Things of great interest are happening in space programs throughout the world. NASA has received a boost in funding with an eye at not only developing a spaceship and a plan for getting to Mars, but they have been given a mandate to develop a propulsion unit which will be able to reach 1/10 the speed of light. When I was a kid this stuff was strictly science fiction, today it is science reality. A couple of other NASA programs will no longer be funded, but NASA is actually talking about a mission to another solar system in 2069 and that system is the closest one to ours. It is around the star Alpha Centauri. Even with the above engine it would take many years to reach it. Many of us hope there will be a breakthrough or some secret technology will be released from black projects which will allow us to travel much faster, but right now there are hundreds of bodies or more in our own solar system to be explored and some are so far away in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud we could use a fast engine just to reach these objects. We really don’t know how many undiscovered planets could be in the Oort cloud and we might find there are more there than the eight we know about.

NASA has a lot to say about future Mar’s missions and is going to use the moon to test out habitats and such. This means we will probably be back on the moon in the next 5 years or so. I like the idea they have of building a tiny solar powered helicopter which would disconnect from the rover and fly ahead scouting the area. Everything I am talking about does assume we are not already on the moon and Mars. Many people believe we have bases in both places and there have been some photos which seem to indicate this could be true. NASA’s budget for the next year (2017) is said to be 19.5 billion dollars. I have to wonder how things would go if NASA decided to suspend most of its programs for one year and use the bulk of the funds to set up a base on the moon. It has been said there are elements on the moon which are worth considerable money and if we mined them it could change the energy situation on earth. In so doing we might be able to wipe out our debt by mining and selling these valuable elements.

The United States is not alone in its quest to conquer space. We know the very best rocket engines come from Russia and the U.S. is still dependent on them, but it is hoped that will soon be resolved by engines being developed by private aerospace companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin. Blue Origin is a company established by billionaire Jeff Bezos the founder and CEO of Amazon.com. SpaceX was founded by the billionaire Elon Musk the former PayPal entrepreneur and Tesla Motors CEO. This competition is truly a battle of the billionaires for developing a space transportation system capable of lifting heavy loads and doing it reliably. These same rockets may be used to travel to planets and moons in our solar system. Here is the problem for Elon Musk. His fortune is valued at “only” 12.3 billion dollars while Bezos has 59.1 billion which is obviously almost five times as much and he can afford to dump more money into his company than Musk can.

India is on the cusp of developing a space shuttle. It is officially known as the reusable launch vehicle (RLV-TD). Just as we hoped for when we developed our shuttle the Indian government is saying it should reduce the cost of placing objects in orbit and they think the cost of placing 1kg in space will initially go down to $5,000 and hope it will eventually go even lower perhaps to $500. Remember what happened when we built our shuttle, costs went way up and it cost about ten times as much to use the shuttle to orbit object as a rocket. Our original design if used might have been able to achieve savings, but the military insisted on enlarging the shuttle which caused us to have to attach outside boosters and made the whole thing very unwieldy and expensive, not to mention it wasn’t as reliable as the original design. I hope the Indian government learned from our experience. One thing of note is the fact the shuttle will use heat resistant tiles just as ours did. It does sound as if there is 1970s technology being used doesn’t it? One has to wonder how much of this design can be credited to our original shuttle or the Russian one? The Indian space agency is the ISRO and has been around since 1969. It has an annual budget of 1.3 billion dollars.

One country which seems to have advanced its space program to the point where it is only second to the United States is China. China has a space station which is due for replacement by a bigger and more advanced one. The station is known as Tiangong-1 and will be replaced by Tiangong-2. They also have a rover on the moon which is sending back data. They established their space agency in 1993 and were late starters to the space program and yet have accomplished some amazing things. Their annual budget for space is also 1.3 billion dollars and while only a fraction of ours, their money goes a lot further. Their space agency is CNSA.

Germany has a space agency known as German Aerospace Center. The country has a budget of 2.0 billion dollars for space research, but sends 1/3 of it to the European Space Agency. Germany has been researching energy and transportation in space.

When it comes to the newest space agency we have to look to Japan. Their space agency is JAXA and was started in 2003. Japan contributed the largest module to the International Space Station and it is known as Kibo. Japan has a space budget of 2.5 billion dollars.

Many of us don’t think of France as a space pioneer, but we forget they were the third nation in history to accomplish a successful space launch. They are the developers of the Arlane rocket which is used for launches by the European Space Agency. They also built the space launch center in Guiana which is used by the ESA for their launches. It admits to having paid UFO investigators. France has a space budget of 2.8 billion dollars.

Now for Russia. The Russian space agency is the Russian Federal Space Agency known as Roskosmos. It has a budget of 5.6 billion dollars. There are still over 250,000 people involved in one way or another with the Russian space program. As mentioned before they have the best rocket engine in the world and it is the envy of every nation. They have launched probes to many planets and put rovers on the moon. The Lunokhod program was a series of rovers the Soviet Union sent to the moon, Venera series probes were sent to Venus and probes sent to Mars. Popular Mechanics states the places the Russians will send the next probes to are the Moon, Mars, Ganymede and the Sun.