Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures

by Ed Finn

  All our assets?

  Pace held out his hands in a kind of embrace.

  Everything that’s up here under our management. To quote one of my heroes: They’re our assets now, and we’re not giving them back.

  Why tell me?

  You’re smarter than you like to let on. There could be a place for you in our ground operations.

  Sergei shrugged. Pace shook his head.

  Hate to see expertise go to waste. Here’s my private email. Let me know if you’re interested.

  That night, strapped in his sleeping bag after Pace and his pilot had departed the hab, Sergei thought it over.

  In 2029, the asteroid Apophis had crossed Earth’s orbit. A scary close approach, closer than many geosynchronous satellites. The thing was 350 meters across. Not extinction-level, but many times Tunguska. A one-gigaton impact was nothing to sneeze at.

  Sergei had been in space then, had watched it fly by. It brightened to third magnitude, moved through about 40 degrees of sky in an hour, faded, was gone. It was due back in 2036. Odds of impact were only a few in a million, but Sergei saw how useful that recent near miss and impending return could be to a system selling itself as asteroid defense. The nuclear option against asteroids made no sense, but politics made no sense. The meme of “protection” was more powerful than reason.

  As to Pace’s longer game, he didn’t buy it for a couple of reasons. First, the U.S. would never hand over control of nukes. They’d invented them; they’d become the global hegemon with them, and more or less remained so because of them. But: that “more or less.” Pace was lying, but his lie had exposed a deeper truth that eroded Sergei’s faith that the U.S. was the U.S. of his imagination.

  Second, it made no strategic sense to station weapons in space. Launch costs were high, platforms vulnerable, delivery difficult. Earth-based systems were the better choice.

  Unless the weapons were assembled in orbit. But why do that?

  He remembered a job he’d done months ago, EVA, in person, servicing an orbital nanofactory which produced microscopic pellets—flecks of material embedded in zero-G-perfected beads of glass. Manifests identified the material as LiDT: lithium deuteride and tritium. Mildly radioactive. He’d been curious, but had forgotten about it once he was safely back.

  Now he logged onto SIPRNet and searched classified scientific papers. Soon he found “Typical number of antiprotons necessary for fast ignition in LiDT.” Primary author: R. Fry, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The paper detailed the results of the first breakeven fusion reaction a few years back.

  That was it, then. The Livermore Lab had worked on fusion since its founding, 80 years ago. Its founding purpose was nuclear weapons, and its Grail was a pure fusion weapon. This bomb could be small and light and still hugely destructive. Sergei was no nuclear scientist, but those pellets were clearly nuclear fuel. They were being produced in orbit; and so could bombs that used them.

  What about delivery? Uber already had a thriving Earthside business in package delivery using small drones. Suppose you mounted a few dozen fusion bomblets on drones, packed those drones in a cheap capsule, dropped it from orbit, popped it open in the troposphere, where you could then MIRV the drones to individual targets. The only defense would be to destroy the capsule before it opened. If the capsule were small and stealthed, could it get through? He didn’t know.

  He could be wrong. Maybe they weren’t working on bombs. Maybe they wouldn’t succeed. Maybe it would take a long time. Maybe he should forget the whole thing.

  Kiyoshi and Sheila’s alcove was near his. Sergei could hear the thumps and moans of their tangled bodies through the thin walls. He allowed himself to think of Izumi, of tracing his finger slowly along the arch of her foot, hearing the intake of her breath, taking her big toe in his mouth and hearing her gasp.

  His heart and soul didn’t buy his maybes.

  Two days later he was on the way back to Earth. They would touch down in Kazakhstan. Kiyoshi and Sheila were also ending their shifts, while Boyle stayed on. Sergei looked away from the couple, strapped in across from him, their hands intertwined.

  It would make sense to take Pace’s offer. It had come wrapped in a veiled threat. Pace even had a point. Sergei had no sentiment for the nation-state. During World War II, Petersburg had been under siege for 900 days. Shostakovich had been there. The population went from 3.5 million to 600,000. In his lifetime, the endless Chechen wars. Was any of that right?

  Out the small window, sun slanted across a long wall of cumulonimbus over the coast of Venezuela. Somewhere below the clouds, American troops were liberating oilfields.

  “The right thing.” Who could know what that was? Imagine all the damned souls who believed they had done the right thing. Who may in fact have done the right thing, and found themselves damned anyway.

  And Sergei was ready, maybe, to finally stay below the clouds. To keep his feet on the ground, to have a normal life.

  But that was mere survival. There was a Russian saying, vsyo normal’no, “everything is normal.” No matter how screwed up: “everything is normal.” Also that American saying: “the new normal.” Universal surveillance was the new normal. Resource wars were the new normal. Climate refugees by the millions were the new normal. And if Pace got his way, his executive monopoly of “legitimate” violence would be the new normal.

  Sergei shut his eyes as the faint whistle of reentry grew to a thunder and the capsule juddered. Soon they’d be at four Gs. Pure falling, again, but now into the burning force of the still-living planet’s atmosphere. Still living for how much longer?

  Izumi had said to him once: You think a lot, but you follow your heart. He wasn’t sure he did, but he was glad she thought so, or at least that she said she did. He let the memory of that gladness echo in him. Maybe it was time to be sure.

  Who will take care of your heart and soul?

  The self is not the soul. The soul is what you were as a child, until you learned to protect it, enclosing that fluttering, vulnerable moth in the fist of the self.

  Outside, the heatshield roared and burned. A firedrake of plasma, the capsule passed over Helsinki, Petersburg, Moscow, specks in a crowded emptiness. He opened his eyes.

  He saw that both his fists were clenched tight. Very slowly he allowed his hands to open.

  Reflections on the “Dual Uses” of Space Innovation

  by G. Pascal Zachary

  Space has always been an important spawning ground for dual-use technologies and the associated issues raised by attempts at targeted innovation: that of unintended consequences, or the specter that many innovators do not get what they want—and, embarrassingly, sometimes get what they don’t want. Because space exploration is on its face directed at otherworldly terrain, emerging technologies in this domain are often justified by non-utilitarian or, more broadly, indirect reasons. In short, the joys of discovery and the delights of exploration for its own sake often dominate debates over the pursuit of both space travel and research into foundational technologies. The expansiveness and idealism of the rhetoric of space exploration means that technologies developed in pursuit of those lofty goals are open to a broad range of interpretations and applications, both military and civilian.

  One example that embodies the classic tensions in emerging space technologies lies at the center of Carter Scholz’s illuminating short story, “Vanguard 2.0,” about a privately conceived and funded attempt to retrieve the original Vanguard satellite. First launched by the U.S. Navy in 1958, the satellite continues to orbit the Earth, though communication with it ended in 1964. In a fascinating conceit, Scholz imagines the original Vanguard device, which was famously described as “the grapefruit satellite” by then–Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, being grabbed from space and replaced by a functionally-equivalent replica—all done in secret and merely so a wealthy space entrepreneur can personally possess the landmark artifact.

  This engineering achievement—of grabbing the Vanguard and replaci
ng it with a replica that behaves in the same way—demands tour de force writing by Scholz. He delivers beautifully on his space gambit, providing a story that exploits contemporary fears over the potential for a sizeable asteroid to strike Earth and cause a catastrophe. Scholz bakes into “Vanguard 2.0” a good deal of consternation and complexity arising from planned or imagined efforts to protect the planet against killer asteroids. Since the technologies created for humanitarian insurance against rogue asteroids resemble space-based weapons, these weapons could be turned against terrestrial targets, unless strong controls against this possibility are adopted.

  The challenges of managing the “dual-use” aspects of civilian technologies are not unique to space. Civilian nuclear energy remains problematic because of the role of reactors in providing essential fuel for nuclear weapons. The intense monitoring of civilian nuclear energy programs around the globe, notably those sponsored by the governments of Iran and North Korea, has received wide attention. And the difficulty of maintaining such scrutiny over long periods is well known, not least because of errors made by the U.S. government in characterizing Iraq’s nuclear programs under Saddam Hussein. That weapons of mass destruction can arise from civilian science and engineering remains the chief reason for interest in the riddles of “dual use” today. Not only do nuclear weapons of mass destruction continue to shadow the future of humanity, but a new set of bioengineering tools, which enable researchers to design novel organisms or reengineer existing organisms in menacing ways, raise additional concerns as to how that technology could be used to harm rather than help, potentially threatening all life on the planet.

  As Robert Rosner, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, observes in his preface to a 2016 study of dual-use technologies, commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “the dual nature of technological advances—capable of elevating humanity and unleashing destruction on it—long predates the total war and scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century.”[1] But the capacity of today’s dual-use technologies, Rosner adds, “drastically” exceeds the scale of mayhem introduced by bygone innovations such as the machine gun or even the chemical weapons that scarred thousands of combatants during the First World War.

  The “trickle-down” character of technological innovation can make constructing durable remedies more challenging. “What is high precision today,” notes Rosner, “is run-of-the-mill tomorrow.”[2] He adds: “capabilities once considered rare and extraordinary, and thus conducive to control, evolve to become the ordinary, slipping outside any possibility of enforceable regulation.”[3]

  The most salient contemporary example of “trickle-down” centers around a set of digital technologies—computers, the internet, strong cryptography, decentralized networks, the “dark web,” and even cyber-war. With deep roots in civilian technology—from supercomputers that simulated nuclear explosions to simple computer and video games to email to online commerce—“cyberwar” owed its early successes to freelance code writers, often flatteringly termed “hackers” by fans and critics alike. The path from hacking to attacking is surprisingly direct and another example, perhaps the most dramatic, of both dual-use and unintended consequences.

  A bit of history can shed light on the special nature of space-led technological advance. Exploration of the skies, by government, arose in the context of competition between the U.S. and Soviet Union over technological supremacy. Allies during the Second World War, each country deserved much credit for defeating the totalitarian regimes of Germany and Japan. But after the war’s end in August 1945, the U.S. and Soviet Union fell out over how to manage the postwar peace. By 1948, these two “superpowers” were arch geopolitical rivals, and nuclear weapons were the focus of their intense techno-scientific competition. By the mid-1950s, jet planes and guided missiles were the object of various “races.” When the Soviets launched their simple satellite Sputnik in 1957, a new “space race” erupted that threatened to overwhelm all else.

  Perhaps because restraining the spread of nuclear weapons on terra firma proved impossible for crucial years, achieving a practical ban on space-based weapons proved far easier. Indeed, from the earliest years of U.S.-Soviet technological competition, space was the place where high-minded humanists could trumpet the grand potential that techno-science harbored for bettering humanity. Rather than militarize space, then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower sought to give a civilian face to space exploration. The bias towards peaceful uses of space meant that concerns over dual use were mainly about the application of civilian technologies to military problems. The Star Wars program championed by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s foundered not so much on the impracticality of space-based laser weapons, but rather on the deep and abiding commitment, however rhetorical, to keep space off-limits for state-controlled weapons of mass destruction.[4]

  In the race to put a man on the moon, many accepted as appealing and persuasive the dual-use distinction as justification for pursuing broad security and social aims at the same time. Wide support, domestically and internationally, existed for refusing to openly pursue military objectives in space. Instead, President John F. Kennedy and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson chose to elevate the generative aspects of human ingenuity over darker impulses. This approach was seductive. The political appeal of demilitarizing space undercut to some degree the costs of proliferating military technologies on land.

  Yet the distinction was always something of a fiction, because of the vagaries of unintended consequences. Who actually could be sure that working on civilian applications would not help militarists in the future? How could choosing to work only on civilian science and engineering provide moral cover if the fruits of this labor ended up benefiting military technologies anyway? And what military project might not ultimately help civilians, so that even earnest weapons designers might argue that, someday, their inventions and insights might also save or enrich lives? Wernher von Braun and his work at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency exemplified the uncomfortable overlap between military and civilian agendas at the dawn of the Space Age. Perhaps the ambivalence felt by the character Sergei in Scholz’s “Vanguard 2.0” reflects the creeping awareness that whether one’s labors are officially on the behalf of civilian or military technologies matters little. In a world of uncertainty and serendipity, technologies can leapfrog across any boundaries, especially those seen in retrospect as arbitrary. Hence Sergei’s willingness to entertain the offer to assist the space tycoon Pace. No wonder Sergei thinks “he could be wrong” for caring about the dual-use problem. No wonder he can easily slide from concern to wondering, “Maybe he should forget the whole thing.”

  Even if the brittleness of the dual-use distinction invites policy-makers to ultimately question its value, the core concern about the societal impact of promoting space exploration and its foundational techno-scientific knowledge and tools remains. Indeed, questions over these societal impacts should trump worries about dual use. I do not mean to say that the dual-use distinction is spurious, only that: whether we discard or retain the distinction, a gnarly set of problems persist regarding how public funds for innovation in space can support public goods.

  These problems orbit around a concept called “targeting.” For policy-makers, targeting seems an obvious solution to the challenge of getting what one wants from spending on innovation. Just say you want “X” and then achieve it. The Apollo project was the classic case of targeting and remains a lodestar for managers of the techno-science enterprise. The pervasiveness of the term “moonshot” is no accident. Setting forth a specific goal, such as explicitly reaching the Moon, is the very definition (and origin) of the “moonshot.” Highly specific, drawing on well-understood technologies and a limited range of unknowns, the Apollo targeters struck a comfortable balance between too difficult and too easy. In a calibration reminiscent of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, NASA identified the sweet spot of space targets—and all Americans were rewarded by the seminal achievement of putting men
on the Moon.

  Yet targets are notoriously difficult to craft, and the process of targeting difficult to manage. Ultimately, the concept is deceptively complicated. Consider the “war on cancer,” which arose with a vengeance in the aftermath of the Moon landings, and came to be criticized for being overly broad and practically impossible to operationalize. Today, concerns over climate change cause many to imagine targets that might either cool the planet or help humans adapt to warming. Yet either approach runs into immediate complexities over what targets to specify and which intermediate targets—we might think of these as stepping stones—should be pursued and in what order.

  To be sure, talking “targets” highlights for the public alternatives to technological determinism, the view that the laws of physics and the dictates of pragmatic engineers shape the outcomes of techno-scientific enterprises. Increasingly politicians, civil society, corporate leaders, and the media talk about technologies they want rather than settling for what Technology (with a capital T) can give them. In this sense, the democratization of technological possibilities has co-evolved with the decline in relevance of the dual-use distinction. The U.S. government once held hegemonic sway in nearly every techno-scientific domain except those areas, such as nuclear weapons or engineering bio-weapons or pandemics, where entrepreneurial freedom obviously isn’t permissible or perhaps even sustainable. Now the federal government’s hegemony is gone, and a new approach to targeting for the public good must be constructed.[5]

  Mounting targets, under any calculus, is worth the effort if only because targets are clever means of holding scientists and engineers to account. Targets help policy-makers and citizens alike chart progress towards appealing outcomes. In the coming era of wider democratic pathways to space travel and space technologies, publicly-generated targets—and accountability trajectories—promise to garner wide support and even shape the new politics of public innovation.