A new year is about to begin, a new year that will be filled with both the good and the bad. We doubtless will face a number of crises, our politicians will regularly make a mess of things. We will be inspired, and we will be discouraged. For some of us, our favorite sports team will do well, and for most of us, we’ll end the season by saying “wait till next year.” Some of us will experience loss and mourning, and some will experience hope and joy. Some of us will face both. For most of us, the coming year will simply be the same old, same old: mostly boring. Boring is good.
The new year of 2015 promises to be a very good year for space fans. Come April the spacecraft Dawn will arrive at the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest of the asteroids that circle the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Dawn spent a year orbiting Vesta (the second largest asteroid) in 2011and 2012 and in 2015 will begin a yearlong circling of Ceres, which may have a bit of an atmosphere, probably has a lot of water ice on it, and perhaps even a subsurface liquid ocean. Doubtless our scientists will discover wonderful and unexpected things.
Come July, New Horizons, which left Earth in January 2006, will at last arrive at its primary destination: Pluto. When New Horizons launched, Pluto was still classified as a planet, rather than a dwarf planet. That changed within months. About six months prior to launch, astronomers had announced the discovery of Eris on July 29, 2005. Eris is located about three times further from the sun than Pluto, in a highly elliptical and eccentric orbit (Pluto’s orbit is likewise very eccentric and elliptical—it actually spends 20 years of its 248 yearlong orbit closer to the sun than Neptune). Eris is slightly larger than Pluto and initially people thought that it would be labeled as the tenth planet. But instead, it forced astronomers to re-evaluate what Pluto was—because Eris wasn’t really alone in these weird objects away far away from the sun: there are several rather sizeable objects besides Pluto and Eris orbiting the sun beyond Neptune that are large enough for their gravity to have made them spherical: Makemake, Haumea (which an ellipsoid because of its rapid rotation), Orcus, Quaoar, Sedna, Ixion, and Varuna, plus many others that are still unnamed and merely numbered at the moment. Rather than continuing to think of Pluto as a planet, it dawned on the scientists that Pluto was actually just the first of this whole class of bodies that existed mostly beyond the orbit of Pluto and stretching out toward the even more distant Oort cloud, the home of the long period comets. Thus, the decision was made by August, 2006 to reclassify Pluto not as a traditional planet, but rather as one of thousands of Kuiper Belt objects. Astronomers have found other stars also have Kuiper Belts, just as most also have planets.
This isn’t the first time this sort of reclassification has occurred. For instance, in the 19th century the asteroid and now dwarf planet Ceres was originally identified as a planet, until the realization that they were simply the largest of the objects we now call asteroids that whirl about scattered between Jupiter and Mars.
Other space related events of 2015 will include multiple launches of cargo ships to the International Space Station. The launches by SpaceX will perhaps be most interesting not for their cargo carrying, but for the tests of the landing system for the first stage boosters. SpaceX will repeatedly attempt to land their booster stages, at first on a floating barge designed just for this purpose, and then, once they become confident of the system and all the kinks have been worked out (some spectacular failures are likely along the way) they will bring a booster stage back to the launch facility for a soft landing. The first successful demonstration of this system will be one of the more significant events in the history of space flight. Up until that moment, rockets have been mostly disposable, each one launched but once and then destroyed after use. If the first stage booster—which makes up about 75 percent of the cost of a rocket—can be landed, refueled and then reused without needing refurbishment, which is the goal SpaceX has set for itself—the cost of space travel will drop precipitously. SpaceX is currently the cheapest ride into orbit. They charge their customers about 61.2 million dollars per launch. The cost of the fuel for a launch, according to the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, is only about 200,000 dollars; the rest of the cost is hardware. If you only need to refuel, rather than replace the whole booster, your cost is going to drop precipitously. The full reusability of the first stage will be a revolutionary change in space travel, making it relatively cheap to get to orbit. Eventually our dreams of ordinary, non-billionaire folk being able to take a vacation in orbit or somewhere else in the solar system will become reality rather than science fiction. 2015 may be the year that we see that future finally begin.
