Bruce Sterling - Essays. FSF Columns

Dreaming of space-flight, and predicting its future, have always been favorite pastimes of science fiction. In my first science column for F&SF, I can't resist the urge to contribute a bit to this grand tradition.

A science-fiction writer in 1991 has a profound advantage over the genre's pioneers. Nowadays, space-exploration has a past as well as a future. "The conquest of space" can be judged today, not just by dreams, but by a real-life track record.

Some people sincerely believe that humanity's destiny lies in the stars, and that humankind evolved from the primordial slime in order to people the galaxy. These are interesting notions: mystical and powerful ideas with an almost religious appeal. They also smack a little of Marxist historical determinism, which is one reason why the Soviets found them particularly attractive.

Americans can appreciate mystical blue-sky rhetoric as well as anybody, but the philosophical glamor of "storming the cosmos" wasn't enough to motivate an American space program all by itself. Instead, the Space Race was a creation of the Cold War -- its course was firmly set in the late '50s and early '60s. Americans went into space *because* the Soviets had gone into space, and because the Soviets were using Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin to make a case that their way of life was superior to capitalism.

The Space Race was a symbolic tournament for the newfangled intercontinental rockets whose primary purpose (up to that point) had been as instruments of war. The Space Race was the harmless, symbolic, touch-football version of World War III. For this reason alone: that it did no harm, and helped avert a worse clash -- in my opinion, the Space Race was worth every cent. But the fact that it was a political competition had certain strange implications.

Because of this political aspect, NASA's primary product was never actual "space exploration." Instead, NASA produced public-relations spectaculars. The Apollo project was the premiere example. The astonishing feat of landing men on the moon was a tremendous public-relations achievement, and it pretty much crushed the Soviet opposition, at least as far as "space-racing" went.

On the other hand, like most "spectaculars," Apollo delivered rather little in the way of permanent achievement. There was flag-waving, speeches, and plaque-laying; a lot of wonderful TV coverage; and then the works went into mothballs. We no longer have the capacity to fly human beings to the moon. No one else seems particularly interested in repeating this feat, either; even though the Europeans, Indians, Chinese and Japanese all have their own space programs today. (Even the Arabs, Canadians, Australians and Indonesians have their own satellites now.)

In 1991, NASA remains firmly in the grip of the "Apollo Paradigm." The assumption was (and is) that only large, spectacular missions with human crews aboard can secure political support for NASA, and deliver the necessary funding to support its eleven-billion-dollar-a-year bureaucracy. "No Buck Rogers, no bucks."

The march of science -- the urge to actually find things out about our solar system and our universe -- has never been the driving force for NASA. NASA has been a very political animal; the space-science community has fed on its scraps.

Unfortunately for NASA, a few historical home truths are catching up with the high-tech white-knights.

First and foremost, the Space Race is over. There is no more need for this particular tournament in 1992, because the Soviet opposition is in abject ruins. The Americans won the Cold War. In 1992, everyone in the world knows this. And yet NASA is still running space-race victory laps.

What's worse, the Space Shuttle, one of which blew up in 1986, is clearly a white elephant. The Shuttle is overly complex, over-designed, the creature of bureaucratic decision-making which tried to provide all things for all constituents, and ended-up with an unworkable monster. The Shuttle was grotesquely over-promoted, and it will never fulfill the outrageous promises made for it in the '70s. It's not and never will be a "space truck." It's rather more like a Ming vase.

Space Station Freedom has very similar difficulties. It costs far too much, and is destroying other and more useful possibilities for space activity. Since the Shuttle takes up half NASA's current budget, the Shuttle and the Space Station together will devour most *all* of NASA's budget for *years to come* -- barring unlikely large-scale increases in funding.

Even as a political stage-show, the Space Station is a bad bet, because the Space Station cannot capture the public imagination. Very few people are honestly excited about this prospect. The Soviets *already have* a space station. They've had a space station for years now. Nobody cares about it. It never gets headlines. It inspires not awe but tepid public indifference. Rumor has it that the Soviets (or rather, the *former* Soviets) are willing to sell their "Space Station Peace" to any bidder for eight hundred million dollars, about one fortieth of what "Space Station Freedom" will cost -- and nobody can be bothered to buy it!

Manned space exploration itself has been oversold. Space-flight is simply not like other forms of "exploring." "Exploring" generally implies that you're going to venture out someplace, and tangle hand-to-hand with wonderful stuff you know nothing about. Manned space flight, on the other hand, is one of the most closely regimented of human activities. Most everything that is to happen on a manned space flight is already known far in advance. (Anything not predicted, not carefully calculated beforehand, is very likely to be a lethal catastrophe.)

Reading the personal accounts of astronauts does not reveal much in the way of "adventure" as that idea has been generally understood. On the contrary, the historical and personal record reveals that astronauts are highly trained technicians whose primary motivation is not to "boldly go where no one has gone before," but rather to do *exactly what is necessary* and above all *not to mess up the hardware.*

Astronauts are not like Lewis and Clark. Astronauts are the tiny peak of a vast human pyramid of earth-bound technicians and mission micro-managers. They are kept on a very tight (*necessarily* tight) electronic leash by Ground Control. And they are separated from the environments they explore by a thick chrysalis of space-suits and space vehicles. They don't tackle the challenges of alien environments, hand-to-hand -- instead, they mostly tackle the challenges of their own complex and expensive life-support machinery.

The years of manned space-flight have provided us with the interesting discovery that life in free-fall is not very good for people. People in free-fall lose calcium from their bones -- about half a percent of it per month. Having calcium leach out of one's bones is the same grim phenomenon that causes osteoporosis in the elderly -- "dowager's hump." It makes one's bones brittle. No one knows quite how bad this syndrome can get, since no one has been in orbit much longer than a year; but after a year, the loss of calcium shows no particular sign of slowing down. The human heart shrinks in free-fall, along with a general loss of muscle tone and muscle mass. This loss of muscle, over a period of months in orbit, causes astronauts and cosmonauts to feel generally run-down and feeble.

There are other syndromes as well. Lack of gravity causes blood to pool in the head and upper chest, producing the pumpkin-faced look familiar from Shuttle videos. Eventually, the body reacts to this congestion by reducing the volume of blood. The long-term effects of this are poorly understood. About this time, red blood cell production falls off in the bone marrow. Those red blood cells which are produced in free-fall tend to be interestingly malformed.