by Michio Kaku
Over time, problems emerged with the space shuttle. For one, although the shuttle was designed to save money, costs nevertheless began to soar, so that each launch consumed about $1 billion. Sending anything into near-Earth orbit on the shuttle cost roughly $40,000 per pound, which was about four times the cost of other delivery systems. Companies complained that it was much cheaper to send their satellites using conventional rockets. Secondly, flights took place infrequently, with many months between launches. Even the U.S. Air Force was frustrated by these limitations and eventually canceled some of its space shuttle launches in favor of using other options.
Physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, has his own thoughts on why the space shuttle failed to live up to expectations. When we look at the history of the railroad, we see that it initially started as a carrier for all goods, including humans and commercial products. The commercial side and consumer side of the industry each had their own distinct priorities and concerns, and they eventually split apart, increasing efficiency and lowering costs. The space shuttle, however, never made this split and remained a cross between commercial and consumer interests. Instead of being “everything to everyone,” it became “nothing to nobody,” especially with its cost overruns and flight delays.
And matters worsened after the Challenger and Columbia tragedies, which cost the lives of fourteen brave astronauts. These disasters weakened public, private, and government support for the space program. As physicists James and Gregory Benford wrote, “Congress came to see NASA primarily as a jobs program, not an exploratory agency.” They also observed that “very little useful science got done in the space station…The station was about camping in space, not living in space.”
Without the wind of the Cold War in its sails, the space program rapidly lost funding and momentum. Back in the heyday of the Apollo space program, the joke was that NASA could go to Congress asking for funds and say just one word: “Russia!” Then Congress would whip out its checkbook and reply, “How much?” But those days were long gone. As Isaac Asimov said, we scored a touchdown—and then we took our football and went home.
Things finally came to a head in 2011, when former President Barack Obama ordered a new “Valentine’s Day massacre.” In one sweeping gesture, he canceled the Constellation program (the replacement for the shuttle), the moon program, and the Mars program. To relieve the tax burden on the public, he defunded these programs in hope that the private sector would make up the difference. Twenty thousand veterans of the space program were suddenly laid off, throwing away the collective wisdom of NASA’s best and brightest. The greatest humiliation was that American astronauts, after going toe-to-toe with Russian astronauts for decades, would now be forced to hitchhike on Russian booster rockets. The heyday of space exploration, it seemed, was over; things had reached rock bottom.
The problem could be summed up in one four-letter word, c-o-s-t. It takes $10,000 to put a pound of anything in near-Earth orbit. Imagine your body made of solid gold. That’s roughly what it would take to put you into orbit. To put something on the moon can easily cost $100,000 per pound. And to put things on Mars costs upward of a million dollars per pound. Estimates of putting an astronaut on Mars are often between $400 and $500 billion in total.
I live in New York City. For me it was a sad day when the space shuttle came to town. Although curious tourists lined up and cheered as the shuttle came rolling down the street, it represented the end of an era. The ship was put on display, eventually resting off the pier on Forty-Second Street. With no replacement in sight, it felt as if we were giving up on science, and hence our future.
Looking back at those dark days, I am sometimes reminded of what happened to the great Chinese imperial fleet in the fifteenth century. Back then, the Chinese were the undisputed leaders in science and exploration. They invented gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press. They were unparalleled in military power and technology. Meanwhile, medieval Europe was wracked by religious wars and mired in inquisitions, witch trials, and superstition, and great scientists and visionaries like Giordano Bruno and Galileo were often either burned alive or placed under house arrest, their works banned. Europe, at the time, was a net importer of technology, not a source of innovation.
The Chinese emperor launched, under the command of Admiral Zheng He, the most ambitious naval expedition of all time, with twenty-eight thousand sailors on a fleet of 317 huge ships, each one five times longer than the ships of Columbus. The world would not see anything like it for another four hundred years. Not once, but seven times, from 1405 to 1433, Admiral Zheng He sailed across the known world, around Southeast Asia and past the Middle East, eventually ending up in East Africa. There are ancient woodcuts of the strange animals, like giraffes, that he brought back from his voyages of discovery being paraded before the court.
But when the emperor passed away, the new rulers decided that they had no use for exploration and discovery. They even decreed that a Chinese citizen could not own a boat. The fleet itself was left to rot or allowed to burn, and records of Admiral Zheng He’s great accomplishments were suppressed. Succeeding emperors effectively cut off contact between China and the rest of the world. China turned inward, with disastrous results, eventually leading to decay, total collapse, chaos, civil war, and revolution.
I sometimes think about how easy it is for a nation to slip into complacency and ruin after decades of basking in the sun. Since science is the engine of prosperity, nations that turn their backs on science and technology eventually enter a downward spiral.
The U.S. space program similarly fell into decline. But now the political and economic circumstances are changing. A new cast of characters is taking center stage. Daring astronauts are being replaced by dashing billionaire entrepreneurs. New ideas, new energy, and new funding are driving this renaissance. But can this combination of private funds and government financing pave the way to the heavens?
Yours is the light by which my spirit’s born. You are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.
—E. E. CUMMINGS
2 NEW GOLDEN AGE OF SPACE TRAVEL
Unlike the decline of China’s naval fleet, which lasted for centuries, the U.S. manned space program is experiencing a revival after only a few decades of neglect. A variety of factors is turning the tide.
One is the influx of resources from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. A rare combination of private funding and governmental financing is making possible a new generation of rockets. At the same time, the falling cost of space travel allows a range of projects to become feasible. Public support for space travel is also reaching a tipping point, as Americans again warm up to Hollywood movies and TV specials about space exploration.
And most important, NASA has finally regained its focus. On October 8, 2015, after years of muddle, vacillation, and indecision, NASA finally declared its long-term goal: to send astronauts to Mars. NASA even sketched out a rough set of goals for itself, beginning with returning to the moon. Rather than a final destination, though, the moon would be a stepping-stone for the more ambitious goal of reaching Mars. The once rudderless agency suddenly had a direction. Analysts hailed this decision, concluding that NASA was once again claiming the mantle of leadership in space exploration.
So first, let us discuss our nearest celestial neighbor, the moon, and then travel outward into deep space.
GOING BACK TO THE MOON
The backbone of NASA’s effort to return to the moon is a combination of the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy booster rocket and the Orion space module. Both of them are orphans of President Obama’s budget cuts of the early 2010s, when he canceled the Constellation program. But NASA was able to salvage the space module of the Constellation, the Orion capsule, as well as the SLS heavy booster rocket, which was still in the planning stage. Originally from entirely different missions, they were cobbled together to create NASA’s basic launch system.
Currently, the SLS/Orion rocket is schedule
d to conduct a manned lunar flyby in the mid-2020s.
The first thing you notice about the SLS/Orion system is that it does not look anything like its immediate predecessor, the space shuttle. It does, however, resemble the Saturn V rocket. For about forty-five years, the Saturn V rocket has been a museum piece. But in some sense, it is now being resurrected as the SLS booster rocket. Seeing the SLS/Orion brings on a sense of déjà vu.
The SLS can carry a payload of 130 tons. It is also 322 feet tall, comparable to the Saturn V rocket. The astronauts, instead of sitting in a ship on the side of the booster rocket like they did on the space shuttle, are in a capsule perched directly on top of the booster rocket, like the Apollo spacecraft was on the Saturn V. The SLS/Orion, unlike the space shuttle, is dedicated to carrying mainly astronauts and not cargo. In addition, the SLS/Orion is not designed to merely reach near-Earth orbit. Instead, like the Saturn V, it is designed to attain Earth escape velocity.
The Orion capsule is designed to carry four to six crew members, while the Apollo capsule of the Saturn V only held three. Like the Apollo capsule, the Orion capsule is cramped inside. It is sixteen feet in diameter and eleven feet tall and weighs fifty-seven thousand pounds. (Since space is at a premium, astronauts have historically been small people. Yuri Gagarin, for example, was only five feet two inches tall.)
And unlike the Saturn V rocket, which was specifically designed to go the moon, the SLS rocket can take you almost anywhere—to the moon, the asteroids, and even Mars.
We also have the billionaires who are tired of the lumbering pace of NASA bureaucrats and want to send astronauts to the moon and even Mars relatively soon. These young entrepreneurs were lured by former President Obama’s proposal to have private enterprise take over the manned space program.
This lineup compares the original Saturn V rocket, which took our astronauts to the moon and the Space Shuttle, with other booster rockets being tested. Credit 1
Defenders of NASA claim that its cautious pace is due to NASA’s safety concerns. In the wake of the two space shuttle disasters, congressional hearings almost caused the space program to shut down entirely amid strong public disapproval. Another disaster of that scope could put an end to the program. Also, they point out that in the 1990s, NASA tried adopting the mantra “Faster, Better, Cheaper.” However, when the Mars Observer was lost in 1993 due to a ruptured fuel tank just as it was about to orbit Mars, many thought that NASA might have rushed the mission, and the “Faster, Better, Cheaper” slogan was quietly dropped.
So one has to strike a delicate balance between the hotheads who want an accelerated pace and the bureaucrats who are gun-shy about safety and the cost of failure.
Nevertheless, two billionaires have taken the lead in fast-tracking the space program: Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, and Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX.
The press is already dubbing it the “battle of the billionaires.”
Both Bezos and Musk would like to shift humanity into outer space. While Musk is taking the long view and setting his sights on Mars, Bezos has a more immediate vision of going to the moon.
TO THE MOON
People from all over have flocked to Florida, hoping to catch a glimpse of the first capsule that will take our astronauts to the moon. The lunar capsule will carry three astronauts on a voyage unprecedented in human history, an encounter with another celestial body. The journey to the moon will take about three days, and the astronauts will experience things never felt before, such as weightlessness. After a heroic voyage, the ship will splash down safely in the Pacific Ocean, and its passengers will be celebrated as heroes, opening up a new chapter in world history.
All the calculations have been done using Newton’s laws, ensuring a precise voyage. But there is one problem. It’s actually a tale written by Jules Verne, in his prophetic novel From the Earth to the Moon, published in 1865, just after the end of the Civil War. The organizers of the moon shot are not NASA scientists but members of the Baltimore Gun Club.
What is truly remarkable is that Jules Verne, writing more than one hundred years before the first lunar landing, was able to predict so many features of the actual moon shot. He was able to correctly portray the size of the capsule, the location of the launch, and the method of landing back on Earth.
The only major flaw in his book was the use of a gigantic cannon to send the astronauts to the moon. The sudden acceleration of the gunshot would be about twenty thousand times the force of gravity, which would certainly kill anyone aboard the ship. However, before the coming of liquid fueled rockets, Verne had no other way to envision the journey.
Verne also postulated that the astronauts would become weightless, but only at one point, midway between the moon and the Earth. He did not realize that the astronauts would become weightless throughout their voyage. (Even today, commentators make mistakes about weightlessness, sometimes stating that it is caused by the absence of gravity in space. Actually, there is plenty of gravity in space, enough to whip giant planets like Jupiter around the sun. The experience of weightlessness is caused by the fact that everything falls at the same rate. So an astronaut inside the spaceship would fall at the same rate as his ship and experience the illusion that gravity has been turned off.)
Today, it is not the private fortunes of the members of the Baltimore Gun Club fueling this new space race but the checkbooks of moguls like Jeff Bezos. Instead of waiting for NASA to give him permission to build rockets and a launchpad with taxpayer dollars, he founded his own company, Blue Origin, and is building them himself, with his own pocket money.
Already, the project has gone beyond the planning stage. Blue Origin has produced its own rocket system, called New Shepard (named after Alan Shepard, the first American to go into space via a suborbital rocket). In fact, the New Shepard rocket was the first suborbital rocket in the world to successfully land back on its original launchpad, just beating out Elon Musk’s Falcon rocket (which was the first reusable rocket to actually send a payload into Earth orbit).
Bezos’s New Shepard rocket is only suborbital, meaning that it cannot reach a speed of eighteen thousand miles per hour and go into near-Earth orbit. It won’t take us to the moon, but it may be the first American rocket to routinely offer tourists a view of space. Blue Origin recently released a video of a hypothetical journey on the New Shepard, and it looked like you were riding first class on a luxury ship. When you enter the space capsule, you are immediately impressed with how roomy it is. Far from the cramped quarters often seen in science fiction movies, there is ample room for you and five other tourists to be strapped into your lush reclining seats, where you immediately sink into black leather. You can look out of huge windows that are approximately 2.4 feet wide and 3.5 feet tall. “Every seat is a window seat, the largest windows ever in space,” Bezos claims. Space travel has never been so gorgeous.
Because you are about to enter outer space, there are some precautions you must take. Two days before the trip, you fly into Van Horn, Texas, where Blue Origin has its launch facility. There you meet your fellow tourists and hear short talks by the crew. Since the voyage is completely automated, the crew members do not ride along with the tourists.
Your instructor explains that the entire trip will take eleven minutes as you soar vertically, sixty-two miles straight up, reaching the boundary between the atmosphere and outer space. Outside, the sky will turn dark purple and then inky black. Once the capsule reaches outer space, you can unbuckle your seat and experience four minutes of weightlessness. You will then float like an acrobat, free of the earthly constraints of gravity.
Some people get sick and vomit while experiencing weightlessness, but this won’t be a problem, the instructor claims, since the trip is so short.
(For training astronauts, NASA employs the “vomit comet,” which is a KC-135 airplane that can simulate weightlessness. The vomit comet rises steeply, suddenly shuts off its engines for about thirty seconds, and t
hen falls back down. The astronauts are now like a rock thrown in the air—they are in free fall. When the airplane turns on its engines, the astronauts fall back to the floor. This process is repeated for several hours.)
At the end of the New Shepard trip, the capsule releases parachutes and then gently lands back on the ground using its own rockets. There is no need for a splashdown in the ocean. And unlike the space shuttle, it has a safety system so that you can be ejected from the rocket if there is a misfire during launch. (The space shuttle Challenger did not have such an ejection system, and seven astronauts died.)
Blue Origin has not yet released the price tag for this suborbital trip into space, but analysts think initially it could be in the neighborhood of $200,000 per passenger. This is the price of a trip on a rival suborbital rocket being developed by Richard Branson, another billionaire who has made his mark in the annals of space exploration. Branson is the founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways and Virgin Galactic, and he is backing the efforts of aerospace engineer Burt Rutan. In 2004, Rutan’s SpaceShipOne made headlines when it won the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE. SpaceShipOne was able to reach the boundary of the atmosphere seventy miles above the Earth. Although SpaceShipTwo suffered a fatal accident in 2014 when flying above the Mojave Desert, Branson plans to continue testing the rocket and make space tourism a reality. Time will tell which rocket system will succeed commercially. But it seems clear that space tourism is here to stay.
