Around the world of space exploration

The first successful landing of a space probe on a comet by the European Space Agency on Wednesday promises to help scientists learn much about how the universe was formed — along with the solar system, planets and even life on Earth.

Space travel has long been a cooperative endeavor, to varying degrees, between different countries. Some significant acts of diplomacy during the Cold War happened in space between American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts, despite the furious rivalry between their respective space programs in other fields, like reaching the moon.

Today the so called “space race” moves at a slower pace, and there is plenty of cooperation, but that doesn’t mean all the world’s space-faring nations are exploring the universe in the same way or for the same reasons.

The United States has an active space program, monitoring information that NASA hardware sends back from Mars, where the Curiosity rover makes tracks, as well as from Saturn, where the satellite Cassini snaps photos, and beyond. But in 2012 NASA lost the ability to send human beings into space on its own. The agency retired the costly Space Shuttle, a ferry for humans going to the International Space Station, and began to rely on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. NASA has paid billions for the privilege.

But the contract to use Soyuz will run out in 2018, so NASA plans to return humans to space using the Orion capsule, which will go up on a rocket and come back down by parachute, like the Gemini and Mercury programs of the early 1960s. NASA hopes to return to the moon, land on an asteroid and, with experience gained, forge on to Mars.

But unlike in the days of John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride, when the U.S. government built the rockets and craft that took astronauts into space, today’s NASA has turned to the private sector for help.

Boeing, an aeronautics company, and SpaceX, a relatively new private space firm, have won NASA contracts to develop new ways of launching humans into space.  Orbital Sciences, another private space company, provides unmanned cargo ships to bring supplies and remove trash from the International Space Station.

Those relationships have worked out fairly well, but the explosion of a NASA Antares rocket at liftoff destroyed an Orbital Sciences cargo ship last month, proving space travel will never be without its risks.

The Soviet space program — which sent the first human into space in 1961 and has landed remote-controlled probes on the moon and Venus — went through dark times in the 1990s, struggling to afford the maintenance costs of its Mir space station following the collapse of the U.S.S.R..

But Russian space agency Roscosmos has found its footing again, and now controls some of the only means of sending a human being into orbit.

“On the human space flight side Russia’s got the Soyuz, which is one of the most reliable rockets ever,” said Bruce Betts, director of science and technology at the Planetary Society, a California-based private organization that sponsors space research.

Russia is also teaming up with the European Space Agency to launch a Mars probe that will leave a rover on the red planet, marking the first time any country besides the U. S. has successfully landed there. That mission has been delayed, but could take off later this decade. 

Russia and the U.S., despite suffering disagreements on Earth, have managed to forge a close relationship in space by partnering on the International Space Station — a collaboration involving NASA, Roscosmos, the European Space Agency and JAXA, the Japanese space agency. In the last fifteen years, the ISS has produced significant research useful to all countries.

But there’s a catch: There is talk of decommissioning the ISS sometime in the early 2020s, due to costs. Betts said there is plenty of momentum in the orbiting laboratory, meaning it could stay up for another 20 years.

Even so, Betts said that the potential end of the ISS program could free up money that space agencies now earmark for the orbiting lab. Those billions of dollars could then be spent on other space projects.

 “As long as you’re plowing money into ISS operations, supporting that whole effort is taking a huge chunk of your space budget,” Betts said.

The European Space Agency (ESA) doesn’t get the same kind of publicity as its American and Russian counterparts, but its contribution to science has been invaluable. ESA, comprised of 20 countries across the continent, maintains contact with several long-range satellites and space probes. One, HELIO, has helped add to our knowledge of the sun, and the European Mars Express surveyor satellite orbits that planet.

The ESA, working alongside NASA, made a major contribution to our understanding of the solar system’s outer planets with its Huygens probe. Attached to NASA’s Cassini Saturn surveyor, Huygens successfully completed the first landing on Saturn’s moon Titan, which is shrouded by thick clouds and home to huge lakes of liquid natural gas. Betts said the probe was able to confirm that Titan’s liquid hydrocarbons function much like water does on Earth.

And, of course, as of this morning ESA is the only space agency to successfully land on a comet.

Unlike the ESA, Roscosmos, NASA and JAXA — the big four partners on the ISS — China does not cooperate in the same way with its fellow spacefaring nations. But it has made great strides in manned spaceflight over the last 10 years, with several "taikonauts" orbiting the Earth or staying in a small space station that remains in orbit. In 2012 China also successfully landed a moon probe, Jade Rabbit, although it stopped transmitting data soon after it arrived.

India also made headlines last year with the successful placement of an orbiter around Mars. Part of the big news was how cheaply it was done. The India Space Research Organization, which oversaw the project, was able to complete it for just $74 million.