IAC 2025 If the USA\u2019s space strategy succeeds, it will run a \u201cvillage\u201d on the moon in a decade, NASA administrator Sean Duffy told the International Aeronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney today.<\/p>\n
Duffy appeared in a session featuring the heads of space agencies from the USA, China, Japan, India, Europe, and Canada. Readers will likely have noted the absence of Russia, a longtime space player, from that list.<\/p>\n
The NASA boss seemingly hinted at one reason Russia\u2019s space boss is not at the Congress when he said the USA \u201ccomes in peace\u201d to space. \u201cWe have not been in the business of taking people\u2019s land,\u201d Duffy said.<\/p>\n
Asked what success looks like for NASA in a decade, Duffy said \u201cWe are going to have sustained human life on the moon. Not just an outpost, but a village.\u201d And a nuclear-powered village at that after NASA recently issued<\/a> an RFI seeking commercial help to build a nuclear reactor on Luna<\/p>\n Duffy also predicted that a decade from now NASA will also have \u201cmade leaps and bounds on our mission to get to Mars\u201d and \u201cbe on the cusp of putting human boots on Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n The theme for this year\u2019s IAC is \u201cSustainable Space: Resilient Earth\u201d. Duffy\u2019s take on that is how to sustain human life in space, an objective he said is NASA\u2019s prerogative because it alone among US government agencies has a remit for exploration. He pointed out that other US government agencies have the job of considering terrestrial stability and earthly resilience, and that NASA must focus on exploration,<\/p>\n The other space agency heads at the event took a different view.<\/p>\n When European Space Agency (ESA) director general Josef Ashbacher had his turn on stage, he offered a very different vision of sustainability by pointing out that the agency he leads freely shares data from its earth observation satellites. \u201cI am glad that we at ESA are working for the betterment of the planet,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n V Narayanan, the chair of India\u2019s Space Research Organization (ISRO) said ensuring food and water resources is his agency\u2019s top goal in space. Lisa Campbell, the President of the Canadian Space Agency said that when her country first orbited an earth observation satellite it had to pay private sector organizations to use its data. \u201cNow they want it,\u201d she said, before announcing CA$5 million ($3.6 million) to fund studies on biodiversity from space. The president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Dr Hiroshi Yamakawa, reminded attendees that Japan recently launched its third greenhouse gas observation satellite.<\/p>\n The deputy administrator of China\u2019s National Space Agency (CNSA) Zhigang Bian said his country has launched 500 earth observation satellites. He sent a little murmur around the auditorium when he said China participates in a constellation of such sats shared by members of the BRICS bloc \u2013 a loose alliance that recently expanded its membership beyond Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. Diplomatic types see BRICS expansion as China developing institutions that rival existing blocs \u2013 on Earth and in space.<\/p>\n Zhigang also said China is working to make space sustainable with new measures to track orbiting debris, manage traffic in space, and provide alerts to warn if spacecraft are at risk. He said China believes those measures are necessary because the growing mega-constellations of broadband satellites increases risks for all users of space.<\/p>\n \u201cChina is currently researching active removal of space debris,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n JAXA\u2019s Dr Yamakawa said Japan\u2019s private sector outfit Astroscale is probably three years away from capturing and de-orbiting a satellite, but that doing so won\u2019t solve the space junk problem.<\/p>\n \u201cWe think the debris issue is one we must cope with,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is not enough time to solve for this.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr Yamakawa also suggested collaboration between spacefaring nations makes extraterrestrial exploration more sustainable, and pointed to the forthcoming JAXA\/ISRO collaboration on the Lunar Polar Exploration (LUPEX) mission that will see a Japanese H3 rocket carry an Indian lander and a Japanese rover.<\/p>\n ISRO\u2019s V Narayanan said the mission will supersize India\u2019s previous Chandrayaan moon missions, by sending a 6,800kg lander and 300kg rover, up from the 600kgs and 25kgs sent by 2023\u2019s Chandrayaan-3 mission<\/a>. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"IAC 2025 If the USA\u2019s space strategy succeeds, it will run a \u201cvillage\u201d on the moon in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44512,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[85,46,141,145],"class_list":["post-44511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}