NASA had produced a flawed 1976 study of space colonization and of Glaser’s SPS idea. The reader may click here to see some artwork from a 1979 NASA publication published by the Government Printing Office. (Use back arrow to retrun to this page.) The publication was called Space Resources and Space Settlements.
Note that the artwork conveys lack of focus. I don't mean that the lines are blurred; there's a lack of artistic organizational focus. A lack of focus was also a fault of that publication and of the NASA study as a whole. The publication did have some interesting sections. But Space Resources and Space Settlements projected a vast, thoroughly impractical scenario, which the government then sensibly rejected.
By clicking this line the reader may view a letter I received in 1982 from then Indiana Senator, Dan Quayle. Quayle’s letter explains the lack of government interest at that time.
So it was: that 1984 Simon & Simon episode that helped keep Glaser’s ideas alive in the mass media. I don’t personally know of anything else on that particular subject in the mass media in the years between ’82 and ’87.
During that period, the splendid magazine Ad Astra did help keep the faith, but it was read by only a limited number of people. I tried putting on my own space show in Chicago and Indianapolis. My total audience was less than twenty. Other than that, so far as I know, Glaser’s proposal and space colonization had become largely moribund between 1980 or so and 1984.
But the Simon & Simon episode was viewed by millions of people. I imagine a number of Soviet citizens with access to American TV--or whose actual job was to study American media--viewed that episode.
That, of course, was during the Cold War. In that period, space exploration was a form of sublimated war, and very competitive.
Indeed, three years after "The Wrong Stuff," the Soviets tried to best Glaser’s ideas by launching their Energia booster. There are more details about those events in another article on this web site. But, to put things in a nutshell, in the late Cold War, Soviet energies were constructively diverted into a peaceful aerospace project.
Energia was laucnched in 1987. The Reagan administration (in which William Howard Taft IV served as a deputy defense secretary) was astonished. The launch had come thirty years after the Soviet Sputnik, which had been a major Cold War event.
And, while the Soviet Union collapsed shortly afterward, the Energia effort wasn’t in vain: the technology on which the Soviet booster was based still has a potentially useful role in solving the global warming problem.
The Russians are aware of that and still use the Energia name on a web site. That site may be accessed by clicking here.
Unfortunately, in the twenty years or so that followed the launch of Engeria, little additional progress has been made, either with Glasser's proposal, or with the broader issue of space colonization. It's true that the public has come to understand global warming better; global warming is the problem that Glaser's proposal was designed to deal with.
But there's been a lack of any published conclusion, at least of which I'm aware, about Glaser's proposal. Would it work? Is there something wrong with it? Have the big oil companies kept it from being developed--as suggested in the Simon & Simon episode?
These are unanswered questions that need to be looked into.
To be specific, is there enough energy density is space to make solar power satellites feasible?
A large installation of solar panels was completed for the international space station in March 2009, according to BBC report. It didn't seem that such panels, even if deployed on a larger scale, could generate nearly as much energy as Glaser had projected.
But Glaser's proposal (as interpreted by Gerrard O'Neil in O'Neil's book on the subject) was for large space mirrors which would focus energy toward a different kind of energy-producing device--a sort of space steam engine. Would that be more efficient?
It would seem that very good use of the international space station would be to test out that sort of question.
Glaser's proposal called for a large-scale space construction project. But small-scale models deployed from the space station might answer feasibility questions.
A related area of research is energy transmission in space.
Glaser's proposal was such as to suggest various modifications and variations. If the original idea won't work, it's still possible that a modified form could.
There have been complaints that the experiments being done on the space station haven't been sufficiently significant? Would experiments along the lines just described help deflect such criticism?
In my discussion of an old TV series and of theatrical people, some of whom have now retired from the spotlight, I myself may seem entirely a relic of the past. I feel I do still have a role, however, in reminding the public of still-relevant topics that center on space colonization.
Indeed, without space colonization it's quite possible that almost everything will be downhill--from now until the foreseeable future--for the long-suffering human race.
Continue
George Orwell,
1984
