Another evening meal with a fellow Samizdatista, and out of it another question. The Samizdatista was Michael Jennings, and the question now is this:
If the cost of getting stuff into earth orbit is seriously reduced, what kinds of things will be done in space that are not done now?
I am not asking how this big price reduction will be contrived. (As I understand it, it’s either better rockets or a giant stepladder, but commenters: don’t bother with that please. As I recall, we’ve had that argument.) I am asking what the consequences will be if, as and when this reduction in cost is contrived.
The two big things done in earth orbit at the moment are, it seems, looking down on earth and seeing things (such as crops and crop diseases, military installations, urban growth, the weather), and: helping to send messages from earth persons to each other, via communications satellites. If that all gets cheaper, there will clearly be a lot more of it.
A reduction in the cost of getting stuff into near space will surely result in a surge of space tourism. Money must even now piling up in earth bank accounts, waiting for the day when day trips to space are available at, say, a million quid a throw.
If only because the increases in what is already going on will alone result in a far greater general human presence in earth orbit, it is to be presumed that many other activities will become possible and will follow.
So, what other things will soon be done in space that are hard or impossible to do on earth?
Switching off gravity on earth is hard, but contriving a vacuum is fairly easy by comparison, so vacuum based manufacture will accordingly still be easier to do on earth than in space. But just because switching off gravity where it is is so hard, going to where it isn’t may bring huge manufacturing benefits. In particular, Michael tells me, it may be far easier to make three rather than merely two dimensional computer chips (very desirable apparently) in zero gravity.
In general, nanotechnology, whatever that is exactly, is relatively easy to do in space, compared with other sorts of technology, on account of it being so small, and hence relatively cheap to get up there. What, in English, might nanotechnologists be able to do that they can’t do on earth, if earth orbit became as easy to get to as a desert is to get to now?
And another ‘in general’ is that, in general, anything involving space travel beyond earth orbit, whether manned or unmanned, will get massively easier to organise if the getting of stuff, human or mechanical, into orbit can be organised separately from the business of going beyond earth orbit. Or so it would seem to me. Two obvious applications? Space tourism beyond earth orbit (see above). And, filling the solar system with unmanned gadgets for looking at our neighbour planets in more detail than has hitherto been possible, in the manner of that gadget that plunged into Jupiter not so long ago, but more so.
Because of all this orbital activity, it is a sure bet that many space service industries will thrive, such as rubbish collection, which I assume to be quite an art in space. (Mishandle a piece of junk and it could vaporise you.) Will there be specialist construction companies? Specialist firms of spaceship cleaners? Where will the advertising industry fit in? Sponsors will surely be heavily involved in space? They’ll want their logos flashed about. Won’t they?
Back here on earth, much new activity will ensue in support of and in response to what is going on out there. There’ll be zero-gravity training courses for tourists, for media people, and for ceremonial visits by senior management and bigshot politicians. There will be vast new bureaucracies to process all the new information that will come flooding back to us, vast new industries made possible by those few magic components that can only be made in space. There’ll be …
Well, those thoughts were the result of about an hour of very casual cogitation. There must be cleverer answers to my question out there, and I’m looking forward to hearing a few of them.
I have to run out the door in about 30 seconds, but for starters:
1. I understand that vacuums of the quality found out in space are still difficult to achieve on Earth.
2. The original Star Wars program – High Frontier (actually the second original program – Eisenhower had one called BAMBI) involved an idea for using large mylar reflectors to power the system and to beam sunlight to collectors on Earth for power. I heard that several Japanese companies were seriously interested in financing part of the Reagan program before their economy imploded.
3. I heard rumors of incredible wound healing and plant growth results from the old Skylab program. I don’t have any idea if they were true. Perhaps Dale has some information on this?
I’m gone.
If it becomes cheaper to get things into space I see two obvious things you haven’t mentioned;
1. Traffic lights
2. Taxes
🙂
Dang, Doug beat me to it. Huge solar arrays are very efficient and cheap once you get out into space. They could beam cheap power back to earth ‘forever.’ Would it lessen our dependance on Oil? I guess it depends on how many you put up there…
However, they are very fragile too. Anything big enough to beam a usable amount of power back to Earth would can’t be sent up in a rocket. I don’t want to tread OT, but the only real way (AFAIK) to get them up there intact is the SpaceLadder. A slow gentel elevator ride lasting about a week.
Some asteroids are supposed to have amazing amounts of rare metals – platinum, uranium, etc. I saw a news story a while ago that suggested astronomers had identied quite a few ‘big ones,’ any one of which would meet Earth’s current demand for those metals for 20 years (not that demand remain current when supply goes up, but you know what I mean). So, asteroid mining for sure.
The Moon has the same composition as Earth, so there’s no material reason to go there. If space lift is cheap enough, people would still want to go and set up a base I bet. It’s also a good place to have a large colony/supply depot to head on out to the rest of the solar system.
Let’s get this straight though – there is almost no rational reason for humans to go into space itself. Almost anything we could want to do can be done with robots. Robots are getting more and more independant every day, and their bones don’t decay in zero-g. As an idea of how independant they are TODAY, there are factories in Japan right now that are visited by Homo Sapiens once every 70 days. For over two months the place is 100% automated. Think about that.
Now if a COLONY is formed, then you’ll need everything. Plumbers, lawyers, engineers (lots and lots of engineers), farmers, etc. No colony can survive for any length of time when it’s dependant on the ‘old country’ for things like food and water. There may be ice on the moon, there’s definately ice on some asteroids. Water, sunlight and human ingenuity can create anything – and they will have to.
One thing we would also have to invent is better propulsion. Even if getting out of Earth orbit were free, getting to Mars with chemical rockets is a bitch. Getting further is next to impossible. There are several technologies on the engineering table, such as nuclear, plasma and ion engines, that would all serve useful niches. “Sci-fi” propulsions such as Anti-Matter and Fusion (and ones as yet undrempt up) would be required to get to other solar systems.
Currently there is a lot of space junk in orbit. Someone would have to clean it up eventually. With cheap lift, you’re going to have more flights, which means a greater chance of someone getting hit. I have no idea how you’d try to do this. I’m sure some clever fellow will think of something.
I don’t think advertisers are going to be a big space presence – not unless then can be very targeted. Would some people like to advertise on a billboard that could be seen anywhere in the western US? Hell, yeah. Would the entire western US put up with that? I don’t think so…
In other parts of the world it’s more problematic. What language would you advertise in? What cultural indicators would you advertise to? Advertisers need to be targeted to be effective.
How fast is this cheap lift? If it’s fast, UPS and FedEx could deliver from New York to Beijing in 1 hour. Commercial passenger flights could be similarly fast. Once you’re in space, the whole world is just 15 minutes away. That’s how ICBMs work, after all.
The US military could hit a human target anywhere in the world, fired from the Continental US. Oh, wait … they’re already working on that. Scratch that.
Large space stations in geostationary orbits could serve as hubs of manufacturing. Everything grows differently in zero-g. Silicon wafers, biologicals, nano-crystals, everything. The uses for these would be extraordinary. A lot of scientists would have full-time residences up in space. A lot of the manufacturing would be done with robots though. Even if it’s cheap to lift people into space, it’s probably not cheap to pay them to stay there. Robots work for free.
Oh, and the Jews will give up on the whole “Israel” thing and establish Zion on Europa, where they can safely beam down their mind-control rays to the leaders of the world.
Not to put words in anyone’s mouth, but I think the bit about advertising probably meant something like slapping corporate logos on launch, space or planetary vehicles, so that anytime someone saw one on TV it would say ‘CitiBank’ or whatever on the side (think NASCAR) – not putting a 10,000 mile wide banner in orbit with ‘US out of IRAQ’ written on it that we would all have to rotate under every 90 minutes…
I love the idea of ScramEx same day delivery, though – that’s cool! And the best reason I can think of for homo sapiens to go into space is to get away from other homo sapiens 😉
Once orbit becomes easy, going anywhere else becomes much easier too. With the hard work of climbing out of the gravity well behind you, going places becomes doable via gradual, rather than concentrated, acceleration.
Also, the thing it makes most sense to manufacture in orbit is: spaceships. Satellites, probes, and manned craft. Build ’em piecemeal up there, from asteroid or lunar materials. No lobbing them up at high gees through hot corrosive atmospheres, means much simpler and more task-focused designs. No cost-per-gram means much more featureful craft.
Regarding space junk- It would have to be considered a resource.
It is already up there. There might be a new field of engineering- a sort of recycling engineer.
Perhaps this would be a career path for the fellows who keep the 1950’s cars running in Cuba, once Castro goes to his ‘reward’.
The moon: Actually it has two compositional differences with the Earth. It is much richer in rutile, an ore of titanium.
That is rare on Earth, with the Russians having the lions share of it. It is also very hard to machine in an oxygen atmosphere as a very hard oxide forms on a fresh surface almost instantanously. This reduces most machine tools to dull nubs very quickly.
On the Moon – no oxygen – no problem.
The second compositional difference is supposed to be the presence of Helium 3 in the top four or five feet of the lunar soil.
Harrison Schmitt, the astronaut, has been trying to stimulate interest in this substance and its possibilities. It is an isotope of Helium with one rather than two neutrons.
Apparently it will combine with deuterium (heavy hydrogen, with an extra neutron) in a sort of low intensity nuclear reaction.
The stuff is available in very small amounts on Earth as a waste product given off by stored nuclear weapons. You can find a couple of places that sell it on the internet.
There just isn;t enough to do much with here. On the Moon, it is a different matter.
I’m not against space bases or factories – the L1 gravity null location between the Earth and the Moon is liable to be the subject of a war someday. But I also think the moon is a very valid objective too. In fact we should never have left.
Even if “the money could have been better spent on Health and Education here on Earth”. In fact, now that I think of it, that is another good reason for space exploration.
I think we’d see more of:
1. Super fast intercontinental travel. Australia only an hour away?
2. Weapons in space. If it’s cheap to put anything in orbit you can guarantee that someone will start filling LEO up with defence material. Others will follow.
3. Satellites for purposes we haven’t even begun to catalogue. Truly cheap access would enable an explosion in communications and imaging.
4. Humans in space. If you build it they will come. An enabler for more ambitious human exploration (Mars maybe?).
5. Deaths in space. No system is 100% reliable. With a dramatically higher activity and the inevitable failures there will be regular accidents. It remains to be seen if we can remain rational about this as we are about airline accidents.
Once you’re in orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere.
But Brock — “Almost anything we could want to do can be done with robots.” — Indeed, why should we even set foot outside of our houses. In fact, we should all just stay in bed. Our robots can maintain our IV feeding tubes. Sorry, man, but I’ve dreamed of going out there since I was a little kid — the Lunar landings gave me hope that it would all become real, and then Nixon and the politicians and the bureaucrats and the bean-counters shut it all down in order to turn NASA into a government engineering bureaucracy job-entitlement and corporate welfare program.
Give us low cost access to orbit and we can have solar power satellites and can find better things to do with oil than just burn it. Give us low cost access to orbit and it will trigger economic growth and technological spin-offs that will dazzle you.
But most of all, the entire solar system will be open to us. (Maybe we’ll sent robots first, but we’ll follow.)
Jim
Strongly agreed. This is why tourism is so important. “Tourism” (the word itself implies a kind of excessive fetishism – tour-“ism” – about making that tour) will ensure that people will go to all these places, and not just robots. If people remain free to spend their money as they like, they will go to space. Whatever has to be done to make that possible will have to be done. The money is there, and it will be spent. Provided people are allowed to spend it.
There is already a buzz of anti-space-tourism talk getting underway among left/environmentalists, and their objective, I’m quite sure, will be to get it banned completely. Space is now the next zone of purity which must not be polluted. Empty as nature intended, blah blah.
Thanks for all the comments so far. Just the kind of thing I was hoping for.
I’m thinking that more open access to space weakens, not strengthens, its use by the military. Joe Spaceboy can just drive up to a zillion pound star wars satellite, and sock it with a baseball bat a few times.
Cheap space access == Political freedom (for those that leave) and the creation of a self-imposed evolutionary bottleneck.
Well of course people are going to go! I didn’t say they wouldn’t, only that they don’t NEED to. I’m going! I just don’t have a reason to – other than beause I WANT to. I love the idea of space travel. Always have. That’s why I actually know about it! 🙂
Tourism’s going to be huge. I didn’t know about the Moon’s titanium. I had heard about he He3, but I had also heard recently that it might not be there after all – that it was a camera trick or something. Whatever, we’ll find a reason to go.
If there’s advertising in space, it’ll probably only be on the TV screen images that get beamed back to earth. Putting ads on the side of a rocket is about as useful as putting them on the side of a 747 – and you don’t see too many of those, do you? Advertising will be probably be restricted to the inflight magazines “Thorazine! It’s the only way to experience Zero-G! Ask your flight attendant.”
What’s most interesting to me is the political ramifications of space travel/ colonization. Last time a big frontier opened up the USA was born – but so was the rest of the Western Hemisphere. A mixed blessing. People will be just as flawed in Space, but hey! They can be flawed in 1/6th gravity! That’ll put a spring in your step.
I just don’t think a lot will be done in space. The Moon and Mars, maybe – but not space. It’s like the ocean. You have cruise ships and supertankers and it’s vital for global trade – but no one lives there. There aren’t any floating factories. People like having dirt under foot. It’ll be dangerous enough that breaking your neighbor’s window with a baseball we depressurize their house, killing everyone inside – don’t need to add a 360 degree, nowhere is ‘down’ experience to that. People just aren’t built for that kind of stress.
One thing you’re going to see a lot of is architecture and interior design specifically created to soothe the senses and make people feel relaxed. We don’t have a lot of that right now because we can always go out in the yard and stare at the trees and clouds. Folks living in the Moon can’t get that – it will have to be provided for. Check out the Boeing 7E7 concept for an idea. It’s actually smaller than a 747, but it sure doesn’t feel that way. Those design concepts will filter back to Earth. Call is a ‘space dividend.’
Garbage-hauling, viz, the disposal of earth bound wastes such as toxic chemicals, radioisotopes and so on. All could be sent into the sun. Of course this is all contingent upon the method of transport being not only cheap but *reliable* (i.e., not prone to blowing up in the atmosphere and distributing the toxic cargo).
As I see it – There is one other thing that is required to make space worthwhile going into…. a decent propulsion system that allows you to go wherever you want in a matter of hours… not weeks months or years… but hours or less.
You would think some entrepreneurial billionaire with a penchant for travel might have come up with a multi-million pound “X-prize” for that type of development! Surely if this was developed the developers and the patron(s) of the prize would become the richest people ever…almost overnight.
Its about time there was a “Warp-drive prize” on offer… even an “Impulse Drive prize” might be a start.
It seems like basic sense to me that if you have a prize with a big enough reward to get people trying to get into space – then you should be running a concurrent prize to power these new space vehicles once you manage to get them up there!
Otherwise its like saying – OK Folks we’ve got a great big ocean out there… we’re giving a prize for anyone who can build a boat to take you out beyond the horizon and back once every two weeks…
…like DUH!!!!!….
…what is there to really capture the imagination in that…. the final goal is way way too low. Especially since we have already been to the moon and we are fed a daily on films that contain interstellar and intergalactic travel.
How about – 1st people to fly to Mars and back in under a week gets a 10 billion dollar prize.
Now if only I had 10 billion dollars to spare 😉
As a part of tourism, we’ll see lots of artists get out there. Think of Spider and Jeanne Robinson’s Stardance series.
I’d love to go to see what kind of visual art I could create. I already dabble in space art myself.
But I’d really love to see dancers out there — and also to photograph them.
Chuck
Fascinating, especially the point about the dancers.
This leads me to recall that in one of the recent Matrix movies they had some zero-g-based fighting. I didn’t see the movie result, but saw it described in a TV documentary about how they did it. Apparently they stuck some real Kung-Fu fighters in one of those parabola flying zero-g-simulating jets, and told them to fight each other. The filmed it, and then used the footage as the basis of the Neo versus Smith fight.
Makes you wonder what other showbiz uses for earth orbit there might be. A lot, would be my guess. After all, Hollywood certainly has money, and sci-fi movies have surely only just begun!
And we haven’t even mentioned sport …
Sport doesn’t seem to be ultra-common in SF movies, apart from the Rollerballs, but I do seem to recall a mention of something called Brockian Ultra-Cricket in the Hitchhikers Guide. Something tells me that the gravity environment of that wasn’t very earth-like.
Zero-g baseball, anyone?
Good answers will, with luck and if I stay interested, be cross-posted by me to Ubersportingpundit.
“One thing we would also have to invent is better propulsion. Even if getting out of Earth orbit were free, getting to Mars with chemical rockets is a bitch. Getting further is next to impossible. There are several technologies on the engineering table, such as nuclear, plasma and ion engines, that would all serve useful niches. “Sci-fi” propulsions such as Anti-Matter and Fusion (and ones as yet undrempt up) would be required to get to other solar systems.”
I figure that rockets that don’t go anywhere near the Earth’s surface will routinely use nuclear propulsion. With lots of elbow room and every inhabited structure already heavily shielded against the radiation that comes from the Sun, nuclear rockets won’t be much of a threat.
With nuclear rockets, you can do things like constant-boost trips within the Solar System.
“It’ll be dangerous enough that breaking your neighbor’s window with a baseball we depressurize their house, killing everyone inside – don’t need to add a 360 degree, nowhere is ‘down’ experience to that. People just aren’t built for that kind of stress.”
And they won’t have that kind of stress. They’ll live in round, rotating structures where ‘down’ is away from the axis.
And structures that can spring a leak from being hit with a 90 mph baseball will not get much use in outer space.
“I’m thinking that more open access to space weakens, not strengthens, its use by the military. Joe Spaceboy can just drive up to a zillion pound star wars satellite, and sock it with a baseball bat a few times.”
Not when it’s got a super laser that can shoot back.
Other military implications would be interesting:
1. No real need for military bases in foreign countries. Missions can be launched from CONUS (or better yet, from space) and get to anyplace in the world in an hour. We can take on trouble spots whether or not a friendly base exists nearby, and we won’t need to spend six months moving stuff to a vulnerable nearby friendly spot.
2. Kamikaze missions can pack a lot more punch. I’m not sure how to defend Earth from such attacks. In space, the only strategy I can think of is to keep each structure fairly small and breed like rabbits.
3. Once we can make anti-matter, the Earth’s days are numbered.
Something else is to differentiate between launching humans and launching cargo. Some cargo can withstand much greater stress than humans.
This topic really stimulates thinking. Here are two more academic (for now) possibilities:
–Physicists have noted, as I understand it, that there may be two kinds of mass in the universe: inertial mass, the kind that makes loose things shoot forward when you slam on the brakes in your car; and gravitational mass, the gravity “charge” on matter that makes it move in a gravitational field like electrical charge makes something move in an electric field. So far as we have been able to tell, they are the same thing but there is no intrinsic reason why they should be the same. If we are ever able to find a difference, it will be in a zero gravity experiment of some sort. I don’t know what it would be. If I did, I would be filling in my Nobel prize application blank right now. If there is a difference, Einstein’s general theory, which is based on their being indistinguishable, might need to be modified. And some of those exotic hyperdrive propulsion systems might be a lot closer to reality.
–One of the tragedies of government financial backing for the sciences, as bad as the retreat from the Moon, was the abandonment of the Superconducting Super Collider. I only recently learned of its potential significance – and I try to keep up with these things. It was probably a non-starter with the government goodie gobbling general public all along. They would never understand it. I suppose I should be impressed that it got as far as it did before the funding was yanked out from under it. I can’t explain its importance here. Suffice it to say that it could concievably have illuminated the fabric of time, space, matter and energy. (If you are interested, google ‘Higgs Boson’.) The SSC was essentially a huge magnetic donut in which particles could be accelerated to energies much higher than anything yet achieved. Much of the cost was due to needing supermagnets to force the particles into a circular path. In space, with essentially free real estate, the same thing could be done much more cheaply in a straight line. Perhaps mylar reflecters could power accelerator coils that would float in a straight line hundreds of miles long. In fact, it might be possible to use cosmic ray particles that are already at a high speed/energy and accelerate them even more.
While we are talking about private investment, we might think about the progress that could be made by decoupling science from government funding. As things stand, the questions that are asked and the experiments that are done are ultimately dictated by the State. I suspect that we were at a little better off when they were dictated by the Pope. He at least had a human mind. The State has no mind, only instincts.
People will spread cookie crumbs in appropriate orbits to ding the space craft and orbiters of people they do not approve of.
And that my friends is the way the cookie crumbles.
Mirrors in space to beam light back to earth for power will not happen.
You cannot focus the light well enough. An optics guy explained it to me once but I forget. Is there an optics guy in the audience. It has something to do with the ratio of the wavelength to the diameter of the mirror and the focal length.
I think night lights for cities migh work though.
I’m not an optics expert, just someone who built a telescope as a kid. I can see how a parabolic reflector might have a focusing problem with the very long focal length involved as well as with atmospheric diffraction effects. The mirror would have to be nearly flat, with a nearly imperceptable curvature to be able to focus on the Earth from a geosynchronous orbit. It would be very difficult to hold it to the right curve.
But there are a couple of ways around this. First, there may be other mirror technologies. Amateur astronomy is something I hope to get back to in my dotage, so I’m a little out of touch now. Nevertheless, I’ve heard about some new reflecting telescopes that work with an array of hexagonal mirrors -flats?- that are coordinated by computer to act as one big parabolic mirror. If you are putting huge mirrors in space, why not put up an array of them, spread over a larger area? That would solve the mirror width/focal length problem.
Another possibility would be to focus the light in space and transmit the energy as either a laser beam or broadcast as electromagnetic waves to Earth.
Finally, it might be easier to deal with a light beam on Earth, should we go that route, if it is not too tightly focused. The original proposal that I heard envisioned large solar collector farms with partially transparent glass solar cells and hydroponic greenhouses underneath. Unless you wanted your potatoes grown already cooked, a less sharply focused beam might be advisable.
While we can speculate about doing things we can currently conceive, cheap access to space will make its greatest impact in areas nobody has yet thought up. After all, the first exporations of the Americas were conducted by people trying to find spices. What they found was far more complex than they could have imagined.
I recommend Michael Flynn’s series the Firestar Saga as a libertarian, pro-business approach to space travel, where a farsighted entrepreneur starts the process of opening up space, and finds the last thing thing she expected–the unexpected.
This reminds me of the Freedom Ship, the mile long powered barge that is to make 2-3yr circuits of the globe ‘someday’. Only sticking point is that they apparently want the customers to pony up well in advance of the thing being built and seem to be stuck in a round of ‘redesign the ship annually’.
Even for something as prosaic as this they apparently haven’t managed to convince a sufficiency of backers to underwrite the thing and get construction started.
Looking at their website I find myself asking, “Who’s going to run the thing and where are they going to live and how much will they have to pay for the privilege of being the official Freedom Ship plumbing fixer?”
Off-planet, non-centrally distributed satellite servers offering tax-free banking, gambling, pornagraphy, et al..