AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter November 1994 Space at the End of the Cretaceous: Real-Time Evolution Brenda Forman If space efforts were dinosaurs, chances are we'd be on the verge of another Great Extinction. Old style space -- i.e., instigated, defined, funded and above all, controlled by governments -- is dying. Oh, we're still going through the motions, passing budgets and mounting ambitious programs (whose chances of actually coming to fruition are increasingly dubious). But then, I don't suppose the dinosaurs saw it coming either. The fact is that the whole space paradigm as conceived and defined by the Apollo experience has reached an evolutionary dead end. Witness the fact that twenty years of efforts to define a new "mission" for the traditional space program have failed utterly. How many Blue Ribbon reviews have we had by now? Begin with Spiro Agnew and work your way forward -- a dozen at least. Impact: nil. There's a message in that; when your message repeatedly falls on deaf ears, it strongly suggests that you change the message. These days, space equals politics. Space programs -- like any other program dependent on Congressional funding -- survive if they create enough jobs in the right Congressional districts. And if they don't, they largely languish and die, unmourned and unremembered. Nor is that going to change -- at least not so long as we continue to think of "space" as solely (or even primarily) the province of the government and the public purse. But if you stand back and look around, you begin to see the very earliest glimmers of something exciting taking shape, the cloudy outlines of a new space landscape (if one may be permitted so contorted a metaphor). Old-style space may be going the way the dinosaurs -- but a new-style space is just beginning to take shape. And it is very different. For one thing, it's tightly focused on one thing: making money. And for another thing, it's tightly focused on earth, not the outer solar system, not even the moon. (I confess to being a bit rueful about that, old spacenik that I am, but it looks increasingly as if the moon and the planets are going to have to wait awhile. I'm convinced we'll go back to the moon and even on to Mars in time. But I don't expect it to happen in my lifetime. The first nexus of real space activity is going to be good old Mother Earth.) As ever, the communications industry is leading the way. Literally thousands of small and medium-sized communications satellites are being planned for launch over the next ten years or so. Indeed, it's shaping up as one hell of a barn dance in LEO. Satellite control and mid-orbit collision avoidance may be the growth industries of the future. Then there's the truly astounding cascade of applications being spun off from GPS (Global Positioning Satellite). It seems like every day someone has identified some fresh human activity on earth or in the air that can do its thing better, faster and cheaper if it can pinpoint its own location with absolute precision. And after all these years of halting progress, remote sensing is finally reaching significant market proportions, and attracting serious commercial investors. Little by little, in short, space is finally beginning to be seen as the next arena for fun and profit, i.e., the two things human beings may be counted on to pursue with tireless determination. It all depends, of course, on getting the cost per pound to orbit down to realistic and affordable levels. Sadly -- but unsurprisingly -- the U.S. Government seems once again to be proving itself incapable of coming to grips with that goal. Paralyzed by budgetary constraints and institutional interests, we seem once again to be taking the easy way out, settling for status quo and business as usual. BUT!! There are bubblings of something excitingly new on the horizon. The recent Space Transportation Round Table in Washington showed how seriously organizations entirely outside the old space fraternity are thinking about the problem of affordable, reliable transportation to space. If even one of the heretical ideas fielded at the forum were to become real, then the old-line outlooks and organizations that have directed and controlled our space efforts so far may be left in the dust -- like the dinosaurs, too slow to adapt, too rigid to survive. And wouldn't it be just delicious if the private sector decided to end-run the whole governmental swamp completely and build a space program to suit itself? Yes, it'd cost billions -- but multi-billion-dollar deals are not all that rare out there in the good old capitalist world. The only requirement is a perception that there's MONEY TO BE MADE. When the numbers add up, the investors show up. It is this glimmer of a new and different future that gives me hope in the face of the increasingly discouraging prospects of our existing space efforts. We just aren't gonna get there from here by the paths we've pursued thus far. It's the vague outline now emerging of new and different paths that give me hope.