Essays. FSF Columns

And then, of course, there's the radiation hazard. No one in space has been severely nuked yet, but if a solar flare caught a crew in deep space, the results could be lethal.

These are not insurmountable medical challenges, but they *are* real problems in real-life space experience. Actually, it's rather surprising that an organism that evolved for billions of years in gravity can survive *at all* in free-fall. It's a tribute to human strength and plasticity that we can survive and thrive for quite a while without any gravity. However, we now know what it would be like to settle in space for long periods. It's neither easy nor pleasant.

And yet, NASA is still committed to putting people in space. They're not quite sure why people should go there, nor what people will do in space once they're there, but they are bound and determined to do this despite all obstacles.

If there were big money to be made from settling people in space, that would be a different prospect. A commercial career in free-fall would probably be safer, happier, and more rewarding than, say, bomb-disposal, or test-pilot work, or maybe even coal-mining. But the only real moneymaker in space commerce (to date, at least) is the communications satellite industry. The comsat industry wants nothing to do with people in orbit.

Consider this: it costs $200 million to make one shuttle flight. For $200 million you can start your own communications satellite business, just like GE, AT&T, GTE and Hughes Aircraft. You can join the global Intelsat consortium and make a hefty 14% regulated profit in the telecommunications business, year after year. You can do quite well by "space commerce," thank you very much, and thousands of people thrive today by commercializing space. But the Space Shuttle, with humans aboard, costs $30 million a day! There's nothing you can make or do on the Shuttle that will remotely repay that investment. After years of Shuttle flights, there is still not one single serious commercial industry anywhere whose business it is to rent workspace or make products or services on the Shuttle.

The era of ma

This grim and rather cynical recital may seem a dismal prospect for space enthusiasts, but the situation's not actually all that dismal at all. In the meantime, unma

And communications satellites have come a very long way since Telstar; the Intelsat 6 model, for instance, can carry thirty thousand simultaneous phone calls plus three cha

Weather satellites have proven vital to public safety and commercial prosperity. NASA or no NASA, money will be found to keep weather satellites in orbit and improve them technically -- not for reasons of national prestige or flag-waving status, but because it makes a lot of common sense and it really pays.

But a look at the budget decisions for 1992 shows that the Apollo Paradigm still rules at NASA. NASA is still utterly determined to put human beings in space, and actual space science gravely suffers for this decision. Planetary exploration, life science missions, and astronomical surveys (all unma

The dire list of NASA's sacrifices for 1992 includes an asteroid probe; an advanced x-ray astronomy facility; a space infrared telescope; and an orbital unma

There is nothing inevitable about these decisions, about this strategy. With imagination, with a change of emphasis, the exploration of space could take a very different course.

In 1951, when writing his seminal non-fiction work THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE, Arthur C. Clarke created a fine imaginative scenario of unma

"Let us imagine that such a vehicle is circling Mars," Clarke speculated. "Under the guidance of a tiny yet extremely complex electronic brain, the missile is now surveying the planet at close quarters. A camera is photographing the landscape below, and the resulting pictures are being transmitted to the distant Earth along a narrow radio beam. It is unlikely that true television will be possible, with an apparatus as small as this, over such ranges. The best that could be expected is that still pictures could be transmitted at intervals of a few minutes, which would be quite adequate for most purposes."

This is probably as close as a science fiction writer can come to true prescience. It's astonishingly close to the true-life facts of the early Mars probes. Mr. Clarke well understood the principles and possibilities of interplanetary rocketry, but like the rest of mankind in 1951, he somewhat underestimated the long-term potentials of that "tiny but extremely complex electronic brain" -- as well as that of "true television." In the 1990s, the technologies of rocketry have effectively stalled; but the technologies of "electronic brains" and electronic media are exploding exponentially.

Advances in computers and communications now make it possible to speculate on the future of "space exploration" along entirely novel lines. Let us now imagine that Mars is under thorough exploration, sometime in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. However, there is no "Martian colony." There are no three-stage rockets, no pressure-domes, no tractor-trailers, no human settlers.

Instead, there are hundreds of insect-sized robots, every one of them equipped not merely with "true television," but something much more advanced. They are equipped for *telepresence.* A human operator can see what they see, hear what they hear, even guide them about at will (granted, of course, that there is a steep transmission lag). These micro-rovers, crammed with cheap microchips and laser photo-optics, are so exquisitely monitored that one can actually *feel* the Martian grit beneath their little scuttling claws. Piloting one of these babies down the Valles Marineris, or perhaps some unknown cra