A Ladder Up Into The Open Blue

Despite the immense differences in scale and technology, there is a striking parallel between Antarctic and lunar exploration. In 1911-12, Scott and Amundsen reached the South Pole using only man-and-dog power. Then it was abandoned for more than forty years, until permanent settlements were established with the aid of aircraft, snow-mobiles, radio communications, and nuclear reactors. Today, ordinary tourists fly comfortably over the most hostile territory on earth. The same scenario will be repeated, on a stage a million times greater, during the centuries to come. Like the race to the South Pole, the initial motivation for going to the Moon was national pride; the Space Race was a bloodless war-how much better than the old-fashioned kind! It produced the basic engineering for travel beyond the atmosphere, a whole armada of expendable, multi-stage rockets like Apollo’s Saturn V, and the (partly) reusable Space Shuttle. Future generations will look back upon all these primitive devices with amused incredulity, though, one hopes, with some admiration-just as we look back at the flimsy powered-kites in which the first aviators risked their lives.

Of course, there were overwhelming commercial -not to mention military-reasons for developing practical flying machines, and this has also been true beyond the atmosphere. Billions of pounds have now been invested in space industries which are now an essential element of our global society-communications, earth-resources, meteorology, and the ubiquitous GPS (global positioning system) which no hiker-and no Japanese car-can now do without. However, the hundreds of satellites providing these facilities all operate automatically, and the engineers who placed them in orbit remained on the ground. The number of humans who have entered space has still barely passed three figures.

Though there’s been much optimistic talk of space (and even lunar) tourism, this will require a longer time-scale than the half-century between the Wright biplane and the Concorde. At the moment, the real cost of a ticket to orbit is millions of pounds; although there are bargains in Russia-and there may soon be others elsewhere-these are heavily subsisted by the state.

Great efforts are under way to develop ‘aerospace planes’ which can carry payloads and human crews into orbit without throwing away fortunes in expensive hardware, or requiring armies of highly-trained engineers to check out every mission. Sometime in the 2010-20 period, the surviving hardware of this Darwinian process will reduce operational costs to a fraction of its present figure, and wealthy tourists will be able to buy tickets for a few tens of thousands of pounds. (The exact amount will be decided by insurance companies, already heavily involved in commercial space.)

Early in the next century, the first orbiting hotels will be constructed, perhaps by assembling the huge fuel tanks which are now discarded by the Shuttle and allowed to burn up. These will be followed by all kinds of zero-gravity laboratories and workshops, prototyped by the International Space Station. Perhaps most valuable of all will be hospitals, where patients can be blissfully weightless. Goodbye, bed-sores and wheelchairs.... Meanwhile, the exploration of the solar system will be continuing with robot probes, which have already reconnoitered all the planets except tiny Pluto. There’s at least a fair possibility that life may be discovered in the ice-covered oceans of Jupiter’s satellite Europa, and although Mars has so far been a disappointment, there’s now convincing evidence that it had a benign climate in the past. Life could have evolved there-and considering its well-known tenacity on Planet Earth, it may well have survived up to the present time. Even the discovery of fossils would be of overwhelming scientific-and philosophical-importance; it would be the first indication that we’re not alone in this huge universe. (The ‘alien abduction’ and UFO nonsense, of course, merely demonstrates the scarcity of intelligent life on earth).

During the next century, scientific bases will be established on (or orbiting) most of the major bodies in the solar system. Some of them will be permanently occupied by human crews, others will be run by artificial intelligence of ever increasing sophistication, and only visited from time to time for checks and upgrades.

Beyond that, it may appear hard to see any reason for large-scale occupation of our planetary neighbours, if only because they’re all extremely hostile to our particular form of life. One day this might be changed, at least in the case of the Moon and Mars, by global engineering projects-’terraforming’, to use a word coined as long ago as ‘42. But do we really want to make the unique wildernesses of other worlds into synthetic imitations of our own? Sometime in the next century Redpeace may be clamouring "Hands Off Mars!" Perhaps we will have to be satisfied with a few square miles of climate-controlled habitat-not much more artificial than today’s London or New York-which scientists and Club Luna clients can use as a base for ventures into the surrounding alien landscapes.

However, attempts to predict the long-term future tend to be hopelessly conservative, because of technological breakthroughs that no one could possibly have anticipated. The IBM chairman once suggested that the world market for computers was about six: then came the microchip, and millions of schoolchildren now carry palm-tops that can outperform the room-sized mainframes of the 1950s. A similar revolution may happen in space. Surprising though it may seem in this era of nine or ten-figure mission budgets, the basic energy cost of escaping from earth is ridiculously low. Would you believe a hundred pounds for a one-way ticket, and-fasten your seat belts!-only twenty pounds for the round trip? This apparent paradox arises from the fact that the earth’s gravitational field is conservative. I’m not talking politics; it simply means that whatever work you put into it, you can get out again, it you’re clever enough. A child’s swing, continuously interchanging height and speed, demonstrates this principle.

It requires a mere 1,500 kilowatt-hours of energy to put an average person into orbit, and if you’re a good customer your friendly electricity board will sell that to you for about a hundred pounds. When you make the return trip, the earth’s gravity will give all your energy back to you...as indeed it does to the space shuttle when it re-enters. And what does the shuttle do with all its expensively acquired millions of kilowatt-years? It just throws them away, heating up the atmosphere. What a scandalous waste! In theory it should be possible to recover at least 80 per cent of the return energy; hence the modest twenty pounds just quoted for the round trip.

Theory is all very well, but how could this be achieved in practice? At the moment, only one method is known-the space elevator, invented by the Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov. It’s a delightfully simple idea: you lay a cable from a satellite hovering in stationary orbit to a point on the equator, and then you can run payloads up and down it, purely by electrical energy. Exactly as in the case of the elevator in a high-rise building, most of the energy can be recovered on the downward journey.

When Yuri-who I met in St Petersburg many years ago-wrote his paper back in 1960, the only material strong enough to build a space elevator was crystallised carbon. Unfortunately, diamond is seldom available in the multi-kiloton quantities needed for the job. Yet now we do have the right material, if only in the laboratory. And it’s still carbon-the tubular form of ‘Buckminsterfullerene’-C60, several hundred times stronger than steel!

In 1996, astronauts in the space shuttle Columbia conducted an experiment which may lead to the elevator, by lowering mile-long cables (‘tethers’) into space. They also carried with them my 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise, in which I very pessimistically placed the actual construction in the 24th century. A photograph of Fountains, floating weightless beside mission specialist Jeff Hoffman, now has pride of place on my office wall.

And here’s a truly astonishing coincidence. When I recorded Fountains on a 12" LP (remember them?), the sleeve notes were written by Buckminster Fuller himself; he drew a sketch showing the elevator reaching up from Sri Lanka to the stationary orbit. What a shame he never lived to see the discovery of the material which’ll make it possible-and which now bears his name!

Yet even when we do have cheap and easy access to orbit, we’ll still need some on-board method of propulsion to venture further into space. Rockets, or similar devices, will be with us for quite a while yet. However, I suspect that they’ll eventually play the same role in astronautics that the balloon did in aeronautics.

Star Trek and its numerous spin-offs have long featured mysterious, seldom-explained ‘Space Drives’ which can whisk their characters from one solar system to the next between installments. Although such visions may be a bit too optimistic, recent work in far-out physics suggests that propulsion devices not depending on the rocket principle may be possible. Recently NASA set up an ‘Advanced Concepts Institute’ to look into this and similar science-fictional ideas. Some of these studies will pay off-but no one knows which, or when. It may take another century: on the other hand, at this very moment neighbours of a mad inventor may be looking up through a hole in his roof, wondering what’s happened to him...

So what I am predicting is that some day the main cost of space travel will be for catering and in-flight movies-not fuel! In terms of energy, it will be far cheaper than air travel, where the engines have to fight enormous drag-forces every inch of the way.

And now, in the closing decade of this century, we have found the best reason of all for developing space technologies. The grandstand view we had of the earth-sized explosions comet Shoemaker-Levy created on Jupiter was a dramatic reminder of what has happened many times on this planet-and will happen again, unless we do something to avoid it.

A quarter of a century ago, in Rendezvous with Rama, I coined the name ‘Spaceguard’ for a defensive system against such cosmic projectiles. I’m delighted the name has struck, and there now are Spaceguard Foundations all over the world, trying to assess the danger of asteroid or comet impact. Those who criticise such efforts and think they should remain in Hollywood, should remember the dinosaurs became extinct as they didn’t have a space programme! If we fail to learn from their example, we’ll deserve the same fate.

And as rocket pioneer Kraff Ehricke put it many years ago: "If God had intended us to explore space-he’d have given us a Moon." Can anyone imagine that the impulse that brought the human race out of Africa will fail, at the very moment when the greatest of all frontiers has opened up? Of course, there may be peril as well as promise among the stars; perhaps the Galactic Bureau of Vermin Control-alarmed by fifty years of our radio and TV programmes-may already have decided that the time is ripe for some cosmic cleansing. On the other hand, if we are allowed to do so, we may spread out across the universe, establishing brave new societies and brilliant cultures, hopefully learning from the mistakes we have made on this Earth.

A thousand years from now, for the vast majority of the human race, the Home Planet may be a world of legends, lost among the star-fields of constellations we would never recognise.

© Arthur C. Clarke
( One of the most celebrated science fiction writers of our time, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, 82, has authored more than sixty books and has more than 50 million copies in print. His bestsellers include, among others, Childhood’s End, 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Ghost from the Grand Banks. He is also the inventor of the idea of the communication satellite. He has lived in Colombo since 1956.)