Space Exploration

Here are some bits from a post by Nigel Calder in his blog Calder's Updates:

Among recent developments, President Obama has scaled back his predecessor’s plans for manned spaceflight – which still use only chemical rockets, of course. Meanwhile China has overtaken Japan to become the world’s second largest economy, with commentators saying it will surpass the USA by 2025 or so. And as the Beijing Olympics illustrated, China’s present leaders are entirely ready to vie for global superiority by extravagant showmanship. In the 21st Century, the colonization of Mars will be the greatest show off Earth.

The West lost its way in manned spaceflight after the success of the Apollo missions. The Russians did too, and the International Space Station, which has consumed much treasure and some lives, is frankly a bore for the general public.More important than any financial constraints, in my opinion, is the fading of that feeling of the 1960s that a new frontier was opening up for humanity at large – when Apollo really did seem like a giant leap for mankind. We’re back to relying on science fiction like “Star Trek” to keep the dream alive.

Scientists stifle the sense of adventure, I’m sorry to say. I was at a space-science meeting in Florence in 1961, on the day when Yuri Gagarin became the first man to fly in space. The city’s Mayor drove up with crates of bubbly, but he was kept hanging about in the lobby because there was no question of interrupting a session on space plasmas with this merely human news. And just last week Lord (Martin) Rees, President of the Royal Society, declared: “It’s hard to see any particular reason or purpose in going back to the Moon or indeed sending people into space at all.”

The cart parks itself in front of the horse. Space science has been fruitful enough, but it’s always been a passenger on space technology initiated for political and technological purposes and sustained by strongly competitive rivalry between nations and blocs, which becomes cooperative only when convenient.

The Chinese have let it be known that they’ll send astronauts to the Moon as soon as possible. Unless there’s a big change in the West’s half-hearted attitude to manned spaceflight, China may beat everyone to Mars quite easily. And it might be very rash to shrug and bid them bon voyage (or yī lù shùn fēng).

The opening up of the Solar System to human travel and settlement has often been likened to the maritime explorations that led to European political dominance in the colonial era. It was an opportunity that China missed, simply by the erosion of will that followed the earlier voyages of Admiral Zheng He. Here’s how I summarized the tale in my book Timescale.

Early guns were cumbersome, and the ideal vehicle for them was a sailing ship.

Ambitious Chinese saw that the time was ripe for domination of the world by gun-carrying ships. They pulled their high technology together and built dozens of large sailing junks with multiple masts, steered by sternpost rudders, navigated by magnetic compasses, and armed with guns. In AD 1405 a powerful fleet set off to impress the barbarians, and a succession of expeditions overawed half the known world, gathering treasure from as far away as Mecca and Africa. Had that naval policy persisted, this book would be written in Chinese. Officials and accountants persuaded the emperor after less than thirty years to put a stop to it, and eventually destroyed even the records of the voyages. It was bureaucracy’s most breathtaking accomplishment. …

The essence of the Chinese maritime technology of ship handling, navigation, and gunnery was known in Europe. The Portuguese flotillas that began groping along the African coast were ludicrously small and ill-found, but as events showed, the world could be snatched by diminutive carracks, without grand fleets of the Chinese sort. Like their horsemen ancestors coming off the steppes, Europeans made up in daring, avarice, and mutual rivalry for what they lacked in imperial wealth and sophistication. The breakout of the European navigators can best be dated from 1492, when a westbound Spanish flotilla stumbled upon the Americas, mistaking them for Asia. Portuguese seamen heading the other way reached India by sea in 1498 and China in 1514. The first circumnavigation of the planet was completed by a Spanish ship, Vittoria, in 1522.

So I can’t help wondering if our grandchildren will see an inversion of the events of the 15th Century, with China ruling the sky as Europeans once ruled the sea.

If you had told me in 1969 when the first landing on the moon occurred that the last one would be 1972 and there wouldn't be any others for the next 40 or 50 years, I would have thought you were crazy. That would have been like telling me in 1903 after watching the first powered flight by the Wright brothers that there wouldn't be another flight for 50 years. Impossible. By 1953 the clunky old biplanes were long gone and lots of sleek jets were zipping through the air. But in the world of rocketry, we are still seeing the clunky old biplanes sporadically and nobody seems to have any ideas for improved designs.