Where is my starship
We suffered a failure of vision — it’s rare to find man, woman, or creature that can coherently articulate why the space program is important right now. For all his genius, Elon Musk advocated colonisation of Mars as creating a backup civilisation in case a disaster strikes earth. Some pointed out that underground bunkers would be more effective — and this argument for the Space Program is pathetically weak. The consequences of such ineptitude are real and disastrous — since the space race we have lost public backing and funding, so our rocket technology has been degrading for 40 years.
After exhausting all other possibilities, Americans did the right thing and started Nasa’s commercial space program. Along with fanatic efforts of SpaceX team, and space start-ups funded by tech billionaires we have entered a space-renaissance. We now have a choice — either we leave it to business-as-usual and get some growth in space industry or we can seize the political narrative and secure public backing for systematic program to colonise the solar system within 50 years.
To accomplish that, we need to step up our game and build a shared vision that is as powerful and compelling as Civil Rights or Communism were in their time. I want to see political leaders questioned on space policy, and considered un-electable because they are ‘soft on meteors’ or some other bullshit.
So how do we get there? Let’s start by putting together some well-articulated arguments that we can use against our opponents.
The Economic Case
I am sick of people claiming that NASA is a ‘waste of money’, they should be publicly bitch-slapped and sentenced to 13 lashes with a whip soaked in Tabasco.
It has paid for itself many times over, not with vague things like inspiration and research, but in hard cash from tax revenues.
The space industry is on par with the semiconductor one at $335 billion, and growing fast. We re-invest only a fraction of tax revenues back into the space agencies that gave birth to this sector.
Consider that even today, at it’s infancy, it’s one of the largest high-tech industries. It’s potential for growth is unlimited, and if we invest and press on it would grow larger that the rest of global economy combined. Take asteroid mining for example
The Ideological Case
At the dawn of the 21st century we find ourselves in an absurd situation. On one hand our civilisation has never been so powerful, we can move mountains and divert rivers at will. On the other, our civilisation has never been so fragile—climate change and nuclear arsenals mean that a slight mistake or lack of foresight or can end organised civilisation. We must be ever more vigilant — soon we will have genetically engineered microbes, true artificial intelligence and nano-machines. We are like a bull in china shop, that taking steroids and growing every day and if it knocks down a wall, the roof cave in and kill it.
We have gotten so efficient at manufacturing that we now overproduce every basic product, from steel to wheat. Under-employment is widespread in the developed world, smart university-educated people end up delivering takeaways on zero-hour contracts. We are victims of our own success and vast energies are going to waste.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky once said “The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.” I propose that we have outgrown the cradle and are now a 14 year-old pretending to be a toddler and that’s the root of our problems.
The Solar System is vast, unexplored, and it’s resources are unlimited. The forces that govern it are so powerful they make thermonuclear bombs look like wet farts.
There are about a dozen planets or moons that can support human life, Luna, Mars, Ceres, Ganymede and Callisto are the straight-forward ones. We should industrialise and develop them, and leave earth as a kind of nature sanctuary / reserve. It’s not about creating backups in case life of earth collapses. The space industry would come and save our ass if needed.
Want to deal with climate change? Take apart an asteroid to make sunshades in orbit. We would offset all of global warming by blocking 1% of sunlight. If they are controllable, you could even manage weather. That’s entirely realistic — if we use today’s solar sails, the whole lot would weigh just ~50 million tonnes, less than the Three Gorges Dam. Piece of cake!
We will have a more advanced, more robust civilisation with a more exciting future.
Stop Planning Camping trips
We present the grand goal for space program withing our lifetimes as a rerun of the Moon program on Mars. That’s how it’s presented in the Martian, Interstellar, by the spokespeople of Nasa and Russian space agencies. It goes something like this:
- Spend ££ billions and 10 years on R&D
- Spend another 10 years building a ship that will take astronauts to mars
- Several dudes land on mars, plant a frag, take a dirt samples and go home
This is really bad. I’ve lost count of times I’ve spoken to forward thinking people — entrepreneurs, engineers, software developers and scientists — and they don’t back going full-throttle with the Space Program because there is no end goal where we change the status quo and move beyond expensive one-off expeditions. It is not clear how do we go from collecting soil samples on Mars to exploring the Solar System / the stars / the galaxy. It seems like there is nothing tangible to be gained by pouring resources into the space program.
You have to delve into truly niche conversations to find any answers. As a result we have failed to convince people pre-disposed and sympathetic to our cause. If we can’t convince them, we can’t convince anyone!
The space program cannot be defined by a one-off, titanic effort to send a few guys to Mars! It’s idiotic. It’s not appealing. We cannot be chained to ideas of the Apollo Program and repeat it’s mistakes.
Focus on Industrialisation
There are really two different space programs: research and industry. Research has been doing very well and we now know lot more about black holes and exoplanets. However our industrial capability has been left behind.
I often meet people that think “it’s not time yet” to really go out into the solar system and we should wait until technology improves. Well, guess what Sherlock? Technology does not improve itself, it only does so when someone invests a metric ton of money and a lot of really smart people address the problem. Instead it was regressing.
You know those Scy-fi stories where civilisation suffers a collapse, and survivors salvage ancient technology to get by? That’s literally what’s been happening with rockets — USA used to have a giant, skyscraper sized rocket called Saturn 5 which could deliver 10 New Routemaster double-decker busses to orbit. With 80 seats each, that’s exactly enough to ship all members of the House of Lords to space. Now it can’t send people to space at all.
Sometimes USA buys NK-33 rocket engines built by the USSR in the 60’s to power it’s space rockets. Can you imagine a similar situation in a car industry, for 60 year old engines to be performance-competitive with modern ones?
The fulcrum of our efforts should be Industrialisation of the Solar System. We should stop trying to cross the ocean on a wooden raft, and instead develop a shipping industry and build ocean liners.
How Simple it is
We don’t need to wait for some miracle technology, be that Fusion or Warp Drive — there is a dozen planets and moons in the solar system we can colonise with just logical improvements of technologies we have today.
I’ve organised the planets by how difficult they are to reach and inhabit, and the four vital technological developments we need to build a space civilisation. Look at realise there is nothing crazy here, these are straight-forward industrial developments.
Step 1 — Reusable Rockets
Did you know that Airplanes are more expensive than rockets? Airbus A380 costs $400 million, while rockets go for under $100 million. We can afford a plane ticket because each plane does thousands of flights, while a rocket only flies once and then gets thrown away. Or they used to, until SpaceX learned how to land their rockets and fly them again afterwards.
With reusable rockets, it is economical to setup a permanent base on the Moon.
Step 2 — Fuel stations in space
Planetary Resources is a startup that is attempting to harvest rocket fuel from asteroids. It’s CEO, Lewicki, put’s it most eloquently — “Imagine you didn’t have to carry that fuel up with you. Imagine, orbiting around the edges of Earth’s gravity well, the Solar System’s first space service-station, supplied by asteroids. Somewhere to refuel your engines and refill your water tanks, before setting off on the next mission stage.
“It blows the mind how much this changes things,” Lewicki says. “If you could take the amount of energy you had in that rocket to get out to space and refill it again, you could get to Pluto.”
Step 3 — Space-based Construction
We know what it takes to move goods across vast distances on the industrial scale — it takes the navy. We will need ships bigger than the largest supertankers we employ today. The problem is we are limited by the capacity a rocket can lift, the largest rocket we ever made lifts ~100 tons into orbit and it takes 15,000 tons of rocket to do that. There is no way in hell we can lift something the size of an aircraft carrier off the surface of the planet.
A way to get around this problem is to build the ships in space. The Moon and the near-Earth asteroids have the materials we need, and the puny gravy would let us lift them straight into orbit with minimal effort.
We can use 3D printing to make the bulk of the ship and only high-tech parts, microchips and trained staff need to be delivered from Earth. These vast ships would ferry goods between planets, never landing on the surface.
With that, we could practically reach the Jupiter system and exploit Ganymede and Callisto.
Step 4 and beyond — Nuclear Rockets
95% of a rocket is fuel. No matter how much you improve the design, there is nothing you can do about the fact that chemical fuels are just pathetically weak compared to gravity.
The only way to improve the situation is to use nuclear fuel. NASA has actually built and tested a nuclear rocket in the 70s but never put it in production because they were scared of public reaction. Even that basic 70s design had twice the performance of today’s chemical rockets. If we want to get serious about reaching the stars, we will have to get comfortable with operating truly powerful machines.
The SpaceX Plan
This September Elon presented his vision for colonisation of Mars — and it is a compelling one. There are several clever tricks to it — he uses an enormous ship to maximise use of the launch window to mars, that comes up every two years, but a smaller rocket booster that he reuses multiple times to minimise the cost.
All the engines are powered by methane and it can be produced out of martian atmosphere with minimal equipment.
I do not want to describe the plan in detail because hundred of people have done it very well. Pick you poison from the links below.
Recommended Reading
Wired did an amazing article that looks in-depth at asteroid mining and I highly recommend it’s worth a read.
Isaak Artur runs an amazing futurist YouTube channel that explaines many advanced space-related concepts in a way that’s understandable and does not break your brain.
Atomic Rockets does a serious scientific assessment of many common Sci-Fi tropes and ideas, it’s a goldmine
XKCD often does space-related ‘what if’ questions, and at times they are fascinating
