Having been a part of several spaceflight programs, I have come to the conclusion that an almost Godlike view has to exist to drive from one end of the journey to the end of it. Where it doesn’t exist, or it exists improperly formed, the road is a hard one, and it’s littered with efforts that stalled out before the desired destination.
And that’s not the half of it. You can have the vision, but if you don’t have the discipline to build out the details and to keep them in view consistently, the effort stalls again. That’s where I find myself. I hold a vision for our development and exploitation of space, but I have to find it within myself to drive that vision. And I do mean I have to.
My intense interest in space exploration has been more or less eternal, at least in the sense that I’ve possessed the fascination for as long as I can remember. The more I work at trying to get humanity into space, the more desperation I feel that it’s not going fast enough. Not far enough, and not for enough people.
So, it occurs to me that to make this right, I should develop that view from on high, and break down a possible future, from basic principles to a very deep set of needed component hardware, environments, and the tasks to achieve them. In more prosaic terms, I am proposing the largest Systems engineering development ever conceived: A program to take humanity beyond the edge of the Sol System.
Certainly, many groups have taken long views, but they have been typically theoretical, speculative. That certainly can get people’s appetites up, and useful work can get done that way. It’s a matter of inspiration, really. Riding on this diet of inspiration there are efforts such as the Apollo Program, the US and Soviet space stations, and of course companies like SpaceX. None of this is bad, of course, but it’s also disjointed in many ways. As far as projecting a true grand vision for humanity getting out of the terrestrial cradle and staying out, there are many approaches but few articulated plans that go any farther than Martian Outposts.
Of course, science fiction visualizes a vast universe where beings go everywhere in space, but that’s sort of just the end state, isn’t it? The work that goes in-between the vision and the destination is left out. It’s seen as pedestrian, maybe even boring. I find the reality to be the opposite. The journey to settling space can be just as exciting as merely envisioning the future, and I think it would be as much so for most of our species if the scope and grandeur of the work could be effectively communicated. And not just communicated as just another story, but also credibly planned and made accessible to real people who want to do real work.
I’m going to make it real for people. I can’t rest until I have. It’s going to be my life’s work.