Cities in the Sky

© Laurence B. Winn

Mar 1, 1999

In a world that worked according to Winn, space development would go like this:

Driven by popular consensus, against which any other action would be political suicide, our gutsy representatives in Washington would slash military spending and entitlements to free up money for the construction of a fleet of Orion-class nuclear pulse heavy lifters (See The Point Loma Legacy). Simultaneously, they would create a research organization on the scale of the Manhattan Project to implement moon mining and electromagnetic mass driver technology for the extraction of oxygen, hydrogen and construction materials from the lunar surface.

Using the heavy lifters only once, then leaving them in space as construction shacks, crews would build the first mining operations, habitats and cargo transportation systems following plans laid out by the Space Studies Institute at Princeton.

Within fifteen years, a population of at least 10,000 would be living and working on the moon and in Trojan orbit, sustaining themselves without resupply from home and providing the following services to earth in payment for luxury imports:

* Space solar power for the developed and developing countries at a cost roughly equal to hydropower, but without the need for dams or long-distance transmission lines. (Note: The latter is especially important in developing areas where the infrastructure for power transmission is not in place, prohibitively expensive, or both.)

* Cheap satellites -- Communications satellites, weather satellites, resource mapping, locator and messaging satellites at a small fraction of their current cost, because they would be set in place and maintained by space workers rather than launched from earth at high cost and low reliability.

* Cleanup of orbital debris which, at this time, can and does endanger space operations.

* Collision insurance. In the remote possibility one of the big rocks we haven't discovered yet paints a bull's-eye on our home planet, humanity will stand a better chance of discovering it in time, acting successfully or, at least, surviving in part.

* Global policing. Protected and guided by orbiting infrastructure supported from the moon rather than from earth, and thus made relatively cheap, a small conventional force can police the planet. A five-pound rock dropped from orbit can take out an aircraft carrier. A larger rock can level a buried command center. From orbit, using large optics manufactured with high precision in freefall, reconnaissance teams can make sure that almost nothing moving on the ground, in the air, on or under the sea escapes detection.

# Optical astronomy using a fleet of Hubble-type telescopes maintained by resident technicians at a tiny fraction of the current cost.

# Materials development. Ten years after the first colony is up and running, space factories should be turning out carbon fibers with a strength-to-weight ratio high enough to build the first geosynchronous towers. This will drop the cost of space transportation from the current thousands of dollars per pound for chemical propulsion to perhaps ten dollars per pound for a three-day train ride up a carbon-fiber rail into space. The departure point: Somewhere on the equator.

For the first time, it will become possible to travel to the immense O'Neill cylinders of Trojan orbit using average personal resources. Some travelers will not want to return to earth. They will find green expanses under blue skies inside structures twenty miles long and four miles in diameter, spun about their long axes to simulate gravity and illuminated through skylights by gigantic mirrors the length of the colony. And while the horizon may seem oddly curved at first, and the night sky strangely configured, colonists will quickly accept the rainbow shimmer of the giant mirrors as they transform day into evening and the playful call of young aerobats skimming the cloud tops near the zero-gravity axis on human-powered wings. Space will have become home.

Earth, the cradle of humanity, can be transformed into a garden only by using the resources of space:

* Weather control by the use of space mirrors to heat and cool the earth at selected times and locations. If we don't like the results of an experiment, we can terminate it quickly and easily, and with little loss of investment, because the people and materials are already in place.

* Illumination from space, again by the use of space mirrors, to light the scene of an emergency or to lengthen the day at selected locations for increased agricultural production.

* Environmental tools developed on space colonies. These will find application on earth. Most discoveries occur by accident, in a strange environment, which is why a human presence in space is the best ally of science.

* Biological and genetic tools of benefit to medicine. Procedures that will meet political resistance on earth because of their hazards will flourish in the perfect isolation of space, where the accidental spread of contagion is far less likely. Laboratories constructed for this kind of work will also make ideal sites to receive sample returns from distant planets suspected of harboring alien microbes. Otherwise, the strange biota, to which earth forms would have no resistance, might present a threat.

# New power sources. Using the high vacuum and near-absolute-zero ambient temperatures of space, gigantic supercolliders could be constructed almost at a whim, just by positioning a few superconducting coils around the yard, as it were. The needed vacuum and cold cost big bucks on earth, but are free in space. Supercolliders are the kind of powerful instruments needed to study the inner space of subatomic particles and to manufacture usable quantities of antimatter. The release of energy accompanying the controlled fusion of matter and antimatter is a reasonable basis for starship propulsion.

# Better politics. New ideas are the bane of the established order, as the ideas of John Locke were to the European power structure of the 18th century. It took a frontier to create the kind of representative democracy much of the world now enjoys. It takes a frontier to sustain it. And it will take a frontier to facilitate the next step to a pure democracy, in which the individual exercises greater authority and assumes greater responsibility. Pure science collects a windfall. Besides the tools and opportunities already mentioned above:

* Radio astronomy facilities on the dark side of the moon, where scientists using instruments shielded from our civilization's electromagnetic noise, can read the early history of the universe in its own red-shifted, low-energy language.

* Cheaper, better and faster exploration of deep space by robots manufactured in, and launched from, the moon's orbit. They could be simpler, more reliable, but also larger and more capable than earth-built probes because they would not have to withstand the rigors or a launching from earth. Yet they would be inexpensive because hardening for a rocket launch and the launch itself are the major costs of robotic space exploration.

* A jumping-off place for the exploration and colonization of the more remote spots in the solar system, including Mars, the asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter.

Finally, and most importantly, our cities in the sky will offer new opportunities, or a second chance, for individuals like you. In a small space population, your skills will be unique and valued, even if, on earth, all you can expect is a lousy job, four walls and a TV. You will have first crack at marketing new products and inventions, because you are where the market is. By the time the conglomerates catch up, you'll own the business. Its happened before. It's the way frontiers work.

Welcome to the high frontier.