About 200 years ago, the very idea of flying was absurd. But we achieved it in 1916. Then “On April 12, 1961, aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin becomes the first human being to travel into space.” [1] In the beginning, flying aircrafts were very rare, but now, millions of people fly every day. So maybe, in a few more years space flight will not only be reserved for astronauts, but it might also become commonplace in our society.

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There are many hopes for the future of space travel as our progression with technology has increased greatly over the past 50 years. With the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently granting SpaceX permission to fly 12,000 satellites into orbit for fast internet connections around the globe and there are currently only around 5000 satellites in orbit right now. This will be a huge task for SpaceX but they have already successfully launched 60 of them, so its looking more and more plausible that we will on our way to mars very soon.  

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Getting anything into space is not an easy feat and “launching a single satellite into space can cost anywhere between $10 million and $400 million” [2] so its very expensive. There have been many ideas of how this could be made cheaper with SpaceX making parts of their rockets land back on earth intact so they can be reused. But is there a way we could make it even cheaper?

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Scientists theorise that by 2050 we will have a space elevator. The idea behind the space elevator is to keep something in space which will hold a tether back to the surface of our planet but unfortunately we currently do not have any material strong enough to hold it together as our “commercially available structural steel has strength of 550 MPa (550 Million Pa)” [3] and a “space elevator tether needs to be made from a material with strength of at least 50GPa (50000 MPa)” [3]. It is estimated that if a space elevator was built the price of getting anything into space would be “reduced from $10,000 per pound to $400 per pound” [4] that’s from £17000 per Kg to £684 per Kg and it could “cost as little as $6 billion” [4] to build.

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There is currently a big problem with how we have been sending stuff into space as a rocket has many different parts which detach when shooting up into space which mostly hold fuel a lot of the parts fall back to earth as they haven’t made it into orbit but some parts stay going round the earth and “travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph” [5]. This makes it very hard to pick an orbital position in space as a piece space debris the size of a marble traveling at that speed would go straight through a space station. There are “more than 500,000 pieces of debris that are being tracked as they orbit the Earth” [5] and “there are many millions of pieces of debris that are so small they can’t be tracked” [5]. If we keep using rockets the way, we do by 2028 the amount of debris in orbit is estimated to be ten times more.

 

With satellites enabling us to use GPS, make phone calls, collect weather data and much more its crucial that we find a better way into space as there’s already 4 satellites per year being destroyed by debris. Another problem arises when these satellites are destroyed as they turn into more pieces of space junk and this starts a chain reaction. If a chain reaction starts with SpaceX’s 12000 more satellites that they are sending up this could create a layer of debris around the earth making it impossible to continue our advancement into space. There have been many suggestions for cleaning up the space junk but the main three are nets, magnets and lasers.

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