TED ATAKENT ESENYURT COLLEGE / 11-C
Earth is Just the Beginning: The Next Chapter of Exploration
Fatma Deniz AYDIN
38
“ The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”— Albert Einstein( Van Bemmel, 2008) in spacecraft, and AI-enabled robotic space travelers. Space innovation, or rather the lack thereof, would leave today’ s life in the 1950s( Gao & Chien, 2017).
In 1969, an Indian boy sat glued to a black-and-white TV screen, mesmerized by the grainy broadcast of Apollo 11. When Neil Armstrong planted his foot on the Moon, the boy, fascinated, whispered,“ One day, I will go there too.” The mother smiled, but years down the line, the boy— Rakesh Sharma— went on to become India’ s first astronaut.
However, beyond technology, space is survival. Home planet Earth is home, but it is fragile. One asteroid, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, would wipe us out too. Space exploration gives us options— asteroid defense, Martian settlements, and even mining rare metals from asteroids to reduce environmental footprint on Earth.
Stories like these are proof that the exploration of space is not just science— it’ s about pushing the limits of human potential. But why is space important? Why must we spend billions of dollars on rockets when we have problems on Earth? The answer is simple: because space is the future.
Space Innovation: Why It Matters The technologies that we develop for space revolutionize life on our earth. GPS, weather satellites, and even your phone’ s camera are all byproducts of space exploration. Nowadays, we are striving for reusable rockets, nuclear fusion for power
What’ s Next? Scientists are developing engines that will propel us to Mars in 45 days instead of seven months. NASA’ s Artemis mission plans to have a permanent Moon base by the 2030s. SpaceX and Blue Origin, among others, are racing to create commercial space travel( Gao & Chien, 2017). The future is not like a movie, but it is real, and it is unfolding.
And what about that little boy? Rakesh Sharma went on to fly India’ s first manned space mission in 1984( Sharma, 2004). Asked to describe what India was like from space, he said,