Remember the argument for eliminating forks? After a prime-time expose of the disgraceful cover-up by the utensil industry of the number of injuries a year attributable to forks, the safety officials came out with their usual line: “Every life is precious.” Mind you, other than prisoners sharpening fork handles into knives, I don’t think they actually came up with any deaths, but hey, the potential was there.
I suppose we should have seen this coming. When I was a kid, physical education classes meant playing ball, running, jumping, and all that. Today, it means fifteen minutes of low-impact aerobics plus a lecture on the importance of exercise. School sports programs were eliminated long ago due to the insurance and liability problems. (Funny thing is, I don’t remember very many kids dying of heart attacks when I was small but it is a growing problem today.) General aviation died long ago, killed by runaway liability claims and regulations designed to prevent any possibility of an accident ever happening. Most people didn’t mind, since most people were scared of little-bitty airplanes anyway. Then, using about the same logic, they eliminated human control of automobiles. That caused quite a squawk, but it passed, because certainly the risks far outweighed the dubious joy of using your own skill and judgment to get from one point to another.
When I was in college, some of my friends liked to climb sheer cliffs with nothing but their toes and fingertips to hang on with. I had other friends who not only went up in little-bitty airplanes, they jumped out of them, just for fun. There were people who jumped off bridges with big rubber shock cords tied to their ankles. I had a motorcycle for a while, and I loved riding through white-water rapids on a rubber raft. Try doing any of that today, and if you aren’t arrested for it, you will at least lose your insurance coverage.
Do you old-timers remember the Challenger disaster? We all knew spaceflight was dangerous. Then, suddenly, we knew it for real. Seven people died. Tragic, but, if you will excuse my saying so, big deal! Throughout history, in enterprises both great and small, people have died in much greater numbers. But this time, instead of pressing on with renewed determination to make their sacrifices meaningful, we paralyzed the space program with the attitude that we must never again have another accident because every human life is precious.
Folks, the more we believe that, the less true it becomes.
And I have been just as guilty of it as the next person.
Until now.
Let me tell you about that job offer I almost turned down. You are certainly aware of the pilot asteroid mining project timidly initiated ten years ago. The discovery of relatively abundant rare earths, particularly scandium, in certain asteroids, plus the unprecedented demand for those elements for such applications as high temperature superconductors, picoaccelerators, gamma-pumped electron cascades, and other engineered ceramic molecules, put a strong economic incentive behind the project. In fact, most economists believe that these materials are absolutely crucial for meeting Earth’s energy needs. A massive terrestrial mining effort sufficient to meet current demand would be environmentally unacceptable, even if the nimbies permitted it. It looks like we’ve finally found a good substitute for beaver pelts in space.
You did know this country was built on the beaver-pelt business, didn’t you? I read that somewhere when I was kid.
Of course, production is still low, in part because transportation is so slow. The piddly little electric rockets they presently use take too long to move too few supplies and people up, and refined rare earths back down. Fortunately, UNASA, not being the encumbered behemoth of its US counterpart, is acting more as a coordinating body for interested investors. Very interested investors. They think they’re going to get unspeakably rich, and don’t mind if a few poor souls have to stick their necks out to do it.
God bless their greedy little hearts.
Some years ago I was on a committee to develop concepts for a fusion-powered spacecraft. Based on a variation of a Higgs-field reactor design of mine, we came up with what we thought was a practical proposal. However, NASA is only interested in exploration, not exploitation, and the robots we were sending into deep space were patient types. So were the people who had job security monitoring the data for years and years. Quicker spacecraft were considered a threat, not a priority.
My, how things change when a gold rush is on. UNASA wants me to head a project to build a fleet of big, fast, fusion-powered freighters. Notice, I didn’t say they want me to head some management group in an office in Milwaukee. I mean they want me to actually go up there and make it happen. Friends, I would have killed for a job like this just a few years ago. But, until this morning, I was going to turn them down.
I’ve built myself a comfy life here. Safe, secure, predictable. I have prestige, money, and all the free chicken dinners I care to attend. Space is dangerous and the accommodations are spartan. The money would be great, but there is nothing up there to spend it on.
At this moment, quite literally, I wouldn’t pass this job up for the world. And I’m hiring, if you agree with me.
I’ll be honest with you about the ordeal you’ll be getting yourself into. The belt miners are shipping back only the rare earths. They have been producing and stockpiling the byproducts: enormous quantities of engineering materials too massive and low in value to transport back. We will be going where the materials are. There is some basic manufacturing capability there already, and we will be taking all the tools we can, but it will be a bit like setting out for the west with a crosscut saw, an axe, and a plow.
By the way, this is a one-way ticket: If you want to come back, or bring your family up, you have to build the ship to do it. That’s the employee incentive plan.
Unless you are a space nut like me, you may be amazed at what is available up there. The belt has about every non-volatile material you could want, if you don’t mind the materials being a little raw. The belt is a lot sparser than most people envision, but it is huge, and the amount of material, compared to minable materials in Earth’s crust, is staggering. There is a project underway to exploit comets for volatiles (mostly water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen compounds, etc.). The goal is self-sufficiency, to eliminate the enormous cost of launching supplies to the belt.
The trip out will take about two years. We will design our construction facility and prototype freighter on the way. It must be something we can build with minimal support from Earth, and it must be durable and repairable. I suspect we will also settle for something a lot simpler than anything a team on Earth would design. We will be licensed to copy any design on Earth, but we’ll have to build it ourselves. Consequently, we need people who are not only willing to get grease under their fingernails, we need people who can make their own grease.
No specialists need apply. We need almost all fields of expertise, and we won’t have nearly enough people for one of each. Initially, a few hundred of us will be doing work that NASA would probably use a few million to do. Everybody will become expert in whatever is needed. Oh, and no lawyers need apply. We’ll probably get three times as much done without them.
This will be a workaholic’s dream job. There is nothing to do but work, and an unending amount of it to do. At first, it will seem like we are constantly reinventing the wheel. Small tasks will be much more difficult than on Earth. Example: we will take tools for resharpening hacksaw blades.