Due to length, this article has been divided across six posts/emails. This is the third. Previous parts can be found at pennheretic.com.
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Part 2: Epic Men Of Flesh And Blood
I haven't yet substantially directly discussed any human space settlement. While it's notable that some rather-not-trivial benefits are realized just by our choice to set our sights upon the planets, we obviously can't have a space frontier society without…well, a new frontier in space. We'll need to put Americans onto the planets, moons, and asteroids.
We already technically have a national program to return to the moon (Artemis), originally scheduled to put Americans on the moon by 2024, a date that has now been pushed back to 2026. And while this is a valiant effort, one whose first unmanned test launch I watched with a deep hope and even some pride, it lacks focus, urgency, resources, and scale. We can do so much better.
Immediately, we should accelerate Artemis's goal of building a permanently manned1 base upon the moon. Rather than the effort being a minor sideshow to our affairs as a nation, our efforts to reach and establish bases upon the moon (and planets and other celestial bodies) should be a principal national goal. Lofty dreams can't be had on the cheap. And if you expect to get Utopia for anything less than a proverbial fortune, you're deluding yourself. We should commit to establishing a moon base within five years, and to (in the words of the President who first set our sights upon the heavens) paying any price and bearing any burden to seeing that goal through. But the moon is only the beginning. We should also commit to reaching Mars and establishing a permanently manned (by trained astronauts, not regular settlers at this point) base there within a decade.
It bears saying that, even during the height of the Apollo era, our space program has always been cautious, both in the sense of resources invested and of taking risks with Astronauts' lives (and in many other ways). The NASA budget has never reached 5% of the federal budget, and it's below half a percent now2. And beyond that, we've had the technology to reach Mars for decades now3. The primary obstacle has always been political, not technical; we can have our astronauts upon and banner above the red sands of Mars a handful of years after we decide to make it so, and farther out not that long after that.
Nor should we abide caution in an effort as important as this. A particularly poignant example of willingness to face risk for space colonization is (see footnote about it) Mars One, which had planned to send astronauts to settle Mars without any plan in place to return them to earth. (NASA’s 2030s/2040s-ish tentative Mars mission plans involve returning the crew to earth.) Since a rocket capable of launching from earth needs far more fuel than payload, and a return mission needs a rocket capable of launching from Mars as a payload of the first rocket, not having a return vehicle makes the mission much cheaper and easier. And similarly, NASA tends to be relatively risk-averse in other regards.
I'll mince no words here: if we abandon caution in the name of this noble effort, it will get us the moon and Mars much more quickly, but astronauts will die because of it. This will of course be a tragedy, but not a tragic one: while saving lives is generally a laudable and important goal, people knowingly willing to risk or sacrifice their lives toward noble ends should be honored for valor, not restrained to prevent supposed recklessness. In this early exploration phase (the same principle should not be applied to the main settlement phase later), the first priority should be to the mission, even above the lives of astronauts.4
I shan't go into great technical detail about setting up these early bases, but there is one salient point to note: distances. On the scale of our solar system, the moon is practically nextdoor, and Mars isn't that far. (Reaching the moon with current rocket technology, even assuming nothing fancy like ion drives, which currently exist, takes a few days. Reaching Mars takes a few months.) The outer planets are significantly farther out, very roughly an order of magnitude farther. This is the reason that I don't suggest applying the stringent deadlines to the outer planets (or, perhaps more importantly, their moons): both because reaching them will involve years of travel time and because making ships capable of surviving that journey will likely take longer than ones capable of reaching the moon or Mars.
While bases across the solar system will have a plethora of benefits, there are three reasons that quickly establishing manned settlements on the moon, Mars, and beyond is crucial for building a space frontier society. The first is that these bases will serve as a testbed for what's actually required to live out there. After all, no man has ever lived upon the surface of another celestial body for even 80 hours. If we're to face the doubtless-considerable challenges of having significant settlements upon other celestial bodies, we'll need to know what we're up against, and know how to vanquish the many challenges that will come our way. After all, once we successfully maintain a small handful of astronauts upon a given moon or planet, settling it goes from an intimidating and unconquered technical challenge to a mere industrial and logistical one. Once American astronauts walk upon Mars, we'll no longer have to prove that we can reach Mars, only figure out how to (economically) do what we've already done once a million more times.5
The second crucial benefit of building these bases is that it will begin to make the dream of a space frontier society concrete. A handful of astronauts don't constitute a space frontier society, nor does their noble quest constitute a utopia. But, when Americans start seeing pictures and videos of their fellow countrymen walking upon alien worlds on their phones, computers, televisions, and newspapers, it will become obvious that we're working towards a space frontier society. That society in the heavens, and the utopia that will accompany it, won't be here, but it'll become clear that it's on the horizon. For the first time in a while, our people will have a reason to be hopeful, to look forward to a glorious future.
The final, and perhaps even greater, reason that it's so important to get our astronauts out on this grand mission is the role models they'll provide. With a few exceptions, the role models people, especially young people, have today are awful. I don't think that I need to explain how deeply messed up looking up to tiktok influencers (or even the kind of people who are conventionally famous nowadays) is making people. As is becoming more brutally apparent with each passing day, role models matter, and we have both a catastrophic dearth of good ones and cataclysmic flood of bad ones.
But imagine that the popular attention, instead of being fixed upon petty dramas (I'm sure you can think of at least a few offhand) and earthly squabbles, were transfixed by the story of valiant astronauts on a grand quest to spread mankind, search for knowledge, serve their country, and push back the cold, unforgiving emptiness of the universe. We'd have a national legend nobler and mightier than even the greatest myth or fairy tale, and it'd be real. And the characters of that national legend would be risking their lives sailing into the great darkness for the toughest and most important mission in history. When every American who looks upward knows that his or her compatriots are conquering the vast, treacherous heavens, our abysmal role models would be replaced with inspiring ones, and all of the forces pushing us towards pettiness, selfishness, and cowardice, would instead push us to become nobler citizens.
Virtuous citizens bound together by common cause aren't the only requirement for utopia, but they're a critical foundation. Remember, getting this far doesn't involve any industrial buildout or massive-scale effort that'll take decades. If we want it, we can have this in ten years.
And this is only the beginning.
For reasons that are beyond the scope of this article, I'd suggest making the high-risk initial exploration (as opposed to settlement, which will obviously require both men and women) missions all men. This is primarily for cultural, not logistical reasons. (Men and women both have physical advantages and disadvantages in regard to space travel; for example, men can tolerate more radiation, whereas women require less food than men. But these aren't the concerns that inform this suggestion, that moreso stems from a chivalric morality combined with the high risk of the early missions.)
Source: Wikipedia. Best source in the world. If you don't believe me, read this: https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a
Mars Direct is one such plan. A company called Mars One (now defunct, only because they couldn't raise enough initial money) had a plan to start a human Mars colony, and thought they could do it for $6 billion, very cheap relative to the US government budget (even if you assume that the real cost would be twice their estimate). Notably, they were able to get the expected cost so low because they had no plans to return the astronauts to earth (they planned to support them indefinitely on Mars).
Which is of course not to say that we should endanger astronauts' lives for no reason, but only that we should be willing to endanger their lives for good reason. If you think no one would sign up for this, think again: Mars One had many volunteers for their one-way trip.
I don't mean to suggest here that industrial challenges--meaning doing many times what you've already done once--are necessarily easy. Indeed, the next section will address the industrial challenge. But reducing an unsolved problem into an industrial challenge is a big and obviously necessary step forward.