Despite the best efforts of the evil, hairless savannah-monkeys of Sol III, I remain alive, and here I am to prove it by actually crawling out from under my nice, comfortable rock to post to you all this evening.
So what's up? Well, as you've seen a few hours ago, I've been voluntold by the Fourth Man to talk a bit about Mike Melvill's flight this morning. Now, There's certainly no shortage of articles about the flight, so I won't bore you by recounting the launch and landing themselves in much detail. You can see for yourself at the semi-infinite pile of news stories sprouting via Google News. Either way, I'm doped up on cold medication right now, so while I'm spaced out I might as well stick my head in the clouds and share my hallucinatory insights with you all.
I had the mixed blessing of being home with the Plague today, so I got to follow the entire launch, separation, and landing live through a few seperate sources, mainly NASA TV's coverage, which actually failed to suck this time around. The flight itself was something else, especially since Melvill seemed briefly about to drill a hole in the desert when he briefly lost control. Regardless, he went back to showing the world just why he's that paradox that's called an old test pilot and brought it through alright. Before and after - especially after - there were quite a few noteworthy goings-on, mostly your standard Statements of Vision (which, unlike certain peoples' statements, can now be said to have some deed dripped over the words), as well as challenges for upcoming years.
The space-advocate community - both those who were there, and those like myself who came after - have sharp and still-painful memories of the decline of the first part of the space age, between the final Apollo missions and the Challenger disaster. While the realization that (shock! Awe!) it isn't perfectly safe - and the Soviet Union's decline killing the need for oneupsmanship - did a lot to turn the public, and through it the space agencies themselves, off major manned operations, there's also the simple fact that the movement ran out of steam. From Sputnik through to Apollo 11, there was always Something To Do Next that people actually acknowledged was The Next Thing. After the moon landing, that petered out. Some people thought the contest was won and that we should all go home; others looked to orbital facilities like Skylab; still others wanted to go further, either taking a shot at Mars or continuing to work with the Moon. The first option obviously sucks, and the third would be preferable to most of the serious advocates, aside from the cost and lack of a "then what?" attached. As a result, we've frittered away a generation and most of another bumbling around in orbit, aside from the admittedly spectacular unmanned missions that are still going on.
With the current crop of people hanging around or participating in the X-Prize project, there seems to be an almost desperate desire to avoid that trap. As a result, we're seeing something that's rare in large-scale advocacy or even commercial groups - something to the effect of intelligent, layered plans. The X-Prize itself set a specific, attainable goal that is already starting to spin off some commercial enterprises[1]. There's implications of followup steps, both from the X-Prize organizers and from some of the teams - especially Scaled Composites, who have been hinting that they have a Tier Two (or Three or..) to complement their Tier One sitting around in the design phases. The prize method has been demonstrated to be somewhat successful, and so we're already seeing the next step in this with a $50 million prize offered for an actual orbit. On top of that, things like the X-Prize Cup, the perverted - yet glorious! - love-child of the X-Prize itself and professional racing - give even the losers of the current competition something to shoot for. Someone who came in second - or, say, twelfth - this time around could stand to win some notoriety and success in 2006, or 2007, or 2010, should the enthusiasm to keep this up maintain itself.
On top of that, though, there's the long-term vision. Rutan's made it clear he wants permanent manned space presesnce. Many of the speakers - most of those names I missed through a fusilade of sneezes, unfortunately, but I'll try to dig them up - said similar things. Everyone has the long-term goals of industrialization or settlement sitting in their more distant crosshairs, however. The important thing is that they're not talking like they're going to jump straight to it.
A lot of really, really ambitious space programs have been proposed or even arrogantly announced in the past twenty years. Most of them have had two problems: they lack any semblance of incremental steps, and they tended to have no point, no "then what?" President Bush's announcement of a Mars-shot (which, it appears, the NFZ has been on the ball with as far as our initial criticism went) has these problems - straight into a fairly lofty program, boom, we're on Mars. "Then what?" The question has no real answer, and as a result the whole affair starts to come off feeling rather pointless. Political statements aside, it wasn't going to go anywhere significant because it wasn't meant to.
On the other extreme are the projects that Have A Point, however vague - "industrialize space," "spread humanity throughout the cosmos," "terraform Mars so we don't have to venusiform Earth," etc. These are good plans, both in the pragmatic and in the noble sense. The problem is, most of the people throwing them around fail to provide the slightest hint of a path to their end point. If we're going to, say, settle Mars, we need some heavy industry to build stuff to get there, as well as to build stuff once we're there. Hell, we'll need some way to get that industry into position in the first place. A lot of this is just handwaved into place, in a kind of underpants-gnome-esque "Step three: profit!" sense. This attracts as much (deserved!) derision as a program which has no particular useful point to it in the first place.
This time around, we might be seeing something different. These are small steps - first we'll send three people a hundred kilometers up and down safely. Then what? Well, let's try something a little harder. Say, three to orbit, or thirty to a hundred kilometers, or maybe hurl ten people from London to Beijing in two hours without a stopover. Then what? Well, we'll try something a little harder, all the while building on what's been established before, all the while growing a little more ambitious, all the while gaining a few more benefits, first commercial, then humanitarian or industrial, from what we've done so far. It's not as dramatic as "Hey! Let's spend the next ten years doing nothing but preparing for a Mars shot!" of course, but it's a whole lot more possible.
There's a lot going on on a lot of time scales. There's the stuff the current crop of activists and engineers are being challenged to do Right Now. There's the obstacle the next hill over, which people are certainly preparing for already. Just in case those aren't enough to occupy folks' attentions and enthusiasms, the movers and shakers of the current movement have some real, specific long-term goals, for ten or twenty or fifty years from now, that are worth pursuing and will become more attainable with every baby step the new crop of spacers take each day.
The last time the dreams of space exploration went beyond the dreamers' reach, we grew jaded and cynical, started looking in on ourselves, and preferred to romanticize the Apollo or Shuttle programs instead of trying something new. This time, there seems to be something a little different. The big dreams are still far beyond our current reach. However, a lot of talented, adventurous, and longsighted people - and even some who are "just" wealthy or opportunistic, but they're helping too - are building a ladder made of lots of little dreams to that big one, and they're building it in such a way that each goal just might be within reach of the previous one, all the way to the top.
It's not such a bad way to do things.
1 - Please don't hurt me for that.
Posted by zibblsnrt at September 29, 2004 08:35 PM