Which trajectory aeronautics will take in the coming year hinges, in characteristically dramatic fashion, on the world's richest man and his magnum opus of a rocket. Depending on how 2022 goes, we will either look back on 2021 as the weird year during a pandemic when we were all captivated by billionaires and celebrities going to space, or as the moment a new era started - akin to the way history now thinks about the likes of the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. This was just a prelude to what we'll see in the near future.Īmong the missions already on the launch docket is a partnership between Axiom Space and SpaceX that will see a commercial spacecraft loaded exclusively with paying, private astronauts visiting the International Space Station for the first time.Ĭommercial space flights drew massive media coverage in the past year, launched infinitely more memes than humans and provided fodder for Netflix documentaries. SpaceX already has its Crew Dragon that sent tourists to both the International Space Station and to orbit in 2021. See also: Those GPS signals are more vulnerable than you realize The decisions made by SpaceX to manage Starlink have a much broader impact than we might have anticipated when the constellation was proposed and approval was granted by the. "Conversely, SpaceX have an important responsibility to maintain a safe environment for every mission making use of or passing through the Starlink orbital shell. "The key point is that it is not exclusively the domain of SpaceX," Lewis told me. And SpaceX is just one constellation operator. Hugh Lewis, who leads the astronautics research group at the University of Southampton, explains that managing Starlink is actually a complicated dance of coordination involving the US Space Force 18th Space Wing and secondary satellite information providers like LeoLabs. SpaceX cited "a bug in our on-call paging system," causing a communications breakdown that led to the incident. In 2019, a European spacecraft had to perform an evasive maneuver to avoid coming too close to a Starlink. The question of how well we can manage all these commercial constellations to avoid potential collisions keeps some space watchers up at night. Amazon plans to boost the first of its Project Kuiper orbiting broadband routers in the latter part of the year. The lights moved quickly across the darkened dome above us, occasionally fading in and out, but always maintaining their straight path.Īt a minimum, we can expect SpaceX and OneWeb to continue to launch hundreds more satellites during 2022. I looked up toward the top of the illuminated evergreen where a string of shimmering lights moved in an impossibly straight line, appearing to emanate from the tip of the tree. Minutes after the three-story pine burst out of the darkness into a new state of multicolored glowing glory, a friend pointed up at the clear New Mexico night sky. In early December, my small town held a nighttime holiday festival where hundreds gathered on our historic plaza to count down the lighting of a huge tree. This holds true even for something as seemingly benign as how our species interacts with the cold, dead vacuum behind the blue sky above us. But changing relationships come with consequences. Over the past few years, the night sky has changed faster than at any time in human history, and the trend will continue in 2022 as our relationship with the space beyond our planet's atmosphere grows more intimate.
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