Every few years, Congress and the administration pass a NASA Authorization Act, which gives the U.S. Space Agency its marching orders for the next few years. Amongst the many pages of the 2017 NASA Authorization Act (S. 422) the Agency’s mission encompasses expected items such as continuation of the space station, building of big rockets, indemnification of launch and reentry service providers for third party claim and so on. But in this year’s bill, Congress added a momentous phrase to the agency’s mission: “the search for life’s origins, evolution, distribution, and future in the universe.” It’s a short phrase, but a visionary one, setting the stage for a far-reaching effort, that could have as profound an impact on the 21st century as the Apollo program had on the 20th.
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NASA has been putting in place all the necessary building blocks to make the Search for Life possible. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), due to launch in late 2018, will begin following up on recently discovered exoplanets, searching for “the fingerprints of life,” gases that scientists believe can only exist in the presence of living organisms. And NASA and private industry have embarked on ambitious new rockets capable of carrying probes and landers to Europa, and launching future telescopes capable of finding and characterizing continents and oceans on Earth-like planets. Soon, they will be able to send (human) geologists and biologists to Mars.