The past week has been bitter-sweet for space endeavours: While the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) successfully blasted off on its mission to study Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa, three of Jupiter’s Galilean moons (except for the volcanic hotspot Io), SpaceX’s mighty rocket — the Starship Super Heavy — failed to make into the Earth’s orbit and exploded.
Both these projects are crucial in the quest for making Homo sapiens an interplanetary species. On one hand, JUICE would be looking for alien life on Jupiter’s moons, and on the other, Starship rockets are being developed to one day take humans to Mars. There is little to explain why humans are looking for habitable alien worlds: To ensure that the species survive, even as our polluting activities doom life on Earth.
A lot has already been discussed about why Mars appears to be our first choice for a home away from home (it was on
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