The Space Age

Exactly 54 years ago to this day, a momentous event created history. This is an event that will be remembered long after man has left the Earth to settle down on other planets.

It was on April 12, 1961 that Soviet (now Russian) cosmonaut was the date of the first human space flight, carried out by Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet citizen. This historic event opened the way for space exploration for the benefit of all humanity. It was also the date on which the first space shuttle (Columbia) was launched from the Kennedy Space Centre, USA, in 1981.

Fittingly, the United Nations has declared April 12 as the International Day of Human Space Flight. The UN resolution calls on all nations "to celebrate each year at the international level the beginning of the space era for mankind, reaffirming the important contribution of space science and technology in achieving sustainable development goals and increasing the well-being of States and peoples, as well as ensuring the realization of their aspiration to maintain outer space for peaceful purposes."

Conviction

The General Assembly has expressed its deep conviction of the common interest of mankind in promoting and expanding the exploration and use of outer space, as the province of all mankind, for peaceful purposes and in continuing efforts to extend to all States the benefits derived there from.

"I am confident that the International Day of Human Space Flight will remind us of our common humanity and our need to work together to conquer shared challenges. I hope it will also inspire young people in particular to pursue their dreams and move the world towards new frontiers of knowledge and understanding, says UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

While manned space flight is fascinating, space technology amounts to much more than humans exploring space. Space technology is widely used for disaster management, weather and climate change studies, food security studies and of course telecommunications. It has also given us a window into deep space primarily through the Hubble Space Telescope, which recently turned 25.

Exploration

But there is no doubt that nothing can really beat manned space exploration, even if some of the alien landscapes may simply be out of bounds for humans and best explored by robotic probes. "In a way the situation was like that in Europe before 1492. The discovery of the new world made profound differences to the old. Spreading out into space will have even greater effect. It will completely change the future of the human race and maybe determine whether we have any future at all. Hopefully, it would unite us to face a common challenge," says renowned physicist Stephen Hawking.

Since 1961, there have been many milestones in human space flight and exploration. Man conquered the Moon in 1969, though we have not been there for more than 40 years afterwards. Many women too have explored the Final Frontier, as space is often called. Astronauts have gone on 'Space Walks' (you know what it is like if you have seen the movie "Gravity") and conducted many scientific experiments in the weightless world of space. Indeed, space exploration has given us many new products that we now use every day.

Many countries have joined together to establish the International Space Station (ISS) and now two astronauts plan to take things to the extreme with a "One Year Mission" in orbit around the Earth. American astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will spend the next 350 days in orbit, helping space agencies to gain a better understanding of the biomedical aspects of long-duration space flight as they gear up for a manned mission to Mars. However, this still won't be the longest anyone has spent in space. That record belongs to Valery Polyakov, a Russian cosmonaut who orbited the Earth from January 1994 to March 1995 - almost 438 consecutive days. According to Kelly, their Mission will give scientists an idea of how the human body could cope with a multi-year round trip to Mars.

Candidate

That brings us to the place Man will probably go next - Mars the Red Planet. Almost the Earth's twin in so many ways, it is possibly the only candidate in the Solar System other than the Moon where Mankind will establish a permanent settlement some day. There is already talk of sending a group of astronauts to Mars who will permanently settle there, partly because bringing them back is prohibitively expensive with current technology.

The privately-run Mars Society already has a Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, USA which mimics Martian conditions and another private organisation recently began selecting 100 applicants for a one-way trip to Mars. We already know quite a lot about Mars thanks to the considerable number of robotic probes exploring the planet, including the fact that it once had surface liquid water (it still has water locked up in ice). But the most fundamental question has still not been answered - could Mars have harboured or still be harbouring some sort of life, even if it is only microscopic?

Efforts continue to send a manned mission to Mars. A recent workshop hosted by The Planetary Society explored the feasibility of a manned mission to orbit Mars's moon of Phobos in 2033, followed by a landing on the surface of the Red Planet six years later, an event at least some of us will live to witness if it happens. Mars may even be "terraformed" eventually, whereby it will be converted to an Earth-like planet. The technology already exists at various levels, but it will be a huge logistical challenge.

Explore

Man will, of course, go beyond the Solar System a la Star Trek and explore other planets, (Exoplanets) about which we already know a great deal. That will have to happen if Mankind is to survive. Robots can only go so far and human curiosity knows no bounds. As the saying goes, there is nothing like "being there". It is inevitable that Man will explore deep space. When that happens one day, we will look back in time at this date in human history that made it all happen.