Date: June 16, 2011

Title: Space Travel or Health & Safety?

Podcaster: Maurizio Morabito FBIS

Organization: Omnologos Ltd

Description: Exploration means risk. Avoid all risk, and you will avoid all exploration. We might as well all be dead on this planet.

Bio: Maurizio is an experienced electronics and computing technologist and scientist, and published journalist and technical and scientific author in English and Italian with a variety of interests, including the study of international relations, economic and social development factors, the energy sector and space technologies. Maurizio has recently been accepted as Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, the world’s longest established organization devoted solely to supporting and promoting the exploration of space and astronautics.

Sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is dedicated to all PAIN members “People Against INcineration” both past and present. Who after a five and a half year battle finally won and stopped Veolia Enviromental Services building a 180,000 tonne per year waste incinerator near our village for more information visit http://www.p-a-in.co.uk/ .

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to another podcast by Omnologos. My name is Maurizio Morabito and today’s topic is a question…space travel, or health and safety?

I was recently reading Frank Cottrell Boyce’s notes at the end of one of his children’s books, “Cosmic”, about him watching the first moon landing on TV. Boyce got the inspiration at the time to think about earth instead – well, that’s quite a waste. So this is the legacy of that concept. We’re stuck on Earth because of the first Moon landing? And yes I was there too, but only two years of age, and I actually that day was fast asleep. I do have an excuse.

Let’s go back instead to a time when progress was about moving forward, not endless introspection. For example, the time of Jules Verne.

“Faisant allusion au peu de largeur de la Floride, simple presqu’îleresserrée entre deux mers, les députés du Texas prétendirent qu’ellene résisterait pas à la secousse du tir et qu’elle sauterait aupremier coup de canon. « Eh bien ! qu’elle saute ! » répondirent les Floridians avec un laconisme digne des temps antiques.”

“Alluding to the extent of Florida, a mere peninsula confined between two seas, they pretended that it could never sustain the shock of the discharge, and that it would “bust up” at the very first shot. “Very well, let it bust up!” replied the Floridians, with a brevity of the days of ancient Sparta.:

That is chapter XI from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne. published in 1865. It is about Texans and Floridians battling it out to get the powerful Moon cannon built on their land. And the Floridians declare, they prefer to see their land “bust up” than lose the chance altogether.

Can you imagine anybody nowawdays pushing for a revolutionary, extremely dangerous new technology for space travel to be installed first in their own region, putting glory and adventure before absolute safety? I just cannot.

And yet. Think of the times of the Saturn V – when every launch was a miracle on its own. On May 25th this year, I attended a lecture at the BIS, the British Interplanetary Society, by Alan Lawrie in London. Alan Lawrie is the main author of the book “Saturn” available at Amazon and the book is a winner of the Sir Arthur Clarke award. You can find the microblogging of the lecture at omnologos.wordpress.com .

Lawrie did spend some time describing the most spectacular incidents of the time of the Saturn V, such as the S-4B (third) stage of the Saturn 5 that exploded during tests on 20th January 1967. Cause of the explosion: an incorrect weld on a helium storage sphere. Think about it. This meant that all other helium storage spheres on all other S-4Bs ever built, did not suffer from “an incorrect weld”. Another explosion was caused by mistaken loading. Multiply now those problems for the several million functional parts that made up a full Saturn 5 rocket including the Lunar and Command Modules and all, and you will understand why every Saturn V launch was a miracle on its own.

Don’t just think of the successful failure that was Apollo 13. Even Apollo 14, as described at the Bad Astronomy-Universe Today forum, had its own collection of close calls, like difficulties in docking the lunar module, a descent to the lunar surface almost aborted by a loose “blob of solder”, an unresponsive radar.

So was it Apollo stopped because of risk? We do know now that the launch of Apollo 8 followed by a day a major structural failure during some tests on other Saturn 5 hardware. Apollo 17 left for the Moon without its third stage ever having been test fired. Obviously many bullets were dodged. After all that’s why most astronauts had been test pilots before. But at a certain point just as the goal of reaching the Moon within the 1960s had reigned supreme, the end of the moon race meant that there would have suddenly been nothing to gain, and everything to lose from having orbiting corpses. One up for safety, one down for exploration. That’s another reason why the Space Shuttle was sold as a way of opening space to everybody, that means at a much lower risk than, say, flying a new airplane for the very first time.

Fast forward to 2011. Open access to space, and by that I mean orbit, is a very expensive possibility on the Russian Soyuz capsules. The space shuttle programme has lost two full crews and that is considered too much by many people. In other news, we are seemingly stuck in one scare after another, be it y2k, sars, avian flu, volcanic ash leading to the closure of the European air space despite few or no measurements ever been taken. Risk avoidance is becoming a goal in itself, and seemingly all it will take for ball pens to be banned on planes will be an idiot trying to blow himself up using a ball pen.

Is this a conducive environment for going beyond low earth orbit? I don’t think so. Imagine, the shock and the horror, were one of the exploring crews lost, or trapped forever on the far side of the Moon or in solar orbit, with their plight and agonizing deaths broadcasted to all. Somehow I don’t think any US President, or any European Space Agency committee will want to be associated to that. And so we’re stuck in an almost impossible situation for any flight of exploration of the Solar System, with any chance far in the future for a time when rescue missions will be ready even before the actual exploratory mission will be ready to go.

Exploration in fact means risk. Avoid all risk, and you will avoid all exploration. We might as well all be dead on this planet. What do we need to afford the risk of human spaceflight once more? Perhaps at some points there will be another race, with the Chinese. Orbiting corpses will become tolerable once more.

And so we will finally visit, perhaps exploit the planets. Thanks for listening.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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