Campbell, John W Jr - Space for Industry

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Space for Industry

it has been more or less assumed that when Man gets going well enough in spaceflight technology, the planets will be

opened for development—that the future pioneers, future investment opportu-nities, will be in the development of

Mars, Venus, the Moon, and, later, planets of other stars.

Maybe, eventually, those developments will come. But ... it looks to me, now, as though we've neglected a major

bet.

I think the first major development of industry based on space technology will not be on another planet—but in

space itself. I be-lieve that the first major use of space technology will be the devel-opment of a huge heavy-industry

complex floating permanently in space, somewhere between Mars and the asteroid belt

In the first place, we're never going to get any engineering use of space until we get something enormously better

than rockets.

We can, therefore, drop rockets from consideration; they're inherently hopeless as an industrial tool. They're

enormously less efficient as transportation than is a helicopter—and nobody expects to use helicopters as the

backbone of a major industrial trans-portation system.

So any engineering development of space implies a non-rocket space-drive. Something that can lift and haul tons

with the practi-cal economic efficiency of a heavy truck, at least. Even nuclear rockets couldn't do that; the

reaction-mass problem requires that even a nuclear rocket start with a gargantuan load of mass solely intended to be

discarded en route.

So: assume some form of true space-drive. A modified sky hook

or an antigravity gadget—anything. It's a space truck—not a delicate and hyperexpensive rocket. It can carry tons,

and work for years.

Now; do we develop Mars and/or Venus?

Why should we?

The things human beings use and need most are metals, energy, and food. It's a dead-certain bet that no Terrestrial

food plant will grow economically on either Mars or Venus . . . except in closed-environment systems. Metals on those

planets might be available in quantities; let's assume that Mars is red because it's a solid chunk of native iron that's

rusted on the surface to a depth of six inches.

Who wants it? Why haul iron out of Mars' gravity field . . . when it's floating free in the asteroid belts? If we're going

to have to grow our food in a closed-environment system any time we get off Earth . . . why not do it where

null-gravity makes building the closed environment cheap, quick, and easy?

And while Terran life-forms may not do well on those planets . . . the local life-forms might do very well indeed

living on us. Why bother fighting them off? In a space city, there would be only those things which we selected for

inclusion.

And energy?

Heavy industry has always developed where three things were available; cheap raw materials, easy access to

markets, and cheap energy supplies. In preindustrial times, that cheap energy supply naturally meant cheap fuel for

muscles, whether animal or human. Somewhat later, it meant water power, and now it means fuels.

The current direction of research efforts is to achieve a controlled hydrogen fusion reaction, so that the energy

needs of growing in-dustry can be met.

In space, that problem is already solved. The Sun's been doing it for billions of years—and the only reason we can't

use it here on Earth is that the cost of the structure needed to concentrate sun-light is too great.

So let's set up Asteroid Steel Company's No. 7 plant. It's in orbit around the Sun about one hundred million miles

outside of Mars' orbit. Conveniently close—within one hundred or two hundred miles—are floating in the same orbit a

dozen energy collectors. They don't last long—a few months or so—but they're cheap and easy to make. A few

hundred pounds of synthetics are mixed, and while they're copolymerizing, the sticky mass is inflated with a few

gallons of water vapor. In an hour, the process is complete, and a horny-looking film of plastic has been formed into a

bubble half a mile in diameter. A man goes in through the bubble wall after it's

set, places a thermite bomb in the middle, and retires. A few sec-onds later, the bubble has been converted to a

spherical mirror. A little more manipulation, and at a cost of perhaps one thousand dol-lars total, two half-mile-diameter

mirrors have been constructed, lo-cated, and faced toward the Sun. A little equipment has to be laced onto them to

keep them from being blown out into outer space by the pressure of the solar rays they're reflecting, and to keep them

pointed most advantageously.

The beam—poorly focused though it is—of one of these solar mir-rors can slice up an asteroid in one pass. Shove

the asteroid in to-ward the beam, stand back, and catch it on the other side. So it's half a mile thick, itself? So what? A

few passes, and the nickel-steel directly under that mirror beam boils off into space. Power's cheap; we've got a

no-cost hydrogen-fusion reactor giving all the energy we can possibly use—and collectors that cost almost nothing.

The steel—it's high-grade nickel-steel; other metals available by simply distilling in vacuum, of course!—once cut to

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Campbell, John W Jr - Space for Industry

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