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

But first this important (non) commercial message.

My next post was going to be about efficient space travel, but first I'd like to complain. Here we are, the Canadian dollar is at $1.07 US (apparently a high in "modern times" according to the CBC - how odd that records on the exchange rate in 1066 are unavailable), and a wide variety of stores are announcing price cuts in order to reflect this state of affairs. And yet, AND YET, trot into the book store of your choice and you will be offered the opportunity to pay 30% more than the American price on paperbacks and hardcovers of all descriptions.

The odd thing is that this is a problem unique to the publishing industry. What other product has the price printed on the item? DVD's, music CD's, software, even computers, there's a myriad of products that could have the price printed on the package, but no one else has elected to do so.

I've been waiting to see if cover prices would start to reflect the declining US dollar, but no, new books arriving on the shelves continue to show the same enormous gap in pricing. So, screw 'em - no new book purchases for a while, unless I happen to make a trip down to Seattle.

- Sid

Postscript: I went into Chapters this afternoon to kill some time and noticed that there was a polite little sign at the bottom of the escalator commenting on the above situation. This explanatory missive pointed out that there were other factors in play other than just the exchange rate, that customers offering to pay in US dollars would still be charged the Canadian price (ha, someone must have had fun with that idea, I'll admit that the thought had occurred to me already) and that the six month lead time on book publishing makes it impossible for the prices printed on books to reflect the current exchange rate.

"Thanks for shopping Canadian!"

Fair enough...let's do a little research, then.

My copy of Wasteland of Flint, printed in 2004, cost $7.99 US, $10.99 Canadian. Exchange rate: $1.37 C to the US dollar in May. If you do the math, these relative prices are almost exactly the same - the exact conversion of the US price is $10.9463 Canadian.

2005: Illium, $7.99 US, $10.99 Canadian, exchange rate $1.24 C/US$.

2006: Olympos, $7.99 US, $10.99 Canadian, exchange rate $1.13 C/US$.

2007: Meeting at Corvallis, $7.99 US, $10.99 Canadian, exchange rate $1.10 in May.
At that rate, the converted price would be exactly $8.789 Canadian.

(May is the magic month because that's the six month lead time for printing to which Chapters refers, as we sit here in November.)

In other words, Chapters would like me to believe that in spite of a 27 cent difference in the dollar's exchange rate over a four year period, the Canadian price relative to the US price hasn't changed by a cent? And we're not even looking at the rate today, which has the US dollar worth $0.92 Canadian, for a converted price per book of $7.35 Canadian.

Somebody's making money at this - and at the expense (literally) - of the consumer. I'm not sure who it is, though! Let's be fair, Chapters isn't putting the prices on the books, the American publishers are. The question becomes one of whether the wholesale price that Chapters pays for the books is based on the US price or the Canadian price. If Chapters get the US price, they're laughing all the way to the bank. If they're paying a Canadian dollar price, they're getting shafted as badly as we are. I wonder which it is...

- Sid

Have Space Suit Will Travel.

"Not too late. No, suh! I goin' to Mars, yes I am, and I beat the Chinese, too. Even if I hafta make my own spaceship, me."

- Jubal Broussard, Red Thunder

Having just finished reading Red Thunder by John Varley, a guardedly acceptable little read in the home-made spaceship genre, my mind turns to the portrayal in SF of space exploration by individuals. (I describe Red Thunder as "guardedly acceptable" because it was a very light read, and other than the sex* would be an ideal read for a bright twelve-year old. But, to be fair, it's reasonably entertaining, well written and so forth.) 

The plot of Red Thunder is strongly reminiscent of one of those Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movies, the ones where someone says, "Hey, gang, let's put on a show!", except in this case it's "Hey, gang, let's go to Mars!" Instead of an uncle with a big barn, these plucky teens meet an alcoholic ex-astronaut whose idiot savant cousin has invented a sort of Rube Goldberg power source that will allow them to beat those nasty Chinese to Mars and to save some of the crew from a failed NASA mission. 

Similar (although perhaps more cynical) entries into the do-it-yourself spaceship category can be found in The Daleth Effect by Harry Harrison and The Mouse on the Moon, by Leonard Wibberley, both of which deal with small countries that trump the great world powers by discovering miraculous means of propulsion that they utilize in makeshift spaceships. 

As a sign of changing times, the Danish astronauts rescue stranded Russian astronauts in The Daleth Effect, written in 1970 - apparently the Chinese have replaced the Soviets as the people to beat, if Red Thunder is an accurate barometer. 

In science fiction from the 40's and 50's, the concept of the individually owned spaceship is a commonplace one, with oceangoing vessels providing the analogy. Obviously, the man on the street won't own the Queen Mary, but if he's in a high enough tax bracket, he might well have some kind of little sailboat that he can use for weekend trips. (If he's sufficiently foolhardy, he can even try to cross the Atlantic - or go to Mars - in his little ship.) 

Cargo haulers, passenger liners, luxury yachts and warships commonly ply the spaceways in the writing from this period, along with the occasional tramp freighter that will barely hold air, and even a few pirates now and then. And, to continue the analogy, private explorers seeking literal "new worlds" might obtain funding from corporations or governments, as did Columbus, but still maintain their independent status. 

The 60's introduced the world to a different paradigm: space travel is so expensive and difficult that it's impossible for anyone but a major global power. It's difficult to think of any other activity so completely elitist in its financial demands, as witnessed by the fact that the Space Race only had two competitors. (Full credit to the X Prize winners, but in the nautical analogy above, compared to NASA they're like people going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.)  

Red Thunder provides an interesting comment on this phenomenon, one which I hadn't really given a lot of thought: the approach taken by the Soviets and the Americans was the least efficient way of doing things. In the course of the story, the ex-astronaut describes the method used by the USA to reach the Moon as being like Columbus sinking all three of his ships on the way to America, making the trip back to Europe in a lifeboat, and sinking that in the Straits of Gibraltar and swimming the rest of the way back to Spain with a life preserver. 

The spendthrift approach used by the Apollo missions is explained as being a side effect of American hubris: any expense or wastage was justified in order to win the race first, rather than winning the race efficiently. That distinction now in place, we'll take a look at efficient space travel in the next posting.

- Sid

*Come to think of it, I was a bright twelve year old and I would have thought that a book with sex was a fabulous find.