textfiles/sf/esf1

Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.sf.ca.us

Literary Freeware: Not For Commercial Use
From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, 
June 1992
F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753  $26/yr; outside USA $31/yr

F&SF Science Column #1

OUTER CYBERSPACE

	Dreaming of space-flight, and predicting its future, have 
always been favorite pastimes of science fiction.    In my first science 
column for F&SF, I can't resist the urge to contribute a bit to this 
grand tradition.  
	A science-fiction writer in 1991 has a profound advantage over 
the genre's  pioneers.  Nowadays, space-exploration has a past as 
well as a future.   "The conquest of space"  can be judged today, not 
just by dreams, but by a real-life track record.
	Some people sincerely believe that humanity's destiny lies in the 
stars, and that humankind evolved from the primordial slime in order 
to people the galaxy.   These are interesting notions:  mystical and 
powerful ideas with an almost religious appeal.  They also smack a 
little of Marxist historical determinism, which is one reason why the 
Soviets found them particularly attractive.  
	Americans can appreciate mystical blue-sky rhetoric as well as 
anybody, but the philosophical  glamor of "storming the cosmos" 
wasn't enough to motivate an American space program all by itself.  
Instead, the Space Race was a creation of the Cold War --  its course 
was firmly set in the late '50s and early '60s.   Americans went into 
space *because* the Soviets had gone into space, and because the 
Soviets were using Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin to make a case that 
their way of life was superior to capitalism.   
	The Space Race was a symbolic tournament for the newfangled 
intercontinental rockets whose primary purpose (up to that point) had 
been as instruments of war.   The Space Race was the harmless, 
symbolic, touch-football version of World War III.   For this reason 
alone:  that it did no harm, and helped avert a worse clash --  in my 
opinion, the Space Race was worth every cent.  But the fact that it was 
a political competition had certain strange implications.
	Because of this political aspect, NASA's primary product was 
never actual "space exploration."  Instead, NASA produced public-
relations spectaculars.   The Apollo project was the premiere example.  
The astonishing feat of landing men on the moon was a tremendous 
public-relations achievement, and it pretty much crushed the Soviet 
opposition, at least as far as "space-racing" went.   
	On the other hand, like most "spectaculars," Apollo delivered 
rather little in the way of permanent achievement.   There was flag-
waving, speeches, and plaque-laying; a lot of wonderful TV coverage; 
and then the works went into mothballs.   We no longer have the 
capacity to fly human beings to the moon.  No one else seems 
particularly interested in repeating this feat, either; even though the 
Europeans, Indians, Chinese and Japanese all have their own space 
programs today.   (Even the Arabs, Canadians, Australians and 
Indonesians have their own satellites now.)	
	In 1991, NASA remains firmly in the grip of the "Apollo 
Paradigm."   The assumption was (and is) that only large, spectacular 
missions with human crews aboard can secure political support for 
NASA, and deliver the necessary funding to support its eleven-billion-
dollar-a-year bureaucracy.  "No Buck Rogers, no bucks."  
	The march of science -- the urge to actually find things out 
about our solar system and our universe -- has never been the driving 
force for NASA.   NASA has been a very political animal; the space-
science community has fed on its scraps. 
	Unfortunately for NASA, a few historical home truths are 
catching up with the high-tech white-knights. 
	First and foremost, the Space Race is over.   There is no more 
need for this particular tournament in 1992,  because the Soviet 
opposition is in abject ruins.   The Americans won the Cold War.  In 
1992, everyone in the world knows this.  And yet NASA is still running 
space-race victory laps.  
	What's worse, the Space Shuttle, one of which blew up in 1986, 
is clearly a white elephant.   The Shuttle is overly complex,  over-
designed, the creature of bureaucratic decision-making which tried to 
provide all things for all constituents, and ended-up with an 
unworkable monster.   The Shuttle was grotesquely over-promoted, 
and it will never fulfill the outrageous promises made for it in the '70s.  
It's not and never will be a "space truck."  It's rather more like a Ming 
vase.
	Space Station Freedom has very similar difficulties.  It costs far 
too much, and is destroying other and more useful possibilities for 
space activity.  Since the Shuttle takes up half NASA's current budget, 
the Shuttle and the Space Station together will devour most *all* of 
NASA's budget for *years to come*  -- barring unlikely large-scale 
increases in funding.    
	Even as a political stage-show, the Space Station is a bad bet, 
because the Space Station cannot capture the public imagination.   
Very few people are honestly  excited about this prospect.  The Soviets 
*already have* a space station.  They've had a space station for years 
now.  Nobody cares about it.  It never gets headlines.  It inspires not 
awe but tepid public indifference.  Rumor has it that the Soviets (or 
rather, the *former* Soviets)  are willing to sell their "Space Station 
Peace" to any bidder for eight hundred million dollars, about one 
fortieth of what "Space Station Freedom" will cost -- and nobody can 
be bothered to buy it!
	Manned space exploration itself has been oversold.  Space-
flight is simply not like other forms of "exploring."   "Exploring" 
generally implies that you're going to venture out someplace, and 
tangle hand-to-hand with wonderful stuff you know nothing about.   
Manned space flight, on the other hand, is one of the most closely 
regimented of human activities.  Most everything that is to happen on 
a manned space flight is already known far in advance.  (Anything not 
predicted, not carefully calculated beforehand, is very likely to be a 
lethal catastrophe.)   
	Reading the personal accounts of astronauts does not reveal 
much in the way of "adventure" as that idea has been generally 
understood.  On the contrary, the historical and personal record 
reveals that astronauts are highly trained technicians whose primary 
motivation is not to "boldly go where no one has gone before," but 
rather to do *exactly what is necessary* and above all *not to mess up 
the hardware.*  
	Astronauts are not like Lewis and Clark.   Astronauts are the 
tiny peak of a vast human pyramid of earth-bound technicians and  
mission micro-managers.   They are kept on a very tight 
(*necessarily* tight)  electronic leash by Ground Control.  And they 
are separated from the environments they explore by a thick chrysalis 
of space-suits and space vehicles.  They don't tackle the challenges of 
alien environments, hand-to-hand -- instead, they mostly  tackle the 
challenges of their own complex and expensive life-support 
machinery.
	The years of manned space-flight have provided us with the 
interesting discovery that life in free-fall is not very good for people.  
People in free-fall lose calcium from their bones -- about half a percent 
of it per month.   Having calcium leach out of one's bones is the same 
grim phenomenon that causes osteoporosis in the elderly -- 
"dowager's hump."   It makes one's bones brittle.   No one knows quite 
how bad this syndrome can get, since no one has been in orbit much 
longer than a year;  but after a year, the loss of calcium shows no 
particular sign of slowing down.   The human heart shrinks in free-
fall, along with a general loss of muscle tone and muscle mass.   This 
loss of muscle, over a period of months in orbit, causes astronauts and 
cosmonauts to feel generally run-down and feeble.   
	There are other syndromes as well.  Lack of gravity causes 
blood to pool in the head and upper chest, producing the pumpkin-
faced look familiar from Shuttle videos.   Eventually, the body reacts 
to this congestion by reducing the volume of blood.  The long-term 
effects of this are poorly understood.  About this time, red blood cell 
production falls off in the bone marrow.  Those red blood cells which 
are produced in free-fall tend to be interestingly malformed.
	And then, of course, there's the radiation hazard.  No one in 
space has been severely nuked yet, but if a solar flare caught a crew in 
deep space, the results could be lethal.
	These are not insurmountable medical challenges, but they 
*are* real problems in real-life space experience.  Actually, it's rather 
surprising that an organism that evolved for billions of years in 
gravity can survive *at all* in free-fall.  It's a tribute to human 
strength and  plasticity that we can survive and thrive for quite a 
while without any gravity.  However, we now know what it would be 
like to settle in space for long periods.  It's neither easy nor pleasant. 
	And yet, NASA is still committed to putting people in space.  
They're not quite sure why people should go there, nor what people 
will do in space once they're there, but they are bound and determined 
to do this despite all obstacles.
	If there were big money to be made from settling people in 
space, that would be a different prospect.   A  commercial  career in 
free-fall would probably be safer, happier, and more rewarding than, 
say, bomb-disposal, or test-pilot work, or maybe even coal-mining.   
But the only real moneymaker in space commerce (to date, at least) is 
the communications satellite industry.   The comsat industry wants 
nothing to do with people in orbit.   
	Consider this:  it costs $200 million to make one shuttle flight.  
For $200 million you can start your own communications satellite 
business, just like GE, AT&T, GTE and Hughes Aircraft.   You can join 
the global Intelsat consortium and make a hefty 14%  regulated profit 
in the telecommunications business, year after year.  You can do quite 
well by "space commerce," thank you very much, and thousands of 
people thrive today by commercializing space.  But the Space Shuttle, 
with humans aboard, costs $30 million a day!   There's nothing you can 
make or do on the Shuttle that will remotely repay that investment.   
After years of Shuttle flights, there is still not one single serious 
commercial industry anywhere whose business it is to rent workspace 
or make products or services on the Shuttle.
	The era of manned spectaculars is visibly dying by inches.  It's 
interesting to note that a quarter of the top and middle management 
of NASA, the heroes of Apollo and its stalwarts of tradition, are 
currently eligible for retirement.  By the turn of the century, more than 
three-quarters of the old guard will be gone.
	This grim and rather cynical recital may seem a dismal prospect 
for space enthusiasts, but the situation's not actually all that dismal at 
all.  In the meantime, unmanned space development has quietly 
continued apace.  It's a little known fact that America's *military* 
space budget today is *twice the size* of NASA's entire budget!   This 
is the poorly publicized, hush-hush, national security budget for 
militarily vital technologies like America's "national technical means 
of verification," i.e. spy satellites.  And then there are military 
navigational aids like Navstar, a relatively obscure but very 
impressive national asset.   The much-promoted Strategic Defence 
Initiative is a Cold War boondoggle, and SDI is almost surely not long 
for this world, in either budgets or rhetoric  -- but both Navstar and 
spy satellites have very promising futures, in and/or out of the 
military.   They promise and deliver solid and useful achievements, 
and are in no danger of being abandoned.   
	And  communications satellites have come a very long way since 
Telstar;  the Intelsat 6 model, for instance, can carry thirty thousand 
simultaneous phone calls plus three channels of cable television.   
There is enormous room for technical improvement in comsat 
technologies; they have a well-established market, much pent-up 
demand, and are likely to improve drastically in the future.  (The 
satellite launch business is no longer a superpower monopoly; comsats 
are being launched  by Chinese and Europeans.  Newly independent 
Kazakhstan, home of the Soviet launching facilities at Baikonur, is 
anxious to enter the business.)     
	Weather satellites have proven vital to public safety and 
commercial prosperity.   NASA or no NASA, money will be found to 
keep weather satellites in orbit and improve them technically -- not 
for reasons of national prestige or flag-waving status, but because it 
makes a lot of common sense and it really pays.
	But  a look at the budget decisions for 1992 shows that the 
Apollo Paradigm still rules at NASA.   NASA is still utterly determined 
to put human beings in space, and actual space science gravely suffers 
for this decision.  Planetary exploration,  life science missions, and 
astronomical surveys (all unmanned) have been cancelled, or 
curtailed, or delayed in the1992 budget.  All this, in the hope of 
continuing the big-ticket manned 50-billion-dollar Space Shuttle, and 
of building the manned 30-billion-dollar Space Station Freedom.   
	The dire list of NASA's sacrifices for 1992 includes an asteroid 
probe; an advanced x-ray astronomy facility; a space infrared 
telescope; and an orbital unmanned solar laboratory.   We would have 
learned a very great deal from these projects  (assuming that they 
would have actually worked).  The Shuttle and the Station, in stark 
contrast, will show us very little that we haven't already seen.
	There is nothing inevitable about these decisions, about this 
strategy.  With imagination, with a change of emphasis, the 
exploration of space could take a very different course.
   	In 1951, when writing his seminal non-fiction work THE 
EXPLORATION OF SPACE, Arthur C. Clarke created a fine 
imaginative scenario of unmanned spaceflight.  
	"Let us imagine that such a vehicle is circling Mars," Clarke 
speculated.  "Under the guidance of a tiny yet extremely complex 
electronic brain, the missile is now surveying the planet at close 
quarters.  A camera is photographing the landscape below, and the 
resulting pictures are being transmitted to the distant Earth along a 
narrow radio beam.  It is unlikely that true television will be possible, 
with an apparatus as small as this, over such ranges.  The best that 
could be expected is that still pictures could be transmitted at intervals 
of a few minutes, which would be quite adequate for most purposes."
	This is probably as close as a science fiction writer can come to 
true prescience.   It's astonishingly close to the  true-life facts of the 
early Mars probes.  Mr. Clarke well understood the principles and 
possibilities of interplanetary rocketry, but like the rest of mankind in 
1951, he somewhat underestimated the long-term potentials of that 
"tiny but extremely complex electronic brain" --  as well as that of 
"true television."    In the 1990s, the technologies of rocketry have 
effectively stalled; but the technologies of "electronic brains" and 
electronic media are exploding exponentially.     
	Advances in computers and communications now make it 
possible to speculate on the future of "space exploration" along 
entirely novel lines.   Let us now imagine that Mars is under thorough 
exploration, sometime in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.   
However, there is no "Martian colony."  There are no three-stage 
rockets, no pressure-domes, no tractor-trailers, no human settlers.  
	Instead, there are hundreds of insect-sized robots, every one of 
them equipped not merely with "true television," but something much 
more advanced.   They are equipped for *telepresence.*  A human 
operator can see what they see, hear what they hear, even guide them 
about at will (granted, of course, that there is a steep transmission 
lag).    These micro-rovers, crammed with cheap microchips and laser 
photo-optics, are so exquisitely monitored that one can actually *feel* 
the Martian grit beneath their little scuttling claws.  Piloting one of 
these babies down the Valles Marineris, or perhaps some unknown 
cranny of the Moon -- now *that* really feels like "exploration."  If 
they were cheap enough, you could dune-buggy them. 
	No one lives in space stations, in this scenario.  Instead, our 
entire solar system is saturated with cheap monitoring devices.  There 
are no "rockets"  any more.  Most of these robot surrogates weigh less 
than a kilogram.   They  are fired into orbit by small rail-guns mounted 
on high-flying aircraft.  Or perhaps they're launched by laser-ignition:  
ground-based heat-beams that focus on small reaction-chambers and 
provide their thrust.   They might even be literally shot into orbit by 
Jules Vernian "space guns" that use the intriguing, dirt-cheap 
technology of Gerald Bull's Iraqi "super-cannon."   This wacky but 
promising technique would be utterly impractical for launching human 
beings, since the acceleration g-load would shatter every bone in their 
bodies; but these little machines are *tough.*
	And small robots  have many other advantages.  Unlike manned 
craft, robots can go into harm's way:  into Jupiter's radiation belts, or 
into the shrapnel-heavy rings of Saturn, or onto the acid-bitten 
smoldering surface of Venus.   They stay on their missions, 
operational, not for mere days or weeks, but for decades.   They are 
extensions, not of human population, but of human senses.
	And because they are small and numerous, they should be 
cheap.   The entire point of  this scenario  is to create a new kind of 
space-probe that is cheap, small, disposable, and numerous: as cheap 
and disposable as their parent technologies, microchips and video, 
while taking advantage of new materials like carbon-fiber, fiber-
optics, ceramic, and artificial diamond.  
	The core idea of this particular vision is "fast, cheap, and out of 
control."    Instead of gigantic, costly, ultra-high-tech, one-shot efforts 
like NASA's Hubble Telescope (crippled by bad optics) or NASA's 
Galileo (currently crippled by a flaw in its communications antenna)  
these micro-rovers are cheap, and legion, and everywhere.   They get 
crippled every day; but it doesn't matter much; there are hundreds 
more, and no one's life is at stake.   People, even quite ordinary people, 
*rent time on them*  in much the same way that you would pay for 
satellite cable-TV service.   If you want to know what Neptune looks 
like today, you just call up a data center and *have a look for 
yourself.*
	This is a concept that would truly involve "the public" in space 
exploration, rather than the necessarily tiny elite of astronauts.  This 
is a potential benefit that we might derive from abandoning the 
expensive practice of launching actual human bodies into space.  We 
might find a useful analogy in the computer revolution:  "mainframe" 
space exploration, run by a NASA elite in labcoats, is replaced by a 
"personal" space exploration run by grad students and even hobbyists.   
	In this scenario, "space exploration" becomes similar to other 
digitized, computer-assisted media environments: scientific 
visualization, computer graphics, virtual reality, telepresence.  The 
solar system is saturated, not by people, but by *media coverage.  
Outer space becomes *outer cyberspace.*
	Whether this scenario is "realistic" isn't clear as yet.  It's just a 
science-fictional dream, a vision for the exploration of space:  
*circumsolar telepresence.*   As always, much depends on 
circumstance, lucky accidents, and imponderables like political will.   
What does seem clear, however, is that NASA's own current plans  are 
terribly far-fetched:  they have outlived all contact with the political, 
economic,  social and even technical realities of the 1990s.   There is no 
longer any real point in shipping human beings into space in order to 
wave flags.  
	"Exploring space" is not an "unrealistic" idea.   That much, at 
least, has already been proven.  The struggle now is over why and 
how and to what end.  True, "exploring space" is not as "important" 
as was the life-and-death Space Race struggle for Cold War pre-
eminence.   Space science cannot realistically expect to command the 
huge sums that NASA commanded in the service of American political 
prestige.   That era is simply gone; it's history now.   
	However:  astronomy does count.  There is a very deep and 
genuine interest in these topics.   An interest in the stars and planets is 
not a fluke, it's not freakish.  Astronomy is the most ancient of human 
sciences.  It's deeply rooted in the human psyche, has great historical 
continuity, and is spread all over the world.   It has its own 
constituency, and if its plans were modest and workable, and played 
to visible strengths, they might well succeed brilliantly.
	The world doesn't actually need NASA's billions to learn about 
our solar system.   Real, honest-to-goodness "space exploration" 
never got more than a fraction of NASA's budget in the first place. 
	Projects of this sort would no longer be created by gigantic 
federal military-industrial bureaucracies.  Micro-rover projects could 
be carried out by universities, astronomy departments, and small-
scale research consortia.   It would play from the impressive strengths 
of the thriving communications and computer tech of the nineties, 
rather than the dying, centralized, militarized, politicized rocket-tech 
of the sixties.
	The task at hand is to create a change in the climate of opinion 
about the true potentials of "space exploration."   Space exploration, 
like the rest of us, grew up in the Cold War; like the rest of us, it must 
now find a new way to live.  And, as history has proven, science fiction 
has a very real and influential role in space exploration.   History 
shows that true space exploration is not about budgets.  It's about 
vision.  At its heart it has always been about vision.  
	Let's create the vision.