Photo: Gaetan Bally / Keystone

I still find it astonishing that people deeply engaged in astrophysics research can, in good conscience, answer ‘no’ to this question. Many of them use the results from the Hubble telescope, which would have been completely unusable without human interventions in orbit, five times between 1993 and 2009.

Of course, someone will say: “Now we have the James Webb Space Telescope, the big brother of Hubble, working perfectly in infrared without costly and dangerous human space missions to maintain it”. That’s true, but we can’t do statistics with just these two space telescopes. Moreover, in November 2019, another astronaut mission saved a valuable scientific instrument, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, on the International Space Station. This antimatter detector aims to achieve a better understanding of the origins of the universe. The success of its rescue, when it wasn’t designed for orbit repairs, has clearly demonstrated that humans in space are not just ‘for fun’. In recent years, human spaceflights have served science magnificently.

There is another aspect of these flights that sparks debate: the idea of a habituated base on the Moon’s South Pole for long-term stays by astronauts from NASA’s Artemis and China’s programmes. The Artemis objective is primarily scientific, but also considered as a step towards preparing for future human missions to Mars.

I’m not in favour of an imminent colonisation of the red planet, unlike Elon Musk. But exploring it with astronaut teams will certainly happen in the future. It’s a major technical and operational challenge and a tremendous source of inspiration and emotions, just like the Apollo lunar programme half a century ago. And an attempt to answer a question of great interest: can humans live long-term and in good health elsewhere than on Earth?

Claude Nicollier is a member of the Federal Commission for Space Affairs and an honorary professor at EPFL. As an astrophysicist, he was the first Swiss astronaut.

Photo: ZVG

Perseverance, JUICE, BepiColombo and many others … These small space robots explore our solar system, sending us images, samples, and physical data that help us understand planetary formation and evolution. Each new generation of probe is more advanced than the previous one, and the rapid progress of artificial intelligence suggests significant advances to come: a time when these small robots will be able to make decisions about their mission, making human missions unnecessary, with or without robots.

These probes have a crucial advantage: they don’t need to breathe, eat, or be shielded from radiation. All financial efforts can focus on perfecting their deployment and boosting their performance. In contrast, human missions are crippled by the exorbitant cost of ensuring the survival of human astronauts in acceptable conditions.

Humans are explorers; they’ve never been content with just staying at home. After exploring Earth, they naturally turned their gaze to the sky. Following the short-lived conquest of the Moon, space stations have enabled long-term human presence in space. This has allowed us to understand various aspects of our physiology, particularly that the lack of gravity has an extremely negative impact on living organisms. The metabolic stress induced by fluid imbalance in the body, combined with increased exposure to radiation, leads to more or less severe pathologies or disabilities that demonstrate how fragile our bodies are when removed from their natural evolutionary environment.

National financial resources are not infinitely extendable. At a time when challenges abound for ensuring a dignified life on Earth, it’s absurd to commit astronomical sums to human missions while robotic exploration reaps such successes.

Sylvia Ekström is an astrophysicist at the University of Geneva and a specialist in stellar physics. She wrote a book in 2020 entitled ‘We Won’t Live on Mars, or Anywhere Else’.