Roscosmos has announced that it will complete the ExoMars mission without alliances to explore life on the Red Planet. Europe and the ESA have the rover, but not the autonomy for the launch. The independence of the United States thanks to Elon Musk and the role of China
The Russians had already baptized him Kazachok, but perhaps now they will change his name: it means Cossack, a symbol in these days of the historic Ukrainian resistance. A name that recalls steppes, ancient wounds and smackings. Kazachok – which in Russian is also a synonym for infiltrator or special agent – is the landing platform that was supposed to have brought the European rover Rosalind Franklin down to Mars, named after the scientist who led Crick and Watson to discover the double helix structure of the DNA. Objective: to scour the surface of the Red Planet for a year and look for traces of life (the name Franklin was not chosen at random). An unfortunate mission since its inception: it should have already left, but the problems of “landing”, that is, the descent to Mars, caused its delay: the planet’s atmosphere is so rare that it does not allow the use of parachutes and the risk of damage to the rover, without the Russian platform, is highly probable.
With the embargo on Putin, the Esa-Roscosmos mission was blocked in the first days of the aggression against Ukraine. But the Russian space agency will complete it on its own, its director Dmitry Rogozin has now announced. “We will lose several years, but we will copy our landing module, equip it with an Angara launch vehicle and conduct this research expedition from the new Vostochny Cosmodrome site independently,” Rogozin told Telegram. As if to get his hands on he then published a copy of the letter from the ESA general manager, in which Josef Aschbacher informed of the decision to suspend the collaboration of the ExoMars project (it was known). “Indeed, this is a very sad event for all space enthusiasts. This means that the joint Russian-European mission to Mars scheduled for September 2022 has been canceled, ”said Rogozin.
But the question is: is Roscosmos able to complete the mission alone? Rogozin is a Putin hawk: he was Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation from 2011 to 2018 and also in charge of Defense. It is also he who, days ago, said on Telegram that, due to the Western embargo, cosmonauts may no longer be able to correct the orbit of the ISS. Result? The International Space Station would enter on a collision course with the atmosphere falling to Earth (Rogozin said verbatim on Telegram that “the 500 tons of the ISS could fall into the sea or onto land”, cynically pointing out in a graph that the probabilities that this can happen on Russia are null and void. Here we asked astronaut Umberto Guidoni, the first European to get on the ISS, what is true or likely).
It seems the beginning of a new space race in the Cold War, the one that actually led the Soviets to be the first to send Jurij Gagarin into space (first man in orbit) on April 12, 1961 and the Americans to touch the surface of the Moon on July 20, 1969 with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin (Michael Collins, the astronaut who remained in the module orbiting the Moon, was actually born in Rome on October 31, 1930 in via Tevere). The confrontation-clash was such as to lead to two schools of thought, that of the Soviet cosmonauts (in space the less technology you carry the less problems you will have) and that of the American astronauts. A distance well summed up by the famous anecdote about the space pen designed by the entrepreneur Fisher with a million dollars to allow, thanks to a gas in the ink refill, to work even in the absence of gravity (today it is a gadget that can be bought on Amazon ). The USSR? He brought the pencil (although it was later discovered that the graphite fragments created problems and in any case, as emerged only recently thanks to declassified documents, the Fisher pen saved the Eagle of the Apollo 11 mission by replacing a lever that had been broken in the hustle and bustle).
With the closure of the ExoMars mission, ESA and Europe are actually in big trouble because we have not invested in autonomous spaceships. The Vega launchers can bring satellites into orbit, but already to reach the ISS there are only two ways at present: the Soyuz (which on March 30 will bring down the two Russians Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov and the American Mark Vande Hei) and the Dragon of Space X (Elon Musk’s company). And to think that it all began here: the “Martian” dream actually took shape at the Brera Observatory with the nineteenth-century astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (it is no coincidence that the 2016 exploration phase of Exomars itself was baptized with his name). It was Schiaparelli (whose beautiful telescope is kept together with the moonstone in the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology in Milan) who observed the famous canals of Mars, lines so straight as to open the world debate on who could have built “infrastructures” aliens on the Red Planet. Thus was born the myth of the “Martians”.
But even the Russians remain in difficulty, despite the proclamations of the hawk Rogozin. Space exploration is one of the most expensive activities in the world. And on many technological fronts, Russia is lagging behind. It should forge an alliance with China, which is making great strides and which has recently returned to Earth some fragments of the Moon from the hidden face of our satellite (they are the first lunar stones brought back to the planet after those taken by the Apollo missions).
US-Europe and Russia-China. Will this be the new geopolitics of space?
For the record: we have already been to Mars with several Rovers, even if the European one has more refined technologies. But as far as the dispatch of human beings is concerned, we are still very far from the goal with several technical problems to be solved (fuel, landing and restarting, environment in which to live, length of the mission). In a nutshell, today we would not be able to complete the mission, which is why on March 17 NASA unveiled the Artemis, the large rocket designed to return to the Moon in various stages until it descends again on the surface and groped to set up a first human “colony”.
March 18, 2022 (change March 18, 2022 | 22:09)
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