by Chris WrightThe Central European Journal of Engineering may not be the most widely read publication in the world, but an essay published in it earlier this year contained the nugget of an idea that could very well alter the course of human history. The author’s name is Brent Sherwood, and his article — titled “Inhabiting the Solar System” — will have been heavy going for people unfamiliar with Whipple bumpers and solar proton events. Behind the arcane language, though, was a rallying cry every bit as ambitious as President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1962 Space Race speech, in which the president argued that we do not explore the universe because it is easy, but because it is hard.
Sherwood is a strategic planner for NASA, and his main point was that it’s time to reverse Kennedy’s formulation. Our long, heroically reckless journey to the stars, Sherwood proclaimed, is about to trundle into the arena of the everyday. “We should anticipate that in the second half of the 21st century, with large numbers of people traveling, living, and working in space,” he wrote, “the technically challenging issues that dominate design and operation of habitable space systems today will have been largely solved and reduced to practice. As a result...more atavistic needs will come to the fore.”
What he meant by this, Sherwood explained in an e-mail interview, is that people who are doing more than “camping” in space will want the same things they’ve always wanted. “A typical day would parallel typical days on Earth,” he says. “What do people in integrated societies do? They feed their families breakfast, send the kids to school, go to work, do errands, and reconvene in the evening for dinner and entertainment.”
In the rarefied world of people who think about human space travel, this remark would likely raise eyebrows, if not blood pressures. Since the beginning, space travel has been ruled by questions of safety and expediency, in which nearly any adaptation beyond survival was dismissed as an expensive, and potentially perilous, luxury. “Failure,” said NASA flight director Gene Kranz during the harrowing Apollo 13 mission, “is not an option.” You get the sense that he would have felt the same way about breakfast nooks.
Sherwood’s argument is that space travel of the not-too-distant future will have little in common with the white-knuckle drama of the Apollo era. Yes, he says, people living and working in space will require reliable airlocks. But they will also need something else: They’ll need potted plants and swimming pools, libraries, parks, and police stations. They will want to be photographed standing in front of grand municipal structures, and to sit on their space porches sipping a nice Moontini. These people will not just be emigrants: They will be aliens. And to survive — to thrive — they will need to create a home away from home, and it is time we started thinking seriously about how to build it.
“None of this is fanciful,” says Sherwood. “It is essential.”
Read more:
