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500 YEARS AFTER Downloaded from by Guest on 03 October 2021 SPECIAL ISSUE Space Exploration 500 YEARS AFTER Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/141/07/60/6412537/me-2019-jul5.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 APOLLOImagining the year 2469—and seeing a world shaped by space technologies first conceived of in the 1960s and 1970s. BY JEFFREY WINTERS The dignitaries in spacesuits stood in a moment of radio silence, gazing across the powdery, footprint-marked field of Tranquility Base Monument. After an interval, Neil Arm- strong’s familiar lines crackled through the radio. It was ex- actly 500 years to the moment that he first said those words. If the Moon landing in 1969 was a cause for worldwide awe, the 500th anniversary in 2469 was somewhat subdued. It’s not that space exploration had become unimportant over the intervening centuries— quite the opposite. The problem was that space technologies were so common- place and so critical to human society that it was impossible for anyone alive to fully appreciate the triumph. SPACE ELEVATOR Many engineers see the cost of delivering a payload to orbit as the biggest single stumbling block to developing space resources. Existing launch systems cost several thousand dollars per kilogram to get a payload into low Earth orbit. Companies that build partly reusable rockets, such as SpaceX, are aiming to get costs down in the $900-per-kg range—better, but still high. The ultimate solution may be to ditch rockets altogether. The concept of a so-called space elevator was invented independently in the 1960s and 1970s by Russian Yuri N. Artsutanov and American Jerome Pearson. Pearson calculated that a sufficiently strong tether could stretch from the Earth’s surface to geosynchronous orbit and beyond; specially built vehicles could climb up that ribbon and release payloads into space. It would take a week to get to geosynchronous orbit, but the cost savings would be worth it. “You’re not going to get to $50 a kilogram using rockets,” said Peter Swan, a mechanical engineer who is the chief operations officer of Zodiac Planetary Services in Paradise Valley, Ariz. “For routine launches on the order of 20 metric tons a day, you need a space elevator.” For decades, the concept foundered on the lack of a material capable of holding together as it dangles more than 35,000 km, but according to Swan, new carbon-based materials such as single-crystal graphene seem to have the requisite strength—in theory. “We are on the path to tech-readiness,” Swan said. “What we need now is industry testing.” One test has already begun: Researchers from Shizuoka University in Japan last year sent an experiment to the International Space Station to test some of the principles of an object climbing a tether in space, though its 11-m tether is made of steel. Swan is confident that before the end of this century, the first space elevator will be operating. By 2469, he believes, the people of Earth will see space elevators as freight railways to the sky. MECHANICAL ENGINEERING | JULY 2019 | P.61 Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/141/07/60/6412537/me-2019-jul5.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 Image: NASA, Pat Rawlings After the commemoration, the invited guests returned heads; humanity lived in an era of abundance, not scarcity. to homes shaped by space engineering far beyond what Another connection to space was more tangible. the Apollo engineers could accomplish, but which had Enormous ribbons of crystalline graphite reached from been foreseen in the first decades after the first Moon port facilities along the equator to massive counterweights landing. in orbit. Used as space elevators, they reduced the cost of lifting mass into space by orders of magnitude, though they epresentatives from Alaska, Finland, and Patagonia suffered from being relatively slow—it might take a week Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/141/07/60/6412537/me-2019-jul5.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 returned to a planet unbreakably linked to space. For for a cargo pod to climb into geostationary orbit. Rinstance, the economies of those countries relied on The physics and economics of space elevators also electric power beamed from orbiting stations. Those sta- shaped the flow of goods. Since it was much easier to send tions, glinting like diamonds in geostationary orbits that mass up than to bring it back down, massless power and are rarely eclipsed by the Earth, collect solar radiation data were the main products sent from space. The traffic with kilometers-wide arrays and then convert that power on the space elevators only went up. to microwave radiation that gets beamed to antennas on When humans travelled to and from orbit, however, they the surface. The clean and virtually limitless power from still used spacecraft that were little changed from the ones these satellites helped stand economic theories on their developed in the early 21st century. POWER SATELLITES Solar power is getting cheap, but it still can only generate electricity when the sun is up. That limitation led engineer Peter Glaser to develop (and patent in 1973) the concept of putting acres of solar panels on satellites in geosynchronous orbit and beam the power down to receiving stations on the Earth’s surface. It’s a simple idea, and according to John C. Mankins, a former NASA physicist currently working in private space development, all the basic components have already been tested and are technologically ready. “They haven’t been demonstrated in space applications,” Mankins said, “but they’ve been demonstrated in terrestrial use or in the laboratory.” For instance, Mankins said, beaming power to an antenna via microwaves was demonstrated in the lab in 1973, with a receiver efficiency above 90 percent. More recently, solid state power electronics have been developed to allow the transmitters to work with fewer losses. The first megawatt-scale demonstration could occur as early as the 2030s, Mankins said. Beyond that, the stumbling block is launch costs, which at present make the cost of power unaffordable. Until cheaper launches are available, the only way to get a large-scale power satellite system in place is by building them in orbit from space-based materials, which might not be possible for some decades, as the industrialization of space is still in its infancy. A constellation of power sats would help supplement Earth-based renewables, but Mankins says that such a power system might have the most value in space. “You can process materials, you can mine asteroids, you can do very high power beaming of energy,” Mankins said. “If you have megawatts of power at low cost in space— and other spacefaring countries don’t—you win.” Image: NASA MECHANICAL ENGINEERING | JULY 2019 | P.63 Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/141/07/60/6412537/me-2019-jul5.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 Image: NASA ASTEROID MINING Some entrepreneurs see space as the ultimate motherlode. One frequently cited estimate suggests the value of minerals in the asteroid belt exceeding $700 quintillion, or $100 billion for every person currently living on Earth. Presented with the possibility of the grand-daddy of all gold rushes, private companies—with names like Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries, and Planetoid Mines Company—are already looking to exploit those riches. Planetary Resources, for instance, announced in 2016 that it was developing a privately funded program to send a probe to an asteroid to prospect for minerals, with a launch date scheduled for next year. If all goes well, it—or one of its several competitors—could begin exploiting minerals by before the end of the next decade. Exactly how to get at those minerals remains debatable. One scheme would send entire robotic processing plants to deep space to extract the valuable minerals—and volatiles such as water—which would then be shipped back to Earth. Another would hitch so-called space tractors to small asteroids and pull the whole object to Earth orbit to be mined. While the mineral wealth of the moon and asteroids may be beyond human imagination, it’s unlikely that it will replace resource extraction on Earth itself. The complication is how to bring tons of minerals down from Earth orbit in a safe and cost-effective way; a mistake would produce an out-of-control meteor. According to Peter Swan of Zodiac Planetary Services, technologies such as a space elevator could support an inexpensive flow of material into orbit, but economically important space commodities will either stay in space or be massless like power or communications. “Coming back is a real bear,” Swan said. “Space mineral resources are going to be used in situ. They are more valuable out where they are.” INTERPLANETARY PROPULSION Getting to low orbit is a challenge today, but to fully explore—and exploit—the solar system, SPACE SETTLEMENTS future generations will need a better way of crossing interplanetary space. Ultimately, space will become a home Rockets have a severe limitation: They must carry their own fuel, which adds mass to a for humanity. But where is the best spaceship, which then requires more fuel. To get a sense of the tooth-to-tail challenge, the 3,600 place to settle? kg Juno probe now orbiting Jupiter was launched in 2011 by an Atlas V rocket loaded with For nearly a century, people have had 518,000 kg of fuel. And it still took five years to reach its destination. a vision of colonizing the Moon or Mars. Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/141/07/60/6412537/me-2019-jul5.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 One approach to beating this problem is to create more efficient engines.
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