Out of this world

I saw a couple of interesting new items this week (at least I found them interesting....).

In the first, Virgin Galactic has had a little ceremony to dedicate the runway at the spaceport it's developing in Nevada, that is supposed to start taking fare paying passengers (at about $200,000 a trip) on sub-orbital flights from the end of next year.  Now there is no way I'm ever going to be able to afford one of those little jaunts, much as I would love to do so, but good luck to Richard Branson with the venture, I hope it's a roaring success, and good luck to everyone who takes a trip.....I envy you all!

The second item was a report from NASA that concerned the probe they crashed into the Moon some months ago.  A spectrographic analysis (or some such) of the pictures taken has shown that there is more ice trapped in the surface, and probably much more below, than they had anticipated, and probably more than enough to support colonies there.  That made me think of a book I read, several times, some years ago: "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert A. Heinlein.  It is an absolute classic, one of the best books I've ever read, and alongside "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "Time Enough for Love" one of the best he's ever written (and the bloke wrote a few before he died, back in the Golden Era of SF writing, in the 40s to 60s).   It's about the Colonists on the Moon and their struggle to found an independent state, led by a self-aware computer called Mike (for Mycroft, named after Sherlock Holmes' brother) and his maintenance engineer, a one-armed ex-ice miner called Manuel Garcia O'Connor.  When it was written back in the 50s it must have seemed possible, given the scientific advances that were happening everywhere, but somehow it all went wrong....

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Of course, that's not the only book that has postulated humans conquering space.....it's been a staple of SF since the genre was started by Jules Verne 150 odd years ago.  Arthur C. Clark's "2001: A Space Odyssey" is on obvious and brilliant alternative, as is his "A Fall of Moondust".  Before that came Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles", Edgar Rice Burroughs ' "Barsoom" series, and many others.  Since then Kim Stanley Robinson has written a brilliant and utterly believable series of "Mars" books, that follow a future history of the Martian colony over many years, terraforming the planet into another Earth.  The list goes on and on, but (with the exception of "Barsoom" which I've never read) these are my personal favourites.

It seems a shame that somehow or other, mankind  - or at least its governments - seems to have lost the courage that sent us into space in the first place, despite the cost in lives and dollars, and prompted (or was prompted by) many of these books.    When "2001" was written, again back in the 60s, the Apollo program was running, and reaching the Moon a close and realistic prospect.  Since that happened not much more than 60 years after the first flight by the Wright brothers  - such incredible technological advances in such a short time! - the idea of space stations circling the Earth as a staging post to commercial Moon trips, a colonized satellite, and beyond, did not seem that far fetched.

But today, where are we?  Well, no-one has been on the Moon since the early 70s, and America remains the only nation to have landed there.   The Russians built their own space station, Mir, but that fell to Earth years ago.   It's been replaced by the International Space Station, but that has taken years to build and although functioning is still very much government only, cramped and primitive in comparison with the beautiful (and technically feasible) station envisioned by Clark and portrayed so well in Kubrick's film, and still unfinished.  The American space shuttle fleet has been retired after nearly 30 years service, and there is no replacement for the first - and so far only - re-usable vehicle yet produced.  Supplies and crew are now being ferried up to the ISS by the old Soyuz launch vehicle that the Russians have been using, virtually unchanged, since the early 70s.  The Chinese have managed to get a couple of astronauts up there, for short flights, and are planning for a Moon landing but not for many years.  The Indians are also working on their own projects.  And that's about it.

Of course there have been thousands of unmanned missions. There is an uncounted number of satellites orbiting our planet: some are communications machines (without which our mobile phones and the internet would not function); some watch and plot weather patterns; there is a network that runs GPS to everyone's benefit (personally I prefer a good road map), and a host of others whose purpose I'd probably rather not know.  There is the Hubble telescope that regularly produces the most stunning images of the sky, stars and galaxies thousands of light years away, that are helping astronomers and physicists figure out how the whole shooting match of a universe came together and holds together, and even identfiy planets forming star systems light years away.  There have been many unmanned probes to the planets - Venus and Mars primarily - and others that performed fly-by's of the outer gas giants and sent back fabulous and intriguing images of them and their moons before heading off into interstellar space.

But man holds steadfast to low Earth orbit.

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Mostly that comes down to budgets, I guess.  The costs of launching anything, even into low Earth orbit, are enormous (and that's discounting the years of development that comes before the launch) and clearly far more than even the most visionary SF prophet ever imagined.  But governments of both the US and USSR (still the main space explorers, despite China's and India's efforts to catch up) happily spent trillions of dollars developing weapons systems, many featuring rocketry, that were ultimately thrown away without being used (thank God!).  Now neither party seems to be able to agree on the next adventure.  There has been much talk of a new series of missions to the Moon, but not for at least another 15 or 20 years (and consider the US went from its first satellite launch to landing Neil and Buzz there in less than 10 years).  The Americans haven't even agreed on a Shuttle replacement yet, even though the last flight is due next month: the favourite was abandoned by Obama on cost grounds last year.  Voyages to Mars have also been mentioned, but in maybe 50 years.....that seems to be largely down to health and safety issues: how are the astronauts going to survive a year or two in space, away from their friends and family, the poor lambs?  There's a multi-national group sealed up in a facility in Moscow right now, and for the next 12 months, trying to simulate a trip to Mars and back, aimed at giving some clues to that.

And yet, not much more than 150 years ago, sailors went off for years at a time, on flimsy sail boats, exploring the uncharted world we live in, and it was accepted that a lot of them would never come back.  It never stopped anyone going.  Man has always been inquisitive, an explorer species by nature - it's what sets us apart from our ape cousins.  And yet it seems the more powerful among us - the ones who hold the purse strings in government - seem to have lost that inquisitive nature, or at least buried it under a lust for power and personal gain.  Where are the visionaries like JFK, who started the Apollo program before he was killed?

So we live in a world that grows more crowded by the minute.  One that is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate.  One that grows more polluted with every new car or bus or motor bike that fires up its engine, and where global warming and climate change are a fact of life - albeit, in Al Gore's words, "An Inconvenient Truth".  Sooner or later this world will become too crowded and under-resourced to support the billions of poor, of every nationality (it's not a uniquely Third World situation to be skint).  What happens then?  Another popular SF staple is to imagine that kind of a future - the early 70s movie "Logan's Run" springs to mind, where everyone had to be subject to euthenasia at the age of 30, to avoid overcrowding and prolong the failing mineral and natural wealth.  Do we really want mankind to end like that - not with a bang but a whimper, as someone much brighter than me once put it?

For the last few thousand years, we've been engaged in a diaspora, leaving our homelands and spreading throughout our world to find more space, better lives, more wealth.  But we've really run out of space now, here on Earth.  Perhaps it's time to pluck up our courage, and start a new diaspora, but out into space, whatever the cost, financial or otherwise.  Before it's too late.

That way, Mr. Sulu.  Out there......