Runners and Riders
Rash Promises
When it comes to crewed space travel, billionaire space nuts such as Bezos and Musk have been making assertions they cannot possibly adhere to. Elon Musk cites his desire to build Tesla cars on the Red Planet within the next forty years while Jeff Bezos wants to move industry into space, whether in low-Earth orbit or on the Moon and Mars – he’s not fussy. All these off-planetary plans are reminiscent of the erstwhile colonisation of far-off territories undertaken on this planet, and whether all the workers required to implement these putative off-planet industries would be voluntary or conscripted is a moot point.
In the light of their remarks, Britain’s Prince William and others have a point when they stated (in 2021) that there are urgent climate issues to be fixed here, because the Bezos solution to climate change moving heavy industry off Earth is not an answer. Launching chemical rocket-propelled spacecraft is extremely damaging to the atmosphere of the home planet, and the extant damage would only accrue with the required amount of rockets to enable any such dreams to play out.
In using their future dreams to justify their current jaunts up to the Kármán line, these competitive billionaires choose to ignore the salient facts of the matter: the planets that they intend to colonise are currently only fit for robots, and their spacecraft are not capable of preserving human life sufficiently well to reach their destination with their crews in a healthy state, and no amount of ingested chemicals, hibernation schemes or tinkering with a trans-human technology interface can change those facts.
The basic design of a spacecraft capable of being launched on a rocket is not equal to the task of protecting the human body from the combined effects of the extant radiation found from LEO outwards, and the deterioration of the human body which is in part due to the lack of the appropriate gravitational environment within the craft. All this is known from the numerous studies done by NASA and other space agencies, but when selling the concept of human space travel to the general public, even though the issues of radiation and the detrimental health of astronauts are considered as showstoppers for manned space travel, the inadequacy of the spacecraft is rarely mentioned. All of which rather begs the question as to how the crewed Apollo missions were so successful.
For the sake of our planet and future generations, humankind needs to find a different solution, but creating a different spacecraft with a completely different technology requires the willingness to recognise that rocket-launched spacecraft have had their day. The former NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe has been the boldest in this regard, when discussing Elon Musk’s Starship he stated:
I remain cautious about Starship’s deeper space capabilities for humans, despite its size and innovation, given that it relies on the same chemical propulsion systems used in spaceflight "since Yuri Gagarin took the first trip and Alan Shepard was right behind him" in 1961.
"Mars is 65m miles away,” he said. "Cutting the distance can only be achieved if you add space propulsion and right now we have none of that. We have no means to achieve it. No one on this rock knows how to do that."
The second thing we don’t have is the means to provide shielding sufficient to preserve human life. As it stands, the radioactivity is so extraordinary you wouldn’t make it, much less get back. Those are the two fundamental limitations I see to anyone being able to achieve anything much beyond the lunar objective at this stage.1
O’Keefe surely knows that ‘deeper space’ is a misleading description, since all of space is subject to radiation. Currently all spacecraft have to negotiate the Van Allen belts and all of the lunar surface and that of Mars is exposed to radiation. But he is apparently attempting to uphold the Apollo myth while making serious statements about the future of crewed spaceflight.
Using a craft powered by a Gravitron Drive technology would be the way to achieve both aims: it is based on the same principles that allow us to live on this planet, and can be scaled down to create a spacecraft or scaled up to create the environment required for a planet such as Mars to be able itself to support life.
Dr. James Green, NASA’s chief scientist who is retiring this year, has boldly stated that "The solar system is ours, let’s take it".2 However, we are but one component of an interdependent eco-system and the war with nature we have been conducting since the industrial revolution must surely end. For when it comes to space travel, we human beings can only “boldly go” when we work in harmony with ourselves and with nature. All space exploration, crewed or by deploying robots and probes, must be part of the solution not part of the problem, and for that to be so, it needs to be achieved without harming or putting at risk planet Earth, upon which we depend for our lives.
Low-Earth orbit is not simply a dumping ground for our unwanted heavy industries, and truly understanding that the planets of our solar system are themselves components of delicately balanced system, not simply a mining project or an opportunity for making money, would be a first small step forward. One that would lead to the giant leap of replacing chemical rockets and their crewed or unscrewed spacecraft.
Mary Bennett
Aulis Online, January 2022
Notes
1. Quoted in an article by Richard Luscombe in The Guardian, Sean O’Keefe was NASA Administrator from 21 December 2001, overseeing the ISS budget overruns, the aftermath of the Shuttle Columbia disaster and the gearing towards the new lunar and Martian programs, before resigning on 13 December 2004.
2. Dr. Green gave his assessment of the future of Mars at the 2017 Planetary Science Vision 2050 workshop.
The NASA website is rather difficult to navigate, but Mark Kauffmann creator and author of the Many Worlds website has posted his excellent article concerning Dr. Green’s talk here.
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