The Point Loma Legacy

Crossing the Atlantic in the 15th century, and repeating the performance time after time, required what was then advanced technology, a special class of vessel that possessed excellent maneuverability and a shallow draft. Modern frontier-building requires a reusable launch vehicle to deliver what one organization, The Space Frontier Foundation , calls "Cheap Access to Space" (CATS).

NASA's answer is the X-33, Lockheed-Martin's VentureStar. The goal is to lower the cost from $10,000 per pound of payload to low earth orbit (LEO) to $1,000 per pound. Once in LEO, out of the deepest part of the earth's "gravity well", you are half way to anywhere in the solar system.

Some commercial ventures are looking at a more incremental approach. While the X-33 will be a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle, the Mayflower of the Civilian Astronauts Corps is pure tourism. It doesn't have the power to get into orbit, but it does afford passengers a view of earth from space and a few minutes of free-fall. The ship is advertised as a "water launched, water landed, rocket powered, state-of-the-art spacecraft." Flight membership, if you're interested, costs $5,000. We are to hope that market forces advance the technology of true space flight in due course.

It is not just a matter of cost and waiting for capitalism to work, however. Without a frontier, it is a distinct possibility that the human race doesn't have that much time left, at least, not as an advanced technological species, and maybe not at all. From earth orbit-crossing asteroids to deadly pandemics, from sociological decay to ecological disaster, the unpleasant possibilities seem real and immediate. Frontier theory teaches that they are real and immediate. Some risk-taking makes sense.

So I give you Orion, and I propose it as a means of bootstrapping ourselves into space. But I cannot make this proposal without pointing out that it does entail risks (as do steam-driven riverboats and narrow-gage railroads). I refer you to the anti-nuke crowd, although they tend to be unreasonably shrill in their protests, because only they are talking about the risks of nuclear propulsion. They use it as a means of exaggerating the dangers of the technology NASA uses on some deep space probes.

While you are thinking about this, I would just ask you to keep in mind that life, and its preservation, are not about eliminating risks, but balancing them.

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