Are we Alone In The Universe?

The programme, announced by President Kennedy in 1961, 'to land a man on the Moon before the end of the decade, and return him safely to earth', was lavishly funded because America wanted to beat Russia. Their pride had been badly dented in 1957, when Russia launched the first 'Sputnik', and this was a chance to recapture the lead in the space race. Reaching the Moon was an end in itself: the last lunar landing was in 1972.

Manned spaceflight now seems a rather jaded spectator-sport: the veteran senator John Glenn's recent trip in the Space Shuttle may have been a morale-booster for elderly Americans, but it didn't recapture the excitement of his pioneering flight 36 years earlier. We admired the Russian cosmonauts more for their fortitude and DIY skills than for anything else, as they coped with one malfunction after another in the decrepit Mir spacecraft.

Nationals of other countries have hitched rides into space. The British astronaut Michael Foal heroically survived the hazards of Mir, the Russian Space Station. French, Bulgarian and Mongolian astronauts have also made the trip. But none of this has recaptured public enthusiasm.

NASA Perhaps the best astronauts are robots

The practical case for manned spaceflight was never strong, and it gets weaker as robots and computers get more powerful. Space technology -- now funded commercially as well as by governments -- has abundantly proved its value. Thousands of small unmanned objects have been launched into orbit.

Satellites are routinely used for long distance telephones and satellite tv broadcasts. The 'global positioning satellites' allow planes or ships to navigate precisely -- and allow solo hikers or sailor to locate themselves accurately anywhere on Earth, with a pocket-sized instrument. Weather forecasts depend on pictures and data from space.

Space exploration need not involve humans. It can be better (and far more cheaply) carried out by fleets of unmanned probes, exploiting the advances that have given us mobile phones and high-powered personal computers.

Cameras and scientific instruments have beamed back pictures from the other planets of our Solar system. And the Hubble Space Telescope has imaged stars and galaxies so deep in space that their light set out on its journey towards us billions of years before our Earth and Sun were born. The cosmos is fantastically larger and more complex than could have been imagined by the ancients who first mapped the constellations.