Martin Rees
In the long run, yes. The practical case gets ever weaker with each advance in robotic probes – indeed as a scientist I see little purpose in sending people into space at all. But as a human being, I’m nonetheless an enthusiast for human space exploration of the moon, Mars and even beyond. However, it will have to be in a very different style, and with different motives, from traditional NASA exploits.
It would be sad if the expertise built up during the 40 years of the US and Russian manned programmes were allowed to dissipate. Abandoning the shuttle and committing to new launch vehicles and propulsion systems is actually a prerequisite for a vibrant manned programme. However, the next humans to walk on the moon may be Chinese – only China seems to have the resources, the dirigiste government and the willingness to undertake a risky Apollo-style programme.
The American public’s reaction to the shuttle’s safety record – two disasters in more than 100 flights – suggests that it is unacceptable for tax-funded projects to expose civilians even to a 2 per cent risk. The first explorers of Mars would confront far higher risks than this. There must be an overt acceptance that the enterprise is dangerous.
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Future expeditions to the moon and beyond will only be politically and financially feasible if they are cut-price ventures, perhaps privately funded and spearheaded by individuals prepared to accept high risks. Perhaps future space probes will be plastered in commercial logos, just as Formula 1 racers are now. And perhaps the pioneer settlers in space communities will live and even die in front of a worldwide audience – the ultimate in commercial reality TV.
, Astronomer Royal and professor of astrophysics and cosmology at the University of Cambridge
Frank Drake
Humanity has a place in space but I don’t think humanity needs to live there. Colonisation of space costs too much and the risks are too high. Expansionism is foolish and this is why extraterrestrials have not arrived in our solar system. We would be better off developing near-Earth habitats than trying to reach the stars. If you collected all the light given out by the sun, solar power alone could support 1022 human beings – that’s a million million times as many as are living at present.
, director of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, Mountain View, California
Richard Branson
To me there can only be one answer: if we do not have a place in space, then we have nothing to live for and ultimately our civilisation will be doomed. Stephen Hawking has put the case for space better than any other human being I have ever listened to. We have to find another planet and, in his view, we have another thousand years to do so at best.
Space is also crucial for understanding the planet we live on now. One could easily argue that without human access to space and the first pictures of the planet from the Apollo missions that James Lovelock would never have come up with his Gaia hypothesis, which has been the basis of most of our understanding of climate change.
Satellite imagery and montoring is helping to feed us as our population rises, and human access to space is also very important in providing solutions to some of the issues thrown up by climate change. People often forget that the IT industry is now producing more greenhouse gas than aviation and could be made much less carbon intensive through the use of satellites in low Earth orbit.
, founder of the Virgin Group
Matt Mountain
We are already in space, comfortably cocooned on our island planet. And we could remain here for perhaps another hundred million generations before our sun turns into a red giant that will engulf Earth’s orbit.
I wonder what we as a species will be like after 10, 100, 1000 or even a million more generations of sedentary existence on Earth. Studies of some Pacific island societies have revealed that over time these societies lost the ability to navigate across the open ocean. Does the same fate await us? Each generation can convince itself that voyaging into space is for the next generation: the array of problems at home will still be undeniably daunting and we can send robots into space instead.
Our telescopes and probes tell us there is much to experience and the unimaginable to find. Maybe it is time for our fledgling species to leave the nest.
, director of the Space Science Telescope Institute, Baltimore, Maryland
Brian Schmidt
Because space offers so many opportunities, it is a place we should keep exploring and understanding. But because space is so expensive to access, I really think we need to be sensible about how we explore it. We need to do activities that are cost-effective and open up the most opportunities for a reasonable cost.
, astrophysicist at the Australian National University’s Mount Stromlo Observatory near Canberra and discoverer of the accelerating expansion of the universe
Mark Kelly
We do now. And we’re staying. We have tourists going to space and the numbers are only going to increase. Companies are making money from space tourism, and over the next century it’s going to explode. We’ll go back to the moon, though we won’t set up a permanent colony there. I don’t believe we’ll ever screw up Earth so badly that living on the moon will be easier. The moon has no atmosphere and no water. How bad would things have to get for it to be easier to live there? Even if an asteroid hit the planet, it’ll still be easier to live on Earth than on the moon or Mars. That’s why we have to look after our own planet – we’re stuck on it.
, astronaut and space shuttle pilot
Patrick Moore
I am quite sure it has. Robots can do a great deal but no machine can replace the human brain. We need both robots and humans; they are not mutually exclusive. Think too of the benefits: space is international; we are all denizens of the Earth, and space research may make us work together. In exploring Mars, we may go a long way towards uniting humanity. This may be a pipe dream, but let us hope.
, UK-based astronomer, broadcaster and writer
Piers Sellers
Emphatically yes. It will be a while before we see people living permanently away from Earth, though. This should not surprise us. It took roughly 100 years between the discovery of the Americas by Columbus and the establishment of successful European colonies there. I expect that over the next century, we will see human colonies in the inner solar system, outposts in the outer solar system and the investigation of extrasolar planetary systems by space-based observatories. So by that time, we will have staked out a small human claim in our solar system and will know a lot more about extrasolar planets and whether any of them can support life.
, astronaut with two space shuttle missions
Jean-Jacques Dordain
More than that! We are part of space, we are stardust ourselves.
, director general of the European Space Agency
