NASA Is on the Cusp of a New Era
Jennifer Heldmann laughed when I pointed out that she used the word “unprecedented” five times in a recent paper. “I should have checked that,” she said. But who could blame her? The NASA planetary scientist was describing a dream come true: The ability for humans to travel to the moon and Mars frequently—and not have to worry about packing lightly!
That’s because of a new vehicle the rocket company SpaceX is developing and testing, called Starship. It shatters the size and constraints with which scientists and engineers have had to content themselves. With space-bound instruments no longer needing to be painstakingly and expensively miniaturized, and with launch costs down and launch frequency up, NASA can think big—really big.
No one is more excited about this than Heldmann. She works at NASA’s Ames Research Center in the Space Science and Astrobiology Division and in the Planetary Systems Branch. She is an expert in the origin and evolution of water ice on the moon and Mars, and is intimately involved in planning, and campaigning for, human exploration missions on other worlds. Her paper, “Accelerating Martian and Lunar Science through SpaceX Starship Missions,” co-authored with two dozen other researchers, including employees at SpaceX, preceded some promising news. SpaceX is preparing the ground for Starship operations at Launch Complex 39A, part of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral, the site that saw Apollo 11’s astronauts land on the moon. “39A is hallowed spaceflight ground,” Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO and chief
