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

by Ed Finn

  [9] Steven J. Dick, “Critical Issues in the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Astrobiology,” Astrobiology 12, no. 10 (2012): 911. [back]

  [10] Hays, NASA Astrobiology Strategy, 143. [back]

  [11] Hays, NASA Astrobiology Strategy, 102. [back]

  Section V: Concluding Thoughts

  When we first arrived, and for twenty years after that, Mars was like Antarctica but even purer. We were outside the world, we didn’t even own things—some clothes, a lectern, and that was it! Now you know what I think, John. This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from three millions of years practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, or make things, or satisfy one’s curiosity, or play. That is utopia, John, especially for primitives and scientists, which is to say everybody. So a scientific research station is actually a little model of prehistoric utopia, carved out of the transnational money economy by clever primates who want to live well.

  —Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

  The Luxury Problem: Space Exploration in the “Emergency Century”

  Kim Stanley Robinson in conversation with Jim Bell

  To get some broader perspective on the theme of space exploration in science fiction, we asked Jim Bell, our project collaborator, planetary scientist, ASU professor, and president of The Planetary Society, to interview the renowned science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson about the future of human ambition in space, the proper place of optimism, and the power of stories to blaze a path for discovery and exploration.

  Jim Bell: In preparation for our conversation, I’ve taken some time to remind myself of some of the context and main themes from your Mars trilogy, especially Red Mars, which I confess I haven’t reread since devouring it when it came out 25 years ago. I was just starting out in planetary science back then, and your ideas were truly motivational.

  But of course, things haven’t really worked out that way—not that the success or influence of your work was contingent on scientific or technological prescience. And so my goal in this interview is to get your take on how the last few decades of Mars exploration have unfolded, and what that might mean for the realization of the kind of human exploration endeavor that will hopefully unfold in the next few decades—not just on Mars, but throughout our solar system (and beyond).

  What has changed over the 25 years since you published Red Mars? I’ve often said that it seems like sending humans to Mars has always been 30 years away. Are we in exactly the same place regarding the human exploration of Mars that we were in when the novel first came out?

  Kim Stanley Robinson:No, we’re not in the same place. We know a lot more details about Mars than we did in the late 1980s when I began my Mars trilogy, because of the robotic orbiters and landers. That said, they have mostly confirmed what people saw and deduced from the Viking missions. We have also discovered that perchlorates are in the surface sands, and this will be problematic for humans as they are toxic to us, if and when we land there. It is a new factor, a danger that we will have to cope with.

  We’ve also got better at manufacturing rockets, and especially their computers and guidance systems. This is important because landing on Mars is still and will always be a tricky operation, so we need reliable software and rockets to make the landing as safe as can be if humans are aboard. The success rate for Mars landings is still at around 50 percent, although recently things have been getting better, but not entirely. So it is still one of the more dangerous space operations we will ever have attempted.

  Other than these, the changes have not been so many. Russia is still a great space power and worth collaborating with, if we could work that out politically. The other nations are still behind when it comes to space expertise and experience. Mars is still very difficult. There are still private aerospace companies that would be thrilled to take U.S. government contracts to build good space vehicles. NASA is still a force leading U.S. and international space efforts. SpaceX is new but will not be going to Mars on its own; it will collaborate with other entities, I predict. The costs are too great and the stakes are too high. This will be, as was always clear, an international, public-private collaboration.

  So while we know more about the challenges facing us, ultimately I would say not very much of fundamental importance to the humans-to-Mars project has changed in the last 25 years.

  I don’t believe there is historical inevitability in anything. And public interest has always been high, without the funding or the detailed engineering being adequate. So I think it could still be 30 years. But more likely 20, maybe.

  JB:With the recent news that SpaceX is going to start sending robotic Red Dragon landers to Mars perhaps as early as 2020, I want to poke back at your statement that “SpaceX is new but will not be going to Mars on its own.” In one sense you are right—they are only partially funded from the personal wealth of Elon Musk, as a large part of their funding stream comes from NASA and its large commercial space contracts for launch and delivery services. But in another sense, they are motivated by a completely different business model than other aerospace companies, with the stated corporate goal of “enabling people to live on other planets.” What do you think about SpaceX’s motivation and potential?

  KSR:I like SpaceX as a company and a force in space exploration. I’ve visited their facility in Hawthorne, California and it was impressive to see serious aerospace manufacturing still going on in Southern California, which is important in itself. (My father worked in Southern California aerospace for his entire career.) To see flat sheets of aluminum turned into rocket bodies was simply amazing, and the precision work on the engines and all the rest of it was inspiring. I take it the Red Dragon might be some version of their proposed Falcon Heavy, which will be three Falcon 9s bolted together, raising the total of rocket engines on the craft to 27, and giving the U.S. a heavy lifter to match the Russian Energia and even our old Saturn lifters. Very nice to see, and important.

  As to landing anything on Mars, they will have the same problems everyone else faces. It’s tricky, and the success rate has been only about 50 percent for real reasons, having to do with Mars’s gravity and atmosphere. So if they try to engineer a new method from scratch, they are likely to experience the same frequency of failures they have had in their attempts to land their boosters on barges at sea. This will be expensive and daunting, and maybe they will press on with the project in the face of reversals.

  But really, I think the Mars project should be bigger than any one company or one person’s dream. That angle, suspiciously like the old science fiction stories of a boy building a rocket to the Moon in his backyard, I think actually deflates public interest in Mars and space generally, by turning it from an exploration of the commons to just another rich person’s hobby, the equivalent of bungee jumping, except up instead of down. Who cares what the rich do to entertain themselves? That’s just a matter of celebrity culture—so maybe many people will care, who knows. But Mars is bigger than that, and I prefer to think of it as something like Antarctica or the ocean, a commons that everyone belongs to equally, so that exploring it should be like exploring Antarctica, a place of scientific interest and international cooperation, as well as adventure tourism. That would be the way to treat it.

  What that implies is adherence to the Outer Space Treaty, which we have signed, including planetary protection protocols, and therefore international cooperation in the project. Also public funding for research in the public interest. In that project, SpaceX could be one of the private contractors executing the hardware aspects, as the big aerospace companies have been all along with the various NASA missions. Those have always been public-private ventures, and I want Mars to
be that too. And I expect it will be.

  JB:You’ve written in Red Mars and elsewhere about complex topics that don’t often get considered in science fiction or exploration narratives, like ecology, social systems and settings, the future of international space policy, and the dynamics of individual human interactions in extreme—exploration or pioneering—circumstances. Based on that experience, and the evolution of your thinking over the past few decades, what are the challenges that we need to master to make Mars habitation work?

  KSR:I think it would help to think of Mars as being like Antarctica, rather than like the “New World.” It would help focus our goals and the steps needed to achieve them. We need to send robotic landers with most of a base camp for humans landed in one area and ready to be activated and inhabited. We need to think of the people going there as scientists making a visit to a Site of Special Scientific Interest, as the British would call it. That they will study Mars and then return home, like astronauts to the Moon, but gone for five years rather than a month.

  This would take the magical thinking out of the process and reduce it to a set of achievable steps, with goals that are interesting and even spectacular, but not game-changing for civilization. There’s too much fantasy projection onto Mars and it obscures the project as it really exists. My work may have contributed to that, but I think a careful reading of my books will show they were always trying to make the case that Mars is no cure for Earth’s ills, just a kind of mirror, or an interesting experiment, even if a thought experiment only.

  JB:That’s an interesting perspective. What would be the effect on long-term human habitation of Mars if, contrary to your hopes, the “magical thinking” does end up ruling the day? Or perhaps other drivers push human exploration of Mars that might be focused on other nonscientific goals, like “flags and footsteps” national prestige? Do we all need to be on the same page—U.S., Russia, China, ESA, companies? If we’re not, do we risk destroying or delaying the effort?

  KSR:It’s very easy to imagine a kind of “flags and footsteps” race to Mars being pursued by the spacefaring nations, now including China, and private companies like SpaceX. But here we’re talking about putting people on Mars, because the robots are already there. And the human landing project is very difficult and expensive. So in the end I think it may come to either a matter of international cooperation, or else a big country investing in the expenses and ignoring the risks to the astronauts involved. That’s what it would take.

  No matter how it happens, an inhabited Mars is no help to us in designing and enacting a sustainable civilization here on Earth. So it’s a derivative of success in other realms, and in effect a kind of luxury problem. If humanity achieves balance on Earth, people will end up on Mars as we are on Antarctica, and the general public may then lose interest. Maybe long after that, a local Martian civilization and culture might emerge—depends on how pregnancy goes on Mars, if at all. Or it might not. But all that is centuries off, and derivative to earlier and one might say much harder successes here.

  JB:You recently looked at the future of human expansion into the solar system in your novel 2312. Do you see such a trajectory as inevitable for our species, if we can survive the next few centuries, or as just one of many potential trajectories? If the former, what drives the inevitability? If the latter, what might represent the turning points—the places where a “gravity-assist” from an important event or discovery, for example—which might alter our exploration and settlement trajectory?

  KSR:There is no inevitability in human history. I regard 2312 as utopian but also as an allegory for the situation on Earth today: the rich as spacers, the rest as the people left behind on Earth. So it needs to be read with both aspects of it in mind at once, to give it its full workout.

  Humanity may inhabit the solar system with scientific bases and later even permanent small cities for some. Depends on how we react to long-term habitation at different gravities than one G; right now we don’t really know what that will do, so it’s all speculative. In any case it all rests on the idea that we first create a sustainable civilization here on Earth. If we don’t do that, the solar system will remain empty or at most a kind of sideshow with some McMurdo-like scientific bases. But really, the solar system is irrelevant to human history. It’s interesting and beautiful, and possibly even useful, even if just as a research area, but it cannot help us in the long-term project of creating a sustainable civilization. Even “saving ourselves so we can become solar-system citizens” is a kind of crazy reason to propose for doing the right thing here. Why not do it for us now, or for the vast majority of the people who will be born and live their whole lives on Earth, like we will? That’s the real motivation. So the solar system is secondary, a derivative, so to speak, of our main project.

  So, we face a kind of emergency century or two, in bringing ourselves into balance with our biosphere. In that project, where the space project helps, good; where it doesn’t, it needs to be put off, as a possible project for people of the twenty-third century perhaps. If at that point we are doing the space project, it will be a sign of success, a marvelous thing.

  JB: Your comment about needing to think about how we react to different gravity, which could equally apply to radiation, or other environmental challenges, makes me want to ask you about the “Mars vs. the Moon” debate. Do you think the Moon will play a substantial role in the future habitation of space, or merely a supporting role?

  KSR:If we do much in the way of habitation of space, the Moon will be part of it, for sure. It’s close and easier to get to and back from. It has some gravity. The side not facing Earth will be great for astronomy. If people react well enough to the gravity, it’s easier to imagine domed or buried cities there doing better than Mars. And it makes a potential way station and proving ground. So I think the Moon will call to people and we’ll go there. But it is the same with the Moon as what I’ve been saying about Mars; it’s a luxury for a later time, in terms of usefulness to us.

  JB:You’ve also thought and written quite a bit about potential economies and social structures of the future, here on Earth as well as among our possible future settlements in space. Of course, lots of others outside the literary world are thinking about such things as well. For example, you are well aware of the emerging space resource prospecting and mining communities, embodied by visionaries in companies like Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries, and Shackleton Energy. There’s lots of debate about what kinds of economic models might work best in the upcoming new space frontier (and beyond). What kinds of economic models will we need to make a substantial and sustainable space future happen?

  KSR:I’m not convinced there’s anything elsewhere in the solar system that we need, that we don’t have here on Earth already. It’s mostly common elements and volatiles out there. Between that fact and the gravity well we’re in, there won’t be space mining any time soon.

  JB:I’m not saying you’re right or wrong, but I know a bunch of people who disagree with you, and they’re putting their money, and others’, on the line over it. There is a lot of hype about precious metals, to be sure, but arguably the most important resource, the one that really matters in the end, is water. This is the resource about which, in my experience, the only serious discussions are occurring. Because of its many uses—rocket fuel, breathing, drinking, shielding—it could make economic sense to build a space-based resource economy around prospecting for and mining water from the reservoirs out there, like near-Earth asteroids, outer main–belt asteroids, lunar poles, Martian poles, rather than having to launch it off Earth. The recent TV series The Expanse plays on this idea—too heavily, in my opinion, but it seems to be popular. Could you expand upon your thinking on this in a bit more detail? What do you think of the “asteroid miners” who are certainly technically capable, and in some cases well-funded, who are going after the water?

  KSR:But this is water used for space inhabitation itself. It will never be the case that we import water from
space to Earth. So if you’re saying, if and when we inhabit the solar system, will we be using the water out there to fuel our projects and keep us alive, yes, of course. Because it would also be crazy to lift water up from Earth to space when it’s out there anyway.

  So, mining the asteroids to live in the asteroids—it’s a very plausible science fiction story, it’s how it would be done. But it’s a tautological justification. If you say, “why go to the asteroids,” and the answer is, “so we can mine water to live in the asteroids,” it has no force as a justification. When people say “mining,” the implication is that we are extracting something that we want here on Earth and bringing it back to use. And that isn’t something space can do for us.

  The exceptions might be energy generation in orbit, beamed down to Earth; and maybe helium-3; and maybe some rare earths. But none of these really pencil out in the capitalist economy. There would have to be a post-capitalist system and some kind of overriding need, which I doubt exists. So again, these are fantasy projections, I think, made by people who “want space” for noneconomic reasons—which is fine—and then try to justify the desire by way of a projective economic logic that doesn’t actually pencil out.

  We don’t need space. We need sustainability in this biosphere. Space is a luxury problem and a luxury opportunity. It’s what we get to explore in some detail, in the centuries after we succeed in inventing permaculture here, if we do.

  Again, it’s like Antarctica. We now inhabit and explore the Antarctic usefully in terms of scientific information gathering. Does anyone care? No, they do not. If and when we get into the solar system, it will be like that. One aspect of the interest in space right now is the fact that it’s the hardest thing we might be able to do as a civilization, given our current technology. That’s why people were interested in the North Pole in the nineteenth century, and then the South Pole, and why they were interested in the Moon in the 1960s. But in all these cases, once we did it, we lost interest. Those last Apollo missions getting canceled—that was a sign that we have to attend to. As an event it has a meaning. What were we really interested in there? Not the Moon. Just the getting there. And space may be the same, every object up there. We get to Mars, great; but then, big deal. Scientists at work. People may get interested in Europa or whatnot, or maybe not. We’ll see. But the signs are clear that we don’t have an intrinsic interest in places where lots of people can’t live.