Responses to my Quillette Article

Mostly positive, some frustrating. Some takeaways for future outreach projects.

After the recent Starship launch, I got the chance to write an article about it for Quillette. As part of my ongoing attempts to talk to people outside the normal space “bubble” this was a great opportunity.

If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend you do so first here

My objective was to reach a wider audience with the idea that mass is the fundamental constrained:

There are still many engineering problems to be solved, but there is also an ample supply of problem solvers on Earth, whose work will be enabled by the coming dramatic drop in launch prices. Just as the density of transistors was the fundamental problem that had to be solved to enable the entire computer industry to rapidly solve software problems, cheap mass to orbit is the fundamental problem which, when solved, will allow rapid solutions to all the other problems of living in space. If the Starship development program succeeds, it is going to unlock this for us.

I think this has been fairly well understood by the audience, based on reactions. Other people have quoted this section as well. One thing that I didn’t end up adding to the article was making it explicit that the solution to the mass problem is not just to be found in rocketry - useful mass can also be sourced from in-situ resources, and from recycling of waste products.

I may do more outreach when New Glenn makes its maiden flight, as this would be a good point at which to talk to people about in-situ resource utilisation in the context of the O’Neillian model that Jeff Bezos follows. Given that New Glenn can send a cargo flight to the surface of the Moon in a single launch and Starship will require many tanker flights to do the same, it is possible Blue Origin gets their unmanned lander there first, and so ISRU may be salient for the competition between that company and SpaceX.

As for recycling, perhaps I can write something about Biosphere 2 and other such experiments such as the Soviet BIOS series.

The Same Old Critics

But there are some people, generally opposed to space colonisation from the start, who seem to have ignored the fact that the article already answered the criticism they are now making.

One of the big ones is radiation. I explicitly mentioned how this is a mass problem, and why, but one of the immediate responses - in the usual condescend tone of someone who thinks he has won the fight with one punch - was that the whole thing was a bad idea because nobody could survive the radiation.

This is such a common trope - its been thoroughly inserted into the public consciousness that beyond the van Allen belts the radiation is hideously dangerous and we can’t dare venture to Mars until much more scientific research is done. This is not true. This is basically nonsense, but people believe it so strongly they will just restate it in response to a refutation.

The problem has been well studied already, and even with relatively simple precautions allows missions of at least 4 years whilst staying under the somewhat arbitrary limit of 1 Sievert. The dose can be lowered even further by the use of heavy shielding on the surface - only really needed on the roof due to the impact of zenith angle on atmospheric shielding - and potentially by the use of a Mars cycler that would permit much heavier shielding in transit. The dose is low enough that for well screened astronauts these mitigations may not even be needed for early missions, and only introduced later in the mass colonisation period.

So I’m going to write more about this, and try to create an accessible article for the public to try and push back against the mythology about cosmic radiation.

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