Irish Examiner view: Ready for lift-off

Space agencies continue to explore our final frontier

With NASA's James Webb space telescope on board, Arianespace's Ariane 5 rocket launched on Christmas Day from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. Picture: NASA/AP

This year is an exciting one for space exploration, space travel, and space tourism.

First off the launch pad is Nasa’s much anticipated return to the Moon and beyond, scheduled for February. All going well, humans will again step on the Moon’s surface in 2025 as part of a wider plan to establish a lunar colony, setting the foundations for more regular trips to Mars.

A joint European-Russian mission will also step up the hunt for alien life on the Red Planet in September with daring plans to land a robot rover on Oxia Planum — a plain on the planet’s northern hemisphere.

Not to be outdone, Nasa in August will try to crash a 1,340lb probe — at 24,000km/h — into a rather large and ominous piece of rock known as Dimorphos to see how much an asteroid’s speed and path can be altered.

And in a battle of the egos, two of the world’s richest men — Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson — plan to launch regular sub-orbital flights this year ... for those with galaxy-sized wallets, of course.