Share Facebook

Twitter

Whatsapp

Mail

Whatsapp The One Hundred Year Starship Project and other speculative space exploration programs could fill an innately human need to stretch the boundaries of achievement and creativity

The restless desire to explore is now driving the space travel experts into speculative long term projects that aim to develop high speed starships. As Antony Funnell writes, the experiments are unlikely to bear fruit for generations, but enthusiasm amongst researchers is still strong, driven by a need innate to the human condition to expand, create, and redefine.

In his latest book Becoming Human By Design the renowned theorist Professor Tony Fry talks of the ‘indivisible relation between the formation of the world of human fabrication and the making of mankind itself.' If correct, there is much to be gauged from the output of human activity about the inward nature of humanity. This may seem an abstract idea, but it helps to explain our ongoing fascination with space exploration.

In 2012, the former Space Shuttle astronaut Mae Jemison was appointed to head an initiative, funded in part by NASA and the premier US Defence research facility DARPA, called ‘The One Hundred Year Starship Project’. On the face of it, it seems an unrealistic endeavour: to raise awareness of, and support for, the idea of interstellar travel. I say unrealistic not because it can’t be done, but because even Jemison herself concedes that with current technology, such a journey would take around 70,000 years to complete—making it the ultimate in long-haul travel.

So why do it? Maybe the reason has much to do with Professor Fry’s ‘indivisible link’. It’s perhaps too easy to see our ongoing fascination with space travel in strictly economic or geo-political terms—as we often do. Arguably our interest in space is the ultimate test of what we as humans can physically achieve and create. And it’s that urge to create that then in turn helps to define our very nature.

Two years ago, while touring Australia, Professor Jim Bell from the Department of Astronomy at Cornell University, a key figure in the development of the Mars Rover program, explained it to me like this: ‘I think that the main benefits that we get from exploring space… are similar to the benefits that we get from music and the arts, the theatre, they're intangible. There's no way to necessarily know that knowledge will be useful in any practical way, but who knows? I think that part of what we have the luxury of doing as a civilisation is spending a tiny amount of our immense national wealth on doing these things that inspire, educate and provide knowledge.’

Which is not to say that tangible benefits are not sought; or that the ambitions that many scientists and technologists have for long-distance human space flight will necessarily have no real world outcome. Instead it could be argued that our human desire to explore, to know, drives our technological development, which in turn fuels our need for further exploration.

Inter-planetary economy

‘Short-term thinking comes from essentially closed-in thinking that comes from living in an already defined environment,’ says physicist Gregory Benford from the University of California, Irvine, who has served on the White House Council on Space Policy and advised NASA and the US Department of Energy. Like most of the space scientists I’ve interviewed for my program Future Tense Professor Benford’s motivations and aspirations appear to be both lofty and pragmatic simultaneously. There seems to be no conflict between the two.

‘We've essentially explored the entire planet and there are few mysteries left—perhaps the deep sea. But the entire solar system beckons beyond, and not only is that a terrifically interesting place to explore, but future human prosperity will rely upon those resources,’ Professor Benford told me recently.

‘Where are we going to get the metals and many, many other things, like Helium-3 that you will need in fusion reactors, because we know we don't have enough on the surface of the Earth. We're going to have to go elsewhere to get the materials we need,’ he said. ‘And that will also expand greatly the human prospect because these will inevitably harbour fresh human societies and new human ideas, new politics, new societies. Everything will change, driven by the goal of building an inter-planetary economy.’

Asteroid mining and Helium-3

Helium-3 is a resource that comes up repeatedly when people talk about the need for space exploration. Scarce on Earth, but abundant in our solar system, Helium-3 is a non-radioactive isotope of helium which many scientists believe could help develop ‘second wave’ nuclear reactors free of the dangers associated with conventional nuclear power, and a replacement for uranium and coal. It was something of a focal point at an international conference on asteroid mining held recently in Sydney.

Helium-3 also happens to be the key to furthering the goal of interstellar travel, some in the scientific community believe. Between 1973 and 1978 the British Interplanetary Society ran a research initiative called Project Daedalus which set out to design the blueprints for a working interplanetary spacecraft. The form of propulsion they believed showed greatest promise for powering long-distance space travel was nuclear fusion powered by Helium-3. And more than three decades on, Helium-3 is also the fuel of choice for those working on the successor to Project Daedalus, a project jointly funded by the Interplanetary Society and a not-for-profit organisation called the Tau Zero Foundation. It’s known as Project Icarus.

The head of Icarus, Dr Richard Obousy, concedes Helium-3 might not be the fuel eventually used to propel spacecraft into a distant solar system, if and when a launch happens, but he says his team decided to stick with the resource because of the fact that it’s a known quantity.

‘What Project Icarus is all about is a rapid interstellar transit,' Dr Obousy says. 'And to get to the closest stars on timescales of a human lifetime, the spacecraft is going to need to be travelling on the order of about 10 per cent of the speed of light, so that's over 18,000 miles per second. So it's incredibly fast. There are two forms of nuclear energy, there's nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. We know both work. We have, for all intents and purposes, mastered nuclear fission. We have liberated energy from thermo nuclear fusion but not in the controlled method that scientists are working towards, but we know that it works. You just look up at our sun during the day to know that thermonuclear fusion works and it liberates vast amounts of energy. There is credibility associated with it.’

Credibility perhaps, but with a project of such grand ambition, and such immense timelines, there is caution about putting all one’s eggs in the same basket. Says Ms Jemison: ‘One of the biggest challenges is to keep people from trying to design every step of the way right now, because we don't know. And as soon as you start saying “I know the answer right now”, then you're probably going to cut off other avenues.’

Two century lead time

It’s a point acknowledged by Marc Millis from the Tau Zero Foundation, the former head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project. He says it’s really too soon to ‘pick any favourites’.

‘Let me put it to you this way, in three different studies, one done by looking at the amount of energy available, one done by financing and one done by technology, all of them came in that there is still going to be about two centuries before we could do a serious interstellar flight,’ Mr Millis says. ‘So even if you pulled off the technology for a fusion rocket, to develop the infrastructure to mine enough helium-3 to fuel it, it's still going to take a very long time. In other words, you could make the technology but to have the amount of energy to put into it takes even longer than developing the technology.’

Asteroid mining, like interstellar space flight, is an area of scientific interest and endeavour that has largely slipped under the public radar. But it’s an area that’s increasingly gaining serious scientific attention. Like interstellar space travel, even those who believe it’s currently unviable, concede that it is technically feasible. After all, in late 2005, a Japanese Hayabusa space probe landed on, and took a sample from, an asteroid called 25143 Itokawa, while early in 2013 NASA’s Curiosity Rover successfully drilled into the surface of Mars in the first, although admittedly small-scale, exercise in off-Earth mining. Teams from universities to private robotics firms like Honeybee Robotics in New York are now actively engaged in developing the sorts of heavy-duty equipment that will be required for digging in a zero-gravity environment; in many cases in cooperation with NASA. In fact, Honeybee Robotics was the company which developed the drilling equipment recently used by the Mars Rover.

As with interstellar flight, those involved in asteroid mining follow a similar circular logic of vision and pragmatism. Their goal is to advance the potential of the human species by first engaging in the seemingly more mundane enterprise of mining. And the more they can mine, they argue, the more they can then advance the human dream.

There are now two serious off-earth mining companies scouting for investors and potential future clients. Both are US companies. Planetary Resources lists among its investors Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt and film director James Cameron, while Deep Space Industries says it hopes to begin the first stage of operations by as soon as 2016.

Of interest though is the fact that both see money to be made—at least initially—in becoming a miner and supplier of fuel to clients already operating in space. Any talk of bringing minerals back to Earth is quickly relegated to the secondary wish list.

Gas stations in outer space

Rick Tumlinson, the founder and chairman of Deep Space Industries, says he sees grand potential for what he and others are trying to do. But he says there’s already a market open and ready for anyone who can help cut the costs of refuelling current communications satellites and other space ventures like the international space station.

‘The idea is to supply the needs of space communications exploration and other activities first,' Mr Tumlinson says. We’re going to be the gas station providers. We’re wanting to be the tanks that fill up the gas stations and let other people deal with the actual interfaces, you know putting the nozzles in and filling up the space craft or satellites.’

Once again pragmatism and vision. In some ways asteroid mining and interstellar flight is so removed from most people’s everyday lives, and so huge in its ambition, that it can be hard to imagine it as a genuine pursuit. It’s the stuff of sci-fi. But as we in the 21st century know all too well, the stuff of science fiction can pretty quickly become science fact in an age of exponential technological development.

Still, that issue of credibility remains a significant hurdle, according to the University of California, Irvine’s Professor Benford. ‘Yes, star flight is a very, very big, hard problem, but so was winged flight through the atmosphere 200 years ago or even 100 years ago. You could do it with balloons but you couldn't control it. So the whole point about thinking about the future is to have some concrete goal in mind and then discover a pathway that leads that way, and what we've learned from prior human history is that prosperity comes from these steps because you are building a structure every step of the way.’

And, adds former astronaut Ms Jemison: ‘There is something that I would say when you talk about how daunting this is and whether or not people say that it's not possible. It's a term that I first heard associated with movies, and that term is "suspending disbelief". At some point in time we have to move forward by suspending disbelief. We have to say for just a second that I believe I can fly. Otherwise we would not have aeroplanes now, because it was a truism that people can't fly. That was known. So somebody had to suspend disbelief long enough to allow it to happen. And what we have to do right now is to suspend disbelief long enough that we can actually get to the capabilities that would allow us to go to another star.'

This article was originally published on 26 February 2013. Find out more at Future Tense.