Space Exploration--The Profit Imperative

Very soon it will be forty years since Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder and made his “giant leap for mankind.” We went back to the moon a few more times and then hung it up. Occasionally someone asks why we didn’t keep going back or why our scientific curiosity flagged so immediately and badly.
History gives us an excellent and accurate answer. It is one that those who champion the cause of space exploration should study carefully. Look at the exploration and exploitation of the American Hemisphere—no, I don’t mean just since 1492 or 1519. I mean way before that.
The first Neil Armstrong to jump off his ship and onto the new world was probably Phoenician. Any objective historian accepts as reasonable the notion that they were here 3,000 years ago. It is possible that Asiatic and North African peoples came here by sea long before that.
There is the legend of Egyptians crossing the Atlantic. There is even a story that the Chief Rabbi of Portugal (who induced the Jewish bankers of Spain to pay for Columbus’s trip) had in his possession a map of the Americas showing land configurations as they might have been 6,000 years ago.
Whatever the legends, the Phoenicians were probably here. There is little doubt that an Irish monk made the trip 1500 years ago. The Scandinavians settled the northeast coast of Canada a thousand years ago. They established a route others followed.
When Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed up the East Coast of the present United States in 1524, he found an abandoned church in Rhode Island modeled after the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem (John Smith of Jamestown fame found the same church in 1610.) In Massachusetts there’s a tombstone depicting a Renaissance knight in full armor. Carbon dating suggests a period about ninety years before Columbus. (I have photographs of both.)
In any case, lots of people were here before Columbus. So why is Columbus famous and the others all but forgotten? You want the simplest possible answer? Money.
Columbus found enough gold trinkets to suggest the serious possibility of profit. Enough so that men like Vespucci and Cortes started looking harder—and found enough treasure to turn Spain into modern Europe’s first super power overnight. Money.
People don’t spend huge fortunes to go exploring unless the venture capitalists who come up with the money think there’s a profit to be made. By Columbus’s day, ships were big and seaworthy enough to carry cargoes of gold, spices, silver and sugar back to Europe in profit-making quantities.
So the wave of exploration he began stuck—while the Phoenicians, Irish and Scandinavians made like astronauts and just went home. They came up with nothing to justify the expense—or had no way of transporting it if they did. But the explorers who followed Columbus found all kinds of backers.
There, in a sentence, is the problem with the human space program. Any gold or uranium on the moon or Mars? We haven’t found it yet. And, our only way of getting there involves such huge quantities of fuel that we have room for no more than a couple of hundred pound of cargo per trip.
Like the Tenth Century Scandinavians, we haven’t found anything valuable—and, if we did, we’d have no way to ship it back to Earth. That, as long as it remains true, will stop space exploration dead in its tracks. All the appeals to Congress in the world won’t change that reality.
If we really want to get into serious space exploration, travel and settlement, there are three things we need to do before we fire off another rocket. One) we have to find a different means of transport—one that can efficiently transport mining, housing and living equipment up there and valuable commodities back to Earth.
Two) we have to find some effective way of shielding any space settlements from the asteroids and pieces of space rock that fly through the ether. If we don’t, we’re going to take enough casualties to end any exploration program right there.
Three) we have to get lucky and locate something that makes people think there’s money to be made up there—like the gold trinkets Columbus found on his voyages.
Some of that may involve the stuff of today’s science fiction—for instance, gravity nullification. Einstein said gravity was not so much an attraction between two objects as it was a bending of space that forced the two together. Maybe we have to rebend it, if there’s such a thing. We need to find a way to go much, much faster than rockets can go. Is the speed of light really absolute?
These are the questions we need to deal with rather than wasting any more money on our current space projects. Some back to basics, knowledge for knowledge’s sake kinds of research—the sort of thing nothing but a government will back either now or in 1492. (The Spanish government was broke so it put the screws to Jewish bankers, but it was still public monies).
Solve the problem of fast space travel, of getting large amounts of gear off the surface of a planet without obscene amounts of fuel—these are what we MUST do, or our space programs will remain the stuff of dilettantism.
To make it real, we need something to invoke the Profit Imperative—that has motivated most human exploration throughout our history. Show me how much money I can make, and I’ll go to Mars. If I can prove to you that the trip will pay off, you’ll invest your retirement funds in my travels..