Latest Innovations in Space Tech 2021

While this year has still proven to be hard as Earth’s population continues to reel from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, those looking to the sky can envisage a brighter future. The growth of the space technology sector is continuing at a rapid rate, fueled by space innovations from big commercial players in the United States. Some billionaire entrepreneurs have already traveled to space on rockets made by their own companies. This looks like a new golden age for space exploration for both the private space innovations sector and government space agencies.

Beyond these high-profile headline grabbers, smaller rocket startups and established government space agencies are also making great strides with space innovations to expand humankind’s access to space. Let’s look at some of the biggest innovators in the space technology industry this year who are paving the way for the next generation of space exploration.

In February of this year, NASA’s mission to Mars launched in 2020 will finally arrive on the Red Planet, depositing the agency’s new Perseverance rover at a landing location in the Jezero Crater. The project’s first goal is to search for evidence of organic life on the planet’s surface, predicted to exist on a microbial level. The second objective is to road-test new space innovations that will be crucial in laying the foundation for human-crewed expeditions to Mars in the future. One example of these space innovations is the robotic helicopter Ingenuity, which will be the first vehicle to reach the planet’s surface that isn’t a lander or a rover.

In 2020, history was made when commercial companies started sending manned flights to the International Space Station, as the private sector became accredited by NASA to transport astronauts for the first time. One year later, other companies are competing to produce the most advanced space technologies development. There seems to be a race emerging between companies that use space planes for suborbital flights and those that utilize vertical launch rockets. It’s a competition that should prove fascinating to watch, and this may ignite what is to be a long and aggressive race by commercial companies to develop new space innovations to grab the emerging space tourism market.

A huge asteroid on a collision course with Earth’s surface might sound like a Hollywood script, but NASA’s scientists believe it to be a very plausible possibility. In response to this scenario, the space agency has been trying to come up with space innovations to counter such a threat. This has led to the development of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. The mission will involve launching one of the latest rockets into a flight path that will collide with a passing asteroid to determine if the process can effectively divert the space rock from its original course. The launch window begins in late July, with the collision itself estimated to take place in the autumn of next year.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has provided the agency with years of faithful service and remains an iconic piece of space technology. However, the agency has decided to put the Hubble out to pasture and utilize new space innovations to provide better space telemetry. Its replacement is to be the James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in October of this year. With a price tag of $9 billion, the telescope will not remain in a planetary orbit like its predecessor. Instead, it will fall into a solar orbit almost a million miles away from Earth, known as the second Lagrange point (L2), which will allow the telescope to utilize the latest technologies in space to provide superior coverage of our galaxy.