Royce's Random Thoughts

And for fifty years, nothing like it has happened since.

That last sentence was deliberately negative, which is an easy path to take when considering human spaceflight. Growing up in the 70's, especially when I began to read sci-fi voraciously, it was easy to see the supposed future ahead of us. We'd have moon colonies mining Helium 3 for fusion reactors, we'd land astronauts on Mars. We would have massive O'Neill cylinders rotating majestically in orbit at L5, as orbital workers built the first solar power satellites feed energy to a hungry Earth. And from there we would move outward, to Jupiter, Saturn, to the stars themselves.

That didn't happen. Space, as the saying goes, is hard. It is utterly hostile to fragile humanity, which is a specialized organism designed to survive in a narrow band between the ground and the sky, on a single world, in a single solar system, two thirds of the way up a spiral arm in an unremarkable galaxy, in a universe larger than our small evolved monkey brains can really comprehend.

The idea of pioneers in rocket Conestogas moving outward to colonize the solar system as we colonized America (but without the Native American genocide) was a pipe dream at best, self-delusion at worst. Rockets are vastly more complicated and expensive beasts than covered wagons, and Mars isn't Kansas.

But it's also disingenuous to complain that space exploration stopped for fifty years either. We just did it using robots and satellites. No one can look at the achievements of Voyager, Viking, Pioneer, Pathfinder, Galileo, Mars Surveyor, Curiosity, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and especially the Hubble Space Telescope, and tell me weren't exploring. We now have detailed maps of every world and major moon in the Solar System. We have proof of water on Mars. We have proof of exosolar planets orbiting other stars, some with the potential of life upon them. And we look at the ice covered surface of Europa, and are making tentative plans to drill deep within it, perhaps to discover Earth isn't the sole abode of life around our star.

All of that was accomplished by engineers and scientists, but none of it by astronauts. Turned out, we didn't need them.

That's another disingenuous argument. The Space Shuttle was an expensive and dangerous beast, built on compromises and (some) ill considered engineering choices, and it never really reached its potential until the last ten years of its life span, when it was used to construct and service the ISS, and it never left Earth's orbit. But the science it provided during its lifetime was as invaluable as any we received from Curiosity and Sojourner.

The dreams of the 70's are very much dead. Helium 3 is a scam. Solar power sats are unneeded with the rapid decrease in the price of ground based solar cells and lithium batteries. L5 colonies were a pipe dream, an expensive suburbia to get away from Those People, at the height of concerns over urban decay. Mars remained out of reach and far too expensive, as NASA no longer commanded the resources and budget of an entire nation. It's not the future I was promised.

But it is still a bright and remarkable future. In recent years, with the rise of reusable boosters, we seem tantalizing close to the point of reaching orbit and maybe the moon on a regular and relatively expensive basis. Ultimately that might not pan out. But if it doesn't, it wasn't because we stopped trying.