While privately funded programs to develop space vehicles and execute extraterrestrial missions have been in play for years, 2024 may well be remembered as a banner year for those efforts as a host of accomplishments — and a few epic failures — marked a shift from what was once the exclusive purview of government-backed space agencies.
One of those private-sector misfires left two veteran astronauts aboard the International Space Station without a viable ride back to Earth. The expected 10-day debut crewed mission of Boeing’s new space craft launched in June but encountered multiple issues that ultimately led to the ship returning to Terra Prime via remote control operations without its original passengers.
Along the way we revamped some long-held beliefs about what the solar system planets really look like, saw the last U.S.-viewable total solar eclipse for a good long while and watched the launch of an extraordinary mission aiming to gather evidence about potential life on a distant, watery moon.
And, in what feels like an extended episode of “The X Files,” we continued to learn more throughout the year about U.S. government evidence that suggests, but still fails to confirm, that we may not be alone in this vast universe.
A blue that’s true
Back in January, scientists at the University of Oxford used newly gathered imaging to recompute the depictions of Uranus and Neptune to reveal a markedly different, but much more accurate, representation of the planets as they would appear to the human eye.
Data gathered in the 1980s by the Voyager 2 spacecraft led to images that depicted Uranus with a pale cyan appearance while Neptune was computed to be a much richer, deep azure.
Oxford professor Patrick Irwin and his team found that both worlds are in fact a similar shade of greenish blue. The Oxford scientists used data from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope to rebalance the composite color images recorded by the Voyager 2 camera some 40 years ago.
How to trip up a moon lander
It’s been over 50 years since a U.S. spacecraft landed on the surface of the moon, but that long absence was broken in February when Intuitive Machine’s Odysseus lander touched down on the lunar surface.
The privately developed, 14-foot tall lander launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Feb. 15 and traveled 620,000 miles to Earth’s sole satellite but a hoped-for upright landing near the moon’s south pole was wrecked when one of Odysseus’ six spindly legs caught a lunar sand dune and ended up on its side in a small crater. The lander was able to transmit images and data for about a week before it depleted power and became inoperable.
Odysseus was the first domestic spacecraft to return to the lunar surface since NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972, and became the first privately developed lander to land on the moon.
The lucrative side of the moon
Residents of the contiguous U.S. have been treated to two total solar eclipses in the last seven years but the event this spring will be the last one until 2044.
The April 8 eclipse’s optimum viewing corridor followed an arcing route that began in south Texas and ended its journey across the continental U.S. in northern Maine and lured some 4 million people to the dozen-plus U.S. states in the path of totality.
The celestial happening generated billions of dollars in windfall revenue for communities within and close to that narrow corridor.
Texas had the biggest single metro area in the path of totality, Dallas-Fort Worth, as well as Austin and San Antonio that, combined, account for 13 million residents who didn’t have to go anywhere to view the event. Bulent Temel, assistant professor of practice and economics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, told the Texas Standard that a million or more eclipse watchers could be traveling to the state and, the time the path of totality takes to travel through the state, will make it the most profitable event to ever happen in Texas.
“Well, this spectacle is going to take a total of 22 minutes in the state of Texas,” Temel said. “And it’s going to bring somewhere between $150 million and $603 million, in our estimates, to the state economy. So that is likely to be the most profitable per-minute stimulation of the state economy in the state’s 179-year history.”
Cosmic castaways?
Back in 2014, NASA announced a pair of “groundbreaking” contracts, granted to Boeing and SpaceX, aiming to bring the job of ferrying astronauts to and from the orbiting International Space Station, a task that was assumed by Russia’s Roscosmos following the retirement of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, back to the U.S.
The Elon Musk-owned space vehicle developer SpaceX won the race to become that provider when the company’s Dragon 1 capsule carried two astronauts to the ISS in December 2020. It has since made dozens of manned and cargo flights to the ISS.
Boeing struggled to develop the Starliner capsule but overcame a series of delays and setbacks in June when it launched the debut crewed flight of its new spacecraft. But more problems arose early in the mission when a handful of maneuvering thrusters failed to perform as expected when the ship was docking with the ISS.
While the mission was originally scheduled to last about eight to 10 days, the work to resolve the thruster issues, along with helium leaks, through a series of mostly ground-based testing and assessment dragged on for months as the two-person Starliner crew, veteran NASA astronauts and former Navy test pilots Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, waited for a verdict aboard the ISS. While Boeing engineers deemed Starliner fit for bringing its crew back to Earth, NASA wasn’t convinced and deemed the issues too risky for a crewed return flight. Starliner would safely return empty in September, executing a parachute-assisted landing at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Later that month, the SpaceX Crew 9 mission docked at the ISS, with only two astronauts aboard and plans to fill the remaining seats in the 4-passenger capsule with Williams and Wilmore for a return flight scheduled, at the time, for February 2025.
On Dec. 17, NASA announced it was delaying the SpaceX Crew 10 mission launch and the expected crew handoff that would have marked the end of Williams’ and Wilmore’s time at the ISS. Now, it appears that the earliest the two astronauts will bring their unexpectedly lengthy ISS visit to a close will be in late March of 2025.
‘Mechazilla’: the rocket grappling robot
SpaceX saw a pair of test flights of its massive Super Heavy Booster rocket end in fiery mid-air explosions in 2023 but the program saw much better outcomes in a series of 2024 tests, including the fifth round in October when the company successfully captured its returning booster in a set of giant robotic arms. The company nicknamed that recapture apparatus “Mechazilla” and celebrated the successful test by posting a video of the dramatic procedure.
The recovery extended SpaceX’s success arc in reusing pricey space flight components as it works to prove out Starship, its newest spacecraft. It’s slated to ferry astronauts to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program and, eventually, carry the first humans to Mars.
The truth may be down here
November hearings hosted by two U.S. House subcommittees continued a string of inquiries about supposed UFO activity and included numerous claims from former government officials that evidence exists and is being shielded from the public by secret programs.
But, as has been the case over the past several years of hearings, investigations and testimony about incidents now classified by the government as unexplained aerial phenomena, or UAPs, no hard evidence was offered to back up the claims.
In written testimony submitted ahead of the latest hearings, retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet said his belief in UAPs was confirmed nine years ago when he was still on active duty and following an incident off the U.S. East Coast involving Navy pilots aboard an F/A-18 fighter jet.
“Confirmation that UAPs are interacting with humanity came for me in January 2015 when I was serving as the commander of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command,” Gallaudet wrote. “At the time, my personnel were participating in a pre-deployment naval exercise off the U.S. East Coast that included the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group.”
Numerous claims about extraterrestrial spacecraft and alien remains have been made by current and former government employees for decades, including in 2023 when a former U.S. Intelligence official alleged the government is in possession of “intact and partially intact craft of nonhuman origin.”
David Grusch, an Air Force veteran and former member of both the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, made news in June 2023 when he went public with claims that he was privy to classified government secrets.
While working on the task force, Grusch said several colleagues approached him about their involvement in a crash retrieval program that researches alien technology.
“These are retrieving nonhuman origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, nonhuman exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed,” Grusch told NewsNation.
“I thought it was totally nuts and I thought at first I was being deceived, it was a ruse,” Grusch said. “People started to confide in me. Approach me. I have plenty of senior, former intelligence officers that came to me, many of which I knew almost my whole career, that confided in me that they were part of a program.”
A Defense Department report released in March said investigators conducted dozens of interviews, including with those who claimed to have knowledge of secret programs studying recovered extraterrestrial materials, but found no credible evidence to support the claims, even though some of the documents and programs named by interviewees actually exist.
“... all of the named and described alleged hidden UAP reverse-engineering programs provided by interviewees either do not exist; are misidentified authentic, highly sensitive national security programs that are not related to extraterrestrial technology exploitation; or resolve to an unwarranted and disestablished program,” the report reads.
Utah’s infamous Skinwalker Ranch, long rumored to be an epicenter of unexplained paranormal activity and UAP sightings, gets a mention in the report as an area that was investigated at one time by the now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, following up on reports of “shadow figures” and “creatures,” and claims of “remote viewing” and “human consciousness anomalies” on the property near Roosevelt, Utah.