Externalized Costs of Crewed Space Exploration
As of May 30, SpaceX, a private for-profit venture, appears to have put folks in orbit. This is the first time Americans have made the journey from America, using American technology, since the last Space-Shuttle launch in 2011. SpaceX funded the mission, in part, by promising investors to make it routine. I watched the launch somewhat nervously this past week, since the Falcon rocket system is not without failures. In 2015, a very similar but un-crewed Falcon 9 rocket broke up just minutes after launch. NASA concluded that an ill-advised, and cheaper, material was employed for a critical bolt in the design. Excepting this debacle, the Falcon 9 rocket has made 88 other launches without major failure over the past decade. The skies seem wide-open for human space exploration. Buy why not simply send robots to do the job for us?
There was a moment 20 years ago when it seemed human spaceflight could be sidelined indefinitely. To that point, arguments in favor of human exploration generally resolved to political unification and elaborations of Manifest Destiny. Support for manned exploration dwindled after two of five Shuttles manufactured met a tragic fate. We began to recognize that humans are fragile, to the extent that guaranteeing our safe passage through the incredibly unfriendly regions beyond our atmosphere can cost tens of times the effort of a simple robotic mission.
The ongoing exploration of Mars makes a great example. I spoke by phone with Dr. David Flannery, a Research Fellow at the Queensland University and a contributor to the 2020 Perseverance Rover project, about his paleo-exo-biological investigations. Flannery suggested that for the cost of a manned mission to Mars, perhaps fifty robotic versions of the same scope could be accomplished. Flannery’s $100 billion estimate of the manned Mars expedition is conservative, with other projections reaching into the $ trillions. “And this won't happen until probably the late 2030s at the earliest. Can you imagine how good our robotic explorers are going to be by then…?”
Dr. Flannery has every reason to be skeptical, if even concerned, about human space exploration since he, like many scientists, is primarily interested in collecting unblemished physical data for analysis on Earth. And scientists want to collect that data as quickly and cleanly as possible. In many ways, this sort of exploration will require no more than this careful retrieval and relay of information from distant worlds. Humans are an expensive and unnecessary liability. But there are non-monetary costs inherent in crewed exploration, too.
The mere presence of astronauts mucking around on the surface of a distant planet could quickly betray any hopes of isolating potential traces of life. Such contamination is a real issue for astrobiologists seeking signs of life beyond our skies. Bacterial spores from Earth are capable of surviving trips to space and possibly even re-entry into the Martian atmosphere.
There are, however, situations where this sort of retrieval/relay data collection could warrant human operators on the ground, or at least in the general vicinity of the research site. Robots require direction. Engineers must remotely command rovers and potentially face a serious communication delay. The round-trip delay between radio communication with Mars can approach 40 minutes. The lag time stretches into hours for more distant bodies like Jupiter and Saturn— and some of their moons may be our best bet for finding viable life in the solar system. But in order to even begin to probe those potential habitats, we will need to drill through miles of ice and/or rock and THEN look for what lies beneath. Having crews in orbit around the moons will certainly multiply the returns.
There’s also the issue of repair. The first US space station, SkyLab, notoriously suffered damage during launch. Because crews were able to repeatedly service the orbiting station, the craft was not lost after the incident. The crew attended to jammed solar panels and replaced a critical heat shield. These repairs allowed the space station to host three different crews before it was eventually abandoned in favor of newer projects. SkyLab demonstrated the potential for humans to do impromptu space-repair, a task that is virtually impossible to ask of an on-site, un-crewed rover. Sending a repair robot out to Saturn, for instance, would require years in transit alone.
So in many real senses, having humans alongside robots makes the most sense. The financial burden of crewed spaceflight has, however, remained at the center of most discussions. It is highly unlikely, for instance, that any government would be able to amass such extraordinary funds. Independent finance is almost certainly a must and SpaceX is proving the path. But there are risks of non-monetary costs, externalities, inherent in offshoring exploration to private industry. In addition to contamination concerns, we may face another Columbus moment where newfound worlds are immediately tapped for resource extraction.
It seems implausible that private operators like SpaceX will be able to fund their missions through space tourism alone. Right now the company relies upon a business model promising transport of items to space. Their clients include commercial satellite companies, international space agencies, and government defense agencies. These may prove sustainable revenue sources, but they are undoubtedly limited. Inevitably, some form of space-mining will have to drive money from investors into the technological infrastructure necessary for wide-spread space exploration. So far, there has been some boom and bust with regards to investment security in such ventures but the industry proceeds with little talk of the inherent ethics.
Surely scientists like Dr. Flannery would prefer not to compete for drilling time on Mars with corporate funders attempting to harvest lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, niobium, molybdenum, lanthanum, europium, tungsten, or gold — just a few of the minerals that could be potentially be extracted commercially. After-all, for scientists seeking evidence of ancient or extant life, these distant worlds represent an unblemished Eden — natural beauty untouched by human hands. When humans invented cloning technologies, biologists around the world set aside their tools until they could agree on ethical guidelines by which to proceed. It seems the same sort of discussion is due concerning extra-terrestrial exploration. The closest approximation, the Outer Space Treaty, is mostly a military agreement and has only sparse and ambiguous references to mining and habitat destruction.
There is no doubt that robots are the most efficient and robust actors in space — they have a guaranteed place in our future explorations. We can accomplish more faster and far cheaper with drones that with our own frail human bodies. Obviously, the vacuum of outer space is a formidable foe- replete with ionizing radiation, zero-G, resource scarcity, and so on. But there is also little doubt that humans will eventually be required to join their automated counterparts. At some point in the next 500,000 years our world may become threatened by an asteroid collision and so off-Earth colonies present a real value as a sort of back-up plan. The recent pandemic could have threatened the entire species had the virulence of the pathogen been much more severe. Beyond this, the vast distances limit our ability to control robotics in real-time, which will require engineers to place themselves at the very threshold of those worlds in order to more effectively guide their mechanized partners. Humans will continue into the cosmos.
The only real question is how gracefully will we proceed ? If scientists have their way, we will creep onto other worlds with ballet slippers, rigorously careful not to disturb traces of a history that we can only begin to imagine. If investors have their way, we will blast our way into untold riches. The moderating discussion will prove a critical endeavor for future generations.
