The end of the Space Age

Space exploration

The Economist, Jun 30th 2011 | from the print editionhttp://www.economist.com/node/18897425
 
Inner space is useful. Outer space is history
How big is the Earth?
 
Any encyclopedia will give you an answer:
its equatorial diameter is 12,756km, or,
for those who prefer to think that way, 7,926 miles.
 
Ah, but then there is the atmosphere.
 
Should that count?
 
Perhaps the planet’s true diameter
is actually nearer 13,000km,
including all its air.
 
But even that may no longer be an adequate measure.
 
For the Earth now reaches farther still.
 
The vacuum surrounding it buzzes with artificial satellites,
forming a sort of technosphere beyond the atmosphere.
 
Most of these satellites circle
only a few hundred kilometres above
the planet’s solid surface.
 
Many, though, form a ring
like Saturn’s at a distance of 36,000km,
the place at which an object takes
24 hours to orbit the Earth
and thus hovers continuously
over the same point of the planet.
 
Viewed this way,
the Earth is quite a lot larger
than the traditional textbook answer.
 
And viewed this way,
the Space Age has been
a roaring success.
 
Telecommunications, weather forecasting,
agriculture, forestry and even the search for minerals
have all been revolutionised. So has warfare.
 
No power can any longer mobilise its armed forces in secret.
 
The exact location of every building on the planet can be known.
 
And satellite-based global-positioning systems
will guide a smart bomb to that location on demand.
 
Yet none of this was the Space Age
as envisaged by the enthusiastic “space cadets”
who got the whole thing going.
 
Though engineers like Wernher von Braun,
who built the rockets for both
Germany’s second-world-war V2 project
and America’s cold-war Apollo project,
sold their souls to the military establishment
in order to pursue their dreams of space travel
by the only means then available,
most of them had their eyes on a higher prize.
 
“First Men to a Geostationary Orbit”
does not have quite the same ring
as “First Men to the Moon”,
a book von Braun wrote in 1958.
 
The vision being sold in the 1950s and 1960s,
when the early space rockets were flying,
was of adventure and exploration.
 
The facts of the American space project
and its Soviet counterpart
elided seamlessly into the fantasy
of “Star Trek” and “2001: A Space Odyssey”.
 
Other planets may or may not have been inhabited by aliens,
but they, and even other stars, were there for the taking.
 
That the taking would begin in the lifetimes
of people then alive was widely assumed to be true.
 
No longer.
 
It is quite conceivable that 36,000km
will prove the limit of human ambition.
 
It is equally conceivable that the fantasy-made-reality
of human space flight will return to fantasy.
 
It is likely that the Space Age is over.
 
Bye-bye, sci-fi
 
Today’s space cadets will,
no doubt, oppose that claim vigorously.
 
They will, in particular,
point to the private ventures
of people like Elon Musk in America
and Sir Richard Branson in Britain,
who hope to make human space flight
commercially viable.
 
Indeed, the enterprise of such people might do just that.
 
But the market seems small and vulnerable.
 
One part, space tourism, is a luxury
service that is, in any case,
unlikely to go beyond low-Earth orbit at best
(the cost of getting even as far as the moon
would reduce the number of potential clients to a handful).
 
The other source of revenue is ferrying astronauts
to the benighted International Space Station (ISS),
surely the biggest waste of money,
at $100 billion and counting,
that has ever been built in the name of science.
 
The reason for that second objective
is also the reason for thinking 2011
might, in the history books of the future,
be seen as the year when
the space cadets’ dream finally died.
 
It marks the end of America’s space-shuttle programme,
whose last mission is planned to launch on July 8th.
 
The shuttle was supposed to be a reusable truck
that would make the business
of putting people into orbit quotidian.
 
Instead, it has been nothing but trouble.
 
Twice, it has killed its crew.
 
If it had been seen as the experimental vehicle it actually is,
that would not have been a particular cause for concern;
test pilots are killed all the time.
 
But the pretence was maintained
that the shuttle was a workaday craft.
 
The technical term used by NASA,
“Space Transportation System”, says it all.
 
But the shuttle is now over.
 
The ISS is due to be de-orbited,
in the inelegant jargon of the field, in 2020.
 
Once that happens, the game will be up.
 
There is no appetite to return to the moon,
let alone push on to Mars, El Dorado of space exploration.
 
The technology could be there,
but the passion has gone—
at least in the traditional
spacefaring powers, America and Russia.
 
The space cadets’ other hope, China,
might pick up the baton.
 
Certainly it claims it wishes,
like President John Kennedy 50 years ago,
to send people to the surface of the moon
and return them safely to Earth.
 
But the date for doing so seems elastic.
 
There is none of Kennedy’s
“by the end of the decade” bravura
about the announcements from Beijing.
 
Moreover, even if China succeeds
in matching America’s distant triumph,
it still faces the question, “what next?”
 
The chances are that the Chinese government,
like Richard Nixon’s in 1972, will say “job done”
and pull the plug on the whole shebang.
 
No bucks, no Buck Rogers
 
With luck, robotic exploration of the solar system will continue.
 
But even there, the risk is of diminishing returns.
 
Every planet has now been visited,
and every planet with a solid surface
bar Mercury has been landed on.
 
Asteroids, moons and comets
have all been added to the stamp album.
 
Unless life turns up on Mars,
or somewhere even more unexpected,
public interest in the whole thing is likely to wane.
 
And it is the public that pays for it all.
 
The future, then, looks bounded
by that new outer limit of planet Earth,
the geostationary orbit.
 
Within it, the buzz of activity
will continue to grow and fill the vacuum.
 
This part of space will be tamed by humanity,
as the species has tamed so many wildernesses in the past.
 
Outside it, though, the vacuum will remain empty.
 
There may be occasional forays,
just as men sometimes leave
their huddled research bases in Antarctica
to scuttle briefly across the ice cap
before returning, for warmth,
food and company, to base.
 
But humanity’s dreams of a future
beyond that final frontier have, largely, faded.
 
More:
The space shuttlehttp://www.economist.com/node/18895018
 
The military uses of spacehttp://www.economist.com/node/18895010