{"id":93197,"date":"2025-10-23T12:10:16","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T12:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/93197\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T12:10:16","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T12:10:16","slug":"2025-a-space-absurdity-resilience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/93197\/","title":{"rendered":"2025: A Space Absurdity – resilience"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u00a0recently connected<\/a>\u00a0faith in space colonization to\u00a0Flat Earth<\/a>\u00a0belief, even though these might seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum\u2014as Flat-Earthers contend that NASA is a hoax and that artificial satellites are not real (wait: because they\u2019re\u00a0artificial?). What connects these groups is a belief in something that\u2019s\u00a0not actually real: based more on imagination than fact, and working backwards from what they\u00a0wish\u00a0to be true. I\u2019m not saying the groups are\u00a0equivalent\u00a0by any stretch, but that they do share something in common, at core.<\/p>\n

Anyway, this observation sparked a few conversations that prompted me to resurrect old arguments (see\u00a0Why Not Space<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0chapter 4<\/a>\u00a0of my\u00a0textbook<\/a>), but also add some new ones. Here, I share some of these new perspectives and related calculations.<\/p>\n

Embarrassing Extrapolations<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll start by dispatching common sloppy extrapolations. One is framed in evolutionary terms: Life crawled from water onto land, took to the skies, and now to space. No! Each step in evolution offers safety from predation and access to new food resources. Space is the\u00a0opposite\u00a0on both counts: unimaginably hostile, and devoid of sustenance. That\u2019s not how evolution works.<\/p>\n

Another trope parallels colonization of the continents, casting space as the final frontier. Yet all earthly destinations were endowed with breathable air, drinkable water, and edible food. Moreover, oceanic voyages were likewise in the embrace of sustaining elements. Continents and other planets share very little in common, practically speaking.<\/p>\n

Most ubiquitous is a sense of accelerating technology that saw us go from walking to horses to cars to airplanes to rockets. Space colonization becomes \u201cobvious,\u201d which is another way of saying \u201cassumed without any serious contextual thought or analysis.\u201d A game I\u2019ve often played is some variant of imagining a person suddenly transported from 1900 to 1960 and another whisked from 1960 to 2020: which would be more baffled by an unfamiliar world? I have found that two out of three people instinctively imagine the latter time-traveler to be more confused, but that\u2019s\u00a0so wrong<\/a>. We\u2019re not actually accelerating: refining, yes. Yet the mythology has such a powerful grip on us that it\u2019s very hard to perceive the waning pace of major new technological capabilities. We imagine the space story will follow a similar pattern of accelerating accomplishment, without any real evaluation of what\u2019s involved.<\/p>\n

The ISS is Hosed<\/p>\n

The closest we have come to colonization of space is long-term occupation of Earth-skimming satellites like Skylab, Mir, and the International Space Station (ISS)\u2014roughly a thousandth the distance to the moon, or a millionth the average distance to Mars. The ISS boasts continuous occupation for almost 25 years. Its typical complement is 7 astro\/cosmo-nauts. One cosmonaut logged 438 days as the longest contiguous stay, while another has racked up the longest cumulative time in space: 1,111 days, or just over three years. Does this mean we\u2019re on track for\u00a0lifetimes\u00a0in space? Are the gates open?<\/p>\n

\u201cSpace station\u201d is in some sense a misnomer, once crucial context is considered. The ISS is re-supplied from the ground every 45 days or so by rocket launches\u2014costing about\u00a0$150M to $250M apiece<\/a>. Essentials such as oxygen, water, food, and fuel (for orbit maintenance) constitute the primary payload.<\/p>\n

Despite the best technology that money can buy, only\u00a042%<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a047%<\/a>\u00a0of the oxygen is able to be recycled. We wouldn\u2019t last even\u00a0minutes\u00a0without oxygen. Earth\u2019s biosphere provides ample oxygen all the time, but for the ISS, we essentially need an expensive\u00a0Rube-Goldberg<\/a>\u00a0air hose connected to Earth\u2019s surface. Seems like cheating: not\u00a0really\u00a0living in space\u2026<\/p>\n

Water recycling is better,\u00a0at 90%<\/a>. All the same, resupply missions typically deliver about 400 liters of water (20% of total on-board storage) every month or two. Without this crucial contribution, the occupants would be desiccated within a year. So, the station also requires a water hose to the ground.<\/p>\n

Simple logic would say that orbits are forever, but simple logic is often wrong (missing context). The ISS is so large\u2014the giant solar panel arrays acting like sails\u2014and so low (1\/15th of Earth\u2019s radius off the surface) that residual atmosphere produces enough drag to lower the orbit by 100 meters per day unless boosted back up. The accelerating (runaway) process would result in a fiery re-entry within a year or two\u2014faster if the station has a bad attitude. The ISS therefore runs through about 7,000\u00a0kg of propellant each year to stay aloft\u2014more than double the water consumption. Great: now we need a fuel hose as well.<\/p>\n

In addition to the required hoses, we also need a conveyor belt of food from the surface. A key tip missing from most (Lonely Planet?) travel guides: there\u2019s\u00a0no food in space. Not a single cheeseburger has smacked into the side of the ISS in all this time.<\/p>\n

I mean, the ISS might as well\u00a0not\u00a0be in space, with all these \u201choses\u201d hooked up to it. It would be much cheaper (in money and resources) to run this camp on the ground and just\u00a0pretend\u00a0the space part, since there\u2019s a huge heap of make-believe in the enterprise already! What\u00a0real\u00a0advantage does orbital occupation offer that is not itself predicated on a fantasy future for humans in space? Take away that future, and what\u2019s left to justify the enormous effort?<\/p>\n

ISS: Resupply Hog<\/p>\n

Resupply launches number\u00a0about 8 per year<\/a>\u2014lately using either Soyuz-2 or Falcon-9 launch vehicles. As best as I can tell, each Soyuz launch consumes about\u00a0155 tons<\/a>\u00a0of propellant, and Falcon-9\u00a0about 530 tons<\/a>\u00a0(larger payload, but also recovering the first stage adds to fuel burden). At roughly four launches per year apiece, this amounts to about 2,750 tons of fuel, annually (dwarfing the 7 tons required for ISS orbital maintenance).<\/p>\n

Comparing this fuel demand to car travel\u2014for which we possess better intuition\u2014we need to account for the fact that rockets must carry their oxygen along, while cars get it for \u201cfree\u201d out of the surrounding air. About 30% of a rocket\u2019s fuel mass is in kerosene. That makes a little more than 800 tons per year of hydrocarbon fuel, or about 2.25 tons per day. The equivalent amount of gasoline is 3,000 liters daily, or nearly 800 gallons. Such an amount of fuel would supply enough for a car to go roughly 50,000\u00a0km (30,000\u00a0mi; more than around the world) every day! Breaking up and allocating to the seven crew members, it\u2019s as if each were driving their personal car 7,000\u00a0km (4,000\u00a0mi) every day! That\u2019s a helluva carbon footprint, and watch out for speeding tickets\u2014or even slight curves!<\/p>\n

The resource demand is a lot more than just fuel, of course. An enormous material (and associated energy) footprint accompanies the enterprise\u2014all of which transpires right here on Earth. My colleague, Mik Dale,\u00a0computed that<\/a>\u00a0every hour a human spends in space incurs an environmental impact equivalent to that of 2,000 hours of an average global citizen. The best way to ensure destruction of Earth\u2019s environment is to try leaving it!<\/p>\n

What about waste? \u201cWhen a\u00a0Progress spacecraft<\/a>\u00a0nears the end of its design life, it is loaded with waste, undocked, and deorbited to safely disintegrate in Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\u201d Thus, ISS is still\u00a0firmly part of Earth\u2014from cradle to grave. The \u201cspace\u201d bit is almost a fa\u00e7ade, or subterfuge\u2014akin to a magician\u2019s misdirection.<\/p>\n

Exorbitant Cost<\/p>\n

Besides the environmental cost\u2014in the form of resources, energy, manufacture\/pollution, and waste\u2014putting humans in space (where they\u00a0really\u00a0don\u2019t belong, any more than caterpillars do) is outrageously expensive in purely financial terms.<\/p>\n

The annual budget for the ISS is at least $2.8B per year ($1.1B for operations and $1.7B for crew and cargo transportation). Spread among seven inhabitants, the total comes to over $1M per occupant per day. What\u2019s the most expensive hotel\u00a0you\u2019ve\u00a0ever stayed in? Was it even one-thousandth the ISS cost? It\u2019s as if the mini-fridge charged $50,000 for a bottle of water! At that bargain rate, take several (or else die)!<\/p>\n

The price tag for the Apollo project in today\u2019s dollars would come to about $300B. The three-astronaut missions totaled 103 days, amounting to about $1B per day per person! That\u2019s a thousand times more than the ISS! Who would\u2019ve thought anything could make a vacation on the ISS seem\u00a0cheap?<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t point to a real budget for a Mars mission, because it\u2019s in fantasy-land, but the sorts of numbers bumped around are to the tune of $500B. Let\u2019s say it involves 5 crew members for a duration of 2.5 years (travel distance is more than a thousand times that to the moon). We\u2019re talking $100M per day per person\u2014and that\u2019s before the usual delays and cost overruns. Eek!<\/p>\n

Getting Radiation Straight<\/p>\n

Before I looked into it more thoroughly, I carried the rough rule-of-thumb that the space environment (like the surface of the moon or Mars) had a radiation exposure about 100\u00d7 that on Earth. Moreover, I figured that the ISS\u2014being deeply embedded within Earth\u2019s protective magnetosphere\u2014would be more Earth-like than Mars-like. My meat-brain was not connecting something it also knew, which is that higher elevations\u2014and especially air travel\u2014present a greater radiation background due to reduced atmospheric shielding.<\/p>\n

Expressing in milli-Sieverts (mSv: a measure of biological damage potential), the\u00a0annual dose on Earth<\/a>\u00a0averages around 2\u00a0mSv. The\u00a0cosmic\u00a0piece of this is only 0.3\u00a0mSv. The bulk is from Earth\u2019s intrinsic radioactivity, making its way to our bodies directly from the rock\/materials, our food, and the air we breathe (e.g., radon). But the cosmic piece doubles for every 1,500 meters of altitude (initially)\u2014the air itself acting as a shielding blanket (i.e., it\u2019s not just the magnetosphere providing protection: the atmosphere has an equivalent mass of 10 meters of overhead water). At commercial flight altitudes, annual dosage from cosmic rays is about 25\u00a0mSv.\u00a0According to NASA<\/a>, by the time you\u2019re at the ISS, annual exposure is 160\u2013320\u00a0mSv, depending on where we are in the 11-year solar cycle. In empty space beyond Earth\u2019s magnetosphere, one absorbs about 600\u00a0mSv per year, while sitting on the moon or Mars is about half that (half of space being shielded by the body itself).<\/p>\n

So, indeed the radiation dose on Moon or Mars is over 100\u00d7 the typical terrestrial dose, and 1,000\u00d7 the cosmic-ray piece at sea level. But the ISS is not nearly as protected as I imagined: at an average of 240\u00a0mSv\/yr, it\u2019s\u00a0much\u00a0closer to Moon\/Mars levels than to Earth levels. I tell ya, that magnetosphere is given way too much credit! In fact, it appears that the magnetosphere offers at most a factor-of-four reduction, so that annual cosmic ray exposure at sea level\u00a0would only be 1.2\u00a0mSv<\/a>\u00a0(up from 0.3\u00a0mSv\/yr) if Earth\u2019s magnetic field were entirely absent. Our\u00a0atmosphere\u00a0is the\u00a0real\u00a0champion of radiation protection.<\/p>\n

Wading past all these comparative numbers, how bad is it, really? On Earth, lifetime risk of cancer is about 40%, and only 2%\u00a0of those\u00a0cases are from radiation exposure (the majority being from\u00a0chemical\u00a0damage to DNA: carcinogens). I was surprised to learn this, formerly believing background radiation to play a larger role. In any case, one Sievert of exposure is thought to present a 5.5% chance of fatal cancer. Lifetime cancer risk would therefore double (from 40% to 80%) if accumulating about 7\u00a0Sv of radiation, which takes about 25 years on a place like the moon or Mars\u2014and half this duration in a tin can away from a giant planetary shield. Long-duration habitation in such places would appear to be a real problem. Unless living in underground caves, a life \u201cabove\u201d our atmosphere is almost certainly cut short by cancer. Either way, that\u2019s no way to live.<\/p>\n

We already discern increased cancer rates\u00a0among airline flight crews<\/a>, where annual exposure is about 70 times smaller than on the moon or Mars (12 times lower radiation, and figuring 30 hours per week spent at altitude). While astronaut exposure per hour is greater, commercial flight crews outnumber astronauts enormously and spend far more cumulative hours being exposed, so that small-number statistics among the astronaut population preclude definitive detection. For example, of roughly 300 ISS occupants, about 120\u00b111 would be expected to get cancer by normal carcinogenic and terrestrial exposure, plus\u00a0three extra\u00a0from a six-month stay on ISS (120\u00a0mSv): buried in the uncertainty (3 being much smaller than 11). Spend decades in space and you\u2019ll get a \u201cdetection\u201d alright, even in a tiny sample size!<\/p>\n

Silly Stunts!<\/p>\n

I am\u00a0fond of pointing out<\/a>\u00a0that just because we\u00a0can\u00a0climb Mt. Everest, and\u00a0can\u00a0venture underwater in scuba gear doesn\u2019t mean we expect to\u00a0live\u00a0in such places. Note the conspicuous absence of condominiums on either Mt. Everest or the ocean floor. This, despite the fact that one can walk\/swim to such places for\u00a0far\u00a0less resource use (and money) than space. Safety\/rescue is near at hand, and resupply isn\u2019t going to run in the hundred-million-dollar range every month. Water and oxygen are all around, and delicious crabs scuttle past the oceanic enclosure. Living in space is even\u00a0more absurd\u00a0than these far-more-benign choices.<\/p>\n

Speaking of absurd stunts, how\u2019s this for a comparison: why not live in an\u00a0airplane\u00a0that remains in flight indefinitely? Does this sound utterly stupid and pointless and hard? More so than space colonization? Really? What if the unfounded assumption of a human space future turns out to be very far from reality? Whether there\u2019s much point hinges on the imagined future (which could be completely wrong). Meanwhile, it\u2019s actually\u00a0far easier\u00a0(less unhinged) to contrive airplane living!<\/p>\n

In fact, no great surprise: living in the air has been done! In 1958, two jokers-gone-wild in Las Vegas took off in a Cessna 172 airplane and stayed airborne for about 65 days (into 1959). You heard that right. They refueled 128 times using a hose to a truck driving underneath them on a straight road in the desert. Food and water were also transferred during refuel operations. They rigged a way to change oil and filter in-flight, and basically went until the spark plugs were too fouled to maintain adequate power. Read more\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Refueling the 65-day flight. Howard W. Cannon Aviation Museum (from\u00a0this site<\/a>).<\/p>\n

But if\u00a0really\u00a0determined to stay up, one could arrange mid-air transfers to fresh planes. Does this sound like a difficult and risky stunt? Compared to the extreme lengths we go to in arranging space travel, plane-hopping is a piece of cake, and has been done\u00a0hundreds of times starting in 1920<\/a>! How hard would it really be to arrange a mid-air airplane docking mechanism, compared to rocket science and space-docking at 7 kilometers per second?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s also compare costs. We\u2019ll start by buying three planes to rotate into service (and maybe to facilitate airborne refueling now that road traffic is worse). Let\u2019s not skimp, either, and pay $500k each for the new planes. A C172 goes through about 8 gallons ($50) of gasoline per hour. That\u2019s $1,200 per day, and we\u2019ll generously add another $800 per day for gourmet food and ground support. And why not throw in $50,000 per year in aircraft maintenance for\u00a0each\u00a0plane. We\u2019re splitting everything between two people (the C172 seats four, but we\u2019re being generous in terms of accommodation).<\/p>\n

The daily cost works out to $1,200 per person, without the capital cost of the airplanes. Note that the $1M\/day price tag calculated above for staying on the ISS also did\u00a0not\u00a0include the $150B construction cost, which\u00a0triples\u00a0the daily room charge when included. If we do include capital costs for our airplane live-ins, we should amortize over at least 2.5 years for comparison to a Mars trip, but we would be equally justified in making it 10 or 50 years when comparing to colonization (after which payment is due to the grim reaper of cancer). Any of these amortization schedules still keeps the cost below $2k per day per person. Note that whether considering capital outlay or not, living on an airplane is approximately\u00a0three orders of magnitude cheaper\u00a0than performing essentially the same stunt on the ISS. Add\u00a0at least\u00a0another couple orders-of-magnitude for habitation on Moon or Mars (infrastructure alone would break the bank).<\/p>\n

The airplane stunt makes for a useful comparison because it invites us to ask why it seems more silly than humans in space, when space is absurdly more difficult\/expensive, and might have just as much purpose, in the end. Perception of the relative value depends entirely on imagined purpose for the future.<\/p>\n

Baby Steps, or Silly Stunts?<\/p>\n

The space-faithful would likely dismiss my approach as being short-sighted and pull out any number of examples of what someone 200 years ago would have claimed to be impossible based on demonstrations of the day. What we witness now, they would claim, are the first baby steps that are necessary to achieve greater future goals. There\u2019s definitely\u00a0logic\u00a0to that, but insufficient context, I would say. We also knew only 10% of physics 200 years ago, and are not still at 10%. We may, in fact, be closer to knowing 100% of the physics that has any bearing on practical living. Any imagined symmetry equating the last 200 years to the next 200 is a brain illusion stripped of most relevant context: a facile trick not carefully examined.<\/p>\n

Given the extreme cost and difficulty of living in space, it really is\u00a0not\u00a0a foregone conclusion that humans face an extra-terrestrial future. So many considerations flood in at once. Foremost, we are not separate from the ecological web of life that spawned us, and almost certainly are not clever enough to engineer a robust replacement. Not a single human (out of perhaps 100 billion past and present) has detached from complete dependence on Earth. Even astronauts walking on the moon breathed air, drank water, and ate food borrowed from Earth, in an elaborate sort of scuba expedition. Not a single sealed environment (no infusions\/deliveries) has sustained human life for longer than 16 months, and\u00a0even that<\/a>\u00a0involved a steady draw-down of initial deposits (at great expense), rendering it an essentially-irrelevant stunt (see next week\u2019s post).<\/p>\n

Second, the space era is a reflection of the finite fossil fuel explosion that temporarily transformed the world in the 20th century. The number of humans launched to orbit annually is now\u00a0down to half what it was<\/a>\u00a03\u20134 decades ago. As this era of extravagance becomes unsupportable (via ecological decline, biodiversity loss, climate change, resource limits, aquifer depletion, etc.) something as expensive as space is less likely to persist\u2014especially if no viable benefit is identified beyond the far-future fantasy level and after the megalomaniac billionaires have shot their wads of money into the void.<\/p>\n

Third, plummeting childbirth around the globe spells\u00a0demographic decline<\/a>, which is fabulous news for humans and the rest of the Community of Life (a much-needed correction that reduces the risk of ecological collapse from our overshoot), but will have economies reeling as growth takes a generations-long holiday: tomorrow will not promise to be \u201cbigger\u201d than today, eliminating investment incentives. The present reality is that over two-thirds of humans on the planet live in countries whose birth rate is\u00a0below replacement<\/a>. Asia (including India) and South America are sub-replacement at this point. How would space ambitions survive the economic tsunami that has already formed far out at sea and will arrive in a generation?<\/p>\n

Finally, lots of past stunts might have\u00a0seemed\u00a0like baby steps to the enthusiasts of the time, but never panned out for a whole host of reasons. Returning to stunts already mentioned, scuba has been around a while, but very little of our collective time is spent underwater. Mt. Everest was first \u201cconquered\u201d over 70 years ago, but only 0.00001% of human egos make the trek, annually. Two guys showed in 1959 that it was possible to stay aloft in an airplane for 65 days, but it wasn\u2019t to become an expanding or even repeated affair.\u00a0Demonstration does not oblige habitation!\u00a0Other examples of exciting and well-demonstrated stunts\/fads that didn\u2019t survive for practical reasons: supersonic commercial travel; the Space Shuttle (envisioning about a flight per week<\/a>\u00a0in a sort of bus-service that ended up being less than a tenth that); jetpacks; self-driving cars.<\/p>\n

Casting our space experience today as baby steps is predicated on flimsy faith in some grand space future. Take that unsupported fantasy away, allow the various threads of context in, and baby steps become little more than impressive\/expensive stunts at which to gawk. These stunts are still fueled to this day by fantasy (and megalomaniac delusion), in that only misguided belief in future space habitation justifies the great expense in the present. And don\u2019t just take my word for it. Former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin validated in 2003 that the only justification for confronting the herculean challenge of space is ultimate colonization:<\/p>\n

For me the single overarching goal of human space flight is the human settlement of the solar system, and eventually beyond. I can think of no lesser purpose sufficient to justify the difficulty of the enterprise, and no greater purpose is possible.<\/p>\n

Once the spell is broken this is nothing short of delusional speech. Space stunts might remain\u00a0impressive\u00a0for all time, but the likely destiny is that they become\u00a0silly\u00a0in the way so many impressive stunts have.<\/p>\n

Teaser image credit: Illustration of a satellite breaking up into multiple pieces at higher altitudes. By ESA\/ID&Sense;\/ONiRiXEL, CC BY-SA 3.0 igo, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=59248903<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u00a0recently connected\u00a0faith in space colonization to\u00a0Flat Earth\u00a0belief, even though these might seem to be on opposite ends of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[85,46,141,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-93197","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}