"We need the stars... We need purpose! We need the image that the destiny to take root among the stars gives us of ourselves as a purposeful, growing species. We need to become the adult species that the destiny can help us become! If we're to be anything other than smooth dinosaurs who evolve, specialize and die, we need the stars.... When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves. We have these chaotic, apocalyptic periods of murderous craziness."
~ Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents, 1998
Someone named Sylvia Engdahl has a very interesting page full of quotes from people I’ve read, such as Frank White, Robert Zubrin, Robert Heinlein, and Buzz Aldrin, and people I’ve not read such as Octavia Butler. So I encourage you to visit her page and read over some of the quotes. Anything that strikes you as especially interesting, please copy and paste to the comments for this essay. Thanks! {The evil mass murderers at Google think this message is too long for email, and Substack is bugging me all the time about it, presumably because longer essays are hated by the Substack team for some reasons. Anyway, if you have a for real email client like Thunderbird, you should be fine. If not, you may wish to scroll back up and click over to this essay on the web or ‘stack app. ymmv}
If this essay is going to have a theme song, let that theme be Kings of the Wild Frontier by Adam and the Ants.
This essay has a few sections so if you feel like you have read some of what I’m saying on other recent essays, feel free to skip along to something new further down the page.
The purpose of this document is to talk about one of the purposes for which I am here in this life at this time: opening the Milky Way galaxy to human settlement in our generation’s time. Does that sound overly ambitious to you?
Well, you may want to take a seat, take a seat right over there, to quote from several favourite South Park episodes. First off, you probably have a contemptuous and limited view of the time for a given generation. You were taught some things that need to be addressed because you probably think that God has ordained your lifespan to “three score years and ten” or to “one hundred twenty years” or to some other number you’ve been taught. God had Methuselah live for 969 years. Enoch walked with God and lives still. Elijah went to a chariot of fire which carried him into heaven. Jesus lives. Mary lives. The saints live. So when you think about a generation’s life time, you should probably pay heed to my friend Aubrey de Grey of the Methuselah Foundation who said in 2005 that the first person to live to be more than a thousand years old has already been born. He was, in fact, speaking in the context of what you think of as a lifespan on Earth.
That point is significant because if we are going to travel to distant stars, as some of us reading this essay (and writing it) shall do, we have some long journeys ahead. Indeed, voyage would be a more appropriate word, since “journey” arises from a French word, “jour” implying a day trip.
My Past
Some people find out early what it is that they are here to do, and that was the case with me. I was five when my parents took my brothers and me into Kansas City to a fancy cinema that they liked. We watched the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” which you can find in various places, including the YouTube, for free if you wish. Above this section you see a glorious image showing “Space Station V” which is involved as the setting for some of the most interesting passages in the film.
The strange beginning with ugly humanoid creatures living in a strange wasteland and then huddling together one night to hide from strange construction noises only to awaken and find a curious monolith. I’m not a fan of Arthur C. Clarke’s views on many topics so his Darwinian heresies are of little interest. Apparently monoliths cause ancient hominids to become violent tool users who throw bones into the sky. Kubrik made the hurled bone transform into a space weapon in orbit. Whee. But then the film transitioned to a passenger space vehicle (operated under Pan Am colours!) to a space station like the one shown above, aboard which there was a proper hotel.
One of my favourite parts was the video phone call home (in an AT&T phone booth because the ugly mass murderer Woodrow Wilson had pushed for a national monopoly to enhance his “black chamber” in its ability to spy on all American phone calls, with the enthusiastic complicity of AT&T and others in the industry) to a child. The visit with the shabby Soviet delegation in a public part of the space station was a bit lost on me, except that I knew vaguely about a conflict with Russia that might end badly if people weren’t aware that the Russians love their children too.
Then it was on to the Moon, to a remote part of the lunar surface where another monolith was found, and then a deep space mission to Jupiter where another (!) monolith was found. It seems like Clarke and Kubrik imagined a species that fairly littered God’s creation with odd looking rectangular boxes. But the 1 x 4 x 9 proportions are pleasing to the eye, so there’s that.
This film had some effects on me, but it was a little later the same year that things got stranger still. My dad was not at all inclined to popular technologies. He insisted that there be no television in the house while my elder brothers were growing up. But in 1968 he broke that rule of his own and bought a (by then very inexpensive and terribly outmoded) black and white television with a 27 inch diagonal screen. It sat in the living room on a card table, indicating its temporary presence.
Dad wanted to watch the political conventions that year. I think he was especially concerned when RFK, after winning the California primary, was viciously and deliberately murdered by the fbi and cia working in concert. So we watched as the police in Chicago deliberately rioted into peaceful protestors, and as Abby Hoffman and the Chicago 7 came up with the uniquely idiotic idea of throwing baggies of human faeces at the pigs.
Consequences ensued! And were televised, so, since revolutionaries are never allowed to have television broadcast licences, it was clearly no revolution at all. We also watched Nixon win the Repugnant nomination over dad’s favourite Nelson Rockefeller. (For the nuclear physicist who first published the term meltdown in nuclear reactors (1955) he had a lot of strange and foolish ideas about politics, did my dad.)
That Autumn included my first visit to a public school. I should possibly mention that the supply of faculty spouses with abundant time on their hands led to a reasonably high quality of education in my home town. It had been the case that my older brothers thought I should learn to read when I was a wee child of three. Why? So I would let them alone while they were reading, of course. Thus I was drilled on the alphabet and words and phonetics until I could get all the way through a “Dick and Jane” story book without error under supervision of an older brother.
So when I got through the first week of school, afternoons only because kindergarten, I was asked at the dinner table a question. We ate, as a family, every breakfast and every supper, every day of the week. Dad’s house, dad’s rules. And so to have my mom ask me a question was unusual, and drew silence around the table and all the eyes were upon me. How was my first week of school? I said, “None of the other kids know how to read. Why do I have to recite the alphabet with them and play alphabet games when I already know how to read?” I was puzzled.
Also that Autumn, the Vietnam war began to intrude on the family. It was on television during all the news reports, and we occasionally turned on the idiot eye (as my dad liked to call it) to see what was happening. Violence. Mayhem. People far away. Was it like the films in the cinema, I asked, hoping it was all made up and not real, like some of the story books I was reading. No, it was actually happening. Terrible. The war would intrude on us further a few years later when my eldest brother graduated high school in 1973 and was accepted to the University of Illinois, but had not matriculated, so was eligible for the draft. We looked at the draft numbers together in the newspaper. Scary times.
Christmastime arrived as it should, announced by mom bringing home and posting an Advent calendar on the kitchen door. Anticipation of many good things to eat, presents, and celebrations. It was a while after we all visited the huge Hoch auditorium at the University of Kansas to hear Christmas carols and celebrate Vespers when we again looked at the television to see Apollo 8 launched into space. A little later, we again tuned in, this time on Christmas morning, to hear Frank Borman read from the book of Genesis while orbiting the Moon.
I attended to these events with great interest in curiosity. Were these images and discussions related to the fictional things we saw in the cinema? No, they were real. My brothers quickly developed an interest in model rockets. Dad had previous experience of building liquid fuelled rockets in college and launching them off the roof of the physics building at the University of California Berkeley, to the consternation of neighbours and local constabulary. So he undertook to buy us birthday and Christmas gifts of model rocket kits, Estes rocket engines, and we would shape these up into flight ready vehicles and all repair to Broken Arrow park to launch them together. Family togetherness for the win.
It was that Winter that the television was banished to a shelf in the basement. Over the ensuing months, I learned that as youngest, I was especially suited to become the remote control device. “Hey, Jim, turn to channel 4.” It was okay, though, because I would be sent to the kitchen up the garage stairs for cookies. And there were always cookies and other things to enjoy in the kitchen, so I would enjoy them. If I got back a while after the commercial break ended, nobody minded, least of all me.
But reading books and staring at the ceiling in my bed of an evening, I thought about these televised trips to the Moon. When I grew up, things would be pretty far along, like in that movie. People would be visiting hotels in orbit. There would be scientific expeditions to the outer planets. I could be involved, somehow. It seemed better than going off to fight and bleed and die for the opium crops on Laos and the cocaine in South America. Maybe, if we all avoided hating one another, the world would survive without a nuclear war eradicating the possibility of doing something good and interesting.
A few years later, the space missions to the Moon had fully stopped. But there had been some fun with a space station called Skylab. And then Deke Slayton and some other astronauts visited a Soyuz vehicle in orbit. They went up on a Saturn rocket and had a huge “test lab” in where the lunar lander would go if it were a Moon mission. So they had a docking ring for the Apollo capsule on one end, and another for the Soyuz on the other. Lots of room in between to eat Soviet caviar and American hamburgers and look at things from orbit.
Linda Lovelace came to town and my brother played the trumpet in the high school marching band that helped her campaign for president, in 1975. Seemed like a candidate who wanted to make people happy, unlike that former member of the lying whitewashing Warren commission Gerry Ford, then in the White House. Some outfit released a film about the occasion, “Linda Lovelace for President.” You can look it up.
It got to be time to paint the fire hydrants all over town to look like Revolutionary War soldiers. I don’t know what lummox came up with this idea, but it dispersed a lot of colourful paint, wasted a lot of time, and left every hydrant looking stupid in a unique way of its own. Happily these paint jobs didn’t prevent the fire departments of the country from finding the hydrants when they needed to actually fight fires.
My brother Tom found a really neat book at a bookstore in our town. The High Frontier by Gerard K. O’Neill. All about how to build human settlements in orbit. Solve the energy crisis with space based solar power systems that would beam power to Earth based receiving antennas. A prosperous future, just like in the dozens and dozens of science fiction novels and stories in the Analogue science fiction and science fact magazine we had in abundance. Tom joined the L5 Society and wrote off to the Space Studies Institute to get some catalogue. I was hooked on the idea of a future not involving nuclear apocalypse and door to door fighting with the communist menace.
So in 1977, I joined the then Tucson Arizona based L5 Society as well. In high school, I organised Lawrence high school L5 as a chapter. Our astronomy teacher Mr. Anderson was our faculty sponsor. I brought to school many copies of L5 News as the news magazine of the organisation was called. We talked about the project to ask our congresscritters to tell NASA that they were a bunch of time serving bureau rats and fools and to stop spending all their budget money on useless meetings and keep the Viking landers in communication rather than, as the evil useless hateful drones at NASA wanted, stop listening. There were other space missions to support with letter writing campaigns.
For a time, I had a collection of form letters robo signed by congress critters telling me how thankful they were for me bothering to tell them about something they didn’t care about, would never profit from, and didn’t even think mattered. The collection of identical matching signatures was pointed out by my older brother Tom who said we were wasting our time. So we began to look for non-political projects. And found them!
While I was getting ready to go to college in 1981, a group in Texas, spearheaded by David Hannah, Jr., who had read Gerard O’Neill’s book, too, was launching the Percheron vehicle from Matagorda Island off the coast of Texas. Splendid! It failed. But a year later, with help from former astronaut Deke Slayton, they succeeded in persuading the Air Force to loan them a Minuteman missile first stage rocket. They launched Conestoga successfully and there was much rejoicing. Some years later, I would tell audiences about this loan, and point out that we knew the exact coordinates of the rocket motor if the gooferment ever wanted it back. Why was it lent and not sold? Can’t.
The gooferment was so goofy (and still is) that they could not sell to a domestic launch services company a rocket motor for “export” to the depths of the Gulf of Mexico without a complicated licence and a change in several poorly written laws. So they arranged it as a loan. Which ought to give you a sense of how you have come to be governed by fools, crazy people, grifters, liars, murderers, and thieves.
In college I joined forces with some other students who wanted to form a chapter of the Planetary Society at Columbia University. So we set about forming a joint chapter of both L5 Society and Planetary Society. I inquired with the New York City L5 Society chapter and was told that it was terribly wrong of me to start a chapter on Manhattan Island. So I ignored their concerns and talked to the chapters coordinator at the national level, who was Christine Peterson. She would later become famous for coining the term “open source.” She seemed intrigued by the possibility.
But it was a policy issue, and she wanted to see what sort of person I was. So she invited me to meet her in Boston with K. Eric Drexler who was another member of the L5 Society board of directors. Drexler had spent quite a lot of the 1970s with Gerry O’Neill and Gregg Maryniak at the Space Studies Institute. Eric saw that the elitist and high level political approach of Space Studies Institute wasn’t going to work without a broad grass roots (rhizomatic) movement. So he joined the ongoing mess that Mark Hopkins was trying to make of the L5 Society in order to try to stem the tide.
Thus I learnt the train system in the northeast, which was quite effective and somewhat mature in 1982. I travelled to Boston as a coach passenger one morning and had lunch at a very nice seafood place with Christine and Eric. They were kind enough to treat me to the meal. I have often said that the international symbol for poverty is a student with books. He’s been to the textbook store and been screwed to the wall with the prices. Miss you Aaron.
They agreed to the premise that we could build some bridges to Planetary Society people, promote the human settlement of space, and get the name in front of a lot of Columbia students. This led to a series of updates from me to the chapters coordinator, a bunch of on campus events, the launching of a model rocket from the sundial in the centre of campus, and quite a lot of late night trips to the top of Pupin Hall where we would introduce ourselves through a back door, crawl through the steps, and operate the large optical telescope on a clandestine basis.
In 1985, I moved to Houston with my shiny new degree from Columbia. Rice University was my first choice business school because of the proximity to the space launch businesses there. In addition to Space Services, a company named Space Industries was promoting their development of a private space station they had an agreement to have launched by the space shuttle. Another company was trying to buy external tanks after NASA had brought them into orbit. They called themselves External Tanks corporation.
NASA was working really hard, using a lot of propellant, to deliberately throw the external tanks away so that nobody could ever use them for pressure volume. NASA was, as always, busy being the door to space and holding that door firmly shut against anyone who wanted to go. By pushing the external tank just before separation, the shuttle used propellant it could have saved, and forced the heavily insulated tank into the atmosphere, generally to re-enter and hit the Indian ocean. The insulation, by the way, was choloro-fluoro-carbon based.
After the first two or so flights, in 1981, NASA stopped bothering to paint the outside of the tanks. Not painting the tanks saved some weight that could go into payload to orbit. That orange colour? Spray on foam used to insulate the very cold tank holding liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen from the warm outside air in Florida. All during the 1980s they were blowing these things into orbit and deliberately pushing them back into the atmosphere to burn up. Meanwhile, scientists were noticing a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica that kept growing all during the 1980s.
What is ozone? It is an unstable molecule of oxygen, typically having three oxygen atoms. It is therefore not neutral, unlike O2, which is the oxygen you breathe. Ozone is formed in the ionosphere by ultraviolet light from the Sun and from ultraviolet rays from the galaxy. It is useful as a component of the high altitude protection God designed around our planet that includes van Allen belts of radiation at various well documented altitudes and which includes the magnetic field that makes those pretty aurora borealis and aurora australis lights when a solar flare or other high energy particles hit our planet’s vicinity.
Panic ensued because the “hole” in the ozone layer might let a lot of ultraviolet light through to the ground. It must be the fault of mankind, of course, because NASA is run by evil mass murderers who are in the pay of freemasons and other demon worshippers. So they decided to blame the chloro-fluoro carbons of your air conditioner in order to force everyone to use a much more expensive, and still patent protected working fluid in their air conditioners instead of freon. And they blamed ground level aerosol spray containers which had to be reworked, or abandoned for some products, because evil people could grift harder if they banned these things. All the time, NASA was taking giant gobs of chloro-fluoro-carbon insulation into orbit and then forcing it back into the atmosphere to deliberately burn up. Naturally, NASA did a study on this matter and completely exonerated NASA of any involvement in the ozone layer problem. Liars.
After taking care of my moped problem, I joined the Houston chapter of L5. The moped problem was that I flew home from college late in the Summer of 1985. Couldn’t check luggage the moped, alas. So I left it locked on campus at a place where I had successfully left it many times. Home in Kansas, I bought a 1980 Honda civic station wagon, a green machine. Then I headed to grad school. The first long weekend was for the Columbus day holiday. At the time, people still thought it was appropriate to celebrate the European settlement of North America.
So I drove 48 hours to get to Columbia. Crashed at Shawn Bender’s frat house. Woke up 12 hours later, collected my moped in good order, loaded it into the station wagon, and headed to Houston. Another all-nighter with a few cat naps at rest areas and truck stops, and I was back at Tidelands II Motel, recently repurposed as the Graduate House complete with a huge supply of the large Southern cockroaches that make New York city roaches look tiny.
It turned out that L5 Houston was voting to disband because they couldn’t find anyone to be an officer. One of the foreign students at University of Houston and I volunteered. So we were able to keep going. I was “elected” secretary and the other gent, whose name I have forgotten, became president. Pretty soon, we were back in high gear.
In 1988, I helped form the assembly of chapters at the Denver international space development conference. They asked me to be chair. So I did that, and kept it up in 1989 at the Chicago convention. We did try really hard to make the best of the merger with Vril-worshipper Werner von Braun’s evil legacy “Nationalist Space Institute” but it was a doomed expedition. Everything was moved from Tucson to the District of Corruption. People I worked with were fired. Very bad people like Lori Garver were hired. Much evil ensued.
Also that same year, I helped start the Lunar Prospector Team as a project of Alan Binder, Space Studies Institute, and L5 Society. We put together a conference in support of the idea of a lunar polar probe to map the resources, especially the water ice at the poles, of the Moon. Also that year I was busy at work, now an analyst at Deke Slayton and David Hannah, Jr.’s Space Services.
Thanks to my project in the Summer of 1986, we had found about 42 payloads that Space Services could launch. I was hired there in the fourth month of 1986. There were few summer intern positions available in Houston. The mass murderers at NASA had arranged to dramatically reduce requests for seating on the space shuttle by murdering Christa McAuliffe and six others. Jokes were running fast and furious. What does NASA stand for? Need another astronaut. What colour are astronaut eyes? Blue. One blew that way, another blew that way… What was the last thing Christa said to her husband before launch? You feed the dogs, I’ll feed the fish. How did they know Ron McNair had dandruff? They found his head and shoulders on the beach.
But I knew Lotus 123, programming in macro language, and a great deal about space stuff, so I was chosen to replace the previous Rice University intern, a guy named Alex whose last name I forget. He showed me the massive multi-file loan qualification programme for Ayshire Real Estate, David Hannah’s bread and butter new housing subdivision company. He showed me the enormous flat file business plan financial model that showed balance sheet, income statement, cash flow, and balanced itself with a small amount of prompting. And then he took his master’s degree and went on to other business activities.
That first Summer I was in my boss Mark Daniels’s office and told him that they should look at the university science market. Lots of small payloads were developed by physicists and by atmospheric scientists, and all you had to do was ask them a few questions. They would be overjoyed to learn that anyone wanted to help them get their thing into orbit, or onto a suborbital launch. How did I know? My dad was, at the time, chairman of the physics and astronomy department at the University of Kansas. He knew about payloads that we could launch.
About a week later, I was told to get them a project plan to tell them what we would do. So I contacted a few friends and before long had a number for the university atmospheric research group that had the right database of names, addresses, and phone numbers for the professors. They, too, were eager to see someone help them find launch vehicles for these payloads, and they sent me the list. It had 400 names.
So I worked up a cover letter and a questionnaire using my new-found grad school knowledge of the statistical package for the social sciences. We asked all the right questions. Susie Anders, who was executive secretary for David and Deke looked daggers at me when I explained how the mailing would go out at a meeting in the conference room, standing under the enormous caribou head that Deke had brought back from the wilds of northern Alaska. It, and about twenty other trophy heads were staring down at us because his second wife didn’t want the trophies in her living room. Susie said, “Four hundred letters is a lot of mail. You’re going to help me put these together, aren’t you?”
I was very eager and in my early twenties, so I said, “Yes! Of course, I’ll be happy to help. We put mailings together for the Houston Space Society every month to eleven hundred subscribers. No problem.”
Charlie Chafer, who was the first person David Hannah hired to work at Space Services, talked to his friends in the district of corruption. Sure enough, there was interest in congress, especially from Dana Rohrabacher, in funds for commercial payloads. They came up with the “centres for the commercial development of space” and picked out some prominent universities in key congressional districts (key to NASA funding every year) and pretty much forced the thing down NASA’s throat. I helped find a likely administrator for the programme from among my dad’s colleagues. And in 1987, there were these centres, and in early 1988, the one at the University of Alabama Huntsville was ready to buy a launch.
So we spent a good bit of time designing a modified Black Brant ix rocket system. And came up with some really terrible names for it. Claudia was one of the temporary secretaries who came in to help with the enormous volume of paperwork. I wrote the technical proposal because I could listen to the engineers designing the electrical, or guidance, or payload support, or parachute retrieval system and write out what they were saying in language that university professors and university procurement departments could understand. Claudia looked at me one day and said, “These names are terrible. Nobody is ever going to buy a Thiokol Bristol 27F launch system. You need to come up with a better name.”
So I thought it over one evening after work. Starfire came into my head. I went to work the next day and talked about it with Mark and Deke. Gary Gartner popped his head into the room about the time I said, “We should name it Starfire.” It was Gary who reacted first, saying that the name sounded great, just the kind of thing people would find easy to remember and inspiring. So it was.
We won the contract in part because we could do it for half the price that NASA was charging for a Black Brant ix, in a third less time, and with better performance adding about 25% to the hang time in microgravity high above the Earth. We started working on the project. I was named logistics manager for the flight. We had parts in Sweden, Canada, and all over the USA. I found out how to move highly explosive rocket motors across the country, mostly by picking the brains of engineers at White Sands Missile Range where we were destined to launch. It was quite an undertaking.
We brought the payload and the retrieval system, together with the avionics (or astrionics as my friend Dennis Feucht correctly calls it), guidance system, and other reusable parts, at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. The payload was built at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and I met all the members of Huntsville L5 Society, including scientist and payload developer Dennis Wingo. It was a great time.
At the end of the third month of 1989, I was in Las Cruces, New Mexico with members of my family. Tom, who had become an engineer in San Diego, working on plotters for Hewlett Packard, flew commercial and drove in from El Paso. Dad flew his Piper Tri-Pacer from Kansas right to the airport at Las Cruces. We had a conference for investors and interested folks. I had arranged an extra payload for the launch, with first day cancellations from a stamp club in South Gate, California. Unfortunately, it was after the spin test, and management opted not to risk the additional weight for the flight.
Then it was off to White Sands and the thing flew. Perfectly. I got the role of voice of launch command for the folks in the viewing stand. The payload was recovered. The metallurgy experiments and other materials processing projects all went off perfectly. Turns out you can foam steel in weightlessness. It is about as strong as steel and much lighter.
Things went on in good form for a while. I was elected to the national board of directors as a regional representative from the region that included Texas, but the Nationalist-socialist Space Society was not interested in free market solutions to the settlement of space. They wanted a bigger budget for NASA and nothing else. In the Summer of 1990, I was obligated to resign when the national board’s legislation committee deliberately attacked one of the investors for Microsatellite Launch Systems, where I was working at the time. Turns out they wanted to pretend that China was doing something wrong offering cheap access to space on Long March rockets.
By then, I was also busy with Space Travel Services. We had hit upon the idea of putting an American in orbit. It came about because Gary Oleson, another regional representative on the board of directors, called up Howard Stringer, who was the president of the Houston Space Society at the time. He asked Howard to come to our next meeting and ask a question.
About ten of us heard the question. It was a barbecue and mailing party at my house. Assembling the bulk mailing, which had been copied at Eagle Engineering late one night by me and Bob Noteboom, and putting on the mailing labels and indicia for bulk mailing acceptance, took about three hours at this point, due to the number of pages (sixteen - duplex on 11x17 paper that we folded, centre stapled, and refolded to fit the post awful’s rules) and the number of subscribers (1,100 or so iirc). The question was, “What is the one thing the Houston Space Society can do in the next ten years to change how everybody thinks about space?”
Howard prefaced the question by saying, “I want Jim to answer first, because as president emeritus, he’s probably thought about these things longer than any of us.”
So I heard the question, nodded, and said, “We could put one of our members in orbit.”
Alvin Carley immediately said, “And we can raffle off the ride to raise money for the trip.”
One of the others, I think Richard Braastad, said “We can buy a trip from the Russians for $10 million, if what they were going to charge John Denver is still available.”
David Mayer said, “No, we don’t have a raffle. We do a 900 number sweepstakes. They just gave away Bon Jovi’s house and the call was 99 cents. And they got over a million calls. For a suburban home in New Jersey that might have set them back $250K. How much would someone pay for a chance to win a trip into space?”
We worked it out. And NASA deliberately wrecked it for us. But that is another story for another time.
Robert Zubrin
The guy who wrote the book The Case for Mars came to Houston. I was once again president of the Houston Space Society in 1993. We put together a big event. Got Mike Duke from NASA to come join us for a big meeting in a big meeting hall at the University of Houston. Bob Zubrin
gave a presentation on why it made sense to go to Mars, what we could do there, and how we would build the big rockets for the journey here on Earth rather than trying to do stupid Battlestar Galactica assembly in orbit.Bob’s proposal was pretty simple in some ways. You pack a nuclear reactor onto a rocket lander. You bring along the hydrogen (because at the time - 1993 - we still didn’t have a good sense of how much water ice and permafrost there was on Mars). You use a very simple, 19th Century industrial chemical production system, to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere of Mars, and break off the oxygen. Now you have fuel for the return journey, plus a lot of oxygen for breathing and setting up greenhouses, and you do all these things without sending anyone.
Once the fuel for the return journey is tanked up, you send a human crew. Habitat modules. Greenhouses. Bulldozers to use Martian regolith as radiation shielding. Maybe you locate some water ice in the soil as permafrost, who knows?
Eventually you have a city on Mars. Then you maybe put chloro-fluoro-carbon compounds and other greenhouse gasses into the air. You want to raise the temperature on Mars, free up the oxygen and water vapour trapped by the cold, increase the total pressure by melting the carbon dioxide (dry) ice of the polar caps. You’ll fairly quickly (about 120 years) get high enough pressure for people to walk around outside without pressure suits. Add another few centuries (maybe 400 years) and you can get the partial pressure of oxygen up to where you won’t need to wear a breathing masque.
Even today there is enough oxygen in the carbon dioxide of Mars’s atmosphere to make it possible to develop a breathing system that scavenges exhaled air and atmospheric carbon dioxide to provide most of the oxygen needed for breathing. An atmosphere is a big part of why Mars is a good choice for human settlement.
With a few thorium reactors you could melt vast areas of permafrost and generate a renewed atmosphere comparable to what Mars had during its warm-wet period, which is reportedly hundreds of millions of years ago - if we are to believe the scientists who have been lying to us about many other things. More recently if they have in fact been lying a great deal, or just making up a time line to fit their ideas about what is so. Or their ideas about what they want us to believe.
Why not build parts and assemble things in Earth orbit? Because nobody has ever done large scale construction in orbit. To this day, refuelling in orbit is a very limited technology, demonstrated with all of 32 pounds of hydrazine by a military team in 2007. On orbit repair and logistics is developing, but it is not at the scale of building a giant vehicle to reach Mars. Whereas rockets comparable to the Saturn V can be built on Earth and launched into space (because they have been).
I’m pretty confident that Mike Duke had some interesting things to say about Mars, but I really don’t recall. Our good friend Alvin Carley died in the days leading up to this event, and all of us were quite shaken. I was an extra for the film “Reality Bites” at the time, and sitting in the green room that same day, I wrote a poem about the experience. It would be more accurate to say that I was the channel through which that poem flowed, from somewhere else, because it all came out without stopping, and I crossed out maybe three words during the process.
Victor Koman
A little later, I read a really great book.
was the author. I think that I paid for it to be sent to me on 3.25 inch diskette. The book was called Kings of the High Frontier. In it, Vic describes building a huge space station in the desert near the Equator. He happened to choose Kismayo because Somalia had gotten rid of its government in 1991 and had been smart enough not to start a new government to tax everyone and pay the evil mass murdering International Monetary Fund its debts.It immediately occurred to me that while one gets a higher payload out of the same launch if you are on the Equator, and the payload to orbit is reduced by the cosine of the latitude, there are issues with reaching an equatorial low Earth orbit from other launch sites. Plane changes are expensive. So when I wrote my book Freedom Decentral: Free the Slaves it was my thought to use the vast open territory of the Guban desert, about 10 degrees north, for a similar space station to orbit concept, but built completely underground because the Guban (which in Somali means “burnt place”) is extremely hot and dry.
Nowadays, I am thinking more about some other environment for the launch, probably at a higher latitude still, for many logistical and economic reasons. But the concept is wizard.
Bryce Walden & Cheryl York
Two influential thinkers you might want to hear about are Bryce Walden and Cheryl York. I believe that I met them in person at either the Denver space development conference or the one in Anaheim, so 1988 or 1990. Not sure.
They had done some live action research, or as we might now say, live action role play, in actual lava tubes on Earth. You see, there are structures on the Moon and Mars that must include lava tubes. On Mars these include the very highest mountain in our star system, Mount Olympus, which is also a dormant volcano.
Immediately I pretend to hear you say, “Well, Jim, if it’s a volcano and we wake it up with a few thermonuclear weapons, it’ll spew all kinds of gasses into the atmosphere.” Which is true, but also potentially a problem. We want to raise the partial pressure of oxygen and we want to raise the total pressure of the atmosphere on Mars. Both of these are accomplished if we raise the temperature. But there are all kinds of things that can go wrong with a thermonuclear (fusion) bomb blast. And it might spread fallout which would be a difficulty.
Most importantly, the lava tubes all through those extinct volcanoes turn out to be really valuable living space. If we go and blow up the mountain, we’ll crush a lot of those lava tubes. And we don’t know how far down the magma we want would be, since we’ve never done any drilling at all on Mars. We have some seismic information going back to the Viking landers. But we might not hit magma and then there would be a mess to clean up, and calls for more bombs. It is a path we should avoid heading down.
Besides, lava tubes make convenient volume of space, easily pressure walled. Build a wall at one end, put in an airlock. Build a wall at the other end. Put an airlock there, too, in case you want to expand later. The space in between is where you unleash your air bottles. Presto change-oh and you have a city sized volume of air.
Follow lava tubes far enough and sometimes you find underground chambers, previously magma chambers perhaps. On the Moon there are probably no limestone caverns, because no oceans to host the coral reefs and such that make the material, and not much running water if any to carve out the caverns. We simply don’t know that much about the underground world on Mars, so limestone caverns are a possibility.
How complicated is an airlock, anyway? There was a short story published in Analogue sometime in the early 1970s iirc which involved a terrible disaster. Earth was thrown far out into space where it was too far from the Sun to stay warm. The atmosphere fell as snow for years. Eventually, some people from a space colony around another star came and visited. They found Earth in its new rogue planet galactic orbit.
And, behold, there was a human settlement on the surface. Some people had survived the cataclysm in an old farmhouse. They had used blankets in terrific numbers taken from the houses all around where nobody had survived, or only a few and they moved in, to create barriers for the heat and atmosphere. Their air locks were a series of blankets. Their space suits were made of ordinary household gear, cobbled together. Padded oversize galoshes for boots.
To get more air, they would go out and shovel through the nitrogen layer to find the snow of oxygen that had fallen. Bring in a few buckets. Meanwhile they had grow lights, greenhouse space, and were tunnelling out more living volume. Making babies just as fast as they could. It was a fun story.
Alan Binder
I met Alan Binder sometime in 1987 at a Lunar and Planetary Science Institute conference in Houston. You might find the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute somewhat interesting. At the time they occupied the 1930 mansion built by Diamond Jim West, the oil and ranching multi-millionaire. It was a great place, since demolished by its short sighted owners.
Alan and I made common cause. He wanted to put an alpha particle spectrometer into a polar orbit around the Moon to find water ice there. I knew people at Space Studies Institute and at the L5 Society who wanted that to happen, too. It turned into a complete mapping mission. We at the Houston Space Society held a conference called the Lunar Polar Probe conference. We raised money.
We supported Alan with an office we rented and furnished. He was very grateful. After the mission was picked up by NASA and actually completed, Alan wrote a book about the venture. He mentioned us very favourably. And, for a time, it was good.
Rather than give you all the details, I will simply refer you to the WayBack Machine archive of the Lunar Prospector Team and its history. All the words there were written by me.
Your Mission
All the way back in 1990, doing research for our space tourism business, David Mayer and I wrote off to everywhere we could imagine. Rockwell International, which at the time was involved in building space shuttles, wrote back with a study they had conducted a few years earlier. They still thought it might be possible to build space shuttles for private industry, as seen in the fabulously silly and joyously unlikely James Bond film “Moonraker.”
In the study, they revealed considerable research. Thousands of people were polled. The survey was conducted to avoid self selection error. It was statistically accurate. The number one answer volunteered by survey participants to the question “What would you like to do about space?” was “I would like to take a trip into space.”
Rockwell International estimated that as many as 400 million people in 1990 wanted to take a trip into space. Can you imagine? The industry would be huge, even if only a tenth of those people ever travelled. Today, based on some economic advancements in various places, I would say the number is more like 800 million or above. Which is a big audience for space tourism. Even just training people for rocket flights, outfitting them with space suits as in the Robert Heinlein book Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and bringing people to luxury accommodations for tours of space launch facilities around the world would be a big business. Space Travel Services reborn.
Your mission, friend, if you choose to accept it, is to think about how you would be a part of a spacefaring civilisation that established communities beyond Earth’s atmosphere. If you think about it, and want to get involved, or think your children would like to get involved, drop a few words in the comments. We’ll keep a light on for ya.
Prayer
Eternal Father, please help us to free the slaves, stop the wars, end tyranny, cast out all demons, translate the Gospels into every language, care for the young and the old, the sick and the dying, with dignity and respect, out of a place of humility, and carry the Gospels to the farthest stars in every direction, and all souls in between. Please help with guidance, resources, ingenuity, endurance, fortitude, and patience. Please show us the little fires so we may pass by them. Please bring love into our lives so we remember what we have to live for. In the name of Jesus Christ we pray. God’s will be done. Amen.
That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.
Jim, thank you, thank you, thank you for documenting this history! Your path crosses that of Keith Loftsrom, a friend of mine from Tektronix days, in so many places that I would not be surprised to find that you and he know each other. He was early into the L5 Society, published his Launch Loop concept in Analogue magazine (DEC83), and has a group of followers around the world working on it.
I talked with Bob Zubrin at the Ohio Space Development conference in the 1990s, told him about the Great Lakes Rocket Society Huron project, and still have his business card.
The GLRS "core four" consisted of Mike Jacobs, a tool&die engineer from Toledo, OH who designed and built the Huron rocket structure; Rick Wills, a propulsion engineer at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, OH - our "plumber" who did the tank design and propulsion subsystem; myself, an electronics engineer (the "electrician") who designed the flight computer, launch sequencing, and quarter-turn valve controller; and Ken Weidaw, a Pittsburgh lawyer who taught space law at U. of Pitt and Carnegie-Mellon U. and was a Washington, DC lobbyist for the AIAA. Ken had obtained a 1000 lb thrust Atlas missile vernier engine that became the engine for our Huron rocket project that he bought from Ken Mason in Socorro, New Mexico, who tested engines commercially on his flat-bed trailer.
The Huron project is another story, and I capture some of it in my book, Rocketry & Astrionics, which contains both the explanation of how those rocket equations on T-shirts are derived, using only high-school math. It also has a "case study" chapter of the Huron. If anyone wants a free PDF copy, contact me through my website at innovatia.com via the email address given on innovatia.com/Inquiry.htm