What Matters: June 2001
Beyond 2001: The Future of Space Travel
By Geoffrey Landis '77
We're going to the stars.
This is something I've always believed (too much exposure to science fiction at a young age) and I guess I still do.
Science fiction leads us to believe that we will do it in one giant breakthrough. Some lone inventor in a basement laboratory, an eccentric Archimedes—probably they call him a crackpot—will come up with a theory, test it, and build a faster-than-light space drive in an afternoon.
Unfortunately, in the years since I left MIT, I've lost my belief in the eccentric inventor in a basement laboratory, and I've learned that if we're going to go to the stars, we will have to go the slow way: one step at a time. I get exasperated sometimes at just how slow the steps can be. And yet, each step further out into the solar system is interesting.
And, without a doubt, there are fascinating things on the horizon. The Cassini probe is now on its way to Saturn, carrying the Huygens probe. Does Titan really have oceans of liquid ethane, continents of polyethylene? The Messenger mission to Mercury—does Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, indeed have ice caps at the poles, as the radar images suggest? A main-belt asteroid orbiter, to take a look at Vesta and Ceres: these are asteroids bigger than some moons. How are they different from the planets? And how are they the same? What can they tell us about the origin of the solar system?
We need to keep on pressing the boundaries. Some of the projects I've been proposing include a rocket-powered Mars hopper. This would be a little vehicle that lands on Mars, and then compresses the Martian atmosphere to convert it into rocket fuel to fly again. The hopper could fly over rough terrain, hopping easily over chasms and boulders, and take aerial photographs as it goes. (As a long-time member of the MIT Rocket Society, I like to think of it as the first model rocket on another planet!)
Another project to push our boundaries will be a Venus airplane. The planet Venus is deadly hot and hostile at the surface, but at the cloud-top level, it is a fine place to fly. A solar powered airplane for Venus would be easy to build—lots of solar power—and could tell us a lot about the greenhouse effect (Venus is the greenhouse planet ne plus ultra!) and about planetary climates. It's a lot harder to fly on Mars—the atmosphere is ten thousand times thinner than Venus's, and a hundred times thinner than Earth's—but flight on Mars might be the next step. Model airplanes on Venus and Mars! From there we can go on to an airplane for Saturn's moon Titan. With a low gravity and a thick nitrogen atmosphere, it's the easiest place in the solar system to fly—and one of the more interesting.
Of course, we can't ignore Jupiter, and right now the most fascinating places around Jupiter are the Gallilean moons. Or, I should modify this to say, the fascinating places are what's under the Gallilean moons, because the indications are that Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa all may have secret oceans hidden under kilometers of ice. A radar mission to probe below the ice and learn more about the possible oceans—a single moon-spanning ocean? Many small, disconnected pools?—will be good for a start, but from there we will want to send submarines, miniature mechanical dolphins to swim the hidden seas and find out if these oceans, like ours, are home to life.
After Jupiter, there are a thousand places to go. Perhaps some of the most interesting are the small bodies of the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud, which seem to be rich in organic materials. Did life on Earth really originate in cold, dark ices far from the sun?
There's a lot to do in the solar system. We need to take risks, and to dare to fail. Every failure is a stupid failure in hindsight, because whenever you try anything new, there is always somebody who said "it won't work." But without risks, we will never advance.
For now, the solar system (except for the Earth, of course) is the realm of robots. Some day, though, we will follow ourselves.
For now, we need to work on getting us there, one step at a time.
About the Author
Geoffrey A. Landis (Class of '77) actually graduated from MIT in 1980, due to a minor bit of procrastination about finishing his undergrad thesis. While his stated degrees were in course 6 and 8, he actually majored in model rockets, model airplanes, and science fiction. After working in the Boston area for five years, he went to Brown for graduate school, and after finishing his PhD in physics, starting hanging around NASA Lewis Research Center (now NASA Glenn), as a postdoc, a support-service contractor, and now as a civil-service scientist. His work on the Mars Pathfinder project involved understanding the effect of Martian dust on the solar energy reaching the surface of Mars. He has published over two hundred scientific papers in the fields of photovoltaics, space power and propulsion systems, and astronautics, and holds four patents. As a science-fiction writer, Geoffrey Landis is the author of over fifty published short stories and novelettes, and twenty poems. He has won both the Nebula and Hugo awards for science fiction short stories. His first novel, Mars Crossing, was published by Tor in December. A short story collection, Impact Parameter, will appear from Golden Gryphon this November. His work has been translated into nineteen languages. More information is available at his web site. He lives in Berea, Ohio, with his wife, science-fiction writer Mary Turzillo, and two cats, Lurker and Lepton.
What Matters is a guest opinion column written by a different MIT alumnus or alumna. The views expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Alumni Association or MIT. Interested in writing a column? Email whatmatters@mit.edu.
