Requiem for the Space Age

The New York Times is commemorating the 50th anniversary of Sputnik with a huge clump of articles about, well, space. I’m a little surprised that I haven’t seen more said about these– they turned up in my RSS feeds on Tuesday, but I’ve been both busy and slightly ill, and haven’t gotten around to blogging them until now. I guess it’s further evidence that space is no longer inherently cool. That, or there are just too many damn biologists on my blogroll.

Anyway, there’s a bunch of retrospective material that I didn’t really bother with, along with four pieces with more of a current scientific emphasis: Kenneth Change debunks myths about spin-offs, and suggests that the real spin-off benefits are at a higher level than Tang and Velcro. John Schwartz looks at the future, and sketches out the prospects for private space flight. John Tierney offers a half-serious open letter to billionaires encouraging them to fund more space research, and also proposes funding space flight by means of a ticket lottery.

Those are all worth reading, but the one that really resonated for me was Dennis Overbye’s wistful reflection on the dream of easy space travel:

I can think of many much worse ways than space exploration to put my tax dollars to work, but the space dream has been dead for me since the early 1980s, when I chanced to see a particular photograph of a shuttle launching. The photo was taken from a chase plane. It shows a tower of smoke rising upward from the Earth’s surface, which is blurred by the haze of altitude and clouds. Near the tower’s glowing top, like a pinhead on Jack’s beanstalk, is the space shuttle, dwarfed by its own plume, roaring away as hard as it can.

There, on a pillar of violence, is your dream of transcendence, of freedom, of escape from killer rocks in the sky, boiling oceans or whatever postmodern plague science comes up with. Of galactic immortality.

That picture broke my heart. I’d seen rocket launches before and been appropriately chastened by the thunder and heat it took to break free of gravity, but I had never seen it from such a perspective. So much work for such a small step into the universe. How could this ever be routine, economical or safe?

That’s not just a pretty piece of writing– I think he’s nailed it. There’s a reason, after all, why “rocket science” is the paradigm of difficulty.

It’s not just that rocket science requires math– the math involved is just vector calculus, and can easily be handled by computers. The real point is that the whole project of rocket science is difficult and dangerous and very uncertain. As the private entrepreneurs currently dabbling in space flight are beginning to find out.

Gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces, but it’s still a gigantic obstacle. Getting anything into space, at the moment, involves strapping a really expensive payload on top of an enormous firecracker, and hoping like hell that it doesn’t blow up too quickly. NASA’s big and bureaucratic and slow, but that doesn’t change the fact that lofting mass into orbit safely is a genuinely Hard Problem, and no amount of spunky entrepreneurial spirit is going to change that.

I think most space enthusiasts are far too quick to belittle the real achievements that we have made, probably because the Appolo program got really lucky, and made the process seem easier than it really is. There’s too much time spent running NASA down, and not enough celebration of the great things that have been managed. The fact that we’ve got robots roaming around Mars at all is absolutely incredible, if you stop to think about what’s really involved in that process.

And, for that matter, the fact that we’ve only lost two Shuttles and one Apollo capsule over the last fifty years is a pretty impressive record. That compares pretty favorably with the exploration of our own planet– I suspect that more people died trying to reach the South Pole than have died going into space.

It’s intensely frustrating to people raised on Heinlein and Clarke and Asimov, of course. Humans walked on the Moon before I was born, and there’s a part of me that resents the lack of a permanent Moon base thirty-odd years later. But, as Overbye points out, if you step back and look at what’s really required for that, the expectations of the Golden Age SF writers don’t look all that reasonable any more.

Materials science may yet come along to save us, by making something light enough and strong enough to reduce or avoid the risks of rocketry. Or somebody may come up with a really compelling reason for manned space flight that will drive more people into the field– fatuous blather about a “primal urge to explore” doesn’t cut it. But for the moment, space travel remains a Hard Problem.

And I’ll give the last word to Overbye:

There is no galactic immortality. Everything we are and have done, the whole Milky Way with its billions of stars, is eventually destined to be swallowed up in a black hole. Neither ourselves nor our works will survive the end of the universe, if dark energy eventually blows it apart, no matter what we do. All we own is the present, so it behooves each of us to live each moment impeccably, guided by whatever lights we choose. Speaking only for myself, while we are around we might as well embrace the light and the unknown, the violence and vastness that terrify us.