Launching objects into orbit has never been so affordable nor has space ever been so accessible. As a result, humanity’s expansion into the universe is accelerating—and with it, the opportunity to correct some of the errors of our earthbound development. New collaborative approaches—public and private, interdisciplinary, and more—will be imperative for humanity to survive and thrive beyond Earth.

In the last decade, the cost of launching objects into space has plummeted 20-fold and attracted a surge of interest and capital which, alongside new technologies, are enabling innovations in commercial satellites, space tourism, and privately funded space stations.

There are now private efforts to establish space-based solar energy platforms, moon and asteroid mining, space logistics and tourism businesses, research and development into essential microgravity applications, and space-based manufacturing. Since 2013, investors have poured $258 billion into 1,688 companies in this still-speculative sector.

NASA’s share of the space economy has consistently declined as the commercial space sector has become a key market driver, taking over certain areas completely, such as communications satellite launches. This shift has freed up the public sector’s ability to invest in commercially riskier activities like solar system exploration, even as the government remains a vital purchaser of space products and services.

The mix of private and public efforts, which includes a substantial role for American universities, seems new but is in fact over six decades in the making. From the early 1960s, the United States relied on commercial interests to help it compete in the space race. In 1965, Hughes Aircraft’s Intelsat I became the first commercial satellite to reach geosynchronous orbit. Also known as Early Bird, the satellite provided real-time transmission of television, telephone, and fax communications between Europe and North America.

In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon expanded U.S. space activities, including joint projects with the Soviet Union, construction of the first U.S. space station, and approval of the Space Shuttle program, which opened more opportunities for private industry.

As European, Russian, Chinese, and more private launchers entered the market after the Cold War, more and more firms sought to send satellites into space. As a result, the exorbitant costs associated with reaching orbit declined. On July 4, 1982, President Ronald Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 42, establishing the development of commercial space activities as a national goal. Later that year, Space Services Inc., of Houston, Texas, successfully launched the first U.S.-built commercial rocket—the Conestoga 1—into space above Cape Canaveral, Florida.

By the mid-1990s, there was a bona fide marketplace in geostationary orbit for Earth observations and telecommunications, which evolved to launch smaller, cheaper satellites that we continue to rely on today for everyday essentials like weather forecasting, streaming our favorite shows, and finding our way around.

Space tourism started in 1996 with the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million privately funded contest to create a spaceship that could safely fly a pilot and two passengers to the edge of space twice in two weeks. In 2004, SpaceShipOne clinched the prize and became the founding technology for Virgin Galactic’s space tourism business. While still a small slice of the industry, space tourism has captured the popular imagination and helped build momentum for additional technical efforts.

In 2005, in preparation for the retirement of the Space Shuttle program, NASA collaborated with the private sector using a novel cost-sharing model to develop cargo and crew transportation capabilities. This program led to the rise of SpaceX and significantly lowered the cost of sending cargo into low Earth orbit—from $65,400 per kilogram in 1981 to as little as $2,600 per kilogram today. That number is expected to plummet over the next few years, as more and more cargo is shipped into space in preparation for humans to return to the moon in the mid-2020s.

In 2019, NASA opened the International Space Station to new commercial opportunities and private astronauts, and last year they awarded $415.6 million to advance three free-flying private space station concepts.

One of these projects is Orbital Reef, a mixed-use business park in low Earth orbit led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. I am the deputy director of Arizona State University’s Interplanetary Initiative; our group leads a consortium of more than a dozen academic institutions responsible for coordinating research and other support in Orbital Reef’s development.

This is just one example of how, in this new space age, NASA and other space agencies will become one of many customers purchasing services of privately owned space companies. Commercial business models like Orbital Reef also will open access to more research, manufacturing, tourism, and activities we have not yet imagined.

As we build new space industries, we are facing new questions, which can be answered not just by scientists and engineers but by experts across all disciplines from social scientists to artists: How will commercial space stations be used? How can access to space be made equitable? What new jobs and markets will these destinations create? And what legal and regulatory regimes—from environmental protections to civil rights laws and governance—will apply in space, and how might they differ from Earth’s?

There have been many reasons to send people to space, including science, military hegemony, technological prestige, global connectivity, economic development, combating climate change, and—of course—answering our most profound questions about humanity’s place in the universe.

To these worthy objectives, I would add one more: Space exploration affords us an opportunity to stress test our human values and to take them to new heights. We have a chance to find out just how far our egalitarian principles can go. Our future in space will create jobs, technologies, and markets that don’t exist today. With such great possibilities and unknowns, I believe our greatest innovation will be how we include all aspects of human endeavor in our future in space. Space is infinite, and humanity’s challenges are vast. We will need effective problem solvers and critical thinkers from all backgrounds and disciplines working together to create the future we all want on Earth, or anywhere else.

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Scientific images, spawned by explorations into worlds we cannot see with the human eye—be they too small and intricate or too large and far away—have not only helped humans understand themselves and their surroundings, but have also documented the advances and challenges of our times. A new release from Aperture, Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe, provides a survey of such images, from a X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA to an image of the Event Horizon Telescope, which will attempt to produce the first image of a black hole.

Scientists first began using photography to document the world around them and share their findings. British botanist Anna Atkins, often regarded as the first female photographer, worked with cyanotypes—shadow images that are created by placing objects onto light-sensitive paper and then exposing the paper and object to the sun. She created numerous cyanotypes to illustrate and share the various plant specimens she collected in her field work.

Scientific images also have the power to show us the fragility of Earth. Earthrise, the famous photograph taken by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission, shows Earth rising over the surface of the Moon. The image shows just how precious—and vulnerable—our planet is. A beacon of life with its clouds, water, and green landmasses surrounded by the darkness and emptiness of space. Similarly, photography has been used to create a visual record of the effects of climate change. James Balog’s time-lapse images of the Bridge Glacier in British Columbia show how the glacier has melted over time, providing powerful and undeniable evidence of a warming planet.

To the general public, the labs, spaceships, and distant landscapes where scientists do their work can seem far removed from everyday life, but photography not only propels scientific discoveries, but continues to give scientists the ability to share their findings with the world. And through these images, we learn not only about the importance of science, but also about our place in the universe.

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The signal, which only came to public attention in late August, may be a product of interference from Earth or have some other non-alien origin—it’s only been observed once, for four seconds, at a single location. Even though the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence believes the signal to be from Earth and says the likelihood that it is an extraterrestrial attempt at contact “is not terribly promising,” the imagination runs wild—maybe aliens are reaching out to us, perhaps the Kremlin is in cahoots with them, or maybe this is more evidence of governmental cover-ups and conspiracies.

The lack of verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence forms the basis of the Fermi Paradox. Given the high probability of intelligent life elsewhere, based on the billions of sun-like stars in the Milky Way (not to mention other galaxies), and the likelihood that planets orbit at least some of these stars, and life exists on at least some of these planets, the silence seems strange. In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi reasoned that aliens should have already contacted Earth, leading him to ask, “Where is everybody?” Nicola Tesla suggested using radio waves to look for alien life in 1896 and we’ve been looking ever since. Perhaps intelligent life isn’t common in the cosmos or is still too far away. Perhaps aliens have visited Earth without our knowledge. Or perhaps aliens have intentionally kept their distance.

But what would happen if this signal were proven to come from intelligent aliens? To call it a game changer is an understatement. What would we do? How would we react? Regardless of what this signal turns out to be, it’s also worth thinking about why aliens might attempt to contact us and what they might have already picked up from our transmissions.

Science fiction offers countless thought experiments in response to these questions. In these stories, the knowledge that humans aren’t alone in the cosmos often causes society to unravel. The discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life would shift paradigms, particularly within certain religions, political systems, and cultures, and those shifts would be messy. Some people might flee or fight, while others welcome an alien species. Perhaps most of all, sci-fi suggests that a signal from an alien life may threaten humankind—not because of anything the ETs might do, but because of the way such a game-changing encounter would highlight and exacerbate existing divisions within humanity, forcing open those cracks. We can’t control what actions aliens might take or what motives might bring them to Earth, but three stories—two novels and one movie—offer compelling guidance about how humans themselves should react to signals from space.

In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, UFOs abduct people, cause electrical disturbances, and attempt to communicate with humans using via a five-note melody. Throughout most of the film, the government denies these occurrences, positioning itself as the voice of reason and authority in the midst of chaos. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, Richard Dreyfuss’ character uses mashed potatoes to construct an image he can’t get out of his mind. His obsession alienates his family, but eventually leads him to Devils Tower, where the spaceship lands. The ship releases people who had been abducted or had gone missing years earlier, all of whom appear both unharmed and unaged, and the aliens appear peaceful and non-threatening.

While it’s never entirely clear why the aliens abduct humans, their benevolent nature suggests curiosity, and since it can no longer deny their existence, the government sends 12 officials to board the ship, but in the end, the aliens permit only Dreyfuss to accompany them to their home world. As in Spielberg’s subsequent film E.T., the aliens aren’t the villains—if anything, the government that chooses not to believe its citizens and to withhold the truth is. The aliens underscore this point by opening their doors only for a true believer, as though humans must prove themselves worthy of aliens, rather than the other way around.

In Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact, humans receive from the star Vega a transmission consisting of prime numbers, which astronomers eventually decode into a visual message—Adolf Hitler commencing the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The Vegans had been monitoring adjacent planetary systems and sent back the image of Hitler—the first indication of intelligent life (oh, the irony) from Earth that the aliens were able to pick up. They beamed the message back in receipt. “What are they going to think of us?” wonders astronomer Ellie Arroway, worried about Hitler serving as Earth’s “ambassador.”

Later, one of the Vegans—a simulacra of Arroway’s father—explains why they made contact upon receiving the broadcast:

The picture, of course, was alarming. We could tell you were in deep trouble. But the music told us something else. The Beethoven told us there was hope. Marginal cases are our specialty. We thought you could use a little help. … You’ve got hardly any theory of social organization, astonishingly backward economic systems, no grasp of the machinery of historical prediction, and very little knowledge about yourselves. Considering how fast your world is changing, it’s amazing you haven’t blown yourselves to bits by now. That’s why we don’t want to write you off just yet.

Imagine what extra-terrestrials would discern about human civilization if they detected one of our transmissions. What would they pick up? BBC broadcasts? Talk shows? Fox News? Cartoons? What would they conclude about humanity based on those glimpses of our culture?

Before he wrote Contact, Carl Sagan chaired a committee tasked to decide what to include on the “Golden Record,” a copper disc carried by the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. (Voyager 1 is now beyond the solar system.) The Golden Record contains 115 images and sounds, including music, animal calls, greetings in 55 different languages, human brain waves, and images of DNA, the Solar System, maps, humans, and wildlife. This carefully curated time capsule could serve as a helpful introduction to the human race—depending on who or what receives it.

Might aliens determine, based on our signals, that they don’t want contact with earthlings? Might they see them as a call for help? In Liu Cixin’s 2008 book The Three-Body Problem, a disillusioned astrophysicist transmits a message into outer space asking for assistance. The message is picked up by the Trisolarans, aliens looking to settle a planet with a stable orbit. The responder warns that its race will invade Earth, but the astrophysicist figures nothing could be worse than the havoc humans have wrought on the planet, so she persists. Some humans plan defense strategies, while others welcome the alien overlords. These opposing factions spend centuries attempting to outwit one another, each trying to save Earth.

In Contact, Sagan also explores the fracturing of the human race in the aftermath of the discovery that humans aren’t alone. International politics become a free-for-all, as astronomers from around the world work to harness and decode the signals amid fears that countries with tepid relationships with the U.S. might withhold or alter data. America and Russia compete to build the spacecraft depicted in the transmitted blueprints. International debate rages over who will comprise the five-person crew and countries trade seats for other privileges. The heightened tensions culminate in the bombing of the first craft and crew, for which dozens of international political, religious, and military organizations take credit. The schism between science and religion manifests in distrust. Arroway consults a religious leader who asserts that the “scientists and the politicians and the bureaucrats are holding out” on and deceiving them. “Do you want people like that to decide the fate of the world? … Do you want a pack of unbelievers to do the talking to God?” he asks.

Sagan brings up a good and difficult question that could easily get lost in the furor over proving the origin of an extraterrestrial signal. Who should serve as ambassadors for the human race in the event that aliens want to communicate?

Close Encounters, Contact, and The Three-Body Problem offer answers here. They suggest that the curious and open-minded humans make the best liaisons. Our earthly ambassadors should be people who embrace the unknown, believe the impossible, and who don’t shy away from the crucible of alien contact despite its dangers. Perhaps it’s a moot point—we may have unwittingly picked our intergalactic liaisons already. The prospect of intelligent life requires that we consider our legacies not just on Earth, but throughout all space and time, just in case.

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With the drama unfolding on their television screens, the attention of millions was focused on a single event—a single step, really—for the first time. It was one of the first grand, extended global social media events of our modern era, much bigger than a Super Bowl Sunday.

But landing on the moon almost didn’t happen—not for the public, anyway. While Armstrong and Aldrin were preparing to make one of the biggest celestial moves of a lifetime, NASA’s small and dedicated marketing team was preparing to make another major move on the ground: televising the event.

Looking back on the moon landing, it would seem almost unfathomable that NASA administrators would have missed the mark to use live television to capture that historic moment, but they nearly did. Unlike recorded video, which had to be returned, developed, and shared after the fact, live television would allow viewers to watch in real-time. Many NASA engineers argued that live footage was a waste of valuable weight and crew focus and would require too much time and money to develop the technologies to broadcast live news feeds from the moon. Most of the original Mercury 7 astronauts and their bosses insisted, with good reason, that operating and performing for television cameras during their missions would unnecessarily detract from the important work at hand.

Embedded within NASA’s formative charter was a congressional mandate to report—freely and openly—the program’s activities and accomplishments to the world, unlike the secretive, closed military program in the Soviet Union at the time. “I insisted,” said Julian Scheer, the head of NASA Public Affairs during Apollo. He would not accept any dissent, either from the engineers or some of the astronauts. “They could never see the big picture. But they weren’t landing on the moon without that camera on board. I was going to make sure of that. One thing I kept emphasizing was, ‘We’re not the Soviets. Let’s do this thing the American way.’”

To enlightened astronauts like Tom Stafford, television’s value proposition was clear: “The American public was paying for Apollo and deserved as much access as it could get,” Stafford said. “They should see the wonders we saw. Photos and movies were great, but nobody saw them until after the mission was over. What better way to take viewers along to the moon than by using color television?”

“Without television, Apollo would have been just a mark in a history book,” says Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon during Apollo 17, when reflecting on the importance of television on board Apollo. “The thing that meant so much and brought so much prestige to this country is that every launch, every landing on the moon, and every walk on the moon was given freely to the world in real time. We didn’t doctor up the movie, didn’t edit anything out; what we said, was said.”

So NASA’s small public affairs team, spread over 14 installations nationwide, got down to business, working long and hard to ensure that the world was informed and engaged using media outlets and other NASA-affiliated contractors’ public affairs employees.

“We sure didn’t do the PR job by ourselves,” remarked Chuck Biggs, a NASA Public Affairs Officer during Apollo. “We needed representatives from Rockwell, Martin Marietta, and all the other contractors to do the job. By head count, we had more contractors’ public relations people than we had NASA public affairs employees.”

Operationally, NASA public affairs chose pioneering tactics now called content marketing, an approach that doesn’t overtly sell a product or brand. Rather than just promoting their cause, NASA used its resources to educate the media, who became surrogate spokespeople for the program and kept the story in front of a voracious public, both nightly on television and daily in the newspapers.

Embracing the content marketing technique, NASA operated its public affairs as if it were a newsroom—staffed not with Mad Men-era advertisers and public relations agents, but with highly qualified ex-journalists. They were professional storytellers, operating as news reporters embedded inside of the agency. As ex-newsmen, they understood what the broadcast and print media needed in terms of content, so they selected and pushed stories in various languages and formats that could slip easily into the news streams of the day. It wasn’t just that they were good writers, but they were also newsmen who understood the power of storytelling and the importance of access to live, unedited, real-time events.

“The core contingent of NASA Public Affairs people were ex-newsmen,” recalled Jack King, head of public affairs at Kennedy Space Center during Apollo. “We were good writers, and we knew the news business. That made a major difference in the whole operation.”

“We are not doing what is known in the public relations business as flackery or publicity or propaganda,” said Scheer. “We are simply not in this kind of business. We are a news operation. We don’t put out publicity releases. We put out news releases.”

Keeping a global audience engaged over a decade—from 1961, when President John F. Kennedy announced his goal of landing a man on the moon, to 1972, when Apollo 17 became the last lunar landing mission—was not easy then and is not easy now. Long-term engagement requires creating a shared, communal experience that resonates with the audience. Due to NASA’s use of television, this experience was not only shared by its own engineers, but by millions of people worldwide.

I call the generation that took part in this shared experience—my generation—the “Children of Apollo.”

Apollo’s place in our collective memories is chiseled there because we experienced it together. NASA didn’t just send three men to the moon on the Apollo 11 mission, they sent more than 600 million of us—men, women, and children from all over the globe—to the moon and back, thanks to live television.

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Rays of light during monsoon rains over the Catalina Mountains outside Tucson, Arizona.

This obsession with desert rain also meant it was hard to resist dreaming about the possibility of rainstorms on Titan, my favorite moon of Saturn, which I was studying (and continue to study) through the NASA and European Space Agency Cassini-Huygens mission. But we knew from data gathered in 1980 by Voyager—the first spacecraft to visit the Saturn system close-up—that there was essentially no water in the moon’s nitrogen atmosphere because it was too cold.

So what would rain on Titan even be made of? Methane takes water’s place on the moon as cloud-forming gas, and thus would be the main ingredient of raindrops, if there were any. And because nitrogen is so soluble in methane, each droplet of rain would have to be 20 percent nitrogen, as opposed to Earth’s droplets, which carry carbon dioxide but essentially no nitrogen. How would these exotic methane rains behave? Would they be gentle and steady, or violent downpours like those in the desert?

First, to know if rain was even a possibility, we had to figure out where the methane on Titan was and wasn’t. Voyager told us that the lowermost part of the moon’s atmosphere was not saturated in methane; the “humidity” (which means the ratio of the methane in the air to the amount required for saturation) at the equator was about 50 percent. That’s not a desert—more like New York City or Chicago. Saturn is almost 10 times farther from the sun than Earth, so there is not as much solar energy to warm the air and push it upwards to the altitudes where clouds can form (and then release its moisture as rain when it cools). It seemed that for any rain to get going, special conditions—mountain ramparts to force moist air upward, and seasonal shifts in winds and sunlight—would be needed.

Armed with these ideas and my picture-window view of the desert mountains, I worked with Maria Awal, a master’s student in atmospheric sciences, to model what it would take for methane rainstorms to form on Titan. We found that a rising column, or “plume,” of methane-rich air that was buoyant compared to its surroundings would be needed, and that Titan’s atmosphere could in fact create one. But the distant sun could provide only enough energy to trigger one or two storms anywhere on Titan at a given time. In other words, Titan storms, if they existed, had to be sporadic but violent—gully washers of the true desert style.

What about the nature of the raindrops? Shortly before he arrived at our laboratory, the planetary scientist Ralph Lorenz speculated that they must be giant and flattened, falling so slowly that the storms that produced them might drift away before the drops even hit the ground. And those drops that evaporate in the dry air—which might be most of them—leave behind “ghost droplets” of ethane—a sister molecule made from methane’s destructive encounter with ultraviolet sunlight high up in the atmosphere.

With Lorenz and another scientist, Caitlin Griffith, who came to Arizona in 2002, our Tucson lab became a thundercloud of research on Titan’s storms as we awaited an up-close and personal view of the moon. That view would come from Cassini-Huygens, the Saturn-orbiting spacecraft launched in 1997 that carried a probe designed to land on Titan. The mission would tell us whether all our guesswork was right or wrong.

In 2004, Cassini-Huygens dropped into Saturn orbit. Early images of Titan showed a south pole bathed in early summer sun with masses of slow-moving convective clouds. Evidence of dark spots under the clouds led us to wonder: Could those be ponds of methane that collected after storms? When Huygens made its descent through Titan’s atmosphere the following year, one of its instruments measured the amount of methane at different altitudes in its descent, and found that it was quite a bit higher than typical cumulus clouds on the Earth.

Most striking were the pictures taken during descent. As the probe drifted over a rocky hill—the rocks on Titan are actually made of extremely chilled water ice—at roughly the cruising altitude of a jetliner, it captured a series of vein-like channels, carved into the hillside in just the way one would expect from rainfall. Bathed in the dim twilight from a distant sun, they had to be caused by streams of methane as they ran down to a dark plain—the signature of occasional and intense methane storms.

The Huygens probe captured this image of Titan’s landscape as it descended through the moon’s atmosphere.

As the seasons changed, Cassini saw vast clouds, covering thousands of miles of terrain, appearing and disappearing around Titan’s equator. They left behind a dramatically darkened surface, which then brightened again. We know that moist soils on Earth look dark in space when they are doused with rain, so why couldn’t Titan’s icy “soil” be darkened by intense methane rain?

What the spacecraft had found was an active methane weather pattern—yes, clouds and rain—on a moon a billion miles from the Earth. Mars has dust storms, Io has volcanic eruptions, and Pluto may have methane snow, but Titan is the only place we know of in the solar system that has liquid rainfall like we have on Earth. Only Titan has environments that allow clouds to make rain, which carves out gullies and valleys in the landscape, ultimately to find its way to the polar seas—seas, as Cassini has discovered, that are so vast that they contain hundreds of times more hydrocarbon in the form of methane than all the known oil and gas reserves on the Earth. What secrets do they hold?

Five years ago, I left the Sonoran desert for wetter and cooler climes back east. The snow outside my window in Ithaca, New York, has no analog on Titan—it’s too warm for methane snow anywhere there. But Titan’s methane cycle has almost everything else that Earth’s hydrological cycle has—clouds, rain, streams, rivers, and seas. (Titan just lacks the globe-girdling ocean.) Titan is our home world transcribed into a minor key. The only witnesses have been our robotic emissaries Cassini and Huygens. Will human eyes someday witness firsthand a Titan monsoon rainstorm?

As I think back to that Tucson office with the panorama of summer thunderstorms moving off the Catalina mountains, I conjure up a fantasy of the future: a lonely base halfway across the solar system with a picture-window view of methane rain falling on an icy hillside, perched next to the final resting place of the Huygens probe, an artifact from long ago.

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