Re: "The Future of Human Spaceflight"

Martha Adams wrote:
"Rand Simberg" <simberg.interglobal@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:49ad9cb0.1446244089@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Sat, 10 Jan 2009 11:00:42 +0100, in a place far, far away, jacob
navia <jacob@xxxxxxxxxx> made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such
a way as to indicate that:


The technology for human space travel is just not there. Look at the
best humans can manage now: The ISS. It is a few hundred Km away, and
it is still plagued by a lot of problems, it has no closed system
it needs supplies from earth. etc.

It's quite stupid to infer that the ISS is the best humans can manage
now.

I think the above thread illustrates my comments well enough. All that stuff, no direction. "HARD," Navia says. *Of course* it's hard, if you don't have a direction, if you don't know where you're going. Look at the development of the nuclear bomb, for example (not my favorite kind of thing but it's a good illustration). At the time the work was undertaken to develop the thing, what resources existed to do it? Whole new technologies had to be worked out, tested, used or discarded. But they had an objective and they got there.


An atomic bomb is two pieces of refined U235 that are pressed together
to form a single piece 10 cm wide with the help of explosives.

It required a lot of development but nothing new had to be discovered.

To live in space there are a lot of completely new technologies that
need to be CREATED.

Technologies like space suits, that seem common place and boring but
when you look at the failure rates, longevity, life expectancy of
the stuff you see that we are FAR away from mastering them.

A few years ago all U.S. space suits in the ISS were down, and
Americans needed to use their Prussian colleagues ones. Space
suits that can be used day-in day-out for say, 2 years, do not
exist at all.

Technologies like closed ecological systems able to provide oxygen
and food for years do not exist. To develop that, even if we were to
use a lot of resources would take 15-20 years. We are speaking of
developing new plants, testing them, etc.

Obviously, we can travel short distances (to the moon for instance)
and we can establish a base shielded underground in the moon.

But that is a far cry from colonizing space and make it habitable.

What I have in mind, are farms of plants of dozens of Km that
would provide food for thousands of people. They need to be done
in vacuum to avoid pressurized space that is too expensive.

Using those new plants, able to grow from photosynthesis in
vacuum, we could make parts of the moon green, and establish
colonies of thousands of individuals.

Obviously making a colony of 5 people in the moon is feasible
(and could give us the testing bed for developing all those new
technologies) but it is a far cry from going to space!

Going to space means that we have a food spply that can feed
hundreds of thousands of people, and that can be done only
with specially developed plants.


Look again at the Apollo program. It was directed to a specific objective. The technologies to do it did not exist, only small indications that they might be developed if someone set out to do it. We all know, they did it. (Decades ago. Then something went terribly wrong).


Apollo was a trip of a few people at a time for time length of a few
days, for a very short distance.

That was difficult to achieve but it is absolutely NOTHING compared
to the scaling problems we would have to solve for moving 100 000
people around to space, establishing colonies etc.

Now look at space. It's not a science-fiction kind of thing that you cannot do space small. Space is different from here: to live anywhere in space requires an industrial triad of of a lifespace, an industrial base to build and maintain it, and an ongoing commercial/business base to give it reason to exist and to support it.

This is essentially what I said, excepting the "business" part of it.

Space is not "profitable", and going to the moon is not an
undertaking that would bring any kind of financial reward
to the people doing it.

That is why Americans never returned to the moon. The objectives
of American society (and Europeans and most of our societies)
are centered in short term profit, and lack any kind of motivation
beyond profits.

Egypt could concentrate thousands and thousand of people building
pyramids because the people were engaged by the sheer beauty of the
concept:

"Lets make a work that will last forever"

And they did it, and it has laster for thousands of years.

The same motivation can be traced to many of our monuments like
the stones of Carnac in France, the cathedrals of Middle Age,
and many others.

Nobody earned any money with a pyramid, it had absolutely no
economical purpose.

It is this kind of motivation that we lack.

Which means, settlement in space must be an ongoing effort of sending out one and then another and then another settlement, one after another, until the commercial ecologies and networks to exist there are built there. I can't see anything novel at all in this thinking. It's just a repeat, different in detail and environment from what we've seen here on Terra.


What is new is the *motivation* to spend all that effort in
something that will never be seen in the bottom line.

As for "HARD" and all that, of course it's hard. Our remote ancestors, finding out by trial and error and thru evolution how to live on dry land, will tell you what's HARD. Uncounted millions of them must have died, over hundreds of centuries. But natural selection is the slow and difficult way to accomplish something. Today, we have the industrial capacity, enough of the knowhow, and the resources to do it. The HARD problem seems to be to win enough money away from wars and political corruption and economic inefficiencies to do it.


Space needs another kind of motivation. A motivation that is not
alien to us, but it has been forgotten: the pleasure of doing things
for themselves, for their intrinsic beauty.


--
jacob navia
jacob at jacob point remcomp point fr
logiciels/informatique
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32
.

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