I don’t think we are done achieving great things. However, we will need to accept that ‘we’ is a word that now includes everyone – else, no one, because down that course lies war, plague, deprivation of the collapse of civilization on a global scale.
I am breaking with tradition and not writing that kind of a diary tonight. I want to talk about what might yet be. I want to talk about the good things to come.
More, below the orange compass of fate.
Let’s look at what’s on the plate right now: private spaceflight. Now, that’s not a technological change but it’s definitely a change in approach and a recognition that we have long been ready to have the types of public-private partnerships for crewed space travel that we already have in place for satellite launches.
We are about to go from a world that puts up a few hundred tons of payload a year to one with thousands, no, tens of thousands of tons of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) capacity per annum. For every tenfold increase in life capacity “supply”, the cost per kilogram of boosting a satellite, or a supply pod, or a space tourist into orbit goes down by … okay, not a factor of ten (people need to get paid) but enough to bend the bootstrapping curve up in a nice, nice way.
Now, there have been private space consortia in spades since the end of the Cold War but until recently we did not see the big push toward commercial crewed systems, developed from start to finish by private enterprises. Up until now, taking a Soyuz bus was fine but now that it’s the only carrier in the skies, Western costumers (like NASA) are a bit twitchy. They’d like a home-grown vendor up and running – better yet, several!
And they’re getting their wish. SpaceX receives most of the press but let’s not forget Boeing and Sierra Nevada. And who could forget Virgin Galactic? (Mr. Virgin certainly wouldn’t approve the oversight.)
Soon, we will see crewed test flights of private spacecraft. Then actual milk runs to the International Space Station. Then the deployment of private space installations – a very good use for such things, even more than places to have cosmic space sex (yes, I wrote that), would be stations dedicated to cleaning up space debris – perhaps utilizing plasma fields to charge the fast-moving particles and induce drag on space junk over time.
Another notion: If the pieces can be broken up to a sufficiently small size, laser light could be used accomplish the same thing. This was in the news earlier this year; the idea is to heat up a fleck of paint with laser light. The object radiates energy in all directions – including “out” away from the earth and “forward” in its orbit. The net effect is to steer the target deeper into the gravity well. Now, it also needs to go faster to stay in that lower orbit but keep in mind that within about 1,500 kilometers of the Earth there’s no such animal as vacuum.
By interplanetary standards (no true vacuum there either, sorry) LOE space is thick as pea soup on account it’s technically in the Earth’s atmosphere. So, the end result is your space junk gets swept up by the most reliably space junk broom of all – the same thing that keep micrometeoroids from bopping you on the head every day.
And people are already working on that. Heck, I didn’t come up with it.
Now, if space can be keep tidy and stuff, it will be all the safer for average schmoes to go visit once the payload cost drop. And the costs will drop even further – not just from private chemical rockets but even more advanced propulsion systems – scramjets for spaceplanes, more advanced versions of the piggyback approach utilized by Virgin Galactic and – my fave – (relatively) high-thrust ion engines. This last, though, has more to do with getting around the Solar neighborhood.
Aerospace buffs (and I know at least a dozen here) are all familiar with VASIMR and other cutting-edge ion propulsion systems. The development curve on ion propulsion in terms of specific impulse is proceeding quite quickly. While it is unlikely that we will ever see a surface-to-space ion engine, we are quite likely to see engines (and potentially soon) that can putter about the solar system at significant but small fractions of gee… I’m talking up to several percent of Earth gravity, perpetually. That’s not going to get you to Alpha Centauri in any kind of a hurry but it could cut travel times to the Moon by a significant chunk.. and to Mars by a huge amount. You see, the longer the trip, the more value there is to constant acceleration.
Now, circling back to interstellar space probes – a crewed vessel to the stars is going to need something with a wee bit more kick (like try potential multi-gee accelerations because you will need that on the back end to climb up to relativistic velocities). However, small (and I mean SMALL) interstellar probes could be punched up to significant fractions of light speed with a tried and true invention: a linear accelerator using magnets.
Robert L Forward was The Man With The Plan for this. He called it Star Wisp. Me? I’d go for a bigger sounding name for such a huge project: How about we call it The Celestial Survey?
Think of what we could do with an ever expanding baseline of simple telescopic elements. Ideally – and the later we start such a project the more operational oomph we can realistically hope to pack into each Surveyor element – we could read the full range of the EM spectrum. The goal would be to use massive redundancy, on the scale of millions, to overcome breakdowns.
Now, sure, I just said let’s clean up the space junk and now I talk about shot-gunning little star probes at near-light speed across the cosmos. What if one of them hits something? Alright, that’s a risk…and perhaps a competing plan would be to place a still-vast array of surveyors out beyond the Kuiper Belt – close enough to maintain the population of the array, far enough out to provide baseline interferometry scores if not hundreds of AUs across. We would still need a quick way to get Surveyors out that far, else it would take years. (Think of how long it has taken the Voyager probes to kiss the heliopause, the boundary of interstellar space.)
So, perhaps we still need that linear accelerator device – just have a proximity detonator that self-destructs each element before it gets too far away from the operational radius..
But if we can do that, we can have a proximity fuse so the probes vaporize themselves and at least give whatever their atomized fragments are about to hit some slim warning. I mean it wouldn’t do to lance the first alien starship to chance by.
Others focus on taming the outer worlds, making them new homes for Humanity. I’d argue that anything done to make space more livable makes Earth’s many extremely harsh environments more livable… and vice versa. This is a salutary cycle – space systems are excellent ecological laboratories. The more we understand closed-cycle systems, the more we understand Earth’s vast nesting of systems, and ways to limit, contain and eventually neutralize the many poisonous by products of advanced technological civilization. Take this far enough down the road – and we will by necessity – we might do without creating poisons altogether. Why, we just might find ways to make our teeming billions not a detriment but a supplement to the ecological well-being of first this planet, then the others that we will someday call home.
What things may yet be… travel for all, first to near-Earth space, in safety and style, then to the New Worlds that we shall visit – first very carefully, then as we master the means to keep both ourselves safe and the places we visit pristine, more casually.
Parallel to these efforts, we will master better ways to live – not huddled in choking mega cities poorly connected by clogged land, air and water and informational lanes but newer higher, safer and healthier and happier ways of community.
The first strange new worlds, the first cities on an alien and hostile plain, might not even be on the Moon or Mars at all. They might be in Antarctica, or on the bottom of the Pacific near a thermal vent, or deep in the interior of the planet. Or, we might see floating cities, giant aerostations floating at the extreme limits of the stratosphere – gateways to Earth and the Stars alike.
So far I have talked of space in terms of travel, of propulsion systems, of means to survey the cosmos to better detect and visit new homes first here around the original Solar System – Sol Origini, it might be called someday – then elsewhere. We can detect worlds by the thousands out to 20,000 light years. The effective range for most sightings of so-called exoplanets is 300 light years. That smaller range includes an immense number of star systems – hundreds of thousands of them with millions of statistically likely worlds. The larger range contains a potential number of worlds in the trillions.
That’s a lot of real estate and some of it will be taken.
I think it quite likely that this century will see the first confirmed detection of nonhuman (and by that I mean nonhuman-derived) sentience. That job won’t be easy, and I think it will require having detection apparatus outside the noisy electromagnetic fog of the inner Solar System – definitely beyond the orbit of Jupiter, perhaps (as I speculated above) out with the comets beyond Neptune.
Space travel is happening. It does not require the participation of our particular nation; other societies are still excited about science. Their belief systems are not the least inconvenienced by the notion that the universe happens to be exactly as old as it seems. People in India and China do not think that the cosmos looks fourteen billion years old because of something Satan is up to. Those societies will get to the Moon and Mars and beyond just fine, with or without our consent.
This is my challenge to the current America – be the America the rest of the world aspires to be, not the one that cringes, afraid of the dark and afraid of the sky. Be brave and forward-looking. Don’t always see a torch as a weapon. Sometimes… it’s a light.
Likewise, a rocket can be a deliverer of worlds, not just a destroyer of them.
The Cold War is over. The need to feel at war with the rest of Humanity – starting with your own countrymen – must end, as well.
Other nations will go – back to the Moon, to Mars – and in time to the stars.
That might yet be a party that the United States of America hosts.
What a lovely thing for all the world, if that turns out to be so.