Advanced Space System Concepts and Technologies: 2010–2030+
Ivan Bekey
Introduction: The Exciting Future for Space
1.1 Linear Thinking Leads to a Gloomy Outlook
The space age—just a little more than 50 years old—has witnessed some astonishing achievements during its relatively short duration. Powerful space communications capabilities, for example, are indispensable to modern life and taken for granted by most users. Indeed, space communications have become ubiquitous technological tools of industrialized society.
Notwithstanding these accomplishments, space applications other than communications have fallen far short of what they could be if adequate attention and resources were invested in new technologies and techniques for exploiting the medium of space. Except for a few notable exceptions such as the Apollo program, development of military, civilian, and commercial capabilities has been a slow, incremental, and conservative evolution with minimal funding and the lowest possible risk. Since the demise of the Apollo program and the Cold War, many bold ideas for utilization of space were advanced but uniformly deferred or rejected. A persistent reluctance to take great steps, push frontiers, and assume risks with untested but high-leverage techniques has essentially prevented many space applications of the Department of Defense (DOD) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from becoming what they could and should be.
But this scarce implementation of space systems with bold capabilities is not ordained. A number of far-sighted projections of imaginative space applications for both government and commercial use were made even before the 1957 orbiting of Sputnik and were greatly expanded immediately after. A prime example is the 1960s pioneering work by Dr. Krafft Ehricke in space industrialization in which he discussed potential capabilities to provide illumination and power to Earth from space, among other ideas, along with means to attain the requisite launch systems.1.1NASA made even more ambitious projections in human spaceflight during and immediately after the Apollo program when it still believed it had a mandate to establish a human presence throughout the solar system. Wernher Von Braun's post-Apollo program included plans for ambitious orbiting outposts as well as bases on the moon and Mars with dozens of astronauts permanently at each location—all to be accomplished before 1981!1.2 Given the large funding sought for these proposals that used tested Apollo technologies, quite likely NASA could have accomplished a sizable portion of those projections—a far cry from the current status.
For its part, the U.S. Air Force over the years has chartered a large number of task forces and special studies to define ambitious future space capabilities, which primarily depended on major advances in a number of technologies, some evolutionary and others revolutionary. Unfortunately, in contrast with the NASA proposals, the technologies for the Air Force and Ehricke studies and proposals were much more difficult and therefore further off than assumed, and in neither case did the hoped-for funding or markets materialize. Thus whether for political, budgetary, or technological reasons, most of the future projections fell far off the mark when they ventured beyond a decade or so into the future, and few have been implemented into actual orbiting space systems.
Every forecast or projection of capability into the future is bound to be erroneous in some important aspects. This is not only because of the limited vision in terms of the possibilities, but because of the utter impossibility of forecasting inventions, especially in the accelerating pace of technology that has characterized the world at least since the industrial revolution. Equally important is the impossibility of correctly gauging the political environment, which can drastically retard or accelerate technological activities. As Edward Teller cautioned more than 30 years ago, "It is extremely hazardous to prognosticate—especially about the future." Think of today's technological innovations that did not exist 50 years ago. Table 1.1 lists technological advancements taken for granted today that either didn't exist 50 years ago or were just in their infancy.
Table 1.1 Perspective: Technology 50 Years Ago
| Nonexistent | In Their Infancy |
|---|---|
| Satellites | Radar |
| Lasers | Transatlantic airlines |
| Fiber optics | Closed loop control systems |
| Solid-state electronics | Telemetry |
| Cell phones | High speed, large memory computers |
| Jet aircraft | Large screen television |
| Orbital launch vehicles | Audio tape recorders |
| Internet/Web | Antibiotics |
| Desktop computers | Interstate highways |
| Color television | Copy machines |
| Organ transplants | Electric watches |
| Word processors | Walkie-talkies |
| Microwave ovens | Automatic transmissions |
| Adaptive optics | Power lawn mowers |
| Global connectivity/networks | Fluorescent lights |
| VCRs or Fax machines | Transatlantic/transpacific cables |
| MRI or CT scanners | Guided missiles |
Our world today is vastly different from what most people—except perhaps a few visionaries and many science-fiction writers—would have imagined 50 years ago. Most people (including technical planners) imagine the future to be a more or less "linear extrapolation" from the present. This leads them to conceive future space systems as being similar in form and function as today's systems but having, for example, a greater number of more sensitive detectors, larger antennas of a similar design, larger solar arrays for producing more power, and larger versions of chemically fueled rockets for launch. But just as linear thinking 50 years ago has come up short in predicting technological realities commonplace today because of new inventions and innovations that could not have been forecast, predictions for technological advancements in common use 50 years from now will be even more in error because of the accelerating pace of technology.
For example, consider the pervasive Internet and World Wide Web, where anyone anywhere can immediately access vast information databases and communicate with individuals or groups independently of distance or time zone. Such capability is changing living patterns; commerce at all levels; communications between individuals, companies, and governments; and, in fact, hard-line political regimes. Consider this in the perspective of the average citizen in 1950, who was lucky to have a rotary-dial telephone with a party-line connection, had neither access nor resources to make overseas phone calls, relied on physical libraries for information, used a manual typewriter to type letters in which errors had to be manually erased, and "cut" a stencil to make a few messy mimeograph copies by hand to send out via the U.S. Post Office.
Neither the routine and affordable distribution of hundreds of color television channels via satellite nor the digital Internet/Web technology and its pervasive effects were foreseen, and indeed were all but unimaginable in the context of the average citizen of the 1950s. Nor did many at that time envision the routine airline travel by millions of people across the oceans in a few hours in relative comfort for affordable ticket prices, all brought about by development of the jet engine.
Indeed, linear extrapolation with respect to space capability several decades into the future will generate a very gloomy prospect indeed for space and its use:
- The cost of launch into space will not be reduced much from today and will still be several thousand dollars per kilogram of payload. Launch vehicles will still be at least partially expendable.
- Spacecraft weight will not be significantly lower than today for the same function and performance.
- Spacecraft cost will, therefore, continue to be tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram after development investments, often three to ten times as great.
- Power in space will still be costly and limited to a few tens of kilowatts in common use.
- Orbit transfer from low Earth orbit (LEO) to geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) will still be considerably more expensive than lofting into LEO from Earth. The propellant for the transfer will still be brought from Earth and the transferring stage discarded.
- The aperture of practical microwave and optical sensors for Earth-oriented surveillance or astronomical functions will be limited to less than about 30 meters for microwave sensors and less than about 10 meters for optical sensors because of the enormous weight, complexity, difficult packaging for launch and deployment, and cost of the primary apertures as well as the necessary precision structural truss work to maintain their premanufactured accuracy during launch and after deployment.
- The ability to explore the planets and beyond will be limited to small payloads sent infrequently at great expense. Interstellar exploration will be only for the science-fiction writers.
- Military functions of spacecraft will be mainly those that provide force multiplication and are used principally to support the forces applied by ground or airborne means and ground fighting troops.
- Space will continue to be the province of governments, except for the limited commercially successful space communications industry.
- Communications spacecraft will continue to be built for the long life required for unattended economic payoff, and will continue to be expensive and increasingly out of date during their lifetimes because of the inability to access them for servicing or upgrading in orbit.
- Opportunities for humans to travel in space will be limited mainly to government astronauts and highly trained specialists, and a few very rich adventurers.
The aggregate of these characteristics does indeed present a very gloomy prediction. Operating in the space environment would remain an expensive and rare activity engaged in principally by governments, large corporations, and a few rich individuals. In this future world, use of space could never become a part of the everyday life of millions of ordinary citizens as airline travel has become in a few short decades. Much of this gloomy picture is due to the great costs of developing and operating systems for space, which are thousands of times greater than for similar functions performed from aircraft, and because of technological myopia. This book will show—with rational technological innovation and targeted analysis—the fallacy of each of these linear extrapolations and of this aggregate pessimistic view of the future of space.
1.2 New Technologies Will Enable an Exciting Future for Space
This book will describe an infinitely more positive and attractive future for space and the technological wonders it portends. To achieve this promising vision, we must "think out of the box," avoid seductively easy linear extrapolations, and apply inventiveness in those technological areas where breakthroughs will have the greatest effect on our future capabilities and costs. We need not make or postulate any new inventions to bring about the space future we want, although such inventions will surely happen. We must apply every technological area already being worked and identify and apply new technologies that, even though still in the basic research phases, would have great impact if developed and proved.
An imaginative view presented by the book describes what space could well become in the next several decades if new technologies that have already been identified are developed and demonstrated, and bold new innovative applications using these technologies are undertaken. To make that case, the book discusses the future environment for space activities and makes a case for why this environment will be very different from the predominant conditions of the past and present. It identifies a dozen critical technologies with the potential for making orders-of-magnitude reductions in spacecraft and launch vehicle weight and cost, and orders-of-magnitude increases in their performance, if only we would make the investment to develop and prove them. It then uses these technologies to identify and synthesize a large number of space-application concepts, addressing both established as well as unconventional missions and functions that have revolutionary potential.
The emphasis in this book is not on incremental improvement but rather on what has been called "disruptive innovation"—that is, the generation of capability so great, or with cost so low, or both, that revolutionary change occurs. In industry, if ignored, this kind of innovation can be disruptive; if adopted, it can make successful new entities and leapfrog current leaders. While this change is disruptive in that it challenges or threatens current activities and dogma, rapid and great advances in both the private and public sectors generally require such innovation and stem principally from such drastic measures.
1.3 Objectives and Approach
The aim of this book is to show what is possible. The hope is that once people see what is possible, they will raise goals and horizons, challenge political and budgetary limitations, and strive hard to accomplish at least some of the new capabilities—or entirely different innovative capabilities not identified or illustrated here.
Thus emerge the fundamental objectives and approach—the guidelines employed in identifying the technologies and application concepts, which are unchanged from those of the 1975 study of possible future civilian and defense space applications:
- Concentrate on technologies and applications that have the potential for orders-of-magnitude change.
- Avoid 10-percent improvements.
- Aim the horizon far enough into the future to be well beyond the "program Improvement" that is typically the focus of the customers of space systems.
- Pay no attention to current political or policy "correctness" nor to likely required budgets if the capability promises to be unusually useful.
- Collect and innovate concepts that might be useful, but not necessarily those that should be built nor necessarily the most likely to be funded or accepted.
- Do not advocate or get wedded to the concepts—just identify possibilities.
- Innovate, invent, as well as collect application ideas and technologies wherever found.
- Include useful nearer-term ideas and technologies if unconventional, overlooked, or discarded for invalid reasons.
- Remember that "creation of new concepts and capabilities must be its own reward."
1.4 References
1.1 Krafft Ehricke, "Space Industrialization," Rockwell International Space Division, Report No. SD 76-SA-0079-1 (June 29, 1976).
1.2 Wernher Von Braun, "The Post-Apollo Program," Presentation to the NASA Administrator, NASA Archives (1969).
