Final Frontier or Die

What will be the future of space?

Well, that really depends on us.  We’re starting to see some private sector investment in space, which is a good thing. but really, mainly because government funding has dropped the ball on space back in the 1970s. NASA has never gotten even 1% of the national budget, and has been twiddling their thumbs since the Apollo Program shut down, and looking at each other going, “Are we going to be able to afford a Coke from the machine next week?”

There are things that most people forget like, whether for good or ill, Landsat discovered more oil within one year than all the oil that had been discovered up to that point, keeping us from running out by the year 2001.

I remember going to the Space Frontier Foundation Lunar Development conference back in 1999, and what really stood out to me was the complete lack of understanding of how society works and the extreme amount childish, petty ego going on. They all wanted to do lunar fly-by projects, but everybody thought that their one test was the only one that counted, and that they did not need to combine efforts or convince anybody other than other nerds at the conference. They had a disdain for the general populace that was, while possibly justified, entirely unrealistic and not useful. The one scientist who spoke because he had succeeded in getting a lunar fly-by project was an object of envious scorn. They were all praying for an angel that they did not deserve. Furthermore, they all snubbed the guy with the proven solar sail system that had been tested on the space shuttle.

If I had been an angel looking to finance a project, I would have forced a group of them to work together with removable test modules on one probe where everybody who had a test that could be done with the same piece of equipment was grouped together and attached solar sails to extend massively the ability to run tests while reducing the need for fuel. I also would have put the one man who had succeeded with a project in charge, and had them set it up so that it flew back by the Earth to have modules changed out to change the tests that could be done.

This model would have given us the equivalent of twenty probes for the price of one.

When I was at the ISDC in Milwaukee in 1998, I worked on one of the panels planning differing aspects of planning a space probe to the moon. Most everybody was in agreement as to what to do for almost everything that our team was supposed to work out, but we got hung up when it came to the orbit that should be used for the project.

I ended up arguing with all of them that the probe should be taking an off-planar orbit, and ticking off the various reasons why. I did not give up on my point because, well for God’s sakes, it’s rocket science, it ought to be logical! We had loudly been debating this for about five minutes or so when Buzz Aldrin came over (I think he was working on one of the other projects at another table or something) and said, “Yes, it absolutely should be an off-planar orbit.  That will work much better. I’ve already worked out the math. I’ll send a copy over.” (He has a PhD in Orbital Mechanics and has proven that he can find the moon in the dark.) Then he turned to me and said, “Sorry for stealing your thunder.” I said, “No, don’t be. They listen to you. We got them to change their minds. That’s the important thing.”

I think that if we make it as a species, that before too long we will have at least one “real” space station at one of the Lagrange Points, probably the one halfway between Terra and Luna, a Lunar base, at least mostly inside of the volcanic vents, where they will harvest water and mine the lunar surface for the ubiquitous titanium, aluminum and platinum, which will be used for space construction–such as the space station–and will proceed to build colonies on other planets such as Mars and Ganymede. By then, we will have worked out better propulsion methods, and will hopefully be at least sending probes to other systems and working on actual FTL drives.

Irrefutable Evidence as to Whether Global Warming Is Real.

There are a lot of aspects of this question that can be ignored for the purposes of this blog.  The fact that the first sign of global warming would be expansion of the atmosphere is, however, significant.  As I explained to school mates in 1978, global warming doesn’t mean that you’ll be warmer all the time. In fact, it immediately leads to more chaotic weather with greater extremes of temperature fluctuation and larger and more powerful storms.  The third thing that will happen if you have global warming is that the ice covering the poles will begin to melt, dropping the planet’s albedo, and thus causing an acceleration of global warming.  As this occurs, material trapped in and under the ice for hundreds of thousands of years, and in some cases millions, will begin to rot, releasing methane and CO_2, further accelerating global warming.  At the same time, diseases (bacteria, viruses, etc.) that are, once again, up to millions of years old, will be released from the ice and begin to adapt to the life forms that have no reason to have resistance or immunity to them which now live all over the planet.  I will not debate these, but will rather focus on the one undeniable truth.

               Hot air expands.

               Many years ago, the United States put up a space station outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, called Skylab.  Skylab was in a stable orbit.  Those of you who have the good fortune of being old enough and actually having a memory will recall that we sent many missions to Skylab and ran experiments similar to the ones being run by the International Space Station today.

               Those of you who are old enough and have a memory will also recall that Skylab came down and hit Australia.  Hopefully, you’re saying to yourself at this point, “Wait, you said Skylab was in a stable orbit outside the atmosphere?   Shouldn’t that mean that it would stay up forever?”  Yes, and in a beautiful example of an extension of Newton’s Laws of Motion, it could not possibly hit the Earth unless acted upon by an outside force.  “Well, what was that outside force?” you may ask.  The answer is both puzzling and enlightening.  That outside force was called “air drag.”

               Wait, how can you have air drag if it’s outside the atmosphere?  The answer is simple.  The atmosphere of the Earth expanded to the point where Skylab was orbiting.  The only ways that could happen is if we acquired more atmosphere, which we didn’t, or if the average temperature of the Earth went up, which it did, by three degrees Fahrenheit.

               In the early 1980s, we were due to go into one of the mini ice ages, and in fact had the type of situation occur which usually triggers the beginning of an ice age.  First, Mount Saint Helen’s blew, and then there were several other large volcanic eruptions around the Ring of Fire.  (The Ring of Fire is the most volcanically active area on the Earth, which forms a large circle around the Pacific Ocean on major tectonic plate lines.)  If that had not happened, the unstable weather changes we have been seeing in the 2000s would have happened in the 1980s and 1990s.  This bought us some time.  Unfortunately, we are not utilizing that time in a productive manner.  In this case, denial is the kind of action which leads to extinction.

               Man has been very good at surviving by the skin of his teeth.  I at least hope that we will do this yet again.  However, every day we wait to begin drastic action to reverse this process raises the price tag for fixing it by about a million dollars. It will also mean that everyone’s lives will be considerably more difficult while we try to fix it, and that means everyone—rich or poor.

               Now, you may say that this MIR-ly one example, but I would call your attention to the Russian space station, Mir, which was up between 1986 and 2001.   Mir had to be boosted into a higher orbit every year, and eventually was brought down by air drag.  That could only happen if the atmosphere was expanding.  Yes, by that time its orbit was affected by an expanding atmosphere every single year.

               These are facts that you cannot deny.   You also cannot deny the fact that companies which are the main cause of global warming in order to save a penny per ton on items they manufacture, and then finagle their way out of paying any taxes are going to expect you to foot the bill.

               That’s right.  I said that global warming is going to cost you money, make you work harder, and lower your standard of living.   If you don’t want that to happen, then you better do something about it right now.