Rocketpunk Manifesto

"She Turned Me Into a Newt! ... (I got better)"

2012-01-29T08:14:00.000-08:00

I must ask the indulgence of this blog's international readership - nearly half of you - for dealing with something as parochial and terrestrial as the US presidential election.

Newt Gingrich is unique among prominent political figures, 'Murrican or otherwise, in that you could imagine him commenting at Rocketpunk Manifesto. Megalomania is an occupational hazard of politicians, but Newt is the only one I can think of whose delusions of grandeur (grandiosity?) were informed by the Foundation Trilogy, in particular Hari Seldon.

On the other hand, if I were a true-believing 'Murrican conservative, this would give me pause. The Seldon Plan uses both religion and free-market capitalism as mere tools to advance a (cosmopolitan and statist!) ulterior agenda: laying groundwork for the Second Galactic Empire. Those who cherish either religion or capitalism for its own sake should be on notice. (Apparently many already are; Newt is taking a ferocious battering from many quarters of the right.)

In any case, my specific pretext for talking about Newt here is his promise that, if he were elected, the US would have a permanent Moon base by 2020. At some unspecified later date, suggested Newt, the Moon could petition for statehood.

One liberal blogger had trouble deciding whether Newt was channeling his inner geek or just making an old fashioned pander. (He made the speech on Florida's Space Coast, hard-hit by the Shuttle retirement.) These are not mutually exclusive; it could be both!

Discover magazine called the lunar base impossible. In the technical sense it surely is possible - just enormously expensive. Which makes it politically impossible, in the current fiscal climate, especially in the absence of any credible plan to build public support for the plan.

The likelihood that Newt will be called on to make good on this promise is slim to none. The GOP nominee will almost certainly be Generic Republican, AKA Mitt Romney. (And I don't think it is pure wishful thinking on my part to suspect that President Obama will make short work of him in the fall.)

But Newt's lunar follies are not without consequences. The last prominent Republican to make reckless promises about the Moon was George Bush ('the Younger'). The circumstances were different. There is no evidence that Bush was ever a space geek. His proposal to return to the Moon was presumably thrown together by advisors who themselves were not space-minded, but merely looking for a Vision Thing [TM].

The results of this careless promise have been fairly dire. Bush got one speech out of it, then paid it no further visible attention. The public barely noticed, and soon forgot about the whole thing. No heed was given to the program's out-year costs, and the US was locked for several years into a gold-plated architecture that made billions for aerospace firms but ended up getting mostly canceled.

The upshot has been to leave the US with no operational human launch capability, and the fiasco significantly discredit the whole idea of human spaceflight. Newt Gingrich's legacy is to have further discredited it, at least modestly.

In longer historical perspective, yes, an argument can be made that a Democratic president, JFK, also overpromised in a way that set back the long term prospects of human spaceflight. I will argue that the post-Apollo stagnation is exaggerated, simply because Apollo was so spectacular, and also must be seen in the context of post-60s backlash and the great tragedy of Lyndon Johnson.

Also, of course, Apollo actually did go to the Moon, which should count for something in this discussion.

By sheer coincidence (or deep synchronicity), two readers brought to my attention a much more thoughtful space discussion by Gregory Benford. He is a far better writer and thinker than Newt Gingrich, but something about space makes him careless too. Mostly he rags on NASA, and it takes him less than 100 words to get from the fatal Shuttle losses to accusing the agency of being "safety obsessed."

Anyone who isn't "safety obsessed" really has no business going into space - and chances are strong that they'll never get there.

In fact, as I have pointed out before on this blog, we have made crucial strides in human spaceflight, and safety is at the heart of them. The ISS has operated for more than a decade without any mishap that required aborting its mission or emergency rescue from Earth. That is the single most important preparatory benchmark for human interplanetary spaceflight.

I'll also note - again, not for the first time - that NASA's robotic deep space exploration program has been a spectacular success, in spite of some embarrassments (feet ... meters ... oops!) along the way.

Yes, I wish we had scheduled commercial flights to the Moon. But anyone who ever said that space was easy was either delusional or selling snake oil. Or both.

An earlier discussion of political ideology and space travel.

Via Wikipedia, the image shows the SM-62 Snark (really!), a 50s vintage cruise missile.

Meanwhile, Back On Earth ...

2012-01-17T20:40:00.000-08:00

Regular readers will know that if the Plausible Midfuture unfolds even remotely as I have speculated here, the vast majority of the human race will still be living on Earth after the next few centuries. Any other outcome requires either a truly staggering increase in the space population or a truly horrific reduction in Earth's population, or both.

Also bear in mind that most humans today 'still' live in the Old World.

So what happens on Earth over the next few hundred years will be overwhelmingly important to most people. Even if the space population turns out to be surprisingly large, what happens there will still be massively shaped by developments on Earth.

This is a topic that I have only sporadically addressed here, which means that it has not yet been beaten half to death. And, happily - just as I was futzing around and getting increasingly antsy about needing to post something here - Winch of Atomic Rockets sent me a link to this MetaFilter page, which in turn led me to a two-part piece on the near to midfuture by Charlie Stross.

(No more links in the body of this post, I promise!)

I come neither to praise Stross nor to bury him. Follow the links or ignore them. Like him I am generally conservative. On the whole I think we are in something of a decelerando, at least compared to the era around 1870-1930, when the Western world went pretty much from post-medieval to proto-contemporary.

I do make, as Stross does, the general presumption that post-industrial civilization is viable enough to last at least through the medium term. Obviously this is not guaranteed to be the case. Post-apocalyptic futures are a whole different matter. On the flip side, post-Singularity futures are also a whole different matter. I am fairly skeptical of either class of outcome, and will ignore them both. (But commenters are not under obligation to do so.)

So we are dealing here with intermediate cases. The future, then, is broadly recognizable to us - even, in many details, rather familiar. Our neighborhood was built some 80 years ago, and mostly still dates to that era. Newer buildings are identifiable by period, coming full circle to the post-modernist retro style.

Within the next century or so most of the old buildings will probably be worn out and replaced, by buildings that probably won't look like the zeerust future. They may get solar roofs sooner than that, barely noticeable from street level.

What things look like at street level may not be the most critical or awesome element of the future, but it is what would give us that all-important first impression. (Compare to the visual appearance of spacecraft.)

In the past month or so an interesting discussion has shown up in some corners of the blogosphere about whether the traditional fashion cycle has broken down, eliminating one of our standard markers of the passage of time. (No links - practice your Google fu!)

The argument is that while the worlds of 1932, 1952, and 1972 had obvious looks that distinguish them from each other as well as from the present, the world of 1992 looked pretty much like it does today, other than the absence of smartphones. Even pop-culture excess has hardly changed - swap in Madonna for Lady Gaga and you're good to go.

My subjective impression is this is broadly true. Hemlines no longer rise and fall consistently; post-post-modernist architecture steals freely from all past epochs as well as from itself; generic no-era cars park freely alongside evocative ones like the Cooper Mini.

Project this into the future, and 2062 and 2112 - even 2212 - might be hard to tell apart, and not that easy even to tell from the present. No monorails, no aircars.

The world of classical antiquity was rather like that (or at least my impression of classical antiquity is like that). Costume, temple design, and the like changed at only a glacial pace. Classical civilization had style, which is timeless, but not fashion.

Having said that, even if we are into a decelerando there will be a great deal of technological progress, if only working out the implications of established technologies. We see a lot of that in the cybertech industry today. We do not have HAL 9000 or anything remotely close, and so far as I can tell, contemporary programming languages are no profound advance over plain vanilla Kernighan & Richie C.

What we do have is enormous raw computing horsepower, and the large-scale computerized mediation of communication between people, of which this blog is a minor example.

The technology that might most exemplify the sort of tech progress that people at midcentury did not expect is the shipping container. It is hard to imagine anything less futuristic - just a big steel box. But it revolutionized cargo transportation, and played a substantial role in the current era of economic globalization.

Because I do not want to keep you my loyal readers waiting even longer than I already have, I will resist the impulse to speculate at length about all the usual things - from medical miracles (or lack of) to the consequences of global climate change.

On the latter, suffice to say that some places will become more or less uninhabitable; some places now subarctic may become gardens; lots of places will become more hot and humid, at times miserably so. Some places will see surprising climate changes, even becoming colder as patterns shift. If world agriculture is severely disrupted, things could get out of hand, but I said I wasn't dealing with post-apocalyptic scenarios, and I won't.

But I will toss in a speculation inspired by recent political issues. An emergent global economic elite could change power politics from horizontal to vertical alignments. Put simply, an elite that socializes and does business together, and not infrequently intermarries, could develop global solidarity. (Or not, per Queen Victoria's grandchildren.) But if they do, the lines of conflict could be within territories and societies rather than between them.

Discuss.

These two container ships entered San Francisco Bay side by side - first time I'd seen that.

A Place to Call Home

2011-12-28T12:11:00.000-08:00

Extrasolar 'Earths' are still in the news, for a fairly loose definition of 'Earth'. Thanks to the Kepler mission the news stream of 'Earths' is likely to continue. Upwards of 200 candidates have been identified, most of which will probably not turn out to be false positives.

Surely some of the not-false-positives will orbit within their parent stars' habitable zones, calling for more detailed investigation. We will then search for signs of atmospheric water vapor, and especially oxygen - a substance so unstable and corrosive that its presence in significant quantities probably indicates life, and complex life at that.

Meanwhile, last post's comment thread drifted to a familiar topic in these parts: permanent, large scale human habitation in space. The 'large scale' part, especially, tends to pushes this subject beyond the Plausible Midfuture, which will have its work cut out producing a 'substantial' human population in space.

(Today's persistent space population is six. If it increases by an average 2 percent per year there are a decidedly modest 250 people in space circa 2200; at 3 percent per year some 1500. At 4 percent per year the space population is close to 10,000 people by 2200. Not so shabby, really. But bear in mind that all such compound interest calculations eventually bump up against something.)

Set aside the question of why - other than sheer coolness - we would colonize space at all. Also set aside, for now, those niggly questions about affording it.

An important, under-discussed aspect of space habitats is whether most humans can readily adapt to living in a can - and, if so, how big a can it takes. This issue was first pointed out to me in an email exchange with Matt Picio, a longtime regular at SFConsim-l. It came up again in the last discussion thread.

Putting it a more immediate way, how long can we be comfortable with never going outdoors? And what qualifies psychologically as being outdoors? We already know something about this without having to go into space, as the phrase 'cabin fever' suggests. Experience with nuclear submarines provides a baseline; so does over-winter habitation in Antarctica. But these habitats are on the same order of size as ordinary ships and buildings.

Space habs, intended for long-term occupation, are generally imagined to be at least an order of magnitude larger in sheer size, and an order of magnitude less cramped for their occupants. We do not have any examples on this scale to go by.

In popular imagination there are supposed to be Manhattanites who have no interest in riding the subway to the outer boroughs, let alone visiting the Big Sky Country. (They may or may not exist in any significant numbers.) But Manhattan is not an enclosed can - even its canyon streets are open to the sky. If Manhattan were domed over, would Central Park still feel like a park, or merely an indoor garden?

The question may not be purely a matter of (habitable!) physical space. Parallax depth from our binocular vision becomes 'infinity' at a few hundred meters; other cues (perspective; haze or lack of) can extend this to kilometers. My subjective impression is that mountain cabins on valleys less than a km or two wide feel confined.

Other factors both physiological and psychological could come into play. How rich an ecosystem is required for a healthy variety of smells and sounds?

Does it matter whether we are talking about an O'Neill-esque spacehab or a domed hab on a planetary surface? Does it count as 'going outside' if you have to stay in a vehicle or put on a spacesuit? I have also noticed, during long train rides, that in spite of the spectacular view from the dome car the impulse to step out of the train during station stops becomes very strong.

Presumably these concerns would not arise on a habitable planet, whether naturally so or terraformed. (But can we be completely sure of this?) And they may not matter for gigastructures approaching planetary dimensions, with rich ecosystems to match, and means other than domes or bulkheads to hold in the air.

But the overall point is that long-term human habitability may involve constraints going well beyond those that apply to spaceships that reach their destinations in a few months.

Discuss.

This image of the recent lunar eclipse above the Rocky Mountains comes, as so often, from Astronomy Picture of the Day. And a link to Atomic Rockets, just on general principles.

A Supersized 'Earth'

2011-12-11T12:50:00.000-08:00

For your entertainment and edification, a short note on Kepler-22b, the exoplanet that has caused a flurry of 'habitable planet' stories in the mass media.

Is it actually habitable? The short and accurate answer is that we don't know. All we really know directly about Kepler-22b are its orbital period and size. But the first of these - not quite 290 days - yields an average orbital distance (semi-major axis) of 0.849 AU. In the Solar System that would fall close to midway between Venus and Earth.

The G5 parent star, however, is a shade smaller, cooler, and dimmer than Sol. Its estimated luminosity is 0.79 solar, meaning that the planet, at its average distance, receives just about 10 percent more light - and therefore heat - than Earth does. The planet must shed that heat by radiation, and a quick-and-dirty temperature estimate, based on the 4th power law of radiation to temperature, makes it 2.3 percent warmer than Earth - about six or seven degrees C.

In fact, the paper announcing the discovery comes up with an equilibrium temperature of 262 K for Kepler-22b, as compared to 255 K for Earth.

Radiative equilibrium is only a starting point for planetary conditions. How much heat a planet actually absorbs depends on how much light is reflected, or its albedo (0.29 for Earth). And its radiative temperature, in the IR, is measured at the top of any greenhouse layer in the atmosphere. The radiative equilibrium temperature is only a starting point.

But - assuming similar albedo and greenhouse heating to Earth - the surface temperature would also be a few degrees warmer than Earth. Which is easily inside the habitable range.

Pause here to note that most of what makes global warming problematic for our civilization is abrupt change in climate, not a somewhat warmer climate per se. An Earthlike planet with stifling tropics but mild subarctic zones would still be eminently habitable for humans.

Now for the caveats. For one, in spite of the cool illustration above (via Sky & Telescope) we do not know Kepler-22b's orbital eccentricity. Most extrasolar planets, unless so close in that their orbits have been tidally circularized, have notably more eccentric orbits than Earth does; this one could be searing hot at periastron, freezing cold at apoastron.

And we do know Kepler-22's size, 2.38 Earth radii, so it cannot really be very Earthlike at all. The radius corresponds to a volume 13.5 times Earth's. If it is primarily rocky its mass is proportional, with surface gravity well above 2g. On the other hand it could be a 'water giant,' with roughly earth-sized rocky core and a hydrosphere thousands of miles deep. Ocean is far too weak a term.

Earthlike it is not, whatever its composition. But it is hard not to speculate. Suppose that a rocky core has a radius of 1.38 x Earth's (and probably a bit denser), with a hydrosphere above.

Planetary mass is then close to 5 Earth masses. Surface gravity is about 0.9 g, and low-orbit velocity is around 11 km/s - similar to Earth's escape velocity. Getting back off after 'landing' on the hydrosphere would be tough, but not as tough as getting there in the first place, since it is 600 light years away.

So ... speculate!

Bonus science destructiveness news: Thanks to regular commenter 'Thucydides,' five cataclysmic events to think about.

Science Fiction versus Fantasy

2011-12-07T18:30:00.000-08:00

Mostly this is not much of a fight. These two subgenres of Romance happily coexist (along with horror) in the same section of the bookstore.

This juxtaposition need not have been inevitable. Horror, at least, could as easily have been shelved along with mysteries. Both have a lot of dark stuff, not to mention shared roots going back to Edgar Allen Poe. In other respects, both SF and fantasy have a good deal in common with historical fiction - all set in worlds different from the everyday present, usually markedly so. But hist-fic seems generally shelved in with general fiction, presumably because its worlds are 'real.'

It is only by coincidence that I bring this up right after the death of Anne McCaffrey, whose Pern setting amounted (IIRC) to a fantasy setting framed within a mostly offstage SF setting.

Exactly how SF and F are to be distinguished from one another is a vexed, long-discussed issue, and now we are going to vex it some more. I have tended to favor the robust if simplistic rule that if it has a spaceship it is SF, if it has a sword it is fantasy, and if it has both it is science fantasy. Which works pretty well as practical guidance, but of course there is more to it than that.

There are theoretical differences - so to speak - between the science-rooted world view (typically) presumed in SF and the magical/mystical/demireligious world view implied by most fantasy. More consequential are the practical differences - science is, well, science, while magic is an art. (Read the posts that follow that one for further discussion.)

Several attempts have been made to 'rationalize' fantasy settings, giving them an SF infrastructure. The ones I have read - notably by Niven and L Sprague de Camp - have tended to clunk. They had no magic, in the literary sense. Explaining magic takes the art out of it, and does what a lecture on nutrition does to a fine meal. The Pern book likely avoided this problem by putting the SF frame on the shelf and reading like traditional fantasy.

Another interesting line of argument contrasts the political undertones of SF and fantasy - the former tending to be broadly liberal, the latter deeply hierarchical and essentially reactionary. I introduce this point in a mealymouthed way because my monkey's google fu is weak. Just a few weeks ago I read an essay or blog post making this point. It was by a pretty well known SF writer, but I can't remember his name, and searching has failed to turn it up. Suggestions by the hive mind would be welcome!

This argument's logic and examples are impeccable, but I can't entirely buy it - and can't entirely put my finger on why I don't quite buy it. It is true that 'traditional' fantasy (as distinct from urban fantasy and the like) is backward-looking, rooted in the social conditions of the agrarian age, while SF looks forward to a post-industrial age.

Is it simply that the Scouring of the Shire is so cool? I've read a revisionist version (which seemed distinct from the one linked - once again reports from the hive mind are welcome), but the Scouring was still cool.

The political interpretation of genre makes for an easy segue to fretting over what has happened to SF/F since their bookstore pairing became the norm, by around 1970. Swords have done better than spaceships, with fantasy becoming considerably the larger of the two genres, as measured by book production and sales.

By further (non-?) coincidence all this happened at just about the same time that space travel became a reality - and turned out to be so difficult and costly as to make the classical SF space future look somewhat ... fantastic. Indeed, much of the modern-era growth in SF itself has been in quasi-fantasy directions, notably including retro-SF that looks as firmly backward as traditional fantasy, if not quite as far.

The flip side may be urban fantasy, bringing fantasy tropes into the post-industrial era.

Yet in spite of the controversies and stereotypes, the two genres do coexist pretty well, to the point where I can more or less take for granted that readers here will be familiar with fantasy tropes. The similarities are, in the end, more consequential than the differences, and more central to the great Romance genre to which they both belong.

Discuss.

The image, besides being entertainingly lurid, illustrates a theme common to SF and fantasy, and provides an excuse to link the page at Atomic Rockets where I found it.

Distance 119+ AU

2011-12-03T19:48:00.000-08:00

A discussion of SF and Fantasy is pending here, but in the meanwhile, a little weekend science news.

According to the Voyager website at NASA, Voyager 1 is currently nearly 120 AU from Earth - 119.862 AU, to throw in a few extra decimal places. (Follow the link to see a real-time distance updating.) Its distance from the Sun is just over 119 AU, a more relevant measure - the distance from Earth will actually shrink during by next (northern hemisphere) summer, when Earth swings around to the same side of the Sun as Voyager.

Voyager 2 is a slightly more modest 97 AU from the Sun. Pioneer 10, which lost contact with Earth a few years ago, is at a similar distance.

We grump about human spaceflight a lot around here, but stop to think about the fact that a human-built spacecraft is now nearly 120 AU from the Sun - still in operating condition, still investigating the heavens.

Meanwhile the Mars Science Laboratory mission, including the rover Curiosity, is on its way to Mars. The image above, from Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD), shows its launch.

Not on its way to the inner moon of Mars, sad to say, is Phobos-Grunt, which fell out of contact on entering Earth parking orbit. Mars has a remarkable history of eating space missions. According to Wikipedia, Russian engineers still have some faint hope of establishing contact and perhaps even sending the spacecraft to a near-Earth asteroid. Otherwise, RIP.

In spite of setbacks, the exploration of the Solar System (and its environs) continues.

Whose Space Futures?

2011-11-22T19:52:00.000-08:00

This blog has a fairly international readership. If Google Analytics are anything to go by, nearly half of you come from outside the US, and about a quarter from outside the Anglosphere. This probably has much more to do with the virtues of the Internet than any virtue of mine.

Space itself has been an international environment, so far. Which probably has much more to do with its perceived lack of immediate economic or power-political value than with anyone's virtue. Like Antarctica it is interesting enough to establish a presence there, but not enough for the major powers to go to the mat over it.

A frequent topic on this blog has been the colonization of space - how likely it is (or isn't), and under what circumstances it might happen. I am not the only one raising the question. Charlie Stross has brought it up a couple of times, at least.

As he notes, and this is pretty much a no-brainer, the 'Murrican SF conception of the space future is highly colonization-centric. It is firmly and understandably rooted in the experience of the New World (by those populations for whom it was new), and especially the Wild West. Thus Bat Durston and Firefly.

My excessively vague impression is that, elsewhere, the conceptions of the space futures are quite different. The contrast that is most striking in my mind is between Heinlein's rip-roarin' interplanetary future and Clarke's crumpets-and-tea version. (For both writers I am thinking mainly of their earlier work. Later Heinlein annoyed me; later Clarke merely bored me.)

Of the two, Clarke's future now strikes me as far closer to a plausible midfuture than Heinlein's. For one thing - but a very important thing - his Solar System was essentially the one we actually live in, with only one habitable planet, Earth.

Heinlein's Solar System - with its habitable Venus and near-habitable Mars, not to mention native civilizations on both worlds - was wonderful but baroque, largely outdated even by the 1950s. In a lot of ways classic Heinlein reads like steampunk disguised as rocketpunk.

2001: A Space Odyssey is, no surprise, firmly in the Clarkean universe, and resembles the real world space program on 1960s steroids. There is a Moon base, or more than one (the Russians presumably have their own), and commercial space travel, but no hint of incipient Heinleinian colonization.

Having said this much, I have no real sense of how non-US perceptions of a space future have developed over the years, or how much part permanent colonization has played in these images. So I want to toss this out to non-US readers in particular: Does the whole space colonization debate even seem salient, or just a parochial 'Murrican concern?

What is the human engagement with space all about, anyway? And while we are at it, what is the relationship between actual space travel and space as a setting for fiction, Romance or otherwise?

Discuss.

The image, from APOD, seems like one that Clarke would particularly have appreciated: a Perseid meteor entering Earth's atmosphere, as seen from above.

Is Realism Unrealistic?

2011-11-07T19:50:00.000-08:00

Realism is viable so long as you only want to do realistic things. Exploring space is realistic. Mining it, colonizing it, or fighting Epic Battles in its far reaches are all operatic things. None of them is impossible. But all are highly unlikely, at any rate in the readily foreseeable future, given technology as we know it.

In fairness to me, I have generally discussed the 'plausible midfuture,' a time and place that is characterized as plausible, but not necessarily most likely, or even very likely at all. But that doesn't do away with the problem. Does an implicit requirement for 'plausibly' demi-realistic technology amount to an unrealistic constraint when applied to essentially operatic settings?

Or, putting it another way - and bringing it down to cases - given that deep space warfare is pretty damn unlikely under the technological restraints I have discussed here, does the Space Warfare series really provide any useful help for writers or gamers who want to make their space battles more convincing. Wouldn't they really be better off to adopt the operatic technology of their choice, then work out the implication for combat under those conditions?

This came up in a recent comment thread, in which John Lumpkin's novel, Through Struggle, the Stars, got taken in vain. I have not read the book, so I have no informed opinion on how convincing his setting is. But the question raised is much more general - does putting 'realistic' spaceships in a setting of space colonies make it less plausible than allowing a technology that would justify deep space travel as convenient and cheap?

As I have noted here before, my bias toward realistic-style spacecraft (and other details of a setting) is essentially aesthetic. Magitech is inherently arbitrary. It is well done if it holds together with internal consistency, but it is still arbitrary. And just on the level of purely visual aesthetics I was heavily influenced by the early space age, when we started getting pictures showing how things in outer space actually look.

Oddly enough, by the way, I have never seen Hollywood successfully capture this look, especially the brightness of spacecraft in full sunlight at 1 AU. In some cases this may be because Hollywood loves gothicism in space, but I suspect the real reason is much more basic: No studio lighting is anything near as bright as direct sunlight.

(Although APOD doesn't mention it, the dim lighting of the spacewalk scene above suggests that it was taken while the ISS was passing over Earth's nightside, illuminated only by floodlights and sucy, not direct sunlight.)

Speaking of Hollywood spaceships, the Venture Star in Avatar may not be quite as realistic as it looks. Its appearance, with big radiator wings and so forth, is very much Plausible Midfuture, suggestive of a gigawatt-output nuclear electric power plant ... but the drive is capable of reaching relativistic speeds at more or less 1 g. I'm not gonna do the math here, but that drive is putting out waaaaay more than a gigawatt of thrust power. Those impressive-looking radiators couldn't shed much more than the ship's galley heat.

See? This is the sort of problem you get into when you start running the numbers for our favorite space scenarios. And the problems exist at multiple levels of meta-ness, from the sorts of technical issues I just mentioned up to (at least) the question of what relationship science fiction settings can or should have to 'the future.'

Discuss.

Space Liners

2011-10-30T19:17:00.000-07:00

In the last comment thread, commenter papa noted a very natural first guess: that the title was a riff on the musical Showboat, and that the post topic would thus be space liners (rather than military showboating).

Thread drift duly followed, so that the rest of last thread can usefully be read as 'pre-comments' on this post.

If you do a Google Images search on battlecruiser, images of space warcraft handily predominate over, you know, actual seagoing battlecruisers. Do the same for space liner and you get a strange grab bag of images - the first row on my screen includes two aerospace vehicles (one from the film 2001), a very stylized deep space craft (from a Maldives stamp), a car, a bicycle, and a pullcart for garbage cans. Spaceliner as a single word brings up mostly bicycles, plus a fair number of buses.

This little search adventure confirmed something I already knew from my traffic stats: We geeks are a rather bloodthirsty lot, at least in imagination.

It also showed me something a bit disappointing that I didn't know. Space liners do not seem very well established as a trope. Even the Evil Website has only one reference (relating to the film The Fifth Element). Yet a future of large scale space travel, interplanetary or interstellar, might reasonably be expected to include space liners, so they are worth considering here.

First, some definition of terms, then a bit of future-history speculation. The minority of Google images showing spacecraft of any sort are dominated by aerospace planes, like 2001's Pan Am shuttle. (Melancholy note that the commercial tie-in was to a now-defunct airline.)

Operators of aerospace liners have a perfect right to leave off the 'aero-' part, but for this discussion I have in mind 'real' space liners that operate entirely in space, especially those making long trips through deep space, interplanetary or interstellar. And I am concerned here with spacecraft intended for travel, from one planet (station, whatever) to another, not the spacegoing equivalent of cruise ships.

(The spacegoing counterpart of the cruise ship is - at least for a long time to come - the orbital hotel. It has simpler operating and emergency procedures, and offers a scenic view for the whole time, not just near departure and arrival.)

If we have anything more than minimal human travel into deep space, we will presumably have the space liner's more utilitarian counterpart, the interplanetary transport. (Some technology assumptions, notably cycler stations, more or less eliminate this role, but I'm somewhat doubtful of these approaches.)

Commenter Tony made a suggestion last thread that early transports, at least, may have only a minimal dedicated crew - the passenger manifest providing needed most of the needed skillsets as well as the scut labor. After all, these early passengers will be trained specialists on assignment to outpost destinations, whatever the institutional details.

I tend to agree. Indeed, as I noted in comments, early passenger transports may have no permanently assigned crew. If they are lightly shielded to save penalty mass, a couple of round trips might rack up a substantial fraction of lifetime radiation exposure, making ship's crew a non-viable career path. And the people being transported to and from deep space outposts reasonably include propulsion techs, along with mission controllers who can function as pilots.

Somewhere along the time line, however, VIPs will muscle or bribe their way onto the passenger manifests. The first of these will make no difference in terms of accommodations - like today's pioneer orbital tourists, they will bunk and eat alongside working crew/passengers. At some later point, VIP passengers, whether bureaucratic or paying, will become numerous enough that First Class accommodations will be provided for them.

At this point the true space liner begins to take form, even if its chrysalis is just a corridor or two within the hab of an otherwise-utilitarian transport. As suggested in the last thread, even the transports will be relatively comfortable, because their travel times are in weeks or months. First Class accommodations may offer slightly larger cabins, or roomettes instead of bunkrooms, but their most distinctive - and expensive - feature will be stewards and other hotel staff.

If bases and outposts do evolve into incipient colonies (by no means a given!), travel will become more commercialized and purpose-built space liners will evolve. These may still have some equivalent of steerage class for passengers who do much of the work of maintaining their hab spaces - at least the basics like making up their own bunks and providing galley services. But they will also have First Class and intermediate level accommodations.

Yes, there is also the possibility of that old SF standby, Cold Sleep, or some other means of snoozing for most of the passage. But the more we learn about humans biologically the more complicated we turn out to be, and I don't think we can count on this.

In any case, by this point we are well beyond the 'Plausible Midfuture.' Will the liners, or at least their First Class sections, have spacious atrium areas with gardens and the like, to provide the illusion of not traveling through space while confined in a can? If your setting is operatic enough to have full-blown space liners, I wouldn't rule this out - though a lot of the spaciousness may be artful illusion.

Discuss.

The image at top is one I made several years ago, representing the liner-freighter torchship Silk Road. Due to the (improbably!) high acceleration no spin is needed, and the passenger pods are shamelessly based on rail passenger cars - even to the 'baggage car' clamped onto the passenger section.

The image below has nothing to do with space liners. It is a Blackpool (UK) 'Boat' - so named for obvious reasons. It is about as cool as streetcars get, and this one sometimes runs in regular service on the SF MUNI's F Market line.

Showboats in Space

2011-10-10T13:21:00.000-07:00

It has been Fleet Week in San Francisco, which invites consideration of the things military forces do besides fighting wars. One of these, assisting first responders in civil disasters, figured in this year's Fleet Week.

But mainly Fleet Week is about showing off. It featured a 'parade of ships' coming into port (where I used my el cheapo phone camera to snap USS Antietam, CG-54, above), and three days of air shows - the first time I've ever walked to an air show. Sunday's Blue Angels performance had to be cut short because of intruding fog. (I had already watched them on Friday and Saturday.) An hour later the fog completely dissipated.

On an international note, this year's Fleet Week had a substantial Canadian presence: four ships and the Snowbirds, the RCAF's precision flight demonstration squadron.

But, ahem, on to the point of this post. In grand-strategic perspective, 'showing off' is arguably the primary mission of military forces. War-fighting is merely their most important secondary mission, the one they will be forced back onto if they fail in their primary mission.

Put another way, truly successful militaries deter, and achieve their wielders' objectives without a fight. Fighting battles and winning them is second-best, and might be regarded as a fail-safe mode. Fighting and losing, or surrendering without a fight, are both failure modes. (Which is worse depends on particular circumstances.)

To be sure, much military showing-off is an implicit display of war-fighting capabilities, and by no means is all or even most of it aimed directly at prospective enemies. Air show demonstration squadrons such as the Blue Angels and Snowbirds illustrate both of these points.

Flying loops in wingtip-tight formation may be a combat maneuver, but it certainly displays piloting skills and aircraft performance that are relevant to combat. But the more immediate objective of demonstration squadrons - as of much military display - is as a recruiting tool. Though come to think of it, being able to recruit troops is also combat-relevant.

The role of military display has generally been understated in the recent era. The books I read on the history of ships tended to denigrate the gilt-work of 17th century 'great ships,' though it served very well for conveying their royal owners' wealth and power.

The shift of attitudes can perhaps be pinpointed to a little more than 100 years ago, when the world's navies abruptly went gray as their armies went khaki. Not that the impulse toward display actually disappeared - at almost that exact moment, 'armored cruisers' gave way to battlecruisers, showboats par excellence, which is why their name survives in SF.

Which brings us to space. Space forces, strictly speaking, have some disadvantages when it comes to military display - in particular, being a long ways from most of the people they might impress. Space fighters, in the strict sense, can't go thundering a couple of hundred meters over the rooftops of Pacific Heights. Only atmospheric craft can do that.

The curious flip side of this is, of course, that the Space Race was all about (quasi-) military display on the grandest scale. In this case the hardware had no specific warfighting role at all. It didn't need to. Everyone understood that if you could hit the moon, you could nail Moscow or Washington.

But the Space Race soon ended, and I doubt there will be a repeat in the next few decades, even among emerging great powers. (Are the Chinese really going to impress India all that much by doing what Americans and Russians did 50 years ago?)

On the other hand, space might still have a future as a place to display technological prowess. And if, as I suspect, war 'as we have known it' is becoming obsolescent, the role of quasi-military display could become even more prominent than in the past. The obsolescence of war is not about moral betterment but pervasive mutual deterrence.

And deterrence is fundamentally all about showboating.

Discuss.

World of Two Suns

2011-09-28T18:10:00.000-07:00

Rocketpunk Manifesto has never claimed to be a space news blog, so I make no apology for being the last space blog in the known universe to mention last week's report of a planet found orbiting both components of a double star. (There is no indication - yet - of more than one planet in this system; see illo note at the end of this post.)

I will apologize for slower posting of late, the excuse being a couple of new work gigs I'm still breaking in.

But back to the world of two suns. The interesting thing about this - apart from the discovery itself - is that when I was growing up, and for long afterwards, the standard wise advice for any SF writer aiming for a speck of hardness was to avoid binary-star planets like the plague.

Any such planet was liable to be hurled out of its birth system. Even more to the point it was unlikely to form in the first place, disrupted before birth by the processes that formed a binary star in the first place. Which meant that in hard SF perspective, any planet of a binary might as well be 1930s baroque, with the blue sun rising as the red sun was sitting and the orange sun was at midafternoon.

Not for the first time - and surely not for the last - elegant inference has been trumped by observation.

Certainly not for the first time in the history of extrasolar planet discoveries. The first such worlds to be found, in 1993, were so hard to wrap our collective mind around - three planets orbiting a pulsar - that they were not fully acknowledged as 'real' planets.

Then came 51 Pegasi b, in 1995. The star is suitably sunlike, but no one expected a planet comparable in mass to Jupiter to be orbiting several times closer in than Mercury. And basically things have stayed weird ever since.

Before 1995, I'd venture that most people (who thought about it at all) expected more or less the same thing I did. Extrasolar planetary systems, when we found them, would mostly have the same overall organization as the Solar System. They'd have some rocky terrestrial inner planets between about 0.3 and 3 AU, and some gas giants out beyond the 'snow line.' Beyond the gas giants would be nothing much.

Details would vary, of course. Some systems might have only two or three planets, others well over a dozen. A few with planets bigger than Jupiter - even approaching brown-dwarf mass - and other systems with only Saturns or Neptunes. Most of these planets, big and small, would be on near-circular orbits, in striking contrast to the highly eccentric orbits typical of binary and multiple stars. The spacing of their orbits would likely be suggestive of 'Bode's law.'

By the current more or less official count of the Paris Observatory there are now 687 confirmed extrasolar planets. And precisely none of them are in systems with an overall architecture like I just described.

As I have noted here before, this is (probably) at least in part an artifact of observational 'selection effects.' Most of those 687 planets have been discovered by techniques that have a technical bias in favor of large planets close to the parent star. Indeed, a duplicate of the Solar System would be only at the threshold of detectability.

All the same it is starting to be just a little bit odd that so few known extrasolar planetary systems are even kinda sorta like the Solar System. Looking at the Paris Observatory website, there is just a hint that planets are more common around 5 AU - Jupiter distance - than around 4 AU or 6 AU. Some even have fairly circular orbits.

But all in all, the planets and planetary systems we have been finding have amazingly little in common with the ones we expected.

I don't want to draw very many large conclusions from this, except perhaps that 'large conclusions' are likely to be wrong. In particular, note that this particular discussion is entirely about the physical (and observational) facts about astronomical bodies, not about future human societies that might investigate those worlds, or seek to do more than investigate them.

But they are interesting, in themselves and for their possible place in human affairs, SFnal or otherwise.

Discuss.

The image comes from Space.com - but just to keep things interesting, it illustrates a discovery made last fall, not last week.

At the Speed of Story

2011-09-13T10:23:00.000-07:00

Spaceships in science fiction, as was first noted by a commenter in the early days of this blog, always travel at the speed of plot. This observation is recurrent, including in comments on the previous post.

The title is a mashup of this principle with Teresa Nielsen Hayden's dictum that plot is a literary convention, while story is a force of nature.

All of which goes to explain why this blog is, in some respects, a futile effort. When story collides with other considerations (such as realistic space travel), story invariably wins.

I have first-hand experience of this problem, which I will be delving into further in upcoming posts. Suffice it for now to say that when a cool technology led me to a story, the story took over completely. And I mean completely. Among other things, not one but two battle sequences ended up on the cutting room floor. They had become distractions from the story; therefore they had to go.

There are, at best, some limited protective measures. The most obvious is to go with the flow. If your story calls for fighter jocks, you are going to need fighters for them to fly. These don't necessarily have to be space fighters - if a planetary atmosphere is handy, air fighters are legit - but you will certainly need fighters of some sort.

The implausibility of space fighters won't get you off that hook. You'll have to either make them plausible - or else say the hell with it and go with implausible ones. This is an eminently safe option. The great majority of readers will neither know nor care. Of the relatively few who do care, most will forgive you. Especially if they like the story.

Other options are available. A radical but straightforward one is to avoid telling a story. This is the strategy I have followed in this blog. I've posted only a handful of fiction snippets here, and most of those had nothing to do with space. (My only actual rocketpunk SF has been a couple of paragraphs in a very early post.)

There is a modest but real interest in 'nonfiction' space speculation. It is not too hard to find blogs or other websites that discuss and describe imaginary spacecraft without trying to tell stories in which they figure. But such is the power of story that it is always lurking, waiting for a chance to intrude. To identify your laser star or killer bus as belonging to the Zorgon Empire is to invite speculation about where or what Zorgon is and how it became an empire. Warning lights flash and sirens warble, because you are now under intrusion by an incipient story.

I ought to note here that all of this applies not just to the details of spaceships and the like, but to the entire setting. I have mentioned a few times here that there are plausible space futures that are simply not very story-conducive. But the comment threads for those posts always veer toward how to get a story out of it.

Discuss.

Last post I mentioned that there are no known cases of spacecraft docking maneuvers being filmed from a third spacecraft. There turns out to be an almost-exception: The image of the Shuttle Endeavor - on its final mission - docked up to the ISS comes was filmed from a nearby Soyuz. It comes from this rather interesting blog.

Will Hollywood Ever Be Accurate About Space?

2011-08-31T12:12:00.000-07:00

As a change of pace from Mars exploration mission architecture, and by popular demand - or, at any rate, the suggestion of regular commenter Geoffrey S H - a few thoughts on Hollywood and outer space.

First, the short answer to the question posed in the title: Yes - when it has to be. That is, when the audience knows the reality, or at least has some notion of the reality, and would laugh at obvious faketude.

Which will not be for some time to come - namely, when enough people are traveling in space for actual space footage to become a familiar commonplace.

Until then, Hollywood will be completely indifferent to space realism. See this page at Atomic Rockets. Scroll down about halfway, to Hollywood Reasons.

In principle, how real spacecraft maneuver should already be familiar. We have been performing successful rendezvous and docking maneuvers since 1965, meaning 46 years of impeccably realistic maneuvers by spacecraft in space, and in close proximity to each other. But so far as I'm aware, in none of these operations has a third spacecraft been handy nearby to film the maneuver from a photogenic angle.

More to the point, rendezvous and docking is conceptually cool, but in purely visual terms it is only slightly more exciting than watching paint dry.

The day may come when docking and undocking are standard bits of stock footage, used the same way snippets of an airliner pulling up to the gate are used, to convey arrival or departure of a character. But the time and attention given to such snippets will be minimal, unless justified by some plot complication - say, a squad of police in hot pursuit, trying to arrest someone before a departing ship undocks. In which case the whole scene will get a lot more attention.

How accurate this attention will be is another matter. The scenario itself invites some interesting legal and practical questions. When a plane pulls away from the gate, or a ship from a pier, it is still within the jurisdiction of the airport or harbor - but once a spacecraft unlatches from a station, is it still within the station's jurisdiction?

Enforcing jurisdiction has its own points of interest, but in any case, don't expect Hollywood to care, any more than most cop movies today care about what would really happen in equivalent situations.

Anyway, space cops are a sideshow. Let's be honest: What you're really interested in is space battles. The usual Hollywood treatment of these, from Trek and Star Wars and on through various TV shows, is pretty risable. Space dreadnoughts fight at Trafalgar range, space fighters do barrel rolls and Immelmann turns, and an implausibly spectacular (and, especially, noisy) time is had by all.

There are a few honorable exceptions - a silent rifle shot in Firefly, and most notably the Starfury fighters in Babylon 5, which sometimes actually maneuvered like spacecraft.

How did they get away with that? I'll venture a two-part answer: First, the fliparound and retrofire maneuver is visually impressive and somewhat self-explanatory - you don't need to understand the underlying physics to appreciate its coolness. Second, J. Michael Straczynski, or someone in his development team, guessed that a small but significant part of the show's core audience would appreciate the maneuver and the logic behind it, and say "Way Cool!" Which would cue in other viewers that something way cool had just happened.

Which is useful guidance on how to make similar effects appear again. You will never convince Hollywood to replace cool by non-cool for the sake of mere realism. You have to offer a cool alternative to the existing conventions.

As one example, combat range. I can think of scenarios where spacecraft might start shooting at very close range (say, an exchange of prisoners/hostages goes pear shaped, or whatever). But most space combat situations imply Stupendous Range, or at least enormous range, certainly far too great for the rival combatants to both show visible details in the same frame.

World War II newsreel footage already solved this problem: Good guy battleship shown firing toward the right, cut to bad guy battleship shown firing to the left. We know and understand this convention - but you still need to convince the director to forego showing both the Enterprise and the Klingon battlecruisers at once.

My solution would be to use a handy moon as a prop. (It isn't like moons are hard to find out there.) Now you can have one ship firing in the direction of a distant moon - then cut to the other ship firing back, with the moon as a nearby planet-scape. Stupendous Range is instantly and vividly conveyed.

Stepping back a bit, I should acknowledge that what exactly constitutes 'realistic' space combat is rather more complex and ambiguous than simply making a nod to Sir Isaac Newton.

As has been previously discussed/argued about here on this blog, space warfare does not just involve physics; it also involves power politics and economics. In the Plausible Midfuture, at least, any space warfare is most likely to a) be fought between rival Earth powers, b) be confined almost exclusively in Earth orbital space, and c) involve only robotic or remote-piloted vehicles. None of which offers much place for space armadas, colonial rebellions, or other classic SF space warfare tropes.

All of which having been said, we'd still be inclined to stand up and cheer for space battles that have even a superficial ring of plausibility.

Good plot and characterization might also be helpful, but that is another discussion.

Anyway, discuss.

The image, via Atomic Rockets, is a scene from The Wrath of Khan - concerning 'three-dimensional thinking' in a battle between spacecraft with a thoroughly two-dimensional aesthetic.

A Mission to Mars

2011-08-18T20:36:00.000-07:00

Speculation about Mars missions produces an irresistable temptation to design paper spaceships, and I won't even try to resist. So here we go:

My bias, as expressed last post, is for reaching Mars and returning on fast transfer orbits, making the one way trip in approximately three months. Allowing a few weeks on (or at least orbiting) Mars, the mission can be done in six months and change.

The alternative is using Hohmann transfer orbits, more or less, and accepting an 18-month round trip. This can be done with chemfuel rockets, and broadly speaking we already know how to do that part. What we don't know is how to send humans into space for 18 months and get them back in good health.

Six months corresponds to the currently accepted mission duration for the ISS. Going much longer will be much harder on the crew. On the other hand, the 'fast' six-month mission calls for an electric drive; even nuclear thermal comes up short.

An electric drive with sufficient performance is semi-speculative. The Dawn probe has three (redundant) ion thrusters with a combined mass of 129 kg, thus 46 kg each, while its solar wings come in at 204 kg. Each thruster delivers 92 mN of thrust from 2600 watts of electric power.

The combined mass of one thruster plus solar wings thus comes to 247 kg, just about 0.01 kW/kg. We need power performance about 100 times better, approaching the figure of merit I have often mentioned here, 1 kW/kg is the standard figure of merit.

The reason for using this figure of merit shows up in sims done on the Rocketpunk Manifesto TravelPlanner. Specifically I looked at a baseline vehicle capable of putting on 29 km/s of delta v in 60 days of acceleration, allowing a 30-day coasting period. This is more efficient than a classical brachistochrone orbit, which expends energy and propellant on putting on speed, then (literally!) turning around and taking it back off again.

Exhaust velocity is a little over 30 km/s, giving a mass ratio of 2.5: given a departure mass from Earth orbit of 250 tons, the 'dry' mass that reaches Mars orbit is 100 tons.

Rated drive power is 15 megawatts. The propulsion system (thrusters and power supply combined) is allowed 50 tons, half the 'dry' mass of the ship. This corresponds to a power density of 0.29 kW/kg - or, putting it reciprocally, 3.45 kg of drive mass - thrusters and power supply - per kilowatt of drive power output. As a gearhead reference point that corresponds to 5.65 lbs per horsepower.

I allow 30 tons for fuel tankage, keel structure, and general equipment. Which leaves just 20 tons for the gross payload - life support hab, stores, and crew. This ship is half engine, not a very balanced design. But this is what you need if drive power density is limited and you want to get to Mars in a few months.

My math fu is not equal to the task of actually determining travel time to Mars for a given mission delta v. But this handy delta v calculator, can do it. According to the calculator, burns totaling 27.33 km/s of delta v are needed to get from a high (100,000 km) Earth orbit to low (500 km) Mars orbit in 90 days.

The calculator assumes a brisk 10 milligees of acceleration. The sims have a much more modest acceleration, averaging half a milligee. (And if the drive is solar electric its acceleration performance will be halved at Mars distance from the Sun. Therefore the calculator estimate quite optimistic, but clever mission design could probably squeeze out some improvements.

At least, to a first approximation, this provides some idea of what it takes to reach Mars in a few months.

But the mission profile is for a one-way trip, implying that the vehicle must refuel at Mars orbit. One day this may be a routine operation, but it will certainly not be routine the first time. Really we should be capable of a round trip with onboard propellant - requiring twice the mission delta v, about 55 km/s.

A second sim shows a lighter and more powerful drive engine, close to the 1 kW/kg figure of merit, putting out 30 megawatts and providing twice the specific impulse. This more powerful engine has a mass of 30 tons, allowing 40 tons gross payload. Realistically speaking this is close to the minimum performance requirement for a practical Mars craft - which is why 1 kW/kg is regarded as the figure of merit for fast space propulsion.

This spacecraft is strictly a crew transfer vehicle, intended to get the crew from high Earth orbit to low Mars orbit and back. Electric drive is completely unsuited to planetary landings, so any mission profile like Mars Direct is ruled out. Everything needed to land on Mars, live and work there for a time, and return to Mars orbit, can be sent on a slow orbit.

Since the mission departs from high Earth orbit, there must be a prior phase in which the ship, assembled in low orbit, spirals out, then is met by a crew ferry. In principle the ship could return to high Earth orbit and be met there. More likely at least on early missions, the payload will include an Earth return capsule for the crew (and samples of Mars material), with the interplanetary bus being expended.

This post is conceptually quite incomplete - really it only talks about the interplanetary bus. But I want to get it posted, so here it is.

Discuss.

The image of Mars' surface is from Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Destination: Mars

2011-08-10T20:39:00.000-07:00

The first human interplanetary mission will, more likely than not, go to the Red Planet. Apart from the Moon it is the easiest major body in the Solar System for us to reach. Its surface bears evidence of rivers and seas, and liquid water may still occasionally flow there. The similarity of its landscapes to the American Southwest is an illusion, but it remains a candidate for life, and its chief rivals - Europa and Titan - are far more distant and hard to reach.

A single image (of an artifact, for example) could of course change all this. But for now at least, Mars is the likely first place to go.

I am not concerned with pure stunt missions, whether by some multi-billionaire or an emergent great power. For this discussion I presume that a human mission to Mars is intended to explore Mars. Yes, other motivations will surely be in the background, involving the usual suspects. But the more serious the exploratory intent, the more likely that going to Mars will lead to further developments rather than end up as a costly one-off.

This does not mean that every individual mission must 'do science.' The engineering demands of safe human interplanetary travel justify what amount to shakedown missions, say, a manned flyby that does nothing but demonstrate our ability to perform the transfer mission. But the program as a whole should be aimed at advancing our knowledge of Mars.

The model here is not Apollo but the robotic deep space program, which in spite of some embarrassing failures (feet/second != meters/second), has in all been a profound success.

A first implication is that a human mission will be undertaken only when robotic missions reach diminishing returns. It is no doubt true that a geologist with a hammer could learn more about Mars in a day than our rovers have learned over years. But the cost of sending that geologist would be very much greater than the next few rovers. And human missions are subject to some constraints, such as landing where it is safe to land.

My instinct in thinking about a Mars program is to proceed cautiously and incrementally - unmanned tests of the vehicle, then a human flyby, then orbit without landing, and only then a full-on landing. I am not sure that each of these stage is strictly necessary, and there are alternate possibilities, such as a visit to a NEO, that would similarly exercise spacecraft and procedures.

And some of these missions - notably, orbiting without landing - might be able to 'do science' on an important and relevant scale. In particular, a crew on Mars orbit can operate surface vehicles and manipulators remotely, but without significant light lag - like steering a minisub from the surface, not steering a rover from Pasadena.

This is as good a place as any to note that 'going to Mars' combines at least two very distinct space missions: the deep space journey to Mars orbit and back, lasting at least months and perhaps most of two years; and landing on Mars, working there for weeks, and lifting back off to Mars orbit. This in itself is reason to test the Mars orbital capability before the surface landing.

Mars Direct argues in effect for a very different functional division - in effect a one way trip to the surface of Mars, then use of a second pre-positioned (and pre-fueled) spacecraft for the trip back. This feels cut-rate and precarious to me, not least because Zubrin is so much like a real estate promoter, not quite trustworthy on principle.

To be sure, there's no reason this architecture couldn't be tested in an unmanned mission, but I also have doubts about packing the hab elements into form factors suited to Mars landing and liftoff. It seems like awfully cramped crew quarters for such a long mission, or else a much larger cabin than you need to carry the crew and some rock samples from the surface to Mars orbit.

In any case, as longtime readers know, I have bias in favor of fast human travel using high ISP propulsion - most likely solar electric, though perhaps nuclear electric - for getting to Mars orbit and back. Faster travel means less exposure to radiation and weightlessness, the main health hazards of prolonged spaceflight.

Solar electric has now been successfully flight tested by the Dawn mission. A fast (~3 month) trip to Mars requires a much higher drive power/mass ratio, which may not be attainable. But solar electric space propulsion is far from technical maturity, and it may well be able to approach the 1 kg/kW standard for fast travel. .

Electric drive pretty much precludes the Mars Direct approach anyway, since an electric spacecraft is ill-suited to aerobraking, and doesn't need it. The surface components of the mission can be sent separately - a Hohmann transfer is fine, since the crew isn't aboard until the Mars landing.

Discuss.

The image, from a European proposal for Mars exploration, is recycled from an earlier post on interplanetary exploration.

Cold Equations

2011-07-25T20:54:00.000-07:00

The title, of course, evokes one of the all time notorious science fiction stories - from geek perspective perhaps the notorious SF story: 'The Cold Equations.' I have been in the bashing school regarding that story, on the grounds that the most basic safe operation procedures should have prevented it, and more broadly because it is anvilicious. (No, I won't link the Evil Website. If you want the link, google it.)

A fair literary response is that the anviliciousness is the point - people may argue about the story, but if you've read it you remember it.

This post is not about the story itself, but about those cold equations, specifically as they relate to reaching Earth orbit. And for that purpose, the grump about the story is, if anything, understated. Realistically, the spacecraft in the story should not have had anywhere a stowaway could hide in the first place. It would be like stowing away in a Formula I racing car.

The cold equations we are specifically interested in are handily available at the Atomic Rockets site. Orbital velocity in low orbit is about 7.8 km/s. Add the potential energy from being about 300 km up, and the kinetic energy needed to reach low orbit corresponds to about 8.2 km/s.

There are also some unavoidable losses from air friction and gravity. In a vertical launch, 1 g of your initial thrust just goes to hovering, adding nothing to your speed. A horizontal launch allows aerodynamic lift to do that work, but means more aerodynamic drag.

If your launch site is at low latitude you also get up a few hundred meters/second of rotational velocity as a freebie.

These variables are, well, variable, depending on vehicle configuration and launch site. But taken together, expect to burn some 9-10 km/s in delta v to reach orbit.

Now we can play with some (very crude!) virtual orbiters. Captain Obvious reminds you that these numbers are not remotely authoritative: for one thing, I routinely round off numbers to 2-3 significant figures.

The highest performance propellant mix that we can really count on is H2-O2, which is good for an Isp in the range of 420-455 seconds, corresponding to an effective exhaust velocity around 4.2-4.5 km/s. Performance in atmosphere is lower. Delicately ignore that for the moment.

Cutting to the chase - and in the best case - getting to orbit calls for a mission delta v equal to at least twice the drive's exhaust velocity. For an SSTO that corresponds to a mass ratio of e^2, or 7.39, or an 86 percent propellant fraction.

To simplistically model more conservative assumptions, again set effective exhaust velocity at 4.5 km/s (still ignoring atmosphere!), while equivalent mission delta v is 10 km/s. In that case the mass ratio rises to 9.23, for an 89 percent propellant fraction.

This is the truly cold equation, because it puts convenient space flight pretty much out of the running. In the ideal case, if your launch mass is 1000 tons, 860 tons of that will be propellants, with the remaining 140 tons for the tankage, thrust structure, engines, minor items such as the guidance package, and (oh yes) a payload. With more conservative assumptions you have 890 tons of propellants and 110 tons for everything else.

These proportions are not, in themselves, impossible. The first and second stages of the Saturn V had dry weights of less than 8 percent and 6 percent of loaded weight respectively. But the first stage used denser kerosene and LOX with much lower performance, while the second stage used H2-O2 but had initial acceleration of only 1.04 g in near-vacuum, and at sea level would have been unable to lift itself off the pad.

For the current state of the art, the dry weight of the SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage is about 7 percent of load weight, but it also uses kerosene and LOX. A tank for H2-O2 would have to be much bulkier - about 3 times the volume capacity - and thus much heavier.

The bottom line is that an expendable SSTO might be viable, but offers no advantage over two-stage expendables. Any saving in operational simplicity (no staging separation or second stage startup) would be have to be balanced against the extremely narrow margins of the design.

Note that both Americans and Russians used 'one and a half stage' designs for their experimental ICBM models, Atlas and R-7 Semyorka - both of which went on to very successful careers as space boosters. Their designs allowed all main engines to be started on the launch pad. But later developments added a true second stage, and modern generation boosters have at least two stages, often with boosters strapped to the first stage.

The Shuttle was (we must now say was!) essentially a 'one and a half stage' orbiter, with recovery of the solid boosters, engines, and payload bay, but expendable main propellant tank.

Getting to a recoverable SSTO rocket would require a tech revolution - either dramatically stronger materials, or dramatically more powerful propellants. Neither is impossible. But likewise, neither is foreseeably in the cards.

An airbreather ascent, as proposed for Skylon, does not call for quite so big a tech revolution, but still requires a couple of very big pieces of undemonstrated technology - jet engines operating up to Mach 5+, then efficiently shifting into rocket mode, and a huge, lightweight airframe capable of handling the heat loads.

Skylon is awesomely cool, but just as awesomely demanding. I can't quite rule it out, but I wouldn't want to rely on it.

Two stages makes it all a lot easier, which is why two-stage boosters are now typical. A fully reusable TSTO vehicle is almost certainly possible. Whether it would be viable - that is to say, competitive with modern generation expendables - is a much iffier question.

And because I've made you wait so long even for this much, I will take up recoverable TSTO, and its alternatives, in an upcoming post.

Related Post: 'The Cold Equations' came up here previously, in the comment thread of a post about what constitutes hard SF.

The image of the X-37 unmanned spaceplane comes from the Christian Science Monitor (which in spite of its name and affiliation has had a good reputation over the years).

A Visit To Vesta

2011-07-16T12:32:00.000-07:00

Via Sky & Telescope comes word that the Dawn probe has reached the asteroid Vesta, going into orbit around it last evening (PDT). Unlike the abrupt arrival burns of chemfuel rockets, Dawn's arrival was a gentle transition from solar orbit to circum-Vesta orbit - the first arrival burn by an electric-drive spacecraft.

The image, taken a week ago by one of Dawn's cameras, shows Vesta as a suitably transitional object, not quite spherical, but also not potato-shaped like smaller asteroids. According to the S&T news note, Vesta probably underwent partial internal melting during its formation, and so has a distinct core and mantle. One of Dawn's tasks is to measure Vesta's mass - implying that we don't actually know yet precisely when Dawn entered Vesta orbit, only that at some point during its gradual burn it must have done so.

Dawn will spend about a year orbiting Vesta before moving on to the asteroid belt's sole full-fledged 'dwarf planet,' Ceres.

This coming week we will return to the vexed issue of reaching Earth orbit. (Yes, last week slipped past me.) But for now, let this be a reminder that exploration of the Solar System is underway and continuing.

In other news, a belated note that I have added my Twitter feed to the right-hand column on the main page, below the archive links. But I haven't taken time yet to add the little bird logo.

Halfway To Anywhere

2011-07-07T15:24:00.000-07:00

Heinlein famously said that once you are in low Earth orbit you are 'halfway to anywhere.' In strict terms of kinetic energy he was wrong. LEO is merely halfway to an independent solar orbit that escapes Earth, but then goes nowhere in particular. With nominal additional delta v, great ingenuity, and enormous patience, you could indeed exploit the 'interplanetary superhighway,' but in spite of the name that is the slowest way to get anywhere.

In more practical respects a case could be made that low orbit is a good deal more than halfway to anywhere. Once in orbit you can use high specific impulse propulsion to reach other worlds, then single-stage rockets to land on and take off from them. None of these maneuvers is as difficult as the brutal lift from Earth surface to orbit.

I have said relatively little on this blog about reaching Earth orbit, precisely because it is so difficult. Getting to orbit is the elephant in the room of space travel, an access ticket that costs about $10 million per ton, give or take.

This cost structure, I would argue, is due as much to modest traffic volume as to purely technical limitations. (More precisely, low traffic volume is one of the technical limitations, perhaps the most important one.) In the current era there are about 60-70 space launches each year, with total payloads probably equivalent to a few hundred tons to LEO.

And for this low traffic volume the familiar expendable multistage rocket is the optimal solution. The launch vehicles are (relatively!) simple and cheap, since they don't need the features - heat shields, wings or parachutes, landing gear or cushions, and so forth - that would be needed to recover them. (The associated ground support facilities can also be skipped.)

Moreover, expendable rockets are built on a production line, achieving some modest manufacturing efficiencies, albeit much less than true mass production (like cars) might allow.

Another way to look at this is that if we had a classic reusable orbiter, capable of being turned around for re-launch every few days, it would be grossly under-utilized. Total world traffic could be handled by one or two vehicles - prototypes, in effect - eliminating all the efficiencies of series construction and fleet operation.

Moreover, those one or two orbiters could not be optimized to match varied payloads and insertion orbits. Thus, most launches would fail to take full advantage of the orbiter's capabilities - meaning that those launches would cost more than, ideally, they should.

The Shuttle, now on the verge of its final flight, is in large part a testimony to misjudged traffic demand. For all of its design compromises and operational shortcomings - which, among other things, cost the lives of two space crews - it was not an outright failure. It proved that a semi-reusable spacecraft is technically and operationally possible.

If we were to build a second generation version we could do a considerably better job. (For one thing, it would not carry astronauts for routine payload launches.) But we will not build a second generation version, and nor will anyone else, at least not in the near future. There is not the traffic demand to call for developing and deploying it.

Note the contrast between SpaceX's Falcon and the 'alt space' proposals of earlier decades. Rather than try to revolutionize space lift, SpaceX has aimed at modest, incremental streamlining of familiar launch technologies. The Falcon doesn't look like the future. It just looks like another two-stage expendable rocket. Which is pretty cool in its own right.

A flip side of this discussion is that I am unpersuaded by the various radical launch alternatives - elevators, launch loops, even laser launch - that have been proposed in recent years. My gut reaction is that they all reek of desperation. Because the Shuttle failed to provide routine biweekly space flights, the thinking seems to go, we should abandon chemfuel rockets entirely in favor of almost purely speculative technologies. I doubt that this is either necessary or viable.

At some point in the plausible midfuture we may reach the point of wanting to put thousands rather than hundreds of tons into orbit each year. At that point - not earlier, and probably not later - we will have reason, and financing, to develop reusable orbiters.

I'm highly doubtful of classic SSTO rockets. The design would have to be too extreme, even with major improvements in materials technology. On the other hand, reusable TSTO is almost certainly technically achievable. It would have a much smaller payload fraction than expendable rockets, since the stages must come back for recovery. But if the traffic is sufficient, there is at least a fair chance of streamlining operations to the point where re-use of the launcher pays off.

Discuss. Be civilized.

Via APOD, the final Shuttle rollout.

Space and Heresy

2011-06-27T16:01:00.000-07:00

Longtime readers of this blog know that I am somewhat heretical regarding the human future in space. As I first argued a couple of years ago, outer space is profoundly unlike the New World - such an evocative phrase! - that Europeans encountered five centuries ago (and proceeded to loot and colonize).

This heresy has come up in, and spilled across, a couple of recent comment threads, especially the one for the previous post. (And yes, it was nearly three weeks ago. What can I say? June sort of slipped through my fingers.) As heresies go it raises enough interesting questions to deserve a front page post.

Space is, for one thing, a great deal more difficult to reach than the New World was. Europe's worldwide maritime expansion closely followed a tech revolution, development of the full-rigged ship. But this new technology could be and was employed off-the-shelf for oceanic missions. The Santa Maria was an ordinary freighter. If we could reach Mars aboard second-hand jetliners we would already have gone there.

And once you do get there, nothing in space is remotely conducive to human habitation. The traditional driver of settlement colonization (as distinct from strictly political colonization) has been cheap land. But there is no 'land' in space at all, at any rate in the Solar System. You have to manufacture it, building a hab or a sealed dome, then providing a working ecosystem inside.

It would be many times easier to build luxury condominium developments in Antarctica, or on the continental shelf.

Now, compare all of this to the Solar System of Heinlein's juveniles, where a lot of us got our basic conception of the space future. The space technology made a couple of iffy assumptions. Nuclear thermal drive was not only technically capable of lifting ships into orbit, but socially and politically acceptable as well. Moreover, the chemfuel alternative involved some very convenient magitech, namely monatomic hydrogen, stabilized by means Heinlein never went into.

If you wonder why our real world space tech is so much less convenient, those are sufficient reasons.

But even more than this, Heinlein's Solar System made Venus a 'shirtsleeves' habitable planet, while Mars required no more - or so it seemed - than a mask type breather device. (Heinlein's juveniles do not strictly form a single future history, and details vary, but they portray a broadly consistent future.)

Heinlein's Solar System also had at least two living extraterrestrial civilizations, on Venus and Mars, the local inhabitants having different characteristics in different stories. (The blue-elf Venusians in Space Patrol are entirely unlike the dragons in Between Planets.)

I belabor all of this because Heinlein's Solar System (in particular) had such an enormous impact on what we expect out of the human future in space. In the first years of space exploration we found out that the real Solar System is a very different place, but we have tended to hold onto the old tropes as far as possible, even when reconfiguring them - as in envisioning orbital habs in place of domed surface colonies.

Much of this is for the sake of Romance, i.e. stories. But space discussion often blurs story settings with 'real' possible futures. This blog is particularly guilty of doing so, and quite deliberately so. Space is no fantasy world, a creation of pure imagination. More than 500 people have gone there, and our machines have traveled across the Solar System.

Human interplanetary missions are clearly possible, to the point where we can discuss their architecture in considerable detail. They are merely horrendously expensive, to the point where there is no particular eagerness to pony up sufficient funds. Permanent human habitation in deep space is technically much iffier, particularly with respect to self-contained ecosystems. But it is surely possible, even without such ecosystems. Again, colonizing space is merely, with foreseeable tech, horrendously expensive.

And there is no obvious reason for doing it except that living in space would be Really Cool. For which people will spend a lot of money, but sometimes cool is just not affordable.

On the other hand, the future - not just the plausible midfuture I talk about here - is a Really Long Time. For that reason, saying we will never do something is the iffiest proposition of all. Who can say what our descendants might be doing in the year 22,011, or 2,002,011?

But in the next few hundred years, absent unforeseen breakthroughs in technology, we are more constrained. We might have true space colonies by 2211, but I think it is unlikely, and also unnecessary. Much more likely we will still be exploring space, mainly with machines though sometimes sending people, and perhaps setting up outposts in a few locations.

As a setting for space opera such a future is deficient, but it is a natural way for humans, at something like our techlevel, to come to grips with space.

For more contrarian argument, see author Jeffrey F. Bell. On the technical substance I tend to agree with him, though I would be a bit less quick to throw around 'impossible'. That said, Bell seems to have a remarkably well developed sense of martyrdom. No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition, but space heresy is not exactly like getting on the wrong side of theological disputes during the 16th century.

Related Post: A Solar System For This Century.

The image of Archbishop Cramner being burned at the stake comes from a website about Anne Boleyn.

Sluggish Pickup, But the Mileage is Spectacular

2011-06-07T11:46:00.000-07:00

This used-car dealership on mid Market St. has intrigued and amused me since moving to Babylon by the Bay.

Since ordinary batteries involve ions, I suppose the Chevy Volt or even a Prius could be said to use a form of ion propulsion, but how many people associate electric cars with 'ions'? In any case there is no indication that this place specializes in electric cars. Their website does not explain the name, but I can only guess that the name is intended to evoke ion propulsion for spacecraft.

The logo - for a business that touts itself as the bay area's 'newest car dealership' - sort of goes along with that connotation, I think. Doesn't it have a bit of Zeerust retro flavor?

Ion drive, in fact, is probably the only high specific impulse that qualifies as a trope, in the (correct) sense used by the Evil Website. A broad cross-section of people, not just geeks, have at least some vague sense that ion drive is an advanced and futuristic space drive, yet at the same time a 'real' one, not pure sci-fi jive. Perhaps its status was confirmed by Trek, either The Wrath of Khan or its TOS progenitor episode, in which ion drive was characterized as an archaic technology.

Nuclear-thermal propulsion, AKA atomic rockets, do not quite qualify as a high specific impulse drive, its classic form outperforming chemfuel by a modest factor of two or three. Fusion drive, much debated and belated at websites like this one, does not seem to me to have quite made the jump from geekdom to the broader public. The same applies to generic torch drive. Possibly Avatar will promote antimatter drive to trope status; only time will tell.

Compared to these latecomers, ion propulsion has an enormous headstart. Somewhat remarkably, Robert Goddard considered ion propulsion more than a century ago, in 1906. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published on the subject in 1911 while Goddard performed actual laboratory experiments in 1916-17.

The rocketpunk-era books I read as a kid about Our Future in Space almost always mentioned ion drive, generally in the context of what I now call the plausible midfuture. I recall one book with great illustrations that portrayed an ion drive ship under the heading To the Stars. The next page had a photon-drive ship, To the Galaxies. The temporal implications of intergalactic STL travel were left undiscussed.

I don't have any specific recollection of ion propulsion in rocketpunk-era SF. Heinlein had no interest in space drives that lacked bone-jarring acceleration; his propulsion sequence thus went from nuke thermal to Ortega's mass-conversion torch to the unabashedly magitech Horst-Milne-Conrad impellor.

Clarke also never specifically mentioned ion drive, at least that I recall. He was usually rather cagey about deep space propulsion details, though I often got the impression that some sort of electric drive was implied.

Therein, of course, lies the rub. As I understand it, ion thrusters are in fact not suitable for deep space propulsion of large, human-carrying spacecraft. Their thrust is very low, even by high-ISP standards, and apparently the thrusters cannot readily be scaled up. Ion propulsion is now in service, used by the Dawn probe among others, but there are unlikely ever to be ion-drive ships.

But in trope terms - in the mind of the popular culture - ion drive is synonymous with electric space propulsion in general. Technologies such as VASIMR, while they do involve ionized plasmas, are not 'ion drive' in the strictly technical sense. But in some broader cultural sense they are indeed ion drives, technical details be damned. If it emits a faint blue or purple glow, produces gentle but steady thrust for days, weeks, months on end, it fits the cultural vision of ion drive.

Though I wouldn't recommend it for Bay Area freeways.

The image was taken from my el cheapo ('free') smartphone while riding a vehicle with electric drive: the F Market streetcar.

War and Peace in Space

2011-05-30T13:54:00.000-07:00

In the United States this is Memorial Day, a holiday that arose from the American Civil War. The day that elsewhere in the Anglosphere is Remembrance Day is Veterans' Day here, and less somber. Most countries surely have some equivalent holiday. Previously on this blog I have noted it simply by recording the then-current death tolls from the wars the US is fighting.

War in space has been an ongoing major topic of Rocketpunk Manifesto. Possibly it is the single topic most addressed here, with fifteen numbered posts so far in the Space Warfare series (one of which, however, dealt with peace), plus several others concerned primarily or exclusively with blowing stuff up in space.

I will most certainly continue writing here on the subject of space warfare. And on fairly rare occasions, of which this is one, I will pause to point out that war in space, like war on Earth, is not in fact a particularly good idea. While I am no pacifist, I am also not persuaded that war is somehow an inherent and inevitable part of the human condition. Refer to the link above for my arguments on that point.

More narrowly I suspect that space warfare, as commonly pictured (including here) is very unlikely, at any rate through the plausible midfuture. Given the strategic value of Earth orbiting satellites, a war between terrestrial powers might spill over into orbital combat. But even if human outposts are scattered across the Solar System, it is very unlikely that any of them would be of sufficient strategic or political value to make the involved powers build and dispatch space armadas to fight over them.

Depending on the specific political context and prevailing culture of war, space outposts might politely ignore the earthly war, fight a mosquito war against each other, or be wiped out by interplanetary missile strikes.

Beyond the plausible midfuture, space communities might grow to the point where they could build their own armadas, if they so wished. I suspect that the likelihood of them actually doing so falls into the same category as enslaving colonists to work in the thorium mines. There is enough history of malicious stupidity in human affairs to provide grounds for such a scenario, but we are entitled to ask whether such things would actually be a norm. (And warfare, as we understand it, has been a social norm, supported by complex and admired social institutions.)

So, given that I don't exactly 'believe in' space warfare as desirable, necessary, or inevitably, why do I write so much about it here?

The crassest answer, with more than a grain of truth, is that that is what you want to read about. Space warfare posts generally draw the highest traffic and produce the longest threads. (The current post almost certainly will not do so!) I am not above pandering to my audience. After all, if I didn't care whether people read this blog, I could save myself the effort.

Another answer, less crass but arguably more disgraceful, is that some aspects of war are interesting. The general human experience has in fact been that war is mostly boring, and the parts that aren't boring are mostly horrific. But the gadgetry of warfare - from swords, chariots, and triremes to battleships, submarines, and missiles - has exerted a peculiar fascination. Only a few civil technologies produce a comparable fandom.

One such technology is railroads; another, rather happily, is space travel. Enter spaceship in Google Images and the resulting (mostly imaginary) images lean heavily toward combatant types. On the other hand, the image results for spacecraft lean toward actual vehicles or 'speculative realism,' and are on the whole much less warlike.

Finally, there is the point that this blog is largely about Romance, and Romance is all about human conflict. Mysteries would be nowhere without crimes, and space opera calls out for space battles.

So I will continue to provide them, alongside discussion of the immeasurably more useful things that we might actually be able to accomplish in space.

Related link: Give Peace a Chance

Discuss.

The image of Arlington National Cemetery comes, via Google Images, from a random travel website.

The Moon Turns Fifty

2011-05-25T19:03:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the history of the early 1960s a lot of golden anniversaries of space milestones are coming up, and a couple of posts at the Atlantic magazine website called one to my attention.

Fifty years ago today, JFK declared that the US would reach the Moon within a decade, thus launching the Apollo program. Forty years after the deadline he set we are still living in its shadow. The two Atlantic pieces reflect, for the most part, one on JFK's decision, the other on its technological consequences.

Going to the Moon was, in some important sense, a stunt. Recently released tapes, as reported in the first linked piece, evidently shown JFK's own subsequent misgivings - mainly, it seems, about the cost, and the lack of dramatic progress as he looked toward the 1964 election. He mulls pitching a military use for space: not on the actual merits, but as a way to make it more politically acceptable.

This is not especially helpful to my own position in a recent post. (But it does not really challenge the core argument about public initiatives. YM, of course, MV.)

The other linked article deals with the path not taken, though I disagree with the author's interpretation of that path. NASA evolved as a vastly ramped up version of a previous agency, NACA, which dealt with aviation, and the idea of flying into orbit was well established in the rocketpunk era. It is certainly elegant; the problem is that it is extremely difficult.

Even 'conventional' ramjets overheat much past Mach 5, and while scramjets have now been successfully flight tested, these tests were enormously expensive, and tested only small scramjets operating for a few seconds. Given that high speed flight has been around even longer than orbital space travel, this does not encourage much confidence in flying to orbit as a practical technology. The Atlantic author sort of glides past that issue, but while you can glide back from orbit you have to get up there under power.

If my remarks here seem to contradict things I have said previously on this blog, it is because my feelings on the subject are in fact contradictory. A reusable two-stage orbital vehicle is, I would guess, technically viable. Perhaps, on a smaller scale, a three-stage vehicle with the first stage (or 'zeroth') stage based on jet transport technology.

But it is by no means clear that such a vehicle, if built, would make orbital spaceflight dramatically cheaper than the way we get there now. Or perhaps even cheaper at all. The problem is that any such reusable orbiter must have added weights and complexity in order to return for re-use, thus a reduced payload relative to its overall size, cost, and complexity. The savings from re-use may not be enough. Almost certainly they are not enough at the current tempo of space missions.

This is where I am supposed to neatly wrap things up and tie them in a bow. But since my views are complex and contradictory, I can only throw the question out for further discussion.

So discuss.

The image of a moonrise above Arizona saguaro comes, as so often, from Astronomy Picture Of the Day.

And a bit more honest plugola: Pending my setting up a proper permanent sidebar link, etc., a few more posts of mine are up at IBM Infoboom:

Business Analytics: Avoiding Too Much Information
The Open Virtualization Alliance: Virtual Storage Goes Open Source
LinkedIn IPO Sizzles: Business Social Media Are Cooking

Click love is very much appreciated!

A Bit of Honest Plugola: IBM Infoboom

2011-05-22T15:33:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, torchships would have had a computer rather similar to this one, probably filling the deck below the astrogation deck, and capable of performing thousands of arithmetic operations per second!

Once upon a time, you would have found that performance level awesome. This particular machine is an IBM 701, vintage 1952. The company's first commercial scientific computer, it was known while under development as the 'Defense Calculator.'

Big Blue, of course, is still very much with us, their latest claim to pop culture fame being winning on Jeopardy! (In spite of an embarrassing slip about what country Toronto is in.)

It is also now, indirectly, underwriting Rocketpunk Manifesto. I recently started a work gig writing blog-style tech industry commentary for a forum that IBM sponsors, IBM Infoboom. They partnered with an outfit called Skyword, which in turn has partnered with me.

I have argued here that capitalism is unlikely to bring on the Grand Space Future. But it is capable of supporting some useful space activities, including putting food on our dinner table, which in turn helps keep me blogging. Remarkable how those things work out.

While I have no intention of turning RM into a commercial hustle (fat chance it would pay!), I'm not the least abashed about encouraging you to drop a little free click love on my articles at IBM Infoboom. My work there is aimed primarily at IT managers for small to midsized firms - which probably describes at least some of you. And chances are that if you're geeky enough to be reading this blog, you're geeky enough to have some interest in the tech industry and its trends.

So without further ado, here are links to my first three pieces for IBM Infoboom: (Registration is free, and I'm not even sure you have to register just to read stuff.) Drop by, and feel free to comment!

Amazon's Cloud Crash: Now Come the Reactions

Another Storm Hits the Cloud: Security Breach at Sony

Green Information Technology: Saving Money, Ensuring IT Reliability

As a byproduct of this gig, I'll so be (finally!) setting up an active presence on Twitter and Facebook. If you have any insights, drop them into the comment thread for this post.

The image, from a computer museum website, shows Thomas Watson (Sr) at the desktop console of an IBM 701. Apparently it is only urban legend that he predicted a global market for five such machines; IBM sold about 19 of this model during 1952-55.

Techjargon and Nomenclature

2011-05-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

The title of this post combines two entries from my old Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy. We're in no rush, so read them and report back for further discussion.

Nomenclature

Techjargon

These subjects are brought back to mind by the comment thread on Space Warfare XIII, which has now reached a preposterous 836 comments, taking it past the mere 820 of Space Warfare XII. I have no moral grounds for ragging on the commenters for being bloodthirsty, given that I served up the topics. One of the many subthreads of the discussion turned to language, particularly (of course) military language, in all senses of the phrase.

How soldiers (or even civilians) talk is an issue that science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction all face on much the same terms. Roman legionaries presumably swore in Latin, but surely not Ciceronian Latin. Nor was it even Caesarian Latin - at any rate not the Latin of De Bello Gallico, though Gaius Julius could no doubt express himself eloquently in good centurions' Latin when he needed to.

In a few cases we have direct evidence of how soldiers spoke: English troops in France during the Hundred Years' War said "God damn" so much that goddams, or godons, became French slang for the English. This is rather reassuring.

Contrary to a popular trope, most military swearing is not actually very imaginative. Yes, there is the occasional CPO or sergeant with Shakespearean mastery of English invective, but service field language relies mostly on a few very basic concepts, generously repeated.

Scroll down this old Language Log post (it isn't long) for what, from my recollection, is a very good summary of gruntspeak.

The example of godons also reveals another basic truth - styles in swearing change, over time and from culture to culture. In particular, while the Fourth Commandment still surely comes in for very frequent violation by service personnel, at least in 'Murrican military service the pride of place - as reflected in the Language Log example - now surely goes to what, with a delicate nod to spam filters everywhere, I shall call 'the eff word.' Even simpler military evolutions than passing pliers would be impossible without it.

Of course the eff word is no recent coinage. While its use by medieval English grunts went unrecorded, it surely did not go unspoken. (Shakespeare makes a sly grammatical reference to a 'focative case.') But it probably was used only in a fairly literal sense. In particular, acronyms such as FUBAR and the now-generalized SNAFU - like most other military acronyms - seem only to have become widespread during World War II.

And this is the point at which things get tricky. "Eff you!" strikes me as fairly timeless, nearly as home in the 31st century as in the 21st - or even in the 11th century, if the speaker is a Viking, given that "Odin damn!" somehow just doesn't work in our era. On the other hand, "all effed up" has - to my ear - a bit too much contemporary flavor, as though the speaker is not just a universal grunt, but specifically a current era 'Murrican grunt.

In this case, not only the YMMV principle but intended audience comes into play. Much military SF is, let's be honest, not just war porn but specifically Ameriwank war porn. Thus, for the stereotyped Baen audience (by no means identical to the full Baen readership, but surely a non-trivial part of it), 31st century espatiers who sound like they just shipped out from Camp Lejeune are a feature, not a bug. Note that this probably applies to an audience with inverse Ameriwank politics as well.

And it applies with even more force when we move away from swearing like a soldier to the more technical aspects of military language, such as names for weapon systems. SPQR may evoke Rome, but SPQ-31B evokes recent era Western militaries, and particularly (again) the 'Murrican military.

(Somewhat off message, but it surprises me that no one else seems to use USAF style sequential type numbering. Even the Soviet era Russians used manufacturer-centric aircraft designations, e.g. TU-95.)

Alphanumeric designations strongly evoke the recent era - great if the connection is intended, awkward and even frame-jolting if the setting is meant to have a more distant flavor.

More ambiguous are generic terms for weapons or ship classes, such as battleship and cruiser for combatant spacecraft. I have tended in asides and comments to come down fairly hard on such terminology - perhaps more so than is justified. For one thing, the opposite extreme of renaming familiar items can be horribly clunky. I've been unable to track down, among hundreds of comments here, a brilliantly devastating invented example, weapons with an imaginary name, described as "like swords, but more awesome." (Whoever wrote that, step up and claim your well-earned prize.)

Looking at different eras is, alas, rather unhelpful. Older terms for ship types, such as carrack or galleon, seemed to refer not to the ship's functional role but to structural features that are often now thoroughly obscure. (On the other hand, a 17th century Florentine type was called a bastardella, 'little bastard' - an expression that may not clarify its mission, but is timelessly nautical.)

Battleships and cruisers, by comparison, at least refer to familiar missions, at least in their 'classical' usage. (And by SF convention, cruiser seems to retain the sense of a large, fast independent patrol craft, not a heavy escort type.) I have argued against the automatic lifting of this nomenclature, as introducing a bias into our thinking about space warfare. But having said that, it is hardly implausible, in operatic settings, to have some heavy spacecraft, optimized for fighting power, that operate in main-force constellations, and somewhat smaller ones, optimized for mobility, that operate independently.

Details of an imagined technology come into play here. If the 'cruisers' are individually larger than 'battleships,' as is plausible (more propellant, larger crew), the classical terminology becomes a bit misleading. But this does give you a great excuse for battlecruisers, and the Rule of Cool is hard to resist in this case.

Another consideration is particulars of a future history. My old 'Human Sphere' setting was a variant on the standard First and Second Empire theme, and centered on nascent 'Second Empire' trade federations in the 28th century.

The 'First Empire' had no heavy space force in its salad days because it needed none. (Who was it going to fight?) So that particular setting should display a great discontinuity in military affairs. People might well cast back into history books to revive terms like frigate, but on the whole their combatant spacecraft and military institutions would more likely be adapted from police, exploration, or other activities and organizations that have some quasi-military features. Thus, in this particular setting, survey ship comes to have nearly the usual connotation of cruiser.

On the other hand, if your setting has space militaries established by terrestrial Great Powers in the 22nd century, with the latter having substantial continuity with the present day, your nomenclature jumps through a very different set of historical hoops, and cruisers can just be cruisers.

Discuss.

The image of a space battlecruiser comes from this SF website. I nabbed it via Google Images - one of eight space battlecruiser images that come up before the first image of the seagoing kind, HMS Hood. Not until the second page do you find any image of a ship that fought at Jutland.

A Little Blowup

2011-05-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

As some of you probably noticed - especially if you tried to post a comment - Blogger had a bit of a blowup a couple of days ago.

Things are reportedly getting back to normal, and any vanished comments are supposed to reappear this weekend. Assuming no further crashes, feel free to use this as another open thread.

A star in Taurus suffered a much bigger blowup in 1054, producing the rightly celebrated Crab Nebula.

Liberalism in SPAAACE !!!

2011-05-10T09:33:00.000-07:00

Click to the original at xkcd to view the mouseover. Thanks to Winch of Atomic Rockets for the tipoff; he is not to blame for my (somewhat belated!) use of it.

This post is, obviously, political. You have been warned. But the political content is not gratuitous. There are plenty of places online where people whom I generally agree with bash on people I generally don't. (See his blogroll, which is actually fairly eclectic.) That is not my objective here. The remarks that follow are specific to the themes of Rocketpunk Manifesto.

I should also note, for a rather international readership, that I am using 'liberalism' in its 'Murrican sense of center-left, not the much more inclusive sense it has in political philosophy (let alone the center-right connotation that it has in some countries). And the entire post is parochial to the extent that it deals specifically with 'Murrican spaceflight. But only three countries have launched people into space; only two on a substantial scale, and I am conversant with the political culture of one of those.

The leading frustration in space geekdom is that while we have accomplished quite a lot in space, we have not gotten as far in space as we hoped, or people 40 years ago took for granted. 2001: A Space Odyssey remains the benchmark of our imagined space present - an alternate world of regular scheduled spaceflights, Moon bases, and human missions to Jupiter. It is the classic rocketpunk vision, with surprisingly little Zeerust.

It did not happen that way, and the basic reason is pretty damn simple: NASA's budget was cut. Reductions from the Apollo era peak were pretty much a given: Apollo was a rush effort to overtake and beat the Russians. That is why, for example, 'Moon Direct' was chosen over the traditional rocketpunk architecture of a shuttle and station first, then moonships.

The amount of cutting, however, was dramatic. NASA's budget peaked in 1965 at $33.5 billion (in equivalent 2007 dollars). By 1969, with Apollo up and running, the budget was down to $21.4 billion. By $1975 it was down to $11.1 billion, and stayed below $12 billion per year until 1983. After that, as the Shuttle entered service, the NASA budget rose modestly, and from 1987 through 2008 (the last year reported), it has ranged between about $15 and $20 billion, averaging $16.4 billion.

The NASA budget dark ages of the 1970s and early 80s were not without consequences, since this was the era when the Shuttle was developed. Richard Nixon reportedly regarded the space program as a 'Democratic boondoggle.' The expression is noteworthy, but his deeds mattered more than his words. He did not cancel the Shuttle program, but he forced a reluctant US Air Force to fund part of its development - in turn for which the Shuttle had to be designed for much larger payloads than originally intended.

What in earlier design iterations had been a sort of space minivan became the familiar space truck - and the combination of a larger payload and smaller development budget forced a fundamental design compromise. What had been intended as a fully reusable liquid fuel TSTO became only partly reusable, and dependent on solid fueled boosters.

We do not know how the Shuttle would have performed if built as originally conceived. There is a serious argument - I have at times endorsed it - that robust reusable orbiters are simply beyond our techlevel: Getting to orbit at all requires an extreme design, and returning in one piece (or even two pieces, for a TSTO) makes for an even more extreme design. You end up not with a truck or minivan, but the equivalent of a racing car that must be torn down and rebuilt before it returns to the track.

On the other hand, the experience of the Shuttle, and its various canceled would-be successors, may simply prove that you get what you pay for, and a severely compromised design is liable to deliver compromised performance.

The Shuttle, in fact, has performed remarkably well given its conceptual shortcomings - a heavy lifter, designed for an entirely new operational realm, but with no development prototype fully tested in advance of the operational vehicles. Its two catastrophic losses were both due primarily to operational failures, not its design shortcomings. Perhaps even more to the point, the design flaws implicated in both losses - the combination of SRBs and external tank for Challenger, and the external tank insulation for Columbia, - were both consequences of the Nixon-era design compromises, not part of the original TSTO conception.

What, you may fairly ask at this point, do particular decisions of a single president 40 years ago have to do with broader political philosophy? The significance is that Nixon's time in office is when the momentum of US political culture shifted against 'big government' and public sector initiatives, of which the space program was the iconic representative.

The downgrading of the Shuttle program thus turned out to be part of a larger political shift, which has affected American space activity ever since. NASA had, and retains, a sufficient base of public and interest-group support that, like Amtrak, it could never be eliminated outright, but it has been kept on a sort of starvation diet, the root cause of many of its failings. If you provide just enough funding to keep a program from dying outright, you keep it alive but ensure that it will be suboptimal.

At the same time an enormous amount of wishful thinking - but not so much actual money - has been invested in the idea that somehow the private marketplace would come to the rescue. But no one has yet managed to come up with the McGuffinite that would tempt big capital to write big checks.

Yes, we now have SpaceX, and may soon have Virgin Galactic, and more power to them both. But let us put them both in perspective. SpaceX aims to tweak and streamline some operational processes within the existing state of the art. It is not remotely an orbit lift game changer. And Virgin Galactic is all about selling the sizzle, not the steak. The sizzle is pretty cool - if I had $200 K to burn, I'd happily buy a ticket for five minutes at the inner edge of space. But the kinetic energy involved is only a few percent of that needed to reach orbit, and orbit is the starting point for space travel in the sense discussed on this blog.

It is always possible that this might change tomorrow - that some McGuffinite will turn up (or at least be strongly enough believed in) that the capital markets will pony up the trillion dollars or thereabouts down payment on the human Solar System. But the smart money has never yet bet that way.

The stall-out of space travel coincides both in time and functionally with the rise to predominance of libertarian economic attitudes. The irony is striking, because 'Murrican space-mindedness has deep and long connections with libertarianism, going back at least to Robert Heinlein.

It has been noted here and elsewhere that the ethos of rugged individualism associated with libertarianism is (absent some major magitech) a poor fit for the requirements of living in space. It also turns out to be a poor fit for getting there.

No, I don't expect anyone to leap up onto the stage, throw away their crutches, and proclaim that they have been healed! People adopt political philosophies for varied and complex reasons, and for that matter everything is not about space. I am merely noting that if, as a matter of principle, you rely on the private marketplace for nearly everything, don't hold your breath waiting for it to provide extensive space travel.

Standard provisos apply. The discussion above is focused on human space travel, but there is an argument to be made - I have sometimes made it - that going in person is nearly irrelevant to, or even a distraction from exploring space. In spite of xkcd, our robotic probes have opened up the Solar System to an extent no one in the rocketpunk era ever imagined.

Other provisos. It is certainly no automatic given that, had the liberal project continued through the last 40 years, it would have necessarily included a vigorous space program. The Space Race might have ended anyway once a touchdown was scored. And a significant segment of the 'Murrican liberal coalition has - at least since the 1960s - shown a marked, Thoreau-esque distaste for big noisy things that go fast.

It is also arguable that other strands of the 'Murrican right are not necessarily so unfriendly toward large public initiatives. 'National greatness conservatism,' of the sort sometimes championed by neoconservatives at the Weekly Standard, might well be open to a major space effort. Indeed, rhetoric along those lines accompanied the GW Bush administration's talk of going to Mars, which produced 'Constellation.' The rhetoric, alas, was not accompanied by funding, and ended up leaving NASA in a very awkward spot.

Once again, you get what you pay for. And to the degree that we wish society to consider space travel - human or robotic - profoundly important, I will argue that we must at least consider whether society, through a public initiative, needs to step up and pay for it.

It is tempting at this point to say "Okay - let's rrrrumble!" But as always in these comment threads, light is more useful than heat.

So I will merely say: Discuss.

(The Saturn V launch image is from NASA.)

The March of Time

2011-05-07T12:17:00.000-07:00

Time, as I have noted previously on this blog, is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once. Time is also what got away from me last week, which is why I'm posting this 'I'm still here!' message instead of a full length post.

The time lapse image, from Astronomy Picture of the Day, shows Mars and the star Regulus close together in the sky, and close to the same apparently brightness. The telescope was deliberately jiggled to get this pattern, which shows the scintillating ('twinkling') effect on the atmosphere on light sources of very small angular dimensions.

Also from APOD, this impressive - and a bit sobering - X-ray image of the remnant from Tycho's supernova of 1572.

Consider this an open thread.

Continuing Mission: Year Five

2011-04-25T13:07:00.000-07:00

Today, as it happens, marks the fourth anniversary of Rocketpunk Manifesto. Unlike the Enterprise of Trek: TOS, this blog is not on a specified five year mission, so it will not end after another year. This mission will continue as long as I feel like posting here. (TOS itself, of course, was canceled after three years.)

The four years of blogging so far have not been all of a piece. I launched Rocketpunk Manifesto with the usual early burst of enthusiasm, which lasted about three months. After that my blogging started to lapse, until I was posting only an item or two per month - a total of 23 posts in 2008, only seven of them from June through year's end.

Around March of 2009 I decided to try bringing the place back to life. I started posting more, and traffic, which had been running about 250 'unique visitors' per month, began to rise - especially after Winch of Atomic Rockets linked some particularly topical posts. Monthly readership grew about tenfold by last spring, and the comment threads started to take on a life of their own - something that has continued rather bumptiously. They have become a very large part of the overall value of this blog, for which I thank the commenters, both regular and occasional.

My posting rate has settled down to about once per week, concentrating on long-form essay blogging. I've sort of drifted away from shorter posts in between, to comment on space news or showcase images from places like Astronomy Picture of the Day. (Would readers like to see more of those posts again? Speak up if you do!)

I have no 'long arc' intentions here, though I will probably (and shamelessly) keep posting additions to the Space Warfare series so long as pandering to the taste for senseless death and destruction IN SPAAACE !!! continues to goose my traffic stats, as it consistently has.

Apart from that, this blog will probably continue to waver, as it long has, between discussions of what might happen in space in the Plausible Midfuture, and what might happen in space in Romance, or at any rate the subgenre of Romance known as SF.

The two, I suspect, will not have all that much in common. Space is filled with wonders, which we will continue to explore. But there is probably no more reason for people to settle there in large numbers than to colonize the slopes of Everest or the depths of the Marianas Trench. Many of you will disagree, often in the comment threads, something that has tended to add spice and vigor to this blog.

But at least on the science fiction side of the balance my perspective leads to a curious paradox. What place do Realistic [TM] spaceships and other trappings have in settings that are fundamentally operatic, settings of Romance? The answer, as I see it, is essentially a matter of aesthetics. If a ship in a fantasy novel is magical anyway, it might as well be built out of bricks. But most of us would find that vaguely unsatisfying.

The Rule of Cool prevails, but one of its subtler tenets is that truly Cool ships, swords, spacecraft, whatever, while they may not be exactly realistic, should at least look like they might be real. At least they should not look embarrassingly fake. The willing suspension of disbelief is supposed to be helped, not gratuitously insulted. D'Artagnan may live in the France of Romance, but his sword is sharp.

So there remains a place for space warcraft (and peaceful trading craft, for that matter) that, however operatic in their implications, nevertheless look like products of a technology that once passed through the Plausible Midfuture, and learned there how to build and operate believable spacecraft.

And I will continue to discuss them here. Along with whatever else I'm interested in and think you my readers might also be interested in.

Yes, you've heard this before, but ... discuss.

The image comes from this website - I have no idea whether it accurately portrays the TOS version of the Enterprise. But I remember wondering about the diverging phaser beams.

Space Warfare XV: Further Reflections on Laserstars

2011-04-18T19:56:00.000-07:00

Much of the comment thread on Part XIII of this series, The Human Factor, turned into a discussion of 'laserstars.' While a thread of 631 comments (so far) might seem to have given this particular debate the full Rasputin treatment, I am instead going to use it as a pretext for another front page post. (And an arguably wretched pun in the title.)

Laserstars, as the term has come to be used on this blog, are military spacecraft designed to carry and deploy a single powerful weapon laser installation of the maximum practical aperture and power. In their 'ideal' form they would be drones, robotic in the broad sense that includes remote control from a separate command ship (or ground station, etc.).

A couple of provisos are needed. In conceptualizing laserstars I chiefly have in mind classical-style lasers operating broadly in the optical band (IR through UV), whose beams are passed through telescope-style aiming and focusing optics. It is this telescope, more than the individual laser itself, that provides the distinctive feature of a 'laser cannon' - if the available power is more than a single laser can handle you could easily have an entire bank of lasers all firing through the same optical system.

If you have lasers zapping in the far UV or X-ray bands, the aiming optics become quite different. My impression is that the main telescope becomes long and narrow instead of short and wide. In either case, however, the optical system of a laserstar is implicitly too big, relative to the whole spacecraft, to be mounted in some equivalent of a turret. Instead it is 'keel-mounted,' and gross aim is achieved by pointing the entire spacecraft toward the target.

The general argument for all this is that the effective range of a laser is in linear proportion to the aperture of its optical system. Double the telescope aperture and you double the range at which the system can achieve a given spot size and zap intensity.

But a further proviso is that the largest practical laser installation and optical system are in fact large enough that you can only conveniently mount one aboard a spacecraft that is itself of practical size for war service. If it turned out that the most cost-effective size for the spacecraft, with its drive engine and power supply, could carry half a dozen of the 'largest practical' laser optical installations, that is how many it would carry.

Finally, a broader proviso is that a laserstar is not to be regarded as a 'space warship.' It is perhaps more nearly analogous to a railroad gun, deployed to a position where it can make use of its long range firepower while being supported by other spacecraft. In spite of the image at the top of this post, I don't see laserstars primarily engaging in combat in low orbit around a planet, but rather at the outer edge of a planet's strategic envelope, either defending it against attack from elsewhere or maintaining a blocked by cutting off communications with or relief from elsewhere.

In the comment thread previously linked, commenter Tony raised several serious issues with respect to the laserstar concept. These range from the technical to the meta, and I'll discuss what I see as the most critical objections in that order. (The expressions of these issues, however, are mine, not Tony's.)

Precision and the battlefield don't mix. There is a lot of precedent for the general observation that pinpoint accuracy is hard to achieve amid the turmoil of combat. On the other hand, in the contemporary era precision-guided munitions have demonstrated capabilities that would have startled military observers of an earlier era. And laserstars are not a rock & roll weapon, which is why I wouldn't expect to see them in action in (relatively!) crowded planetary space. They are long range artillery for use against targets that must travel through deep space.

Monocultures are vulnerable. This principle of ecology also applies to warfare: Dependence on one weapon generally makes you vulnerable to an enemy who can make use of several. A laserstar by itself is indeed dangerously inflexible. In its 'pure' form it would be deployed only in a constellation containing other spacecraft and weapon systems.

In other situations I would expect to see only partial application of the laserstar concept - for example, I suspect that multi-mission military spacecraft (broadly 'cruisers') would carry a single big keel-mounted laser mirror, for long range zapping power, while also carrying a few smaller mirrors, along with kinetics, for fighting in more chaotic environments.

And, of course, having said this, in any given setting it is plausible that things have worked out otherwise. Laserstars or their like may have no place in the order of battle, for perfectly credible reasons ranging from inability to combine extreme steadiness with extreme power levels, to a power-political environment in which the ability to zap things at 30,000 km has no military significance.

Space armadas have no place in the plausible midfuture anyway. On this point I plead guilty; significant military operations beyond Earth orbital space are an inherently operatic concept, only to be expected when there are substantial human populations, strategic assets, and even polities scattered across space.

This point has a couple of sub-implications. Since we are somewhere beyond the plausible midfuture anyway, techlevels are presumably higher, especially propulsion performance and thus the ability to sling kinetics.

A subtler argument also stems from being beyond the 'plausible midfuture:' A civilization with colonies and space armadas has evidently solved the problem of sending large numbers of people into space - weakening the argument for automated spacecraft as against human crews.

The specific response to these points would be that higher techlevels presumably apply as well to lasers and automation. But really this aspect of the debate takes us into an issue broader than just laserstars, namely the balance of technology and the flavor of technology in space-operatic settings.

I used to have an SF paperback that featured, among other things, a reconditioned World War II heavy cruiser armed with smoothbore muzzle-loaders. This combination was justified by a post-apocalyptic setting, but in general we want our future technologies to have an internally consistent techlevel, or at any rate feel as if they do. What constitutes this internal balance is itself, of course, a matter of speculation.

Also, if you are a regular reader of this blog you probably have a bias toward 'realistic' space technology, in a sense that is as much aesthetic as strictly technical. Roughly, you want spaceships that are broadly recognizable as industrial products - at least descended from the plausible midfuture, even if that era has become the plausible mid-past.

I will deal further with this subject (but not necessarily laserstars) in upcoming posts.

Meanwhile, discuss.

Via Atomic Rockets, this Martin-Marietta concept for an orbital laser ABM platform gives the general impression of a laserstar, but is already notably retro - probably of 1980s vintage. We'll delicately ignore the visible-in-space beam.

Fifty Years of Human Spaceflight

2011-04-12T10:54:00.000-07:00

Thanks to commenter Anita for reminding me of this benchmark anniversary, and Tony for adding a tidbit I hadn't known: At liftoff of the first human spaceflight, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin called out "Poyekhali!" - 'Off we go!'

In the following 50 years a total of 517 people have traveled into space, using the international definition of space as beginning at an altitude of 100 km.

Outer space has turned out to be a difficult environment for us. It is costly to reach; living there requires extensive and specialized life support; and prolonged exposure to space conditions, especially microgravity, is debilitating to human beings. The optimistic speculations of Arthur Clarke, among others, that living in space would be healthful proved (alas!) to be quite wrong.

On the other hand, what we have learned since Yuri Gagarin's single orbit 50 years ago is that humans can live and work in space. This, let us remember, was by no means a given. Until he came back to Earth alive and well, no one could be sure that humans could safely travel in space even for 90 minutes, let alone 180 days. Heart failure or deterioration, brain damage, grave psychological disorientation, were all on the table. They might make human spaceflight fatal or unacceptably dangerous, or simply render it hopelessly unproductive.

Yuri Gagarin's flight began to show us that none of these was the case. Not only can we travel in space, without excessive ill effects, for a period of months, but we can do work there. We have judgment enough to operate and maneuver spacecraft, and - even encumbered in space suits - dexterity enough to maintain and assemble them. Doing Cool Space Stuff is very difficult and extremely expensive, but it is not impossible.

It is not (yet!) obvious that there are things we can do in space better by sending people up there than by sending up only our machines. So far, the only thing that human spaceflight is uniquely capable of doing is demonstrating the possibilities of human spaceflight. But there is sufficient interest, and thus sufficient political and economic support, that we will continue to send up modest numbers of space travellers in Yuri Gagarin's footsteps. Over time we may find new reasons to send up people in more than modest numbers.

Gagarin's flight also accomplished something else that is worth mentioning on this blog, on which I spend a fair amount of time talking about blowing stuff up in space. If the Space Race of the 1960s accomplished nothing else, it gave Americans and Russians of that era a way to flex their muscles and beat their chests without resorting to fighting. This was an extremely good thing. Much as I indulge talking about it here, warfare is a bug, not a feature.

Meanwhile, here's to 50 years of human spaceflight. Poyekhali!

The image of Yuri Gagarin comes from this space oriented website. From another space site comes this image of Vostok 1 lifting off.

Space Warfare XIV: Things As They Ought To Be

2011-04-07T21:04:00.000-07:00

At 100 kilometers per second, any object - be it a depleted-uranium slug, a carton of skim milk, or a throw pillow - packs kinetic energy equal to 5 gigajoules per kg, equivalent to 1195 kg of TNT, rather more than a ton of bang. In space the bang will be soundless, but it will still hurt.

(Someone in the back raises their hand to ask, '100 km/s relative to what?' For purpose of this discussion the answer is 'relative to whatever it hits.' And you should have figured that out on your own.)

This is the basis for kinetic weapons in space warfare. To regular readers of this blog it is no news; in particular I discussed kinetics in two segments of this series of posts. (Though the specific form of killer bus I described in the second post is a bad idea.)

I bring kinetics up again because they were long my weapon of preference for space warfare, for at least three distinct reasons, distinct in addressing different aspects of the overall problem:

1 - Missiles in space have effectively unlimited range, more than even Ravening Beams of Death.

2 - If you have the space technology to put large numbers of people in space, you pretty definitionally have the capability to throw lots of luggage, and throw it fast.

3 - There is reasonable scope for tactical maneuver in kinetics-dominant space combat, something that (it seems to me) is much harder to get in laser combat.

You may note that these three justifications are ranked by increasing meta-ness. The first is a general consequence of space speeds. The second hints at future history.

Any spacefaring society on a grand enough scale to have grand space battles has put generations or centuries of major effort into its overall space technology, whether its past has been peaceful or warlike. Long range lasers probably have more limited and mainly military applications. (Extensive use of laser propulsion does change this equation.) As a point of comparison, in the 19th century military technology tended to adopt new civil technologies, rather than being a primary driving force in itself.

The third point is most shamelessly meta. The people who fight wars are not concerned to make them interesting; that is only of concern to people inventing them in order to write about them.

Thus my picture of kinetic space warfare was kinetic in style as well as in weaponry. My starting point was the observation that if two ships are armed with similar-performance missiles, the more maneuverable ship has a crucial advantage. It can (at least in principle) maneuver to evade an enemy's missile, while the more sluggish enemy ship cannot quite evade its own missile.

Multi-ship tactics also look potentially complex - and therefore interesting. Ships maneuver like (3-D, vector) polo ponies to line up shots at opponents while avoiding the enemy's shots. The worst position a ship can be in is dynamically surrounded, so that a burn that carries it away from one enemy's missile envelope takes it right into another's.

The second worst position a ship can be in is to make a burn that accidentally carries it out of the fight at the point of decision, allowing the enemy to defeat its consorts in detail.

Lasers, in my vision, were purely secondary and defensive, intended for last ditch defense against incomings. There was a serious question in my mind whether a defensive laser armament was even worth carrying - the extra mass of a laser battery would mean reduced missile firepower, more sluggish performance, or both.

In this thumbnail description it sounds much like space fighters dogfighting, though the scale of the thing was such that battles would unfold over hours or days, even weeks.

I have not put any numbers to all this, except for the ones I gave at the very beginning, implying combat encounter speeds on order of 100 km/s. When I first came up with this image of space battles my assumptions were EXTREMELY operatic, as in photon drives with multi-g accelerations. Eventually I worked my way down to mere fusion torches in the low terawatt range.

A variety of holes, of various gauge, can be punched or burned through this vision of space combat, but it still represents one variation on the theme of what we all want for story purposes, Cool Space Battles.

I eventually abandoned this conception. Not because the propulsion was still operatic even in its later, more modest forms - any setting where you have space battles at all, other than near-Earth encounters in a primarily terrestrial war, is at least demi-operatic. But I came to suspect that the laser assumptions I was making were conservative out of all proportion to the propulsion assumption, yielding the equivalent of ships with gas turbine engines and smoothbore muzzle loaders.

By no means is that certain to be the case. Lasers and space propulsion are not inherently linked technologies (though under some assumptions they would be). And there is plenty of experience to show that battle performance of weapons often falls short of bench test performance, sometimes dramatically so. But I came to feel that it was special pleading to assume as much, and ended up with laserstars, as I have described them in prior installments of this series.

At some future point I might change my mind again.

Discuss. (Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!)

The somewhat retro image is from Atomic Rockets - read also the discussion on the linked page.

Space Warfare XIII: The Human Factor

2011-03-28T15:38:00.000-07:00

Discussion of the recent post on Interstellar Empire led to a question that until now failed to get a post of its own: the role, in space warfare, of drones versus ships carrying human crews. Consider this deficiency now corrected.

A few provisos apply. Set aside for now the question of whether warfare, as we have known it and too much loved it since the Iliad, may be obsolescent as a viable mode of conflict among post-industrial communities.

Also set aside the Plausible Midfuture, a place where warfare in deep space is doubtful even if Earth orbital space is armed to the teeth. Set aside as well the general messiness of warfare on planets; my concern here is with space combat. We are dealing here with space armadas, a concept that is demi-operatic at least.

Will these armadas be made up primarily of warships with human crews - the familiar classical vision - or largely of robotic craft?

A lot of this comes down, I would argue, to good old money. The first 50 years of deep space exploration have been exclusively robotic because robotic spacecraft are cheaper. They are cheaper for several reasons: They can be much smaller; except for sample returns they don't need to come back; and in fact they don't even need to always get there.

So far as I can recall, every mission to the outer planets has (so far) been a success, but we only reached the point of batting .500 against Mars since I launched this blog. Such a loss rate was regarded as acceptable for human missions in the 16th century, but not in the 21st. (The more so because the enormous cost of human spaceflight, and resulting high profile, makes human spaceflight losses more controversial than, say, helicopter crashes.)

The situation in warfare is somewhat different, because soldiers are in some fundamental sense expendable - many of our military traditions are, in one way or another, built around that fact. But they are not lightly expended, if only because high quality crews are costly to train and difficult to replace. For post-industrial societies, where untimely death is no longer a sad commonplace, public resistance to casualties may be problematic even for authoritarian regimes.

Cost and risk of losses, taken together, are ample reason for the designers of combatant spacecraft to automate them so far as is practical. But how far is practical?

Kinetic weapons will have no human crews, for obvious reasons. There are almost equally strong reasons not to put crews aboard the buses that deliver them. Kinetics are most effective in a single wave that saturates defenses - the faster they are thrown the harder they will hit, and the less time the defense will have to stop them. This argues for a bus that uses its full delta v for maximum closing rate, rather than holding back propellant in order to recover the bus. For its basic mission it need not be very sophisticated, and you will not be re-using it anyway, at least not anytime soon.

So it is probably cheaper to make the bus expendable.

Lasers are a different matter, as are alternatives such as particle beams. (And for that matter kinetics, if these are slung on their way by coilguns. Flip side, bomb-pumped lasers are expendables, with military properties similar to kinetics.) A laser star is inherently reusable, and suited to missions, such as blockade or maintaining a 'presence,' in which repeated engagements may be required. A laser and its associated optics are also presumably sophisticated equipment. On all of these grounds putting a crew aboard a laser star seems much more plausible than putting one aboard a kinetic bus.

But what exactly would the crew be called upon to do? No gunners' mates are needed to shove photons into the breech, or even aim the laser. Actual precision aiming of the beam will be automated in any case, and assigning targets can be done from a few light seconds away.

The other traditional role of ships' crews is maintenance and repair. But drive engines and megawatt lasers do not, so far as I can see, provide much scope for onboard servicing, let alone damage control during battle. Repairs of either one pretty much need the services of a cageworks. Occasional replacement of smaller failed systems, or whacking balky parts with a wrench, can be done by service teams based elsewhere - at a space station, for defensive orbital forces, or aboard a tender for deep space constellations.

It is a peculiar fact that both many space emergencies - such as onboard fires or air leaks - and much of the corresponding scope for human emergency repair, relate specifically to life support habs. (Propellant tanks can also leak, but offer precious little chance of onboard repair.) I suspect, indeed, that life support maintenance will be a major role of space crews. But this sets up an odd circularity. Take away the hab and you eliminate many of the emergencies that a crew could respond to.

The final role for humans in space combat is command and control, especially rules of engagement decisions. We might not want to trust even high level AIs with these decisions - either because we are not quite sure of their motives, or because they have no motives at all, and so can free us of everything but the need to decide. But the scale and probable tempo of space combat are such that - as mentioned above concerning target designation - these functions generally don't need to be aboard the weapon platforms. Why not offload them to the 'tender' that provides teams for the occasional maintenance call?

Back in Part III of this series I gave the following description of a space combat constellation:

Taken as a whole you might call it a fleet. But it more nearly resembles a mobile, distributed, and networked fortification, deploying in action into a three-dimensional array of weapon emplacements, observation posts, and patrol details, all backed up by a command and logistics center.

But even supposing that a main battle force is built along these lines, what about smaller independent mission packages - the equivalent of a cruiser, for example, for patrol missions?

Contrary to the (understandable!) assertion of a well known Evil Website, space is not an ocean. At sea, a single 10,000 ton ship has major advantages over four 2500 ton ships. It is more seaworthy, far more comfortable for its crew, harder to sink, provides a higher and dryer command for guns and sensors, and can maintain higher speed with less power and fuel consumption.

In space these considerations apply with far less force, if they apply at all. A single large hab pod is likely preferable to several smaller ones - but only the command ship / tender needs a hab pod at all. And the other force elements can be carried as riders, if desired, separating only to deploy for combat.

If your propulsion tech involves an electric drive powered by an external reactor, which also supplies the primary laser, you want to match the drive, reactor, and laser, which does argue for putting them together aboard the same spacecraft. And you might reasonably be less than comfortable about separating the crew hab from the main drive. But if your setting has fusion drive, or any self-contained drive, this is much less a consideration.

One other human-factor consideration to keep in mind was brought up in the linked discussion by commenter Tony: What happens to the morality of warfare - such as it is - when no soldiers put themselves at risk to fight it, because the fighting is all done by robots?

In the scenario I have outlined above this is not really the case. The constellation has a human crew, aboard the command ship / tender, even if it is 'behind the lines' relative to the weapon platforms. If the combat units of its constellation are defeated the crew must retreat, surrender, or face destruction - the choices that have always faced combatants who were disarmed in battle rather than killed outright.

Discuss.

Related Links:

Atomic Rockets, of course - especially, but not exclusively, the pages on space warfare.

And previously in the Space Warfare series on this blog:

I: The Gravity Well
II: Stealth Reconsidered
III: 'Warships' in Space
IV: Mobility
V: Laser Weapons
VI: Kinetics, Part 1
VII: Kinetics, Part 2 - The Killer Bus
VIII: Orbital Combat
IX: Could Everything We Know Be Wrong?
X: Moving Targets
XI: La Zona Fronteriza
XII: Surface Warfare

Also ...

Battle of the Spherical War Cows: Purple v Green
Further Battles of the Spherical War Cows

Plus

Space Fighters, Not
Space Fighters, Reconsidered?

And, indulging in heresy -

Give Peace a Chance

The image shows Achilles fighting Hector.

De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum

2011-03-17T12:30:00.000-07:00

Meta raised its head again, in a big way, in discussion of the last couple of posts on FTL. This should not be a surprise, because the rather problematic physics of FTL brings us very close to the boundary line between science fiction and science fantasy. (Including the question of whether it is valid to distinguish them at all.)

The perspective of this blog from its beginning has been that SF is a subgenre of Romance, a term now narrowed down by marketers to a different subgenre of itself. Romance in all its subgenres is distinct from 'realistic' fiction, which is largely why academic literary criticism has been rather nonplussed by it. Realism, in this context, is mostly about psychological realism in characterization, not Realism [TM] in technology, physics, or other aspects of the setting.

Yet that latter kind of Realism [TM] is itself a very relative thing, and arguably amounts largely to a stylistic flourish. Take for example the question of space warfare, a subject that probably drew many of you to this blog.

There is, to be blunt, precious little 'realistic' about clashes of armadas in deep space. Half a century of space travel combined with enormous military budgets has shown mainly that the world's major militaries have zero interest in space armadas. The US never deployed any manned space warcraft, unless you count 'Blue Shuttle' (which the USAF never wanted). The Soviet-era Russians dabbled a bit, but soon lost interest.

For that matter, from a genuinely realistic perspective there is not much basis for any of the familiar space tropes that we know and mostly love here. The exploration and exploitation of space, as of the ocean floor, is much better suited to robotic or remote-controlled vehicles and systems. Deep space does add the complication of light lag: Teleoperators at JPL in Pasadena can't guide machines on Mars in real time. But this is only a limited constraint, and - let's be honest - there are cheaper and more convenient workarounds than sending hundred-ton human habs to Mars, at enormous cost, plus the even more enormous cost of bringing them and their crews back safely.

Any number of unforeseen circumstances might change all this, and provide some McGuffinite that justifies extensive human space travel. We have discussed such possibilities before on this blog, and you can safely guess that we will discuss them again.

Stories about space travel, on the other hand, require no such hypothetical McGuffinite. It is sufficient that space travel is Cool. But even fictional space travel is subject to the willing suspension of disbelief.

How disbelief gets suspended, and in what ways, is in fact arbitrary and genre-dependent. Practically all fiction, including realistic fiction in the conventional sense, expects us to take its characters as people, not figments of the author's imagination. Even traditional literary criticism joins in this pretense, talking about Achilles or Elizabeth Bennet as if they were actual people. Experimental fiction that overtly admits to being fictional is arguably 'metafiction,' while time-honored framing devices for fantastic fiction, such as the old lost manuscript, have long fallen out of active use, and would be evoked today only for retro flavor.

I have an aesthetic bias in favor of the trappings of Realism [TM], both in the technical details of spaceships and the social details of why someone is paying to have them built, which is why Rocketpunk Manifesto belabors all of those questions about why people might actually go into space in large numbers.

It is important to emphasize that this is precisely an aesthetic bias, and my biases can be amazingly idiosyncratic and narrow. For example, spaceships that look like the Navajo missile of the 1950s are both coolific and Realistic [TM] in my eye, while spaceships that look like a V-2 with wings look corny, dated, and implausible. Never mind that they are both equally genuine design concepts, little more than a decade apart and both more than half a century old - or even that one evolved directly from the other. One looks right to me, while the other doesn't.

Many of my SF biases are reflected by the Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy, from my old static website. Even though it is largely a snark at convention space-fiction tropes, fundamentally that is still how my tastes run. I neither apologize for those tastes nor defend them. These tropes are a perfectly legitimate branch of SF as it has developed over the past century or so, but by no means the only perfectly legitimate branch.

From one perspective, science fiction itself is obsolete - a creation of the industrial revolution, an inherently transitional phase when visions the pre-industrial world could scarcely have imagined became possible to think about, even if some may never be possible to achieve. It is really, really hard today to come up with SF ideas that have never been written before.

On the other hand, SF has permanently expanded the frontiers of Romance - including the revitalization of its bookstore neighbor and rival, fantasy, along with a host of spinoff subgenres. None of it is realistic, but much of it thrives on the artful faking of realism.

Discuss.

The launch images of the SM-64 Navajo come from an aerospace history blog. Compare to the ramjet shuttle at the lower right of the RM logo image above.

FTL Part II: Just Plain Cheating

2011-03-09T13:36:00.000-08:00

In our last exciting episode we considered the possibility that the dictum Causality, Relativity, FTL travel: chose any two may not be strictly true. Consult the comment thread for discussion, particularly some thought experiments offered by commenter Luke.

I cannot vouch for the validity of these arguments, only that they are either a) valid, or b) extremely high quality bullshit, and I choose a as my working hypothesis.

Einsteinian street-legal FTL is, as the discussion takes note, subject to certain constraints. Its use in a story is, in turn, subject to some meta-level contraints. So far as I can tell, it is consistent only with the 'jump' style of FTL, in which you pre-select your destination before hitting the big red button. FTL in which you navigate freely seems ruled out. And you are taking your chances with drawing (or narratively describing) a 'subway map' of FTL jump routes, unless you can ensure that your map meets the requirements for a directed acyclic graph.

You have been warned.

Having said that, the whole subject is pretty much moot unless you are a physicist, or can credibly impersonate one. Nearly all your readers will ignore your validation, and assume either that you are jiving them as part of the story, or else that you are simply a crank. (Which will not help them buy into the story.) Within the SF world, FTL is more or less universally understood to be a pure dodge, dumping physics for the sake of story. And it is just as universally accepted on that basis.

A point made in comments to last post was that there are also STL workarounds, even for such tropes as interstellar empires. Said commenter Horselover Fat: "For FTL, you need to dump Einstein. For STL empires, you need to dump your cultural assumptions. And you choose to dump Einstein?"

Very good question. My answer would be that cultural assumptions tie in closely to characterization, right at the heart of fiction. Change them greatly and your story pretty much has to be about those changes. Dumping Einstein, not so much. (Note: I am not saying that you need to ignore the laws of physics, only that - in space opera - you can.)

You do still have to fake it convincingly. As I suggested last post, the less you say about your specific handwaves the better off you will probably be. You also have to adhere to some internal consistency. If FTL jumps require generating Stupendous Energy on demand, you need to deal with the implications of a technology that can do this. Similarly, if you need to travel 100 AU in normal space to reach jump points, you need a normal-space drive capable of doing so in convenient time. (And if you stick with relativistic STL, you need a beaucoup powerful drive.)

All of which produces, or can produce, its own awkward complications. If your interstellar tramp freighter has a drive engine capable of slagging a continent, the movement of such ships anywhere near an inhabited planet will be very strictly regulated. This may spoil some otherwise charming tropes. (Think Firefly.)

There are a host of other possible complications to bear in mind. If FTL jumps can be made by small spacecraft just above planetary atmospheres, you've opened the door to bomber-mission nuclear strikes, or even interstellar ICBM strikes. But if it takes too long to reach jump points in normal space you could end up at least partly defeating the purpose of FTL.

Another criticism I have seen is mildly meta: settings in which there is FTL for convenient star travel, while the rest of the technology pretty much resembles the Plausible Midfuture [TM]. The problem here is that you have supposedly had a fundamental revolution in physics, yet with no technological consequence other than FTL itself. How remarkably convenient ....

A reasonable counter-argument might be that relativity itself gave us the atomic bomb and nuclear subs to deliver it, but no atomic motorcycles or force-field steak knives. Nuclear power plants put out the same kind of juice as coal-fired plants, and for most story purposes are pretty much invisible. I imagine that modern physics is implicated in a host of everyday gadgets, but not in dramatic ways.

So, the presumed future physics that gives us FTL might also give us antigravity drive and other Cool Stuff, or - for different desired values of coolness - might have few other obvious effects besides fast interstellar travel.

For that matter, a Pretty Strong argument could be made that all of this is tech geek navel gazing, irrelevant to the practical problems of SF world building. Heinlein's Starman Jones remains a favorite of mine in spite of an FTL that requires you to violate relativity in normal space, before you even get to make the FTL jump.

And to take a more modern example, I thoroughly enjoyed Elizabeth Moon's Heris Serrano books, though the stuff that reads like hard SF is really almost pure bluff. The fact of the matter is that if onboard instruments indicate the approach of an enemy ship, and the characters respond to this situation in a persuasive way, we as readers do not insist that they stop to calibrate their instruments for us.

On the other hand, this blog is more or less dedicated to the art of faking details convincingly.

Discuss. (As if you needed an invitation.)

The subway-esque hyperspace image comes, via Google Images, from a screensaver website.

FTL Part I: An Honest Cheat?

2011-03-03T12:01:00.000-08:00

It might seem contrary to discuss FTL only after a post on interstellar empire, a concept that pretty much depends on star travel being cheap, convenient, and above all fast. (Yes, there are STL scenarios, but they are so stretchy that violating General Relativity suspends less disbelief.)

But in broader perspective it is our desire for interstellar empire, or other such cool settings, that calls out for the willing suspension of disbelief in the first place. All spaceships, as a commenter on this blog once observed, travel at the speed of plot, but that is especially true when it comes to FTL. Spaceships in the Plausible Midfuture have some of the constraints of real-world vehicles, and plots must work around them, but the only constraint on FTL is that it must sound convincing to readers who want to be convinced, at least while reading the story. (Although FTL systems in SF not infrequently fail even at that.)

Unlike last post, this time I remembered to link the relevant page at Atomic Rockets, which covers or links the relevant physics and pseudo-physics, and offers some useful FTL typologies. Also a link to my observation in the Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy that all FTL tech is equivalent to flipping tarot cards while chanting in Welsh - i.e., effectively it is magic.

And a post here from last year which noted that contemporary physics has just barely left the door open to FTL, subject to certain constraints. The relevant effect of these constraints - as I understand it (and General Relativity is not my field of expertise) - is that you can stay out of temporal trouble so long as your baseline FTL routes do not cross-connect.

To follow the rapid transit metaphor I used in that post, you can have multiple routes out from Earth (via wormholes or whatever), with as many branches and sub-branches as you want, and travel times can be as fast as you want them to be. But each station can only be on one line. If you can take two separate routings to reach a given destination, of differing length, then you have to pay the temporal piper.

For example, from Sol to Sirius is 8.6 light years, while from Sol to Wolf 359 is 9.0 light years. Given tramlines equipped with a suitable array of oscillating hands, you can reach either one in in a month by your onboard clock, or an hour, and return in similar time. In Earth's frame of reference, going outbound you are in fact travelling nearly a decade into the future, and returning you are going nearly a decade into the past. This produces no awkward time-travel-esque results, because you don't return to Earth before you left, and you can't get back to Sirius for a second visit prior to your first one.

From Wolf 359 to Sirius is 7.7 light years, so the roundabout route to Sirius via Wolf 359 is 16.7 light years. If you could simply open another tramline, you could travel to Sirius via the indirect route, arrive there 17 years from now, read some stock quotes, return by the same roundabout route to Earth, then go by the direct route, and invest in Sirian stocks years earlier. Big trouble, and not just for stock markets.

So, to avoid breaking causality, such routings must be ruled out, or at least force you to twiddle thumbs those extra eight years instead of raking in a bundle. I don't begin to understand the required coefficient of jive, but apparently it can be done without violating General Relativity, at the price of making such roundabout routings very inconvenient.

(Commenters who do understand this stuff are welcome - indeed, invited - to step in and expand on / correct these points.)

The hitch is that for story purposes we probably want those roundabout routings - not to travel into the past, but merely to run blockades and the like.

My impression is that there is still a workaround. Simply assume that all FTL travel to Sirius proceeds via Wolf 359, but that there are separate 'local' and 'express' tramlines along the route - the former stopping off at Wolf 359, while the latter passes right through without entering normal space.

If each entry or exit from a tramline involves a cost (e.g., reaching the jump point through normal space), then regular Sol-Sirius travel would follow the express tramline, passing by Wolf 359 nonstop. But the local routing, stopping off in normal space at Wolf 359, would remain available when needed for story purposes.

Yes, this is more than a little strained (and possibly downright wrong), but hey, we're talking about FTL. The alternative, so far as I can see, is simply blowing off a lot of well-establish physics entirely. Remember, it isn't as if Einstein kicked Newton onto the ash heap; old Sir Isaac still gives an approximation good enough for interplanetary travel planning.

Moreover, the above gimmickry can be almost entirely buried out of sight, at least so long as your intended flavor of FTL is jump-oriented, and you don't get deeply into the weeds about the sequence in which routes were established in the first place.

Having said that, this approach should probably be left to physicists, or people who do General Relativity as a hobby, and might as well be physicists.

My more general advice on FTL - which I seem to have arrived at via Wolf 359 - is to say as little about the mechanism as possible. Don't talk about wormholes, don't talk about Alcubierre, or any other present-day speculation. All you will do is date yourself, because I don't need to travel into the future to guess that these particular edge-of-the-envelope speculations will be superceded.

Bury all that theoretical stuff under a couple of toss-off jargon terms - Horst-Milne congruencies, Alderson Drive, whatever - and concentrate on what actually matters, which is how FTL actually operates in a setting: size and cost of the gizmo, apparent travel times, available routings, and so forth.

Some of which I will (probably) discuss next post.

Related links: Atomic Rockets, Chanting in Welsh, and Rapid Transit.

The image comes from a Battlestar Galactica website.

On Interstellar Empire

2011-02-22T12:30:00.000-08:00

As the post title should make clear, this is a discussion of space opera. It is true, according to commenters who know more than I do, that the theoretical door to FTL is not quite welded shut, but we are far outside the scope of the Plausible Midfuture, even for the most generous interpretation of that phrase.

But the heroes of high fantasy do not fight their dragons with cardboard swords. Likewise, even in operatic settings we are entitled to the appearance of plausibility.

The question of interstellar empires arose in comments on a recent post about artificial intelligence (go to the second page of comments, around #215 or 220). The thread drift concerned the use of bluntly named killbots, but my immediate concern here is not with the technology of interstellar war but its 'geopolitics' (astropolitics?).

It is a quite basic - but rather unappreciated - fact of power politics in space that, except for independent colonies located on the same planet, there are no contiguous borders. In fact, we can get a bit narrower than that: independent colonies on the same continent or landmass. Yes, borders can be drawn through an ocean, or - given a suitably holographic map - even through interstellar space, but you cannot march across them.

At least, you cannot march across them unless you have stargates of the sort that can be localized onto a planet. Unless your FTL technology permits interstellar streetcars, it likewise precludes interstellar armies. To be sure this does not preclude interstellar marines, or espatiers. But marines are fundamentally a naval arm, and espatiers are fundamentally an arm of space forces, whatever name you choose for the latter.

And this is significant ... why, exactly?

It is significant because your all conquering space legions can conquer no one - at least no one off-planet - unless they are transported by an all conquering space fleet. At which point the legions' own task is more or less the mopping up operation.

Which is significant in turn because, historically, maritime powers have been a considerably different beast than land-based powers, more or less as sailors have differed from soldiers. At least in their internal politics they have generally been more liberal, and in their external affairs more concerned with control of trade than with the direct rule of territory. Victoria, for example, became Empress of India only after indirect rule through the East India Company went pear shaped.

These political differences seem to reflect broader cultural differences, reflected even in epic poetry: The Iliad is a soldier's epic, the Odyssey a sailor's epic.

In my old Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy I made this an argument for the likely predominance of trade federations in classic FTL settings, and I think that argument still essentially holds.

Discuss.

The image of Brunhilde comes from a website, Soldiers of the Queen, which deals mainly with the Victorian British army, but also includes an opera page.

Decelerando?

2011-02-12T11:21:00.000-08:00

Will the Industrial Revolution end not with tranformation but a truce?

This is a question I've considered here before, noting that the true 'accelerando' of the Industrial Revolution peaked about a century ago, and that technologies in general alternate between rapid transformations and much longer periods of maturity and incremental progress.

This subject was lately taken up by Tyler Cowen at his blog Marginal Revolution, and in expanded e-pamphlet form, and as a quick google will show, he has stirred up a hornet's nest of discussion. One reason Cowen has a 'big' blog while this is a 'small' one is that he came up with a snappy title for the phenomenon he discusses, The Great Stagnation.

In a nutshell, argues Cowen, we have already picked much of the low-hanging fruit of technical progress, making what remains harder to come by and thus more expensive. As I noted last fall, the speed of human travel increased in a rather Moore's Law fashion from about 1830 until 1960. In the 50 years since then it has stalled; our jet planes travel at the same speed as first generation jetliners.

More broadly, while we do have the Internet, we don't have household robots, or aircars, or all those other things we were supposed to have in The Future. Nor do we have substitutes or counterparts for most of them. Broadly speaking, except for the mobile phones, a middle class neighborhood of 2011 is broadly similar to one of 1973, the year Cowen picked as reference point (just before the first 'oil shock' and some other trends that made the later 1970s a rough patch).

Some important provisos. A lot more people have the industrial age basics. In 1973, as I am old enough to remember, famine was still an endemic threat to much of the world's population. Now it endangers only the poorest and most marginalized people: a dreadful exception, not a norm. At least half a billion people in China and India alone have, broadly speaking, joined the global middle class in the last decade or so, and probably a similar number in other countries. This is a stupendous increase in human material well-being. But it has to do with the spread of existing technologies, and the institutions that support them. It is an extension of the achieved, not of the possible.

Of course there is the Internet. For sheer coolness it is awesome, and of course it has made this blog possible. But is it really as economically transformative as, say, motor transportation was? In particular, the Internet economy is curiously limited. It has created nothing like the vast pool of fairly well-paying jobs that the auto industry did. It has created a few spectacular fortunes, a few thousand or tens of thousands of impressively well-paying careers, an (unpaid) opportunity for me and the commenters to hold forth to an audience, and allowed millions to either read this blog or - vastly more likely - watch pets and their people do silly things.

Turning from technology and economics to the underlying fundamentals of science, the picture is rather similar. We still don't have a Grand Unified Theory; our physics remains, broadly speaking, a mashup of relativity and quantum mechanics, as it was for most of the past century. Our cutting edge not infrequently cuts right through into metaphysics, offering conceptual possibilities such as bubble universes that we cannot test even in theory.

Space speculation and space SF show much the same trajectory. In 1861 neither one existed. By 1911 they both existed, and Tsiolkovsky had already outlined the principles of multistage, liquid fuel rockets. In 1961 Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth, and the original rocketpunk era of Realistic [TM] space speculation was already being overtaken by events. In 2011 we are still very much within that same framework; alternative techs remain nearly pure speculation.

On the flip side ... there is an oft-repeated story - alas, it seems to be apocryphal - that a mid-19th century patent official recommended closing the patent office on the grounds that everything that could be invented already had been. (The linked blog tartly observes that this involves two improbabilities: that a tech geek would believe such a thing, and that a government bureaucrat would recommend abolishing his own job.)

Inventions are very unlikely to cease, but 'big' ones might well become less common.

Presumably there is some point at which we could know, in broad outline, how the universe really works, leaving nothing truly fundamental to discover. A recent comment thread considered this question, not without some contention.

I am not suggesting anything so sweeping - only that a punctuated equilibrium may be giving way to a new equilibrium. We may have worked our way through most of the broad outlines of science-as-we-know-it, and its major technical implications.

In much the same way, the technological revolution c. 1400-1500 that gave rise to the full-rigged sailing ship gave way to a maturity of more gradual refinement. A seaman of 1400, time-shifted to 1500, would have found ships nearly unrecognizable. A seaman of 1700, shifted to 1800, would have found many improvements but few real surprises.

If so, this has some important social implications. What happens if economic growth rates in this century, at any rate in the most industrialized countries, are markedly lower than they were in the last one? Dividing up the economic pie becomes a much more fraught issue if the pie is no longer getting larger, or only at a glacial rate. 'Creative destruction' will become the exception, not the rule.

Discuss.

The image is a vintage 'muscle car,' a 1966 Pontiac GTO.

The Midfuture of Religion

2011-02-04T14:06:00.000-08:00

In due course this blog will return to simple, innocent speculation about zapping or otherwise blowing up spaceships. But for now, I can't resist following through on my recent promise (well down the comment thread) to play with fire.

Religion is a very widespread, even pervasive characteristic of human societies, and pretty damn widespread among individual humans. Having said that, what exactly do I mean by religion? What we now call simply 'the West' was, for about a thousand years until rather recently, called Western Christendom. Whatever our personal beliefs, most of us grew up in that cultural milieu, and it shapes our concepts of 'religion.'

As a minor example, in the linked thread I made a reference to faith. Yet my impression is that classical paganism cared not at all about faith - it insisted on ritual, carried out as prescribed, without caring whether you 'believed in' it or not. I gather that there is also a bit of a standing joke in archeology that if you find an artifact, especially a carefully made one, with no obvious purpose, you put it down as a 'cult object.' And what will future archeologists make of that big statue of Athena Polias in New York harbor?

For purposes of this discussion I won't even try to define religion - anyone who thinks they can, click the comments button and give it a shot.

But as a matter of fairness I'll show my cards. I was raised in the Episcopal Church, the 'Murrican member of the Anglican Communion. This fact has currently produced a dispute that gives a whole new (old?) meaning to 'primate house behavior,' which I won't belabor here. I had no beef with it, but in college I was converted to agnosticism by a fundamentalist friend, who probably remains mercifully ignorant of how his evangelizing misfired.

Rigorist atheists would probably describe agnosticism as 'squish' atheism, and this was mostly true of mine, though I have subsequently shifted to a purer agnosticism - from There is no God! (But I hesitate to assert it dogmatically.) to Is there a God? God only knows!

From a somewhat different perspective, though, I would be tempted to argue that most self proclaimed atheists (and mere agnostics) are actually followers of a religion I shall call Puritanical Pantheism.

Conventional pantheism is the belief that divinity, 'numinosity,' God-ness infuses the physical universe, AKA Nature. Pantheism of the ordinary sort is associated with the environmental movement, especially its more spiritual-minded wing, as well as with Westerners who are attracted to Eastern mysticisms. Stereotypically it connotes hippie dippie types who wear sandals in places where hiking shoes would be more convenient.

It is a rather 'Catholic' sort of pantheism, not (obviously!) in any doctrinal sense, but in its baroque richness of imagery and vast calendar of saints. Its present day believers are (again, stereotypically) not terribly fond of industrial civilization or, of most interest here, space travel, even though environmentalism as we now know it is very much a product of the space age.

Distaste goes both ways, unsurprisingly, since heretics are always worse than mere infidels.

Puritanical Pantheism is an altogether starker faith than the garden variety sort. It offers no solace that our souls will somehow be joined with the butterflies, and no sacred groves where we might contemplate such things. It offers nothing at all to its believers save sheer awe. Sinners in the hands of an angry God? Try sinners and non-sinners alike in the hands of an utterly indifferent Universe.

For just that reason, puritanical pantheism will probably not sweep all other faiths before it into the dustbin of history. If I were to guess, and I will, both the death and the revival of more traditional forms of religion is probably overstated. The world's major religions have not gotten that way without offering powerful world views to their believers - or even their not-quite-believers. My own world view remains shaped in important ways by the Book of Common Prayer.

That said, I would not be surprised if a syncretic muddle is common in the midfuture, because we are far more aware of the range of possible religion than people in the agrarian age generally were. Short of a catastrophic collapse this is unlikely to change. This by no means implies that everyone will believe in a syncretic muddle; major faiths will likely retain their full vitality among many millions of believers.

Fundamentalism? It is, I suspect, a characteristically transitional phenomenon. Traditional believers of an earlier era were not 'fundamentalist;' traditional teachings were simply taken for granted for lack of alternatives. God (or Thatever) may have created the universe ten minutes ago, complete with fossil record, etc., just as we write stories with a backstory extending back beyond Page 1. In my personal opinion - worth what you paid - accepting this is a far more robust position than trying to take pliers to the material evidence to bend it to fit doctrinal positions. That is to say, 'creation science' is neither scientific nor very creative.

(If you wish to argue otherwise, bear in mind that this is a seriously geeky crowd who will cut you ~~little~~ no slack if you slip up on technical points.)

But religion is not limited by fundamentalism, and the methods of science have their own constraints. Broadly speaking, science deals with the orderliness of nature. What is not orderly - human history comes to mind, not to mention the human experience as recorded in literature - requires different methods of study to produce useful results. And if the universe were created, like a sim except for real, it is questionable whether any purely internal analysis could ever show this, or refute it if not so.

Discuss.

The image is of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

A reminder to commenters and prospective commenters from Captain Obvious: This is, shall we say, a potentially contentious subject for a blog post. Rocketpunk Manifesto has, so far, been amazingly devoid of flame wars, and I ask all who enter the comment thread to help keep it that way.

What Do AIs Want?

2011-01-21T12:20:00.000-08:00

Freud did not ask that question, but my commenters have, in the last thread, unconstrained by the post having nothing to do with artificial intelligence. (Note: This is a feature, not a bug.)

I have argued here before that there is no particular reason to expect 'strong' AI in the midfuture, mainly because we know very little about how human thought works, except that it is very different from the way computers-as-we-know-them work. On the other hand, this is no argument against the possibility or plausibility of strong AI, only that it is outside the scope of what we can currently extrapolate.

So. Suppose that we do develop high level AI, as in smarter than us. Set aside all specific technical questions about how this might be implemented - silicon, bio, some other tech, 'pure thought,' or whatever. What will be its motivations? And what, as a consequence, will be its relations with us?

SF has given considerable thought to the questions of AI-human relations over the years. Following are some of the answers that have been offered:

1. It will be a murderous psychopath. This is the oldest theme, going back to Mary Shelley in the predawn of SF. Truth to be told I've never read Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (have you?), and his creation may have comprehensible motives. But in the popular tradition it spawned the AI's own motives are absent or irrelevant; it is the AI's Faustian creator who opened Doors Man Was Not Meant To Open.

2. It will be driven insane by human wickedness and folly. Offhand I can only think of one example of this theme, but an important one: HAL 9000, whose breakdown results from human secrecy and hypocrisy due ultimately to the Cold War.

3. It will be murderous, albeit for understandable reasons. The original robots, in Karel Capek's play R.U.R., were essentially slaves doing the Spartacus thing. (Capek's robots were not quite robots in the modern sense, but this does not affect the argument.) In cultural terms this is the 20th century intellectual's counterpart of #1, giving the horror theme the added frisson of hinting that we had it coming to us.

4. It will be murderous, for understandable - but paranoid - reasons: getting us before we get it. I can't think of literary examples, but I probably just missed them or can't bring them to mind. In any case this theme appears in the comment thread to the last post. The AI, motivated by self preservation, will eliminate us as a potential threat.

All of these themes have obvious literary appeal: Killer Robots, 'nuff said. In Hollywood's hands they all drift toward #1, because killer robots are not an invitation to complex plot exposition. But there is one further, subtle variation:

5. It will never exist. We will eliminate it preclusively, before it can eliminate us, by refusing to invent it.

Now for the non-killer-robot themes:

6. It will be benign, due to the Three Laws of Robotics. These of course were Isaac Asimov's response to the prevalence of killer robots in the early Golden Age, and the Three Laws practically killed off killer robots in mainstream SF - though not, per above, in Hollywood.

7. It will gently enslave us for the best of motives, again due to the Three Laws of Robotics. As Asimov himself realized, 'To Serve Man' can raise some complex and ambiguous issues. (Even aside from the culinary dimension.) For sufficiently high level AIs this process can be summarized as Is there a God? Now there is.

8. It will serenely ignore us, as irrelevant to its concerns.

9. It will ignore us, but neither serenely nor with any other emotion. It is after all a machine, with all the emotion and motivation of a lawn mower.

What have I left off this list? Most of these possibilities have any number of variations, many of which blur together - how do we classify Robocop, or his cousin, the defensive robo-fortress that engages and destroys every conceivable threat, including its builders?

And this whole discussion blurs into the question of whether, and to what degree, 'intelligence,' robotic or alien, will or might go hand in hand with anything that we would call personality. To take one particular example from the previous discussion thread, I'm not sure that an AI would have any concern - let alone 'instinct' - for self preservation. We have it because we evolved that way, but AIs don't arise through natural selection. (Though they are arguably subject to it once created.)

And there is one familiar AI that I don't know how to classify, Mycroft in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I didn't care for the book, so I don't remember much of it. (If you gotta message, use Western Union; not to mention the obvious impostor claiming to be Hazel Stone.) But I do remember Mycroft. So far as I can recall its motivation was primarily to have interesting conversations, which strikes me as not implausible.

Discuss (further).

Related posts: A PoMo reflection on Asimov, and thoughts on aliens.

The image of a Cylon was swiped from this blog post.

The Ferry to Hogwarts

2011-01-13T20:33:00.000-08:00

Reality 1, whimsy 0 ...

Alas there seems to be no ferry service to anywhere from this pier, though a block away is the ferry to one of San Francisco's most famously dubious tourist attractions, Alcatraz. (Possibly relevant note: The gap in my posting here was due to a stubborn head cold, not incarceration.)

Nor is there any profound justification for posting this image, beyond the general Rule of Cool. But it provides a handy segue to an ongoing topic of this blog, the somewhat uneasy boundary line between Realism [TM] and Romance.

Such border disputes are by no means confined to outer space, but space is a particularly productive environment for them, because the whole idea of going into space for any reason is essentially and profoundly Romantic. Yes, comsats, weathersats, and various other things we have sent into space have their practical uses, but it seems awfully unlikely that strictly practical people would ever have come up with them, given how absurdly difficult and costly space travel is.

Yes, before space travel there was military rocketry. But - setting aside the question of in what sense our blowing each other up qualifies as practical - the established or foreseeable roles of military rocketry in the early 20th century did not point toward space boosters. Practical military rockets like the Katyusha were essentially self propelled shells, more expensive and less accurate than standard shells, but able to be fired from cheap, lightweight launchers instead of heavy, expensive artillery rifles.

The V-2 was, in the pre-atomic age, a supremely impractical weapon: an expensive and inaccurate way to lob a shell not all that much farther than the longest-ranged guns of the time could achieve. No one would have come up with such an idea on purely military grounds. I'll guess that Versailles restrictions played a role in making the German army interested in alternatives to conventional artillery, but it was the first generation of space geeks, not military specialists, that put long-range rocketry into play.

Yes, nuclear warheads made ICBMs all too practical, but it is no accident that the first generation of ICBMs, both US and Soviet, turned out to be much more suitable as space boosters than as weapons.

Space travel is, like the image above, ultimately all about the Rule of Cool, AKA Romance. This has significant implications. As strong as are the practical reasons for not spending zillions on it, these reasons have not, so far, succeeded in making the whole silly thing go away. Unless post industrial civilization removes itself from the social selection options, it will probably not go away in the midfuture, either.

A comparison can be made here to other Zeerust-era future techs, such as the SST. Supersonic aircraft are also inherently cool, but not that cool. So, not only do SSTs fail to offer enough merely practical benefits to pay for their development cost, they also fail to offer enough coolness to overcome that limitation.

I suspect that people will walk on Mars before airline passengers (again) travel at supersonic speeds.

It may be somewhere between paradoxical and hypocritical for me to turn around and argue this point, considering how much time I spend here beating up on popular space tropes. But I beat up on the PSTs so you won't have to. Romance, in and of itself, need not apologize to realism for anything, but the minor sub-branch of Romance that decks itself out as hard SF has a certain obligation to fake it convincingly, including space futures that sustain at least the illusion that they were invented in this century.

The image was snagged from Google Maps. And here is a genuine example of mysterious British transportation signage. Can anyone here elucidate the meaning?

Try Try Again ...

2011-01-01T14:50:00.000-08:00

Blogger ate most of my last post (possibly my error, not Blogger's), so an updated reconstruction of the point is due.

In fact my original post was a bit unfair to the illustration, as I learned while writing it. In 1899, when that image was presumably drawn, the skyscraper era was only just beginning. The Eiffel Tower had demonstrated that much taller structures could be built, and the Otis elevator ('lift' to some of you) made such structures practical for mundane uses, but no office building in 1899 had yet overtopped the Great Pyramid, something that several medieval church spires had achieved, albeit by narrow margins.

So the artist was not really so much projecting a contemporary trend as imagining a yet-unrealized trend. And - given that the scale of the image is rather loose and impressionistic - they did a pretty good job of capturing the general sense of the 20th century NYC skyline, even though the tallest twin buildings are, apparently, some 5 km high.

Whether or not it really illustrates my intended point, the image is of interest for its own sake, notably the dirigibles and the kilometer-long ship in the East River.

But the intended point, the Linear Fallacy, is the tendency of predictions to project the Latest Trend into the future, whatever that trend may happen to be. In 1968, Kubrick and Clarke projected the decade just past into the future, and so that had a major interplanetary infrastructure already taking form by 2001.

This blog may also be guilty of the Linear Fallacy, operating in the other direction - presuming that the incremental progress of the last 40 years is the norm.

In fact, tech progress overall seems to be a combination of the two, with accelerando phases interspersed with (generally much longer) eras of incremental progress and gradual refinement. A good historical example is European sailing ships, which underwent an accelerando in the 15th century - the emergence of the full rigged ship - followed by 350 years of refinement until the Industrial Revolution swept the whole tech into the dustbin of quaintness.

If our path in the next 200-300 or so years does lie in the direction of extensive human space travel, it will likely as not take the form of two or three dramatic accelerando leaps separated by longer periods of incremental progress.

The image for today's post, from Astronomy Picture of the Day (h/t Tammy), has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject, but is offered for your viewing satisfaction out of sheer badass coolness. It shows a Delta IV Heavy, capable of sending 9.3 tons onto an Earth escape orbit. Click to appreciate in larger format.

Our current launch technology doesn't do all that we wish it did, but it is certainly AWESOME.

The Linear Fallacy

2010-12-31T15:40:00.000-08:00

The hazards of prediction are many - particularly, as Yogi Berra observed, about the future. One such hazard is tropes such as monorails that even the full Rasputin treatment won't kill. But another, and my closing theme for this year, is the impulse to project current trends into the future.

When the above image of a midfuture New York City was imagined - presumably in 1899, though possibly 1900

Update ...

Blogger glitched badly and ate most of this post! I'll try to recover it, but it may be gone along with 2010 ....

Update II ...

A (considerably revised) version of the lost post is now up as the first post of 2011.

Transport Nexus III: I Brought My Heart to San Francisco

2010-12-23T13:17:00.000-08:00

Truth to be told, in all but the narrowest technical sense (driving the car) she brought me; it was my wife Paula's inspiration and effort that got us here. In any case the move and settling-in process account for the lack of posts here in the last couple of weeks, but now RM is up and running again.

In itself all this has nothing at all to do with space travel, but it does inspire some further thoughts about space stations. Recent discussion threads have included noteworthy heresies on this point.

In the traditional understanding that we all grew up on, an orbital station had two primary functions. One was to serve as a center for orbital operations such as communications, weather observation, and so forth; the other was to serve as a transport nexus, the meeting point between shuttles coming up from the surface and deep space craft arriving from other worlds.

Time and technology spoiled the first of these. All the observation and communications relay functions that Clarke and Heinlein expected space stations to perform are instead done by a host of satellites, and no crews are needed to change burned-out vacuum tubes.

The comment thread heretics challenged the second function as well. For a long time to come, spacecraft (or the modules that make them up) will be built and serviced on the ground, where the industrial infrastructure is. Work on orbit will be limited to final assembly, requiring no large staff of orbital workers. Deep space ships may well arrive and depart from individual parking orbits, with no need and no advantage to matching orbits with a big fixed orbital facility.

Space stations, in short, may have become obsolete before any had been built. The ISS, so far as I can tell, serves exactly none of the traditional functions of a space station. For practical purposes it is not a space station at all but a sort of training ship for future deep space missions.

Being obsolete is, in a surprising number of cases, no bar to success. San Francisco was technologically obsolescent from the very beginning of its history as a major city.

From a pre-industrial perspective it is the logical location for a seaport, a transhipment point between oceangoing ships and craft serving the vast inland waterway formed by San Francisco Bay and its outliers, which in turn provides access to rich agricultural regions: the wine country, Santa Clara (now Silicon) Valley, above all the Central Valley.

The railroad era - already well established by 1849 - changed all that, at any rate in principle. San Francisco, at the end of a rugged peninsula some 60 km long, is not a convenient rail terminus (except from the south). The original transcontinental railroad had its western terminus far inland at Sacramento, accessible to water transport; the line was later extended to Oakland, accessible to seagoing ships. And indeed Oakland eventually did supplant San Francisco as a seaport, though it took more than a hundred years, and the physical transformation of port facilities by the container revolution, to accomplish it.

What Oakland has not yet managed to supplant is Gertrude Stein, whose quip, "there's no there there," is practically her sole claim to fame. (Along with Alice B. Toklas brownies.)

San Francisco did not become a suburb of Oakland because of a combination of local circumstances and sheer inertia. Steamboats long remained more economical for regional transport around the Bay Area, and railroads were expensive to build so far from existing industrial centers. By the time these factors changed, San Francisco was already a major port, and network effects took over. It had infrastructure and port services, and the availability of these more than made up for the potential freight charge differential for east-west rail traffic.

Even when the port finally declined a broader network effect continued. In the current era San Francisco is, functionally, the downtown core of the Bay Area metropolitan region, accounting for about a tenth of the regional population but a much larger proportion of metropolitan services. These services to and beyond the region have only an incidental connection its original function as a seaport.

Unfortunately for space stations, the particular circumstances that allowed San Francisco to grow as a port even in the railroad era do not seem to apply in space. On the other hand, cities have always been defined less by their initial primary functions than by the secondary and tertiary services that they are uniquely suited to provide. If - for whatever reason - there are a large number of people in Earth's orbital space, they will probably aggregate in ways that allow them to have lunch together without having to undertake space missions just to get to a restaurant.

Where people go, cities will probably follow.

The image of San Francisco and environs was taken from the ISS.

The Unspecified Drive

2010-12-12T10:35:00.000-08:00

Deep space propulsion is, unsurprisingly, a major concern of this blog. I regularly specify the performance of interplanetary craft fitted with some form of high specific impulse drive. Sometimes I describe it as a nuclear electric or solar electric drive, sometimes simply as electric, often not even that much. Sometimes, especially when discussion takes us to the wide open spaces beyond Jupiter, I allude to fusion.

Since I got myself in a bit of hot water, or some more exotic (and much hotter) coolant, by some snide remarks about fission power plants, a few comments on deep space propulsion are in order.

First of all it is not the main barrier to widespread interplanetary travel. That would be the sheer amount of costly design engineering needed to build a fleet of prototype spacecraft, followed by the cost of getting them all into space.

But once we are up there, how we get around is an important concern. The current limit to human space missions is about six months, beyond which the health consequences of prolonged microgravity become severe. Longer missions require a spin hab, adding cost and complexity. Even with spin habs, radiation and ordinary human factors limit practical mission duration to a couple of years or so.

Within these constraints we could reach Mars with chemfuel (and a spin hab), but the Hohmann round trip to the main asteroid belt is two and a half years, without any stay time at the destination, while to Jupiter and back is five and a half years. This is too long for regular human travel.

So for a human interplanetary presence we need fast orbits. These are above my math pay grade to calculate, but a klugewerks of flat space modeling, sketching orbits, interpolation, and sheer guesswork indicates that reaching Mars in three months or Jupiter in a year calls for a mission delta v in the range of about 30-100 km/s, and therefore some form of high specific impulse drive. Even NERVA style nuclear thermal rockets - the classic Atomic Rockets that gave the website its name - fall short of this requirement.

The time honored high specific impulse drive in science fiction is ion propulsion, used in real life to send the Dawn mission to Ceres and Vesta, but not suited to much larger human-carrying spacecraft. To a great many people, however, 'ion drive' is more or less synonymous with electric drive in general.

The most likely such drive for human missions appears to be some form of plasma jet. Unlike ion drive this is a thermal drive: The plasma has a meaningful temperature - and it is extremely hot. But the thrust chamber is a magnetic field, so it won't melt. Only the gizmos that produce the field are exposed, and they don't get up close and personal with the plasma. They and their supporting struts must have heat shielding, forming a 'lantern' structure.

(The strictly technical term for this drive is electrothermal magneto-plasma propulsion - doesn't that sound exactly like classic Trek technobabble? "I've engaged the electrothermal magneto-plasma thrusters, Keptain - she canna take much more!")

So far plasma drive has gone no further than the laboratory bench, but there don't seem (yet) to be any serious problems in scaling it up to be suitable to large spacecraft. Like many forms of electric drive it has no inherent exhaust velocity and therefore no fixed specific impulse. At least in principle these drives can be configured either to expel a relatively large flow of relatively (very relatively!) cool plasma at lower velocity, or a smaller quantity of hotter plasma at higher velocity.

The effect is very closely analogous to gearing; these drives can be set for a higher acceleration and lower specific impulse or vice versa. VASIMR is supposed to achieve this not only in principle but in engineering practice, permitting clever tweaking of engine settings to get the optimum performance in each phase of flight.

For all of its advantages, electric drive has one essential drawback. It does not produce its own energy, as chemfuels do, or even use a reactor directly to heat the propellant, as nuke thermal does. It must be plugged into an external electric power supply. This is seriously inconvenient, because it takes a lot of electric power, tens to hundreds of megawatts, to drive a big, human carrying ship even at milligee acceleration.

For travel in the inner system I am partial to solar electric power. It hums along quietly with little fuss and practically no moving parts. But the butterfly's wings must be enormous, a hectare for every few megawatts, and extremely light. Even milligee forces may be problematic when the wing structure is that big and that light. And solar electric fades rapidly with distance from the Sun, unsuitable for travel beyond Mars.

For the asteroid belt and Jupiter the practical alternative is nuclear electric drive, which was the cause of my original grump. All vivid if misleading imagery of clanking steam engines aside, nuclear power plants are heavy, filled with complex plumbing that must operate for months under fiercely hostile conditions, and produce two or three times their useful output in waste heat, which must be got rid of through large radiators with their own demanding plumbing.

That eerie green glow is produced by the disintegration of money.

There is an upside to all this downside: Ships with nuclear or solar electric drive have plenty of juice at the main switchboard, making these drives, especially nuke electric, well suited to laser stars. All you need is the laser installation; the power supply is already provided, and you can zap away as long as you want to hold down the trigger.

But the general messy inconvenience of carrying around a naval-equivalent fission power reactor accounts for much of the appeal of fusion. In principle, and popular imagination, fusion is an ideal power source for a plasma drive, because the fusion plasma and the thrust plasma can be one and the same. VASIMR in fact is a byproduct of fusion research; in a conceptual sense it is a derated fusion drive.

Fusion in practice could turn out to be another matter. What else is new? The easiest fusion reactions to sustain (and we can't yet fully sustain any of them) release most of their energy as neutrons, useless for propulsion, but - irony alert - suitable for heating a steam boiler.

On the other hand, fusion propulsion is in some respects simpler than fusion power for earthly energy needs. It does not need to be an economical means of producing electric power. In fact to serve as a drive it need not produce any electric power at all, though any fusion drive would likely produce some 'bleed' power.

There are alternatives to fusion, all about as speculative as fusion itself. Orion is arguably the least speculative of the bunch, though the organ music and black cape factor has pretty much overshadowed the actual technical challenges of building a spacecraft that must nuke itself thousands of times, at close range, in the course of normal operation. (Those have to be some badass shock absorbers!)

But on the whole the specific technical details of a high specific impulse drive matter surprisingly little. What matters is how heavy the thing is, relative to the thrust power it puts out. The benchmark here is is a specific power output of roughly 1 kW/kg, or a megawatt per ton, for the full drive installation including thrusters, power supply, and waste heat radiators. (For a complete drive bus add propellant tankage and keel structure; mate it all to a payload to get a ship.)

Example: Suppose a 100 MW, 100 ton VASIMR style drive engine. With exhaust velocity tuned to 75 km/s, specific impulse near 7500 seconds, propellant mass flow is 36 grams/second, producing about 2.7 kN of thrust, enough to push a 500 ton ship at just over a half a milligee, gradually increasing as propellant is burned off. If half the departure mass is propellant (250 tons, plus 100 tons for the drive, leaving 150 tons for tankage, structures, and payload), mission delta v is just over 50 km/s. Full power burn duration is about 80 days. This broadly corresponds to the requirement for a fast, three month orbit to Mars.

Tune the same drive to an exhaust velocity of 150 km/s, specific impulse near 15,000 seconds. Propellant mass flow falls to about 9 grams/second, producing 1.3 kN of thrust, pushing the ship at a quarter of a milligee. With the same mass proportions our ship has a mission delta v of just over 100 km/s and full power burn duration of 11 months, approximating a one year trip to Jupiter.

Improving on this performance will not be easy. To reduce travel time on semi-brachistochrone orbits with prolonged burns you must reach a higher peak speed in less time, and must therefore increase both thrust and specific impulse. In the flat space approximation, drive power increases as the inverse cube of travel time - that is, you need eight times the drive power output to cut travel time in half.

The good news, such as it is, is that this also works the other way. An early generation drive with a more modest 250 W/kg power output can still take a relatively fast orbit to Mars. But you pretty much need fusion drive, or an equivalent array of oscillating hands, to reach Jupiter in a few months, or for practical travel to the outer planets.

Still, the Solar System as far as Jupiter should be a decent sized playground for a while.

The image comes from a NASA publication on VASIMR.

Accelerando

2010-12-01T20:18:00.000-08:00

Comments on our last exciting episode discussed, among many other thread drifts, the concept of an Accelerando, a speeding up of technological progress that is presumed, in many circles, to culminate in the Singularity. (See the comment thread, starting around #180.)

I will argue - and I've made this argument before - that the real Accelerando happened roughly a hundred years ago, say in the period from about 1880 to 1930.

The Industrial Revolution began a hundred years earlier, but most people in 1880, even in industrialized countries, still lived essentially postmedieval lives. (Cribbing from my own comment follows:) Railroads and steamships had transformed long distance travel, but on a day to day basis people walked, or if they were quite well off they used horses. They lived by the sun; the only artificial lighting was candles or oil lamps, the same as for centuries. A few large cities had gaslight; reputedly it made Paris the City of Lights.

By 1930, millions of people were living essentially modern lives. They drove cars to homes with electric lighting, talked on the phone, streamed entertainment content on the radio or played recorded media on the phonograph. To a person from the pre-industrial world a hand-crank telephone and an iPhone are equally magical; to a person from 1930 the iPhone is an nifty piece of 'midfuture' technology, not remotely magical. (Gee whiz, Tom, a wireless telephone with moving pictures! And it all fits in your pocket!)

Militarily a good part of the Accelerando played out in the course of World War I; people went in with cavalry and came out with tanks and aircraft. Commenter Tony handily expanded on this theme:

Murray and Millette made this point in their operational history of WWII, A War to be Won. They pointed out that a lieutenant in 1914 had little in common with the colonel that he himself had become by 1918. Yet that same colonel would have easily recognized the overall form, if not the detail, of war in the 1990s.

How do you measure an Accelerando? One handy benchmark is human travel speed. Here the Accelerando actually began a bit before the Industrial Revolution. Stagecoaches could maintain a steady speed of about 15-20 km/h by combining advanced carriage design with the infrastructure innovation of fresh horses for each stage. Ordinary travellers could thus maintain human running speed for hours.

The first steam locomotive ran in 1804. General purpose steam railroading began in 1825-30, and a locomotive appropriately called The Rocket reached 47 km/h in 1829. Rail speed data in the 19th century is amazingly sparse, but I would guess that locomotives exceeded 100 km/h by midcentury. The next doubling was reached in 1906 by a (steam!) racing car. The next doubling after that, to 400 km/h, was achieved in 1923 by an airplane.

Mach 1 was reached in 1947, and then of course things got wild. Yuri Gagarin reached orbital speed, a shade under 8 km/s, in 1961, an accelerando of 25x in 14 years, with another bump up to lunar insertion speed of 11 km/s in 1968.

Things have settled back a shade since then. Most of the 500+ human space travellers have piddled along at orbital speed, while since the retirement of Concorde the civil standard for long distance travel is high subsonic.

In this particular case the period 1880-1930 actually falls between stools - steam railroading was already pretty well developed by 1880, while aviation in 1930 was just starting to combine low drag airframes with high power engines.

Other technologies would give different results. Some, like computers, are still in the rapid transition phase of railroads around 1840 and airplanes around 1950. The overall Accelerando of the Industrial Revolution is a sort of weighted average of many individual and interrelated tech revolutions. And sometimes an older, mature-seeming tech gets a new power jolt, as has happened with railroad speed since the Japanese bullet trains of the 1960s.

Science fiction is the literary child of the Accelerando, and emerged as a distinct genre of Romance in just about the period 1880-1930. Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon in 1865; Hugo Gernsbach launched Amazing Stories in 1926.

In 1800 no one speculated about the world of 1900, because no one imagined it would be all that different from the world they already knew. And in 2000 there was only limited speculation about the world of 2100. Indeed the future has gone somewhat out of style, replaced in part by the enchantment of retro-futures.

The future has lost its magic not so much (if at all) because our technical progress has reached a 'decelerando,' but because we have learned to take technical progress for granted. It is a lot harder to get a Gee Whiz! reaction these days, a sort of psychological decelerando. As I've suggested in the last couple of posts, the challenge of interplanetary travel is not how to do it but why to spend the money.

(As a far more modest example of psychological discounting, where in this holiday retail season are the iPad rivals? Did Apple blow everyone else's tablet devices back to the drawing board, or has everyone else decided that tablets are a niche market they'll leave as an Apple playground? I haven't a clue.)

This is where I am supposed to wrap my arguments neatly in a bow, but I am not sure what the summation should be. So instead I will toss the question out for comments.

The image of a North American train c. 1900 comes from a public library site in Kansas.

Searching For McGuffinite

2010-11-19T07:00:00.000-08:00

Humans will reach the planets in this century; at least there is a rather good chance that we will, without ever needing to be explicit about Step Two. The inherent coolness of space travel, along with national vanity and parochial economic interests, has turned out to be sufficient for half a century. There is no inherent reason why this should not remain the case into or through the midfuture, as our steadily growing capabilities carry us outward.

What this highly plausible space future does not have room for, however, is most of our favorite space tropes. Last post I made a comparison of space to Antarctica. The popular literature of polar exploration is tiny, and most of what there is deals with the early days. (Amundsen and Shackleton are the two names I remember off of hand.) Real space travel may turn out very similar. People will work very hard and spend a great deal of money to see to it that dramatic adventures do not happen in space.

Nor does the human scale of the thing lend itself to space opera. In the early interplanetary era - and, in all likelihood, for a long time after - there may be hundreds of people in space, but probably not thousands and certainly not millions. There will be a space economy, but no economy in space: the ships will be transports, not liners, and certainly not tramp freighters. (Sob!)

For story purposes this is not what we want. We want a lot of people in space. We want the outposts to grow into bases, then towns, then cities, and of course we mostly want them to end up fighting space battles with each other. For this we need a justification.

At least in 'Murrican science fiction, the profit motive is enshrined as probably necessary and certainly sufficient reason to go into space on whatever scale is desired. This attitude is not just confined to the libertarian-minded; Evil Megacorps in Space are a variation on the same theme. (I am not sure how it is elsewhere. Clarke's space midfuture, at least in his earlier stories, seemed not unlike the 'realistic' vision I portrayed above.)

The most popular profit motive has been mining. This is only natural. Mining fits the broad Western trope, and it does take people to the most Godforsaken places.

You have to make a few friendly assumptions to get space mining for terrestrial use to pan out (so to speak). But the subtler problem is then what? Suppose we learned that the rings of Saturn are full of McGuffinite. There is not going to be a rush of would-be Belters heading out to be Ringers instead.

Instead there will be some very big consortium formed, or a handful of them, probably with more than cozy relationships with existing national or para-national space agencies. A very focused program will develop the technology to do one thing: Go to the rings of Saturn, extract McGuffinite, and bring the stuff back to Earth. This effort will not go anywhere or do anything else. (With a limited but potentially important exception I'll get to below.) It will involve the necessary minimum number of humans in space, especially Saturn space; from every operational perspective the optimum is zero.

And once in place, beyond Earth orbit the mining operation may scarcely interact with other space activity. Mining transports headed for the Rings do not stop off at Mars or Titan. The experience of developing countries is that resource extraction infrastructure is not very helpful. The rail line runs from a seaport to the mine, and even the seaport is chosen for access to the mine, not its potential as a general trade entrepot.

Resource extraction is an economic monoculture, and like other monocultures it does not support a rich ecosystem.

The most popular political McGuffinite, a great power arms race, has a rather similar problem. As earlier discussions here have shown, great power warfare scenarios offer little role for space cruisers in whatever form. Only for laser stars that may well be robotic, and kinetic killer buses that will certainly be.

A somewhat different matter is resource extraction in space for use in space, such as the popular lunar shipbuilding industry. This is not McGuffinite, because it is not a reason to go into space. It is something you do only when you are already in space, and in a big way.

And of course there are other complications. Building spacecraft requires an enormous industrial base, and every pipe wrench has to come up from Earth unless you set up a pipe wrench factory or at least a fab. The lower energy cost of orbit lift from the Moon can evaporate quickly when you consider all the front end and operating costs.

It will be a long time before we have production industries in space.

An exception could be propellant, because space travel uses so much of it, and it is fairly simple stuff. Once we are regularly going somewhere with accessible volatiles, there will be consideration of obtaining propellant from them. This is not as simple as it is often made to sound. For example, all the ice on Mars is no use to deep space craft unless you lift it to Mars orbit, a major spacelift operation even if you can do it with a one stage vehicle. And there is no space infrastructure on Mars but what we take there.

I would say that the early interplanetary era ends on the day that a ship makes a routine burn in Earth orbital space using propellant that did not come from Earth.

Propellant production differs from McGuffinite mining in one crucial respect: It is inherently tied to the rest of the space infrastructure. And space travel is no longer entirely geocentric; for the first time, some of what happens in space stays in space.

Still a long ways from the Solar Confederation versus the Planetary Union, but everything has to start somewhere.

If I were working out a future history with a serious illusion of plausibility, I would stay away from McGuffinite. It is an ancient, overused crutch, and not a convincing one. Given worlds enough and time (and both are available), exports to Earth may well arise, as consequences rather than cause of space exploration. These may be - almost certainly will be - entirely unexpected and counterintuitive.

To quote myself, from last year's 'A Solar System For This Century':

Someone will find out that burgundy grapes grown in a Martian greenhouse have a distinct flavor. Pretty soon they are shipping back little airline size bottles that sell for $500, with just enough for a toast, and 'robustly Martian' ends up being used to describe burgundies from lands where Charles the Bold once ruled.

Unlike McGuffinite, Martian burgundy doesn't have to be globally profitable - paying back the cost of going to Mars in the first place, or even the cost of the transport system. It only needs to be locally and marginally profitable ('marginal' in the formal economic sense, not precarious). Those little bottles only need to pay for themselves, their contents, and the extra propellant to get them to Earth. Ivan Q(ing) Taxpayer already paid for the transport ships, though you'd never know it from the collected works of the wine industry council.

Multiply such serendipities and, gradually, the human space ecosystem grows more complex. Oenologists now have a place on Mars, bringing a body of specialized knowledge and also an outlook on life and civilization.

This sort of thing takes time, probably lots of it, because it cannot be planned, it can only evolve. It may not happen. Indeed it probably will not happen, even in a future of interplanetary travel, because space travel is inherently so difficult.

But it is the one most likely path to get you from Earth to space opera.

The imagined image of Cassini, as so often, comes from Atomic Rockets.

First Stage

2010-11-15T15:20:00.000-08:00

We can already do, and have done, a great deal in space. We have scouted all the major planets, landed on the Moon, Venus, Mars, and Titan, and dropped among the clouds of Jupiter. We have passed through the heliopause into interstellar space.

The International Space Station has shown that crews can live and work aboard a spacecraft for years, with no emergency requiring evacuation to Earth or urgent support from Earth.

This is the primary requirement for human interplanetary travel. At a fundamental level, add a drive bus and you are good to go. Nor is any really major handwave needed for a solar or nuclear electric drive capable of reaching Mars in 2-4 months. (If Mars leaves you cold, adjust for the destination of your choice. It will probably be colder.)

All you need to wave is a check for $200 billion or so, to pay for developing your vehicle and mission from conceptual design to flight testing and human spaceflight certification.

Do not expect to get there for much less than that. The Airbus A-380 and Boeing 787 Dreamliner - commercial products of private industry, working in a mature kindred technology - each cost some $15 billion to develop. Such projects simply require an enormous amount of costly engineering work and one-off fabrication.

SpaceX and Scaled Composites do not prove otherwise. They prove only that the ecosystem has a place for small, agile skunkworks that can underpay top talent to work on exciting projects. Even technologies like 3-D printing won't really change the equation, because initial space costs are mainly engineering costs, and engineering at the cutting edge remains a craft trade.

But for a trillion US dollars or equivalent, give or take, you could probably build yourself a decent start on the classical rocketpunk midfuture: a second generation station with spin hab; outposts on Luna and Mars with ships to serve them; a human mission to Jupiter; altogether up to a few hundred people living in space. Call it the Clarke-Kubrick vision, though it could equally well be called the Ley-Bonestall vision.

The specifics are all freely subject to change. Commenters have challenged such rocketpunk-era verities as an orbital station as transfer point, and of course there are debates about where we should actually go and in what sequence. But this infrastructure, or something comparable, is the trillion dollar admission ticket to everything else.

A trillion dollars is a lot of money. More precisely it is a staggering, awesome, incomprehensible amount of money. It might end up being more than we are willing to spend on space travel in this or any century. But it is not impossible money. It is comparable to NASA's cumulative budget from its beginning to the present day, and about twice the cost of another public transportation system of similar age, the Interstate Highway System.

I am very doubtful that the private sector can or will take us into deep space on its own. But the largest corporations have revenue and market capitalizations of a few hundred billion dollars, so - given persuasive enough reason to believe that it would be profitable - it is not utterly out of bounds to imagine a global commercial consortium raising a trillion dollars.

The time scale of space is really, in large part, the money scale of space. If space spending in the later 20th century had remained at Apollo levels we might well have had the Clarke-Kubrick vision on schedule in 2001. At the levels of space spending and resulting space progress that we have seen over the last 35 years it is about in line with what we might expect for 2101.

It could as easily be 2071, or 2171. (Or never.) Given a sufficient (hand)wave of great power muscle flexing it might be 2031. But I will use 2101 as my conservatively optimistic benchmark. This presumes that we continue going into space in the same rather muddled, low-keyed, but persisting way we have since those heady early years.

So. At the start of the 22nd century, or broadly comparable date of your choice, we have regular interplanetary travel, but still very little of it, and what there is is very expensive.

Production jetliners, as I've often mentioned, cost about $1 million per ton at the factory ramp. But commercial jets can be sold for that price because Boeing and Airbus expect to build several hundred of them, spreading out the development cost and permitting semi-mass production efficiencies.

The first generation of interplanetary ships will be handbuilt prototypes. The second generation will still be largely handbuilt, though modular construction will begin to allow limited production runs of standard hab pods and the like. So a ship capable of carrying 10-20 people on an interplanetary mission, with departure mass of 1000 tons, dry mass 500 tons, gross payload 200 tons, might cost $5 billion assembled on orbit and ready for loading.

Adjust ticket prices accordingly. Suppose that your ship can make 10 round trips to Mars in a design service life of 25 years, so charge each round trip $500 million up front. Add another $500 million for 500 tons of propellant lifted from Earth - don't expect launch cost under $1 million/ton at the modest traffic volume of the early interplanetary era. And don't expect to get it from anywhere else, not at this stage.

So (simplistically!) $1 billion for our ship to make one round trip to Mars. It carries 20 people in transport configuration, so that will be $50 million, please. For a first class ticket $100 million - not for the caviar and steaks but the chef and stewards.

I confess a personal weakness for Pullman class interplanetary travel. The Realistic [TM] space travel alternative of doing basic preventive maintenance on microgravity toilets for 200 million miles would get old even faster.

But a note of practical caution to my libertarian minded readers. A world with so much loose money sloshing around the economic elite that it can send a Pullman car full of billionaires to Mars every two years is also a world with thousands of Paris Hiltons. Never mind poverty and social injustice. At some point sheer annoyance will bring out the guillotines.

Ahem, back to the point.

What happens after the early interplanetary era, in the second century or two of space travel, is much more conjectural, even by the necessarily naive standards of this essay.

Personally I think that by far the most likely human space future, through the 22nd century and well beyond - in short, through the midfuture - is far more like Antarctica than Heinlein: a chain of scientific and technological outposts, gradually extending outward.

Space is remote, costly to reach, difficult to live and work in, implacably indifferent to human life, and filled with things that fascinate us.

It is probably not filled with McGuffinite.

The human Solar System may well belong to artists, not writers. A deep space effort like this provides all of the lovely images - dawn on Mars, gliding through the rings of Saturn, everything Chesley Bonestall imagined and more - but not many plot lines, and certainly not the favorites among this bloodthirsty audience.

Which might be a feature, not a bug: a Solar System touched more by our aspirations than our failings.

That is probably not what you want, but I will save other possibilities for another post.

The image of an ESA concept for Mars exploration comes from a Romanian space website.

Home Away From Home

2010-11-07T17:54:00.000-08:00

The comment thread on my previous post about space patrols raised the issue of base stations for more prolonged missions, extending to years.

This has application far beyond military or quasi-military patrols. In fact it is fairly fundamental to any extensive, long term human presence in deep space. Whether or not we put permanent bases on the surface of Mars, Europa, or wherever, we will surely place permanent or semi-permanent stations in orbit around them. Particularly because the stations can be built in Earth space, where the industry is (at least initially), and flown out to where they will serve.

Hab structures intended for prolonged habitation should be fairly large, if only because if you are going to live for years in a can it should be at least be a roomy one. And they must be thoroughly shielded against radiation, much more than ships that you only spend a few months aboard every few years.

So let us play with some numbers. Make our spin hab a drum, 200 meters in diameter and 100 meters thick. Volume is thus about 3.14 million cubic meters. The ISS has about 1200 m3 of pressurized volume and a mass of some 300 tons, for an average density near 0.25, but the mass includes exterior structures such as keel and wings. Let average interior density be about 0.16, for a mass of 500,000 tons.

If we allow 100 cubic meters per person the onboard population (whether 'crew' or simply residents, or a mix) can be up to 30,000 people. This is about twice the density of a middle class American urban apartment complex. Given that much of the usable volume must be working areas, public spaces, and so forth, the actual crew or population might be more on the order of 10,000 people, equivalent to a decent sized small town or a fairly large university or military base. Thus the hab has 10 times the volume of an aircraft carrier and twice as many people.

Spin the hab at 3 rpm and you get almost exactly 1 g at the rim.

By my standard rule of thumb the cost of this hab is on order of $500 billion. That is a steep price tag, but on the other hand it is only five times the cost of the ISS, and you need very few of these unless you are engaged in outright colonization.

Now, shielding. The standard for indefinite habitation is about 5 tons per square meter of cross section. (Earth's atmosphere provides about 10 tons/m2.) Portions of the hab where people do not spend much time, and exterior to where they do spend time, can be counted toward the shielding allowance. So let us say that the outer 10 meters of the interior (about 35 percent of the volume) are used for storage, equipment rooms, and the like. This provides about 2 tons per square meter of shielding, 40 percent of the requirement.

The remaining 3 tons per square meter of exterior shielding must cover about 125,000 square meters of surface, so shielding mass is about 375,000 tons, adding 75 percent to the mass of the hab, now 875,000 tons. This shielding need not be 'armor.' As I recall, water provides pretty good shielding against GCRs, your biggest radiation problem, and water is so useful that having 375,000 tons of it on hand in a reservoir will never be amiss.

Moreover, to move the hab you can vent off the water (or pump it out) and not need to lug the mass, assuming you can replace it wherever you are going. The deep interior of the hab, more than 25 meters from the surface (about 28 percent of the volume) is still shielded by the rest of the hab structure, so the hab can carry a reduced population during the transfer.

You are still moving a half million ton payload, so don't expect to rush it unless you have a really badass drive bus handy. Habs being repositioned across the Solar System probably travel on Hohmann orbits, and have drive accelerations of a few dozen microgees, good for about 1 km/s per month of steady acceleration.

For a smaller hab structure, scale down the linear dimensions by half, to 100 meters diameter and 50 meters thick. Structural mass, volume, and capacity are all reduced by a factor of 8, to 400,000 cubic meters, 60,000 tons, and a crew / resident population of about 1500-4000. Our 'mini' hab is now broadly comparable in volume, mass, and crew to an aircraft carrier.

Surface area is only reduced, however, by a factor of four, to about 30,000 square meters. Moreover, the smaller hab provides less interior self-shielding. If we keep the same proportions our internal reserved zone is just 5 meters deep and provides only 20 percent of the needed protection, not 40 percent.

We now need about 120,000 tons of shielding - twice the unshielded mass of the hab. If we move the hab fully shielded our payload mass is 180,000 tons. Remove the shielding and payload mass is just 60,000 tons, but no part of the smaller interior is fully self-shielded, so any crew on board during a 'light' transfer must be relieved every few months. On the bright side, if you have a 100 gigawatt drive bus floating around, or about $100 billion to buy one, you can take a fast orbit and get there in a few months.

The image shows a drum-hab station ship with a spin hab of the full sized type described above, 200 meters in diameter by 100 meters thick, fitted with a heaviest class drive bus for transfer. I am delicately ignoring details of the connection between the spin drum and the hub structures.

The shuttles approximate the NASA Shuttle, as a visual size reference. The deep space ships docking up to it are large fast transports, 300 meters long, ten times heavier than the patrol ship discussed last post. The station ship itself is about 675 meters long by 450 meters across the outrigger docking bays.

In my image the station ship is no aesthetic triumph. Allowing for my limitations as an graphic artist (compare to commenter Elukka, from the last comment thread), the transport class ships don't look too bad, but the station ship merely looks tubby instead of grand. Some modest architectural improvements might yield a more impressive appearance with little change in overall configuration.

Of course the interior will matter immeasurably more to the people on board. Mostly, presumably, it will resemble the interior of a very large oceangoing ship, corridors and compartments, probably including some fairly imposing public spaces, comparable to the grand saloon of a 20th century ocean liner or even larger. It can be as elegant or as sterile as you like (or both, depending on deck and sector). The third popular choice, rundown industrial gothic, is constrained by how far you can go in that direction before the algae dies or the air starts leaking out.

So find yourself a cubby and make yourself at home. You might be here for quite a while.

Space Patrols

2010-11-04T21:28:00.000-07:00

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

The discussion thread about 'temperate and indecisive conflicts' veered, among other things, into a discussion of patrol missions in space. [Oops, wrong thread - the discussion arose on the 'Industrial Scale of Space' thread.] My first reaction was that (so long as you aren't dealing with an interstellar setting) there is no place in space for wartime patrol missions. But the matter might be more complicated, and for story purposes probably should be.

According to The Free Dictionary, patrol is The act of moving about an area especially by an authorized and trained person or group, for purposes of observation, inspection, or security. This fits my own sense of the word, and is in fact a bit broader, 'security' including SSBN patrols, which are not observing or inspecting anything, just waiting for a launch order if it comes.

In a reductionist way you could say that all military spacecraft are on patrol, since they are all on orbit, and if they are orbiting a planet they have a very regular 'patrol area.' But this is not what most of us have in mind. We picture a patrol making a sweep through an area, looking for anything unusual, ready to engage any enemy they encounter, or report it and shadow it if they cannot engage it.

Back in the rocketpunk era it was plausible that, say, Earth might send a patrol past Ceres to see if the Martians had established a secret base there. But (alas!) telescopes 'patrolling' from Earth orbit can easily observe the large scale logistics traffic involved in establishing a base; watch it depart Mars and track it to Ceres. If you want a closer look you can send a robotic spy probe. If you engage in 'reconnaissance in force' by attacking Ceres, that is a task force, not a patrol.

In an all out interplanetary war there may be plenty of uncertainty on both sides, but very little of it can be resolved by sending out patrols.

But of course all-out war is not the context in which the Space Patrol became familiar. I associate it with Heinlein's Patrol; apparently the 1950s TV series had an independent origin (unlike Tom Corbett, who was Heinlein's unacknowledged literary child).

The rocketpunk-era Patrol, which in turn gave us Starfleet, was placed in the distinctly midcentury future setting of a Federation. This is as zeerust as monorails. But plausible patrolling is not confined to Federation settings. It can justified in practically any situation but all out war.

Orbital patrol in Earth orbital space will surely be the first space patrol, and could be imagined in this century. It might initially be a general emergency response force, because travel times in Earth orbital space are short enough for classical rescue missions. On the interplanetary scale, with travel times of weeks or more likely months, rescue is rarely possible. But eventually power players will want some kind of police presence or flag showing in deep space.

As so often in these discussions, I picture a complex and ambiguous environment in which policing, diplomacy, and sometimes low level conflict blur together. To take again our Earth-Mars-Ceres example, there are kinds of reconnaissance that cannot be carried out by robots (short of high level AIs). If Ceres closes its airlocks to liberty parties from a visiting Earth patrol ship, that conveys some important intelligence information.

The ships that perform these missions will be fairly large (and expensive). They must carry a hab pod providing prolonged life support for a significant crew: at least a commander and staff, SWAT team of espatiers, and some support for both.

Let us say a crew of 25 - which is cutting the human presence very fine. Now we can venture a mass estimate. Allow 100 tons for the hab compartment plus 25 tons for crew and stores plus 75 tons other payload, for a total payload of 200 tons. Let the drive bus be 200 tons for the drive, including radiators, and 100 tons for tankage, keel, and sundry equipment.

Our patrol ship with a crew of 25 thus has a dry mass of 475 tons, mass fully equipped 500 tons, plus 500 tons propellant for a full load departure mass of 1000 tons. Cost by my usual rule of thumb is equivalent to $500 million, perhaps $1 billion after milspecking, expensive compared to military planes, cheaper than major naval combatants.

This is no small ship. If the propellant is liquid hydrogen the tanks have a volume of about 7000 cubic meters, equivalent to a 7000 ton submarine. The payload section is about two thirds the mass of the ISS and of roughly comparable size, though the hab is probably spun giving the prolonged missions.

Armament is necessarily modest. The 75 tons of additional payload allowance probably must include a ferry craft for the espatiers and an escort gunship or two, plus their service pod, leaving perhaps 15-20 tons each for kinetics and a laser installation. The laser might be good for 20 megawatts beam power, with plug power from the 200 megawatt drive engine.

This ship is no laser star, but the laser is respectable. Assuming a modest 5 meter main mirror and a near IR wavelength of 1000 nanometers, at a range of 1000 km it can burn through Super Nano Carbon Stuff at rather more than 1 centimeter of per second. Its armament is also rather 'balanced.' My model shows that this laser can just defeat a wave of about 1000 target seekers, each with a mass of 20 kg, closing at 10 km/s - thus a total mass of 20 tons, comparable to its kinetics payload allowance.

Deploying troops, or personnel in general, is impressively expensive: About three fourths of the payload and cost of a billion dollar ship goes to support and equip a crew of 25, with perhaps a dozen espatiers. For comparison the USS Makin Island (LHD-8) displaces 41,000 tons full load, carries a crew of 1200 plus 1700 Marines, and costs about $1.8. So by my model it costs about as much to deploy one espatier as 80 marines.

And this ship is about the minimum patrol package, so standing interplanetary patrol is a costly and somewhat granular business, something not everyone can afford.

Discuss.

Apparently this cover is from the current reissue of Heinlein's Space Cadet.

Rix Pix 2010: Cold Bath

2010-11-01T20:20:00.000-07:00

For the most part I keep this blog free of my politics, except as my broad political philosophy shapes my opinion on the topics discussed here - which is quite a bit.

But I have made a long term tradition of putting out my US election forecasts and commentary, originally as an email. Now that I have a blog I hijack it. The nearly half of you who come from elsewhere can skip this without perceptible loss; in fact so can my fellow 'Murricans. But I actually invite you to stick around; some global perspective would be interesting in comments.

I am a yellow dog Democrat, and we're gonna take a shellackin' tomorrow night.

This is the least of surprises. The country has a nasty economic hangover, and who is the electorate going to take it out on but the party in power? (I could say a word or two about the Bundesbank, for whom every year is 1924, but they aren't on the US ballot.) I think the argument that Obama's policies helped keep us from going over a cliff is valid, but it is not a vote getter.

House of Representatives - net Dem loss 56 seats, GOP takeover

House Democrats will bear the brunt of it. My call is thoroughly middle of the road, and leaves the next House with 235 Republicans and 200 Democrats, an 18 point GOP margin. Some of those Republicans are convincing evidence of interstellar travel, but they will be shuffled off to the remoter reaches of C-Span and YouTube, and the GOP House will focus on keeping the legislative branch tied up in knots, which is both easy and effective for them.

Senate - net Dem loss 6 seats, Dems retain majority

Senate Democrats will also take a drubbing, but will probably keep the majority, not that narrow Senate majorities are good for a whole lot, especially when the other party has the House.

Sorry, Harry Reid. He may be remembered as a very effective Majority Leader, but Nevada is a stranded space colony, and the colonists will send the Imperial governor out the airlock. I won't be so sorry about Feingold; a bit self righteous and a bit of a showhorse were a bit too much.

President Obama

He is not on the ballot, but will take a media beating in the short run. This is irrelevant to his political fate. Barring the unforeseen, meaning mainly a crisis abroad, that will depend on what happens to the US economy over the next two years. Adam Smith's animal spirits did not come across for him and the Dems this year, but I would not bet against them two years from now.

I know the economic conventional wisdom is that a sluggish economy will persist for years, but the ECW usually just mirrors the recent past. In some alternate world we will turn away from consumption and austerity will become a way of life. This is the same alternate world where 9/11 made Americans serious and thoughful about foreign policy.

In the real world we are 'Murricans. We like to buy stuff. We have had to put it off because some of us lost jobs and more found out their homes weren't piggy banks after all (or found they were broken ones). We will start buying stuff again. So the economy will probably pick up enough for Obama to claim credit in 2012, whether he deserves it or not. In the meanwhile he will discover the world, because that is what presidents do when they can't get anything through Congress.

California

The Golden State is apparently on a different planet in this election from the rest of the US, and politically a much more habitable one. This in spite of the fact that the Great Recession hit harder here than in most places, and a dozen lost colonies' worth of abandoned housing developments.

Perhaps that is because the face of the GOP in California is Arnold Schwarzeneggar, who as it turned out was not only no Terminator, but also no Ronald Reagan. As it looks now, Barbara Boxer will be re-elected Senator, but at least to me the big story will be the second coming of Jerry Brown, who I voted for in the 1970s and have already voted for again.

And on the footnotes of politics front I will go out on a bud, as it were, and venture that Proposition 19 will pass, making personal possession of marijuana legal under state law.

The image of the Acropolis comes from a collection of travel photos.

The Industrial Scale of Space

2010-10-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

How many people does it take to build a spaceship? The actual fabrication process might be entirely automated, but how large must a community or society be to have the productive muscle, and range of specialized skills, needed to build and operate spacecraft?

This question lurks behind the last couple of discussion threads, and many earlier ones. It is implicated in a number of classic SF tropes. How long can a crew keep their ship going before they need repairs that only a cageworks can perform? Are outpost colonies condemned to slide to pre-industrial conditions? (Or extinction, if they cannot survive without industrial technology.) Can more robust colonies maintain space fleets?

Note that industrial scale is quite different from techlevel, which is more or less whether a society knows how to build and maintain spaceships at all, and what kinds. A familiar example of industrial scale is automobiles. With a good machine shop you could build a car entirely from scratch, fabricating all the parts, but the cost in labor and shop time would be many times the cost of a production car.

A nod to Henry Ford, and once again to Adam Smith, who lived so early in the dawn of the Industrial Revolution that he only mentions the steam engine in a footnote, but who hit on the importance of the division of labor.

So, how many people does it take to build a spaceship? Certainly no more than three billion, the world population at the time of Apollo. And I would say no less than about 100 million, because France had to partner up in the ESA in order to get in the game. Even the grotesque exception that proves the rule, North Korea, has a population of 25 million.

I grant that national space programs are political entities, and an imperfect metric of industrial capacity - which is in any case part of an interdependent world economy, not neatly partitioned by borders. But it is the metric we have, and the ability to build space boosters corresponds roughly to the ability to build large commercial airframes, also confined to a few big economies.

Only a very large economy, a large industrial infrastructure, can support the web of factories and skunkworks, launch and tracking sites, academic institutes and training facilities, with their hundreds of specialized skills, that go into present day space operations.

This blog generally presumes, for the sake of discussion, that in the Plausible Midfuture the cost of space travel will be very much lower than it is today. This is further presumed to be not because spacecraft become cheaper, but because they become more productive. Today, $100 million buys you a booster good for one trip to orbit, carrying a few tons. In the PM it might buy a shuttle capable of hundreds of orbital missions, or a deep space ship making biennial Earth-Mars trips for decades.

The ships may still cost just as much, and building and operating them may likewise require an equally large industrial base. Note that the industrial base means much more than just the shipbuilding industry as such - it means the tools that build the tools that build the tools. There may be a time when spacecraft fabrication, as such, has largely moved into space, but still relies on Earth's vast and mature industry for its own most sophisticated components.

But could future techs drastically reduce the needed industrial scale, to the point where smaller communities - in the extreme case, individual households - could maintain themselves in space?

I am going to sidestep all pseudo-technical discussion of nanotech, 3-D printing, and all of that. Basically we are talking about replicators, where 'replicator' is really just techjargon for a compact super machine shop that can fabricate any desired item, including a copy of itself. Presumably all routine processes can be automated, so that the only human labor is setting up the job (the industrial equivalent of 'rules of engagement' decisions).

I can't think of any reason in principle why a midfuture tech couldn't build that capability on a pretty small scale, whether it fits in a backpack or a Winnebago.

It will not abolish costs, because its existence creates an opportunity cost: It can only make one thing at a time, so you have to choose. And for a portable home replicator to make a duplicate of itself may take quite a long time. My computer has far more speed and power than a 1960s mainframe, but it chugs away for hours on one 3-D render.

And replicators will not abolish economies of scale. Take making cars. The core replicator element might be able to make anything that will fit in its fab chamber - today a car, tomorrow a CAT scan machine. But if you dedicate it to making cars you can set up the shop floor to bring steel in one door and roll cars out the other. You can hire people who know about cars to do the detailed job specifications, so the AIs won't have to waste time on handholding.

Taken one at a time these advantages are incremental, but add them all up across supply chains and industries and they become overwhelming. Organized industries will continue to have an essential advantage over do-it-yourself, an advantage that will drive trade and economic life in general. This does not mean that people cannot live 'off the grid,' but doing so will take more work to maintain any given standard of living.

Now, to add one more chainsaw to juggle, the ability of communities to live independently in space is a matter of techlevel. A space population cannot sustain itself if the cost of keeping one person alive in space is more than one person-year of labor output. (A population can be sustained by Earth, of course, as the ISS is sustained now.)

In fact, for an economically independent society the cost of sustaining one person must be a good deal less than one person-year of output, because a society must support many people - most obviously children - who are not productive in any immediate economic sense.

Today it costs several hundred million a year to keep one person in space, on order of 10,000 person years of output. This cost can surely be reduced dramatically, let us say to 100 (current) person-years of output. Productivity has increased roughly tenfold in the 200 years of the Industrial Revolution; if it continues at the same pace, independently space-living populations become just barely viable in the 25th century, with most adults working to keep the hab going.

This still does not mean that your libertarian commune of 100 households can head off for the stars. There remains that little matter, or all too big a matter, of the industrial scale of space. If the industrial scale of technology - the advantages of scale - remain high, while all-round techlevel increases, it might take a mega-hab cluster of 100 million people to provide the range of skills and internal efficiencies needed to sustain itself in space.

To get small, economically independent and self-sustaining groups living in space you need both an increase in overall techlevel and a similarly dramatic reduction in the industrial scale required to support space operations.

For those of you who want one, which is a lot of you, here are a few escape hatches:

Most obvious and shameless, rich people, whose income is a lot more than average per capita productivity. But unless they are also making their money in space, this is merely a case of Earth subsidizing people in space, not an economically independent space population.

Another escape hatch, invoked in comment threads, is to make do with less. Science as a practice and profession is an outgrowth of Western monasticism. (Take that, mystical Eastern monks!) And there is a distinct ascetic streak in the space movement. Among the stars we can live at one with Nature, drawing on the essentials of energy and matter, unencumbered by smooth talkin' lawyers and fancy talkin' wimmin, or pretty talkin' gents as the case may be.

In practice, what doing with less - living closer to the productivity threshold - means is that people spend much of their time cleaning balky toilets, or fixing plumbing for more exotic but equally noisome fluids. That is what 'keeping spacecraft going' will be largely about, with the occasional call for a replacement part, whether you order it from stock or fab it onboard.

Faking it. Some people may seem to live independently on a small scale without really doing so, or only within narrow limits. Take one of my favorite tropes, the Serenity style space freighter. It is plausible to me that such a ship could keep going for quite a long time, perhaps many years, on just fuel and the most basic supplies. That is what it was designed to do.

Note that a ship like this probably cost more from the builder than a core zone ship that is designed for pull & replace servicing between runs. And eventually it will need to go into a cageworks for replacement or scrapping. But in the meanwhile it goes and goes.

Extend this concept a bit and you have a whole outer-fringe ecosystem that was costly to build in the first place, and would be costly to fully overhaul and restore to factory standard, but is relatively cheap to operate, and can be operated safely for decades or even generations before its service life is finally at the limit.

So this ecosystem, once built, can go for a long time as if it were independent of outside support - and can come, culturally, to take independence for granted. Though the bill will eventually come due.

The practical effect is much like Ken Burnside's 3-Gen rule, but the basis is entirely different. The 3-Gen rule argues that 'normal' human societies lack the social discipline to maintain something as complex as a hab. In my case the hab is not expected to replace or renew itself, only go a long time before either one is needed.

And there you have it. If you want small, independent, more or less self sustaining space habs in the midfuture, I have no Space Patrol, and no reason to send it to stop you if I did. Just be aware of the techlevel you are implying, 4-5 orders of magnitude improvement over what we have achieved in 50 years of space travel.

Space is hard. Even with enormous progress in both our overall capabilities and our specific space techniques it will still be hard.

This image of the ISS from Astronomy Picture of the Day deserved a reprise.

Barbarians in SPAAACE !!! - Part II

2010-10-25T20:30:00.000-07:00

Barbarians you want, barbarians you get. My last post left itself open to a threadjacking, and the commenters were quick to oblige. Barbarian hordes 1, temperate and indecisive, 0.

First of all, what do we mean by 'barbarians?' There turns out to be more than one definition. In comments on the last post I used it in a quasi-technical sense to mean nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples who lived on the fringes of the agrarian age world, and periodically invaded and laid it waste, or so the 'civilized' survivors claimed. But there turn out to be two other relevant definitions, at least.

A second meaning is gross violators of civilized norms, a sense of the word in which the last century produced more and worse barbarians than any before it. This is relevant to conflict because it gave us World War II, enough said.

In the beginning the word means simply people who did not speak Greek, and applied equally to Egyptians and Thracians. The late Romans applied it to all those people who made border security difficult and finally impossible, and whom the Romans viewed, well, barbarians.

In the popular culture this image comes right down, via Gibbon, to Conan the Barbarian. Because from Tacitus on, the 'barbarians' were seen not just as savages but also at times Noble Savages, free of the constraints and artifices of urban civilization. This third meaning - essentially 'barbarian' as a trope - is the one that concerns Romance, so that is the one I will concentrate on here.

This is why I set aside 'barbarian' in the sense of civilization gone bad. No matter now much a rogue state traps itself out like a heavy metal band, if you are filing weekly reports of how many people you massacred, you are not a 'barbarian' in the sense that Conan is.

(Having said that, I admit a Hollywood tendency to conflate 'barbarian' and 'totalitarian' elements that would hardly go together in real life - think of the original Klingons on Trek TOS.)

I will say a bit more, though, about the sense of 'barbarians' as warlike nomadic peoples, by quoting another eminent 18th century Briton, Adam Smith:

A nation of hunters can never be formidable to the civilized nations in their neighbourhood. A nation of shepherds may. Nothing can be more contemptible than an Indian war in North America. Nothing, on the contrary, can be more dreadful than Tartar invasion has frequently been in Asia.

From my 'Murrican perspective the likes of Andrew Jackson, not to mention George C. Custer, could have a word or two about this, but on the grand strategic level Smith is right. By sometime around 1700 the First Nations lost any prospect of stopping the European incursion. There just weren't enough of them. Even if they had learned to be shepherds, or cowhands, gunpowder had closed that window of opportunity. Compare to the fact that the Norse - Vikings, no less, the scourge of Europe for 300 years - found the local Skraelings more than they wanted to deal with.

In any case, nomadic peoples got into the history books as 'barbarians' because their ordinary way of life made most of the adult male population warriors. There's no obvious futuristic counterpart. People who have spaceships have a huge advantage over people who don't, but the advantage is in mobility, not fighting as such (other than the ability to throw kinetics).

This does offer a tempting analogy to the Vikings, and the rather similar Homeric sea rovers who helped finish off Mycenaean Greece. Seamanship provides no inherent advantage in a fight on land, though a ship's crew is already a cohesive unit, a big advantage over hastily assembled militia. But the raiders' advantage in actual fighting came more from practice than from their previous way of life.

Hastening a bit through Step Two, here is a scenario, as hackneyed as it deserves to be. The Empire is collapsing. This is actually one of the easier pieces of space opera to justify - just combine post-Apollo funk with the real estate bubble, and scale up. It would be the least of surprises if a period of spectacular space expansion were followed by retrenchment, and when Earth sneezes the outposts get pneumonia.

A 'pre-collapse' could be developing in the Back of Beyond even as the Empire is still growing. As in a classic bubble, sound enterprises - colonies, mines, whatever - give way to bubblicious ones, local shortages and crises develop, and law and order can begin to fray. This can go on for a long time before anyone on Earth really grasps the implications. (When they do grasp the implications is when collapse goes into high gear.)

A scavenger subculture plausibly develops, starting with surplus equipment sold for scrap prices and moving on to equipment that has been abandoned outright.

Scavenging permits some classic mining tropes that otherwise are hard to justify. The problem with mother lodes and claim jumping in space has always been that if you can reach one mother lode in the vastness of space you can probably reach many others. But there are only so many abandoned space stations to go around.

The next step, for some scavengers, will be not waiting for abandonment. If a struggling colony cannot defend its orbital station it is yours to salvage.

Really this is just Mad Max with spaceships instead of bikes, and the reason it works is that it doesn't really need to work - the scavenger subculture does not need to be a sustainable way of life. It is, after all, part of a collapse process. The Homeric sackers of cities ran out of cities to sack, except in Egypt where they ran into Rameses III. The scavengers will, in time, run out of stuff to scavenge.

In the meanwhile some of them might learn to do more with less, learning to maintain a high techlevel with a much smaller population base - replicators, nanotech, whatever - while others evolve from scavengers (and sometimes raiders) to traders. So the scavenger subculture has its positive side as well, and best of all it gives you three classic SF tropes for the price of one.

Are the scavengers 'barbarians?' Obviously not in the narrow historical sense of being Eurasian steppe nomads, but their way of life implies a sort of nomadism while it lasts. Some may well qualify as 'barbarians' in the moral sense, the worst of them robbing struggling habs and colonies of their means of survival.

And even the best of them might be 'barbarians' in their disconnection from large formal institutions. Their progenitors worked on contract for large firms or other institutions; later they are working just to keep going, sometimes trading, sometimes raiding, mostly scrounging and patching.

For practical purposes they will pretty much do.

There are variations on this theme. As commenters have suggested, parts of a space economy could slide into decline and collapse while the rest of it thrives - rustbelt worlds of declining industries. And we see in the present day world that world trade interests find it cheaper to pay off the occasional Somali businessman than to pay for a massive naval mobilization to suppress piracy.

Like the Wild West, or the great age of Caribbean piracy, or the terrible and grand 12th century BC that Homer sang, the era of scavengers will not last long, not in historical terms (though it might persist for decades). But it will cast a long shadow as a formative experience of the new, rising worlds.

Sort of hard to resist, isn't it? These tropes do exist for a reason ...

This pop-culture barbarian image graces the Interstellar Empire page header at Atomic Rockets, which I have not linked to enough lately.

Temperate and Indecisive Contests

2010-10-17T20:41:00.000-07:00

Edward Gibbon contributed much to science fiction; without him there could be no fall of the Galactic Empire. In chapter XXXVIII of The Decline and Fall, summing up his theme, he speculates on a historical what-if that has never been followed up on in SF, so far as I know, and probably won't be: What if there were another wave of barbarian invasions?

Post-apocalyptic fiction has plenty of goth/biker barbarians (and post-Gibbon history has shown that 'civilized' people can be plenty barbaric), but old style barbarian conquest of civilized lands has been relegated to the sword & sorcery shelves.

Gibbon agrees that barbarian conquest has had its day, and gives several reasons. The first and most basic is the Russians, who by Gibbon's time had pretty much solved the problem of the Eurasian steppe nomads at the source: The plough, the loom, and the forge are introduced on the banks of the Volga, the Oby, and the Lena; and the fiercest of the Tartar hordes have been taught to tremble and obey.

But a bit later in his list Gibbon provides the text of this post. In war, he says, the European forces are exercised by temperate and indecisive contests.

This is of interest to us because, bloodthirsty lot that we are, we want to write about blowing stuff up, especially but by no means limited to spaceships. Temperate! Indecisive! does not sound like the way to sell a war saga. But if the war is intemperate and decisive you won't have much of a saga, because it will end with Chapter Two:

There was a brilliant flash of light.

In fiction this only works once, and probably with real civilizations as well.

The wars of the 18th century were temperate and indecisive, or seemed to be, for fairly basic reasons of technology and economics. Serious warfare, as the 18th century knew it, was expensive stuff: paid regulars and keeping them paid and supplied; artillery; massive fortifications and ships of the line.

And the advantage lay heavily with the defense, tactically and strategically. Enough dirt and stone, or even half a meter of oak, would stop cannon balls. As for the strategic level, experience in the ~~17th and 18th~~ 16th and 17th century showed what happened to armies that pushed beyond their supply lines: They devastated a province or two, then came down with dysentery and crapped themselves to death.

Thus 18th century war looked at the time like a cohesive system, inherent to an advanced proto industrial society, but this line of Gibbon is usually quoted for its irony value, because along came the French Revolution and Napoleon and all of that.

The modern view through the 20/20 hindsight rangefinder is that the French Revolution raised the stakes of warfare by harnessing the power of national mass mobilization. You could put far more troops in the field than the pre-1789 world had imagined, but only by arousing the mass passions of your population - at which point you were no longer really in control.

But there were a couple of military preconditions to all this. First (or so I gather), the French Revolution showed that a militia rabble could indeed defeat 18th century regulars, if they outnumbered the regulars massively enough and were fired up enough, and second, that with good sergeants you could turn that rabble into a decent army pretty quickly.

I vaguely recall something about an artillery officer from Corsica in this mix, too, and strategic mobility coming back into play, but my ignorance is profound here. Suffice it to say that the 18th century model of temperate and indecisive contests did not hold up.

Now let us imagine midfuture settings. The means of making war in a serious, great-power way are presumably still expensive. The means of simply nuking your enemy back to the stone age are available, and cheaper, but not the means to keep your enemy from nuking you back to the stone age.

Since nuking each other back to the stone age is against the general interest of all parties, could they avoid it by tacitly accepting temperate and indecisive contests, and scaling their objectives to suit?

Doing so by overt treaty, and making war by formalized rules, sounds vaguely tinselly and implausible to us. But the stakes of 18th century war had been implicitly limited by the same Treaty of Westphalia that has given the name 'Westphalian' to the whole concept of a state system and balance of power. Religion, which had made 16th and early ~~16th~~ 17th century warfare so implacable, was more or less taken off the table as a reason for European states to go to war.

This agreement was possible because bitter experience had taught everyone that neither Protestantism nor Catholicism were going to go away, so there was no point fighting over them.

No such formal agreement might be needed in a future era, only a tacit understanding reinforced by the very powerful motives of elites toward self preservation. The fact that World War II happened does not negate this tendency; in 1939 not only was the atomic bomb still (literally) science fiction, but most of the offensive weapons and tactics of the war were still quasi-experimental and more or less untried. Now elites know what will happen to them, and it tends to concentrate minds.

Some classic SF scenarios lend themselves to temperate and indecisive contests, for example deep space trade wars. Trade warriors may be constrained on the one hand by the risk of burning their profit margin on military spending, and on the other hand by the disadvantages of vaporizing prospective customers.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Starship Troopers logic of racial wars of extermination pretty much points toward, well, wars of extermination. Pick your scenario and take your chances.

The image is a scene from the Battle of Minden, 1759.

Bat Durston and Sherlock Holmes

2010-10-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

The mythos of the American West, as regulars here have heard me preach, is a very bad analogy for anything we can plausibly expect to happen in space over the next few centuries. Grubstake miners in the asteroid belt, sodbusters on Mars, and train robbers waiting at the Lagrange Pass for the 4:58 to Titan all differ only slightly in their quotients of probability, and all are very close to zero.

Given worlds enough and time, some civilization may come along that takes Dodge City as its cultural inspiration, but just as in the long gone days of Trek TOS, that is really only good for one episode.

Yet as regulars here also know, I was a fan and advocate of Firefly, which served up Western mythos in straight shots. It even got away with old fashioned Injuns, the Reivers, as incurably savage and implacably hostile as Lakota Sioux in 1950s Westerns. No one was going to smoke a peace pipe with them, and no tears would be shed over wiping out as many of them as possible. One dimensional natives remain alive and well in Hollywood - even, as Avatar showed, when filmed in 3-D.

The tension between Realism [TM] and Romance is is not a problem over on the fantasy shelves. Not many people trouble themselves to explain how dragons might really be possible. Only a few authors have framed fantasy-esque settings within an SF structure, with Anne McCaffrey the most familiar example: Pern is hardly less likely than any other colony planet.

It is not even really a problem in the various retro-future genres that have sprung up - if I want to have a steampunk alt-future city with pneumatic subways, no one is going to point out that electric rail technology made them obsolete by 1888.

It is a problem, potentially, in one other branch of the great super-genre of Romance: mysteries. Mysteries have somewhat the same relationship to horror that SF has to fantasy. In both genres someone generally winds up dead, often in colorfully gruesome ways and with creepy psychosexual overtones. But while horror is unabashed in its supernaturalism and irrationalism, mysteries confront horror with rationalism in the person of the detective.

God, that sounds lit-critty. One swig of meta leads to another ...

In mysteries the confrontation of the rational and the magical is direct, if disguised, and as a result mysteries are a highly stylized form with conventions (in the literary, not fannish sense) that make those of SF look positively lax.

In SF we glide past those tricky questions on orbital trajectory, never having to fire our engines. There may be no stealth in space when it comes to scan technology, but there is plenty of literary stealth. By salting the text with convincing sounding bits and pieces, torch drives and laser apertures, we invite the reader to not notice all the implausibilities of the setting. Move along, move along, nothing to see.

And in space, moving along is wonderfully easy. You don't have to do a thing.

Related post: An Athenian counterpart to Marcus Didius Falco.

The image was snagged from this mystery oriented blog.

Goldilocks Planet

2010-10-04T10:11:00.000-07:00

By now you have probably heard media reports of a 'Goldilocks' planet orbiting Gliese 581, the ~~seventh~~ sixth planet found in the retinue of this dim red star.

Mass media hype aside, this discovery is both important and unsurprising. Important because this is the first known planet apart from Earth itself that orbits entirely inside its parent star's habitable zone, and so could potentially harbor life without broiling or freezing it. Unsurprising because nearly 500 extrasolar planets have now been discovered, and sooner or later one was going to turn up in the right orbit.

All we know about Gliese 581g are its orbit, at about 0.15 AU from its parent star, and its approximate mass, about 3-4 times Earth's. We do not even know for sure that it is 'a planet' rather than, say, two planetary-mass bodies orbiting each other. We know nothing about its composition, such as whether there is water vapor in its atmosphere, let alone liquid water on its surface. We know only that liquid water could exist at that distance from the star, unless the planet has an intense greenhouse atmosphere or some other complication.

But let the speculation begin, as naturally it already has. If it is a single body it should be tide-locked to Gliese 581. This used to be a deal breaker, but current thinking is that atmospheric heat transfer is ample to keep the air from freezing out on the nightside.

If the planet has extensive uplands and limited water, the water might (my own speculation) form vast ice sheets on the nightside instead of pooling as oceans. On the other hand, the general feeling seems to be that big planets will have more water, while the heavier gravity should make a rocky surface flatter - how much so is above my pay grade to estimate. But this may well be a waterworld, or even a 'water giant' with a hydrosphere thousands of kilometers deep instead of Earth's thin muddy film of liquid.

As Arthur Clarke said of Jupiter, when it was thought to possibly have a deep hydrosphere, think of the fishing.

I would not rush out to put a colony on Gliese 581g in my setting. It is probably not a world for us. (If any worlds are 'for us' beyond the one we evolved on and any we may one day terraform.) But we are free to imagine a golden-red glint of sun across a very distant sea.

Image source.

The Cities of Earth

2010-09-30T20:43:00.000-07:00

This blog deals mainly with things that might happen in outer space. But what, in that plausible midfuture, might be happening back on Earth?

I presume here that post industrial civilization on Earth does not fail in any of the familiar ways, nor in novel ones. If it does, nothing much will be happening in space except the patient beeping of robotic systems executing the last instructions they received. (If they are sending instructions to each other that is its own story, but not one I'll deal with here.)

If humans can live in space with no support from Earth, we are almost by definition past the midfuture, even if the far future comes sooner than I expected.

Current fashion, and it is a reasonable one, is to see the world political order reverting to a familiar great power structure: something like China, India, the US, the EU, Russia, Brazil, more or less.

The traditional definition of a great power is one that can take on any other great power. As I've argued before, it is not clear how far post industrial powers can take each other on without taking each other out. And even midrank powers can arm themselves with deterrents that will give a great power reason to pause.

A more practical definition for this century may be that a great power is a country that can project significant military force abroad. This is frightfully expensive. Militia war and tribal war are cheap, but the kind of war great powers make has gone far to price itself out of the market. Forces are much smaller than a century ago, and while their ability to blow stuff up is far greater, it still means less to go around.

For reasons discussed in the ground warfare post and - at much greater length - the discussion thread that followed, I believe that while sheer destructive power favors the offensive, in modern conditions the ability to exercise control favors the defensive. Big, heavy aircraft - assault and transport types - will be at great risk over hostile terrain, while logistic support convoys will be at risk as soon as they start moving.

Over time these conditions should favor political decentralization. Midrank powers have less need of a great power patron. And in the extreme case a central authority can blow a rebel province off the map, but cannot expect to reconquer it and find it in any condition to pay taxes. (China's underlying problem with Taiwan.)

How far might decentralization proceed? I will suggest that the 'natural' political, social, and economic unit of the midfuture may be the city. In the Western political tradition this would be full circle: Western political thought from Socrates to Machiavelli developed in a context of city states.

The great cities of today are a thousand times larger, with metro area populations in the tens of millions instead of tens of thousands, but they still have an inherent structural unity that megacorps lack. They lend themselves to regional government, and their economies are large enough to support the elements of a modern defensive umbrella, including if needed a nuclear deterrent.

Cities might form leagues, as medieval German cities formed the Hanseatic League, but more for economic than security reasons, since the added security of a league is only modest. Global politics in such an environment might take a variety of forms, from coalitions of leagues to a limited world government, to a welter of jurisdictions so complex we might have trouble describing it.

So ... what might a world of city states be like?

Related Posts: Goodbye, Westphalia, and Futures of Power Politics: Tank Commander.

The image comes from this 3-D screen saver site.

A Spiral Surprise

2010-09-26T16:15:00.000-07:00

Work caught up with me before I finished a post, so until I do finish it, a little something for your entertainment and edification.

Via Astronomy Picture of the Day comes this Hubble image (click to embiggen), not a galaxy but a star 3000 light years away, LL Pegasi, more precisely a binary star. The cause of the spiral is uncertain, but according to Sky & Telescope it may be the swan dance of the seven veils, to mix some metaphors, by a dying red giant star that is shedding its outer layers on its way to becoming a white dwarf. The outer layers will in due course light up as a planetary nebula, but for now they are being spun off in a stream, forming an Archimedean spiral. The spacing between streams, 800 years, corresponds to the binary motion of the dying star and its companion.

It all sounds vaguely torrid.

Feel free to use the comments as an open thread.

Give Peace a Chance ...

2010-09-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

And it might surprise you by taking it.

Well, at last check the grunt warfare thread is starting to lose steam at 484 posts. Come on, guys & gals, don't fall back on me now. Over the top! Over the top!

This blog dabbles in futurism, but it is mainly about Romance. In the Western literary tradition the first Big One started in 1194 BC, and in the pop culture version the pretext was a woman. (Classical Greek sexual politics in a nutshell: gay love affairs can win wars; straight love affairs can start them.) If you took away war and affairs you would pretty much wipe out Western literature. If Bollywood and Hong Kong are anything to go by, nonwestern literature too.

That said, this blog does dabble in futurism, so let me put it in that light: Could there be an end to war?

Let me offer a parallel. For much of the last 5000 years, the condition of most human beings was serfdom or slavery. This was simply a given in the agrarian age. There were exceptions around the margins, but they were exactly that, marginal.

This has ceased to be the case in much of the world since the Industrial Revolution, and is rapidly ceasing to be the case in most of the rest. Outright slavery survives only in the shadows, and serfdom as a way of life will probably be marginalized in this century, barring whatever apocalypse.

Plausibly war, like serfdom and slavery, was characteristic of the agrarian age, and will become marginalized in the post industrial age. You could say this is already the case, Afghanistan a perfect example, the US, Pakistan, and India all more or less fencing around the edges, with Iran and China in the offing.

Once again, though, we have seen this movie before. The same years before World War I that saw all those Next War speculations, grist for the steampunk mill, also had an active international peace movement. For that matter the Great Powers sometimes cooperated militarily on the ground in dealing with troublesome locals, even in the Balkans. A lot of people argued then, also plausibly, that war was obsolete. Unfortunately they were wrong, or at any rate premature.

I am in the school of thought that regards the World Wars as, in some basic grand strategic sense, two rounds of one war, with Versailles the uneasy truce to end all uneasy truces. And in the course of that one great war industrial-age warfare went from 19th century war on steroids to, well, you know what it went to.

It took industrial civilization just that one double round to find out that the assumptions of agrarian civilizations no longer applied. Industrial nations could deliver a dreadful pummelling, and stand up to one for years, but the pummelling they could deliver then was nothing to what they can do to each other now - even aside from nuclear weapons.

Yes, there are anti- anti- anti- this and that, but in the end the bomber either mostly gets through or it doesn't. In the first case you conquer ruins after being reduced to ruins yourself; in the second case you're just burning money to no effect.

And here is the real difference between post industrial war and war in the agrarian age: In the agrarian age - that is to say, most of recorded history, and the age that shaped most of our thinking - war not infrequently paid off, in direct and obvious ways.

Conquerors conquered and thrived, because the basic payoff was landed estates, hard to destroy and easy to avoid destroying. The estate-house might be burned, and its treasures with it, but they weren't the real value of the estate: the land was. The peasants might be slaughtered in large numbers, but the survivors would quickly replenish them. Meanwhile you had the land.

Sometimes agrarian age war went so far that agriculture was ruined and societies collapsed. Legend and later Romance told of the Trojan War. Mute archeology tells of a wave of greater wars that brought down not only Troy, Mycenae, Tiryns, and wise old Nestor's sandy Pylos, but the estates that supported them: Much of Greece was largely depopulated, and the land lay fallow for some 300 years.

But this was not a typical result, and for ruling classes, war quite often worked. It also provided the ultimate Xtreme sport to thin the ranks of excess young male aristocrats (along with expendable peasants). This function accounts for much of war's prominence in lit.

It does not work that way any more. It is not just that smart bombs and roadside bombs vigorously expand on the unsportsmanlike tradition of the gunpowder age, itself a precursor of the industrial age. Even more to the point, the wealth of post industrial society is largely in its targets: U-boats took no prizes to make their captains and crews rich.

This comes through in the last thread, and in fact most of the space warfare threads. Even under operatic assumptions, direct military conquest of a planet, landing troops and occupying it, looks fantastically difficult, much harder than simply wrecking the place. The same goes even more for spacehabs and the like.

War simply does not pay the way it (often) did in the agrarian age, and that could be the end of war as a normal element of power politics. Militaries will gradually morph into something like paramilitary police organizations, no more designed to fight each other than police forces are.

If it makes you feel better, this need not mean the end of fictional war in Romance, where landed aristocracy also still thrives. Both will go on, largely shorn of their grubby underpinnings. Safely in the words and images of Romance is where war belongs.

Let's see how many comments this thread gets!

The image is of a decommissioned and abandoned fortress island in the Netherlands.

'Space' Warfare XII: Surface Warfare

2010-09-09T16:35:00.000-07:00

Ask, and ye shall (sometimes) receive: A reader emailed asking me to discuss future ground war. This I will take a bit more broadly as warfare fought on habitable, shirtsleeves planets, including sea and air operations. Warfare on non-habitable planets is an ambiguous case, with features of boarding operations in space.

I intended to deal first with the space context. But y'all want grunts, preferably in power armor, supported by coolific armored vehicles and aircraft, with subs and trimaran assault cruisers out to sea. Which brings us to something that has not been tested yet. What happens when post industrial forces fight each other?

We don't know, but we have seen this movie before, in flickery black and white a hundred years ago. Industrial age Western armies had shown how well they could scythe down waves of natives, usually. The general prognosis was that 1900-modern weapons were so accurate and effective that when turned on each other they would pretty much wipe each other out, and quickly.

The Next War would be a come-as-you-are war, settled in months if not weeks by whoever ran out of arms and ammo first, if it weren't won a week earlier by strategy and tactical execution. 1870 was the prelude; 1861-65 merely an example of a semi-modern war fought entirely by blundering amateurs.

It did not work out that way in 1914, so I hesitate to say it would work out that way now, or in 2114. What might happen, in fact, is broadly what happened in 1914: Everyone goes to ground.

The general principle of future surface war, it seems to me, is that if you are caught out in the open you are headed for the celestial choir. This goes for guerillas, it goes for power armor troops, it goes for laser armed tanks, trimaran cruisers, aircraft, and spacecraft in low orbit. Give precision weapons a clear target and they will take it out.

Thirty meter mecha, sad to say, make for very clear targets.

Reconnaissance robotics, on the other hand, will be hard to take out. They can be very small and stealthy, making the Predator look like a B-36. So you should have plenty of scouts, including a robotic fly on the wall of the other side's headquarters. Your intel problem is noise - the more raw intel, the more noise. Any AI good enough to cut through it is an intelligence officer, not a piece of equipment.

A tank backed into the underbrush is still effective, because it is hard to find, and you may only find it when it opens up on you. A tank on the move has a target painted on it. This, I think, is the real advantage of power armor troops: Compared to tanks they are stealthy, and can slip through environments where a tank would draw attention and fire.

I expect power armor to be relatively light. At minimum you want enough to stop small arms fire, shrapnel, and the like. The maximum of useful armor is reached when a hit would kill you anyway, like getting hit by the equivalent of a truck. Against lasers this may mean the point at which you cook inside your armor, not good.

Future war may well be 'slow,' because the mobility of power armor troops is essentially foot mobility, with enhancements like powered roller skates. Mobility is limited behind the front as well, because truck convoys will be conspicuous targets even hundreds of km behind the lines. Logistics too will have to be stealthy.

It is easier to have a Ho Chi Minh Trail in the jungle, so one thing timeless will be the supreme importance of ground and the physical ecosystem. This of course gets interesting on habitable planets other than Earth.

Some kinds of fortifications might remain valid, basically because dirt absorbs a lot of damage points. Yes, there are bunker busters and Thor bolts, but the point is that such big powerful weapons are costly to deploy, carried by vulnerable platforms, and can be engaged by defensive fire. This could be the saving of large naval surface combatants, hard to sink except by massive attack that overwhelms their defenses.

The one way to achieve rapid, heavy movement, whether logistic or an actual assault, is to ramp up the noise level so high that the enemy's sensors are saturated, and nothing (you hope) is in 'plain sight.' If you are right you get blitzkrieg; if wrong you get the Somme.

Large scale surface war may thus have an alternating rhythm - weeks or months of stalking, skulking, and skirmishes along the front, interrupted by episodes of sheer rock & roll, perhaps to cover the fast movement of a truck convoy up to the front, where it will disperse itself and go to ground.

All of this takes place, or doesn't, against the background of nuclear weapons. The constraints on mobility in 'conventional' warfare could make it indecisive enough for the great powers to engage in it without risking a nuclear exchange. As in the 18th century they would be fighting for provinces, not national survival.

Now for the space context. If suitable planets are limited - say, Earth and terraformed Mars or Venus - politically balkanized planets are to be expected, unless you go mid 20th century retro and have ~~the American Empire~~ a Federation. Certainly on Earth itself you can plausibly expect Great Powers, with great power militaries.

In a few-worlds setting, space itself will be off in the background. India is not going to get in a major tussle with Olympus Mons; both have bigger problems much closer to home. And India and China are not going to take their arguments to the asteroid belt, at least not in a big way, because money spent on deep space forces comes out of much more critical surface, air, and Earth orbital forces.

This can have advantages for space-centric settings, because you can let the major Earth powers stalemate each other, keeping them off the deep space chessboard.

In the classic operatic setting of many colony worlds, it could be a different matter. Uniform planets are rightly bashed, and I've bashed them myself. But in such a setting I think politically unified planets will be common, perhaps the norm. In the colonization era everyone can have their own planet, and later on, even if local fissures develop - and they will - any planet that can present a united front enjoys a huge advantage in interstellar power politics.

Or putting it another way, any planet that cannot present a united front is at a huge disadvantage, drawing plot complications like flies. And here we are.

I could make the many and salient arguments for peace, but I know they would fall on deaf ears, so we'll go straight to comments.

The image comes from this futurist blog.

Android Attack

2010-09-04T09:49:00.000-07:00

A small change of pace ...

In the future we will have handheld devices that resemble an iPad, except that they are not beholden to either Steve Jobs or AT&T. And we will want to know the Mars travel schedule right now, whether or not we can afford a ticket.

To prepare for this future I have started playing around with the Java language and the Android operating system. I've written a number of sim programs in C, some of which are on my static website, but they all have a neolithic user interface that makes them impressively user-hostile. So I have decided to move into the 21st century and play with some sim apps that don't go out of their way to be inconvenient.

Learning to program for mobile devices is a bit odd when I don't even own one, but the alternative was learning either Java for Windows, if there is such a thing, or programming inside a browser, which also seemed odd. Android provides a definite environment, and the Eclipse development tool comes with a nifty Android emulator, which you see in the screenshot.

Because working with modern user interfaces is new to me, that has been the focus of my initial efforts, which you see above. Don't go rushing out to buy an Android phone just yet; as space game apps go this one is both unrealistic and boring. You type in a heading in degrees (on the slide out keyboard, not shown). When you hit ENTER it reports the heading in radians, and positions the spacecraft at the desired angle. The little graphic comes with a Lunar Lander game at the Android development pages.

Hit the Reset button to clear the entry. Hit the Rotate button and the ship does a 360 degree rotation (at a steady rate, no fancy acceleration and deceleration). Error entries - anything non-numerical - cause the image of a wrecked ship to appear. That is the entire functionality of the app.

But the odd thing about a space sim app is that the rocket science is in many ways the easiest part. You don't actually have to design the hardware, after all, and as for the computations, Sir Isaac Newton and the computer processor do the heavy lifting. Providing the information in a way humans can play with it is the more challenging part. This little gizmo is effectively a sort of 'Hello, World' test of basic interface tools, and giving me a first sense of Java code in action.

What I have in mind for now is a solar orbit sim, intended to test the performance of the sorts of midfuture ships that I discuss on this blog. Right now there are no tools out there (that I know of) for modeling steep, fast orbits, and my estimates of travel times are a mix of flat-space approximations and sheer guesswork. The interface, as I picture it, will toggle between a 'pilot' view roughly like this one, and a 'navigation' view showing the orbits. There will also have to be a design-phase screen for entering ship characteristics.

It probably won't challenge FarmVille in the game popularity rankings, but who would have guessed that a farming sim would be a hit? And it will give everyone an opportunity to miss your destination and hurtle on to oblivion, without fuel enough to slow down let alone return to Earth.

Good clean fun for all!

In Which I Bash Space Colonization Again

2010-08-25T09:54:00.000-07:00

First let me be clear. I am talking here about my old friend the Plausible Midfuture. I'm not going to answer for AD 40,000, let alone 40 million. And this is obviously not about Romance, for which the rule of cool is sufficient, even if it dresses in Plausible Midfuture outfits as a rhetorical flourish.

But really, guys 'n' gals, we are not going to be colonizing space any time soon. (Well, probably not.) Not in this century, not in the next, perhaps not in this millennium. The whole idea is rocketpunk in the sense of Late Steampunk, the imagined projection of a brief era into a vast and timeless tapestry, i.e. Romance, which is different from real life. That being the point after all.

But in merely practical terms, the Solar System is a whole lot of Oakland, still no there there. Think about the debate over whether it is better to colonize planets (moons, asteroids, etc.) or to build space habitats, so people can actually live in the middle of nowhere. This is no way to sell real estate.

And let's be honest. If it weren't so cool, none of us would be talking about extracting exotic minerals from uninhabitable hyper-deserts, lacking even breathable air, located millions of kilometers away. People in the relevant industries are not talking about it. They are talking about, and investing in, technologies such as nanomaterials that either use less of those exotic materials or permit use of cheaper stuff instead.

He3 from Uranus is an impressive line haul, but a tenfold reduction in the cost of solar cells makes plain old earthbound, tree huggy solar power cheap and abundant. (Under cautious assumptions, roughly 1 TW of peak production per 10,000 square km of collector surface.) Space-based alternatives postulate at least a tenfold reduction in launch costs, and still need relatively cheap cells to be competitive. Deep space alternatives pretty much require a hundredfold reduction in launch costs.

That is a lot to ask of a mature technology, and basic space technology is fairly mature - we have been building and launching space missions on a routine basis for decades.

A launch cost reduction of 100 x (to about $100,000/ton, or $100/kg) might in fact just be doable. Our current launch systems are geared to a low traffic rate, at most a few hundred tons put into orbit each year. A traffic revolution allowing economies of scale might cut costs tenfold, and decades of subsequent streamlining based on operational experience cut another factor of ten.

But even that does not really provide a reason to do it, other than that it would be really, really cool.

On the other hand, there is a place in human affairs (and the economy), for really, really cool: just ask Hollywood. And it is basically sheer coolness that accounts for the ISS and interplanetary missions, vicarious space tourism for everyone courtesy of NASA, the ESA, and a handful of counterparts around the world.

If you are libertarian you can be philosophically grumpy about this, but it has gotten us this far, and there's no sign that private money-making ventures could have done anything like as well.

The one thing in space (besides coolness) that we know is of value is knowledge - itself a form of coolness, among other things. And it will probably keep us going, even if it points at a future of research stations rather than mining colonies.

Support of these research stations may in time give reason to mine stuff in space for use in space, but even if commercial mining firms develop they will surely be largely automated, and incidental rather than central to the long term enterprise of space.

Beyond the midfuture this might point to a Solar System where some research stations evolve into towns, then cities, but situated at points of research interest rather than mother lodes of McGuffinite.

And there is nothing wrong with that, even for purposes of Romance.

Related Posts: Recently on space as the Wild West, and my first post on this general theme early last year.

The image comes, as so often, from the ever-useful pages of Atomic Rockets. And here is another one implying that perhaps it isn't about real estate at all.

Future Imperfect

2010-08-17T15:30:00.000-07:00

From a recent XKCD, via Language Log, comes this concise observation on the future history of the English language. (Don't forget to go to XKCD and do the mouse-over.) Over a somewhat longer time scale - but just how long is very hard to say - the spoken English of the future will become unintelligible, with the written language following at (perhaps) a slightly slower pace. There's at least one online speculation about 'Murrican in the year 3000, though the website is currently down.

Given how widely it is spoken, I can readily imagine future English dividing into an 'Anglic' family of languages, as Latin fissured into the Romance languages. I seem to recall Arthur C. Clarke arguing that none of this would happen, because sound recording would freeze the language. He was wrong; apparently even the BBC no longer uses 'classical' BBC English.

The rate at which this might happen is not known. There have been suggestions that language change, like genetic drift, is random in detail but happens at statistically predictable rates. But the known rates of language change vary widely. English has changed beyond intelligibility in the last thousand years*; ~~Islandic~~ Icelandic [oops!] has changed only slightly, and I've read that classical Greek is about as accessible to modern Greeks as Chaucer is to us.

* Written English artificially exaggerates this, because Old English had very different spelling rules, but the spoken language would still be unintelligible. The biggest change wasn't all those French words the Normans brought, but the near disappearance of the Germanic grammatical case system - probably already fading from the spoken language before 1066.

In any case we can only speculate about future English; we cannot predict it. For story purposes, however, we might want to evoke it. Inventing new slang words is an ever popular trick, though it is more common (and more interesting) for familiar words to acquire new meanings, as 'text' has now become a verb.

Over longer time periods the rhythm of speech changes, which ultimately brings changes in grammar. 'Yoda I am' is a familiar example, long since beaten to death. Firefly used a mix of invented curse words and some subtle shifts of speech rhythm to effectively convey a different era. I once played around with using a pseudo 18th century diction to represent 'Standard English,' used in the 28th century as medieval people used Latin; a character trying to ~~come on to~~ communicate with a girl in a foreign station describes a trade starship as an Indiaman.

Over longer time periods recognizable features would disappear, and a future language can only be represented by tone. The challenge then is a familiar one, equivalent to people in a fantasy novel speaking an invented language, or Marcus Didius Falco speaking a slangy, streetwise Latin.

Related Post: My last look at language speculated about communication with aliens.

Beyond Scarcity?

2010-08-12T14:08:00.000-07:00

Discussion on a recent post turned, not for the first time, to the economic implications of continued technological progress, especially technologies such as replicators. More generally, could a higher techlevel lead to a 'post-scarcity' economy?

First, a benchmark figure. In rough, round numbers the per capita GDP in the US is about 10 times greater than it was 200 years ago, at the dawn of the industrial revolution. The early US was already a rich country - all that cheap land, stolen from the Indians, but industrialization has made us, on average, some 10 times richer.

The figure for European countries is at least comparable. For Japan it might be somewhat more, Tokugawa era peasants probably having been poorer than contemporary European peasants, but still on the same broad order. The implication is that each century of rapid technological progress has made the most developed societies some three times richer. (The process is faster for newly industrialized countries, which can adopt technologies already invented.)

If that same rate continues into the midfuture, the economic level of 200 years from now should be about 10 times higher still, a per capita GDP equivalent to about $250,000 or $500,000.

There are obvious constraints and provisos. Natural resource prices, in real terms, trended downward through the 20th century, but the low-hanging fruit has arguably already been picked. Oil, at least, will not get cheaper in the long term, and post fossil fuel energy probably won't be cheaper at the plug than energy is today. Automobiles have become more efficient and safer in the last 50 years, and may soon be 'smart,' but not cheaper or faster - so their basic functionality is largely unchanged. People regard old cars as classics; no one thinks of old computers that way.

For that matter, the economic level of most 'Murricans has not increased much since the 1970s; the real GDP increase since that time has been funneled largely to economic elites. One popular dystopian future is a high techlevel, largely automated capitalism with practically no demand for labor, relegating most of the population to a marginal netherworld.

This is a distinctly modern dystopia. There are hints of it in Heinlein, especially Starman Jones, but it is very different from the capitalist dystopias of a century ago - in Wells' The Time Machine the Morlocks were workers; it was the upper class Eloi who were the useless unemployed.

But let's consider the possibilities of a high-techlevel economy.

The classical economics view is that human desires are unlimited. We want things, like tickets to Mars, that we can't get now at any price. We quickly learn to want things, like mobile Internet access, that we previously never even thought about.

On the other hand, our physical needs and comforts are in some sense biologically fixed. Dietary preferences vary culturally, but we can only eat so much. In much of the world, and certainly in industrialized countries, having plenty to eat is no longer a sign of wealth. As one consequence, putting on extravagant public feasts, like Bilbo's birthday party in Lord of the Rings, has pretty much died out as a custom. Even fancy society wedding banquets don't feature dozens of exotic dishes, or for that matter scores of liveried servants to bring them in.

Oversized houses are still a mark of wealth, because big houses remain beyond most people's reach - hence the proliferation of McMansions in the US and probably other industrialized countries. But even this is probably in relative decline; McMansions are the mark of the pretentious demi-rich. The super-rich do not make their houses an object of display - in fact, their estates tend to be secluded. I doubt that an Elizabethan noble would be impressed by Bill Gates' house, and he'd be puzzled by its obscurity.

Feasts and palaces are things people prized not for their 'creature comforts' (an appropriate phrase), but for the status and power they embodied. Once they cease to be effective as display the demand for them reaches its limit or even trails off. I'd suggest that a similar law of diminishing returns may apply to material goods in general, once the economic level is such to render them unimpressive.

On the other hand, the desire to impress does seem unlimited, because it is purely social and relative. If the Joneses own a planet, you want to own one as well, or even a whole planetary system. Throughout the agrarian age - the age of feasts and palaces - material wealth was a great way to impress people. Or more than impress: If you could afford hundreds of liveried servants you could also afford hundreds of troops.

But in a high-techlevel age, where mere display of material goods is no longer impressive, could people find other ways to impress? And what might those ways be?

One way is simply by becoming well known. This is not new. It is what the Latin world nobilis, root of our 'noble,' originally meant. Indeed, before there were chieftains or aristocracies there were 'big men,' who made themselves the center of attention - and did things like putting on feasts in order to remain the center of attention.

The modern rise of celebrity culture, people 'famous for being famous' might be a harbinger of things to come, hinting at the dynamics of a post-scarcity and post-capitalist economy. In such a world, capital resources might still be amassed, but only as one of multiple paths to eminence and status, and not the primary one.

How we would get there, or what it would lead to, I don't know, but I will throw it out for discussion.

Related link: For those who haven't come across links yet, here is the Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy on my old website.

This painting by Botticelli, based on an episode in the Decameron, shows a Renaissance wedding feast.