Space Travel & Survival

The International Space Station (ISS) is in low Earth orbit some 250 miles from earth and circles our planet 15.5 times every twenty-four hours. Launched in the late 1990s, it is the world’s only laboratory in microgravity and it has been continually inhabited by astronauts since its first crew came on board in 2000. It is maintained in orbit by space agencies from five countries or regions: US (NASA), Russia (Roscosmos), Europe (ESA), Japan (JAXA) and Canada (CSA). As of August 2025, 290 people from twenty-six countries had visited the station.

The primary mission of the ISS is to carry out scientific research relating to its unique environment and the abilities of humans living and working in space. The experiments conducted over the past twenty-five years have ranged across numerous fields, such as space medicine, astrobiology, materials science and meteorology. Examples of specific work relating to human capacities include: studying lab-grown human muscle cells in tiny 3D printers, with the aim of finding ways to prevent age-related muscle weakening; and research into how weightlessness affects complex fluids.

The ISS astronauts, who typically stay for six months, are also closely studied to investigate the effects of spending time in space. Without the downward force of gravity, fluids tend to pool in the head and the upper parts of the body, which can affect eyesight. There are also problems of bone loss and muscle atrophy when these parts of the body are no longer working against gravity, while the difficulty in adjusting to floating in microgravity can cause nausea, vertigo and headache. The space scientists also experience a significant loss of red blood cells during their stay, leading to anaemia that may continue for some months after they return to Earth.

The ISS was also intended to be a staging post for potential future missions to the moon, Mars and asteroids but this ambitious plan has been overtaken by the earthly issues of structural problems, the expense of ongoing maintenance and a changing geopolitical environment. NASA and its international partners now intend to decommission the station in 2031 (by guiding its descent into the Pacific Ocean) and to replace it by privately-funded space stations.

The era of passenger space flights and space tourism is now just opening up for those who can afford the experience. A suborbital flight will take passengers to between 50 and 70 miles above earth, with a maximum speed of around 2,200 mph. The Virgin Galactic journey involves an ascent to 55 miles above sea level, providing ‘several minutes of out-of-seat weightlessness and breathtaking views of earth’. With regard to orbital flights, which travel in low Earth orbit at a speed of around 17,500 km per hour, an increasing number of companies are developing orbital launch capabilities and the first short space tourism flights are already available to those who have many millions to spend on their ticket.

The first human-made object to touch the moon surface was the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 probe in 1959. In 1969, the United States’ Apollo 11 was the first crewed mission to land on the moon, with five more successful Apollo landings carried out in the three years to 1972. The twelve astronauts involved in these missions explored the lunar surface, set up experiments and returned with rock samples for study. The programme was not continued at that time, due to the exorbitant costs, massive cuts to NASA’s budget, lack of political will and limited support among the US public for further exploration.

While no human being has stepped onto the moon for over fifty years, space exploration has continued and there are regular crewed missions, with plans for further moon landings now being well advanced. NASA has partnerships with well-funded commercial companies, which are driving down costs due to more efficient technologies, and is recharging the moon race with its Artemis programme (co-sponsored by the European, Canadian and Japanese agencies). In 2026, the Artemis 11 mission will encircle the moon, taking the four crew deeper into space than any human has gone before and exploring the moon ‘for scientific discovery, economic benefits and to build the foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars’. Following this, the Artemis 111 crewed mission is scheduled to land on the moon in 2027, although this date may slip due to the preparations falling behind schedule.

China is also planning a crewed moon landing by 2030 and the international competition includes Russia and India. This awakened interest is fuelled by the expectation that the moon holds quantities of key natural resources that could underpin a new space mining industry. While there are historical international agreements dating back to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and including the 1979 Moon agreement adopted by the United Nations, the key countries (China, the US and Russia) have not signed up to the prohibition on national appropriation of space resources.

The astronomical cost of future efforts might be reduced by revolutionary ideas such as a lunar elevator attached to the moon’s surface and terminating in high Earth orbit, with solar-powered robotic shuttles moving up and down the cable. In anticipation of a lunar base and human settlement, NASA has commissioned the design and construction of 3D-printed lunar dwellings. The aspiration is to build these dwellings on the moon itself, using natural lunar materials.

The average distance from Earth to Mars is around 140 million miles, with a range from about 55 million miles at its closest approach to about 250 million miles at its maximum distance. The huge range is due to the planets’ elliptical orbits around the sun. By contrast, the average distance to the moon is around 239,000 miles, with a range from 225,000 to 252,000 miles. With our present-day technology, the journey to Mars will take between eight or nine months, while a crewed round trip would take from two to three years, allowing for favourable alignment of the planets for the return journey. Prior establishment of a moon base is likely to be important for crewed Mars missions and the following stage of deep space voyages to the asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are expected to take place in much later decades.

A modelling report produced in 2022 by academics, astronomers and computer scientists predicted that the mid-to-late 2030s may be a realistic goal for the first human landing on Mars. This timeframe, and others, may prove to be way out, as scientists are now exploring the potential of future rocket technology, such as a laser-thermal propulsion system or spinning liquid uranium at very high speeds to heat the propellant and increase thrust by three or four times. The timing will also be influenced by the pace of progress in solving critical issues relating to the survival and safety of astronauts, such as the risks posed by cosmic radiation on the surface of Mars.

In the Lifespinners novel, humans are busy colonising Mars by 2048, much to the disapproval of 118-year-old DJ Johnny: ‘Mars is already piled with junk. It’ll be overrun and tacky in no time, a party planet and dodgy haven for criminals and bent tycoons with loot squirrelled away in space banks.’ In our real world of 2025, there are many differing scientific, moral and philosophical views on whether we should venture into the outer reaches of space or begin to colonise neighbouring planets. At one end of the debate, it is claimed that we need the insurance policy of a second planet, as species extinction is the norm on Earth and beyond that, the laws of physics have destined our planet for destruction. At the other end, it is argued that the scale of space is too vast, other planetary environments are too harsh and hostile, the journey is too daunting, mining of resources is too risky for too little benefit and much of the technology remains theoretical.

The solution to these rather large barriers, it has been suggested, may lie in the further development of knowledge and expertise in genetics, robotics and AI, to the point where machine intelligence overtakes us and highly adaptive (and obedient) electronic entities are tuned to explore, discover and design our post-human destiny in outer space.

Regardless of whether it will be biologically resilient or genetically enhanced humans, half-human cyborgs, self-improving machines or digital avatars that finally make it to Mars and beyond, there remains the tantalising question of whether alien life exists in our galaxy or in the wider universe. To prepare for our contact with intelligent extra-terrestrial civilisation, a group of far-sighted scientists and humanists in Scotland have set up a Post-Detection Hub. The aim is to co-ordinate our collective knowledge for assessing evidence and planning the world’s response to extraterrestrial signs or signals, based on international agreement and combining exoplanet science with global law and governance.

Astronomers working on SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) have been looking for radio waves or laser signals sent by a distant civilisation for more than sixty years. In this research, scientists aim to find technosignatures, rather than biosignatures that reveal traces of biological life. The search for deliberate signals remains one of the most popular SETI strategies, although it assumes that other civilisations want to make contact. Some astronomers are also looking for traces of alien technology, including spaceships. It may be more likely that intelligent aliens will pick up the clearly artificial radio signals that we use to communicate with satellites and spacecraft. Technosignatures also include megastructures, such as massive solar panels, chemical pollutants and artificial light or heat resulting from industry or other processes.

Space telescopes have increasingly powerful capabilities, with the James Webb Telescope able to carry out in-depth profiles of far-off exoplanets and infrared exploration to detect water and carbon dioxide signatures in their atmosphere. Estimates of the number of planets with potentially habitable zones capable of supporting life (as we know it) vary among astronomers and exobiologists, but all the figures are colossal (a minimum of 300 million and possibly 60 billion in our Milky Way galaxy alone).

While astronomers, philosophers and others have long been curious about the possibility of extra-terrestrial visitors to Earth, it has generally been considered something of a fringe, science-fiction topic. In 2021, however, a US intelligence report included evidence from military aircrews of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) operating with far superior aerial abilities to our own. The resulting bill approved by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has rebranded UFOs as Unidentified Aero-space-undersea Phenomena (UAPs), indicating that they may be able to move seamlessly between space, air and water. While some will argue that it is pointless, reckless or simply a seriously bad idea to reach out to unearthly intelligent life, it might conceivably already be with us, or at least on its way here. Interstellar objects seen travelling through our solar system are of particular interest in this regard, especially if they have some unusual features, although so far these rare sightings appear to be of natural celestial bodies.

A further twist in the search for alien life lies in the far-out idea that our whole universe is actually a computer simulation, with some unknown agent, maybe an advanced species, fine-tuning the conditions. This hypothesis follows from the suggestion, first made by a physicist in the 1980s, that our physical reality is fundamentally mathematical and emerges from pieces of information, rather than being based on the fundamentals of space-time and matter. Proponents of the simulation theory argue that this may explain some curiosities of physics, such as the maximum speed being the speed of light, and the observation that the basic laws of physics resemble lines of computer code. Some experimental approaches have been put forward to test this alternative version of reality and potentially re-order our thoughts and assumptions about the place, power and significance of human beings. While this line of thought does not arise in the Lifespinners novel, there are other mind-twisting forces at play, some of which could possibly have similar effects beyond 2048…….  

Edited November 2025