All aboard for the future of space travel... but it’s a one-way ticket only

WANTED: astronauts to explore new worlds, to seek out new civilisations – to boldly go where no one (or, at least, no sane one) has gone before.

The catch? it’s a one-way ticket. The next generation of star adventurers may hurtle through the cosmos for years or decades on a mission to explore distant planets and stars – and never return to Earth.

A senior NASA official is convinced that the world’s space agencies, or the commercial firms that may eventually succeed them, could issue one-way tickets to space, with the travellers accepting that they would not come back.

“You would find no shortage of volunteers,” said John Olson, NASA’s director of exploration systems integration. “It’s really no different than the pioneering spirit of many in past history, who took the one-way trip across the ocean, or the trip out west across the United States with no intention of ever returning.”

Speaking on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission in which man took his first steps on the moon on July 20, 1969, Mr Olson predicted that humans will reach Mars by 2050 and said the next obvious target was the stars and moons beyond.

“We’re going back to the moon, not for flags and footsteps but for a sustained presence,” Olson told the Guardian newspaper. “We’re going to use the moon as a stepping stone to Mars and we’re going to look at other interesting spots, like asteroids and near-Earth objects, and we’re going to look at all the other exciting places to go in this solar system.”

In May 1961, then US president John F Kennedy challenged the US to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and return him safely to Earth.

While NASA is still bound by JFK’s directive to bring astronauts home, Olson believes that the world’s future space agencies and commercial space exploration firms will have no such scruples.

“Space is no longer for power and prestige; it’s truly for economic benefit,” the Apollo 11 flight director Eugene Kranz said.

“The technology that emerges from high-risk, high-profile, extremely difficult missions is the technology that will keep the economic engine of our nation continuing to go through the years.”

But while a trip to Mars – launched from a lunar outpost – would last six to nine months each way for a year-long mission on the surface, the star nearest the Earth’s solar system, Alpha Centauri, is 4.37 light years away – more than 2.5 trillion miles – or a very long way from Tipperary.

Since the dawn of the Apollo programme, America has lost 17 astronauts to fires and collisions but never through abandonment. That could be about to change. If the astronauts of the future want their place in space, they could be on their own.