Centauri Dreams

I conceived an early love for Tennyson, but it wasn’t until a bit later in life that I ran into his “Locksley Hall,” which contains lines many science fiction fans are familiar with:

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.

When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.—

and so on. The poem is the lament of a soldier returning to the places of his boyhood and eventually turning his thoughts, and his resolve, on the future. When I read the line ‘the long result of time,’ I realized that it was here that I found resonance with the poet. The idea of a remote futurity and the need to build its foundations now was a powerful motivator.

Building Structures That Last

A sense of that futurity pervaded our recent sessions at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop in Huntsville. Several speakers alluded to instances in human history where people looked well beyond their own generation, a natural thought for a conference discussing technologies that might take decades if not centuries to achieve. We talked about a solar power project that might take 35 years, or perhaps 50 (much more about this in coming days).

The theme became explicit when educator and blogger Mike Mongo talked about getting interstellar issues across to the public, referring to vast projects like the pyramids and the great cathedrals of Europe. Cathedrals are a fascinating study in their own right, and it’s worth pausing on them as we ponder long-term notions. Although they’re often considered classic instances of people building for a remote future, some cathedrals were built surprisingly quickly. Anyone who has stood in awe at the magnificent lines of Chartres southwest of Paris is surprised to learn that it came together in less than 60 years (the main structure in a scant 26), though keep in mind that this was partly a reconstruction of an earlier structure that dated back to 1145.

Image: The great cathedral at Chartres.

With unstinting public support, such things could happen even with the engineering of the day, creating what historians now view as the high point of French Gothic art. Each cathedral, of course, tells its own tale. Salisbury Cathedral was completed except for its spire in 45 years. Other cathedrals took longer. Notre Dame in Paris was the work of a century, as was Lincoln Cathedral, while the record for cathedral construction surely belongs to Cologne, where the foundation stone was laid in 1248. By the time of the Reformation 300 years later, the roof was still unfinished, and later turmoil pushed the completion of the cathedral all the way into the 19th Century, with many stops and starts along the way.

Remember, too, that the cathedral builders lived at a time when the average lifespan was in the 30s. The 15-year old boy who started working on the foundation of a cathedral might have hoped to see its consecration but he surely knew the odds didn’t favor it. Humans are remarkably good at this kind of thing, even if the frenetic pace and short-term focus of our times makes us forget it. Robert Kennedy pointed out to me at the conference that the Dutch dike system has been maintained for over 500 years, and can actually be traced back as far as the 9th Century. The idea of technology-building across generations is hardly something new to our civilization.

The ‘long result’ context is an interesting one in which to place our interstellar thinking. Naturally we’d like to make things happen faster than the 4000-year plus journeys I talked about on Friday with worldships, though my guess is that as the species becomes truly spacefaring and begins to differentiate, we’ll see colonies aboard O’Neill-class cylinders holding thousands, many of the colonists being people who will spend less and less time on a planetary surface. At some point, it would be entirely natural to see one of these groups decide to head into the interstellar deep. They would be, after all, taking their world with them, a world that was already home.

Evolutionary Change in Space

Gerald Driggers is a retired engineer and current science fiction author who worked with Gerald O’Neill in the 1970s. I see him as worldship material because he has chosen for the last seventeen years to live on a boat, saying “It was the closest thing I could get to a space ship.” Driggers believes we can begin our interstellar work by getting humans to Mars, where they will be faced with many of the challenges that will attend much longer-term missions. We must, after all, build a system-wide infrastructure, mastering the complexities of power generation and resource extraction on entirely new scales, before we can truly hope to go interstellar.

And what happens to humans as they begin working in extreme environments? Evolution doesn’t stop when we leave the planet, as Freeman Dyson is so fond of pointing out. These are changes that should be beneficial, says Driggers. “Evolutionary steps toward becoming interstellar voyagers reduce the chances for human failures on these journeys. We’re going to change, and we will continue to change as we look toward longer voyages. The first humans to arrive around another star system probably won’t be like anybody in the audience today.” Responding to evolutionary change, Martians may make the best designers and builders of interstellar craft.

Image: Gerald Driggers discussing a near-term infrastructure that will one day support interstellar missions.

Get it right on Mars, in other words, and we get it right elsewhere and learn the basics of infrastructure building all the way to the Kuiper Belt, with active lunar settlements and plentiful activity among the asteroids. Along the way we adapt, we change. Driggers’ worst-case scenario has Martian settlements delayed until the mid-22nd Century, but he is hopeful that the date can be moved up and the infrastructure begun.

All of which brings me back to something Mike Mongo talked about. We are not going to the stars ourselves, but we can inspire and train people who will solve many of the technical problems going forward, just as they train the next generation. One of these generations will one day train the crew of the first human interstellar mission, or if we settle on robotics, the controllers who will manage our first probes. Placing ourselves in the context of the long result acknowledges our obligation to future generations as we begin putting foundation stones in place.

It’s surprising but gratifying that we can now talk about the ‘interstellar community.’ Just a few years back, there were many scientists and engineers studying the problems of starflight in their spare time, but when they met, it was at conferences dedicated to other subjects. The fact that the momentum has begun to grow is made clear by the explicitly interstellar conferences of recent memory, from the two 100 Year Starship symposia to the second Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop. Icarus Interstellar is mounting a conference this August in Dallas, and the Institute for Interstellar Studies plans its own gathering this fall in London.

Of course the Internet is a big part of the picture — Bob Forward and his colleagues could use the telephone and the postal service to keep in touch, but the energizing power of instant document exchange and online discussion was in the future. All this was apparent in Huntsville for the Tennessee Valley event, from which I have just returned. There was an active Twitter channel open and video streaming of the talks, and although I had little time to answer them, I was getting emails from many interested parties who couldn’t attend. Getting copies of papers and presentations after the conference closed can be managed in hours on the Net.

Starflight challenges not only everything we know about propulsion but also our understanding of human nature. If we are seriously considering human travel to such distant destinations, we are looking at decades of travel time at a bare minimum, or the possibility of a generation ship in which people live their lives entirely aboard the craft, which could take hundreds or even thousands of years to reach its destination. Astronaut Jan Davis, who gave the keynote in Huntsville, talked about the various problems of even short duration spaceflight based on her own experience of multiple Shuttle missions.

Image: Rockets dominate the Huntsville skyline in this shot I took from the Calhoun Community College on the final night of the workshop.

Some of these issues are well identified, including the lack of privacy and the loss of muscle and bone mass due to prolonged weightlessness. The privacy issue balances oddly with a sense of isolation, Davis said, as you are cut off from all aspects of your normal life. “You hear a lot of voices, but they’re not the voices you take for granted every day. I missed my dog. I missed sounds like wind, waves hitting the shore. You’re busy, but you’re also isolated.” As medical officer on her two flights, Davis trained on emergency procedures in case a crewmember became incapacitated. The main issue was to stabilize a patient long enough that he or she could be swiftly returned to Earth.

The conclusion from all this is that humans are adapted for Earth, not space, yet they have key advantages over robotic systems, including the ability to discern, judge and learn on a fine-grained basis. Swiftly changing conditions in an on-board experiment she was managing led Davis to alter the schedule on the fly, making changes that would have been difficult for the current generation of robotics. The astronaut sees a combination of the two paradigms as the most likely possibility for long-term missions, perhaps aided by medical breakthroughs in hibernation that would allow the crew to spend most of a long mission in stasis while automatic systems ran the ship.

Robert Hampson (Wake Forest University) extended thinking in this direction by talking about what we need to learn about the human brain before we can contemplate long-duration spaceflight with an interstellar reach. Hampson is an associate professor of physiology and pharmacology with a passion for neuroscience and biology. Given what we know today about risk factors like stroke, epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease, he notes that if we launch 100 people on a 100 year journey, 25 of them will be incapacitated by the time they arrive even if we can extend their lifetimes significantly. Interstellar flight, then, demands that we learn to predict and prevent degenerative diseases, keeping the brain healthy through entertainment and intellectual stimulation.

One way to do that is with a direct human/machine interface, a kind of TiVo wired into the brain. Hampson told the audience that to fix the brain for long-duration spaceflight, we have to find a way to interface with it, and that means we have to understand its language and coding. It’s a challenge that demands the help not just of the medical community but of mathematicians, physicists and engineers. As to the hibernation that Jan Davis talked about, Hampson asks how much we know about brain activity during hibernation. Is an astronaut under hibernation for fifty years going to have a fifty-year long dream?

I’m jumping around in the schedule here to tie thematic ends together, so I’ll add that my own talk, called “Slow Boat to Centauri,” got into long-duration mode by discussing worldships and how they could sustain themselves along the way. The idea was to show how many resources are available between the stars, suggesting as many space researchers have that our expansion might not involve a direct mission to another star, but rather a step-by-step progression of colonies that gradually moves the human sphere outward. Gradual exploration like this might take thousands of years.

We can all hope for fast propulsion, but suppose the engineering is intractable. Would we still go to the stars if limited to speeds much less than ten percent of c? One-tenth of one percent of lightspeed gets you to Alpha Centauri in about 4300 years, which is also (very roughly) the extent of human history in terms of recoverable documents and written language. A worldship moving at this speed, in other words, recapitulates the human historical experience aboard a craft that would have to be engineered to be a living world, a vast O’Neill cylinder with propulsion.

The right kind of worldship — and Gordon Woodcock (L5 Society) worked through the engineering problems of creating such a vessel in a first-day talk — would have to be one large enough to sustain a population of thousands in conditions that were eminently livable, the complete antithesis of the cramped quarters Jan Davis experienced aboard the Shuttle. We’re all on a worldship of our own, following our star in its 230 million year journey at 220 kilometers per second around the galaxy, so perhaps a livable worldship engineered by the future Kardashev type 1 civilization we hope to grow into would be an acceptable interstellar ark.

Image: A worldship designed to hold generations of humans, as imagined by space artist Adrian Mann.

Putting the speed issue in perspective, one tenth of one percent of the speed of light is 300 kilometers per second, compared to the 17 kilometers per second that our fastest deep space probe, Voyager 1, has attained. There are ways of moving that fast that we can calculate today, but the engineering needed to produce a worldship — and the vast issues raised by creating a closed-loop ecology aboard the craft — demand a multi-disciplinary approach that takes us into biology, philosophy, sociology and the humanities as well as physics. The long-term perspective needed for such thinking was frequently discussed in Huntsville, about which more on Monday.

Air travel presents us with challenges we seldom anticipate. Flying into Charlotte on Sunday I had developed a ferocious headache. I was headed to the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop in Huntsville and had a long enough layover in Charlotte to seek out a pain reliever with decongestant properties. The ridiculous thing was that I couldn’t get the plastic mini-pack open. The little symbol showed me tearing off the corner of the packet, but it wouldn’t tear for me, and it wouldn’t tear for the guy who happened to be sitting next to me at the USAir gate.

It became clear that I needed something sharp to get into this packet, but it was also clear that I was in an airport, the very definition of which these days is to prevent passengers from having anything sharp. I finally took the packet back to the kiosk I bought it from and demanded redress. The lady looked askance at me, looked at the packet, and opened it effortlessly. Further comment seems superfluous.

By the time I got off the plane in Huntsville the headache was much better, and I was surprised to find my shoulder tapped by Andreas Hein, who heads Icarus Interstellar’s worldship project, called Hyperion. We shared a taxi to the hotel, where the lobby was stuffed with interstellar folk like Rob Swinney, now project head for Project Icarus, Claudio Maccone (who will give a keynote on Tuesday), Kelvin Long (head of the Institute for Interstellar Studies) and my buddy Al Jackson, just in from Houston. Al was kind enough later to drive me over to the venue for the evening reception, pictures of which you see here. Al and I owe much to his Garmin GPS.

Image: Andreas Hein (left) and Rob Swinney, of Icarus Interstellar.

The conference — or in this case ‘workshop’ — dilemma is again facing me. There was a day when I thought ‘live blogging’ would make sense for Centauri Dreams, but the more examples of live blogging I read, the less I like the idea. At both 100 Year Starship conferences I mainly sent out tweets, finding Twitter an interesting platform for conference coverage, but one that nonetheless distracted me from making the kind of detailed notes I needed to be working with, just as live blogging did. So this time around, although I may do the occasional tweet (@centauri_dreams), I’ll mostly be paying attention to the speakers and making notes that will turn into more coverage after the workshop is over.

Image: A cordial host, MSFC’s Les Johnson, co-editor of Going Interstellar (Baen, 2012).

So bear with me if Centauri Dreams is off its regular schedule for a few days, though I’ll slip things in wherever possible, and next week we’ll take a close look at the papers here. Meanwhile, there should be no interruption in comment moderation, which I’ll get to as time allows. I will tell you this for now. Robert Kennedy (The Ultimax Group) makes a drink called the Alpha Centauri Sunrise, and I have not only had one, but have also snapped a surreptitious photo of the recipe. Robert later said it would be OK for me to share it, so at some point during the week, I’ll explain how to make this estimable drink. Hint: Three berries are involved. And moonshine.

These days we know that perhaps a million objects the size of the Tunguska impactor or larger are moving through nearby space, and talk of how to deflect asteroids has become routine. Given our increasing awareness of near-Earth objects, it wouldn’t be a surprise to hear of a new Hollywood treatment involving an Earth-threatening asteroid. But I wouldn’t have expected a science fiction series that ran from 1959 to 1960 would have depicted an asteroid mission and the dangers such objects represent.

Nonetheless, I give you “Asteroid,” from the show Men Into Space, with script by Ted Sherdeman. Viewers on November 25, 1959 saw the show’s protagonist Col. Edward McCauley (William Lundigan) take a crew to ‘Skyra,’ a 3.5-kilometer long rock that scientists believed might hit the Earth. The crew assesses whether the asteroid is salvageable for use as a space station and decides there is no other choice but to destroy Skyra, which they do at the cost of considerable suspense as McCauley works to save an astronaut separated from the others while the clock ticks down. The suspense would have been heightened by the fact that this was a show on which astronauts sometimes died and hard sacrifices were the order of the day.

I report on all this with the help of John Fredriksen’s new book Men Into Space (BearManor Media, 2013), which arrived in the mail the other day. Like me, Fredriksen had watched the show in its all too short run while growing up in the Sputnik era. He was taken with the understated but tough role of McCauley, who was depicted as participating in all the significant space missions of his time, from the first lunar journeys to building a space station and, at the time of the show’s cancellation, two attempted flights to Mars that were plagued by problems and aborted.

You could say that Mars as a destination hovers over all this show’s plots. Its final episode, “Flight to the Red Planet,” did get McCauley and team as far as Phobos, where their ship was damaged enough to force an early departure without landing on Mars itself. The Mars of this episode is a compelling target, because from Phobos, in these years not long before Mariner 4, the crew can see waterways that seem to be feeding an irrigation system. This is Percival Lowell’s Mars in an episode surely designed to build into a second season, but that season was unfortunately not to be.

Fredriksen’s book walks fans through all the episodes, with extensive quotes from the scripts and stills that capture the look and feel of the production. If some of these images seem familiar, it may be because Chesley Bonestell was asked to produce concept art for the show, resulting in sharply defined lunar landscapes reminiscent of his paintings. Lewis Rachmil, who produced Men Into Space, would have been familiar with Bonestell’s Hollywood work, which included Destination Moon (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951) and Conquest of Space (1955), not to mention the famous space series in Collier’s.

Frederic Ziv, who headed up ZIV Productions, didn’t stop with Bonestell when it came to making his show as realistic as the times would allow. Sputnik had been launched in 1957 and Ziv had been exploring doing a different kind of space show for CBS ever since. From the book:

Unlike the children-oriented science fiction programming of a few years previous, the tenor of the times now demanded an approach that was rigorously scientific to appease more mature audiences. Ziv, who prized flaunting the technical expertise assisting his programs, also believed that obtaining Department of Defense cooperation facilitated access to their extensive and elaborate space facilities. At length, his show acknowledged help from the Air Force Air Research and Development Command, the Office of the Surgeon General, and the School of Aviation Medicine. Ziv’s credibility was further enhanced with Air Force technical experts who were brought into the scripting and consulting process, receiving credits in the end titles.

Couple this with location shooting at research facilities like Edwards Air Force Base and Cape Canaveral and stock footage of missile launches of the time, along with special effects crews working with von Braun-style three-stage rockets launching capsules that were almost as tiny and cramped as Apollo. Men Into Space turned out to be complicated and expensive. Fredriksen notes that ZIV gave the Air Force the final say in keeping the show realistic, which is why the more fantastic tropes of 1950s science fiction make no appearance. Personality conflicts and equipment malfunctions took the place of ray guns and aliens.

Fredriksen gives all the details, including a summary of each of the show’s 38 episodes. It’s a nostalgic trip for those who remember watching Men Into Space, and it brings back to life memories many of us had long forgotten. After all, this was a short-lived series that survived only in occasional syndication and in some of the space suits and ship interiors that wound up being used again in episodes of The Outer Limits (I knew they looked familiar!). Nominated for a Hugo Award in 1960, the show lost out to The Twilight Zone, and critics sniped at its mundane special effects and earnest quest for authenticity. Despite the promise of Mars, the show was axed in September of that year.

But early impressions count, and it’s safe to say that this show captured more than a few young minds, not the least of them being Fredriksen’s, for whom the experience was indelible:

May future generations rekindle that sense of awe, the ability to dream a better future, and a fixed determination to cross the gulf separating imagination from reality as we did, and joyously so, in the 1950s. If Men Into Space encapsulates the essence of a departed, heroic ideal, it is also a good measure of everything we have lost as a space-faring culture.

As for me, I’ve always been a William Lundigan fan. This is a guy who walked away from Hollywood in 1943 to join the Marines, where he served with the 1st Marine Division on Peleliu, an operation that ranks with Iwo Jima in terms of the ferocity of combat and the staggering percentage of casualties. He went on to Okinawa as a combat photographer and, having received two Bronze Stars, returned to acting after the war. 1954’s Riders to the Stars was his first science fictional outing in a show about astronauts trying to capture meteorites in flight. His work with Ivan Tors on that film fed into a role in the series debut of ZIV’s Science Fiction Theater.

Of Men Into Space, Lundigan would say: “…this was not some Buck Rogers type show. It was not a science-fiction series but a science-fact series. You might even say it’s a combination of a public service show and a dramatic series.” Even he would become exasperated with the quality of writing in some of the later shows, but as Fredriksen’s book makes clear, there was still inspiration to be found here of the kind that awakens young people to careers in engineering and science. With a little better luck and a second season landing on Mars, Men Into Space might be far more than the obscure recollection it is today, and the name ‘McCauley’ might be as recognizable as ‘Kirk.’