Earth is the Cradle of Mankind,
But one cannot stay in the cradle forever.
But one cannot stay in the cradle forever.
If you’ve been following the GOP political campaign circus of late, you could hardly avoid Newt Gingrich’s proposal to build an American Lunar Colony. And you could hardly miss the ridicule being heaped on him from left and right alike. But, before we question his sanity, we might want to remember that prior to Mr. Obama’s decision to scrap the NASA program, it was official (and quite popular) US policy to “return to the moon” by 2020, as the next step in the route to Mars. So, if Newt’s got the wrong idea, so do a lot of other folks. Understand that I’m not particularly endorsing his presidential campaign, but he has brought up a point that’s dear to my heart, and one that I wish all the candidates would address.
The big opposition view in our society’s current thinking about space flight is apparently “why waste the money”, or in words of one syllable “we can’t afford it”. The political right looks at the burgeoning national debt and gets hysterical whenever someone mentions spending even more money. The left on the other hand is quite comfortable with spending a few trillion more dollars, but they want the money dumped into ObamaCare and/or a vastly expanded welfare system under the guise of “redistributing the wealth”. But there are some of us on the middle ground that see a different sort of alternative. Just how much money are we talking about when we say “Lunar Colony”? One guesstimate predicts somewhere around the high side of $130 billion, spread out over the next eight to ten years. Well, let’s consider that the price of an F-35 jet fighter is about $156 million, while the B-2 bomber costs an average of $737 million per copy. Nuclear submarines cost us anywhere from 5 to 13 billion dollars, each, while a nuclear carrier has a sticker price of about 22 billion dollars to build, and in well in excess of $168 million a year to operate! The 2009 defense budget was $680 billion dollars, and quite a bit more in suplimental “wartime” spending. HEW on the other hand has an annual budget of around $700 billion. You can figure that the US annual budget is almost $3 trillion dollars, and NASA’s current $17 billion cut of that is quite a bit less than the cost of building just one nuclear carrier. That’s not very much in comparison with the rest of the budget. Sure, it’s going to be expensive, but with those numbers spaceflight isn’t unaffordable, and we would be creating hundreds of thousands of high paying American jobs as well. Remember the Apollo lunar landing program? When a shortsighted Congress cut the funding, high-tech unemployment skyrocketed, and we soon had PhD’s pumping gas at the corner service station.
Part of the manned spaceflight bad press comes from so many highly specialized space scientists claiming that we can do the science far cheaper with robotic craft. I’m quite sure we could… if the darn things worked properly… all the time! How many space missions have you heard of lately that failed, due to any number of “minor” glitches? How many times have panicky remotely controlled software fixes saved a mission, or at least a part of it? In general the highly successful mission of the Opportunity Mars Rover is an aberration, abit a happy one. There’s a reason that aerospace engineers (and the flight dynamics people) call Mars the “planet of death”, and any mechanical or electronic equipment can fail, usually at the worst possible time! If those expensive lost missions had been manned, how many of them could have been saved by a flight engineer with a toolbox and a few spare parts? Remember the Mars mission that crashed because a computer programmer forgot there’s a big difference between miles and kilometers? Could a human pilot or navigator have spotted the problem and saved the mission? Quite probably. The Viking Mars landers of the late ‘70’s conducted tests to detect signs of life. One experiment came up positive, but the results of the other two failed to reveal any organic material in the soil, leaving many to believe that the positive results were caused by non-biological chemical reactions from soil conditions. That argument rages on today, and could have been readily settled at the time by a on-scene scientist or two. Certainly, in some cases a robotic system is indicated for several reasons, as the various multi-year photographic flights to the outer planets show… but a robot can only do what it’s previously been told to do… and when something breaks, will the computer programers have always anticipated every possible failure? No, there’s lots of argument for manned spaceflight, and I rather think that space exploration of the future will be manned, and have a lot of robotic assistance.
Throughout history, humanity has been blessed (or cursed, depending on your viewpoint) with people who are never quite satisfied with a humdrum life. They are driven to find something newer or better, or just to see what’s on the other side of the mountain. These are the explorers, the “long hunters” and mountain men, the colonists, the pioneers, who will happly risk everything in search of their personal El Dorado. Thousands of years ago explorers began spreading humanity across the face of the Earth. More of them came to the new world a few hundred years ago and preformed a near miracle of nation building. Certainly there are those in each generation that are quite happy in their nice warm, safe, totally boreing little niche in their all to familiar world, and they are quite welcome to stay home if that’s their desire. But in America our ancestors were a bit more adventurous than most, and being a somewhat cranky and disruptive sort, were dissatisfied with their stifiling old world society, it’s rules, regulations, taxes, and overcrowding. They picked up their marbles, left their homeland, and went on to build a new country that became the showpiece of Earth. Those sort of people are still with us, and, being fresh out of new lands for them to explore, the population pressure is again building, and we’ve got to find a relief valve, a means for them to go pioneering, lest they disrupt that nice safe world prefered by the stay-at-home types.
Another problem facing humanity is the fact that we’re running out of accessable resources. For the most part we’re now mining low grade materials to feed our industrial demands, and even those materials are getting scarce. (Globally we use about 3 billion tons of iron and steel each year, and little of that is recycled.) We’re running out of energy sources as well. What’s going to happen when the oil finally runs out? The enviro’s object to our burning coal, they won’t let us develop nuclear fission, and their alternate “green energy” programs have been a total flop so far. Yet the sun each second puts out about forty million times as much energy as we need on Earth, which leaves the possibility of building efficient space based solar power systems to solve our energy problems… until the sun burns out in a few billion years.
It would be nice if we could develop a new supply of natural resources… before we’re reduced to living in an updated version of the stone age! The moon, and the near Earth asteroids, contain a plentiful supply of just about everything we need here on Earth, and to live and work in space itself. Professor John S. Lewis, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona states that an asteroid only two kilometers in diameter, and assuming typical meteorite composition, would be worth (at todays prices) around 300,000 trillion dollars! That’s about the gross GLOBAL product for a very long time into the future! In one dramatic estimate, Professor Lewis highlights that main belt asteroid 3554 Amun as potentially having $20 trillion in gold beneath its surface, along with another $8 trillion in iron and nickel, $6 trillion in cobalt and $6 trillion in platinum! Humm… anyone for a gold rush in space?
Due to its proximity to Earth, the Moon is often discussed as the primary target for space colonization, an idea with its good and bad points. To start off, it’s fairly easy to get there, at least in comparison to a trip to Mars or Venus. Then, once on the moon we can, in reasonable safety, learn the tricks to living and working in space, which is going to prove a necessity to the future of the human race. Additionally, the moon has only one sixth Earth gravity, which makes it much easier and cheaper to launch deep space missions (including a trip to Mars) than it is from Earth’s surface. The main drawback to utilizing moon resources is that some of the materials we need are lacking… but we can get those materials from the near Earth asteroids, which are even easier to reach from Earth orbit than the moon is! Many people say it can’t be done, yet the Department of Defense had quite viable plans to build a permanent lunar base… in 1958. That’s ten years before Apollo flew. The science was done decades ago, now it’s simply a problem of engineering, and of course finding the will to make the effort.
We couldn’t, even if we wanted to, specify the political systems, religious beliefs, or social mores our descendants will live under. But in the question of space colonization, we have in our hands should we decide to use it, the power to leave them a shining future in which they can choose their own way.
The big opposition view in our society’s current thinking about space flight is apparently “why waste the money”, or in words of one syllable “we can’t afford it”. The political right looks at the burgeoning national debt and gets hysterical whenever someone mentions spending even more money. The left on the other hand is quite comfortable with spending a few trillion more dollars, but they want the money dumped into ObamaCare and/or a vastly expanded welfare system under the guise of “redistributing the wealth”. But there are some of us on the middle ground that see a different sort of alternative. Just how much money are we talking about when we say “Lunar Colony”? One guesstimate predicts somewhere around the high side of $130 billion, spread out over the next eight to ten years. Well, let’s consider that the price of an F-35 jet fighter is about $156 million, while the B-2 bomber costs an average of $737 million per copy. Nuclear submarines cost us anywhere from 5 to 13 billion dollars, each, while a nuclear carrier has a sticker price of about 22 billion dollars to build, and in well in excess of $168 million a year to operate! The 2009 defense budget was $680 billion dollars, and quite a bit more in suplimental “wartime” spending. HEW on the other hand has an annual budget of around $700 billion. You can figure that the US annual budget is almost $3 trillion dollars, and NASA’s current $17 billion cut of that is quite a bit less than the cost of building just one nuclear carrier. That’s not very much in comparison with the rest of the budget. Sure, it’s going to be expensive, but with those numbers spaceflight isn’t unaffordable, and we would be creating hundreds of thousands of high paying American jobs as well. Remember the Apollo lunar landing program? When a shortsighted Congress cut the funding, high-tech unemployment skyrocketed, and we soon had PhD’s pumping gas at the corner service station.
Part of the manned spaceflight bad press comes from so many highly specialized space scientists claiming that we can do the science far cheaper with robotic craft. I’m quite sure we could… if the darn things worked properly… all the time! How many space missions have you heard of lately that failed, due to any number of “minor” glitches? How many times have panicky remotely controlled software fixes saved a mission, or at least a part of it? In general the highly successful mission of the Opportunity Mars Rover is an aberration, abit a happy one. There’s a reason that aerospace engineers (and the flight dynamics people) call Mars the “planet of death”, and any mechanical or electronic equipment can fail, usually at the worst possible time! If those expensive lost missions had been manned, how many of them could have been saved by a flight engineer with a toolbox and a few spare parts? Remember the Mars mission that crashed because a computer programmer forgot there’s a big difference between miles and kilometers? Could a human pilot or navigator have spotted the problem and saved the mission? Quite probably. The Viking Mars landers of the late ‘70’s conducted tests to detect signs of life. One experiment came up positive, but the results of the other two failed to reveal any organic material in the soil, leaving many to believe that the positive results were caused by non-biological chemical reactions from soil conditions. That argument rages on today, and could have been readily settled at the time by a on-scene scientist or two. Certainly, in some cases a robotic system is indicated for several reasons, as the various multi-year photographic flights to the outer planets show… but a robot can only do what it’s previously been told to do… and when something breaks, will the computer programers have always anticipated every possible failure? No, there’s lots of argument for manned spaceflight, and I rather think that space exploration of the future will be manned, and have a lot of robotic assistance.
Throughout history, humanity has been blessed (or cursed, depending on your viewpoint) with people who are never quite satisfied with a humdrum life. They are driven to find something newer or better, or just to see what’s on the other side of the mountain. These are the explorers, the “long hunters” and mountain men, the colonists, the pioneers, who will happly risk everything in search of their personal El Dorado. Thousands of years ago explorers began spreading humanity across the face of the Earth. More of them came to the new world a few hundred years ago and preformed a near miracle of nation building. Certainly there are those in each generation that are quite happy in their nice warm, safe, totally boreing little niche in their all to familiar world, and they are quite welcome to stay home if that’s their desire. But in America our ancestors were a bit more adventurous than most, and being a somewhat cranky and disruptive sort, were dissatisfied with their stifiling old world society, it’s rules, regulations, taxes, and overcrowding. They picked up their marbles, left their homeland, and went on to build a new country that became the showpiece of Earth. Those sort of people are still with us, and, being fresh out of new lands for them to explore, the population pressure is again building, and we’ve got to find a relief valve, a means for them to go pioneering, lest they disrupt that nice safe world prefered by the stay-at-home types.
Another problem facing humanity is the fact that we’re running out of accessable resources. For the most part we’re now mining low grade materials to feed our industrial demands, and even those materials are getting scarce. (Globally we use about 3 billion tons of iron and steel each year, and little of that is recycled.) We’re running out of energy sources as well. What’s going to happen when the oil finally runs out? The enviro’s object to our burning coal, they won’t let us develop nuclear fission, and their alternate “green energy” programs have been a total flop so far. Yet the sun each second puts out about forty million times as much energy as we need on Earth, which leaves the possibility of building efficient space based solar power systems to solve our energy problems… until the sun burns out in a few billion years.
It would be nice if we could develop a new supply of natural resources… before we’re reduced to living in an updated version of the stone age! The moon, and the near Earth asteroids, contain a plentiful supply of just about everything we need here on Earth, and to live and work in space itself. Professor John S. Lewis, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona states that an asteroid only two kilometers in diameter, and assuming typical meteorite composition, would be worth (at todays prices) around 300,000 trillion dollars! That’s about the gross GLOBAL product for a very long time into the future! In one dramatic estimate, Professor Lewis highlights that main belt asteroid 3554 Amun as potentially having $20 trillion in gold beneath its surface, along with another $8 trillion in iron and nickel, $6 trillion in cobalt and $6 trillion in platinum! Humm… anyone for a gold rush in space?
Due to its proximity to Earth, the Moon is often discussed as the primary target for space colonization, an idea with its good and bad points. To start off, it’s fairly easy to get there, at least in comparison to a trip to Mars or Venus. Then, once on the moon we can, in reasonable safety, learn the tricks to living and working in space, which is going to prove a necessity to the future of the human race. Additionally, the moon has only one sixth Earth gravity, which makes it much easier and cheaper to launch deep space missions (including a trip to Mars) than it is from Earth’s surface. The main drawback to utilizing moon resources is that some of the materials we need are lacking… but we can get those materials from the near Earth asteroids, which are even easier to reach from Earth orbit than the moon is! Many people say it can’t be done, yet the Department of Defense had quite viable plans to build a permanent lunar base… in 1958. That’s ten years before Apollo flew. The science was done decades ago, now it’s simply a problem of engineering, and of course finding the will to make the effort.
We couldn’t, even if we wanted to, specify the political systems, religious beliefs, or social mores our descendants will live under. But in the question of space colonization, we have in our hands should we decide to use it, the power to leave them a shining future in which they can choose their own way.
