If You Can Fry an Egg in Space, Hilton Wants to Talk to You
FIRST PRINTED OCTOBER 1999
I’VE HAD A DREAM since earliest childhood. I want to go to space.
I’ve wanted it ever since I read Robert A. Heinlein’s science fiction novel Rocketship Galileo at age six. Mr. Heinlein clearly yearned to go to the moon—and considering the world he’d been born into in 1907, he came astonishingly close. At one point during the Apollo 11 mission, NASA staff and press were clustered around President Johnson at Mission Control. Then Robert Heinlein entered the room…and LBJ found himself alone. Everyone present knew which man had done more to put Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon.
I’m less ambitious. It doesn’t have to be the moon; even Low Earth Orbit would suit me fine. I just want to view my home planet from the box seats. Each year the bonds of earth seem a little surlier; I yearn to slip them. I want to lounge in comfortable free fall, free from backaches, neck-aches, swivel-chair spread and sore feet. I want to get from here to way over there by merely flexing a toe. I want to hang out where brawn is a disadvantage and physical strength a nuisance, where nobody is taller than anybody else. I want it so badly I collaborated with my wife Jeanne on three novels set in space, just so I could have the warm pleasure of imagining myself there for months at a time…and get paid for it.
So I was inexpressibly delighted to hear Hilton Hotels Inc. announce they’re looking into the feasibility of a space hotel.
This is not the first serious proposal for an orbital hotel—but the Hilton name lends considerable credibility to the idea. A 1997 study indicated that space tourism is a multibillion dollar market “if economic and technical barriers can be overcome.”
They already have competition for those gigabucks. Robert Bigelow, owner of the Budgets Suites of America chain, has formed a new company called Bigelow Aerospace, and committed half a billion dollars to building an LEO-to-Luna “cruise ship.” Notice this presupposes the passengers can get to Low Earth Orbit.
Hilton, by contrast, is only cautiously optimistic. “Is this only for young, healthy people,” a spokeswoman wondered, “or can the John Glenns of the world go up there and have a good experience? If you want your New York steak or pasta primavera, is it going to be in pill or freeze-dried form?”
Of course, she answered the first question herself: Senator Glenn proved that even the present put-a-big-bomb-under-their-butts method of reaching orbit is accessible to seniors—and better methods are coming. A decade ago hardly anyone but Bob Truax was working on LEO passenger vehicles; today there are dozens of firms competing for large prizes.
But that second question is interesting. How does cooking change—especially luxury hotel cooking—in zero gravity? Heat won’t rise; eggs won’t stay on a pan; nothing will stay in or on anything; most existing utensils are useless. Somebody is going to get rich solving these problems—for Hilton or some other outfit. Any designers out there with flexible minds?
Consider music. Jeanne and I spent hundreds of hours deriving and refining the fundamental principles and basic vocabulary of zero-gee dance together—we even took a crack at designing an orbital luxury hotel in the third of our three novels. But the physics and logistics of mounting an orchestra in zero-gee—or even a simple jazz band—defeated us: we had our free fall dancers working to canned music. Humans always bring live music with them wherever they go, and they won’t all want to play a keyboard strapped to their thighs. Someone is going to invent musical instruments for space conditions…and it would be nice, it seems to me, if that someone were Canadian.
America brought the world crew-cut jocks in space, mumbling arcane jargon and doing incomprehensible things. Canada, in addition to the worthy Canadarm, has already given the world dance in space, at least in theory. Good music would make a nice companion gift. So would good food.
Mind you, these are not the points that will sell space tourism to the rich. Civilians have no idea how difficult it is to bring them dance or live music under earthly conditions, so they won’t be impressed just because it’s three times as hard. Tourists expect good food and good live music.
I hope I’ve inspired someone out there to design a zero-gee kitchen, or to begin creating the new cuisine it makes possible, or to dream up zero-gee musical instruments. And I hope the first dancer in space is a Canadian—or at least someone who’s read our books and doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. But that stuff isn’t what will sell space tourism. Nor will the comfort of zero gee for aching limbs, or long-sought liberation for paraplegics and arthritics, or lightened cardiac load, or even the view.
No, the flood of bookings for the High Hilton will come when the vain rich finally get through their heads one basic fact of space physiology that NASA’s always been too bureaucratically hidebound to mention. In the absence of gravity, the fluids of the body totally redistribute themselves.
The legs get slimmer, the chest gets bigger…
Senator Socksdryer and the Two Million Dollar Boondoggle
FIRST PRINTED JULY 1999
THIS IS, HONEST TO GOD, a true story. As you’ll see, it’s not one NASA is especially anxious to discuss—but I had the good fortune to spend some time in conversation with Buzz Aldrin when we were co-Guests of Honor at a science fiction convention a few years back, and he graciously confirmed the central facts for me.
It’s difficult to remember now, and almost impossible to believe, but back in the late 1960s NASA enjoyed a fairly lavish budget. The US government was either intelligent enough then to know basic research always pays off in the long run—or, more likely, so desperate to Beat Russia to the Moon that money was no object. Even then, however, there were noisy critics of this “blank-cheque” approach.
One now-forgotten congressional ignoramus-and-proud-of-it whose name rhymed with “foxfire,” then notorious for the cheapshot “Golden Fleece Awards,” which made fun of any scientific project he didn’t understand (that is, any scientific project), was particularly caustic about the $2 million NASA wasted developing a zero-gravity pen for the Apollo astronauts: an ingenious nitrogen-pressurized ballpoint capable of writing smoothly in free fall. What, Senator Poxliar wanted to know, was wrong with a Number 2 pencil? It seemed a reasonable question to some. Indeed, the Soviets issued pencils to their cosmonauts…albeit for reasons which have only become fully clear in retrospect: they (the nation, not the pencils) were broke.
Hearken now to what happened to Apollo 11. Fast-forward through the launch, the trip, separation from Collins in lunar orbit, the descent, Eagle’s truly hair-raising landing, the bungling of the “…one small step…” line—fast-forward through almost the entire historic mission, in fact, and cut directly to its final moments on the lunar surface. Armstrong and Aldrin are done, now. Time to go home, and the only task left before liftoff is to remove those big (and now useless) backpacks and toss them out the airlock to save launch-weight.
But the interior of the LEM compares unfavorably for size with a phone booth. As Commander Armstrong is removing his backpack, he brushes against a wall…and accidentally destroys the ignition switch for the ascent engine. Just snaps it off clean, flush with the wall. He and Aldrin have zero tools, not so much as a screwdriver: all left up in orbit with Collins, to save weight. There is no backup switch, no alternate way to launch the LEM.
It dawns on Armstrong and Aldrin that they are now dead men walking…a really long way from home…
…and then, God be thanked, Armstrong remembers what Senator Jocksfire called the Two Million Dollar Boondoggle. That egregious taxpayer-ripoff frippery: his zero gravity pen. He retrieves it, roots around in the ruins of the switch…and becomes, among his other distinctions, the first man ever to hotwire a vehicle on another planet.
Had he and Aldrin been issued Number 2 pencils, they’d still be on Luna today, slowly turning to leather. (I picture them in their final pose, each raising to Senator Mocksflyer a gesture which might be construed as resembling a Number 2 pencil.) The
rest of the Apollo Program might never have happened, and today humanity’s presence in space might be even more unforgivably feeble than it already is.
You can buy a descendant of that Space Pen in most stationery stores today for under ten dollars. I carry one, to remind me of the importance of budgeting the luxuries. (And to write refrigerator notes. And just in case I ever need a spaceship ignition key) Had NASA then been run like most high-tech companies are today—had it been legally required to maximize immediate stockholder profit at all times, and overseen by gimlet-eyed bean-counters unwilling to “waste money” on “fripperies” like blue-sky R&D—the history of our species might have been a sadder and far less proud thing.
If there’s one thing the Apollo Program proved, it’s that it is impossible to waste money on pure research: Apollo is in fact the only thing the US government has ever spent money on that returned its initial investment, in hard cash, within ten years. Naturally, this unmistakable, inarguable lesson has been ignored or forgotten—by the very government that benefited directly from the Apollo program’s returns and by the entire English-speaking community of high-tech investors and entrepreneurs. In these vaunted economic Good Times, budgets for research in general and space in particular are everywhere at historic lows, and even NASA has been forced to learn to run “lean and mean” like the CBC—kept, that is, on a starvation diet in the hope that it will starve. We here in North America have raised up the dumbest group of aristocrats in the history of man, too stupid to make hay while the sun is shining, too shortsighted to lay in firewood against the coming winter. Thirty years from now, what will there be to spin off from?
Time for us to take the long view and invest lavishly in the future. While we still can. You never know when a frippery will turn out to be crucial.
Nostalgia for Tomorrow
2001, by God!, or Looking back at the future
FIRST PRINTED JANUARY 2001
I’M SOMEWHAT AMAZED to discover just how amazed I am to have made it to the new millennium.
I was born a few years after Hiroshima, so I’m of the generation for whom Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey proverbially represented the distant future. “Boomers,” we’re called. I first saw the movie at twenty. I remember working the math in my head as I left the theatre, and realizing I’d have to live past fifty in order to see the real 2001.
And I recall concluding that would probably never happen.
Not because I anticipated poor health. I was myself so flush with youth and strength that for me their inevitable decay was still only an abstract intellectual concept, as hypothetical as 2001 itself. As things have turned out, I am now older than my mother ever got to be…but I knew nothing of that in 1968. And yet I more than half expected to be gone before 2001 rolled around. Why?
Well, because I expected that almost everybody would be gone by then.
And so did most of my contemporaries, whether they still remember it or not. We confidently expected atomic Armageddon. And nothing less, either. I’m not talking about exchange of a few ICBMs, casualties in the hundreds of millions, a few cities uninhabitable for a century or so—long before Carl Sagan and others gave it a name, we expected Nuclear Winter itself. The end of humanity, for sure, and possibly even the sterilization of Terra.
Everyone felt that way. Everyone sophisticated enough to give the future any thought, at least. It’s hard to remember now, perhaps because it’s not something we like remembering. Deep down, a whole generation expected the End of Everything to arrive, and soon. If you didn’t understand that much, you weren’t bright enough to be worth talking to; you probably still believed in Santa Claus.
Some of us actually yearned for apocalypse. And not just the religious zealots who welcomed nuclear firestorm as God’s punishment on the wicked and the heathen, a long-overdue Second Flood. Even the rational started to think that maybe we might as well get it over with. There was a strain of what was then called “post-holocaust” science fiction (Nazi-survivors had not yet claimed exclusive use of the word “Holocaust”), and one branch of it suggested the horror ahead might turn out to be a blessing in disguise, a necessary pruning, a culling of the flock. It would certainly teach technological civilization the error of its ways, in no uncertain terms, and at the same time conveniently remove the enormous mass of people that made technological civilization an utter necessity. Those lucky enough to live through it and competent enough in Darwinian terms to survive its aftermath might then build a new Eden together, powered by windmills and waterwheels and ruled only by nice people.
We did not, quite, all despair—thank God. We clung to hope, some of us anyway; we cherished its embers and fanned them into flame when we could. I became a science fiction writer four years after I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, in part because I hoped that if I could only imagine enough happy futures, loudly enough, maybe someone would get confused and build one for me. But nearly every SF story about the future written during that period—that is, most of the SF ever written, including my own—contained, somewhere within it, some equivalent of the phrase, “…assuming we don’t blow ourselves up, first.” Rare was the fictional universe without at least one burned-out planet bearing mute evidence of a technological civilization which had failed the nuclear test and destroyed itself.
The only thing as obvious as the Armageddon problem itself was that it was utterly intractable. The Cold War was permanent, eternal. Capitalism and communism could never ever coexist. The Evil Empire’s commissars would never yield as long as there was a single peasant left to sacrifice. Neither would the equally evil swine who protected us from them, the bloodthirsty baby-killing military-industrial complex. Mutual Assured Destruction was inherently unstable, an accident waiting to happen. Hope was all very well, denial was a perfectly workable strategy for living. But to actually believe you’d see the next millennium was as crazy as…oh, I don’t know, as crazy as believing South Africa might ever give up apartheid. Or dreaming that smallpox, still the all-time champion slayer of human beings then, could somehow be eradicated forever. Or expecting equal rights for women anytime soon. Or anticipating a meaningful European Union. Pie in the sky stuff.
And so we mostly ignored 2001’s story—the silly idea that technology might actually bring us closer to our creators, that perhaps gods do live in the sky after all—and we focused on its most memorable feature: the mind-bending plunge through a space warp at the end. That sequence has been quoted, or stolen if you prefer, by at least a dozen movies since, and nobody who’s seen it ever forgets it. It’s a magnificent metaphor for the way the future comes at us: much too fast, way too bright and gaudy, a confusing flood of images that race by too fast to comprehend.
The real future has turned out to be somewhat less wonderful than Clarke’s fictional one. We do not have a meaningful presence on the Moon yet, and there are no manned expeditions to Jupiter planned. On the other hand, the laborious and expensive phone call Heywood Floyd makes to Kubrick’s daughter would today be direct-dialed and dirt cheap. Modern mainframes can deal with contradiction without going insane. And the Cold War ended peacefully—perhaps the first war in history to do so.
2001 was once the far future for us Boomers—and now, after the real thing has arrived, I hope history will remember us, despite our name, as the generation that could have made very big booms indeed, had many excuses to and did not do so once. It was a great millennium: we got out of it alive.
The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be
FIRST PRINTED MARCH 2003
I WANT MY MONEY BACK. This millennium sucks.
Remember the last one? Only a few years past, and already it feels like a lifetime ago. I’m a science fiction writer: I look forward by training and inclination. Future equals good. Or at least better. I spent the closing half of the twentieth century yearning for the arrival of the twenty-first, because it was my conviction that things could only get better, and therefore they would.
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nbsp; It seemed a reasonable assumption. All my life, each year things seemed to get—on average—just a little bit better than they’d been the year before. Sure, there were exceptions, setbacks, rude shocks. The year they got Martin and Bobby certainly stands out in my mind as a dark period. It got ugly in what used to be called Croatia, and in Rwanda, and other places. Hell, I still can’t believe some imbecile backshot John Lennon.
But overall, things tended to improve slowly but steadily, at least in my experience. The Berlin Wall suddenly dropped, one day, as though it were no more than a pile of bricks and stones. The Soviet Union itself, the dark monolithic menace that had overshadowed the first half century of my life, folded its cards without firing a shot. Nelson Mandela walked free, apartheid ended. The abominations in Bosnia, and then in Africa and in other places, finally began to start the world thinking halfway seriously that something like a Terran Federation might be a good idea. Somebody punched out Geraldo Rivera on camera. There seemed every reason to believe we were finally getting somewhere.
Consider: at the turn of the millennium…
the economy was booming. The Age of Deficits was finally over for good; we’d learned our lesson. Unemployment and inflation were down, budgets trending toward balance. It still seemed remotely possible that at least some of the promises on which Free Trade was sold to Canada might not be total mahooha. Hard to remember, I know.
peace in the Middle East seemed just around the corner, thanks to the patient diplomatic efforts of a well-informed, articulate and creative American president. It took time to realize that poor taste in mistresses was a sensible reason to replace him with a man who’s proud to tell you that foreign affairs are something he himself is never ever going to have, swear to God, and whose idea of diplomacy is smiling while delivering an ultimatum.
The Crazy Years Page 25
