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

by Ed Finn

  I don’t mean to sound pessimistic here. I just think that if we focus on our real needs and desires and understand them better, we’ll do a better job of achieving our goals. Here, what we really need is sustainability on Earth. So, space science that supports that is good; space science irrelevant to that is premature at best. It makes a kind of rubric for decisions. Also it’s important to be realistic about difficulties. We don’t know how humans will do off this planet over the long haul. Could be pregnancy won’t work on Mars. Could be everyone will get sick and need to get home to Earth for a kind of “sabbatical,” as in my 2312. We just don’t know. So admitting that is part of the work of focusing on what our project really is, and what we should do now.

  JB:Finally, in the broadest sense, why do you write about space exploration? What role do you hope that your work will play in conversations about space?

  KSR:I have been writing about humans in space for 40 years, but I haven’t often thought about why I have done that. I guess it began with a love for science fiction as a literature and story space, meaning I guess the future, and the future history of humanity in particular. That was assumed to include space, in the time when I began writing science fiction, and so my eye turned outward. What I saw that caught me immediately was the solar system, a marvelous collection of planets, moons, and asteroids that felt within reach and would be very exciting to explore as landscapes with exotic features.

  Story ideas came to me and it seemed true that the solar system was a great story space for me. Usually I wrote about a time that was post-exploration, more a matter of humanity in a settled solar system. This became a comfortable story space for me. And very soon in my career, the Viking landers and orbiters gave us Mars, and that became my focus for many years. I still believe in the Mars project, meaning a place of eventual human habitation and maybe terraforming, as a kind of extension of a viable permaculture invented and enacted on Earth.

  In the course of my career, my studies led me to think that human travel to other solar systems, and humanity spreading out through the galaxy, was impossible and not going to happen. So that’s become part of my writing too; that the solar system is all we’ve got, but is good enough.

  I think now that space science is an Earth science, and getting things right on Earth is the main task for civilization. So my views have evolved over the course of my career.

  The Practical Economics of Space

  Clark A. Miller

  Space, the final frontier. Star Trek has given us uncountable ideas about possible human futures in space, what we might find there, and how to behave properly once we’ve run into neighbors from nearby planets. What it has never given us is a clear, pragmatic sense of the economics of space: that is, in the simplest sense, how human activities in space will get paid for.

  Star Trek never discloses how much it cost to build the USS Enterprise—the starship, not the aircraft carrier. We never learn what kind of salary Captain Kirk earns, nor who pays the taxes to support Starfleet and their five-year mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” It’s an interesting omission.

  Frontier societies always give rise to questions about their economics, whether we’re talking about the settlement of new lands or the invention of new technologies. How do you pay for the work that has to get done to build infrastructure, extend supply chains, extract resources, provide for the sustenance of new settlements, and ship the excesses home? How do you pay for the upfront research and development costs of innovation on the technological frontier?

  But there’s also a deeper dimension to economics. We pay for things because we value them. We pay people because we value what they do for us. What—and who—will we value in the human future in space?

  Currently, there are basically three mechanisms that finance human societies. The most important is markets. If something has value to someone, and she has enough money, she can purchase it, so long as she can find someone willing to make it or bring it to market at a price she can afford. Banks provide a market for aggregating money to allow people to make larger purchases—like cars and homes—that they would find difficult by themselves. The second mechanism is government. Governments collect taxes and then use the resulting money to purchase things that, for one reason or another, individuals and companies are not positioned to buy. National defense is a good example. The third is philanthropy: wealthy individuals donate money to causes they find compelling. There is a fourth, voluntary human labor, that often goes unrecognized or unrewarded but is extremely important, especially in supporting certain kinds of basic social infrastructure. More on that later.

  One of the central reasons that many organizations, including NASA, are putting significant efforts into commercializing space is so that they can generate new and additional revenues to accelerate space exploration via markets. This seems like a good idea, in that government funding is always limited. NASA’s budget, for example, has been about $20 billion in recent years. Compared to the $20 trillion U.S. economy, this seems like small potatoes. $1 out of every $1,000 to fund space. Surely the market can do better.

  Another comparison tells a somewhat different story, however. The annual budget of the U.S. government is $4 trillion. By contrast, the largest company in the world, which at the moment happens to be Walmart, has annual revenues of a bit more than $400 billion. That’s 10 times smaller.

  No single business organization in the world can match anything like the spending power of the U.S. government. When the U.S. government decided that it needed to intervene in Iraq—whether one believes that was a good idea or not—it ultimately spent $2 trillion over a decade. That’s why private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX actually make most of their money by selling to the U.S. government. And, of course, it’s the U.S. Department of Defense, not NASA, that spends the most money among federal agencies in space.

  And then there are philanthropists. The richest is Bill Gates, with $85 billion. But that’s not an annual revenue stream. It’s all the money he’s got. So even he can’t even come close to matching a big company, let alone the U.S. government, for pure ability to finance future space expeditions.

  Exploring the futures imagined in this book, it’s not hard to see how the outlines of a future space economy might emerge. There are two key elements. First, somebody needs to sell something. Second, whatever that product is, it needs to have value for people living on Earth.

  Until now, commercial activity in space has been dominated by communication satellites. Many companies, especially news and entertainment organizations, have been willing to pay other companies to put communication satellites into orbit. Those companies are willing to pay because their customers on Earth are willing to pay, in turn, for the services that media companies can deliver via satellites, like live news coverage or lots of inexpensive TV channels. Not much else justifies significant commercial activity in space just now. We can move electronic signals through near-Earth space quickly and for relatively low cost, compared to the value generated by DirecTV, CNN, or Verizon for their customers.

  The stories in this collection point us in a few basic directions for the near-term future of space: tourism, mining, real estate, and environmental cleanup. Tourism has a coolness factor, as Steven Barnes’s story “Mozart on the Kalahari” reminds us. The possibility of traveling into space can inspire all different kinds of people. But the reality is that few people are likely to be in a position anytime soon to afford that kind of journey. You can take up a few people for free, as a publicity stunt, but pretty soon a company would need paying customers. Yet, outside the top few percent of the world’s wealthiest people, willingness and ability to pay drops off rapidly. The number of people who can afford more than the $5,000 to $10,000 of a relatively expensive vacation for a family of four is vanishingly small. Few can afford even high-end hotels planet-side, with their $1,000 per night price tags, let alone their space counterp
arts. So, you could build a space economy on tourism, but it would be small, at least initially, and it would depend on very rich people. Maybe you could build capital gradually, invest in lower-cost transport infrastructure, reduce your prices, and grow over time. It might work. It might not.

  More people think the future of the space economy is in mining, as several of the stories suggest, including Eileen Gunn’s “Night Shift.” Gunn’s protagonist lives in Seattle but works with robots to capture and mine asteroids. Historically, mining has driven many frontier economies. They have serious problems: pollution, environmental degradation, exploitation of indigenous groups. How serious any of these challenges will turn out to be in the reality of space is an open question. At the beginning, people will argue that space is so vast that worries about pollution are fearmongering that puts the cart before the horse, but they often said the same thing about frontiers on Earth, too.

  In Low Earth Orbit, the rate of growth of orbital junk is already a problem for today’s spacecraft and satellites. It’s a sufficiently big problem, in fact, that Carter Scholz imagines Uber creating a space division to clean up space debris in “Vanguard 2.0.” I’m surprised he didn’t choose Waste Management, a company that’s already gobbling up garbage companies—and garbage—all across the Earth. I bet they’re already thinking about it. So, yes, environmental remediation could be a good space business—although it might be better not to cause the problems in the first place. And, like environmental cleanup on Earth, it might be a challenge to convince people to pay for it.

  When we consider the commercialization of space, however, several of the stories remind us that all of these ideas—and every other one we’ve thought of to date—suffer from some rather severe handicaps. It’s really expensive to get stuff from Earth into space (like tourists or mining equipment). That’s why Barnes envisions poor people entering contests to try to get into space, Gunn’s story involves robotic space missions by nanobots which are tiny and thus cheaper to launch (and can build replicants of themselves, in place, in space, from resources already up there), why Ramez Naam writes of automated factories on the Moon making the materials and fuels to colonize space in “The Use of Things,” and why Myrna’s friends all work on Earth as they build the Martian city of the future in Karl Schroeder’s “The Baker of Mars.”

  Likewise, everything in space is a long way away and thus requires a lot of time and energy to get to and to come back. For both Ashby, in “Death on Mars,” and Schroeder, getting people to Mars is a massive undertaking. Indeed, for NASA, getting just three small robotic rovers to Mars was a massive undertaking. It’s not an accident that Gunn’s nanobots and their AI teammates work in near-Earth space, where the time lags between remote systems and human controllers are short enough not to matter. Communication lags get significantly longer, the farther you go.

  The inhospitality of space environments also means that human beings in space require extensive life support systems that make their participation even more expensive and risky. Life support systems are costly. So are redundant safety systems to reduce risk. Both also add to the weight of the payload that must be taken from the Earth’s surface to orbit and thus require very high amounts of fuel and more expense. The human body itself must be also lifted out of the Earth’s gravity well.

  Finally, as Schroeder reminds us in his story of the quest to invent real estate on Mars, the ownership of assets in space is entirely unclear. Who owns the surface of Mars? Who owns the metals or other materials in an asteroid? These are not idle questions for those seeking to commercialize space ventures, nor those seeking to finance space missions on the hopes of a future return on investment. They are questions of governance, specifically, of who governs and who has the right to allocate ownership rights in space. To this point in human history, ownership is a legal concept grounded in national law, and national territorial jurisdictions do not currently extend into space. Indeed, the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies expressly prohibits its signatories, which include most spacefaring nations, from claiming sovereignty over territory in space.

  Still, law is a figment of the human imagination and a product of human institutions; thus, humans can change it. Existing nations may seek to extend their jurisdiction to authorize ownership in space through workarounds, as the U.S. has sought to do under a new 2015 law, by claiming ownership over “resources” without claiming ownership over places. Or nations may simply withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty and claim territory. Or humanity may invent new nations in space, or invent new concepts of governance, like Schroeder’s self-governing, blockchain-enabled commons. As Schroeder explores in his story, ownership is complicated in space. Early entrants into markets for space places and space resources may lose their shirts if ownership rules change. We might even fight wars over who owns what in the frontiers of space.

  And, even if we can reach agreement on who owns the sky and how to mine it, no one has yet found any mineral or substance in space that doesn’t also exist on Earth or that has a sufficiently constrained supply on Earth and a sufficiently high demand to drive up costs high enough to justify space mining.

  So how might space companies solve these problems? One approach is to make stuff in space and create a “local” space economy, meaning an economy in which people or organizations in space sell stuff to each other. That’s a great idea. In frontier economies, alongside the mine there was also always the general store, the saloon, and the blacksmith. The European Space Agency is already thinking about things like sending 3D printers to the Moon and making things there, so you wouldn’t have to pay the cost of launching them off Earth. Spacecraft and fuel would be especially valuable, as Ramez Naam points out in his story, and could then be sold to others in space. We might call this the bootstrapping or bottom-up model of space commercialization.

  There are two challenges, however, in bootstrapping your way to a space economy. The first is that it will be slow. When markets grow in a bottom-up way, they start small and do not grow quickly in absolute size. Maybe that’s fine. But growing a space economy largely in space itself is unlikely to be a get-rich-quick scheme.

  The second challenge is that this model still requires an Earthly value to the activity. Someone must be willing to invest in the infrastructure to obtain space materials. Someone else must be willing to buy something from them at sufficiently high prices to pay for the spacecraft and fuel in question. Think about the city being built by the homesteaders in “The Baker of Mars.” It’s all speculation, based on the idea that people on Earth will want to buy real estate on Mars at prices high enough to compensate for the costs of building there. Or think about Gunn’s and Naam’s mining probes. The whole point is to secure materials that can be sold on Earth. At least at the outset, a space economy is not likely to pay for itself. Earthlings must ultimately pay for it. We’re the big market on the block.

  Another approach to solving the space economy puzzle is to significantly reduce costs by upgrading autonomous systems and allowing robots to do most of the work. This has long worked for NASA, which has a strong space probe business and has sent many spacecraft into space that were piloted by scientists and engineers back on Earth. It’s still not cheap, however. And in the stories in this book, like Gunn’s and Naam’s, robots do far more than just travel from place to place. They also adapt to diverse realities of mining in space. That’s why Gunn imagines nanorobotic swarms. No current space mining technology fits that bill: existing robots are just not capable of autonomously sizing up an asteroid and mining it. And, at least according to the logic of her story, we can’t afford to put humans into space to do the sizing up and orientation for the robots. And nanobots will have limited intelligence. So, Gunn also gives the swarm a smart controller robot. Perhaps a bit too smart.

  Given my experience with Siri on my phone, it’s going to be a while before we have an AI system
that’s good enough to do what Gunn’s AI does. Siri does some pretty cool things. But she’s also pretty stupid in a lot of ways. Siri is not actually in my phone (or yours), either. She’s in a giant server farm somewhere, probably more than one. For very-near-Earth activities, the communications lag and finite data transfer rates between Earth-based server farms and space AI systems may be solvable problems. For activities that occur even a modest distance from Earth, however, we’re going to need to send the AI hardware into space. Remember HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey? That will mean significantly shrinking the weight, size, and energy requirements of the computational infrastructure required for high-level AI. Or we’re going to need to build and move very large AI spacecraft through space, which may be just as expensive as sending people in the first place.

  Using people to coordinate robots from Earth, as a few of the stories suggest might be possible, is going to run into similar problems of data bandwidth and communication speeds. And, as NASA’s experience with its Mars rovers suggests, this has been demonstrated successfully only for very controlled environments and plans. It’s not clear it would work without deep and exact knowledge of the circumstances of the mission.