WEEKLY WHINE

Space down to Earth?

It's taken a while for space travel to be accessible to normal people. Since the Wrights sent the Flyer [I think that's what it was called] on its maiden voyage in 1903, several folks, known as aviators, flew planes all over the place, but nobody else did. It wasn't until the 1950s and 1960s that air travel became widespread in the private sector, although it existed to some extent before then. This analogy is certainly the most overused, but it is nonetheless a good analogy.

Compare this to space travel. The first humans entered space in 1961, and since then, it's been only people known as astronauts or cosmonauts. So far, the private sector has been closed from space. People from the private sector, that is. Independent firms have access to launch vehicles through NASA. For that matter, independent firms make launch vehicles. Some belive that NASA's launch vehicles are its own construction, that it makes everything it launches. That's only true for some things. For the most part, the Space Shuttle components come from separate contractors, but it doesn't have to be the separate contractors that put it together. There are other launch vehicles, though, that are built entirely by other companies.

Regardless of who builds what, there is still the fact that it's not easy to go to space. There is the selection process, training, waiting, and waiting. About two months ago, I met some members of the "Astronaut Class of 1998", defined as that group of astronauts selected by NASA in 1998. They had been in the selection process for at least a year, some longer. They have been training for about six months, I think, but they still have at least a year before the first of them is assigned to a mission. Then, it's more training for at least nine months, probably beyond a year, before they actually get the chance to go to low Earth orbit. Even then, they don't get to do very much. Some will assist in constructing the International Space Station, though not many; they told me that NASA wants experienced crews doing that. Some will be on servicing missions for spacecraft such as the Hubble Space Telescope. Others will launch or retrieve satellites. None will go to the Moon or to Mars in the foreseeable future.

That's a problem, since that's one of the most important parts of space exploration to begin with. The major reason to send human crews anywhere is for detailled scientific observations. For the most part, many of the things that NASA is doing with the Shuttle could be automated; in fact, some are. Recently, NASA has become obsessed with "faster, cheaper, better" ways to explore space. Humans may not be as fast or as cheap as roboticised probes about Luna or Mars, but they are better by orders of magnitude. Given the appropriate scientific payload, humans can perform a wide array of experiments on location anywhere, assuming we can send them there. That, of course, turns out the most important part of the procedure.

Could commercialisation of space be the way to liberate it? NASA's advantage is that its motive is not profit. It desires not money but accomplishments: landing humans on other bodies, learning to predict solar flares, discovering the inner workings of magnetars, looking for usable resources on Mars, and the like. It's not the same as maximising profit, but it's not entirely different either. The more NASA does, the more the global economy as a whole prospers. Space sells: the National Air and Space Museum is one of the most popular tourist attractions on the planet, and the two major space centres, Kennedy and Johnson, each sport immense tourist facilities. The Star Wars films were amongst the most popular and most lucrative films ever made, and other films about space go to theatres annually. On the day of Mars Pathfinder's landing, its site set what was then a Web record for hits in a 24 hour period. Space Legos are probably the most abundant, and there are many other space toys present. Space can also benefit the economy by providing new products that had been designed for astronauts but which are just as good for normal people as well: Velcro, Tang, Dustbusters. Aerospace engineering can come back to other types of engineering, yielding new and improved ways to build lightweight structures that are capable of withstanding more stress. The standard of living has improved with each space success, and this is surely a mere beginning.

Earlier this week, a potential step in that direction was taken with the unveiling of the X-34, a reusable vehicle that can carry very small payload to the edge of space. It uses a single stage that burns kerosene. Overall, it's too small to do anything actually useful, but it is being used as a test vehicle to determine how to reduce the costs of processing such reusable launch vehicles. It plays a role in the long term development of spacecraft, but for the time being, nothing much has changed.

The results of the X-34 studies should be useful for other companies in the aerospace industry. There is, for example, the X Prize being awarded to the private company that can fulfill a certain set of requirements, including launching a three member crew into Earth orbit, returning them safely to the ground, and launching the same vehicle within two weeks. This will probably turn out to be an important step toward the commercialisation of space, as well as toward enabling ordinary people to go there. The process has begun.