Exactly 80 years ago today, man was walking on the moon for the first time. On this very specific day, we became a multiplanet species. Out of our primary physical condition and less subject to the constraints of our natural environment, Humanity took the initiative to fly out of its original world and to explore beyond what had never been possible.
As we celebrate these 80 years, a lot has been said about the past eighty years that have passed.
Indeed, after this impressive success which, more than the success of a country or a community, was indeed the success of the whole humanity, the space conquest eventually went to a rough stop. Of course, technical missions have continued (mainly through probes and other robots) but without a real project to transport humans from our planet.
For decades, most certainly related to the economic and social situation of our planet, we continued to look at the stars but we stopped focusing our energy on their exploration.
Then, in the 2020s, finally, Humanity rested the question: what if we went to visit elsewhere? Operated by companies created at the time such as SpaceX, Blue Origin or RocketLab that have facilitated the development of less expensive solutions, more flexible and therefore more adapted to the context of the moment, new spacecrafts were designed with the end goal of starting to explore again.
The ambitions of some of these entrepreneurs, including the best known and most visible of them, Elon Musk, have finally succeeded in reviving human space exploration projects.
In 2034, finally, the first manned mission to Mars took off from the surface of the Earth.
At that time, as still today and as in the early days of space exploration, many people were asking themselves and always wonders about the usefulness of such an approach. Between issues related to spiritual, religious, philosophical beliefs, critical approaches due to economic or environmental questions ... many reproaches could be made to this industry and this vast project, often presented as ambitious, presumptuous or even related to primal instincts of competition.
However, we often forget that projects related to space exploration have often been linked to the discovery of technologies that are concretely useful for those who have remained on Earth: the evolution of medicine, technologies related to energy and transport ... The conquest of Space brings us much more than the answer to a "kid's dream" and the positive impacts on our daily lives are easily assessable.
Beyond that, it will be useful to emphasize that, like many technological innovations, the space conquest was at the start strongly linked to the armaments industry and the military ambitions of many States. But the privatization movement of the space conquest, as initiated at the end of 2010, completely separated the space industry from the military world eventually. Better yet, this ambitious conquest has since been brought closer to environmental issues related to climate change and has thus been able to draw the attention of the general public to the urgency of the situation.
Reduced to having to change planet, Humanity began to understand the importance of individual actions and commitments!
While the first human mission is about to return from our red neighbor, it is more than necessary to remember that it is by targeting the stars that we will reach the moon!