With the Friday launch of Expedition 12 to the International Space Station (ISS), Gregory Olsen, chairman of Sensors Unlimited, became the third person to pay his way into space.
Olsen’s flight represents the return of commercial, manned spaceflight after the loss of the Columbia in February 2003, particularly through space tourism.
While the word tourist evokes images of a bungling oaf that harasses passers-by and lacks any knowledge of his surroundings, Olsen is conducting several experiments investigating the effects of space travel on human and microbial physiology for the European Space Agency. No mere tourist, Olsen is both an astronaut and a patron of the science of spaceflight.
Space tourism is rapidly turning into a viable commercial product. According to the National Space Society, as reported at spacefuture.com, there is no shortage of dreamers ready to be fulfilled: “Surveys indicate a wide personal interest in space tourism with people willing to spend upwards of a month’s salary to visit space once.”
Importantly, several companies have entered the market-most notably Space Adventures, the company that arranged Olsen’s trip, and Virgin Galatic, which will fly the first commercial, passenger carrying descendents of SpaceShipOne by 2008. Multiple companies create the competitive environment necessary for driving down launch costs to even lower thresholds, allowing for more people to enter the space industry.
And in such an industry lies the future-not just of tourism, thrill seekers or science, but of humanity as a whole. Like the New World offered the Europeans, space offers a vast new world to explore, learn from and, most importantly, exploit.
Space exploitation offers an answer to the limited resources available on Earth. Energy can be harvested using solar panels, unobstructed by weather or night, orbiting the Earth and then beamed down using microwaves. Raw materials can be mined from the moon, asteroids or on planets and other moons instead of being extracted from the earth at the expense of its invaluable ecosystem.
Moving heavy industry such as mining into space is the most environmentally friendly action possible. Properly set up, space born industries can transport their goods anywhere on Earth easily and improve their products-microgravity simplifies production of many advanced materials, while avoiding the harmful effects of pollution and urban sprawl on the Earth’s biological wonderland. Perhaps the best place to establish such industries is the moon, which is both close to Earth and already possesses many useful resources in abundance-including oxygen necessary to life and materials such as aluminum. Solar panels can be made from lunar materials as well, making the moon a potential bastion for power generation and clean industry.
Clearly, not all heavy industries will migrate into space nor will the migration be quick or easy. But for some industries, especially power generation and mining, moving into space will become the best option. The industries will bring workers, encouraging migration.
Settlers drawn by the resources and living room of space will recreate something last seen at the beginning of the 20th century, a new frontier. Frontiers are often the birthplaces for social advancement. The United States was born from one and women’s suffrage originated in a frontier state, Wyoming. Likewise, space will provide a place for people who don’t fit in-like the Pilgrims who settled Plymouth.
Olsen’s voyage into space is the harbinger of important things to come, the commercialization and exploitation of space. Space tourism is its most immediate result, but in helping create a space-based industry, Olsen is helping start a waterfall effect that will revolutionize our society and our world.