By Shruti Menon Seeboo
There is a photograph taken by the Cassini spacecraft in 2006, from a distance of nearly 1.5 billion kilometres, in which the Earth appears as a pale, barely visible dot nestled in the shadow of Saturn’s rings. Jim Adams has shown this image to students across 28 countries on the African continent — and now, for the first time, he has shown it to an audience in Mauritius.
“I hope you smile,” he told the packed hall at the Rajiv Gandhi Science Centre in Curepipe last week, “because NASA took your picture.”
It was a characteristically disarming moment from a man who spent more than 35 years at the US space agency, most notably as Deputy Chief Technologist, and who has made it his life’s work to make the cosmos feel personal. Adams was in Mauritius as the centrepiece of the Freedom 250 programme, a series of events organised by the US Embassy to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence. The week-long initiative brought him into dialogue with government officials, academics, educators, students, and researchers — culminating in a keynote lecture at the Rajiv Gandhi Science Centre entitled Freedom 250: Artemis and US Leadership in Space Innovation.
“It’s the domain of all humanity”
Adams opened his lecture with a quiz. How many human beings have ever been to the moon? Most in the room guessed too low. The answer, he revealed, is 31 — of whom only 12 have actually walked on the lunar surface. Thirteen of those 31 were on Apollo 13, which never landed but still circled the far side of the moon. Then, just last month, four more names were added to that count.
The Artemis II mission — NASA’s first crewed test flight under the new Artemis programme — launched from Kennedy Space Center and carried its crew further from Earth than any humans have travelled since the Apollo era. The commander was Reid Weissman; the pilot, Victor Glover; mission specialist Christina Koch; and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, for whom it was his very first spaceflight.
“Can you imagine,” Adams said, “being selected to be an astronaut, and the first time you go to space, you go deeper than any other human being has ever been? That’s pretty amazing.”
The choice of crew was deliberate. Unlike the 12 men who walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972 — all of them white, all but one of them test pilots — the Artemis programme has been built around a different philosophy. “We said it’s no longer the domain of this demographic,” Adams explained. “It is the domain of all humanity.”
Steam, Not Smoke
Adams is the kind of speaker who cannot resist a teachable moment. Describing the Artemis launch, he paused to correct a misconception he has spent years addressing with high school students.
“This is not smoke,” he said, pointing to the billowing white cloud beneath the Space Launch System rocket. “It’s steam.” Rocket fuel, he explained, is hydrogen and oxygen. Combust them under the right conditions and you get water — superheated water, erupting from the engines as vapour. “What happens when you put hydrogen and oxygen together in the right conditions? You end up with water.”
He also noted, with evident pride, that his own father had been one of the designers of the F-1 engine that powered the original Saturn V — the rocket that carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon. And in a moment of unexpected historical theatre, he pointed out that the US Embassy’s Deputy Chief of Mission, Caleb Goddard, present in the audience, is the great-grandnephew of Robert Goddard, the inventor of liquid rocket propulsion. “So you actually have two rocket scientists sitting in today,” he said.
Why Go Back?
A question Adams is frequently asked is why the Artemis missions are necessary at all. Apollo 8, in 1968, proved that humans could orbit the moon and return safely. What, precisely, does Artemis II add?
His answer was brisk and practical. “Would you get on an Airbus 380 if you’d known that it hadn’t been flight tested?” he asked. The point stands: the technology has changed entirely. The Orion capsule, the Space Launch System, the life support systems — all of it must be proven before NASA sends astronauts to the lunar surface. Artemis II and Artemis III, he explained, are about validating equipment, not repeating history.
Artemis III, he clarified, will not land on the moon as originally announced. Instead it will remain in low Earth orbit to test rendezvous and docking procedures. It is Artemis IV that will carry humans back to the surface — and when they return, the mission will be different in character from Apollo’s brief visits. “This time it won’t be a three-day demonstration of American leadership,” Adams said. “This time it will be for all of humanity to go and to begin to put a foothold on the surface of the moon.”
Ice, Fuel, and a Hotel
The long-term vision Adams described is ambitious and, he acknowledged, still partly speculative. But the scientific case is compelling. The moon’s permanently shadowed polar regions, never touched by sunlight across billions of years, are believed to contain water ice accumulated from comet impacts. Given that rocket fuel is composed of hydrogen and oxygen — the same elements as water — the moon could, in theory, serve as a fuelling depot for deeper space missions, eliminating the need to haul propellant all the way from Earth.
“We believe these permanently shadowed regions are filled with water ice,” Adams said. “What’s rocket fuel made out of? Hydrogen and oxygen. What’s water ice made out of? Hydrogen and oxygen.”
There are also minerals, manufacturing possibilities in low gravity, and — he mentioned with evident amusement — at least one group of entrepreneurs he had spoken to who want to build a hotel. “What kind of jobs would you need to run a hotel on the moon?” he asked. “Food services, housekeeping, maintenance… you could end up being the first chef on the surface of the moon. That’d be kind of cool.”
The goal, ultimately, is Mars — though Adams was frank about the technological gaps that remain. Landing on Mars is fundamentally different from landing on the moon. Taking off from Mars has never been attempted. The radiation environment beyond Earth’s magnetic field is unlike anything astronauts have encountered. And a crew of four people, hurtling through deep space for three years with no meaningful connection to home, faces psychological challenges that are only beginning to be studied.
“We will not send somebody on a one-way trip,” he said, echoing the commitment John F. Kennedy embedded in NASA’s founding mission. The moon, Adams argued, is where the missing technologies must be developed — within reach of Earth, within range of a rescue, and within the scope of what is currently possible. “We’ll conquer the Moon, will utilise the moon as a forward base, and then we’ll go on to Mars.”
The Whale Shark Algorithm
The second half of Adams’s lecture turned from the skies to the ground — or rather, to the unexpected ways in which space science has transformed life on Earth. Over 2,000 so-called NASA spin-offs have been catalogued since the agency began tracking them 50 years ago: technologies developed to solve space programme problems that were subsequently licensed to commercial enterprises, adopted by hospitals, or picked up by entrepreneurs who found entirely unforeseen applications for them.
The story Adams clearly relished most involved a marine biologist, a Hubble Space Telescope scientist, and an unlikely mathematical coincidence. The marine biologist was struggling to track whale sharks: sightings were running at one or two per year, insufficient for any meaningful study of breeding or migration. The space scientist, overhearing the complaint, mentioned that Hubble’s pointing system works by triangulating on star fields — a recursive algorithm that identifies precise patterns on dark backgrounds. The spots on a whale shark’s skin, it turned out, behave exactly like a star field.
“So the Hubble Space Telescope pointing algorithm worked perfectly to distinguish one whale shark from another,” Adams explained. Today, anyone who photographs a whale shark — from a boat, a plane, or a drone — can submit the image to an institute in Australia, regardless of the angle, and contribute to a global tracking database. Annual sightings have risen from one or two to 2,500. “It helps us understand the breeding and the migration patterns of these amazing beasts, some of which are up to ten metres long.”
Other examples came thick and fast. An infrared camera developed to detect wildfires from space is now used in hospitals to screen for early-stage breast cancer. A suitcase-sized radar device — originally built for deep-space object detection at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory — was adapted into a search-and-rescue tool capable of detecting a human heartbeat or respiration under ten metres of rubble. When an earthquake struck Nepal, test units of the device, known as Finder, were flown in. “We were able to save lives,” Adams said, “essentially by opening up the suitcase and directing rescue workers.”
The camera chip in every modern mobile phone traces its origins to a 1976 NASA invention — the active pixel CCD, developed to build the smallest possible planetary camera. Half of the world’s baby formula, until the early 2020s, contained a nutritional compound (DHA-ARA) originally derived from algae grown to sustain astronauts on long-duration missions. The bent wing tips visible on virtually every commercial aircraft today — the feature that saves an estimated ten billion gallons of fuel and five billion dollars annually in the US market alone — came from research at NASA’s Langley Research Center. Boeing and Airbus, Adams noted drily, needed some convincing. The strategy that worked? Offering the patents for free to small aircraft manufacturers first, until the big players grew jealous enough to come on board.
A Seat at the Table
Adams reserved some of his most pointed remarks for the question of Mauritius’s relationship with space. The island’s Exclusive Economic Zone, he pointed out, covers an area equivalent to 67 per cent of the continental United States — an enormous maritime territory that poses genuine governance challenges. Solving those challenges, he argued, will generate knowledge and intellectual property that could ripple outwards. But to benefit fully from the international space ecosystem, Mauritius needs a seat at the table.
That seat is available, he said, through the Artemis Accords — a framework established in 2020 to govern peaceful, transparent, and responsible space exploration. To date, 67 nations have signed. Caleb Goddard, speaking earlier in the ceremony, had expressed the Embassy’s hope that Mauritius would become the 68th. Adams endorsed the aspiration, and was clear about what signing would mean in practice. “Does that mean that Mauritius will have an astronaut as soon as they sign the Artemis Accords? Of course not. You may not even have a payload on the way to the moon yet. But it does give you a seat at the table as these decisions and deliberations are being made.”
He drew a direct parallel to the entrepreneurial ethos he had celebrated throughout his lecture: what matters is not size or resources, but participation, creativity, and the willingness to solve hard problems and share the solutions publicly. “When you solve a problem,” he said, “you make it known to the public, you make it available to the public. As a government, you owe it to your citizens to give it back to them and allow them to help Mauritius make an impact on society.”
The High School Student
It was the American Makerspace at the Rajiv Gandhi Science Centre that Adams returned to at the beginning and the end of his visit — and it was there that he found the image he kept coming back to. During the week, he had met a young man, not yet out of secondary school, who was working in the Makerspace on a website that used AI to detect bullying on social media. When Adams asked him what was next, the student’s answer stopped him short: he wanted to build a system to monitor human trafficking.
“Here’s a kid not even out of high school,” Adams said, “and he’s realised what he can do for humanity.” That, he said, is what American Spaces can be about: not just equipment and connectivity, but a pipeline — a way of helping young people see the scale of what they might accomplish. Dr Aman Kumar Maulloo, Director of the Rajiv Gandhi Science Centre, had described the Makerspace as a place for students “to think out of the box, a platform for them to bring their ideas, bring their creativity and innovativeness so that they can make things and make their ideas become reality.” Adams could not have agreed more.
He closed his lecture with the Saturn photograph — the one in which Earth is a speck of light beside the planet’s rings. Some people look at it, he said, and feel small. He does not. “We are significant,” he told the audience, “because we were able to build a robot spacecraft that went all the way out to Saturn, took seven years to get there, and then looked back and took a picture of home. That is technological innovation, that is exploration and leadership — American style.” He has been to Africa 28 times. This was his first visit to Mauritius. It will not, he promised, be his last.
