yet
Fusion energy and self-driving cars are just two of the possible spin-offs from space exploration,
write Tim Radford and David Rowan
In 1945, Arthur C Clarke wrote to Wireless World with a proposal for communications satellites in geostationary orbit, and it must have seemed like a fairy tale. In 1957 the Russians launched Sputnik I, and it looked like little more than an insolent gesture in the Cold War arms race. But since then, access to space has changed the world.
Airline pilots need no longer learn to navigate: they can tell exactly where they are because of satellites that circle above. Polar explorers and yachtsmen routinely check their position with the help of one satellite network, receive weather forecasts from a second, and phone home using a third. The military might of two superpowers was built on space technology, and an industrial communications superstructure has grown up around bits of metal orbiting the planet every 90 minutes or so.
But even “research” satellites have become powerful agents of change. There are satellites that monitor wave heights in the Southern Ocean, and feed the data back into a model of world weather. Orbiting instruments measure soil moisture and predict famines that might be about to happen. High-flying monitors track El Niño or the hole in the ozone layer; radar instruments, in high orbit, detect evidence of underground rivers in arid regions or the traces of long-buried human settlements for the archaeologists.
Space has also become a laboratory. Huge numbers of experiments over the last decades have taken advantage of microgravity: only by examining human physiology in space can scientists begin to understand how warped we are by the steady tug of Earth’s mass. Astronauts in orbit for a week begin to leak calcium, their muscles begin to waste a little. Discoveries like these are beginning to answer questions about human nutritional needs and chronic back conditions.
Astronomers — now devising instruments to collect light that has been on its way to Earth since shortly after the birth of the universe 13-billion years ago — have developed detectors that could help spot cancer cells as they form. They have instruments which can measure a million millionth of a degree, the equivalent of resolving a virus on the moon.
But the most dramatic advances have been in engineering. Spacecraft needs have kept computer and materials scientists on their toes. The payoff has been in robotics, data handling and sensor technologies.
The headlong rush for the high frontier has led down some unexpected avenues. One team of Nasa scientists is experimenting with a silicon gel 1 000 times less dense than glass. They have dubbed the stuff “frozen smoke”: a lump the size of a human could bear the weight of a car — and weigh only 500g. Another team is about to put a laboratory of granules on to a space shuttle. It will help answer questions about soil behaviour in earthquake zones, or what happens to vacuum-packed coffee and cosmetic blusher powders.
So how will space technology touch our daily lives in the future? Richard Taylor, chair of the British Interplanetary Society’s Scientific Programme Committee, offers one prediction: colonisation.
“We are likely to see it on a small scale by the end of the first quarter of the 21st century,” he says. “There will be numerous … exploration bases on the moon, and later on Mars. Most of the technology to do this already exists.” Perhaps in 200 years, he says, Mars could provide a home for billions of people.
More immediately, Taylor forecasts solar power stations in space and the mining of asteroids, for materials such as nickel, iridium and platinum that are in short supply on Earth. He also believes global positioning satellites will be used to develop “automatic-drive self-navigating cars that would create accident-free driving”.
Nick Flowers, who works at University College London’s Mullard Space Laboratory on the Cluster project to study the magnetosphere, foresees a cleaner alternative to nuclear-fission technology. “Helium-3, an isotope of helium — something only known to exist on the moon – – could be used to generate energy through fusion technology, rather than the fission now used in nuclear reactors. Fusion generates little radiation in comparison, and no byproducts that take thousands of years to decay.”
The moon is also packed with metal oxides that could be mined for use on Earth. “Take the oxygen off, and you’ve got a lump of metal for industry to use, all without digging up rainforests to get to it.”
Industry would also benefit from processes that depend on zero gravity. “In space, heating something does not lead to convection — which causes havoc in some industrial processes. So it would now be much easier and cheaper to grow, say, extremely pure silicon wafers for electronics applications. This is already happening on Mir.”
There will also be medical applications, Flowers says. “Last year on Mir, an insight was given into osteoporosis, the loss of bone calcium … Under zero gravity, a German wore an insert on his foot that tapped the foot periodically. Afterwards it was found that this foot had kept its bone structure, yet the other foot had lost mass. This suggests that shocks to the bone, such as walking, trigger the laying of bone structure. Perhaps this knowledge will generate a cure for osteoporosis some day.”
There are also likely to be further developments in the current obsession for mobile-phones. Duncan Lunan, company director of the Association in Scotland to Research into Astronautics, says it will not be long before hand-held satellite telephones evolve towards wrist phones. “The first elements of the Iridium satellite constellation are already in orbit and under test, with two competing systems starting launches soon.”
Meanwhile, the day-to-day job goes on. Necessity is the mother of invention, but the level of invention since the launch of Sputnik I has been bewildering.
Arthur C Clarke once observed that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. There is plenty more magic on the way yet.