After a year of countless rocket launches, the next decade is set to witness a boom in space exploration. And 2020 is full of promise — we will most likely see everything from robot-crewed missions to Mars to private crewed missions to Earth's orbit.
Mars missions planned for this year:
- NASA's Mars 2020 Rover, which will leverage new instruments to probe the possibilities of extraterrestrial life
- China's Huoxing-1, scheduled to study the Martian atmosphere and terrain for 90 days
- The United Arab Emirates' Hope Mars Mission orbiter, which will study Mars' atmospheric chemistry from above
- And the European Space Agency (ESA) rover named Rosalind Franklin, in honor of the British scientist who paved the way for the discovery of the DNA structure.
In the field of private spaceflight, SpaceX and Boeing are in their final preparations before launching NASA astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon and the Boeing Starliner, respectively, bound for the ISS.
While both missions are targeting first-quarter launch dates, others — such as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin — plan to launch crewed capsules later in the year. In the case of Blue Origin's New Shepard, for example, the vertical-takeoff-and-vertical-landing suborbital rocket is expected to carry humans to space by year's end.
And when it comes to lunar missions, NASA and the China National Space Administration (CNSA) are pushing ahead — NASA with a first (more limited) iteration of its Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion deep space capsule, and the CNSA with its Chang’e 5 lunar mission.
Text by Peter Diamandis