Global Exploration Strategy Chapters 1-7

The Global Exploration Strategy:

A Framework for Coordination
Status as at February 25, 2007

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  All agencies to review and provide comments on this draft to be discussed and disposed at Kyoto, Japan, meetings on March 6-9, 2007
  

The purpose of the Framework Document is twofold: 1) to articulate a compelling political case to decision makers in space agency capitals for gaining broad public support of globally coordinated, exploration-focused space activities of the Moon, Mars and other destinations; and, 2) to set the stage for future discussion on space exploration coordination mechanisms and initial lunar exploration architectures.]

In order to finalize this document at our meeting in Kyoto on March 6-9, 2007, we have very little time to make comments on and edits to this document. The intent of this exercise is to make the document acceptable to your agency. Please limit your changes only to wording that for your agency are unacceptable; where the wording is unacceptable, please suggest an acceptable change. In order to ease our review, please provide clearly marked line-in/line-out changes. Please also note that we can submit this to a professional editor, so I would hope that your review will focus on only those items that would by their inclusion make it difficult for your agency to accept the document. Grammatical, spelling, plurality and punctuation issues will be handled by the editor.]

Chapter 1
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Space exploration is essential to our future. Through the exploration of space can we answer fundamental questions such as: ‘where did we come from?’ ‘what is our place in the universe?’ and ‘what is our destiny?’ Coordinated space exploration will both serve and inspire our societies by bringing nations together in a common cause, revealing new knowledge, and stimulating technical and commercial innovation here on Earth. The Global Exploration Strategy is a key to unlock this door to this future.


lobal Exploration Strategy: The Framework for Coordination
Human curiosity compels us to explore, to understand and to use the world in which we find ourselves. Voyages of exploration and discovery are an index of cultural vigour and every vibrant society has looked beyond its horizons to somewhere new.

[The evidence suggests that modern man emerged in ancient Africa and spread across Eurasia, beginning about one million years ago, no doubt using some of the same available land routes north of the Himalayas that were later to become the Silk Road. Some believe that primitive man may have built rafts to sail the oceans. Thousands of years ago, man also inhabited the Americas. Genetic analysis tells a complex story of the subsequent movements of peoples across all the continents. Some cultures remember individual explorers while others recall mass migrations through myth and legend.

In the 20^th Century, the highest mountains were climbed and a few explorers reached the South Pole after long and dangerous treks. As history shows, traders, scientists and – finally - ordinary people follow the first explorers. Today, business involves countless international partnerships across the continents as well as personal, human connections that span national boundaries. The Himalayas have become a tourist destination and even the Antarctic supports permanent scientific installations where we learn about life in a hostile environment and investigate climate change.]

Only in the past fifty years – a brief moment in human history - have we been able to venture beyond the shores of Earth and into the new ocean of space. But already, the pattern of early discovery followed by sustained presence is being repeated. Since Yuri Gagarin’s flight in 1961, most of the four hundred and fifty human explorers of space have been confined to orbiting a few hundred kilometres above our heads. The only exceptions were the two dozen Apollo astronauts that ventured to the Moon between 1968 and 1972.

We have learned many new skills needed to live and work in space, both physically, with humans, and by proxy using robotic spacecraft.¹ So far, the most distant and challenging destinations have been explored only by these robotic missions. They have given us a tenuous, ‘virtual presence’ across our Solar System. The most travelled of these probes, Voyager 1 is now leaving the Solar System forever.
Meanwhile, Earth’s orbit has been harnessed to serve the citizen, through satellites that provide worldwide telecommunications, deliver reliable weather forecasts and aid emergency workers responding to natural disasters. This document is not concerned with these latter, well proven uses of space. Successful coordination mechanisms exist already to allocate the radio spectrum used for Earth telecommunications and to harmonise the use of the world’s fleet of Earth observation satellites.

Instead, the Global Exploration Strategy (GES) presents a new opportunity. It elaborates a vision for globally coordinated space exploration, which we define as being focused on Solar System destinations upon which - someday - humans will live and work. It also sets the stage for the discussions and hard work that will turn the vision into reality. And it includes a plan for action for coordinating national space agency strategies in ways that will help these agencies (government representatives that include space agencies and groups of space agencies designated by their government), more effectively and safely execute their objectives for space exploration.

The number of individual countries involved in space exploration is growing steadily. At the same time, by building on what has already been learnt, our overall ability to accomplish scientific, technological and human goals has never been so great. Together, these trends suggest that we are entering a new wave of space exploration, one of historic significance. For evidence, consider the US Vision for Space Exploration; the European Aurora space exploration programme; and the ambitious national Moon or Mars projects in China, India, Japan, Russia and Italy. The public has witnessed astronauts building the International Space Station - perhaps the most ambitious science and technology project ever - and marvelled as the Huygens probe revealed a new world of river valleys and mountains beneath the clouds of Titan, nearly a billion miles from Earth.

Much of what has been achieved has resulted from bilateral or multi-lateral agreements between space-faring nations. This will continue in the future. But there has never been a single, comprehensive strategy for space exploration, one that allows existing plans to be coordinated and new ones to be developed. This GES Framework for Coordination, developed by fourteen space agencies, therefore represents a new beginning.

It builds upon international discussions during 2006 that have shaped a common set of space exploration themes and published lunar objectives. It discusses the attributes of and need for voluntary, non-binding forum (the Coordination Mechanism) for nations to share their plans for space exploration and to find ways to work together to increase the impact of individual projects and the strength of the collective effort.

This Framework is not a proposal for a single programme, for this is neither practical nor useful. Nations have varying national scientific, technological and societal objectives for their space activities, and – inevitably – some can afford to do more than others. The principal space exploration destinations for the foreseeable future comprise the Moon, Mars and near-Earth asteroids. We have not yet the practical knowledge to conceive of human missions to exciting but distant destinations such as Europa, Enceladus or Titan. Yet even for the first group of feasible destinations, exploration will require both robotic and human space missions of all sizes and complexity for many years to come. Thus, space exploration will continue to comprise multiple but inter-linked lines of progress.

A coordinated strategy can help in several ways. As progress is made, the results of one project – scientific results and technical performance - could assist the development of another. Objectives could be shared and opportunities for joint projects will naturally emerge, driven by the wish to maximise the return on investment of individual nations.

Further, as a central tool in developing mutual understanding, the Framework foresees the development of an exploration Reference Architecture. By jointly creating this common language of exploration building blocks, planners and engineers will be able to agree how practical features such as communications systems, environmental models and docking systems could be made to work together. Such ‘interoperability’ between space vehicles will lower the risk of space missions and could even assure crew safety in case of a life-threatening emergency.

The international coordination process is not an exclusive club. As a voluntary mechanism, participation is open to other nations. They will bring new perspectives and skills and in return will gain access to the common knowledge and experience. Although government agencies have led the creation of the GES, the Framework also recognises that commerce will have an increasingly important role in turning the new frontiers of space to economic opportunity. It is hoped that entrepreneurs will create businesses in exploiting resources or by providing services such as cargo transport and telecommunications, thus freeing-up government funds to push further the bounds of human knowledge. The successful exploitation of Earth’s orbit over the past thirty years strongly suggests that this is likely. In time, issues of property rights and the protection of sites of scientific interest may arise and the GES Coordination Mechanism will provide a forum to discuss such new challenges.

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Space exploration is no longer the preserve of a few countries. It is now a global endeavour that in the 21^st Century will see humanity extend its presence across the Solar System, with both crewed and un-crewed space missions. The time is right to establish international co-ordination of space exploration to maximise the benefits for nations, business and every citizen.

n this Framework document, the rationale for space exploration is described, together with the steps along our collective journey. The need for synergy between robotic and human explorers is introduced together with the common themes of exploration. The renewed focus on the Moon is explained, both as an important destination in its own right and as a stepping-stone in particular for human exploration to Mars and beyond. Thus we show how the opportunities for coordination will make space exploration both more affordable and more robust and so will deliver the maximum benefit to society.

Chapter 2

Space Exploration in Service of Society

Globally, humankind is facing many pressing social, political and environmental challenges. In this context, the relevance of space exploration to society is sometimes not well understood. So, why does it matter? How can space exploration contribute to our common future?

Space exploration is today’s expression of what seems to be a fundamental human characteristic: our deep curiosity to explore the unknown. In doing so, we gain new knowledge and skills that then become part of our collective ability to help solve human problems and support commerce in many useful and unpredictable ways. The very difficulty of space exploration is what triggers human inspiration and innovation.

The first 50 years of spaceflight not only created the know-how for global telecommunications but also the ability to monitor the Earth from space. The data from Earth observation satellites has provided key evidence of climate change – for example, the steady increase of sea surface temperature measured over 15 years. The technical creativity responding to the challenges of the airless, low gravity space environment constantly creates spin-off benefits. For example, cordless power tools such as drills were derived from equipment developed for astronauts to collect surface and subsurface lunar soil samples. Terrahertz imaging technology used to study whole planets has now been adapted for use in a new generation of airport security scanners and for medical diagnosis.

In the future, a sustained but affordable agenda of globally co-ordinated space exploration can serve our society through:

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  Securing new knowledge and solving global challenges in space and here on Earth through innovative technology;
  
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  Permanently extending human presence into space, physically and culturally;
  
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  Enabling economic expansion and new business opportunities;
  
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  Creating global partnerships by sharing challenging and peaceful goals;
  
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  Inspiring society through the collective effort and personal endeavour.
  

Theme 1: New Knowledge in Science and Technology

Exploration is inherently about willingly taking manageable risks to go about discovering the unknown, and much of what it reveals is unknowable in advance. This presents challenges for economists wanting to calculate the returns from new investments, but this is not a new problem. To take a historical example, when Heinrich Hertz was experimenting with the first apparatus to transmit and receive electromagnetic waves in 1887, he hardly envisaged our modern world of global telecommunications, nor the economic activity that it sustains.

An understanding of our Solar System in relation to both the biosphere of Earth and to the vast Universe beyond is central to the search for new knowledge that space exploration delivers. We have made a good start with robotic spacecraft, brief human missions to the Moon and human activity in low-Earth-orbit. However, while these have yielded insights into the evolution of our solar system and its planets we have by far not reached a thorough understanding.

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Today, much Solar System research feeds one big question: how and why is there life on Earth, in such glorious abundance, and yet we have so far not found it elsewhere. This is a question not just of cold scientific interest but also of philosophical importance.

[Missions to Venus - at first sight, the Earth’s twin in size - have found a planet of hellish conditions where a runaway global warming has produced a dense atmosphere of choking sulphuric acid and temperatures hot enough to melt lead. While the scientific study of Venus continues it is unlikely to be a destination for humans.

In contrast, Mars seems to have many of the raw materials for life, including water, yet it seems on the surface to be cold and barren. We know that the maintenance of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere – necessary to maintain temperatures warm enough for life – is intimately linked to volcanic and tectonic activity which recycles substances vital to life. Thus, although Mars has huge extinct volcanoes, today Mars seems quiescent.. However, robotic missions have now found evidence of recent hydrological activity and some scientists believe that there is evidence of frozen oceans. Today, we simply don’t know whether life could, did or even still does exist on Mars.

What triggers life? Simple carbon molecules that could be precursors to the complex chemistry of life have been found in such diverse places as comets and the thick atmosphere of Titan, the huge Moon which circles the planet Saturn. Why is our chemical make-up more akin to both the Sun and the giant planets such as Jupiter than it is to the rocky planet on which we live? The answers are unclear and will only be found by mapping the distribution of these ‘pre-biotic’ chemicals throughout the Solar System as well as in the planets forming around distant stars. We need to visit all relevant destinations to get a complete picture, but we will bias our most detailed investigations to the more accessible places, where humans can undertake long term research.

The Moon has a unique role to play in unravelling the origins and history of the solar system. To quote one learned body, ‘the Moon is potentially a unique museum of the history of the solar system’. Most of the Earth’s surface is geologically young, as the motion of the tectonic plates, earthquakes and volcanoes have re-made the face of the planet many times. Consequently, the Earth records little of the solar system’s story –the many impacts from comets and asteroids or possible changes in the Sun’s behaviour - or the conditions in which life emerged. In contrast, the cold environment of the Moon has been passively receiving material from the solar wind, meteorites, and even galactic particles throughout its history of four billion years or more.

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Global scale space exploration is an engine of scientific and technical progress. Problem-solving drives innovation, and the bigger the problems, the greater is the innovation that results.

ost tantalisingly, if - as is currently thought - the Moon was formed by a cataclysmic collision between a planet-sized object and the early Earth, some clues about the conditions on Earth when life began may be preserved in the Moon. To successfully explore this ‘planetary museum’ will likely require both the ability to access the sub-surface several hundred meters down and also the ability to roam over the surface at will. Both imply that human explorers, perhaps working in partnership with advanced robots, will be essential to answer the big questions.

Similar techniques will be needed at Mars. There, we will drill for ice core samples just as we do at Greenland and the Antarctic, seeking the historical record of the planet’s climate. We will penetrate purported subsurface bodies of water where some form of life may yet exist, protected from radiation and the cold of the surface.

We have also started to investigate the leftover materials from which the solar system was built: asteroids and comets. Beyond the question of their role in distributing pre-biotic chemicals and water through the early solar system, we now know that these objects can and do strike the Earth and likely have been the cause of several mass extinctions in the Earth’s history. So far, humanity has been lucky, but one day our luck will run out. Exploring, mapping and even exploiting these objects for their mineral resources is now a realistic prospect. Studies of the first spacecraft to deflect an Earth-crossing asteroid are now underway. A healthy space exploration programme will create the essential knowledge needed to give us this ultimate insurance policy. As the space scientist Carl Sagan observed, the dinosaurs died out because they didn’t have a space programme.]