The [Final] Frontier - Space Part One

I can’t say that I like Newt Gingrich. His politics and mine do not align. I think he holds a lot of responsibility for the corrosive strain of conservatism that dominates the Republican Party right now. But during the 2012 Republican primaries, I think he got a bad rap for an actual decent idea.

Okay, Newt’s plan detailed in speech at Cocoa Beach, Florida in January 2012 was a bit on the idealistic/pipe dream side of things. But the sentiment, and the challenge I think, were well worth it. Newt had the idea that if elected that by the end of his second term (yes, as a primary candidate he was planning already to also win re-election) the US would establish a permanent outpost on the Moon’s surface. He even suggested the idea that the base could grow and begin accepting residents, gaining the rights to apply for statehood under the same framework by which the country expanded to its current 50 states.

Before we all start petitioning a change of date formatting to Universal Century, there are a few roadblocks. For one (and thankfully in regards to other more important issues) Newt Gingrich isn’t president, so his ideas are not policy. But more importantly, his ideas really were a bit too far outside of our current capabilities or most realistic expectations of what our capabilities would be for by his 2021 deadline.

Most estimates right now suggest that it costs around $10,000 a pound to put something in space – just to get it into space. Getting it to the moon would likely cause a good chunk of cash more. But we’ve done that before. A long time before. As in four and a half decades ago. Haven’t gone back since. Haven’t really gone much of anywhere since.

That is probably one of the more frustrating parts for space enthusiasts – the lack of much forward progress since the late 60s and early 70s.

That isn’t to say we haven’t done important things in space. The completion of the International Space Station, the launch of the many research probes and satellites to the other planets, the landing of the rovers on Mars… we’ve done some very impressive stuff. It all really has had a profound effect on us, expanded our knowledge and understanding of the universe and our place in it.

But it all somehow seems to pale a bit compared to the fact that we did land on the Moon. Humans made it to the Moon. It was such a big deal that it became a metaphor for any and all challenges; if we put a man on the Moon, we can do ­__. But we haven’t gone back to the Moon or sent humans any further. To many people it’s a lot like if we ventured out west during expansion of the U.S, and then turned back never to go there again.

Obviously it’s more complicated than that. Living in space takes a lot of resources. There is no place like Earth in our solar system, maybe our galaxy. Air, water, food, all of these things would have to be supplied to any mission that looks to spend any time at all in space. Now consider doing the same not for a few days of space habitation, but for indefinite habitation. It certainly would not be possible to send a whole lot to support even ten people for very long. Essentially you would have to run a system of nearly constant launches of supplies and materials up to the Moon, the frequency increasing as the size of the mission expands with the growth in whatever population you decide to house there.

Growing the outpost would itself also require copious effort. Again, there’s nothing on the Moon. That means no building supplies either. That would mean construction of any and all facilities would rely on sending those materials to the Moon. Because of the hassles, dangers, etc. of actual construction, the obvious preference would be to send at least partially completed structures.

Living in space is wrought with technical difficulties. It is in part the reason that Mars actually makes for a more promising start for land-based space colonization. While at initial thought it may seem more plausible to colonize the Moon before trying for Mars, Mars is actually the better bet because it is suspected to have liquid water below its surface and frozen at its poles. Water weighs a lot. A lot of water weighs a ton. The more water you have to send up with you in space, that is more weight and more cost. When it comes to colonization, you’ll need water, of which the Moon has none. A colony mission on the moon would need lots of water sent up to it, again, more and more as it grows.

If Mars has water below the surface, it can be collected and be somewhat cleaned. That would allow not only long-term colonization from that basic drinking needs, but that water could then be used for other things like agriculture so that the colony can grow its own food. That would put the colony well on its way towards self-sufficiency.

Colonizing Mars would also help to speed up another science fiction goal of terraforming Mars. The process of terraforming, changing the surface of another celestial body to make it fit for habitation, is a theoretically possible project, although estimates of how long it would take to accomplish on a planet like Mars measures in the hundreds of years. It requires the generation of an atmosphere. That would be accomplished through, of all things, the generation of greenhouse gasses, something humans are fairly adept at doing. Operating a colony would produce a substantial amount of greenhouse gas that would help form an atmosphere and warm the planet. It would also be feasibly easier to manage the entire process with an outpost there rather than remote managing the operation from here on Earth (though arguably, depending on the scenario, the operation of an orbital colony would be the better bet).

We have already taken steps towards space colonization. The ISS is, for all intents and purposes, a space colony. It just happens to be one that has non-permanent residence (no one “lives” there, astronauts rotate in an out) and is used entirely for scientific research. But the ISS is basically what the first steps of a space colony would look like. It’s a far cry from something like the colonies of the Gundam series, obviously. There too there are technical details that need to be worked out, mostly in terms of technologically creating gravity (we know how to do it on paper), and again the cost of producing something so massive and possibly self-sustaining, or at least predominantly self-sustaining.

A potential solution to the problems of space colonies, at least Earth orbit space colonies, would be a space elevator. I will admit that I had no knowledge of the topic until Gundam 00. But, the project works about as it sounds. It’s an elevator… to space. Actually, it is right now the most likely of many of our fanciful forays into space. Moreover, it helps with the costs and difficulties of launching rockets and shuttles to space for supply missions. Further, if you imagine something like a dock or a garage attached or in close proximity to the elevator, you could suddenly achieve better range on something like a space shuttle, by fueling and launching already in orbit, rather than having to burn so much fuel to achieve enough thrust to first escape Earth’s atmosphere.

Why aren’t they done then? Strength. You need very, very strong cables to create an elevator that will stretch way up into space. Carbon nanotubes are a promising technology, but so far scientists have had trouble producing large structures, like a braided cable, using carbon nanotubes; they just don’t retain the same properties when scaled up to that size. So for now space elevators remain only a tantalizingly close dream.

Newt Gingrich was a little off in his goals; a little too ambitious. But He wasn’t wrong. The space program needs big ideas. It needs a little reckless ambition. It needs the drive of inventive and excited people not only dreaming of the future, but working towards grasping it too. If only for that I think it would have been worthwhile for Gingrich’s idea to have received better attention than it did rather than off-handed dismissal. There are no doubt many problems that we have to face here on terra-firma, but perhaps by thinking about a slightly larger picture we can come together to fill in the smaller pieces too. It’s lofty, perhaps too lofty to achieve, but if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we set the goal for ourselves of establishing a permanent post there in eight years?