The Pathway to Mars

The future of human space travel

50 years on from the race to the Moon
 

In the following transcript the views of a corporate governance consultant (CGC) are put to David S Percy concerning two key points: why the US has not attempted to get to the Moon for over 50 years since Apollo, and the future of human space travel.

Background
There are differences between the 21st century so-called ‘race to space’ with its mix of civilian and government space industries, and the original US government-led space program of the 20th century – politically dubbed ‘the Cold War space race’. The original space race was primarily about making a political and technological point. Since then no attempts have been made to venture beyond the International Space Station and low-Earth orbit. But now, after some 50 years of inactivity a new space age is upon us.

On reading this transcript as an observer it turns out to be a useful lesson for us all. It shows how the effects of a decision made back in the 1960s affects our technological progress to this day. It also reveals that decades later, the citizens of the nation primarily involved in that decision have been obliged to shape their language in order to cope with the increasingly obvious issues resulting from that inconvenient decision.

Explorers on Mars

Two explorers inspect a robotic lander and its small rover in an artist's concept of a future Mars mission, NASA/Pat Rawlings, SAIC

Transcript
CGC: The era of the ‘space race’ was a singular, time-constrained period in which the United States was willing to invest deeply and broadly in its space endeavour.1 Significantly, for the various contractors involved there was always the smell of money. Virtually all the people who had trained and had a career in the space industry between 1960 to the 1980s have now aged out. Present day technology has advanced and is leaving them behind. The people who were enthusiastic in their teens, twenties and thirties are now 50, 60 and 70.2

The challenges that faced a contemporary program, based on knowledge that was extant at the time has now changed and evolved, so the US space race program had reached a natural end point. The direction of thinking has since changed, it is now related to the facing up to the immensely difficult issues of putting and maintaining humans in space.3

It also changed the emphasis towards concentrating on the science of just sending out probes and keeping close to Earth, orbiting in LEO in space stations where is it relatively safe. The task was to study and see what happens to humans over long periods of time. We observed what they were like when they returned.4

We don't need Saturn V rockets for that. And now that we are not ‘enemies’ of the USSR we can be space partners – and we are, for example in the realm of Russian rocket engine acquisition and deployment.5

Although reconstituting a space program is partly based on what has been learned over the past 50 years, we are restarting it from a knowledge base. What was done before was necessary at the time. We now know what the real challenges are. They are indeed far greater than we had ever imagined. We now know the impact of space radiation, and yet we have not invested in the technology to meet these challenges because to date it has not been a priority. We have been focusing on problems closer to home.6

DSP: But now, we do want to focus on sending crewed spacecraft out beyond LEO, how are we going do that? And how are we going to accomplish the new space program’s immediate targets of getting to the Moon and to Mars with human beings?

CGC: Rather than saying to those who were employed in the space programs of the 1960s ‘you were wrong’, those individuals (who were doing what they were asked to do) accomplished something, they expanded science in many dimensions.

However, now with that knowledge, some unanswered questions and unexamined assumptions will have to re-examined and readdressed in order to move forward. This is essential to get to embarking on the next exponential leaps in our capacity to understand the forces at work in the broader universe. These are the things we are going to have to invest in.

Do we have the courage, do we have the will, can we garner the broader support to examine these matters in earnest? Because it is still not a dead cert we are going to be able to do it in the near future. We will have to take the long-term view. So the real question is what do we want to accomplish regarding the technologies of deep space travel that have to be developed? These are the questions.7

People generally don’t know or care about the exact science and technology involved.8

So the question really is, why is it important? The key thing is that the level of investment required in the ’60s will not be replicated in the 21st century, given all the critical issues that confront humankind today. And there is no agreement as to what the dividends are going to be. Although history shows that there are always benefits that flow from such enterprises.9

How are we going to remove our reliance on chemicals for propulsion? Because maybe we have reached the capacity of how to safely travel vast distances. Maybe our existing technology is outmoded. Can we develop other ways of escaping Earth’s gravity and continuously propel a craft through space? We don’t know for sure, but there are some innovative ideas that have evolved over the years which should explored in earnest. Some show great promise such as the Gravitron Drive proposal. [The concept of thrusting a craft through space without requiring propellants, instead using the interactions between the craft and its surrounding space environment.] We should take these ideas from the fringe and bring them into the mainstream. As has always been the case with convention-shattering new ways of thinking.

We went from an Earth-centric idea of the solar system to a heliocentric system. We are now moving beyond Newton and Einstein into new realms. There are many things we have not yet figured out. The kinds of industries that we are going to have to develop are in materials science, the new physics, in computing power and other related fields. These are going to come from the civilian sector because the way in which the military industrial complex has evolved is quite different to the way it started in the 50s and 60s. Now much of the new brainpower lies in civilian circles. People like Bezos and Musk may be barking up the wrong tree(s) but people like them are going to be the ones who are going to play significant roles going forward. Such people are not bound by convention.10

It’s not just governments who have found this quest a tremendous challenge, look at the long, excruciating journey that Virgin Galactic took to achieve just one passenger flight, with Branson saying it was far more difficult that he could have ever imagined. Branson, Musk and Bezos who are approaching these endeavours from different directions and with different objectives are all are finding it extremely challenging. So the lesson to be drawn from this situation is we have much yet to learn as to how to scale these new heights of technological, human and organisational problems.

There needs to be a new way of convening the new knowledge and attempting to validate what has been happening at the edges and seeing which of the edge ideas survive and reach validation and testing. The question is which of these new ideas has a chance of long-term success. We are not picking sides are trying to choose winners, we are simply trying to open the conversation to a broader range.

So far the technology has been relatively easy to develop because it is based on the proven science from the past 2000 years when the Chinese took gunpowder and made rockets for the first time. We have used those technological frameworks in order to evolve and have even made them incredibly sophisticated within the constraints of their boundaries.

So how do we unbound our thinking and keep open minds to progress? Maybe we really do need to combine voices from the edge with those from the centre.

Maybe experienced individuals in the industry might be interested and admit, “I have worked on all this stuff for years and I know what remains to be discovered. We are going to have to come at this from very different directions because we may have reached the limit of the conventional chemical rocket and the manipulation of forces thatwe have already understood.”

The fact is everybody is struggling to balance the costs, the long-term benefits of human space exploration to other planets (such those as described in [Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel] Red Mars) and admit the benefits are more than science fiction, they are a new reality.

Rather than basing our plans on what has already been achieved and asking “why can’t we just do it again?” This situation is different to assuming that our accumulated technology will take us on to the next step.

No real progress is achieved without actually jettisoning old models. There are two ways of making real progress, there is incrementalism which has often been the case in the past, and there is the break, as has been the case in cosmology, in mathematics and in physics. And it is all based on approaching the outer limits of the power of incrementalism, imbedded in which is a way of thinking.

The genius of humankind has been the ability to leap that chasm over and over again.

Is this challenge any different? We are at the point of asking people to acknowledge that we are once again at such a significant point in our history. So we get to the point when people who have actually spent their lives inside these disciplines have to say:

  • We have reached the stage when we can’t liberate ourselves to solve the next generation of problems based on what we have accomplished so far.
  • We understand that there are various dangers from radiation in space to overcome.
  • We accept there is the need to generate a source of gravity on long duration space flights.

All this requires a paradigm shift. Are we in store for a paradigm shift in relation to future deep space travel to Mars and beyond? Are we still using the incremental approach because that is our largest mental model? It takes people at the outer edges to come up with paradigm shifts. But people who can accomplish the required leap are very few and far between. So how do we lay the foundation for this progress? It must be possible to coalesce the voices. Why is investment in this new technology so important? It is initially for the few, but eventually the benefits will trickle down broadly across society. Maybe one of the current entrepreneurs will in time realise they are taking the wrong approach and be willing to think of something radically different.11


DSP: So with that, we are back where we started, and here is another comment on the state of space technology extracted from a long article by Neal Stephenson, "Space Stasis: What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation":

To employ a commonly used metaphor, our current proficiency in rocket-building is the result of a hill-climbing approach; we started at one place on the technological landscape—which must be considered a random pick, given that it was chosen for dubious reasons by a maniac—and climbed the hill from there, looking for small steps that could be taken to increase the size and efficiency of the device.

Sixty years and a couple of trillion dollars later, we have reached a place that is infinitesimally close to the top of that hill. Rockets are as close to perfect as they’re ever going to get. For a few more billion dollars we might be able to achieve a microscopic improvement in efficiency or reliability, but to make any game-changing improvements is not merely expensive; it’s a physical impossibility.

There is no shortage of proposals for radically innovative space launch schemes that, if they worked, would get us across the valley to other hilltops considerably higher than the one we are standing on now—high enough to bring the cost and risk of space launch down to the point where fundamentally new things could begin happening in outer space. But we are not making any serious effort as a society to cross those valleys. It is not clear why.


Some observations on the above by Mary Bennett
See also Harnessing the Mind: future spacecraft propulsion

1. The use of the word ‘singular’ indicates that although fully aware of David Percy’s position (that the historical record for crewed spaceflight is not an accurate account of the Apollo missions or indeed the American space program in general), CGC cannot allow himself to go further than note the ‘singularity’ of that period. That exceptionality also justifying the enormous amounts of money that disappeared into the black hole of ‘the space race’.

2. If present day technology has advanced so much that the old rocket guys are left behind, how can it be that we are still trying to do space with the exact same systems as back in the 1960s? Obviously this contradiction occurred to CGC as soon as he had said it.

3. So it’s a do-over job. Although this sounds like a gloss-over-the-facts job. The Apollo program supposedly had astronauts put into space and kept there for days on end, so how does that chime with what is now, in the shiny new space program: ‘the immensely difficult task of putting and keeping humans in space? CGC deals with the inconsistencies in his argument (or to be fair, NASA’s argument) by linking ‘the putting’ and ‘the keeping’ of humans in space’, into one sentence. But breaking it down reveals the weakness. Because he next acknowledges that space is dangerous for human beings beyond LEO, as has NASA, by not sending anyone through or beyond the Van Allen belts, so one could call that a change of program direction.

4. Putting human beings into space has been an incremental process since the launch of Yuri Gagarin. As for keeping them there: since we first started orbiting the Earth everyone involved in the space business has been ‘trying to see what happens to humans in space over long periods of time’ – we have just been increasing the time period, that is all. Furthermore, concerning the ability of the human body to withstand extremes of cold, heat, pressure, vacuum and gravity etc., experiments conducted with bio-organisms and human beings were undertaken decades before that, here on Earth. Often inhumanely it must be said.

5. Here we have the issue of the decades long inability of US rocket manufacturers to actually build a spacecraft to even get to LEO justified as a friendly partnership between former ‘rivals’. It is well known that when it came to science, even during the cold war the space engineers were exchanging information. ‘Rivalry’, a useful tool to keep the funding flowing, was the domain of the military and political theatres.

6. From the statement ‘that radiation to date has not been a priority’, we must surely ask how it is those outside the space industry can still cling to the belief that the Apollo missions could travel via the Van Allen belts, out to the totally unprotected surface of the Moon, in poorly-protected capsules with no possibility of an adequate protective shelter had there been a Solar Particle Event? All the articles on Aulis.com relative to the radiation issues, and the fact that even in the 1960s the Russians were openly stating that they could not deal with the radiation when it came to crewed spacecraft and lunar exploration reveal that radiation has always been a showstopper. That intelligent people find it necessary to justify the Apollo program even in the face of such hard scientific data as is currently available, looks to be cognitive dissonance born of patriotism. Space has not changed its nature, it was just as lethal then as it is today, and making matters worse, we were blasting the immediate environment with nuclear bombs. It is only very recently that we have learned more about what is ‘out there’ and we are still learning. While the current batch of spacecraft might help with launching satellites to deal with those ‘problems closer to home’ of themselves they cannot resolve the crewed problem.

7. What we want to accomplish is protecting astronauts and their spacecraft, so that they can actually survive the journey through space and be viable human beings when they arrive at their destination.

8. While that point is not necessarily true, when it comes to space travel, the idea that ‘it’s rocket science so don’t ask,’ is an outworn concept, perfectly fitting to the Apollo era, when they really, really did not want anyone to ask. But building the new generation of spacecraft is going to require a completely different attitude, one of complete awareness of the task from all the participants including the funders.

9. These same critical ‘dividend’ issues were also extant in the 1960s, and in part the great emphasis on matters closer to home, is also a good excuse to avoid the issues raised by the Apollo historical record. The dividends of a project are not always tangible and immediate material benefits, so human space exploration should not be regarded as a product, but as an investment in our future as a planetary civilization.

10. But even the billionaire civilians involved in the space program are bound by governments and the space agencies who are partially funding them. All of which does not stop several of these unconventional persons from suing the very agency with whom they have contracts.

Aulis Online, January 2022

See also Harnessing the Mind: Future spacecraft design and propulsion



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