IT MAY turn out to be a bare and barren rock. The fact that liquid water could be flowing across the surface of the planet just discovered orbiting Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun, does not mean that any actually is—nor for that matter that it has an atmosphere. The fact that water and air, if present, could make this new world habitable does not mean that it is, in fact, a home to alien life.

But it might be.

What is exciting about this new world is not what is known—which, so far, is almost nothing (see article). It is what is unknown and the possibilities it may contain. It is the chance that there is life beneath that turbulent red sun, and that humans might be able to recognise it from 40 trillion kilometres away. In the immense distances of space that is close enough to mean that, some day, perhaps, someone might send probes to visit it and in so doing glimpse a totally different form of life. In the thrill of such possibilities sits all that is most promising about the exploration of space.

All our yesterdays

Next year will mark the 60th anniversary of the first satellite, Sputnik. The intervening decades have brought wonders. Men have looked back on the beauty of the Earth from the bright-lit Moon—and returned safely home. The satellites of America’s Global Positioning System (GPS) have created a world in which no one need ever be lost again—changing the human experience of place rather as the wristwatch changed the experience of time. Robots have trundled across the plains of Mars and swooped through the rings of Saturn. The Hubble space telescope has revealed that wherever you look, if you look hard enough you will find galaxies scattered like grains of sand across the deep.

Even so, space has of late become a bit dull. No man has ventured beyond low Earth orbit in more than four decades (no woman has done so ever). Astronauts and cosmonauts commute to an International Space Station that has little purpose beyond providing a destination for their capsules, whose design would have been familiar in the 1960s. All the solar system’s planets have been visited by probes. The hard graft of teasing out their secrets now offers less immediate spectacle.

The use of space is integral to all sorts of things, including the workings of armies, air forces and navies, but its role in GPS—or, for that matter, Google Maps—barely merits a mention. Some companies make money from putting satellites into orbit, and not just the kind that do things for governments. But there is an undeniable bathos to the fact that the biggest business in a realm once synonymous with human transcendence is providing viewers on Earth with umpty-seven channels of satellite TV.

Now that is changing. The technological progress that has put supercomputers into the pockets of half the world has made it possible do a lot more in orbit with much smaller spacecraft. A generation of entrepreneurs forged in Silicon Valley—and backed by some of its venture capitalists—are launching highly capable new devices ranging in size from shoe boxes to fridges and flying them in constellations of dozens or hundreds. Such machines are vastly more capable, kilo for kilo, than their predecessors and cheaper, to boot. They are making space interesting again.

The first new businesses are based on something easily returned from space to Earth: data. Although companies such as DigitalGlobe, in Denver, have been selling satellite images for decades, most of their customers have been spooks and soldiers. Today’s entrepreneurs at companies like Planet, BlackSky and Spire are hoping to sell not just snapshots of places that brass hats want to peer at. They are offering comprehensive and constantly updated global data sets. Ever better machine-learning programs can mine these for information on crops, shipping, traffic, wildlife or the environment that will be used by everyone from eco-warriors to hedge funds. Add the potential of small, smart satellites in their hundreds or even thousands to connect the billions of people too poor and remote to have yet been reached by the phone revolution, or the trillions of devices in the “internet of things”, and this new space age will bring more than ever to the world below.

And that is just the start. Elon Musk, the founder of both Tesla, a car company, and SpaceX, a rocket company, wants to found a colony on Mars and will soon be building spacecraft that can go there. Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, is following a steady and somewhat secretive path that may one day see the skies filled with automated factories and asteroid mines. Yuri Milner, an investor who got into Facebook early, is spending $100m on the most serious attempt yet to detect civilisations around other stars. He is also funding a programme aimed at studying planets like the one around Proxima Centauri with probes travelling at a fifth the speed of light—spacecraft so tiny as to make today’s shoe-box satellites look like battleships.

New life, and new civilisations

Even if they fail, these attempts to reinvigorate space will be instructive and thrilling. Just as on Earth, states will always have a role as, among other things, protectors of their national satellite infrastructure and as the enforcers of the laws they have put in place to govern the commercial exploitation of space. But in the years ahead, as the cost of hardware plummets and as systems on Earth learn to make better use of data, the growing number of star-struck entrepreneurs promise to relieve governments of the burden of space-age dreams with a torrent of innovation.

There is no objective need for people to colonise space or for them to look at planets in other solar systems in order to answer questions about life’s place in the universe. People can survive without such journeys or knowledge. Some, though, see the possibilities, stand in awe, and start making plans. They may not succeed. The planets may turn out to be barren rocks. Infinite space, in the end, might be just a nutshell’s worth of emptiness.

But, then again, it might not.