spacecrafts will each wander alone in the universe. In the year 40,272, Voyager 1 will pass 1.7 light years from the star Gliese 445. And around the same time Voyager 2 will pass by a small star called Ross 248. Both these stars can be seen here from Earth; they are objects in our night sky that humans have looked up at since our beginnings. Thousands of years from now, two pieces of humanity will have finally reached the stars.

Perhaps by this time, humans will have developed the technology to travel further than we can dream of. They may even catch up with the two Voyagers. But even if they don’t, the spacecraft will still continue on their journeys. Passing by clouds of dust, blown out by dying stars into the vacuum of space.

On board each spacecraft is a twelve-inch disc, known as the Golden Record. These gold-plated phonograph records each contain ‘murmurs of Earth’ – the sounds of our planet and spoken greetings in 55 different languages. They also house electronic images of what life was like in the 1970s – sporting events, families with children, islands in the ocean, dancers and traffic jams in Thailand, as well as details of our anatomy, the structure of our DNA, a map of the planet and a photograph of Earth. Our first cosmic messages in a bottle; a time capsule of who we once were.

Also etched on one side of each record are details of where the two spacecraft have travelled from. Should an extra-terrestrial civilisation ever happen to come across one of the Voyagers, they will be able to decipher the precise location of Earth and how long the crafts have been travelling for. Although in the scale of the universe the chances are slim – the Voyagers are effectively needles in a vast cosmic haystack – there is a small possibility that someone or something might one day discover the first human-made objects to venture beyond our solar system.

In about five billion years’ time, our Sun will swell and die. Earth and the solar system we are only just exploring will be no more. But it is likely that the Voyager spacecraft will still exist – albeit without power. They will spend an eternity wandering through space. Two pieces of the universe that will forever be part of humankind.

In the timespan of one human lifetime, we will not have all the answers to what is out there. We may never have all the answers, but why wouldn’t you want to at least try? To be part of the adventure. We have a choice: remain alone and isolated on this island in the universe that is Earth, or step out into the ocean of our cosmos. All the wonders of the stars above us await.

Prologue
Daring to Dream

‘Curiosity is the essence of human existence.’

Gene Cernan

We are born explorers.

Human beings have always been driven by a desire to know what is over the next hill, on the other side of the river, or across the ocean. In the course of our history, our journeys of discovery may have been motivated by a desire to get rich, to expand our country’s territory or to escape from something at home. But it’s our innate curiosity and our ability to wonder what else is out there that prompted us to make the first steps into the jungle or cast off from the quayside.

Of course, our human curiosity has turned out very badly for some individuals, who took huge risks and paid the ultimate price. But it is this fundamental curiosity that has driven us forward as a species. We love to learn, we yearn to understand what is out there, and leaving the beaten track has taught us a lot of valuable lessons. Our world of today is owed to those who pushed the limits of what is possible; who had a restless urge to know what was over that next hill. Each generation has built on the knowledge gained as a result of the extraordinary risks taken by those who came before them – be that exploring the land around us, sailing the great oceans or taming the skies.

Our quest to discover Earth has gone hand in hand with our fascination with the stars and the universe above us. For nearly as long as there have been people, we have been captivated by space. Cave paintings found at various sites in Europe – some possibly dating back as far as 40,000 years – not only depict hunting scenes and people, but also patterns of the stars in the sky. These primitive star charts were most likely used as a form of time-keeping and demonstrate that our prehistoric ancestors were – like us – looking up.

As civilisations developed, so too did our knowledge and understanding of the stars, and we started to more carefully map and measure what we saw. From Egypt to Babylon, India to China, Greece to Rome and Mesoamerica, there is evidence of humans studying the night sky and using what they could see to better understand life on Earth. Observing the movement of the Sun across the sky and the phases of the Moon led us to develop calendars and learn to tell the time. In Ancient Egypt, for example, the knowledge was used to better plan when to plant and harvest crops, which in turn helped to advance agriculture.

The word ‘planet’ owes its origins to the Ancient Greeks who, like many other civilisations, noticed five star-like objects that, over time, slowly moved through the constellations. Greek astronomers called these points of light asteres planetai, or ‘wandering stars’; today we know they were looking not at stars but at the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

But, lacking in knowledge about the solar system and our place within it, many at the time thought the planets were deities. We owe the names we use for them today in English (and other Latin-based languages) to the Romans, who named them in honour of their gods. The vastness of the night sky and the movement of the celestial bodies were so beyond our comprehension for most of human history that we told ourselves stories of gods and demons to explain them. In Hinduism, eclipses were explained by the demon Rahu briefly getting hold of the Sun or Moon. In Norse mythology, the Sun and Moon are pursued by two wolves, Hati and Skoll, who sometimes briefly catch up with them. And in Ancient China, it was believed that during an eclipse the Sun was eaten by a dragon, and it was necessary to bang on drums to frighten it away – a superstition that persisted even after Chinese astronomers learnt to predict when an eclipse would happen.

Our oldest science – astronomy – also aided our exploration of Earth. Navigation relied on it. Before the compass (invented in China in the eleventh century), the stars guided explorers as they sought to understand the world around them and expand their civilisations. For a long time, the geography of our planet – something we take for granted today – was continually evolving. For many centuries, while Europe languished in the Dark Ages, Chinese and Islamic thinkers and explorers led the way in understanding the world. But by the fifteenth century, some European nations – spurred on by the prospect of expanding their trading routes – were poised to catch up, with huge consequences for the world we know today.

In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan set sail from Seville with a fleet of five ships and a crew of 270 men. Their voyage was being bankrolled by the King of Spain and the intention was to find an alternative passage to the Spice Islands – now the Moluccas, in modern-day Indonesia – by heading west around the globe instead of taking the established easterly route. Few educated people at this time thought the world was flat, but some of Magellan’s contemporaries still suspected the voyage wasn’t even possible. The problem, though, was the size of the Earth, not its shape.

Polynesian people had explored the Pacific, settling on the islands they discovered – from Hawaii to Easter Island – starting perhaps as far back as 3,000 BCE. However, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the most Europeans knew about what we now call the Pacific Ocean was that there was some sort of ‘south sea’ on the other side of the Americas. They had absolutely no idea of the scale of the ocean Magellan was planning to cross, nor how to find a sea passage into it. Yet despite the dangers, the arduous conditions they would experience on board, and the fear of sea monsters and storms, sailors joined Magellan’s crew. They were motivated by the riches they could gain if they were successful – the spice trade was incredibly lucrative at the time. But there were still less dangerous ways to make money. Magellan and crew were daring to dream an impossible dream. It had only been 20 years since Vasco da Gama had become the first European to travel around the Cape of Good Hope and make it to India.

Of the five ships that set sail, only one made it back to Spain. Many – Magellan included – died during the attempt. While Magellan succeeded in finding and crossing through a strait at the foot of South America – which would go on to be named after him – he had to face a mutiny from his crew beforehand, and only regained control after beheading and marooning some of the mutineers. Those that survived the scurvy and starvation that ensued on their 98-day crossing of an expanse of water far bigger than anyone had imagined became the first Europeans to sail the Pacific Ocean.

Magellan himself died in the Philippines after picking a fight with a local king, but those 18 expedition members who survived the three-year voyage to return to Seville became the first humans to ever circumnavigate the globe. They had undertaken a voyage nobody else had. Something which to so many had seemed impossible, was now possible.

This period in European history is known as the Age of Exploration. It radically reshaped the world as we then knew it, and wreaked devastation on countless indigenous peoples. The Portuguese prince often called Henry the Navigator is credited with making a big contribution to exploration as he commissioned many expeditions at a time when lots of sailors were afraid of setting out into the Atlantic Ocean, tasking them with recording as much information as they could about the coastlines they visited. However, Henry was also responsible for starting the Atlantic slave trade. So when we celebrate humanity’s drive to explore, at the same time it is also important to reflect on the horrendous mistakes we made.

The desire to discover new lands for their nations pushed shipbuilders, cartographers and astronomers to come up with better technology. A new type of ship, the caravel – capable of faster speeds and with manoeuvrable sails allowing it to tack into the wind – helped to make the voyages of Magellan and many others possible. Explorers also had to learn how to live on board ship for long periods of time, though how to prevent scurvy – the eventually deadly consequence of depriving the body of vitamin C – wasn’t understood until the eighteenth century. Our desire to explore has continued to help push the limits of our understanding of the sciences of medicine and physiology.

At the same time as we were sending ships to further-away places, great minds were looking up and challenging the established ideas about the universe, often going against the thinking of religion. On his deathbed in 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published his book On the Revolutions of Celestial Spheres. For more than a thousand years, we had believed the Earth was at the centre of the solar system; the Sun, the known planets and the stars all travelled around the Earth. But Copernicus’s work challenged the idea upheld by the church. He stated that the Sun, not the Earth, was in fact at the centre of the solar system. His book was met with controversy, but it led the way to the Scientific Revolution and a new way of understanding our world. Among the great inventions of this period was the telescope, which opened up the wonders above us like never before.

Then, in 1768, the Royal Society and the British Admiralty sent James Cook to sail to Tahiti, where he and his crew aboard the Endeavour would observe the transit of Venus. This is when Venus appears to cross the Sun, as viewed from Earth. The transit of Venus occurs in pairs, eight years apart, every 120 years or so. Scientists at the Royal Society hoped that observing this phenomenon from the Pacific Ocean would expand their knowledge of the solar system. At the time, we understood that there were six planets, including Earth. Astronomers knew the relative spacing of these planets but what was a great mystery was the size of the solar system. It was hoped that by measuring Venus crossing our Sun from different locations on Earth, and noting the start and stop times, it would be possible to calculate how far away the planet is from Earth and therefore deduce an estimate of the size of the known solar system.

Using special telescopes, Cook and his onboard astronomer Charles Green observed the transit. But the intense sunlight filtering through Venus’s atmosphere made the edge of the disc of the planet fuzzy, meaning it was difficult to get precise timings. The times recorded by Cook and Green differed by 42 seconds, and there were many variations in the other measurements recorded elsewhere in the world. It would take until the nineteenth century and the next pair of transits for astronomers to get the precise measurements needed – this time aided by photography.

Cook then continued with the second part of his mission and headed south, in search of ‘Terra Australis Incognita’. Dutch, and possibly Portuguese, explorers had visited parts of Australia’s coast already, but it wasn’t known for sure whether this was the southern continent that many scientists believed must exist to ‘balance’ the landmass of the northern hemisphere.

After he first arrived in New Zealand and mapped it, Cook concluded that it was two islands and not what he was looking for. He finally sighted what he would name New South Wales on 19 April 1770 and ‘claimed’ it for Britain. The result of his discovery was that it was now possible to draw a reasonably accurate map of the world. Our picture of our home planet had changed completely since 1492, when Christopher Columbus had arrived in the Caribbean and believed it to be Asia.

Before the Age of Exploration began in the fifteenth century, the oceans had been the great frontier. But by embarking on these bold journeys and pushing the limits of where humans could go, we gained a better understanding of the Earth’s geography. These impossible voyages also opened the door to future expeditions that would focus on scientific discovery rather than conquest and riches. In many ways, the voyage of the Endeavour was comparable to our space missions of today – Cook and his crew set sail both to conduct scientific research and to expand what we knew about our surroundings.

As we increased our knowledge of our planet and our understanding of science, our attention began to turn to the skies. People have always been fascinated by the idea of flying and the ability of birds to leave terra firma and rise high above us. The first real studies into the possibilities of flight were made by Leonardo da Vinci in the 1480s. Centuries ahead of his time, he produced over 100 drawings to illustrate his theories, and he famously drew a design for something that looks a lot like the modern helicopter. However, the ability to successfully rise above the ground and travel in the air had so far evaded us.

Then, on 19 September 1783, a crowd of dignitaries including King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette gathered in Paris, France, to watch the flight of the Montgolfier balloon. I like to imagine that the atmosphere was comparable to the crowds watching the first crewed rocket launches on Florida’s Space Coast almost two centuries later. The Montgolfier brothers behind the first hot air balloon were the Elon Musks of their day. They had made their money in paper manufacturing – a high-tech industry at the time – and were now pioneering a new type of technology.

The passengers for this flight were a duck, a sheep and a cockerel. No one had yet been up in the Montgolfiers’ invention as they didn’t know at the time if people could survive at altitude. The animals had been selected carefully; the thinking was that the sheep mimicked the physiology of a human, the duck was seen as unlikely to be harmed (as they already fly) and the cockerel was a control – cockerels are birds, but they do not fly. The animals survived their eight-minute journey, and humans would shortly follow them into the skies.

Two months later, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent le Vieux d’Arlandes sailed high above the rooftops of Paris – to the astonishment of its citizens – in the first crewed, untethered flight. Europe became gripped by balloonmania and its early pioneers were celebrities of the time.

Scientists, engineers and designers – and the people or organisations who bankroll their work – bring us great technological breakthroughs, enabling things to be done that have never been done before. But in order to achieve anything, you first have to come up with the idea. As Albert Einstein famously said, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’ And for nearly as long as we have understood the Moon to be our satellite, and another world, rather than a deity or object in danger of being eaten by a wolf or dragon, we have imagined what it might be like to go there.

By the late nineteenth century, our understanding of science and technology had boomed as the Age of Enlightenment brought about a new understanding of the world around us. In turn, this knowledge helped inspire the imagination of artists and writers. Works of science fiction began to depict voyages to space. Jules Verne’s eerily prophetic From the Earth to the Moon of 1865 and its sequel Around the Moon, told the tale of three Americans launched from Florida bound on a voyage to the Moon, who later splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Little more than 100 years later, three astronauts would do just that – launch from Florida bound on a mission to the Moon. Science fiction became science prediction.

One of the greatest ever writers of adventure stories, Jules Verne was born in 1828 in the French coastal city of Nantes. He grew up on stories of shipwrecks and nautical travels, and watched sailors at the docks close to where he lived arrive back from remote and far-flung places. The books he wrote as an adult were about impossible voyages and daring expeditions, but they were grounded in meticulously researched scientific fact and inspired by our real-life adventures on Earth. Verne’s story about a voyage to the Moon would go on to inspire one of the first movies, Georges Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la Lune. The 13-minute film captivated audiences in 1902, showing a crew of explorers shot from a cannon into the eye of the Moon.

Then, the following year, on 17 December 1903, on a windswept beach in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, humans became capable of powered flight. Two bicycle builders, Orville and Wilbur Wright, successfully flew the aeroplane they had designed. The initial trip lasted just seconds, but it ignited the age of aviation. The skies became the new frontier.

Aviation’s pioneers continually pushed the limits of where flight could take us. This new technology developed quickly and captured the imagination of the public. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first person to travel solo across the Atlantic by aeroplane, flying from New York to Paris. His journey took 33.5 hours. A great ocean, which for so long could only be crossed by an arduous sea voyage, had been traversed in less than two days.

This new frontier of flight, of course, came with high risks. Many of the famed pilots of the era – among them Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic – lost their lives in the pursuit of extending our airborne capabilities. But in spite of the risks and the dangers, people continued in their quest to tame the sky. The spirit of adventure and yearning to fly called loudly to a new generation of explorers.

The demands of the Second World War brought yet more development in flight as aircraft became larger as well as capable of flying further and faster. Then in 1947 Chuck Yeager did something which had once been thought impossible – in a specially designed craft, the Bell X-1, he flew at over 800mph, faster than the speed of sound. Until this point it was unknown what would happen if someone in a plane attempted to cross what had been dubbed ‘the sound barrier’.

As many remained captivated by the developments of aviation, other great minds looked very seriously at the feasibility of humans leaving Earth. Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Esnault-Pelterie would become known as the ‘Fathers of Rocketry’. Inspired by great works of science fiction, at the turn of the twentieth century they worked independently to develop the mathematics and techniques that would form the basics for us to eventually leave Earth by rocket. Voyages to space were no longer the stuff of science fiction, but instead within our grasp.

The stage was set for the stars.

On 4 May 1989, Magellan once again set out to explore the unknown. This time it was the Magellan spacecraft, launched by NASA to reach the orbit of Venus and map the planet’s surface. It became one of NASA’s most successful deep-space missions, just over 200 hundred years after those aboard James Cook’s HMS Endeavour watched the planet cross the Sun from the deck of their ship. NASA has often named spacecraft for the great explorers who set out to learn more about our planet or their ships – the Space Shuttle Endeavour was named after James Cook’s ship, and the name would later be used for the first SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule to be flown with astronauts onboard, while the Space Shuttle Challenger owed its name to the British Navy research vessel HMS Challenger, which explored the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in the 1870s.

In many ways, space was our next natural step. Once we had sailed the great oceans, mapped the land and mastered the skies, it was inevitable that we would want to go further. So while our contemporary space scientists and engineers are working at the edge of what we currently know how to do, in some ways this is nothing new. We have always pushed at the boundaries of what we are capable of – figuring out how to achieve the impossible is how we move forward as a species. Our world of today, for better and worse, is owed to those who set sail in search of new horizons.

Today, the distance between the planets in our solar system is like the span of the oceans between the continents for those in the Age of Exploration. Just like our ancestors, we are setting sail into the unknown on voyages that will bring about new discoveries, knowledge and benefits that we cannot even imagine. History has taught us that, by building on the knowledge of previous generations, things which once seemed impossible eventually become possible.

Chapter One
The Space Race

‘Far better it is to dare mighty things.’

President Theodore Roosevelt

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