Tower of Babel, Mathys Schoevaerdts, created
between 1682 and 1702, public domain
On the 13th of this month, a ninety-year-old, formerly somewhat well-known Canadian actor took a ride in a rocket manufactured and owned by Jeff Bezos, the owner and former CEO of the vast Amazon.com empire. The name of the actor who took the ride is, of course, William Shatner, who was the main star in an American sci-fi TV series that first aired well over fifty years ago. The name of that series was Star Trek. And Star Trek, which initially struggled to find acceptance with the executives of the network on which it aired, has become enough of a cash cow that over the years it has spawned several big-screen movies and a number of spin-off TV series. (Some might say that Star Trek has by now become in the American consciousness like a piece of chewing gum that has been left in a person's mouth for 55 years...)
Some interesting things about Shatner's Star Trek character, Captain Kirk: he was supposed to be a youthful super-achiever whose drive and determination had helped him to become the youngest captain in Starfleet. He was also modeled very much after the type of Germanic war-hero typified in ancient Anglo-Saxon fables such as Beowulf - that is, he was always the first member of his crew to confront any mortal danger, the bravest and most physically capable (with the possible exception of his first officer, Mr. Spock), the point man leading the charge as his ship, the U.S.S. Enterprise, boldly went where no man had gone before. (He was also a champion womanizer. Lucky for him that there were plenty of compatible alien women on those planets where no man had gone before!) According to several sources, Shatner struggled at times with his association with Captain Kirk during the first years after the original Star Trek series was canceled by its host TV network - perhaps being fearful of typecasting. But those struggles soon died away and Shatner began to consciously associate his own personality with the larger-than-life character of Captain Kirk. And as Kirk had commanded the lion's share of attention in both the original series and the movies that resulted from it, Shatner sought to command all available attention for himself in any social setting in which he found himself. I speculate therefore that the chance to ride in Jeff Bezos' rocket must have seemed the chance of a lifetime for him to recapture some of the lost glory of his youth.
Some interesting things about Shatner's rocket ride: most media outlets wrote that Shatner became "the oldest living human being to go into space." But that begs a question: where and what, exactly, is "space"? For if one digs beneath the surface (and if one is sufficiently geeky to do so), one learns a few things. So watch yourselves, because I'm going to geek out for a few paragraphs. First off, let's look at the launch vehicle that Shatner and his fellow passengers rode. It is named the New Shepard 4, and its typical flight profile is thus: it launches vertically, then ascends under power for 140 seconds, reaching a maximum velocity of 3,615 km/h (2,247 mph). Once the powered phase of the flight ends, the crew capsule coasts upward to an altitude of 66.1 miles above the ground, which is just above the von Karman line. The von Karman line is a widely accepted definition of the boundary of space. Given the fact that other definitions used by some of the armed forces of the world's most advanced nations are a bit more lenient (allowing for definitions of a boundary of space below 60 miles), we must hand it to Mr. Shatner. He really did go into space after all. But could he have stayed there for any appreciable time? The answer is no. The velocity of his capsule at its maximum altitude was far below the velocity required to achieve orbit. And even if his capsule had achieved orbital velocity at its maximum altitude of 66.1 miles, atmospheric drag would have degraded its orbit very quickly so that in much less than a 24-hour day, he would have fallen back to earth again. Such facts cut Shatner's trip a bit down to size.
And maybe the boasts of the people who put him into space ought to be cut down to size a bit as well, as well as the boasts of their competitors. The two most dominant figures in the privately funded race to space are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. They are now locked in a lawsuit over space, by the way. (See this also.) And both have made a number of rather outlandish claims about what they are going to do to get humans back into space again in a big way. Bezos seems to me to have painted himself as the visionary humanitarian whose interest in space travel springs from his desire to make a better future for humanity. Musk, on the other hand, seems to me to have painted himself as the uber-smart inventor whose genius has imbued him with the power to work magic. Bezos boasts that his company is intending to build a space station as a place for researchers and industrialists to get some out-of-this-world work done. Musk, on the other hand, has promised to colonize Mars. (See this also.) But geeks like me must ask, How? Who's going to pay for it all?
For the undeniable fact is that space travel - the way it is done at present - is expensive. The unavoidable element of expense consists of providing the kinetic energy required to accelerate a load to orbital velocity. And it gets even more expensive if you're trying to accelerate that load to a speed that will enable it to escape the gravitational pull of Earth. That required amount of energy is captured in the following formula:
where k.e. stands for "kinetic energy", m stands for mass, and v stands for velocity. If you're handy with math, you can therefore calculate the amount of energy possessed by an object with a certain mass when it is traveling at a certain velocity. That's how much energy must be supplied by the fuel which any rocket uses to accelerate a mass to orbital velocity or to escape velocity. And when you calculate how much chemical energy is contained in any given amount of the fuels now used in rockets, you see that it takes a lot of fuel to put a given mass into space. Moreover, there's a hard upper limit on the amount of energy you can extract from fuels that are burned in chemical reactions. Making large amounts of these fuels costs some serious folding money. That's why Bezos, Branson, Musk, and others will find that they will fail in the same places in which the governments who initially pioneered space flight have failed. No one will be able to pay for their dreams.
But some might protest, saying, "We can always use nuclear fission rockets! They have much higher potential energy densities than chemically fueled rockets! And one day we'll have fusion rockets, which have even higher energy densities!" However, the promise of cheap space travel via nuclear fission rockets depends on the possibility of an abundant supply of plutonium fuel, and an abundant supply of plutonium fuel depends on the ability to construct breeder reactors that are both safe and commercially viable. At present, breeder reactors are neither safe nor commercially viable. One problem which breeders have is that operation of the reactors destroys the materials the reactor is made of, by processes such as neutron embrittlement. The same process threatens to make nuclear fusion commercially non-viable for the foreseeable future. And this of course does not take into account the problems with proliferation of weapons-grade nuclear material and large amounts of radioactive waste, as well as environmental degradation.
So now, let's drop the geek persona for a bit and ask some philosophical questions. Could it be that the space boasts of Branson, Bezos and Musk are part of a larger cultural trend? Could it be that fantasies of space conquest are a sort of psychic defense mechanism for the most high-flying members of the Global North as the Global North is increasingly forced to confront the signs of its own mortality, its own loss of dominance, its own passing? Could dreams and boasts of space conquest serve the same function as the magazines I see from time to time in the checkout line at Winco when I shop for groceries - magazines commemorating the life of John Wayne or of America's best rock bands or the British royal family or the Apollo lunar landings or World War 2 or the Beach Boys? Could it be that the flight of William Shatner was, in the grand scheme of things, really nothing more than a very expensive moment of nostalgia? Perhaps what's needed now is not a cultural escape into fantasies of unlimited success, brilliance, beauty, power and love, but a realistic letting go of lost glories and a realistic embrace of a future that is actually coming.
