Photo by ESA/Rosetta/Philae/ROLIS via CNES

That image above is an up-close-and-personal look at the surface of a comet, taken this morning by a tiny lander called Philae moments before it made contact with that ancient chunk of ice and rock. Philae spent 10 years traveling through deep space to make this rendezvous, carried aboard the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe. After a circuitous route that required a couple of slingshot maneuvers past Mars and Earth, as well as fly-bys of two different asteroids, Rosetta finally came alongside Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, some 311 million miles from Earth, back in August. Since then, it has been slowly moving in closer, mapping the comet’s terrain as it went. And then this morning, it released Philae for a seven-hour journey down to 67P. Other space probes have done close fly-bys of comets, and we even slammed a projectile into one back in 2005, but this is the first time we’ve gently set anything down on one.

Even leaving aside the historical-first aspect of this landing, it’s an incredible feat of navigation. Consider: 67P is only two-and-a-half miles across, and it’s speeding around the sun at roughly 85,000 mph. Imagine trying to hit a target that small and that fast in all that infinite emptiness with a spacecraft — Rosetta — that’s only 105 feet across its solar-panel wingspan. The mind boggles. And then there are the problems of actually landing on a comet. For one thing, 67P isn’t even a sphere, like a planet. Most of the descriptions I’ve read compare its shape to a rubber duckie: two irregularly shaped “lobes” stuck together. Because it’s so small, it has hardly any gravitational pull; Philae weighs only half an ounce when it’s on the surface of 67P. And the comet is outgassing, meaning its icy components are evaporating and venting off into space, which means, in that super-low gravity, that the comet can literally blow Philae away. To counter this, Philae has a cold-gas thruster on top intended to hold it against the comet’s surface while two anchoring systems — harpoons and ice-screws in its landing pads — dig in and make the lander fast. Unfortunately, it appears that these systems didn’t work quite as hoped: the thruster failed to properly pressurize as the lander was preparing to depart Rosetta, and the harpoons did not fire once it reached the surface. Last I heard, ESA scientists were still trying to verify whether or not the ice-screws had attached themselves, which means the lander could be just floating alongside the comet, or in danger of drifting away from it. But it definitely did make contact… in fact, it appears that Philae bounced and settled back to the surface at least once, so it made contact a couple of times.

Communications with the lander have been intermittent, for undetermined reasons, but ESA has confirmed it is on the surface, and it is functioning, so with luck we should start getting some interesting data back any time. Philae carries a suite of 10 scientific experiments, including a drill to take a core sample and an onboard laboratory to analyze it. Its primary mission is scheduled to last a couple of days, then — depending on how well the lander is able to recharge its batteries — a secondary phase will begin that could last until March of next year, after which conditions will likely be getting too hot for it to continue functioning as 67P plunges toward the sun.

I’m excited to see the planned panoramic photograph of the landing area, but in the meantime, feast your eyes on this gallery from The New York Times, including lots of shots of the comet taken as Rosetta approached.

One final thought: As exciting as this landing has been, a friend of mine lamented over on Facebook earlier that there was a time when this would have been an American achievement instead of a European one. I understand what he was getting at. I’m not really prone to nationalism myself, but when it comes to space stuff… well, I do take a lot of pride in the fact that it’s an American flag up there at Tranquility Base, and that we were the first nation with a reusable spaceship. But as someone else pointed out on that Facebook thread, it’s better for the countries of the world to work together on missions like this than to compete like we did in the Cold War days. (NASA did, in fact, contribute to the Rosetta mission.) For one thing, sharing the costs is the only practical way around the enormous expense of space exploration. But more generally, I also think it’s simply right that we all work together for this. If space exploration is truly “for all mankind,” if our ultimate goal is to make humanity an interplanetary species, then all of humanity needs to be involved and represented in what we’re doing out there. The first moonbase or Mars colony, ideally, ought to include Americans, Europeans, Asians, Indians… and  Russians… Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, and yes, Muslims, too. This is the ideal established by Star Trek and Babylon 5, and it’s the one I dream we’ll achieve. Chances are we won’t, of course. I’m not so naive as to believe reality isn’t going to end up a lot messier than Star Trek ever was, and there will no doubt be some ventures where nations cooperate and others where they don’t. (I foresee that asteroid mining, if it works out, will probably be intensely nationalistic and/or corporate, with different organizations laying claim to specific rocks… hopefully peacefully, but not necessarily…) But hey, let’s at least try for the dream. It worked out pretty damn well this morning, didn’t it?

Astronauts on the International Space Station submerge a sealed GoPro in a blob of water. Awesomeness ensues:

Space is hard – but worth it. We will persevere and move forward together.

–Richard Branson, founder and CEO, Virgin Galactic

Last week was a tough one for commercial spaceflight.

Last Tuesday morning, an unmanned Antares rocket, operated by a company called Orbital Sciences Corporation and packed with supplies and experiments bound for the space station, exploded in a spectacular fireball seconds after rising from its launch pad. The latest report I’ve found indicates the launch safety officers deliberately detonated the rocket after its first-stage propulsion system failed, as a precaution to keep it from going down over a populated area. The cause of the failure is still under investigation. This was the third of eight cargo missions Orbital is contracted to perform for NASA; the company’s competitor SpaceX will reportedly fill the gap created in the resupply schedule. Also affected by the Antares disaster is Planetary Resources, the company that wants to mine the asteroids; its Arkyd 3 test platform was aboard the doomed rocket as well. You can read more about that here, if you’re interested.

As if losing the Antares wasn’t enough of a blow, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo then broke up during a test flight on Friday, resulting in the death of one of its pilots and serious injuries to the other. It appears the rocket plane’s braking system somehow deployed earlier than it should have, although investigators still haven’t said conclusively that was the cause of the accident, or have any idea of why the system deployed.

Predictably, there was an almost immediate torrent of op-eds and online commentary denouncing private space operations (Time had a memorably galling headline, “Enough with Amateur-Hour Space Flight“), and even calling for an end to manned spaceflight altogether. “People are dying!” the cries go. People could die, if something like that Antares blast happens to, say, a crewed Dragon capsule. To which I reply, yes, they are. and they could, and that’s tragic… but how many sailors died during the Age of Exploration? How many would-be colonists did not survive the passage from the Old World to the New? How many pioneers fell while crossing the Great Plains, or didn’t make it through their first harsh winter of homesteading? How many early aviators died trying to figure out how those new-fangled (and by our standards, appallingly fragile) aeroplanes really behaved?

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not heartless, and I certainly don’t mean to be glib about human lives. I regret and mourn every life lost in the cause of furthering a human presence in space. I certainly wouldn’t want to lose my own life in such an accident, or a friend or family member’s. But I firmly believe those deaths are honorable and meaningful. Because I believe passionately in the cause they died for.

Whenever this subject comes up, I always think of a moment from the original Star Trek series, a scene that’s come to be known to fans as the “risk speech”:

Now, obviously Captain Kirk’s soliloquy here is tailored to the details of a specific storyline. When he says “risk is our business,” he’s referring to the crew of the Enterprise, and to Starfleet, and the risk he’s speaking of is first contact with the alien species of the week. But what I hear in these words from a 46-year-old television segment is nothing less than my vision of the entire human race. Risk is our business, as a species. I believe the urge to explore, to wander, to want to know what’s over the horizon, is built into our very DNA. Pushing back new frontiers is dangerous… but as Kirk says, the possible returns are immense. Too immense to ignore, whether you believe we need to get off this rock in order to preserve our species in the event of a planetary-scale catastrophe, or you think there’s money to be made from the resources out there, or if, like me, you just think exploration is a worthy enough goal in itself, simply for the sake of seeing what’s out there..

Virgin Galactic isn’t in quite the same category as the Apollo missions, of course. The company’s raison d’etre is to take well-heeled customers on a brief thrill ride, and nothing more. SpaceShipTwo isn’t even capable of reaching orbit — its flight plans are all merely trampoline hops up to the edge of space and back — and I’ll confess I’ve been pretty dismissive of this venture compared to, say, SpaceX and its long-term goals of sending people to Mars. (I’ll also confess that I’d be a lot more enthusiastic about Virgin Galactic if I thought there was a chance in hell that I could one day afford one of its trips.) But in the wake of this accident, I’ve done some thinking, and I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter if SpaceShipTwo is just a rich man’s folly, because the more human beings we actually put up there in the black, even if they’re only there for a few minutes, the more we become a space-faring species. And by figuring out how to do it efficiently, safely, and cost-effectively for this one purpose, we learn things that can go toward other applications. Perhaps suborbital hops like this could someday shorten travel time for ordinary civilians like myself. Perhaps there are problems we haven’t even identified yet that will be solved by things we learn now.

Look, Richard Branson, the founder and CEO of Virgin Galactic, said it perfectly in the tweet I quoted at top of this entry. Space is hard. Getting there is hard, at least with our current approach. We’ve been in this place before, after the loss of space shuttle Challenger, when everybody was stunned to suddenly realize what a rocket ship actually is: a massive load of high explosives. And again after the loss of Columbia, when everybody realized it’s as difficult to come back from space as it is to get there. That’s just how it is, at least until someone invents an antigravity drive like we see in all the movies, or builds a working space elevator. We’ve just got to accept a certain amount of risk if we’re going to open this particular frontier. And I think we are going to open it, and that we should. I think we’re going to find we really don’t have any choice. And given the economic realities of our age, we’re going to need private enterprise to be a part of the opening process. So forget all this talk of abandoning space, or just leaving it to NASA. Let’s just suck it up, find out what went wrong with the Antares and SpaceShipTwo, mourn our losses, and then move on…