A Delayed Dream in a Sea of Stars

Version Español
In an effort to open my blog on a positive note, and to avoid using controversy as a gimmick to 'sell' the articles I will write, I have decided to use my first post as a birthday present to myself and explore a topic most people rarely consider in their day to day lives, but is near and dear to my heart.

Allow me to paint a picture for you. Imagine a world where people dwell in the inky void of space, where they live and work in artificial environments that hang suspended in a sea of stars. Imagine a world where each of these self-contained wordlets has its own farms, factories, villages, and hundreds of people who live, work, and play under the benevolent supervision of Terra, Luna, and countless glimmers in the sky, a world where shuttles fly from colony to moon to Earth and back in a daily progression of trade and near-harmony.

It sounds fantastically science fiction, doesn't it? What if I told you that the technology for all these fantastic things were theorized and some were proof of concept tested in micro-scale in the late 1970s? An unbelievable claim, isn't it?

Sadly, as will be typical of the things mentioned in this blog, it's all true. During the 1970s, a great deal of intellectual sweat was invested in the idea of creating what common lexicon would call a space station, but scientists correctly identified as a space habitat, as the complex machines put into orbit would not be mere working places, but home to thousands of people. In the spirit of old-time explorers, who recognized their settlements as colonies of their mother nation, I will refer to the space habitats as colonies in recognition that they would be the settlements of humanity in a new frontier.

From here on, the assumption will be that the colony in question will be a Bernal sphere, 500 meters in diameter, and able to support about 10,000 people. To begin simply, an island of humanity in space must first deal with the minimum of human needs in space. The first would be the threats from an obviously hostile environment. The basic threats can be summed up as radiation and meteoroids. The sun is a highly active ball of super-combusted gases that throws out radiation in all directions. The Earth’s atmosphere prevents the majority of that radiation from coming into contact with living organisms, but such natural shielding would be unavailable in an artificial construct such as a colony. The second threat, that of meteoroid impact, are statistically insignificant, but still there for the sake of completeness. A meteoroid that weighs a gram can be expected once every ten years, and a ten kilogram meteoroid is a threat of every one hundred thousand years. Both can be addressed with heavy metallic shielding that resist radiation and have a strong ability to resist impact, which will require millions of tons of metal, and is actually the most economically feasible.

What about basic human needs, such as food, water, air, stress, and, that most ignored of all necessities, gravity? Gravity is arguably the most necessary, as without gravity, human bones rot away, making the bones less sturdy and breakage more likely. Gravity is the most easily addressed, surprisingly, as a rotating environment can be set to produce the necessary 1 G (9 m/s^2) by adjusting its rate of revolutions per minute (RPM). To translate, by making the colony rotate once a minute, a sensation of weight akin to that on Earth is produced. Air is needed to maintain life, as is the pressure present from the air. The ‘air’ we breathe is actually a composite of many gases from which we take in the necessary O2 to exist. However, the air also has to provide enough pressure for human lungs to work adequately, yet prevent losses in the inner chemistry or the growth of hostile bacteria. From there, the creation of a proper atmosphere is actually more like copying the atmosphere available on earth. However, the actual pressure of that atmosphere well below that of Earth’s actual atmosphere.

Food and water would actually be incorporated into the entire system. It’s accepted scientific fact that the atmosphere is maintained through the environment through a complex interaction of animal and plant. That same environment would become a keystone of the actual support system to sustain life. As for the inevitable stress that would result from living inside of a floating metal island, those would be addressed through design aesthetics, such as the aforementioned plants, giving colonists plenty of ability to customize, as well as creating a ‘view’, either through blocking off sections of the colony, and making it easy to look ‘outside’, into the ink well of the void.

Another matter to address is population growth. It is my belief that given the small size of the initial colony, it won’t be filled at the start. It will probably be filled with about half its capacity, to allow for a natural growth and demographic transition. Bernal spheres would be primarily agricultural, able to feed and probably clothe itself, but in need of heavier goods. Obviously, trade with Earth will be a necessity for it to survive and prosper for a long time.

I’ll finish up this particular part of the article with how to build the colony, and then move on to the reasons why it hasn’t been implemented, and my theory on how we’ll finally manage to get into space. Obviously, labor for construction will have to come from Earth, and the initial stage of construction will require that the materials come from Earth as well. But how are we supposed to economically deliver many tons of materials into space, when shuttle launches are a crippling $45,000 per kilogram? As I’m sure you can expect, that problem was also addressed, and even proof of concept tested. A mass drivers is an electromagnetic launcher which accelerates payloads to an incredible speeds to fire it out into space. Obviously, the speeds involved nullify this as a possibility for human transportation, but at least the tools, materials, equipment, and other necessities can be launched into space for a relatively cheap $0.10 a gram.

However, an Earth-based mass driver would only be the first step in creating the first space colony. Another matter that must be considered is having a pseudo-stable work environment. Things in space drift, and without air resistance, potentially never stop moving. It’s possible that the colony being built would drift off from Earth, into the moon, with no way to stop it. Physics has generously provided a solution to that problem with the Lagrange points, points in the orbit of Earth that will stay in place when put into orbit there, which means a stable work environment. There are five Lagrange points, and the closest is the one between Earth and the moon, L1, but the most stable are L4 and L5, which are at equilateral points that are equidistant from Earth and Moon.

Where a colony is built is up to logistics and simplicity of ease, so L4 or L5 are more likely than L2, due to the complexity involved at L2. Regardless, once the mass driver launches materials at incredible speed, something has to catch it, and some sort of mass catcher will be positioned at the most logistically easy point. From there, it’s a simple matter of launch, catch, construct, and repeat, which is not to say that such a major construction project would not require a great deal of time, but in relative terms, would be no complex than the construction of a particularly large aircraft carrier.

Given that all of these concepts are being couched in 1970s technology and 2008 dollars, what’s stopping NASA or some other space-inclined power? The eternal bugbear of science: money. An earth-based mass driver would cost something in the area of $40 billion dollars, more than double NASA’s annual budget. Most of that money would be dedicated toward creating energy capacitors from the 1970s to power the mass driver, as it would only take about $100 million dollars to buy the raw materials and actually build the mass driver. The price tag for launching materials into space I provided also includes the cost of amortization of capital for payload, so those costs were not ignored. However, even in the 1970s, a proposed solution for the energy problem was to make the entire drive coil system of a mass driver superconducting, as well as the coils, so that enough energy could be stored inductively by charging the system with current. Then quench the coil when done, and the costs would be substantially reduced. Colonies themselves are expensive masterpieces, requiring billions of dollars in materials in labor to build.

So, is there hope for a future in space or will it die on the desks of bureaucrats? Current models of sustainability indicate that, at best, Earth can only produce enough food to support 10 billion people. Population projections conservatively project 9 billion people by the year 2050, and this is including the various demographic data that prove the extremely low fertility rates in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia, and China. One has only to look in famine-plagued nations at the results of not having enough to eat: war for food and water. So, will there be a future in space? I think it’s inevitable, even if bureaucrats continue to hatchet the program for the next two generations. Needs must.

Finally, it’s my belief that the nation most likely to launch space colonies first will be an unexpected upstart in the modern world: India. India has a growing population that is already well past 1 billion, and will surpass China’s in the near future. It is rapidly becoming a wealthy nation, with a GDP of $5 trillion that is projected to continue growing. Not only that, Indians produce a large share of engineers, scientists, and the other kind of people necessary to make the space colony dream a reality. It has the impetus of a massive population, along with the intelligence to pull if off. Neither the United States nor Europe, areas already well within Stage IV of demographic transition (death rate is equal to the birth rate), when not in Stage V (death rate exceeds the growth rate) without immigration, have little real reason to want to put up space colonies, as they do not have any particular excess population nor threat of it occurring. Russia is within Stage V, so again, while it has the resources and ability to do so, does not need to, nor will have the need to. Lastly, China, behemoth though it is, will eventually not need space colonies, and that will be sooner rather than later. The One Child Policy artificially puts China in Stage IV, and given that One Child Law in China that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of surplus males without any possibility of finding a mate, the natural process of reproduction will make it less attractive and even necessary. Regardless of which one of the space powers pulls it off, living in space is closer than anyone thinks.

Sources
Space Settlements: A Design Study
International Data Base
Ten Billion Mouths To Feed
Mass Driver Update