by Paul Gilster | Oct 9, 2012 | Culture and Society |
While I’ve often opined in these pages that a Solar System-wide infrastructure must emerge before we can contemplate interstellar flight, the obvious question is how we get there. Stephen Ashworth (Oxford, UK), who writes the insightful Astronautical Evolution blog, recently tackled the subject with such vigor that I asked him for permission to run his essay verbatim, especially since it grew out of a discussion right here on Centauri Dreams. If you’re trying to do something spectacular — like growing a global civilization into an interplanetary one and boosting wealth into the realms needed to push to the stars — how would you go about it? Ashworth’s vision for the ‘ten-billion-times growth factor’ makes the needed transformation. Is it a logical extrapolation or does it push too far? A lively debate should grow out of this one.
As a lifelong jazz buff, I can’t resist adding that Stephen is to be heard on tenor sax playing jazz standards at the Monday evening jam sessions at either the Ampleforth Arms in Risinghurst, or the Chester Arms off the Iffley Road, for those of you in the neighborhood. I now have a can’t-miss music scene — Ellington, Gershwin, Cole Porter — for my next trip to the UK, with interstellar talk to follow. Life is good.
by Stephen Ashworth
The ten-billion-times difficulty
Paul Gilster reports on his Centauri Dreams blog that, just before setting out to go to this month’s 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston, he received an e-mail from someone whose grasp of the difference between interplanetary and interstellar distances was less than perfect. “We’re already going to Pluto”, said the writer. “How much harder can it be to go to a star?” Gilster mused: “I could write a whole book in answer to that question. Wait – I already have…”
Regular reader Joy often posts comments from a more skeptical or reality-check point of view. This time she responded in the comments section:
__________________________________________________________
Velocity x 1000 = energy x 1,000,000
x Crewed spaceflight duration 100 x longer than the longest space station missions
x Mass of vehicle 100 x anything we have orbited
I reckon it to be merely 10,000,000,000 times harder
__________________________________________________________
Regular reader Astronist (a.k.a. Yours Truly) produced the following response to Joy’s calculation:
__________________________________________________________
Joy said: “I reckon it to be merely 10,000,000,000 times harder.”
Given determination, patience and the resources of the Solar System, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem:
Present-day human population x 1,000,000 – this is John S. Lewis’s estimate (in his classic book Mining the Sky) for the population of a developed Asteroid Belt. Say 3% growth for 470 years.
Present-day wealth per person x 10,000 – this is 2% growth for 465 years.
Multiply these together to get an economy 1010 times more powerful than that of today, thanks to the power of that fashionable bête noire, exponential growth.
Taking the resource of solar power (380 × 1012 TW) as indicative of our actual physical room for growth (and remembering that the biggest growth factor for a starship identified by Joy was propulsion energy), an economy well over a trillion times larger than at present is conceivable (asteroidal matter for space colony construction can be expanded if necessary by dismantling small moons). Thus we would still at that point possess only 1% of the ultimate economic power of a fully developed interplanetary civilisation.
About the year 2500, therefore, Joy’s growth criterion could be met, assuming continued faith in material progress and success in finessing our way through all the stresses and strains of growth.
_________________________________________________________
However, within the confines of a blog comment I did not have sufficient space to specify the practical details of how our global civilisation might grow to a multiglobal one with a million times the population and ten thousand times the wealth per head than today.
An omission which I shall now try to make good.
Scenarios for growth… or decline
In considering future growth in space, a number of different scenarios suggest themselves.
How will growth be driven forward?
- Will it be driven primarily by government, through a continuation of the present-day space agency monopoly, certainly on manned and on lunar and planetary spaceflight?
- Will the space agencies be disbanded and further progress managed entirely by commercial enterprises?
- Or will some balance between government and commerce acting in concert drive future progress, thus the private-public partnership model?
This gives us three broad options to choose from.
Secondly: what will be the economic and social conditions on Earth over the next few centuries?
- Will we face a “perfect storm” of overlapping and multiplying crises in overpopulation, climate change, rising sea levels, peak oil, militant religious and ethnic fundamentalism, social security burdens for a greying population, cheap and easy access to weapons of mass destruction, and the “existential risks” of genetic engineering and self-replicating machines?
- Will we face such an abundance of entrepreneurial ingenuity, new sources of energy and multiplying wealth creation that war, poverty and deprivation become things of the past?
- Or will the future be a crazy patchwork of both of the above: with immense new sources of wealth as new technologies go to market, but at the same time immense new problems deriving both from old conflicts and from the stresses involved in adapting to new ways of life?
There are therefore another three broad options, making in combination nine distinct scenarios.
However, eight of these scenarios involves extremes of one sort or another: of monopoly by bureaucrats or buccaneers, of wealth or poverty. Others may wish to explore these. For the present I should like to develop further the “middle way” scenario: a creative community of public and private institutions acting in concert, yet with no overarching master plan, and a set of new technologies which both multiply wealth and introduce new problems, yet whose benefits on balance exceed their drawbacks.
This scenario is therefore based on the pattern of past history: progress arises as an evolutionary, system-level phenomenon, not one governed by any one institution or single clique of middle-aged men in smoke-filled rooms, and the new technologies of the past 200 years have on balance indeed benefited humanity despite all the problems they have brought in their wake.
While others may disagree, to me this seems both the most plausible vision of our future, and the one most likely to achieve the result of expanding civilisation to the stars.
A scenario for the ten-billion-times growth factor
Within this middle way scenario, I would envisage the following sequence of events for the future of manned spaceflight merging into Solar System colonisation.
1. Government exploration missions to low Earth orbit, and establishment of an outpost there. (Now complete.)
2. Based on the exploration in step 1, private enterprise now markets low Earth orbit for commercial passenger spaceflight, dominated by space tourism but also featuring commercial space manufacturing and university-funded science, and creates a growing, economically self-sustaining low Earth orbit infrastructure. (Now just beginning, and dependent upon SKYLON-type vehicles for full success. Expect this phase to unfold during the 2020s, with ultimately thousands of passengers flying to orbit and back every week.)
3. As low Earth orbit becomes more populated and costs of access fall, a market will appear for lunar flyby trips (Space Adventures has announced it already has one committed client for a flight around 2015). These are best satisfied by adapting existing space hotel designs for injection into Earth-Moon cycler orbits, thus ensuring that full solar flare protection, repair facilities and buffers of consumables can be built up in cislunar space. (Late 2020s to 2030s.)
4. The growing space hotel system and the demand for translunar propellants create a large-scale market for volatiles, especially water, in orbit which can be satisfied by robotic mining of the near-Earth asteroids; again, government exploration, in this case robotic asteroid exploration, will be needed to develop the technologies towards commercial sustainability. (2030s to 2040s.)
5. Based on the infrastructure in steps 2, 3 and 4, governments, singly or in collaboration, now launch new exploration missions to the Moon very much more economically than could have been achieved with an Apollo-style system, and establish one or more outposts there. (2050s.)
6. Based on the infrastructure in steps 2, 3 and 4, the construction of solar power satellites to serve Earth now becomes economically attractive, and the conversion of Earth from fossil fuels to solar power begins. (2030s to 2050s.)
7. Based on the exploration in step 5, private enterprise now markets the Moon for commercial passenger spaceflight, dominated by space tourism but also featuring lunar surface science, and creates a growing, economically self-sustaining lunar surface infrastructure. (2060s.)
8. Based on the infrastructure in steps 2, 3 and 4, government now launches exploration missions to Mars and Venus, and establishes outposts there. (2080s.)
9. Based on the exploration in step 8, private enterprise now markets Mars and Venus for commercial passenger spaceflight, dominated by science and colonisation. Interplanetary transport will use a network of cycler stations based on several decades of experience with Earth-Moon cycler stations. (Into the 2100s.)
10. Outposts on Mars and Venus grow into colonies, and meanwhile the cycler stations also grow into substantial transit cities, supplied from asteroids rather than from Earth. (First half of the 22nd century.)
11. Based on the existing interplanetary infrastructure, government now launches exploration missions to the Main Asteroid Belt, Jupiter and further afield. (Mid-22nd century.)
12. Based on the exploration in step 11 and several decades of experience operating interplanetary cycler stations, private enterprise sets up mining and construction ventures in the Main Asteroid Belt to create self-sufficient colonies there. New cycler stations link these colonies with the inner planets. (Mid-22nd century.)
13. At the same time, private enterprise sets up cycler stations to serve Jupiter and Saturn, serving growing colonies on the respective giant planets’ moons and among the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. (Late 22nd century.)
14. The interplanetary economy is now growing independently of Earth, but at the same time the commerce (material, energy, information) between the colonies and Earth enriches civilisation at all locations. (The state of play at 1 January 2200.)
This scenario thus completes the transformation of civilisation from monoplanetary to multiplanetary status, and sets up the conditions under which economic and population growth may now proceed without interruption until the limits of the carrying capacity of the Solar System are reached.
Clearly, those limits will one day be reached, and the transition to a low-growth society must be faced. Those who call for such a transition are correct. However, their timing is wrong. I estimate that growth can continue at typical present-day rates for a few thousand years. The society that will face the transition to a low-growth economy will therefore be very different from that of the present day.
At some point a few centuries in the future (I suggested the date 2500 above – as good a guess as any), the first starships will be able to depart, carrying our descendants to the stars. By this time, I assert in all seriousness, almost all of our descendants will be living permanently in space colonies. Why? Because we need to grow, and that is where the greatest opportunities for growth are.
Perhaps the biggest question so far unanswered is how humanity will change in coming centuries under the influence of genetic and information technologies. While genetics may modify us, principally in terms of improving disease resistance and extending our lifespans, information technologies, it is often claimed, have the potential to create a superior order of machine beings which are more intelligent than we are and more capable than natural humans in every way. Humans may be confined to Earth forever, or may even vanish completely, driven extinct by competition from the superior machine intelligence they have created.
This, however, is a topic for another essay.
by Paul Gilster | Oct 8, 2012 | Outer Solar System |
One of the challenges of running a site like Centauri Dreams is that deep space news accumulates so swiftly that it’s easy to focus on one issue while another timely story slips away. I don’t want to get too far past the European Planetary Science Congress, which ended in Madrid on September 28, without mentioning the interesting discussion of Titan that took place there. A new proposal for landing on the moon and sampling Ligeia Mare, its largest lake, was put forward to join previous Titan exploration proposals, all of them challenging yet doable.
Titan Lake In-situ Sampling Propelled Explorer (TALISE) is the brainchild of SENER, a private engineering and technology group that has provided components and subsystems for a wide variety of space missions. The idea is to land a probe in the middle of Ligeia Mare, near Titan’s north pole, and embark on a six- to twelve-month cruise to the coast, gathering data all the way. TALISE team member Igone Urdampilleta explains what makes TALISE different:
“The main innovation in TALISE is the propulsion system. This allows the probe to move, under control, from the landing site in the lake, to the closest shore. The displacement capability would achieve the obtaining of liquid and solid samples from several scientific interesting locations on Titan’s surface such as the landing place, along the route towards the shore and finally at the shoreline.”
The image below shows one TALISE concept, using paddle wheels on either side of the probe, but SENER’s studies involve several propulsion methods including screws and wheels. Working in partnership with the Centro de Astrobiología (Madrid), SENER’s work is considered a Phase 0 Study which now moves into a feasibility study that will develop a preliminary mission architecture. What all that boils down to is that this is an extremely preliminary concept that is a long way from becoming an actual proposal in response to an ESA science mission call.
Nonetheless, TALISE is an indication of Titan’s continuing hold on the imagination, with its lakes and rivers of liquid hydrocarbons and its thick atmosphere more suggestive of a planet than a moon. This boat concept joins a Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory design called Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) as another potential craft on Ligeia Mare, offering us an in situ look at a lake that may be at least tens of meters deep, one whose shoreline changes over time in apparent response to seasonal effects. We looked at Titan Mare Explorer last April in Splashdown on Titan.
Nor should we forget AVIATR (Aerial Vehicle for In-situ and Airborne Titan Reconnaissance), a 120 kg airplane that takes advantage of Titan’s thick atmosphere (with atmospheric pressure one and a half times greater than Earth’s) to soar the skies of the moon for up to a year, backed by efficient Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator (ASRG) technology. Aerial methods like AVIATR and various balloon designs have the advantage of being able to roam widely over the surface but a long-term Titan strategy will incorporate both landers and aerial craft. See AVIATR: Roaming Titan’s Skies and A Closer Look at the Titan Airplane for more on the latter designs.
Image: An artist’s impression of Titan’s surface near the shore of one of its lakes, the kind of view we might eventually get from one of the boat/lander missions. Credit: SENER.
You’ll recall that the Huygens lander was designed to float for a time if it landed on a Titanian sea, an outcome mission planners considered a distinct possibility. The interaction between liquid methane and the moon’s weather patterns would be a major area of investigation for any floating probe, as would the complex organic chemistry that makes Titan a unique laboratory for the study of how life develops. Moreover, the sheer drama of operating a craft in an alien lake — or like AVIATR riding the currents of Titan’s thick atmosphere — could enliven public interest, providing a needed boost to deep space planners faced with chronic funding shortfalls.
by Paul Gilster | Oct 5, 2012 | Exoplanetary Science |
Gliese 581d seems more and more to be considered a habitable zone planet, as Siddharth Hegde (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy) and Lisa Kaltenegger (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) describe it in a new paper. They’re homing in on how to characterize a rocky exoplanet and point to HD 85512b and Gliese 667Cc as well as Gl581d as examples, but they also assume that we’ll be seeing more and more habitable zone worlds as the Kepler mission continues its work, so how we learn more about these planets becomes a big issue.
In the absence of missions like Terrestrial Planet Finder or ESA’s Darwin, which would allow us to analyze an exoplanetary atmosphere for biomarkers, what else can we do to find the places where life exists? Hegde and Kaltenegger look hard at a planet’s color to find the answer. Specifically, they’re interested in what’s known as a color-color diagram, which takes advantage of the fact that an object can be observed at a variety of wavelengths, with a different brightness becoming apparent in each band observed. ‘Color’ in this sense refers to the difference in brightness between different bands, easily plotted on a color-color diagram.
Image: Voyager 1’s famous image of the ‘pale blue dot’ that is our world. Can we use color information from direct images of exoplanets to learn which are most likely to house life? Credit: NASA.
Analyzing an exoplanet in visible light on a color-color diagram can reveal some of the basic physical properties of the planet, assuming cloud cover is not problematic. The new paper homes in on the kinds of environment on Earth that can support extreme forms of life and considers how we might identify equivalent environments on an exoplanet:
Small changes in temperature, pH or other physical and geochemical factors… can lead to such environments being dominant on a potentially habitable exoplanet, what could govern evolution of life. These various “extreme” surface environments on Earth have characteristic albedos in the visible waveband (0.4 µm – 0.9 µm) that could be distinguished remotely. We therefore explore the color signatures that are obtained from the surface environments inhabited by extremophiles as well as test our approach using measured reflection spectra of extremophiles.
Of course, detecting surface features in a reflection spectrum is not itself a detection of life, and the authors are quick to point out that their method is a diagnostic that has to be used in conjunction with a study of the exoplanetary atmosphere. But the paper is an interesting attempt to link the known characteristics of extremophile environments to observational astronomy, one that acknowledges that as we get to the point where we can study distant rocky worlds through actual imagery, we’ll be working at extremely low resolution at the limits of our instruments.
Nonetheless, there is much we can do to distinguish the percentage of the surface covered in water or vegetation or desert, a method that should allow us to prioritize the exoplanets best suited for follow-up spectroscopy. The method builds on prior studies of the vegetation red edge caused by the absorption of red light by photosynthesis, but expands that work to consider different life forms that may live on or below the surface. Piezophiles, for example, thrive under extreme oceanic pressure, while halophiles grow in high salt concentrations.
Although some extremophiles — lichens, bacterial mats and red algae — may be detected by direct albedo measurements, we would have no way of directly detecting many extremophiles in a reflection spectrum. Even so, we can do useful work: The idea here is to identify the kind of surface features that would be common in those environments that supported extremophiles living within them. And the range of characteristic surfaces that can be detected by these methods is large, ranging from water, snow and salt to sand, red-coated algae water and trees.
There are plenty of wild cards here, including the kind of star the planet orbits, which could have a profound effect on the signature of vegetation. As we detect rocky planets around different classes of star, we’ll have to adjust our methods accordingly. From the paper:
…the chlorophyll signature for planets around hot stars, may have a “blue-edge” to reflect some of the high energy radiation in order to prevent the leaves from overheating… Chlorophyll signature for planets orbiting cooler stars, may appear black due to the total absorption of energy in the entire visible waveband such that plants gain as much available light as possible for photosynthetic metabolism… Therefore, the positions of trees, microbial mats and lichens [on the diagram shown in the paper] are only valid for an Earth-analog planet orbiting around a Sun-like star and should be taken as guides. The albedo of vegetation and chlorophyll-bearing organisms for non-Sunlike stars requires further study.
Hegde and Kaltenegger’s paper points toward the first kind of work we’ll be able to perform on an exoplanet in the habitable zone once we’ve been able to acquire a direct image of it. By working with extremophiles, the researchers establish environmental limits for life on our own planet, a useful baseline for our first examinations of other terrestrial worlds. The basic filter photometry in visible light used here can provide a first step in probing these planets by identifying characteristic colors, linking them to environmental niches that support life. We would then await the space-based instruments needed to analyze the atmospheres of high-value targets.
The paper is Hegde and Kaltenegger, “Colors of Extreme ExoEarth Environments,” accepted for publication in Astrobiology (preprint).
by Paul Gilster | Oct 4, 2012 | Exoplanetary Science |
New findings from the Herschel space observatory demonstrate how effective the infrared telescope can be at teasing out details of distant planetary systems. At issue is the system around Beta Pictoris, a young star (12 million years old) some 63 light years from the Earth. We’re looking at planetary system formation in progress here, with a single gas giant planet and a dusty debris disk that may be the forerunner of a disk much like our own Edgeworth/Kuiper Belt, the collection of icy bodies that orbits outside the orbit of Neptune.
Ben de Vries (KU Leuven) is lead author of the paper on the new Herschel data, which examines the composition of dust in the outer regions of the Beta Pictoris disk. The study, reported today in Nature, presents a photometric and spectral analysis of dust particles produced when planetesimals in this region collide. The key player here is olivine, a mineral associated with protoplanetary disk material around newborn stars. The olivine found around Beta Pictoris is similar to that found in the dust of primitive Solar System comets.
Herschel has been detecting a magnesium-rich variety of olivine at a distance of 15-45 AU from the star. While olivine can crystallize out of protoplanetary disk material, it eventually becomes part of larger bodies, from comets to asteroids and planets. Usefully, the two states of olivine can be distinguished from each other, as de Vries explains in this ESA news release:
“As far as olivine is concerned, it comes in different flavours. A magnesium-rich variety is found in small and primitive icy bodies like comets, whereas iron-rich olivine is typically found in large asteroids that have undergone more heating, or ‘processing’.”
Moreover, finding olivine in the cold debris disk is itself a marker, for the mineral can only crystallize within about 10 AU of the star. The de Vries team assumes that radial mixing processes are at work, produced not only by stellar winds and heat from the central star but by temperature differences and turbulence in the protoplanetary disk itself. The Herschel data show that olivine crystals make up 3.6?±?1.0 percent of the total mass of the dust found in this outer region, a figure similar to the Solar System comets 17P/Holmes and 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, according to de Vries.
Image: Infrared view of the Beta Pictoris solar system, obtained by combining data from the ADONIS instrument on ESO’s 3.6 m telescope (outer regions) and the NACO instrument on one of the 8.2 m units of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (inner region), and then subtracting the overpowering glare of the central star. The image shows a planet orbiting at roughly the same distance from Beta Pictoris as Saturn is from our own Sun, and a prominent dust disc in the outer reaches of the system. New observations from ESA’s Herschel space telescope have found magnesium-rich olivine crystals in the disc that likely originated from collisions between comets: the dust shares the same compositional characteristics as in several comets in our Solar System. Furthermore, the observation of these olivines in the outer dust disc suggest that they have been transported from their birthplace close to the central star, since they cannot form under the cold conditions found further out. Credits: ESO/A-M. Lagrange et al.
The findings are helpful because they point to basic processes of planetary system growth. Beta Pictoris is one and a half times as massive as the Sun and eight times as bright, but the radial mixing process at work here looks to be roughly the same as that postulated for the early Solar System. Measuring residual materials from an early exoplanetary system is an impressive feat and a reminder of Herschel’s capabilities. Launched in 2009, this is the first observatory to span the entire range from far-infrared to submillimeter wavelengths, pushing deeper into the far infrared than any previous mission. Meanwhile, Beta Pictoris continues to be an ideal ‘laboratory’ for watching a young system grow. It doubtless has much more to teach us.
The paper is de Vries et al., “Comet-like mineralogy of olivine crystals in an extrasolar proto-Kuiper belt,” Nature 490 (04 October 2012), pp. 74-76 (abstract).
by Paul Gilster | Oct 3, 2012 | Culture and Society |
Yesterday’s discussion about Man Will Conquer Space Soon!, the landmark series in Collier’s that so elegantly defined the 1950s view of space travel, has me in a retrospective mood. The Collier’s series was highly visible, and those old enough to have seen it tend to remember its concepts whether or not they’re in an aerospace-related profession today. But a few years later a TV show called “Men Into Space” turned up on CBS, fighting for audience share and generally out-publicised by the network’s “Twilight Zone” offering. It would run only a single season and end in September of 1960, months before Yuri Gagarin’s daring ride in a Vostok.
But “Men Into Space” sticks with me for a reason. Its 38 episodes followed Col. Edward McCauley (played by William Lundigan) through a variety of space situations, using him as a viewpoint character while the astronauts he worked with dealt with breakthroughs and problems. In that sense there was a certain similarity to what would become the Mercury program — we can assume this is exactly what the producers had in mind — but in its relatively realistic view of the dangers of these missions, it also harked back to the era of the rocket plane, when test pilots flew the X-15 and its X-series predecessors to new speed and altitude records.
Image: William Lundigan, star of “Men Into Space,” who portrayed a seasoned astronaut guiding an often-changing cast through the dangers of manned spaceflight. Credit: Ziv Television Productions.
It’s that dual emphasis that makes this series interesting. Back in 2003 when I was researching Centauri Dreams in Cleveland, I was headed out to lunch with Marc Millis and Geoff Landis. This was not long after the Columbia disaster and the idea of risk — and its ability to paralyze the space program — was very much in the air. I quoted Landis on this in the book:
“If a test pilot crashes at Edwards Air Force Base…they name a street after him, and the next day someone else flies another mission to see what went wrong. With space, things are different. Every mission has to be a success, we can tolerate no casualties. It may be a cultural thing. Maybe we’ve grown too afraid of risks.”
My thought was that it’s not the people in the machines who fear the risks but the culture that sends them, and in that I agreed with Landis. But these retrospective thoughts about space in the media have me wondering just why — and when — the risk paradigm changed. If you read Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, you’ll recall the mindset that Wolfe identified at Edwards, where Chuck Yeager cracked the sound barrier in the X-1 and Scott Crossfield pushed the X-15 to every limit in the book (Crossfield is famous for saying that the X-15 was one of the few aircraft that caused grown men to cry when it was summarily retired). Wolfe is worth quoting on the idea of risk and how it looked in the late 1950s, when “Men Into Space” was made.
As to just what this ineffable quality was…well, it obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life. The idea seemed to be that any fool could do that, if that was all that was required, just as any fool could throw away his life in the process. No, the idea here…seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment — and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite — and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God. Nor was there a test to show whether or not a pilot had this righteous quality. There was, instead, a seemingly infinite series of tests…
“Men Into Space,” in a post-Sputnik America that was about to go crazy with the idea of going to the Moon, pushed its astronauts into a variety of Moon landings, space station scenarios, the building of a Moon base and two different attempts to reach Mars. The two Mars missions failed and they were not alone, for this was a show where astronauts occasionally died. Things went wrong and, unlike Neil Armstrong and David Scott’s dangerous Gemini 8 flight, which could easily have proven fatal, many of the “Men Into Space” missions lost their crews. Technical glitches were common and astronauts kept going back into space in spite of all this.
I’m an old movie buff and I particularly enjoy the depiction of aviation in movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Recently I was watching Pat O’Brien and Humphrey Bogart in “China Clipper” (1936), in which a turbo-charged Bogart pushes O’Brien’s new clipper design to the limit, flying through an advancing squall line to demonstrate that the design had what it took to survive the Pacific. Pilots died aplenty in the early days of aviation and it was considered part of the price for learning how to build better aircraft, an approach that fed directly into the culture Wolfe describes at Edwards. It’s an attitude that feeds countless aviation films of this era.
Something happened to our cultural risk paradigm between the late 1950s and the end of Apollo, something that was certainly with us when we lost our two Space Shuttles, and I’m wondering just what it was. My guess is that the rocket-plane pilots of Edwards Air Force Base were never in the public eye to the extent that the Mercury 7 were, and that our decision to mount a national effort to reach the Moon in the context of the Cold War elevated our crews into the kind of public figures whose loss would be unthinkable. The risks of these flights were palpable, but the risk paradigm — what we all felt about those flights and those crews — seemed to be changing.
I suspect that if we do enter into a time of commercial space development, with companies like Planetary Resources actually mining asteroids with human crews launched by SpaceX or other companies, the paradigm will begin to shift again. Sheer numbers will eventually force it to, for a large enough population working on a regular basis in space is a different thing than a single crew facing long odds on a dangerous mission. The show that prompted these musings, “Men Into Space,” doesn’t seem to be available in streaming mode, but I do see various DVDs out there. Like the Collier’s series, it’s an interesting illustration of how our thinking on space has changed.
