Another small step, or fear of the Frontier?

Last week NASA published a report, which probably took thousands of man hours and millions of dollars to research and compile, telling the US government that were the market to be opened up to the assistance of industries and businesses, the private sector could operate a space program a billion times better than NASA is doing. Broadly speaking. It found that were there competition among private companies and cooperation among others the vessels and craft we use, the technologies applied to travel both to and within the vacuum or near vacuum of space and the costs involved would all be improved upon dramatically, in relatively short time.

Now, yes, I have a bit of a history of following headlines about space and then ranting and rambling. Naturally I've got a few things to say about this revelation. Mainly that it's what I've been saying all along.

Here, here and here are the previous posts talking about the need for a viable space program, in particular one that isn't run off the back of the Russians'. It'd be like the scene from Armageddon where the US boys meet the haggard and slightly mental cosmonaut to refuel, and would probably work about just well as that did. It seems bizarre that the US, tying itself into knots with red tape and endless to-ing and fro-ing between the million and one committees and boards and coalitions that make any single decision, should need a multi-million dollar report to tell them this. We can't rely on war, or the need to beat the Soviets, but competition can be had without either of those outdated threats. Generate it, and we might end up with a Honda/ Virgin orbital shipyard within fifty years.

I know that this all sounds a little whimsical, but it's really not that fictional. Plans are underway, and the sooner science fiction is tied in with the most cutting edge speculative science theory we have, the sooner we can achieve progress and get a little closer to the hard science fiction that seems to have been lost over the last thirty years for, to use Pratchett's term, "fantasy with bolts on".

Which is also the view of Neal Stephenson, outlining the need to write a future. He argues that sub-genres like dystopia, steampunk and post-apocalyptic worlds have clouded the duty of science fiction writers and smothered any real speculative fiction, the J.G. Ballard/ Arthur C. Clarke/ Ben Bova approach. Now, I don't know about duty, but certainly it's always been an inherent part of the science fiction canon and has fallen away in favour of sweeping tropes and situations that have, unfortunately, become much of a muchness in the saturate book world we exist in. And NASA itself is looking to collaborate with authors to write scintillating prose and stories based on proposed projects they have, anchored in hard science once again, even if they haven't the money to enact any of them. The idea seems to be "get kids interested in space again", but so that they can help build a better programme rather than move into an existing one.

Conversely, there's been a development in the insistence that we keep staring at the heavens from our Earthbound perspective. It's only about a third complete, but is already the most powerful telescope we've got, and given the reluctance of some governments to continue getting off the rock and actually going to the phenomena, it'll have to do. At 5,000 metres about sea level, you could do a lot worse.

It's called the Atacama Large Millimeter/ Submillimeter Array, or ALMA in the tradition of seemingly naming seafaring ships, computer databases and machinery after ladies. 66 dishes or antenna span a plain in Chile, a tool heralding a "golden age of astronomy", giving incredible images. It works in collaboration with the Hubble telescope to deliver clearer and more precise images than ever before. Here is what ALMA sees-

What ALMA and the Hubble see together, when their images are factored together, is this-

As these pictures of the Antennae Galaxies clearly show, we can now spy even further afield and even further into the past than ever before, which can only be a good thing. We're nowhere near travelling to these depths of space, so in the meantime observation is all we can rely on, and improving that a thousand-fold is incredible. However, we shouldn't just abandon any chance of getting there. We have to start small, a step outside of the comfort zone, before we can flit all the way to other systems, even galaxies, and keeping a close eye where we're going is crucial. But start to get there we should.