The Subtlety of What's Next in Space

This is my entry for the Coalition for Space Exploration's "What’s Next?" Contest, please enjoy.

Photo by rAmmoRRison



We will not have cities on other planets in one hundred years, but subtle progress towards space habitation. This includes increased reliance on the undergraduate community, motivating them to continue space related careers. Isolating space programs economically, by the use of space resources to fund these high flying endeavours, will protect them from the recession and political movement. The diffusion of space centers and research throughout the nation will decrease the political tension in the space field. Increased focus on life cycle engineering during space system design is forced upon us because of the space junk problem. There is also the troubling public opinion towards science in general; it is no longer respected but is often regarded as “opinion”. All of the above items are next if becoming a space-faring species is in the cards for humanity.

One of the first lessons I learned in my ongoing undergraduate career is that attending a university is hard and learning Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) is harder. The joy of a STEM career is not enough to motivate students to complete their STEM majors, especially when other majors, like finance, seem more profitable. Space agencies will have to find ways to encourage undergraduate participation in the progress towards a space-faring society. This should be enough to keep STEM retention high.

Photo by blueforce4116

Global markets are currently volatile, so volatile that I fear we can no longer depend on them to fund space ventures using Earth’s resources. Private companies and governments must look at using space resources to fund high flying dreams. This will allow space development to continue no matter what happens on Earth. Furthermore, it will bring people into space ventures as money making opportunities open up in the high frontier.

Currently, with government being the major consumer of space services, space companies are exposed to political movements. At times like these, NASA is on the chopping block. However, independently funded space ventures are free from the tides of public opinion, even if they are ran by the government. No one will cut programs with short-term profit and technological benefits with no tax burden on the public. We also have the side benefit of speedier space development when funded with space resources.

Space projects are increasingly seen as only pork-barrel projects; not as projects of benefit to the greater public. However, this will change as humanity’s adventure into space increases in speed. Instead of adding onto the current space complexes, we will see spaceports rise all around the nation as demand for space services (especially telecommunications) increases. If people are able to see the impact of space in their local economies, they will have less reasoning behind the already baseless claim of the porky nature of space exploration.

However the space community does have self-made problems. The “[s]pace junk problem reache[d a] tipping point'” recently, “with enough currently in orbit to continually collide and create even more debris, raising the risk of spacecraft failures"1. If humanity wants to be space-faring, all future designs must focus on the whole life cycle of the device and include a way to safely de-orbit the object. I also fear that our attitudes are far riskier to development of the high frontier than a sphere of deadly space junk.

Science is no longer regarded as fact and I am troubled by this trend. This general attitude impacts the space field because of its high tech nature and need for heavy R&D. For example, if people are denying global warming, it becomes harder to convince them to launch more weather satellites or look into radiation. What we need is an increase in STEM education to allow people to connect with the scientific community better.

1: O'Neill, Ian. "Space Junk Problem Reaches 'Tipping Point'." Discovery News. Sep 2, 2011. Web. 26 Sep. 2011. .

There are No Silver Bullets

Space has been portrayed as a silver bullet to a lot of the world’s problems. From energy shortages to world hunger and over population, many think the plenty of the stars will save us. However, space habitation is not a silver bullet; there are no silver bullets.

This post was inspired by the paper No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering by Dr. Fred Brooks, professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Most of the ideas in that paper are limited to the paper’s field, software engineering. But, there is an argument made that can be applied anywhere:

“...as we look to the horizon of a decade hence, we see no silver bullet. There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity... Although we see no startling breakthroughs, and indeed, believe such to be inconsistent with the nature of software, many encouraging innovations are under way. A disciplined, consistent effort to develop, propagate, and exploit them should indeed yield an order-of-magnitude improvement. There is no royal road, but there is a road”.

Basically, Dr. Brooke is claiming that, if there where a scale from productivity, reliability and simplicity. It would be impossible to go from 1 to 10, 10 to 100 and so on with one piece of technology or one change in habits. However, those increases are possible with a system of technologies and habits implemented, with discipline, overtime. For example, at the beginning of this school I brought running shoes. I ran about 10 times and they felt great, but, as the year progressed, I ran less and less. I never really developed the mindset of a runner, running wasn’t a high enough priority for me. Next thing I knew, I was very good friends with the freshmen 15. This experience is not limited to me.

The lessons from software engineering and running shoes are important to promoting and planning space settlement; they both prove that there is no silver bullet.

There is a paper by Dr. David Livingston, The Ethical Commercialization of Outer Space, which demonstrates how much trouble space settlement alone can cause. Dr. Livingston is host of The Space Show and an expert who has influenced me greatly. He argued that

“without an ethical orientation to the conduct of one's business, people can be made to suffer extreme harm as business decisions often have the power to touch most people's lives... [T]he founder and CEO of SpaceDev, Inc. of San Diego, Jim Benson, an individual who is deservedly at the forefront of launching new commercial space businesses, can serve as an example. Mr. Benson is an important and capable leader in commercializing outer space, but some of his statements describing what the early period of the new commercial space industrialization will look like foster concern for the ethical issues. Perhaps the best example of this comes from an interview with Benson in the Oct. 26-Nov. 2, 1998 issue of The New Yorker magazine regarding space commercialization as discussed at Space98, an international space conference held in Albuquerque, New Mexico in April 1998. Benson, who was both an important speaker and participant at Space98, said in reference to a question about the establishment of space colonies that "these colonies are going to grow like boom towns. There is going to be no planning. It will be an economic workhouse. You're going to wind up with prostitutes in space and blue-collar workers and office workers, and people are going to die, they are going to be killed, and we are going to find places to squeeze people into some tuna cans up there”.

I believe there is something to the overview effect - a feeling of being insignificant yet connected to all humans generated by looking at the Earth from space, but I really wonder if one would have time to look over the Earth while counting money earned by unethical means. The mindset of some of the leaders in the space field is...scary. With this in mind, we realize that forcing a change in business culture by paying for space settlement (just like paying for running shoes) will not fulfill the responsibility “we in developed nations bear...for the plunder of the past centuries”. It could only cause more plunder, because current business practice is a habit.

However the alternatives to space habitation, social change or environmental action, alone will not generate a non-spacefaring way to reach O’Neill’s goal of plenty for all humans. We need more resources to support our growing populations. Environmental action can protect remaining resources by insuring that farmland and fresh water are not polluted. It can make our use of resources more efficient through recycling and energy conservation. However, we are quickly running low on farmland and water. Extracting energy from the biosphere could backfire; I remember a lecture where we discussed alternative energy and what would happen to the Earth if we used enough wind power to significantly slow the winds or enough geothermal were used to cool the core of the Earth. Those scenarios would take a lot of energy use to become real, but it is something to consider when looking at the energy needs 100 years from now.

Social change could create a more educated, wealthy humanity and it has been shown that education and wealth reduces the number of children per family, but social change is hard when resources are dwindling. The following is O’Neill’s argument, covered in-depth at the end of chapter 2 of The High Frontier, but societies tend toward totalitarian rule in desperate situations like running out of resources, destroying the chances for a cultural change.

This is why I really think that the space community must always broadcast that there will be hard work involved with accessing the resources of space and achieving the image of a space based utopian future. We have a long road filled with the overcoming the obstacles involved with attempting to implement widespread environmental awareness, encouraging a sweeping social change and building support for an epic space settlement program. All three massive endeavours, if brought together, can pull off our ideals. It will take a lot of hard work and passion from the people who want to see a spacefaring society that lives up to its promises. There are no silver bullets, but there is a path. 

Photo by eschipul and by surinamensis2000

Is There a Doctor in the House?

Over the past couple of days I have been trying to answer a question I had in the post SPC #23: Kalpana One: Could we counteract the lack of gravity on other planets by wearing weights?

It's not going every well, I found a few interesting papers about human development and the need for gravity in order for human to survive, but I feel I'm not painting an accurate picture of the frame of reference. The paper I looked at in the SPC #23 said we needed artificial gravity mainly for childern to develop strongly. That aspect of the argument for artificial gravity I know nothing about. Basically, my BS detector went off on my own post.

So, I'm looking for a doctor or a med student to answer some questions about children and space settlement. I want to find out exactly what the effects are. If you know of anyone, contact me. I'm going to give links to the person who found me the lead and the doctor/med student I interview. Thanks!

TED Friday: The Last Mile

From my study of space habitation, most, if not all the problems, are solved. There are detailed plans for space settlements, business arguments proving that it will be profitable and engineering analysis of obstacles surrounding space habitation.

Even so, there is no moon base or mars base and Sendhil Mullinathan’s TED talk explains why. We have done most of the work and I will claim we are traveling the last mile of the journey towards space habitation. I claim that the same reason why insulin isn’t used as much as it should by patients is why space habitation hasn’t occurred. Space habitation will need a behavioral change in humanity to gain support. I don’t know much about human behavior, but my understanding is that humans hard wired to not leave a resource until it is depleted. This was a core survival technique that is the base of our society (major cities cluster around resources needed for survival, mainly water, were as dessert settlements are rarer). Space habitation supporters are telling humanity that we need to go acquire more resources before we run out of resources on Earth.

In Case You Skimmed

-Human behavior may prevent space habitation

Reactions

-Do you think we will be able to change this behavior, even though we are already suffering because of dwindling resources.

Resources

Mullinathan, Sendhil. "Solving Social Problems with a Nudge" February 2010. Online video clip. TED. Accessed on February 6 2010. <http://www.ted.com/talks/sendhil_mullainathan.html>