= ASTRONAUTICAL EVOLUTION =

The Pillar versus the Pyramid

The cartoons presented at the ESA workshop

I drew these cartoons for my presentation at the European Space Agency’s Exploration Workshop at Edinburgh in January 2007. I still think they make a good point, despite the fact that ESA was clearly not paying attention.

My argument was that the traditional space architecture would be unstable and liable to collapse at any time. Thus one single space station, followed by one single Moon base, followed by one single Mars base. This is the pillar (first cartoon).

Of course a space agency would justify the pillar architecture by pointing out that they would have neither the need nor the funds to operate more than one space station. In fact they would be more likely to want to scrap the orbital station in order to free up funds for going to the Moon, and scrap any presence on the Moon in order to be able to afford Mars.

In other words, they would assume that only government scientists have any business spending time in space.

A stable, sustainable architecture, by contrast, would require a pyramid architecture (second cartoon). Starting, for example, with the objective of having ten people on the surface of Mars in a given year (around the year 2030, I speculated), there should be at one and the same time:

• 10 people on the surface of Mars.
• 100 people on the surface of the Moon.
• 1000 people on cruises around the Moon.
• 10,000 people in space hotels in low Earth orbit.

Thus at each level a diverse and economically self-sustaining economy for space travel needs to be in place to provide the basis for the next level.

In order to set this architecture up, I made four recommendations to ESA:

• Find a creative balance between pure scientific exploration and enabling the new industries of space.
• Give top priority to promoting a fully reusable, commercially attractive orbital spaceplane.
• Launch a prototype solar power satellite.
• Base ESA’s public and political relevance on its role as catalyst for a popular passenger spaceflight industry and a clean, sustainable future energy source.

I supported these points with reference to the history of aviation. In the late 1940s, 45 years after the first aeroplane flights by the Wright brothers, the world’s airlines carried over 20 million passengers per year. But during the year 2006, 45 years after Yuri Gagarin, only 28 people flew into space. Now, of course, the number flying annually has fallen further and is down to half of what it was a decade ago (see the space statistics for 1961 to 2015).

I mentioned spaceplanes because of the work being done at both Bristol Spaceplanes and Reaction Engines in the UK, as well as work done in the 1980s to 1990s in Germany on the Sänger II, based on Eugen Sänger’s designs. But, as we are now beginning to see, for a first step towards reusability a vertical launch rocket with return to Earth capability may also be effective.

Obviously space solar power was then and still is now a controversial topic. But I was amazed then (and still am now) that space agencies have made not the slightest attempt to cash in on the anthropogenic global warming / clean energy meme by proposing to build prototype space power satellites.

Whether or not those satellites would ever have led to an economic power source for Earth is not the issue; after all, exploration of the Moon and Mars was not expected to lead to any economic application either. So in my view the agencies missed a golden opportunity to increase their funding and power and at the same time their political legitimacy and public image.

Reviewing my four recommendations now, nearly ten years on, they still seem to me to be as relevant as they were. Yet there’s no sign of them either in ESA’s current programmes or in its Lunar Village proposal.

Please send in comments by e-mail.
Interesting and relevant comments will be added to this page.