Fifty Years In Space

October 4 marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. That event is generally considered the dawn of the Space Age.

Sputnik itself lasted only three months, but in the five decades since it first circled the globe, space has become a busy place. There are now scores of satellites orbiting the Earth. Humans have walked on the Moon and there's a permanent station in low orbit. Probes have visited all the other planets, investigated asteroids, and smacked into comets.

Satellites have proved so useful nobody even questions their value any more. They have saved countless thousands of lives by monitoring weather. The GPS constellation has revolutionized navigation, giving anyone the ability to pinpoint their exact location in the world. Spy satellites look down on rogue states and terrorist camps. Communication satellites link the world. If something knocked down everything in orbit the world would be blind, deaf, and lost.

And yet . . .

Where's the Moon base? Where's the Mars colony? Where's the giant atomic Jupiter spaceship? Satellites and space probes have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of visionaries like Arthur C. Clarke or Hermann Oberth. But manned space exploration stalled out after the Apollo program. Why?

One reason is that our ability to make amazingly tough, capable unmanned machines got better much faster than our ability to keep people alive for long periods in space. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers have been roaming the surface of Mars for almost four years, taking pictures and examining rocks. Each robot, including booster, parachutes, and heat shield, weighed about a ton at launch. Sending a single man to Mars and supplying him for that long would require at least fifty tons. And that man on Mars would suffer bone and muscle degeneration during the long flight in zero gravity, he'd have a higher risk of cancer from radiation exposure, and he might just go bonkers from the isolation.

In short, unmanned missions cost millions. Manned spaceflight costs billions.

But there is one thing unmanned exploration lacks. It's not fun. Sure, you can get pictures direct from Mars over the Web, and that's incredibly cool -- but it's fundamentally no more cool than Webcam pictures from Antarctica.

Space enthusiasts like me don't just want pictures. We don't even want to hear about millionaires taking glorified carnival rides to low orbit. We want adventure. We want to hear the first words from the surface of Mars. We want to hear astronauts describing the cloud tops of Saturn. But economics, that dismal science, says no. So what will bring about large-scale permanent human presence in space? What will take people past low orbit again?

I'll discuss that in Part II next week.

Comments

[Rainer Gerhards]

I fully agree with your post. Human space flight provides the inspiration that we all need to push things forward. I am a space addict since long, and I will finally be able to view my first space shuttle launch ever (if you are interested, you can read my blog at http://spacelaunch.gerhards.net ). Unmanned missions have great scientific value, but manned missions help us grow to now horizons!

Rainer

[Mr. Cavin]

"There are now scores of satellites orbiting the Earth."

Dozens? Here's a neat little JAVA tracker, courtesy of NASA, that provides positioning and orbit information on some nine hundred of them. It takes a minute to load.

http://science.nasa.gov/realtime/jtrack/3d/JTrack3D.html

Correcting for classified and secret satellites would probably add quite a few more. Not to mention all the ones I've been launching from the backyard.