The Failure of Space: Conspiracy theory

Great Debates
1

Author’s Note: The following is pure speculation; I do not line my hats with aluminum foil, or stay up nights watching for black helicopters.

I was brooding the other night about the failed promise of spaceflight. If you were a kid in the 60s like I was, you followed the Apollo missions, and saw 2001: A Space Odyssey when it first came out. In the 70s, you read about proposals for space colonies to build powersats and how the Shuttle would make manned spaceflight cheap and commonplace. And more or less, you presumed that by the 21st century mankind would be involved in space in a big way.

Well of course it didn’t work out that way. After the early heyday of the Apollo era, manned spaceflight was placed on the back burner until the Shuttle was operational. And then the Shuttle failed miserably to meet it’s original mandate. Now, decades after we first sent men into space and landed on the Moon, we’re building an “International Space Station” that’s behind schedule, over budget, and won’t do anything that wasn’t done years ago by the Skylab and Mir programs.

Even in unmanned exploration, the last really innovative programs were the Voyager missions to the outer planets and the Viking landers on Mars. The Galileo probe to orbit Jupiter might have been good, but it experienced technical failure, in part due to sitting around in storage for years waiting for the Shuttle to be ready to boost it. Now about half our probes succeed and we’re thrilled that a tiny rover the size of a child’s toy can crawl a few hundred yards on Mars, showing us pretty much the same barren expanse of red rock that the Viking landers showed us already.

Sure we have surveilance and communications satellites, but those have been part of the status quo since the 60s. And even communications satellites, the one commercially succesful venture in space, isn’t doing as well as it was. Fiber optic networks are rivaling or even supplanting satellite relays, and the Iridium and Teledesic systems that were going to provide global satellite cell phone and Internet access have foundered. In fact, almost every new proposal for commercializing space since the 80s has fallen through.

In purely technical terms, we could be doing so much more! We could have a real space station, with rotation for gravity, closed system recycling and assembly and refueling facilitys for service spacecraft. We could have sent balloons or rocket-powered aircraft to Mars for low altitude aerial surveilance. We could at least maintain a semi-permanent manned presence on the moon. We could have given private industry the incentives to build really economical launch vehicles rather than the Edsel of spacecraft, the Shuttle. Yet today, it seems like squeezing a few more miles per gallon out of an automobile (mainly by making it smaller and flimsier) is more important than getting the human race off this rock before resource depletion, nuclear catastrophe, or environmental degradation sends us all back to the Dark ages for good.

Perhaps it’s just part of growing old and seeing the dreams of my youth go unfullfilled; but I can’t help looking back in wistful longing and saying “What went wrong?” And in my more paranoid moods, it seems like the promise of space couldn’t have gone off track any worse if someone was somehow slowly and patiently squelching the whole idea of space travel.

You say I’m blind, I say you’re hallucinating.

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That’s just what the Bavarian Illuminati wants you to think!!

3

For everything you’ve mentioned, there are specific reasons that they turned out the way they did: the international space station, for instance, is far behind because the Russians can’t keep up with their commitments, and the whole project is already too far over-budget to bail them out again.

In general, though, blame the public. People lost interest in the adventure of space travel once it had been done, and the scientific value of space exploration couldn’t justify the expenditures. Until the commercial exploitation of space becomes viable, it won’t happen on any significant scale, and the scientific initiatives have to struggle with shrinking budgets and public disinterest.

All’s not lost, though. This article is about figuring out exactly the kind of problems that need to be solved before private industry will see space as a feasible for development.

Never attribute to an -ism anything more easily explained by common, human stupidity.

4

When I reread old sci-fi novels about the wonderful world of space ready to be opened up, it always strikes me that they never really come up with a good motivation for going there. It’s always something about our drive to explore or conquer new realms, or whatever. Let’s face it - the only thing that’s going to get us going in space is money. That’s why satellites are doing so well. They make money. Lots of it. There’s no money to be made in going to Mars.

Oh, sure. People have proposed ways to make space conquest profitable, like mining asteroids or building zero-gee factories, but these ideas are just not practicle. Why spend billions or trillions of dollars establishing a mine on a nearby asteroid when iron is still plenty cheap here? Resources are going to have to get a lot more scarce before space becomes a viable alternative.

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Here are a few good reasons to make the jump:

  1. Chances are there is something incredibly profitable in space that we haven’t even begun to imagine

  2. Most of the land on Earth is taken, forcing wealthy men like Bill Gates to live under someone else’s rules. A lunar colony or space station would put them beyond national borders.

Space is our frontier. It’s where brave folks will soon be able to travel to try to make something of themselves and get first pick of the spoils.