Robert Zubrin, The Case for Space (Prometheus Books, 2019)
Reviewed by Richard Schulman
This Sunday, July 21st, is a bittersweet anniversary. The sweet side of the remembrance is that it’s the fiftieth anniversary of the date the first humans — US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin — walked on the Moon. The bitter side is famously summed up by Buzz Aldrin’s “You Promised me Mars colonies. Instead, I got Facebook.”
Dr. Robert Zubrin, president of The Mars Society, polymath author and engineer, explains why the dream of Aldrin, President Trump, and millions of Americans wasn’t realized by now by NASA. Zubrin has written a handbook – make that the handbook – for not only returning to the Moon, colonizing Mars, mining the asteroids, outer planets and their moons, but even setting out for the nearest stars and their planetary systems. How this can be done is explained using presently understood science, not science fiction. Zubrin explains why this is a national priority rather than just a “nice thing to do eventually”: the US is the bulwark of the individual freedoms large numbers of the planet’s humans presently enjoy. Those freedoms would cease to exist if China were to dominate space in lieu of the US.
That competition, as in the earlier competition with the USSR to land humans on the Moon, will recruit and inspire a new generation of scientists in the US and other nations. The scientists and entrepreneurs who created the personal computer and smart phone and who went on to advanced degrees in STEM fields were the kids of several decades ago who were inspired by the promise of exploring new worlds beyond the Earth. The number of US graduates in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) rose then and have plummeted since. With space exploration, travel, and settlement back as a national priority, a new upsurge in science enrollments can be anticipated, along with many new technologies as the byproducts of the exploration and colonization of the solar system.
Human exploration and settlement of the solar system and beyond is the new frontier, Zubrin writes, the disappearance of which in late 19th century America historian Frederick Jackson Turner mourned in a famous speech to the American Historical Association “more than 125 years ago”:
The Turner thesis was an intellectual bombshell, which within a few years created an entire school of historians who proceeded to demonstrate that not only American culture but the Western progressive humanist civilization that America generally represented in its most distilled form resulted from the great frontier of global settlement opened to Europe by the age of exploration….[T]hroughout recorded human history, the most progressive cultures have been the ‘Sea People,’ such as the Minoans, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, diaspora Jews, Italian Renaissance city-states, the Hanseatic League, the Dutch, the British, and the Americans, whose leading elements constantly accepted new challenges by engaging in long-range (typically maritime) trade and/or exploration….[I]t is no coincidence that the blossoming of classical Greek culture occurred during and immediately following their age of Mediterranean colonization, or that the fantastic explosion of innovation in European culture that transformed…relatively static medieval Christendom into hyperdynamic and globally dominant Western civilization occurred simultaneously with the West’s age of discovery and colonization. The most extreme example of the stimulus of frontier shock is North American civilization, which was developed as a culture of innovation, antitraditionalism, optimism, individualism, and freedom based on…its vast and constantly changing frontier.”
Human settlement of space, Zubrin adds, will provide an insurance policy for our species should a large asteroid or thermonuclear warfare overcome Earth. Our space pioneers will carry on the species in their extra-terrestial outposts of freedom.
Malthusian ideas of Earth becoming overpopulated and resources becoming exhausted will have even less credibility than they already merit once the whole universe is open to settlement and development. The Case for Space has an ingenious proposal that will help accelerate this. Zubrin recommends that the US open a land-title office for mining claims on asteroid real estate. The titles will take on value as space ships and plans for reaching the asteroids take shape, thus encouraging investments in the enabling technologies.
Mars, Zubrin writes, would provide an ideal base camp for launching asteroidal mining missions. He describes how Mars could be terraformed to make it more Earth-like over a period of several decades. He introduces his chapter on terraforming with a delightful story of how, while mountain climbing, he couldn’t figure out how the immobile conifers had managed to transport their pine cones up the steep rocky slopes close to the summits. Well, they didn’t, he writes. That was done by the chipmunks he watched deliberately carrying the cones uphill in order to expand their habitat. Humankind, it would seem, is a late comer to terraforming.
So, how did human space travel somehow get back on the agenda after fifty years of no progress? Dr. Zubrin describes how conversations he held with Elon Musk helped inspire the latter to commit himself to founding SpaceX to turn space travel into an affordable reality. By successfully creating reusable rocket stages, Musk has cheapened the cost of launching satellites into Earth orbit by a factor of ten, with more to come. In so doing, he inspired other private-sector entrepreneurs, such as Jeff Bezos, to launch their own competitive operations. By having drastically reduced costs, rocket launches are no longer a government monopoly. In fact, SpaceX has inspired entrepreneurs to enter other fields previously thought too expensive for private enterprise, such as fusion power development.
Space exploration is key to advancing basic science
Zubrin explains that after the 1969 Moon landings, NASA did an outstanding job in pursuing space science because it was tightly focused on achieving specific objectives – launching space telescopes such as the Hubble and Kepler and investigating the geology of the planets and their moons through landings and fly-bys. He notes that
There is no bettter place to do astronomy than space. Our existing space observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, have already revolutionized our knowledge of the universe. Indeed, Hubble discovered dark energy, which comprises 70 percent of the substance of the cosmos, and which is responsible for a fifth force of nature (beyond the previously known gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear forces) that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. So while scientists before Hubble’s 1990 launch thought they pretty much knew the nature and laws of the universe, without the space telescope, we today would be completely unaware of most of what exists…In addition, Hubble made numerous other discoveries bearing on the origin of planets, stars, galaxies, and quasars…
The Kepler Space Telescope has discovered thousands of extra solar planetary systems, proving that, far from being the exception, families of planets accompanying stars of every type are virtually the rule.
This makes it far more likely that there is life out there.
Space is ideal for telescopes, Zubrin explains. There’s no atmosphere to distort the view. The Moon, in particular, would be an excellent candidate for “an array of telescopes…stationed across the Moon’s diameter” to “achieve a resolution nearly a million times better than Hubble.”
There are many important longstanding unsolved problems in physics. As the discovery of dark matter already indicates, future advances in the understanding and mastery of nature are likely to come from humankind’s ventures into the solar system and the cosmos beyond.
NASA’s 50-year failure to advance human space travel
Why has NASA been so productive in space science but not human travel? NASA pursued a purpose-driven process to determine the best science projects, research teams, and vendors. But with regard to human space travel, Zubrin writes, NASA’s programs were vendor-driven, set no ambitious goals and timetables, and hired Congressionally-favored contractors on a cost-plus basis, so that contractors’ incentives were to expand costs to increase profits and to drag out their contracts. By contrast, in the private sector, or with competitive bidding for fixed dollar amounts, vendors’ incentives are to increase profits by reducing costs and hastening completion of contracts.
(Alas, the Pentagon’s huge budget is similarly bloated by cost-plus contracting.)
Dr. Zubrin wants to put NASA back on course. He explains in The Case for Space and elsewhere why the Trump administration should drop NASA’s plans for a Lunar Gateway – a space station in Moon orbit. This is not only unnecessary, but a vendor-driven slab of pork, a waste of billions of dollars and, worse, an obstacle to subsequent cost-effective human missions to the Moon and Mars. Zubrin provides his own widely-respected Moon Direct and Mars Direct plans as less-expensive, sooner-realized alternatives.
Benefits for the earth-bound
Rocket development for space travel will have tangible, exciting benefits for those of us remaining on Earth. One of those near-term benefits — as an offshoot of the cheapening of rocket travel by SpaceX and its anticipated competitors — will be drastically shortened air travel times between cities on Earth. Launching satellites into Earth orbit won’t provide sufficient business for a competitive rocket industry, but reduced-cost travel by reusable rockets will. It will make available one-hour travel between any two points on Earth feasible and affordable – at first by business travelers and later by the rest of us. That should do for the rocket industry what government mail contracts did for launching a commercial airline industry.
With Boeing temporarily in the doldrums with the grounding of the 737 Max – a major blow to exports and the US balance of payments — the administration will presumably do all it can to insure that regulatory obstacles don’t impede entrepreneurial efforts by our Musks, Bezoses, and other entrants to revolutionize domestic air travel. President Trump meanwhile seems to be all-aboard with the Mars Direct program developed by Dr. Zubrin and presented in his earlier The Case for Mars and with updates in The Case for Space. The internet publication The Verge reports that
On June 7th, Trump tweeted that “NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon,” arguing we had already been there 50 years ago. “They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!,” he wrote….Trump made his interest in Mars much clearer today [July 19th at a moon landing commemoration event], asking [NASA administrator] Jim Bridenstine to explain NASA’s Moon plans and why they were necessary. He asked Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins his thoughts, to which Collins replied, “Mars direct,” indicating NASA should go straight to Mars and bypass the Moon altogether. “It seems to me Mars direct,” Trump replied. “I mean, who knows better than these people. They’ve been doing this stuff for a long time. What about the concept of Mars direct?”
The president is clearly familiar with and aligned by preference with the Mars Direct plan authored by Zubrin and endorsed by astronauts Aldrin, Collins and others. He may not realize to what extent NASA’s human space travel plans continue to be sabotaged by Congressional appropriators carrying water for Boeing and Lockheed Martin. But the US will never get humans to either the Moon or Mars astride the white elephants NASA is presently sponsoring. The Case for Space could be the president’s 2020 briefing book for not only keeping America great but making it the greatest.
Hat tips: Eaglebeak and L.C.
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