helium-3 (He3)

On balance I’m glad Obama wants to continue, even while feeling that Mars can wait. I watch the little lab bench advances, and although I don’t expect any single breakthrough to cheap access to space, still they accumulate – and converge toward a situation where we could get far more bang for the launch buck, if only we had a practical robotics architecture in LEO.

By this I mean, automated docking and cargo handling; an erector set of modular programmable manipulators; a practical catalog of connectors, reaction wheels, tether spoolers, non-contact energy transfer points, gas and liquid taps, an intranet, can-openers … In sum, a mature, robust version of what we’ve only been able to play with on the ISS. I think of it as “SpaceMall” – a facility at which multiple customers can have their special payloads installed on suitable platforms, assembled from off-the-shelf components, in orbit, by programmed or teleoperated manipulators.

That would get us into the big stuff. Production lines for printing conductive polymer and photovoltaic layers on CNT-strengthened ribbons; nuclear-powered tugboats; smart probes for near-Earth object assay and smarter platforms for NEO mining. The O’Neill project is far from dead, it has just been absorbing the first few waves of actual space experience, which had to include exploring the major technical obstacles.

I can imagine implementing SpaceMall as a very clever accumulation of purely robotic components. But it is a whole lot easier to imagine, if we also assume that we have some engineers in LEO as well, housed in TransHabs or Bigelow inflatables or such, with hands-on access to the components.

If it were strictly a matter of planetary science, I would be very willing to let space development continue through robotics alone; and to accept the criticism of the ISS as a scientific dead end as conclusive. But instead, I look at the prospects for space industry, and they seem far more concrete if you invest in what the ISS could have been, if the U.S. had had a mature heavy launcher working at the time; that is, an orbital R&D workshop aimed at bootstrapping a sound space infrastructure.

Also, competing for going into space is a much better sink of money than the current wars.

Unless someone finds a profitable use for a substance in the ground of the Moon or Mars or something. Then science is out the window again.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/radio/2008/08/05/holt/index.html

Heh, the irony of that first name!
PS, I suppose that when a Congressman etc, is called “a physicist” it typically means, has the degree and not still also working as such – true?

It is pretty clear we can’t push into space fast enough to handle our resource and population issues on Earth. The O’Neil idea we can all homestead off Earth in the near future and solve our problems that way is frankly a fantasy.

Clearly space probes, instrumentation and robotic probes are what we will most successfully push into space. Humans in space might facilitate this, such as in case with the Hubble service missions, but if this is our prelude of moving into space these are at best baby steps that will take a long time to measure up to anything.

Lawrence B. Crowell