Dude, Where's My Mars Colony?
In which I ask a question I find embarrassing: why is space so hard?
This post was a winner of the Effective Ideas monthly Post Prize. The month’s theme was Embarrassing Thinking, where entrants are encouraged to examine a question that they’d normally be embarrassed to ask about.
Yes, I know. It doesn’t seem that embarrassing to ask about space travel, which is complicated and technical and fairly niche. But I noticed recently that there’s an awkward confusion at the centre of my beliefs about space. Despite my deep interest in the topic, I remain unsure of why exactly space exploration/colonisation hasn’t become more developed, more commonplace. We put humans on the moon in the 1960’s darn it, as is often bemoaned. My intuition says that even though the Cold War space-race is over, I would expect to see a lot more space-stuff happening in 2022 than I do. There are a lot of ‘obvious’ answers that come to my head for why grand space expansion hasn’t (yet) come to pass, but I’m not sure whether they’re good answers. So let’s explore them.
Motivating the Dilemma
Why is this even question?
Well, follow my thinking here. In 1957, the Soviets successfully put the first satellite Sputnik 1 into orbit around the Earth. In 1966 they successfully landed the spacecraft Luna 9 on the moon. Then in 1969 the USA beat them to a human moon landing with Apollo 11. So in twelve years, we went from ‘never putting anything in space’ to ‘humans walking around on another celestial body’. This is an absolutely ridiculous escalation, obviously driven (at least in part) by the political rivalry between the USA and USSR.
Let’s say that this is an unrealistic rate of progress to continue for much longer than a decade or so. Okay, fine. But the year is 2022. Compared to 1969 we have sophisticated technology and comparatively godly computing power at our disposal. We also have a global economy nearly five times larger than in 1969, a population 4.4 billion higher (more than double), and a bunch of new powerful nation-states who could potentially be motivated to go to space. To top this all off, we’ve had 53 years since the first person stepped foot on the moon to expand our presence in space.
And, having said all this, where do we find ourselves? As I write this, 10 people are currently in space. Less than one football team. We have one manmade object that has ever properly left the solar system, three active rovers on Mars, one active rover on the moon and two active space stations. The total amount of humans that have ever been beyond low earth orbit is 24. No-one has joined this group for 50 years.
Okay, that’s pretty grim. But why would we even have bothered going to space more in the last 50 years anyway? I can think of a bunch of plausible reasons:
Politics: status, competition, aesthetics (eg. the Cold War)
Politics: race for control/ ownership of space. National security advantages
Knowledge: scientific research, trickle-down technological advances from space activity
Economics: tourism
Economics: resources (eg. rare metals), land (well, space)
Security (Global): existential security against catastrophes confined to Earth (eg. asteroids)
Psychology: the human drive to explore and expand, plus lots of people’s general excitement about space, plus excess resources to dedicate to it
Intuitively, more people going to space (and more space development/ exploration) over the last 50 years seems to have been overdetermined to me.
So all of this brings me to a question: what is going on?
Here, I can offer up a (very) simple toy model of an agent’s behaviour. There are two important factors that I think govern any agent’s behaviour: incentives and capacity/limitations. To do something, an entity generally has to want to do that thing, and be able to do it.
So to clarify, I think that at least one of two things must be happening. The first is that the motivating factors for space activity that I’ve cheerily listed above are either false, exaggerated (ie. not actually that valuable), or generally just irrelevant. The second is that there are hard limitations which stymy efforts to go after these goodies.
Let’s explore some possibilities.
Extraterrestrial Goodies (or, Space Just Isn’t What It’s Cracked Up to Be)
Above, I listed seven rough reasons why I think space would be motivating to various agents, and why I would expect to see more space travel/ colonisation etc. going on. So let’s first ask whether these goodies even present any real value, substantial enough value to be motivating.
Because the alternative is that maybe space just isn’t that good. And if governments and companies know this, then it means that the reason for our impoverished space presence is that we just don’t want to go to space that badly anymore. This hypothesis comfortably fits the story of declining funding for the US and Russian space agencies over time, and the lack of any substantive alternatives from other countries.
1) Space as Status
It’s possible that going to space was only ever really about countries flexing their economic and political might over competitors. This frames space as being more about image than anything functional: the ultimate status symbol. There has been only one major space race, and it occurred during a time of two large competing power blocs. Once the USA beat the USSR to the moon, and furthermore once the USSR collapsed, maybe there was not much reason to continue to go to space.
I find this pretty compelling. There were certainly national security implications for the space-race, but none that I can find for going to the moon. Beyond Earth’s orbit, it seems like all human activity to date has had a lot to do with symbolic victories over the enemy. We got there first. We’re smarter and more powerful than you.
But there are at least one big challenge to this account. Though I think it would be silly not to acknowledge that the claim is at least partly true, the first big problem is that we have another global power standoff on our hands right now between the USA and China. If space is all about projecting national power, then we could expect to see a similar dynamic occurring. Do we?
I looked into it, and the results are mixed. But first, a side-note about the Big Six space agencies because it’s important to the topic (and also really interesting novel information to me).
Tangent: The Big Six (or Seven)
The ‘Big Six’ space agencies that I’ve heard spoken about are: NASA (USA), CNSA (China), ESA (Europe), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), and ISRO (India).
This excludes France, Germany, and Italy because a lot of their work feeds into the ESA, although there is a good case to be made for counting them individually, especially France. I think that this ‘Big Six’ model is actually out of date even as I’m writing it, but it’s a good starting place anyway.
Have a look at this cute graph I made of rough annual budgets for space activity:
A few things jump out. First, the USA has an insanely aggressive lead. The reason why its total government space spending is so much higher than NASA’s budget is that the USA spends a lot of money on the Department of Defence’s space capacity. You can see the same thing with Russia’s spending, a halfway split between defence and civil spending. Defence spending on space is, without exception that I can find, boring but important stuff like satellites. It’s all orbital, none of it expansive in the sense that we’re looking at here.
Anyway, even ignoring defence spending, NASA has a healthy lead. China and Europe form the two runners-up, followed by everyone else.
A couple more notes. First, about the character of these agencies.
NASA needs no introduction. Despite a fall from the heights of its lunar heyday, it has done more than anyone for space research and technology. The question is really how aren’t they better? Their budget is massive yet we see them floundering to do anything ambitious. They’re working towards a moon return, but even then their SLS system is being embarrassed by SpaceX’s accomplishments. Still, NASA are the ones to beat.
Here’s a surprising graphic that will be useful later:
I always imagined that NASA took a fiscal nosedive after the space-race, and never recovered. This is true if we look at the decade or so after the moon landing, and it’s also true if we’re talking about the percentage of government spending allocated to NASA. But I was shocked to see that in absolute terms, NASA doesn’t have that much smaller of a budget than it did during the moon landing. Adjusted for inflation, NASA’s 1969 budget was less than $35 billion. Today, as since the 1990s, it hovers in the low-to-mid $20 billions. It’s less sure, but not that much less. Given improvements in technology, this piece of information makes the lack of lunar returns even weirder. Surely $10 billion dollars isn’t the only thing standing between NASA and another moon landing? This will come up later.
China’s space agency CNSA is impressive too. They’re basically dominating the lunar exploration game at the moment. I’ll talk about them right after this side-note.
Everyone else can almost be skimmed over. Japan seems competent but underperforming. India is doing remarkably well on a shoestring budget and are definitely ones to watch in future. Individual European countries do cool stuff of their own, but the ESA is cooler.
An interesting note: Russia is set to basically fail as a spacefaring power. After the falling post-race budgets of Roscosmos, Russia was mostly relying on legacy hardware and international demand for their rockets. Now SpaceX has basically destroyed that business model, and their invasion of Ukraine has left them fighting for economic survival. Putin is cutting the space agencies funding to $1.5 billion USD this year and demanding that they “do more with less”. I think it’s safe to say that we won’t be seeing much space development out of Russia anytime soon.
Finally, what we might call the third rising power of the industry, along with China and India: SpaceX. SpaceX is unbelievable in many ways. It has single-handedly ensured American space domination for another generation, and proved that private space companies can innovate, driving down launch costs so much that later in this post we’ll have to discuss the implications. Reusable rockets are a huge deal, and we’re probably going to see the Artemis program using their rockets, along with any future manned Mars mission. All of this puts SpaceX at space-power parity with China in my eyes, punching far above their budgetary weight. And importantly, most of SpaceX’s power has yet to fully bear fruit.
So what is the current Space Power Ranking (trademarked by me)? Well, it’s worth noting that as I write this, only three space agencies (and SpaceX) can send humans into orbit without external help: China, Russia, and America. And given what I’ve said about Russia, it’s possible that they’re essentially irrelevant to the conversation going forward. This could change of course: I can imagine India in particular developing into a human-spaceflight-capable country given its trajectory. But otherwise, we’re looking at a bottleneck of only a few truly space-capable players. So, If I had to rank the players now:
USA
China
SpaceX
Russia
Europe
India
Japan
If I had to rank where I think we’ll be in 2030:
USA
SpaceX
China
India
Europe
Japan
Russia
This means we could speak of a new Big Seven, with SpaceX racing up the ranks, Russia barely clinging on with legacy hardware, and India coming into its own. We’ll see how well my predictions hold up! Okay, end of side-note.
Okay, so we were talking about whether we’re seeing another space-race dynamic. Thanks to the side-note, we can see that (ignoring SpaceX), China is the only real near-term competitor to NASA. It’s got a hefty budget, and it’s throwing its weight around in a bunch of cool ways. They’re building their own space station, and have an active rover on the Moon’s far side (making them the leaders of far-side exploration) and an active rover on Mars. Wow. China is basically the third country to ever do a lot of this stuff: send people into space, bring back lunar material, and land things on Mars. And in fact, since Roscosmos’s slow crumbling, it’s basically the new Russia. We’re seeing prestige racing dynamics at work.
Of course, this is probably not the only reason. Although it’s very likely that China is doing a lot of this for symbolic status reasons, it’s also plausible that the reason why great powers are the ones doing the competing in space is that space is very expensive and they’re the only ones that can afford it.
Still, it’s a tick for status games as a motivator. It drove us before, as confessed by various Cold War figures. It’s probably still driving us now. Imagine being the country that lands people on Mars. Everyone wants that.
2) Control, Ownership, & National Security
This is going to be a brief one. I’ve already talked about the boundaries of national security generally only extending to Earth’s orbit. As of now, there’s no part of anyone’s nation to ‘secure’ in outer space. So this isn’t really an incentive. But control and ownership is.
Space governance is weird. I’ve heard about 1967’s Outer Space Treaty and how it prevents countries from claiming sovereignty over space territory. This is cool, but I’m sceptical about enforcement and generally think that space governance probably has a lot of issues. Basically, I think that sovereignty is slippery. If a country sets up a base on the Moon and takes up a bunch of surface area with habitation and mining and spaceports, they basically own it in all but name. And if history is anything to go by, both corporations and countries love expanding their territory, owning more things, and controlling more stuff. This is a rough heuristic but, i think a pretty accurate one.
Maybe there are incentives preventing countries from wanting to control parts of space? Ratified treaties and the fear of international pushback could be one. But I don’t see that having teeth, especially to countries like the USA. Maybe the people in control are actually nicer than I think they are. For example, NASA is semi-independent and can set its own goals to some degree. NASA could be run by a bunch of idealistic scientists that don’t have much interest in controlling a bunch of space land and resources. And at the end of the day, it’s only worth controlling stuff for two big reasons: status (which we’ve talked about) or resources (which is coming up shortly). Grabbiness may exist on its own as an impulse, but it’s generally instrumental.
Basically, I’m very uncertain about the power of this as a motivating factor.
3) Knowledge
Space is a frontier and a very weird place, so it’s perfect for scientific research and technological development. Lots of cool science gets done in space, and lots of Earthly technologies have been informed by developments in the space industry. This seems pretty motivating but I can think of a few reasons why it might be less important than it sounds.
First, maybe we’ve picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit in terms of space science? I actually don’t know enough to evaluate this, and I don’t really want to go on yet another tangent. But I think that the complaints I’ve seen about bottlenecks are good reason to think that maybe there’s a lot more space science that people want to do.
Second, A lot of scientific and technological developments are public goods. If one agent shoulders the burden of doing the research, benefits are diffuse which reduces the individual payout. Sure, NASA research has military applications, but a lot of it is just cool science that every researcher on Earth can read about.
Third, maybe a lot of the science is totally doable in orbit, so we don’t need to do it further away? I’m sure that there are geologists and planetary scientists that want to do a bunch of Mars research, but a lot of other research on microgravity, biology, physics etc. can be done just above our atmosphere. Way more convenient.
Empirically though, scientific research has been a massive part of the small ongoing space programs that we’ve had in the last 50 years. I think that’s pretty compelling on its own.
4)Resources
This is the one that I thought would be the most important going into this. I’ve been constantly told that space is a goody-bag of important metals and rare materials. This is… half right, half horribly wrong.
The correct claim is that there’s a lot of stuff in space. There are lots of metals, minerals, and a bunch of sunshine.
But a space resource has to be worth going into space to retrieve, otherwise we’ll just do it here on Earth. And as the the fantastic Casey Handmer points out, there are currently no known commodity resources in space that could be sold on Earth. Yes, you read that right. It turns out that most raw materials have narrow margins as it is, without literally flying them down from the Moon. Plus, we have a bunch of them on Earth right now anyway. Only Helium-3 sounds even plausible on first inspection since there’s a bit more of it in lunar dirt, but there isn’t even that much demand and the price would be ridiculous.
Basically: no. Space resources aren’t worth it. The only thing they’re good for right now is that we can do research on them to learn more about our solar system, or we can use them in space to help build or sustain space projects in future.
What about land? I sort of mentioned this in Point 2 about how large entities like countries generally like controlling land. This is true, but what’s the ultimate goal of controlling land in space? We don’t have an overpopulation problem or a lack of room here on Earth (contrary to the beliefs of some), and there’s comically large amounts of land available on the Moon and Mars anyway. So I don’t see anyone going to space just to snatch up empty lunar plots anytime soon.
5)Tourism
Wow, an industry that could actually generate revenue in space! The thing is, a lot of people want to go to space, and many would be willing to pay a lot to do so. Generally, like with the decline in airfares in the mid 20th century, the demand drives things to become cheaper over time, further expanding the tourism industry.
So yeah, on it’s face I don’t see a lot of arguments against this except fundamental cost (which we’ll talk about soon). Space tourism is cool. The big caveat is that I don’t see government agencies like NASA really cashing in on commercial projects like this. China would be more plausible, but even more likely are the new crop of space companies popping up: SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic. In the latter’s case, they’ve made a bet that a lot of people would be happy with a cheaper orbital flight than a more expensive moon visit. This is a pretty plausible argument. I can see orbital hotels long before moon hotels, although I could be wrong.
Generally, it is pretty limited as an industry, even with its growth potential. Space tourism could have been the spark of more space settlement, but I’m not sure how universally compelling it is as a reason to go to space int he first place.
6) Global Security
There are two big arguments here: the first is that we need to be in space if we have any chance of deflecting asteroids. This is true, and (although it raises other concerns about potentially offensive uses of this tech) explains why NASA is exploring potential options. However, I can see a lot of these projects being limited unless they’re international efforts, because of the same public good problem we had with scientific research. The other thing is that NASA already tracks what we think are nearly all of the large asteroids and none of them are set to pose a risk to us. Although comets could be a problem, the likelihood is so low that its not as motivating as you might imagine an ‘existential risk’ to be.
The second argument is very Muskian: we need a civilisational backup. If Earth is destroyed, we’d better have a self-sustaining Mars colony up and running.
Here’s why I think this argument doesn’t really work. Most people don’t think that Earth is at real risk, and aren’t willing to front the cost of space colonisation on the off-chance they’re wrong. Elon Musk is an exception, but even he is doing space stuff for additional reasons. (Note: quite plausibly, AI poses the biggest existential risk this century, and you would probably be no safer on Mars than on Earth anyway).
7) Psychology
Another brief one because yes, this is a compelling reason. People love space. It awes and inspires them. Science fiction set in space is very popular, and loads of people from politicians to billionaires to artists all love the idea of a spacefaring humanity.
Wrapping Up the Incentives
Let’s rank these incentives.
Status may actually still be the biggest driver of space development. It got America to the moon after all (and arguably China as well).
Psychology is surprisingly strong too I think, especially because many organisations are headed by people who just really love space and want to go there.
Knowledge comes in third, because there are a lot of scientists that want to do a lot of space research, and a lot of cool technology that parties could still benefit from before dissemination.
Global security is important, and I can see government agencies caring about it even if the risks are unlikely.
Control might come in next, I think, because of sheer grabbiness. If other people are doing it, then we want to do it. No-one wants to be left uninvited to the space party. Still, it’s a lot less compelling than the historical case for Earth-based grabbiness.
Tourism is cool, but I can see demand being saturated at a certain point. When I say I’m confused about space, I’m partly confused about why there aren’t permanent human settlements and stuff. I would still be fairly confused even if there was moon tourism going on, without significant colonisation taking place.
Resources is the big loser here. Even in scenarios where space travel becomes much cheaper, it is still not a compelling proposition.
At the end of all this, I find myself still without an answer, because all together we have a bunch of good reasons for going to space. Some more than others, yes, but status + intrinsic desire + scientific and technological advancements + existential security + grabbiness + tourism = a pretty motivating cocktail.
I’ve managed to dispel a little bit of my embarrassing confusion, because some of these factors seemed more compelling before I dug into them (the uselessness of space resources in particular was a massive update for me). So we’ve gone from space being 300% motivating to space being 140% motivating, say. But that’s still enough that we should see space activity going on! So we have to turn to the other side of our behavioural coin: the limitations that we face.
Space is Just Really Hard (and Hard Means Expensive)
Let’s think about what it takes to go to space. Let’s take the moon. First, you have to have a ridiculous amount of propulsion just to escape Earth’s immense gravity well. This on its own puts hard limits on the amount of mass you can get into space without making a bigger and more expensive rocket.
Then, you have space itself which makes Antarctica look incredibly pleasant. There is no air. I repeat, there is no air to breathe. It is below the freezing temperature of water. It’s full of radiation. And there is no food. Just emptiness, and big rocks, and sunshine. And some of those rocks pose their own problems: new gravity wells that you have to land on without destroying your craft, silicate dust so fine that it destroys machinery and penetrates into your lungs, and other toxic chemicals.
And if you can get out of Earth’s crushing gravity, and bring your own carefully sealed air and warmth and food, and can land on the lunar surface safely, and can avoid the damaging moon dust, well… you’re alone, in astonishing emptiness. Emptiness not just of people but of resources. To colonise the moon in even a relatively self-sustaining way you’d have to send a ridiculous amount of mass from Earth, and bootstrap the rest (industry, energy, agriculture etc.) in the most hostile environment imaginable.
When I think about the concrete steps involved in expanding into space instead of vague images of sperm-like rockets zipping around pollinating planets with humanity, I get a sense of why we haven’t done more. Yes, sometimes the obvious reason is correct: space is just very, very hard.
But I don’t want to stop here. Because it still doesn’t tell the whole story. Space is hard, but NASA still send people to the moon in the 1960s. Space is hard, but it would get easier the more space-travel we did thanks to gains in knowledge, technology, cost, and operational know-how. Surely our civilisation’s progress has left us better at handling ‘hard’ now than we were in the 1960s?
Have We Picked the Low-Hanging Fruit?
Maybe everything we haven’t done in space is way more difficult than the stuff we have done. The moon landings were hard, but we did them. This may have drained a lot of incentive (status, psychological drive, initial scientific research) for others to go to the moon afterwards. Maybe Earthly satellites and extraterrestrial rover and probes are relatively easy, but anything else is way harder.
There is some merit to this. Sending humans to outer space requires complex life-support systems, limits acceleration, and imposes all sorts of other complications. Still, I think that with technology we’ve had since the 1960s, we could have established at least a station on at least the moon with at least a one-time or occasional crew. I doubt that staying on the moon for a month can be orders of magnitude harder than landing there briefly.
So maybe ‘we’ve exhausted the easy wins’ is the wrong way to think about it. Maybe it has to do with another factor which is attendant on space’s difficulty: cost.
It’s the Economy Stupid (Maybe Space is Just Too Expensive)
When something is really difficult and technical, it’s going to be expensive. The Apollo program totalled more than $160 billion in todays dollars, a sickening amount to send a handful of people briefly to the moon. Though we’ve seen some cost reduces in space travel, it’s only recently that we’ve seen real hope.
What’s expensive about space? Well, all of it really, but mostly the part where you get there. You have to develop and build and fuel a rocket to escape Earth’s gravity, and then make a new rocket if you want to do it again. Because of this, the cost of getting a single kilogram into LEO (low-Earth orbit) averaged around $20,000 from 1970 to 2000. This hasn’t been helped by uncompetitive launch markets in each country which has allowed monopolistic pricing.
I don’t actually intuitively know how much $20,000 per kilogram is. Obviously it sounds like a lot. But here’s a helpful comparison: shipping big containers around on Earth cost around $0.10 per kilogram. So yes, it adds up. Especially because you’re always launching thousands of kilograms at once to even make it worthwhile.
With these limitations, agencies and companies have had to be ruthless with mass constraints, downsizing their technology and their ambition, cutting corners whenever they can.
So even with all the cool stuff we want to do in space, we’ve finally found the downstream culprit of a lot of the problems: the hard limitation of money. And when things are expensive, people often don’t want to invest in costly innovation, especially if the market isn’t competitive to begin with. And so, nothing much changes.
Until now.
SpaceX realised that the largest component of this cost was constantly having to build new rockets, and invested in reusability. They were quickly able to drop costs to around $2000/kg or less with the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, an order of magnitude less than the previous average. But they aren’t done. As I write this, the Starship gets closer to completion, a mind-bogglingly game-changing piece of technology.
The SpaceX Starship will be able to transport 100-150 Tonnes of cargo into orbit per launch. It will be completely reusable. It’s internal space is double that of the entire ISS, without even repurposing the fuel tank. And, most importantly, we could see prices fall below $5 million per launch. That’s $35 per kilogram. Three orders of magnitude less than twenty years ago, a 99.9% reduction, an absurdly cheap figure that opens up space in a way we’ve never seen. It’s dizzying. I didn’t realise the extent of the shift underway.
Of course, they have to fly the thing first. But it’s hard to imagine SpaceX failing now, given where it started.
A Tragedy of the Commons?
This is a relatively minor note compared to the (I think) compelling case for the difficulty-expensiveness confluence being the major bottleneck for space travel. Still, I wanted to consider that since going to space has been difficult and expensive, and the benefits often shared, there’s a kind of underinvestment in space going on. I’m not saying anything revolutionary here, because this is a simple case of public goods and positive externalities. So when the Guardian says that “spin-off companies from space research and a growing commercial space industry generates seven to 14 times the cost of missions” we have to consider that a lot of that benefit goes to people who don’t pay for it. I like public goods, but it could be hard to justify a lot of space investment when other people are just going to steal your employees, ideas and technology to do the same thing.
The space agencies are all government entities though, less motivated by profit. So this problem applies more to companies than anyone else, and even then I think it breaks down in cases like SpaceX who are busy building a launch infrastructure so good that no-one will be able to compete.
Conclusion: Solid Incentives, Big Problems (and the Great Thaw)
The last fifty years have seen a kind of big freeze in space travel, which starts from a confluence of three main factors:
the USA won the space race, and then the Cold War. Afterwards, there was less status to be gained from further immediate space travel, and less urgency.
Space is really difficult and our technology could be better.
Going to space was really really expensive because of Point 2.
And so, a stable-ish equilibrium was reached. With relatively small but still impressive slivers of government budgets, the USA and Russia (and to a lesser extent other countries) were able to do some stuff in Earth’s orbit. Private companies helped with some of the technology (like rocketry), and we were able to launch a bunch of satellites for navigation, communication, and defence. We also built the ISS and did some cool science in space. This helped us learn a bunch about living and working in space, and managing space stations and other off-world missions. Finally, we sent some rovers to the moon and Mars to do more research for us.
This was about all we could do given the three limiting factors above: lowered motivation, high difficulty, and high costs.
And then, a couple of things happened.
The first thing was the rise of China as a political and economic power. Like a classic ascendant power that wanted to prove itself, it started a space agency that started doing some impressive things. To a lesser extent, India was doing the same. This increased competitive, status-driven motivation for everyone else in a way reminiscent of the first space race.
The second thing to happen was SpaceX.
Space has suddenly become much cheaper and substantially more competitive. Holding constant the other five significant motivating factors, this means that we can probably expect the next couple of decades to be a space renaissance as the natural systems of incentives kick into gear. The developments in technology and know-how that we develop as we do this will further drive down costs in a virtuous cycle.
So where are the Mars colonies, after fifty years of space travel? Well, they’re finally coming, I think.
Great post. One correction - India's space agency is ISRO, not ISEA.