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Quote of the Day: The Cradle of Humanity
“The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.” – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
I work on the Lunar Gateway program. This is a proposed crewed platform that will trail the Moon and support crewed Moon missions. It is interesting work, and it sounds glamorous, but my job is prosaic. I am part of a team analyzing the data needs of Gateway. Last week I was given an unusual assignment. My boss’s boss was given a document to review and comment on. As is typical for these types of assignments, he gave the job to my boss. Due to a combination of people being absent and others being busy, he passed it on to me.
The document contained the high-level requirements for equipment to be used to explore the Lunar surface: This includes the Lunar surface spacesuits, the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (think of a two-seat lunar dune buggy), and the Pressurized Rover (analogous to a four-seat off-road sedan). Send your comments in by next Tuesday, I was told.
For those not engineers, technicians, or mechanics, requirements are the rules specifying the performance of a system. Systems are designed to meet those requirements. As an example, consider a car. It is built to meet requirements as to the number of people it can hold, how much cargo it can carry, gas mileage, and emissions standards. Want a radio or wireless capability for your car? That has to be in the requirements. That brake light at the back of the roof of your car? The result of a requirement. I was being asked to review the requirements of the surface mobility systems for completeness and adequacy.
What I found remarkable was the request to review the requirements. Reviewing requirements documents is part of what I do. Rather, I marveled at what I was reviewing; vehicles to explore the lunar surface. In the 1950s, when I was born, vehicles to roam the Lunar surface were science fiction. Yes, Colliers had published illustrated articles by Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley outlining their vision of exploring the Moon’s surface, but it still ranked as science fiction to many.
The Moon Colony from the Colliers series
I grew up during the Space Race, which culminated in the Apollo Moon landings of 1969-72. Despite the Moon buggy, Lunar exploration was still more science fiction than fact. I started working on the Shuttle program in 1979. At the time, most of us at NASA believed we would soon return to the Moon. After all, we had walked on it less than ten years earlier. None of us believed it would not be until well into the 21st century that new efforts to take manned spacecraft (it was still manned back then, not crewed) beyond low Earth orbit would begin.
Now I was looking at a document defining the performance of lunar surface vehicles and systems. As part of my job. I was to provide comment on it and improve the requirements. The science fiction I had read in my youth is turning into reality. I was part of that.
Skeptics will likely say it will never happen. That NASA does not have what it takes to return to the Moon or reach Mars. They may be right about NASA, but humans on Moon and Mars will happen, and sooner rather than later. Commercial companies are already putting people into space. India plans to launch its first crewed vehicle into Earth orbit by the end of this decade. China has a space station second only to ISS, and larger than the forthcoming Lunar Gateway. It is still growing. And the Chinese have their own plans to put humans on the Moon (the superior Han Chinese, in their view) and build outposts there. The issue is no longer if, but rather who?
Tsiolkovsky was right. Mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.
Published in Group Writing
Only one problem with your idea: Climate change fanatics will support us moving away from Gaia, not covering more of Gaia. We need to take support where we can get it. :)
a) Screw ’em. If an Elonesque billionaire were to foot the bill to build a private colony in Antarctica, who’s gonna stop ’em? Would the countries that pretend to have claims on Antarctic territory actually use force to evict colonists? I doubt it. Well maybe Russia, but they could likely be bought off.
b) I think you underestimate the ability of environmental fanatics to come up with reasons to ban human colonization of the Moon and Mars.
;-)
Fair point. No reasoning required.
Several years ago I wrote an article for Ad Astra about colonizing the Moon. In it I discussed using strip mining to extract resources. The editor asked me to remove that because it might upset environmentalists reading the article. I pointed out there would be no environmental damage. The Moon was a dead, sterile body. I was told that didn’t matter.
Yes but of course a base on either the Moon or on Mars would be able to sustain itself far sooner than they would be able to have their own infrastructure for a return trip.
Hmm, doesn’t that sound like saying there should never be a Mercury program until there is an Apollo program FIRST?
Except for their argument that rocket launches etc injure Gaia.
I don’t think a permanent colony on the moon – versus operating bases etc with rotating personnel – would be a good idea until there is some form of artificial gravity developed, and I don’t mean just occasional visits to a centrifuge etc. What I’ve seen so far is that human health doesn’t do well in long-term low or zero gravity. Mars is less of a problem since it has almost 3x the gravity of the Moon, but still might be some concerns.
Small price for final departure.
Even without strip mining, permanent habitation on the Earth-facing side of the moon will irrevocably alter the night sky.
Humans still haven’t cracked how to build, maintain, and coexist in a self-sustaining closed system facility on Earth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
Maybe that could be offset by installing a huge stadium-style display that could show soothing nighttime messages.
No, because Apollo was primarily about beating the Russians rather than being about practical benefits of humans on the moon.
It have read it argued that Kennedy’s preferred mission was to put a permanent space station in Earth orbit by 1969, but the big brained space experts said it was impossible, that he should set his sights lower, and that going to the moon would be way easier.
Also, I wrote “almost” for a reason. If a few
foolhardybrave souls wanna let Elon send them on a one-way trip to Space Madness, that’s their prerogative.I simply won’t see it as “solving the problem” until humanity has first cracked the problem of how to live sustainably inside an artificial closed system. Getting to Mars is the easy part.
I think that the space dream are utopian nonsense, leading to wasteful spending that could otherwise be used to make our home better.
Home, not cradle. The rhetorical trick on the quote is, ironically, infantile, in my view. This is ironic because the silly cradle analogy suggests that it is the sensible adults who are infants wanting to stay in the cradle.
I don’t think Tsiolkovsky was being infantile, necessarily. After all, forever is a very long time. The quote doesn’t include a deadline.
The infantile folk are those who use his quotation to manufacture a sense of urgency, like “humanity’s gonna go extinct if we don’t colonize Mars RIGHT NOW! The next ELA could happen any day now!”
That’s something of a… misnomer, or something… because Biosphere 2 was supposed to be “natural” and not rely on high-technology. Any type of self-sustaining colony on the Moon, especially, would rely on a lot of technology. The question then is only if the colony could be sustained just on materials from the Moon, without having to get oxygen or whatever imported from Earth.
Wait for it…
Total cost of the Apollo program was 25 billion. If it had been added to the Great Society spending, would things have been better?
Not as good as the 25 billion made life for the whole world really, thanks to resulting developments in electronics etc. Meanwhile, it would have been a drop in the bucket for Great Society spending.
We could do marvelous technological things when we pulled teams up from below, gave them their job and let them do it. Once successful, they left and their assistants took over so it had to die. Do we have enough creative bottom to pull up, or is it all bureaucrats? In academia? Probably not. Big business? Same answer. Will China or Germany do it? Not creatively with an open mind. When the largest piece of the economy is a parasitic bureaucracy that lives off everybody else strongly supported by private similar sorts, we have to begin more basically, primarily to save the potential to think along the lines posed here.
Years ago (I think it was the 25th anniversary of the first Moon landing) I remember looking at a cartoon picturing two people sitting on a park bench looking at the Moon. One was saying to the other, “Some said, now that we are there we need to keep going. Others said, no, that money should be used to fix things here on Earth. In the end, we did neither.”
That pretty well sums up my view of the “Fix Earth Firsters.” Like the poor, problems on Earth will always be with us. We will never fix all of them. Had those that came to the New World stayed in the Old World until everything got fixed there, the United States would not exist. Neither would the good that came with it. Perfection comes in Paradise and Hell, not in this world. Those that feel we cannot progress beyond Earth until everything is fixed here are like the servant who buried the talent lent for fear of losing it, rather than putting it to productive use.
It’s a very common view among those of limited imagination and foresight.
Wow! I wonder what will be the definition of a dirty job (the TV show) in the future that you are witnessing? What keeps you up at night?
According to a RAND study, the Apollo program returned six dollars to the economy for every dollar spent on it. How many other gummint programs can claim that, or anything close to it?
I can think of a lot of dirty jobs on the Moon and in permanent orbital habitats. For example, treating human solid waste. You need to sterilize it (easy enough – just set it out in the lunar day and the heat will treat it) and then mix it with lunar regolith to produce fertile soil. Because your other option is to ship 40 cubic yards of topsoil from Earth – and that will be prohibitively expensive.
Back on January 1, 1999, there was a comic strip, I don’t remember which one, where a husband and wife are sitting on the couch, talking.
“Well, it’s 1999.”
“Yep.”
“Isn’t Martin Landau supposed to be on the moon by now?”
If it had been used to cut taxes, on the other hand…
Was the study funded by NASA?
Don’t fool yourself. It would have been snarfled up by the Leviathan government.
$25 billion over however many years would have been a trivial tax cut, too.
And while the spending is long past, we continue to benefit from the advancements.