JR Hay

It was a few months ago that I read the 1966 work “The Moons a Harsh Mistress”. In Heinlein’s future Earth of 2075, Luna has become a resource-producing penial colony highly inspired by colonial America. Luna is a breadbasket for the world, launching massive shipping containers of wheat via catapult and letting the gravitational well of Earth do the rest. Aside from the science fiction trope that we English-speaking earthlings will forgo our celestial sister’s colloquial name in favor of her Latinization, it was an interesting and surprisingly scientifically watertight book. Some examples of the author’s attention to detail include the “loonies” loss of muscle and bone mass, the efficient shipping of wheat via orbital mechanics, and an early explanation of artificial intelligence.

 One critical plot point which goes to show the difference in thinking between Heinlein’s experience in 1966 and ours 58 years later is the fret of Earthly overpopulation and mass starvation. In 1966 this fear was at its peak in the collective psyche. Only two years later in 1968, Dr. Paul Ehrlich would release his book “The Population Bomb”, prophesying the end to come, filled with famine, overcrowding, and resource war. Two more years after that Dr. Borlaug would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on genetically modified resilient wheat variations which has been posited “as saving at least a billion lives” by his alma mater, the University of Minnesota. As the latter quarter of the twentieth century rolled on it was clear that these predictions of the sixties would not come to fruition, crop yields increased, and the rate of population growth slowed. We still face our fair share of turbulence ahead, such issues as climate change, global wealth inequality, and the degradation of mental and physical health. The idea of growing wheat surely sounds a lot more comical to me than it did to Heinlein’s audience of the late sixties.

What then do we project on the future of space travel to serve our most looming fears of today?  Well, several current projects come to mind.

What were working on today in the 21st Century

Starlink satellites, promise plug-and-play access to the internet almost anywhere on the planet. Global wealth inequality has led to highly varying infrastructure quality, even within wealthy countries, necessitating a push towards equitable internet access. This is especially important given a society which is growing ever more dependent economically and socially on high-bandwidth instant communication. This region of space between low earth to geospatial orbit will, I believe, continue for the next century to dominate as the most economically profitable. Like the crowded airspace and shipping lanes of our terrestrial world, coordinated planning and action will be necessary to avoid collisions of expensive equipment and even a possible Kessler Syndrome event. Perhaps soon collector satellites like the ESLA by Astroscale will sweep these orbital zones, accumulating dangerous debris before self-disintegrating in the atmosphere.

Another common reason to place objects into orbit is for pure science. Scientific satellites may not be economically viable outside of governments and academic institutions but they have been a large part of the space effort to date. Recently, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been getting all the glory, and rightfully so. One look at those magnificent images is enough for many to support the continued funding of such organizations for years to come. Projects like these inspired me to go into a scientific field and I don’t doubt they will continue to serve generations to come. I will note that the JWST orbits around Lagrange Point 2, a position that allows it to remain away from the sun year-round protecting its IR sensors. Large and costly telescopes are not the only instrumentation being put into space. Solar wind or space weather as it is often referred to, are the electromagnetic fluctuations which occur because of the fusion occurring in our sun. These solar flares can potentially cause major damage to our power and communications systems so understanding and predicting the radiation dispersal in our solar system is quite economically important.

              Coming back down to earth, climate change continues to be a global threat.  It is worsened in part by the change of the atmosphere’s gaseous recipe. One of the best ways to understand this recipe is spectrographic imagery taken in orbit. During my undergrad, I was lucky enough to sit in on a talk hosted at the University of Arizona by Christene Bradley, the Optics Lead on the EMIT project at JPL. She explained that space-based spectroscopic imaging can be used for a multitude of cases. EMIT which stands for Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation is an imaging spectrometer analyzing the spectrum of our atmosphere from the visible to SWIR range while affixed to the ISS. As the ISS orbits the earth EMIT is creating beautiful hyperspectral images which can be used not only to track dust movements but also other pollutants as they puff, mix, and disperse in our atmosphere. This is important information specifically for human health but also for the farming and mining industries. Satellites like these tell us more about our planet which can lead to better decision-making here on Earth.  

Now that I have mentioned the ISS I can’t dance around it. The International Space Station is now in its 25th year of service and looking forward to retirement around 2030. Besides being the largest structure ever assembled in space it was never able to generate enough corporate interest as its NASA heads may have hoped. In my opinion, this retirement is bittersweet. We have, for the time, exhausted microgravity research and it is exciting to free up a maintenance budget and put money into new human space flight projects. Human spaceflight, while typically orders of magnitude more expensive due primarily to added weight and maintenance of life support systems, is a major reason for space exploration in the first place. Until robotics outperforms our versatility, we will continue to be the technicians running experiments and maintaining long-term bases. Quite honestly, I don’t envision such a future that we lose our tenacity for exploration, so even when robots begin to become more sensible for such missions, we will surely make up reasons to remain.

The United States, China, Russia, and Europe are currently the major players in human spaceflight. China has recently put the Tiangong space station in orbit, sending three-person crews for roughly six-month stays. Otherwise, the Artemis mission, headed by the US is the future of human space flight. Many are skeptical of its objectives and timeline, but it seems to be continuing development at full speed.

Into the 22nd Century

I give all of this introduction on the current affairs of the space industry to weigh in on my personal answer to the question I posed. Simply put, where do I see the future of the space industry?… Let’s say in the next century or so since the “Moons a Harsh Mistress” took place in 2075 a little over a century from its release date.

Increased Activity in the low-earth orbit / geostationary orbit

There are so many reasons why the orbital zones nearest to Earth make so much logistical sense. For starters, they are the easiest to get to and communicate with. As I stated, many parts of the world lack infrastructure for high-speed internet, roughly one-third of the population remains offline. These zones are also important for various earth observation satellites which will be evermore important for tracking increasingly dynamic weather patterns, atmospheric conditions, and earth operations for various national intelligence agencies. Perhaps there will be future low earth orbit space stations like the Tiangong or ISS but I doubt they will be as influential as either.

Space Tourism

Although I am much less inclined to believe trips to the moon will be as affordable as trips to Miami Beach or Italy there will undoubtedly be some portion of the population with enough wealth to view Earth as that “tiny pea” as Armstrong so unpoetically described it. The private industry, however, seems very keen to exploit this revenue stream so I expect space hotels to exist in special viewing locations or historical landmarks by the 3020’s.

Mining

The rocket equation is never going to cease vexing our desires to build superstructures in space. The Earth’s gravitational well is just too strong to support the constant launching of “raw” materials needed to construct the space hotels and outposts of the next century. The Moon is comprised of the same minerals found in the Earth, with a few extra mineralized chemicals due to its icy poles. I doubt that the moon will ever serve as the world’s breadbasket, but I do believe that catapults may be flinging metals and fuel into lunar orbit. Asteroids offer another potential source of raw materials and due to their foreign composition may devalue the minerals we view as rare today.

Exploration and Science

By the turn of the century we will most likely have landed probes on all of the major rocky bodies, as well as plunged deep into all the gaseous giants. I presume that long-term human operations will exist on or in the orbit of Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. I don’t mention the moon because I hope by now there are operations greatly exceeding mere scientific outposts. I predict autonomous missions will continue to lead the way and that there will be probes launched to our nearest star system neighbors. If the study of gravitational waves continues the most straightforward step to take is enormous space-based interferometers which will be able to track incredibly small fluctuations in the fabric of space. Hopefully, we will have the astronomer’s dream of telescopes outside of Jupiter’s orbit, collecting data from much closer to the edge of the observable Universe only several thousand years from the Big Bang. Unfortunately, electromagnetic energy travels at the speed of light, so there is not much that I know of that we can do once Solar Flares happen. However, better sensing of the surface of the sun could lead to better prediction of future events.

Space Bases

This last category is a bit redundant, if we are to have long-term human missions around the surfaces of Mars and Venus, we must change how we construct space stations. The past twenty-five years of NASAs human spaceflight incentive has been focused on the human condition in microgravity, well the answer is in… it sucks. Microgravity degrades our bodies in a myriad of ways, whether it be our optical, cardiovascular, muscular, or skeletal systems our bodies evolved for gravity, and without it, we cannot hope to pursue long-term operations in space. Centrifugal artificial gravity is the most sensible system for generating a conservative force to simulate Earth’s gravity out in space. It’s all over Sci-Fi but perhaps most popularly in “2001 A Space Odyssey”.  I would expect to see many spinning rings, cylinders, and disks in the future.

Those are my predictions, outside of being a space nerd I sourced a lot of my predictions from Christopher Wanjek’s: “Spacefarers: How Humans Will Settle the Moon, Mars, and Beyond”. Perhaps I should write my own Science Fiction to codify these predictions so that someone like me can tear them apart a century from now.

I am interested in what my readers think about this question so please make your predictions in the comments below.