The Answer to Despair

on a clear night

“Create ships and sails capable of navigating the cœlestial atmosphere and you will find men to man them, men unafraid of the vast emptiness of space.”
~Johannes Kepler, letter to Galileo, Anno Domini 1610

Many long years ago my friends Aleta Jackson and Greg Barr found that quote from Kepler. They used it on some of the last literature of the L5 Society before it was degraded into the Nationalist Socialist Space Society founded by Werner von Braun. It got me thinking in a lot of interesting directions, did that quote.

For one thing, it was less than 400 years earlier when I first read it. Now, in 1610 the population of the planet we call Earth (or in Greek Latin, Terra, making us lot Terrans in some sense) were about 98% rural. Today in many industrial countries we are about 2% rural, and we feed far more people than ever before.

Try to imagine for a few moments the visualisation involved for men like Kepler and Galileo in understanding the distance scale of the star system we occupy. With some rudimentary information about a well at Cyene that cast no shadow at noon on the equinoxes, a guy named Aristarchus of Samos worked out how big the circumference of the Earth must be given how long a shadow was cast by a 6-foot pole at Alexandria, Egypt at noon on the same day, and given what he was able to discern from the tax records about the distance between Alexandria and Cyene. Aristarchus did his calculations roughly 280 BC.

(I feel obliged to note that in the 19th Century the British, never enthusiastic for the work of “worthy Oriental gentlemen,” chose to run the same survey work conducted thousands of years earlier by the priests of the temple of the pyramid. They learned that the priests had recorded a value 10% greater in the east-West dimension and 10% greater in the north-South dimension for every single property they surveyed, so they could collect 21% more taxes from everyone. So the value Aristarchus calculated for the circumference of the Earth was too large by 10%. And the oldest tax records we have indicate that fraud, theft, and taxation are synonyms.)

Kepler and Galileo were capable of estimating the distance to the planet Jupiter. Galileo made detailed records of the orbits of the larger of Jupiter’s moons, which are to this day known as the Galilean moons. Within about a century of his work, Newton and others were able to calculate the masses of some of the objects in our star system. So when Kepler wrote about “the vast emptiness of space” he had a good sense of how much volume of space, and how very empty it is. Yet he understood that God has placed us amidst plenty.

Coincident Economics

People have not experienced stagflation for a very long time. The last time Americans had that experience was between 1971 and 1981. Fiscal and monetary policies under Nixon, Ford, and Carter were “corrected” to some extent by Paul Volcker with what at the time were very high interest rates.

Nixon’s many egregious actions included creating entire government agencies out of whole cloth and without any constitutional authority, such as the environmental protectionist agency, the occupational safety and health administration, and others. Nixon chose to eliminate the gold cover clause of the Bretton Woods accord, ending the redemption by foreign banks of dollars for gold. (Americans were still denied the freedom to own gold by the evil executive order of mass murderer and ardent communist Franklin Roosevelt up until Gerald Ford decided to run for re-election.)

Nixon nationalised and socialised the passenger and cargo rail services, creating Amtrak, again without any constitutional authority. Conrail was created out of the embers of the cargo rail services that had been regulated to death by the interstate commerce commission and other unconstitutional government agencies. Conrail also had no constitutional authority when it was created by Gerry Ford.

It is in this exact context that Gerard K. O’Neill, a physics professor at Princeton, began his inquiries into what would be the best place for developing a technological civilisation. Professor O’Neill was famous for his 1956 invention of the particle storage ring for high energy experiments. He also developed a magnetic mass driver extending on the work of Edwin Northrup.

In 1969 many of his students in his physics classes were doubtful about the benefits of the study of science. That year was the first year of the first term of Nixon. The Vietnam war was raging, and being lost despite victory in nearly all the battles. The cold war was still raging, and many Americans were convinced that the world was going to be annihilated in a nuclear inferno. So, Professor O’Neill used examples from the Apollo space programme to stimulate the thinking of his students. Then he asked a really interesting question: “Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?”

The answer, of course, is no. No it is not. Many advantages are available being out of the deep gravity well of our planet. Robert Heinlein calculated that once you are in low Earth orbit you are “halfway to anywhere” in our star system in terms of change in velocity.

There are many Earth orbits at all sorts of altitudes above the Earth’s surface. Low Earth orbits are interesting for basics like space stations and satellites that observe Earth’s surface. There is a particular class of polar orbits called “Sun synchronous” which provide for passing over the same part of the Earth’s surface at the same time of day every time, so you get the same Sun angle and can make meaningful comparisons over time.

There is another particular class of orbits called “geosynchronous” which are equatorial orbits (having approximately 0 degrees of inclination to the Earth’s equator) at about 19,300 nautical miles or 35,800 kilometres. At that altitude, a satellite makes one orbit in one sidereal day (23 hours, 56 minutes, and a few seconds). In other words, it appears from the perspective of someone on the ground that a satellite in that orbit is stationary in the sky. Which is why ever so many communications satellites are in geostationary orbit.

Early in his work, Professor O’Neill and his students figured out that there were high Earth orbits where eclipses happened very rarely and only for short periods of every day. Placing large solar arrays in those orbits would allow for the collection of enormous amounts of energy. And then a guy at Rice University, Dr. John Freeman, invented the photo-klystron which converts sunlight directly into radio energy, dramatically enhancing the efficiency of beaming that power from one satellite to another or to a receiving antenna array in some desert place on Earth.

The economics for building large structures in orbit are made much better if you go grab some of the Earth approaching asteroids, of which there are many hundreds. You can also get a lot of raw materials from the surface of the Moon. It turns out that there are a lot of things you can use that are all around our star system. Some months back, I mentioned a few of these in my essay “Save the Earth, Develop Space.”

One of the projects I was deeply involved in back in 1988 to 1999 was called the Lunar Prospector mission. Friends of mine in Houston and I co-founded the Lunar Prospector Team, provided office space and funding for Dr. Alan Binder, and organised a conference to examine the potential for a resource survey of the Moon using a polar orbiting probe. Good times. Noodle salad.

I began this section of this essay with a discussion of stagflation because last year my friend Courtney Smith pointed out that we were very likely going to be experiencing another period of stagflation. It is not completely clear yet that the Powell mistake to echo the Volcker mistake has been made, but it is clear that there will be more dollar price inflation for some months or years to come. So I think it is worthwile to re-examine the topic of space resources as a way to potentially reduce a lot of material costs. Manufacturing in space would also reduce the pollution arguments the communistic watermelons (green on the outside, bloody red on the inside) make about everything wrong with industrial civilisation.

Stop the Wars

Every once in a while I take the time to be unhappy with the moral condition of young people. It doesn’t last very long because, well, young people are fickle af. Quite a long while ago I was against registration and the draft. I was against nuclear war at a time when Barack Obama was on campus at Columbia University attacking, smearing, and denigrating the anti-war activists with whom I associated. I am already against the next war.

So I was interested to find out that the Generation Z types, so-called Zennials or as I prefer to denominate them, Zennias, have finally come to grips with the fact that the people in gooferment who are talking about having a military draft are talking about drafting people of their generation. So I guess they will stop having blue and yellow Ukraine flag icons on their Failbook and Tweety-bird profiles, huh? Slava urine and all that rot. Here’s an article about it: Zennias against the draft

And here’s a meme about it:

Is this a digression? No, it is not.

You see, there are a bunch of things you can do with missile technology. One of the things you can do, if you work at it, is you can put objects in space. One of my buddies worked on missile systems at White Sands, at Cape Canaveral, and at a bunch of other space launch sites. He worked on the original V2 missiles brought over from Germany after WW2. He worked on the Thor rocket programme. He developed the amateur rocket societies of the United States. His name was G. Harry Stine. I met him in 1987 at the North American Science Fiction convention (which is what we call the World Science Fiction convention for Americans when some place you cannot reach by driving has been chosen for that year’s venue) in Phoenix. It was one of my first visits to Phoenix, which is a very hot place in late Summer. And I met a bunch of the Tucson L5 Society people there at that event.

Harry used to tell the best stories. He was very affable and a great story teller. He wrote science fiction under the pen name Lee Correy. He enjoyed explaining how things work, which is one of the reasons his amateur rocketry handbook is still a great resource for hobbyists. He passed away in 1997. I miss my friend.

Way back in the day the core members of the Houston Space Society incorporated our outfit in 1988. We were sceptical about the impending merger of the L5 Society with the Nationalist Socialist Space Society of Werner von Braun, and so we chose to have our own corporation. We held a bunch of meetings for the public, roughly once a month, with invited speakers like Dr. Robert Zubrin and Harry Stine and many others. We also had a newsletter, a physical form 16 to 24-page document we sent to about 1,100 subscribers and celebrities every month. We originally called it “The Colonist” and later the “Journal for Space Development.”

In memory of my friend, I will now recount two of Harry’s stories. The first of these took place at White Sands missile range in the late 1940s. A bunch of V2 rockets were taken as war trophies by the American military from Germany to the United States. White Sands was chosen as the place to launch them.

I myself worked on a rocket project at White Sands for a commercial space transportation company at the end of the 1980s. In particular, I wrote the technical proposal which won the launch contract in 1988, helped with the spin testing at Redstone arsenal in Alabama that same year, and was the voice of launch control in 1989 during the first successful launch of a commercially licensed rocket system. (I had nothing to do with applying to the FAA for the launch licence, though I believe some of the text I wrote for the technical proposal ended up in the licence application.) The payload was for the centre for the commercial development of space at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. It performed 7 minutes or so of microgravity experiments on materials and then was retrieved by parachute about 200 miles down range.

Many Americans are unaware that the United States launched a ballistic missile that hit Mexico back when. Harry told the story. He said that in the early days of the V2 rocket tests, they had experimenters who were scientists and engineers. These guys would develop a payload to put on top of the rocket. They were the “principal investigators” for the rocket missions. After they had the payload the way they wanted it, rocket guys like Harry would put it on top of the rocket. Then they would launch the rocket and see how things went.

The launch team would get inside a block house, a very strongly built structure, partly buried in the ground, with reinforced concrete block construction (thus the name block house) and often with those crazy glass blocks you see that pretend to be windows and are almost always horribly distorted as far as visual clarity for someone peering through them. And therein hangs the tale.

There was this one principal investigator who didn’t like the view from inside the blockhouse. He liked being out in the wind. And the blockhouse was at the South end of the launch range. The launch pads were all at the South end of White Sands. All the rockets went north from there, into the empty desert, the sands from which the missile range took its name. (Yes, please insert white supremacy jokes here.)

Now, it was early days. So there was radar, you betcha. And there were range safety devices in case a rocket went off course. The range safety officer for a given launch would have a button and be able to blow up the rocket in the event something went wrong. And in those halcyon days, the principal investigator was thought to be a great person to be range safety officer. After all, he would have a college degree or even a graduate degree, and be of a stable disposition. Not flighty and weird like the guys who actually knew how to make things work, how to fit parts together, and how to get the stuff to go, for whom the military higher ups (also known as rear echelon mfs) had very little if any respect.

Then one day this wind-preferring principal investigator had his payload on top of a V2 rocket. So it was his job to push the button to detonate the range safety explosive in the event anything went wrong. He very politely requested, and the guys who got things working obliged, a long cord with a box at his end with the button. The other end of the wire was connected to the transmitter that would send the signal to the device on the rocket. And, this guy stood outside while the rocket went up.

First time he did that thing, all was well. Second time, as I recall the story, same gig. No worries. The rockets did their thing and went up and north and became ballistic and the payloads sent back telemetry or whatever. But the third time, well, no.

On that occasion the rocket malfunctioned. Instead of going up and to the north, it just went straight up. And started drifting South. It was definitely right over the blockhouse when the radar control team said, “Blow the rocket. Push the button.” And everyone in the blockhouse shouted out at the principal investigator, “Push the button.” And he didn’t.

You see, there was all that metal in the sky directly overhead, and he was unhappy with the idea of steel rain. So he wouldn’t push the button and make a mad dash for the blockhouse. He waited. And waited.

Meanwhile the rocket went further up and further South. And he was starting to feel like he could get inside before the debris cascaded down on his head when the word came back, “Don’t push the button!” The radar team reported that it was now over El Paso, and would definitely make an alarming set of holes in parts of the city if it were blown up. So they all waited.

The rocket went further up. And further South. Now it was over Juarez. So that was reviewed in the chain of command and having come this far without blowing it up, they determined to wait even longer. So they all waited.

Finally word came back that it was now high enough and far enough South that it would most likely not demolish any homes in Juarez. So the word came, “Push the button.” And behold, the button was pushed. The range safety device blew up. The rocket stopped going up and its parts began coming down. And indeed they did land in a cemetery (as I was told by Harry one fine day some decades later) near Juarez.

So the launch team went to the main base, and they all jumped in trucks and headed for the rocket crater. Which went really well until they came to the border. Here there were Federales whose job it was to consider the merits of a group of military guys and casually dressed engineers and a lone principal investigator with a sheepish look on military trucks seeking to come into Mexico. No. Possibly even “No señor.”

There they sat for two days. Word went back to White Sands. Word went up the chain of command. Word went to the State department. Polite inquiries were passed to Mexico city district federale. (Yes, friends, the capital city of the country known as the United States of Mexico is called Mexico city DF - the rest of the world should be so candid. ;-) Eventually permission was granted to enter the territory of the country that the United States had just hit with a ballistic missile. Word filtered up to the border. And the trucks went down through Juarez.

When they were pondering what to expect while sitting at the border cooling their heels, the consensus was that the local people would be very frightened by the explosion in the sky and the rain of debris. This theory proved mistaken. When they got to the crash site, there were vendor booths set up all around the perimeter of the crater. Every piece of junk metal from miles around had been cut up and was being sold by worthy entrepreneurs as “pieces of the missile from America.” It was a festive atmosphere. The actual rocket parts were at the bottom of the crater and completely unharmed by the local community, who were enthusiastic about the team of rocket jockeys who showed up to haul it off. Many meals and cold beverages were sold. And there was much rejoicing.

The other story Harry liked to tell was from 1957. I heard this story from him in 1987 in Phoenix, again at the infamous and epic-in-its-madness 1988 World Science Fiction convention (or Worldcon as we call them) in New Orleans at which I was an impromptu speaker for some sessions and again in 1993 at our monthly meeting featuring Harry in Houston. So I have the story by heart. Whether there is perfect truth to it or not, I don’t know.

Harry worked on a rocket for the Air Force that was to be launched from the vicinity of the Cape Canaveral naval air station. It was Summer 1957. For the last three years, since 1954, the Air Force had been working on the Thor rocket system. According to Harry, by 1957 they had a fairly good working understanding of the main rocket system, and were testing a number of second and third stage systems. I’m willing to suppose that the tests were conducted under national security, and that Harry was enjoined from talking about them. But certainly by the time he was getting free drinks at science fiction conventions with the story, his contract with the air force would have lapsed.

Anyway, the team he was working with was given the task of configuring an experimental rocket engine to be a fourth stage. They ran their calculations and behold, the fourth stage would enter low Earth orbit at 102 miles altitude. Better still, it would be able to carry an additional 50 pounds to that orbit. So the team was very excited. Here it was more than halfway through the 20th Century and the promise of all those science fiction stories they had read in the 1930s and 1940s in Astounding and other magazines were finally coming to fruition. Mankind was going to go boldly into the space frontier. What should they send up?

Well, the mission commander knew his place in the world, sad to say. So he talked to the base commander. They considered how to celebrate this momentous event. Would they send out a press release? What kind of payload would be good? A telescope? An atmospheric sampling device? Something else? They sent word to Washington, DC with the exciting prospect and the inquiry about what to put on the rocket as its payload.

Word came back. The United States Navy was going to launch the first satellite into space, dummies. You are hereby ordered to fill that fourth stage rocket motor with sand. Not propellant. So the first Earth orbiting satellite launched by mankind went up from a Soviet space launch site and was called Sputnik. Shoulda coulda woulda.

Your Future

I shall not belabour the point much further. The people in charge of missile technologies decided to build a whole lot of nuclear tipped ballistic missiles. They worked out how to launch Polaris missiles from submarines. They worked out how to get rocket systems to fly through the atmosphere as cruise missiles. And they have, in the decades since Robert Goddard pioneered the liquid fuelled rocket technology in 1926, used rockets to blow up a lot of things, murder a lot of people, and do spectacular amounts of damage, all over the world.

For that entire time, since the 1920s, people in the science, engineering, and science fiction communities have openly sought to have missile technology used for putting people and equipment in space to exploit the vast resources God created for us out there. And in a few cases some rockets have been dedicated to those purposes.

So if they do choose to blow up the whole world in an apocalyptic nuclear conflagration, just remember, it didn’t have to be that way. I personally believe very strongly that God has no intention of allowing His creation to nuke this planet entirely. However, I have a very strong leading from the Holy Spirit that two cities in the United States are going to be nuked.

The very same Holy Spirit says that mankind has access to the resources of all the star systems in this galaxy if we would only learn to love one another. All you need is love. God is love. Amen.

Eternal Father, please help us free the slaves, stop the wars, and end tyranny. 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. Amen.

Do you feel despair? Sadness over what is possible not coming to fruition. Go outside on a clear night and look up. The endless bounty of God’s creation is out there, waiting for us. Let us choose to live up to that possibility, God willing. Amen.