Engineers at NASA say they have successfully revived thrusters aboard Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from our planet, in the nick of time before a planned communications blackout.
A side effect of upgrades to an Earth-based antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, the communications pause could have occurred when the probe faced a critical issue — thruster failure — leaving the space agency without a way to save the historic mission. The new fix to the vehicle’s original roll thrusters, out of action since 2004, could help keep the veteran spacecraft operating until it’s able to contact home again next year.
Voyager 1, launched in September 1977, uses more than one set of thrusters to function properly. Primary thrusters carefully orient the spacecraft so it can keep its antenna pointed at Earth. This ensures that the probe can send back data it collects from its unique perspective 15.5 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space, as well as receive commands sent by the Voyager team.
The funny thing is we are a lot closer to the technology of successful Mars settlement than we are to the politics of successful Mars settlement.
The book, A City On Mars, is an excellent read that explores everything required to colonize the red marble, and you’re absolutely right - it’s a lot.
There are so many technological hurdles to cover. And any advocacy for Mars settlement as some sort of emergency evacuation of Earth is either very wrong or very dishonest. Or both.
The absolute hostility of the surface of Mars will always be orders of magnitude worse than anything climate change will throw at us. Humanity would be completely eradicated before we even got halfway to polluting Earth into the uninhabitable state of Mars.
If you can terraform Mars to support human life, you could easily terraform Earth to be a lot more hospitable. If you can’t terraform Mars, and instead just want to build a colony base… well, you can do that on Earth too. Dig deep into a mountain or pick a remote corner of Antarctica and guess what? Even with an epoch-ending asteroid or complete thermonuclear annihilation - it would still be easier to build an apocalypse-proof city on Earth than trying to build a city on Mars.
But the politics?
The same species that is actively destroying its own environment would just… move somewhere else. We would bring all of the same problems with us, plus all of the new problems of space travel and Martian colonization! The book makes an excellent case that there are virtually no conditions under which humanity in its current form would ever benefit from attempting to build A City On Mars. Probably not for at least a couple centuries.