Space Station One (NASA, zero.)

A few minutes later, he caught his first glimpse of Space Station One, only a few miles away. The sunlight glinted and sparkled from the polished metal surfaces of the slowly revolving, three-hundred-yard diameter disk. Not far away, drifting in the same orbit, was a swept-back Titov-V spaceplane, and close to that an almost spherical Aries-1B, the workhorse of space, with the four stubby legs of its lunar-landing shock absorbers jutting from one side.

- Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

Having finished ranting about the exchange rate as it applies to the book publishing community, back to the topic at hand: efficient strategies for the exploration of space.

In the process of researching this post, I read what I can only describe as "misguided" position statements from NASA and the US Government. ("Damn fool" is probably a better modifier than "misguided", but let's be polite.) NASA's long term plan sounds positive on the face of things: more missions to the Moon, and an eventual mission to Mars - all well and good. Sadly, the manner in which they plan to achieve these goals is, by their own admission, "Apollo on steroids".

Credit where credit is due: the Apollo missions were successful, albeit, as Terry Pratchett would say, for a given value of "successful". Yes, they successfully put a man on the Moon. If their goal had been to kill a mosquito, their equivalent response would have been to put said mosquito on a concrete wall and ram it with a car: true, the mosquito is dead, but the method relies heavily upon brute force and is not repeatable, at least not with the same car. (And after a few mosquitos, the bill for cars starts to add up, and people start asking why you're killing the mosquito in the first place, but let's not overwork the metaphor.)

Now, let's look at space exploration not from the point of view of counting coup over other countries, which was the real bottom line of the Apollo missions, but as a logical process.

The flaw in the NASA approach as used in the Apollo missions is that it was an approach designed to win a race, and as such was structured to achieve its goal quickly - which was sensible, that's how races are won. What it was not structured for was efficiency or repeatability: every time a group of astronauts did the round trip, when they were finished there was nothing usable left of their rocket, shuttle or lander - to make another trip it was necessary to build another complete spaceship.

In designing an efficient space program, the first step has to be the creation of a logical division based on functionality. The requirements for a ship that needs to get from ground level to vacuum and zero gravity are entirely different than the requirements for a ship that needs to travel from point to point in vacuum and zero or near-zero gravity. And, logically, the requirements for a ship to make extended exploratory trips are different from both of those.

Ah, but if you posit three different types of ships, how do you go about making the transition from one to another? At this point, the fourth "need" takes us to the key to an efficient space program: the space station.

A space station (or several space stations) makes the whole process of space exploration so much simpler. It provides a convenient environment for transferring from one type of ship to another, as well as providing a work platform to build and repair the ships that only operate in vacuum. An orbital platform becomes a fuel depot, an emergency shelter, a repair garage, a ship hangar, a communications relay, a research lab, an observatory, and a just plain shirtsleeve refuge in the midst of a hostile environment. Science fiction is full of space stations, which perform all of those functions and more, because they're just so damn handy for so many reasons.

Looking at my library, I'm spoiled for choices of fictional examples of achievable space travel, but in the next post we'll see how things are viewed by the man whom I think of as the real authority in this area, the man who has arguably spent more time thinking about how space travel would really work than anyone else: Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

- Sid