6.02.2022

“Space is becoming cheaper in general, and there is more access to space than ever before,” said Sara Seager, the principal scientific investigator for the upcoming missions

As it sped away from Venus, NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft captured this seemingly peaceful view of a planet the size of Earth, wrapped in a dense, global cloud layer.NASA

The first private space mission to another planet could launch as early as next year, carrying a robotic space probe to Venus to scan its clouds for chemicals essential to life.

The small robotic probe — the first of a planned series of three called the Venus Life Finder missions — is among the most ambitious of a growing slate of planned space missions happening outside not just the traditional government space institutions but also the handful of major companies, most notably SpaceX and Blue Origin, that have dominated the private space industry so far.

“Space is becoming cheaper in general, and there is more access to space than ever before,” said Sara Seager, the principal scientific investigator for the VLF missions and a professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Construction of the probe’s two-pound scientific payload has already begun with funding from MIT alumni, Seager said, while the costs of building, launching and operating the entire 100-pound robotic probe during its mission to Venus will be met by Rocket Lab, an aerospace company based in Long Beach, California

Rocket Lab, like much of the growing commercial space industry, has focused on launching satellites into space. The company has already placed more than 100 satellites into orbit using lightweight rockets launched from New Zealand’s Māhia Peninsula, and plans soon to launch rockets from its new launch complex on Wallops Island in Virginia. A spokesperson for the company declined to answer questions about costs and funding of the VLF mission. 

Mason Peck, a professor of astronautical engineering at Cornell University and a space industry expert, estimated it’s likely to cost more than $50 million. And while it’s not yet clear how Rocket Lab could profit, the company could be in line for contracts for other scientific space missions if it successfully operates a probe to Venus, he said. 

Although the VLF mission would be the first private probe to another planet, it comes after other signs that private industry is moving into scientific space exploration.

The California-based space fund Breakthrough Initiatives, headed by the Russian and Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner, announced its Starshot project in 2016 (Peck is an adviser on that project). Starshot is an estimated $100 million effort to develop hundreds of tiny light-sail probes that could make the journey to Alpha Centauri, the sun’s nearest star, in about 20 years, instead of the tens of thousands of years that would be needed by the fastest probes that now exist.

Last year Breakthrough Initiatives also announced they’d fund the TOLIMAN project — a small private space telescope to search the Alpha Centauri system for planets, which presumably could be destinations for the Starshot probes.

Robert Jacobson, a space industry analyst and the author of the book “Space Is Open for Business,” said there are similarities between the funding of space missions today and the earliest phases of the exploration of the New World, which were paid for by wealthy monarchs.

“There wasn’t an early business plan. There were a lot of unknowns,” he said. “So even if there’s not yet a business case for Mars, or for Venus … you will start to see business cases for sending [missions] to these other places in the solar system, whether for governments or for the private sector.”

Seager said Breakthrough Initiatives funded an initial study for the VLF missions, but it had no further involvement.

She said the small VLF missions would complement the much larger DAVINCI+, VERITAS and EnVision probes to Venus planned by NASA and the European Space Agency, which will get there in about a decade.

Quelle: NBC News