Essays. FSF Columns

No one lives in space stations, in this scenario. Instead, our entire solar system is saturated with cheap monitoring devices. There are no "rockets" any more. Most of these robot surrogates weigh less than a kilogram. They are fired into orbit by small rail-guns mounted on high-flying aircraft. Or perhaps they're launched by laser-ignition: ground-based heat-beams that focus on small reaction-chambers and provide their thrust. They might even be literally shot into orbit by Jules Vernian "space guns" that use the intriguing, dirt-cheap technology of Gerald Bull's Iraqi "super-ca

And small robots have many other advantages. Unlike ma

And because they are small and numerous, they should be cheap. The entire point of this scenario is to create a new kind of space-probe that is cheap, small, disposable, and numerous: as cheap and disposable as their parent technologies, microchips and video, while taking advantage of new materials like carbon-fiber, fiber- optics, ceramic, and artificial diamond.

The core idea of this particular vision is "fast, cheap, and out of control." Instead of gigantic, costly, ultra-high-tech, one-shot efforts like NASA's Hubble Telescope (crippled by bad optics) or NASA's Galileo (currently crippled by a flaw in its communications ante

This is a concept that would truly involve "the public" in space exploration, rather than the necessarily tiny elite of astronauts. This is a potential benefit that we might derive from abandoning the expensive practice of launching actual human bodies into space. We might find a useful analogy in the computer revolution: "mainframe" space exploration, run by a NASA elite in labcoats, is replaced by a "personal" space exploration run by grad students and even hobbyists.

In this scenario, "space exploration" becomes similar to other digitized, computer-assisted media environments: scientific visualization, computer graphics, virtual reality, telepresence. The solar system is saturated, not by people, but by *media coverage. Outer space becomes *outer cyberspace.*

Whether this scenario is "realistic" isn't clear as yet. It's just a science-fictional dream, a vision for the exploration of space: *circumsolar telepresence.* As always, much depends on circumstance, lucky accidents, and imponderables like political will. What does seem clear, however, is that NASA's own current plans are terribly far-fetched: they have outlived all contact with the political, economic, social and even technical realities of the 1990s. There is no longer any real point in shipping human beings into space in order to wave flags.

"Exploring space" is not an "unrealistic" idea. That much, at least, has already been proven. The struggle now is over why and how and to what end. True, "exploring space" is not as "important" as was the life-and-death Space Race struggle for Cold War pre- eminence. Space science ca

However: astronomy does count. There is a very deep and genuine interest in these topics. An interest in the stars and planets is not a fluke, it's not freakish. Astronomy is the most ancient of human sciences. It's deeply rooted in the human psyche, has great historical continuity, and is spread all over the world. It has its own constituency, and if its plans were modest and workable, and played to visible strengths, they might well succeed brilliantly.

The world doesn't actually need NASA's billions to learn about our solar system. Real, honest-to-goodness "space exploration" never got more than a fraction of NASA's budget in the first place.

Projects of this sort would no longer be created by gigantic federal military-industrial bureaucracies. Micro-rover projects could be carried out by universities, astronomy departments, and small- scale research consortia. It would play from the impressive strengths of the thriving communications and computer tech of the nineties, rather than the dying, centralized, militarized, politicized rocket-tech of the sixties.

The task at hand is to create a change in the climate of opinion about the true potentials of "space exploration." Space exploration, like the rest of us, grew up in the Cold War; like the rest of us, it must now find a new way to live. And, as history has proven, science fiction has a very real and influential role in space exploration. History shows that true space exploration is not about budgets. It's about vision. At its heart it has always been about vision.

Let's create the vision.

BUCKYMANIA

Carbon, like every other element on this planet, came to us from outer space. Carbon and its compounds are well-known in galactic gas-clouds, and in the atmosphere and core of stars, which burn helium to produce carbon. Carbon is the sixth element in the periodic table, and forms about two-tenths of one percent of Earth's crust. Earth's biosphere (most everything that grows, moves, breathes, photosynthesizes, or reads F&SF) is constructed mostly of waterlogged carbon, with a little nitrogen, phosphorus and such for leavening.

There are over a million known and catalogued compounds of carbon: the study of these compounds, and their profuse and intricate behavior, forms the major field of science known as organic chemistry.

Since prehistory, "pure" carbon has been known to humankind in three basic flavors. First, there's smut (lampblack or "amorphous carbon"). Then there's graphite: soft, grayish-black, shiny stuff -- (pencil "lead" and lubricant). And third is that surpassing anomaly, "diamond," which comes in extremely hard translucent crystals.

Smut is carbon atoms that are poorly linked. Graphite is carbon atoms neatly linked in flat sheets. Diamond is carbon linked in strong, regular, three-dimensional lattices: tetrahedra, that form ultrasolid little carbon pyramids.

Today, however, humanity rejoices in possession of a fourth and historically unprecedented form of carbon. Researchers have created an entire class of these simon-pure carbon molecules, now collectively known as the "fullerenes." They were named in August 1985, in Houston, Texas, in honor of the American engineer, inventor, and delphically visionary philosopher, R. Buckminster Fuller.

"Buckminsterfullerene," or C60, is the best-known fullerene. It's very round, the roundest molecule known to science. Sporting what is technically known as "truncated icosahedral structure," C60 is the most symmetric molecule possible in three-dimensional Euclidean space. Each and every molecule of "Buckminsterfullerene" is a hollow, geodesic sphere of sixty carbon atoms, all identically linked in a spherical framework of twelve pentagons and twenty hexagons. This molecule looks exactly like a common soccerball, and was therefore nicknamed a "buckyball" by delighted chemists.