Space Is Awesome

I have loved all things space related for a long time. Like little kid long time. Space and the exploration of it is something I’ve always been fascinated about and is one of my favorite topics to talk about.

Let me share with you why space and its exploration is so important to me.

What’s cool

When it comes to space related topics, certain things are top of my “That’s AWESOME” list:

• Autonomous Machines exploring (also known as robots)
• Orbits - This is basically using math to predict where things are going to be. For every time I asked “When will we ever use this” in a math class, if the teacher had replied “to calculate orbits” I probably would have studied 10x harder and become a mathematician.
• Remote sensing - The ability to send a robot to take pictures or radar scans of something and send it back is something that will always impress me. In the early days of exploration we relied on the eyes and art skills of an explorer to draw a picture of what they saw. Now we can capture the light and send it back so we can all see and experience what it is like in a place we will never be able to visit in person.

So those are some of my “why space is cool” reasons, but the follow up question is usually some form of “Why?” or “Isn’t that really expensive just to take some pictures?”

Those are valid questions! Here on Earth people are hungry, there are wars and diseases with no cure. But in my mind, space exploration is the exercise we need as a species to unlock the answers to those problems.

Close to home

The Space Race of the 1960’s helped kickstart research into many technologies that had payoffs many years later that we are now reaping the benefits of. From talking with non-space obsessed people I have found that this isn’t widespread knowledge. Sure people know that things like Velcro and satellites came from the space program, but there were so many everyday things that can trace their lineage to the research of the 1960’s to today:

• GPS (e.g. your maps in your cars)
• Computers in your pockets: Cell phones are a great example of a technology that shook out from the space program. Making powerful computers that can communicate with other computers while being portable and using small amounts of energy sounds incredibly nerdy… Until you reframe it as “I shared a picture of my dinner that took while on vacation”.
• Communications in general: I think the work done to keep machines in touch with earth (radio transmission, data compression) helped push things like cell phones and even the idea of WiFi. Granted, WiFi came many years later, but if we didn’t need to send data between computers would this have even developed like it did?
• Materials: NASA did a lot of testing on more “basic” material research topics. The vast treasure trove of data on how metals and plastics work in a wide rage of environments would probably not exist in the form it does today.

There’s probably more examples of this, but overall the idea is this: our focused work as a species on a specific problem of exploring a new environment unlocked a lot of new tools.

Exploring is what humans do best

Personally I’m curious about what’s out there. Throughout history many humans have felt this way, and this is why we have spread out all over the globe, not just restricting ourselves to small pockets where the weather is nice all the time.

We go places that are not friendly to learn what is there. Sometimes we learn something we already knew (the ocean has fish here just like at home), other times we learn brand new things (there are worms that live near the boiling water in the depths of the ocean next to hydrothermal vents).

Space is huge. Vast. There is so much out there we could learn about. Even if we aren’t looking for the holy grail of life, there’s so much we could discover. Places out there that are like nothing on Earth could teach us so many things.

While we might not know the consequences of that knowledge right away, the knowledge gained from the Space Race shows us we could us the new information to create new things we can’t quite imagine today.

The balance: how to make this happen

So how do we make this happen while keeping in mind the people around us here on Earth also need resources? To me the answer is pretty straightforward:

• Prioritize robotic exploration over human travel
• Iterate quickly
• Lower the cost to get off the planet

Putting humans safely into the unforgiving environment of space is very expensive. Spaceships and missions have to be designed very differently to keep people alive as they explore. To put it mildly this is very expensive.

In contrast, robotic explorers can tolerate much more than humans. In a much smaller volume and weight they can travel faster, further, and longer than our squishy biological selves can. Our electronic friends basically need less resources, only a power supply and some thermal regulation vs the food/water/entertainment/exercise that a human explorer would need.

That alone can lower the cost of exploration by orders of magnitude while allowing it to happen quickly: The reviews needed for a human launch vs a robotic launch are vastly more involved. Human passenger? Huge check list needed. Robot? Much shorter list.

The result of this is we can put more robots into space quicker. This will get us more knowledge of more places faster.

This of course will involve more infrastructure details that I’m ignoring for the moment, but if this were a pro-human spaceflight argument that same infrastructure would be necessary (and probably more expensive as it is supporting human operations). But for the moment let’s just assume that would be needed no matter what is flying.

The last point is making this exploration more affordable. As discussed above it is not cheap to get human into the vacuum of space and get them home safe again.

Getting robots into space has traditionally been cheaper, but still expensive. In the industry the measurement used is “Cost per kg of cargo”. It is usually thousands of US dollars per kg to launch something into space. But that is changing.

New companies are overturning the old assumptions about spaceflight. Reuse of rockets, experiments with new fuels, and launching multiple satellites per rocket are helping to reduce to cost pretty dramatically. With it’s Starship launch vehicle SpaceX is looking to drastically cut the cost to around $100/kg. That combined with its large launch capabilities could open new doors for the exploration I’ve outlined.

Let’s go!

Exploration is part of the human story.

We are at an interesting place in time where our tools are allowing us to put our senses in place we couldn’t normally visit for a cost that is very reasonable, especially compared to our past efforts.

Let’s do this.

Make robots to explore. Make robots to visit every large body in the solar system and find the places where humans could visit some day. We can even have robots prepare for our arrival!

The future is now.