Real exploration is not sightseeing, and it’s not even going hiking on the Appalachian Trail; exploration is expensive and dangerous.

Meanwhile unmanned flight has been stellar, with Voyager (or should I say V-ger) about to make that literal. Consider, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, Mars Orbiter, Ebb and Flow, Cassini, Galileo, Mercury Messenger, Kepler, Hubble, on and on. Science has moved on spectacularly but manned space flight has not yet found another gimmick to justify its costs and small returns.

as you stated, “A society cannot do that which it lacks the language to coherently imagine and describe.”  this is the problem in a nutshell.  the lack of new visual materials to spur the imagination of the next generation is definitely a large part of the problem.  even with those new visual materials, the current state of science education where kids are taught that “jeebus rode a dinosaur to the last supper” and “evolution is JUST A THEORY” is, unfortunately, a bigger part.

the biggest part of the problem is the public education system in this country where budgets rule and science is not one of the “three R’s” and therefore an “extra” cost (but not as important, obviously, as football).  This is exacerbated by the large and very vocal minority who truly see science as an evil that has to be fought tooth-and-nail to preserve the purity of their religious beliefs.  Add to these problems the attitude that “we can cut science budgets because we can” and we have the basis for our current situation.  After all, nobody cares except a few eggheads and who listens to them?

i too, long for the days when humans thought that they could do anything.  and i agree that the visuals from my childhood spurred thoughts of exploration and discovery.  i hope that the general public will rediscover that science is an important thing and produce the textbooks and other materials to compliment an increased demand.

note: i saved the above quote and will spread it around where i think it will do some good.  and i will attribute it to you (hope you didn’t steal it).  thank you.

the idea was to use the OTV to place and retrieve satellites from high orbit.  this would allow maintenance of communications satellite systems and alleviate the problem of “crowding” in the geosynchronous orbit space by dead satellites.  because the higher you go, the lighter the load that the space shuttle can carry (and the shuttle can’t even get to geosynchronous orbit), this would allow installation of really big comsats and science platforms.  it would also let us park a “spare” comsat in low orbit (possibly tethered to the ISS) where it could be tested and ready to deploy when an active satellite fails.  the dead satellite could be brought back to low orbit and repaired/rebuilt.  you could probably build a “maintenance bay” from a discarded shuttle fuel tank to give a pressurized work space.

all of this could be written-off as incremental work to improve satellite systems performance and reduce costs.  sneaky, huh?  the trojan horse part comes next.

it would be “noticed” by “someone at NASA” that the OTV is more than capable of transferring astronauts and cargo to lunar orbit.  it’s only a few feet/second difference between low-to-geosynchronous orbit and low-to-lunar orbit.  if you have two  or three OTV’s you can even run a lunar rescue mission if necessary.  brilliant!

A society cannot do that which it lacks the language to coherently imagine and describe. And in a mainstream cultural sense, our society now lacks the ability to coherently, plausibly, visualize any sort of positive future–a spacefaring future in particular. Part of this relates to a long media industry obsession with apocalyptic and dystopian visions that has left most of the society perceiving suggestions of things being, in any way, better tomorrow as anachronistic and naive–or for that matter anything that takes more than a few years of concerted social effort to accomplish as remotely possible. We simply no longer believe there is a future. We live perpetually waiting for the other shoe to drop. Since the Cold War western civilization has been alternately obsessed with apocalypse, nostalgia, or fantasy. Tomorrowland became Retro-Futurist-Land. (at Disneyworld Paris, it became Steam-Punk land…) And it doesn’t help that when today’s futurists attempt to talk about the future it often sounds rather like a drug trip with its practically psychedelic metaphors.

But another very critical aspect of this is that, even as we have become a progressively more visual culture to the point where reading more than two paragraphs has become an imposition to most people, the means to visual communication for many topics has become more difficult because the once ubiquitous art of commercial illustration is now dead, obsolesced by the advance in photography and reprographics. Some things cannot be communicated in photographs and ideas about the future are among them. You cannot photograph what doesn’t already exist. But what happens when the talent and skill necessary to illustrate ideas becomes really scarce? Well, you get a space advocacy movement on the rocks, space programs that cannot effectively relate to the public, and a field of space literature that has–with the exception of astronomy photobooks and books written by the small community of science celebrities–steadily declined in production value, and thus readership, until it’s virtually dead. In a few more years everything not authored by Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson will be self-published and hopelessly obscure, selling a few crude print-on-demand or eBook copies a year.

At the start of the space advocacy movement, shortly after WWII, the cost and complexity of getting photos to mass print media was still such that most everything in our culture still had to be hand-drawn to be shared with the public. The fairly sophisticated skill set of commercial and technical illustration was ubiquitous. It was easy for authors–science writers of the time in particular–to find collaborators for art and books on the subject of space were all lavishly illustrated. Though it’s biggest amplifier was probably Cold War gamesmanship, a key factor to the success of the space advocacy movement was the ability of people like Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, and Chesley Bonstell to transform, through media, the general cultural aesthetic perspective of space. Before those guys, it was still pretty much Flash Gordon and Barsoom. But after them, and in partnership with the likes of Walt Disney (himself a futurist), space became something much closer, more real, more plausible, and imminently important. It was this which won us civilian space programs rather than military ‘space forces’ for whom strategic military logic would not get us beyond orbit. We see of the aerospace visualizations of the time as anachronistic, yet there was more intellectual content to it than most of what we see today. Science fiction art–and not a little supposedly realistic industrial design–has largely reverted back to Flash Gordon and Barsoom with a contemporary style applied. It’s all fantasy. There is no difference between Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

As advancing reprographics technology pushed illustration into a shrinking group of market niches, the skill set declined–along with, to be frank, the general level of education among artists. (it’s now really rather rare for professional artists and designers to have a college-level general science education) We can see this in the decline of things like courtroom illustration–once a remaining haven for journalistic illustration and now so generally incomprehensible as to be the butt of jokes. We see it in the gradual decline of illustration quality in children’s science books–particularly by the late 1970s. And we see it in the worsening scarcity of illustration in all books on the subject of space and the future. Today, most books about space are forced to recycle NASA space art and photos going back 40 years. How can you possibly cultivate a coherent picture of the future from a contemporary perspective using 40 year old media? We generally take for granted the visual media that flows around us. Surely, the 3D computer graphics modeling we see so much of has now replaced illustration and that should have made it all easy, right? But there’s a dirty little secret about 3D modeling. It’s not drawing. It’s model-making. It is a very different skill set nowhere near as efficient in time and cost to the hand-drawn illustration common in the mid 20th century. Only the likes of James Cameron can now afford to comprehensively illustrate a space mission concept–which he once did. Even NASA has a difficult time with this.

I think this is a much overlooked issue for the question of the contemporary cultural relevance of space. Even if you have a much more relevant vision of space development, it’s now very difficult to publicly share it. So how can anyone really get it?

Also how we get there is important too. Single large rockets … literally not scalable. Build the ship in orbit via shuttles (oh wait), well smaller launches. So then some guys from the ISS could travel over to the moon vehicle and take a leisurely trip to the moon come back with some rocks etc. Checkout the vehicle, refuel, new lot of scientists could then make another leisurely trip to the moon. After a few of these you might start to think … you know maybe we should just set up camp on the moon. Yeah, this is somewhat tongue in cheek but if you have a moon vehicle that only ever goes between ISS and the moon then you don’t have to worry about reentry and other things. Smaller reliable rocket engines. I don’t need to point out that this is not new, this is how many considered the exploration of the solar system would be done, and it still makes a lot of sense.

Consider Space-X and its launchers.   The guidance systems benefit enormously from decades of advance in electronics, driven mostly be mundane terrestrial applications.   Even the very significant welding technique they use, Friction Stir Welding, was invented as a general purpose technique (in England in the early 1990s), not for the purpose of building rockets.

Once technical advance slows elsewhere and the spin-ons stop, then it could make sense to drive space technology purely for its own sake.  Before then, though, space is going to have to justify itself in the here and now.

rocketry as we know it is a dead end technology.  you put something (or somebody) on top of a disintegrating totem pole filled with tons of high explosive and light the fuse.  exciting, but also noisy, polluting, inefficient and dangerous.  let’s do something much more useful, efficient and safe.

plan A: build some big lasers and their power plants on the ground.  use laser-ablation propulsion to get spacecraft to orbit.  you carry a relatively small mass of propellant but it’s still noisy, polluting (though less so) and dangerous (but at least no high explosives).  not a bad stopgap technology though.  after the initial investment the cost per shot is relatively cheap (hundreds of dollars/pound as opposed to thousands).  this is something we could build starting today.  we have high-energy laser knowledge from stuff like the laser fusion program and some DOD things out there.

plan B: build a large spaceship in orbit (use plan A).  go find a big carbonaceous chondrite asteroid (you’ll need it for the carbon later).  install a mass driver on the asteroid and use it as a rocket to move the asteroid into geosynchronous orbit.  start mining the asteroid for the carbon while installing a factory to make carbon nanotubes and weave them into cables.  lower the cable down toward earth while counterbalancing with waste rock on a cable in the opposite direction.  when the cable gets to the ground tie it off and start climbing.  it would be easy enough to add power cables and elevator tracks to the cable while building it so when it touches down you just add the elevator cars and connect it to the grid (or better yet, to solar panels at the high end).  bingo – instant elevator to orbit.  quiet, non-polluting, efficient and safe.

here’s where the moon comes in.  plan B is something for the future but we almost have the technology for the cable now.  however, what if the cable breaks?  that’s why you build the first one on the moon – nobody dies if it crashes.  also, the lunar cable is lighter and uses less material so it’s cheaper.

if we want to get into space in a big way we’ll need something like plan B.  the reasons for building it are numerous.  cheap access to orbit is just one thing.  if you go out to the far end of the cable (where the counterweight is) your velocity can be greater than escape velocity so to go to the moon or mars or elsewhere you just step off at the right time.  with multiple elevators/cable the amount of stuff that could be lifted (and returned) is enormous.  you could even use it as an extension cord to power the earth from solar arrays in orbit.  think of it, unlimited, cheap, non-polluting power.  if we ever decide to build Plan B we should start plans to take over some small country on the equator now so we have someplace to call our own for a base station (or just tie it off to an old aircraft carrier filled with cement).

there’s also a plan C.  but i ain’t tellin’.

when you explore there isn’t foreknowledge of what you’ll find out and it doesn’t really matter what you learn or what interesting thing you see.  no matter what, someone, somewhere will turn that new bit of knowledge or that new thing into wealth.  the new idea/thing will be transformed by some scientist (lab rat) or technologist (geek) into a process, the process into product and when the product is manufactured it means jobs and money.  and those jobs and money will be taxed which, in turn, pays for more exploration (or at least that’s the way it’s supposed to work).

all of the technology for a project like going to the moon has to be developed beforehand here on the ground (at least so far).  that means jobs here and money spent here.  all of that technology has spinoffs that generate more jobs and wealth down here.  all the stuff learned by exploring gets added to that so the multiplier here is pretty good.

some have argued that all the exploration could be better done by robots and rovers.  robots are a good way of getting a preliminary look around but they are no substitute for human hands eyes and brains on site.  if a robot gets stuck it stops and waits for a human to figure out what to do.  this may take days and involves simulations, programming changes, trying small things to see if it improves the situation and, hopefully, developing a solution that is then, finally, transmitted back to the robot.  with a human on site the solution is usually obvious (kick it, or something similar) and accomplished almost immediately.  then the human races off to do more exploring (probably at 60 mph, unlike the robot that moves at about 1 mph).

That, my friend, was a fairytale. Something one told the rubes, to support you with grunt work and tax money, while you plotted to make your grab for the fabled lost-city-of-gold.

Really?  Joking aside, was there ever such an endeavour, as such you describe?

112:55:38 Cernan: (With a slight tone of authority, to Jack)
You’re allowed two quick looks out the window, one now and one when we pitchover.

(Or at least he thought that was his job, anyway)