July 14, 2005
Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization by Robert Zubrin
Robert Zubrin is a plasma physicist and rocket scientist and a well known advocate for the human exploration of Mars. He is the president of the Mars Society that has the above purpose. He has written a previous book on this subject (with Richard Wagner) called "The Case for Mars".
This book is a more general attempt at advocacy laying out the various arguments for converting a (perhaps evanescent) global society into a spacefaring one. In the first section of the book: "Type I: Completing Global Civilization" Zubrin concentrates on various details of the space program run by NASA in the U.S. giving fascinating details on the development of the Space Shuttle and its potential replacement, and the International Space Station. He says little about the title of the section, assuming perhaps that global civilization is inevitable or that U.S. itself can be taken to be a global power and thus represent mankind. There are two good reasons to colonize Earth orbit and the nearby Solar System: one is business and the other science. A lucrative space business is difficult to come by as Zubrin himself points out in great detail. Science undertaken by a major superpower or a world at peace is the remaining reason. But when will this happen. On this point, Zubrin is silent.
The first section does have a detailed description of the various scientific and engineering aspects of spaceflight. This helps set the tone of the book which could easily drift into pie-in-the-sky speculation. Zubrin grounds all discussion in what is really feasible.
In the second section "Type II: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization", Zubrin lays out the various possibilities of human settlements on the Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt and the Outer Solar System. The focus is on creating economical conditions where these settlements can be self-sustaining, usually by trading with Earth the local mineral resources unavailable elsewhere. Zubrin gives detailed information about chemical reactions that can be industrialized on the Moon and on Mars to produce valuable raw materials. These industries are also crucial to produce oxygen, nitrogen and water for sustaining these human settlements without constant supplies from the Earth. For many of these reasons, Mars seems to be the most likely candidate for a self-sustaining human settlement. Zubrin spends little time on a detailed Mars settlement plan since that is the topic of his earlier book. But the general arguments are well presented.
Once Mars is settled, Zubrin makes the case for the industrial exploitation of the Outer Solar System. The main reason to care about asteroids, of course, is because they are projectiles that can occasionally impact on the Earth. The only feasible solution to defend ourselves from these impacts is to catalog the asteroids exhaustively and to have a human presence in space which is capable of diverting them early at a point when the force needed for the change of orbit is feasible.
The third section: "Type III: Entering Galactic Civilization" gets increasingly speculative. Zubrin reviews the various techniques that would permit interstellar travel. As in other chapters, Zubrin debunks many ideas that are still commonplace in hard-sf. An interesting method for interstellar travel that Zubrin himself was involved with is one that merges the idea of a solar-wind or laser-pushed light sails with the Bussard ramjet to give a mode of transport called the magsail which seems a practical alternative to fusion-powered rockets for interstellar travel.
The last few chapters talk about terraforming and other extraordinary engineering projects (spending some time debunking the impossible-to-construct Dyson sphere), the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and spends the last few pages on unabashed speculations. Zubrin does give a good description of the Drake equation and a discussion of Fermi's famous question: ``Where are they?''
In the end, at the very least, you will come away with an appreciation of the delta-V required for launching rockets into space, a notion of the kinds of chemical processes we could sustain on the Moon and on Mars and perhaps elsewhere in the Solar System, and just perhaps you could end up sharing Zubrin's dream that humans will settle another world in our lifetime.
%T Entering Space %T :Creating a Spacefaring Civilization %A Robert Zubrin %I New York: Penguin Putnam %D 1999 %G ISBN: 0874779758 (hc) %P 305 %K astronautics, space-travel, science
Review written: 2001/05/07
Posted by anoop at July 14, 2005 11:37 AM