Oberg, Jim - Space Power Theory - 06 - Text

VIP免费

2024-12-02 0 0 596.84KB 172 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Impact of Space

Activities Upon Ordinary

Citizens and the World

“Let us conquer space!” was the rallying cry of a faction in the US

Congress early in the 19th Century. Their strategy was to use federal

funds to build a paved road westwards from Maryland through the

Cumberland Gap, toward the open spaces of Ohio.

In proportion to modern federal budgets, the project was to be as

expensive as the Apollo program a century and a half later.

Opponents argued that it would be a “road to nowhere,” that at the

far end would be only “empty desolation and howling savages.”

There were a dozen more worthy and more immediately beneficial

projects for the expenditure of public money.

After long debate, the highway—called the “National Road”—was

built, and as with later cases of federal investments in new frontiers, it

paid off magnificently. Likewise, federal investments in and subsidies

of canals, railroads, advanced ocean-going technologies, aircraft, and

so forth have opened doors and lowered thresholds for public and

commercial traffic to flow through. Federal spending on military

forces has protected this flow of commerce as each opportunity and

technology came along, both from overt hostilities and from natural

dangers.

The arguments in today’s “conquest of space” have likewise

already been won. After decades of debate on what would be

worthwhile to do in space, government (both civil and military) and

commercial programs are in full swing, taking advantages of the

unique opportunities that space access offers. To the extent that these

The Impact of Space Activities Upon Ordinary Citizens and the World

applications have become invisible mainstays of modern life, most

Americans seem to remain unaware of how deeply space assets are

woven into the fabric of their daily lives.

But exploitation of space is a two-edged sword. Insofar as space

applications have often proved superior to old earthbound ways of

doing things, the better ways have come to dominate and push out the

former systems. In some areas, such as communications, astronomy,

or other scientific research, space remains a specialized supplement to

competing or complementary ground systems. In other areas—

weather forecasting, navigation, reconnaissance—space systems have

so outclassed former competitors that these functions soon (if they’re

not already) will be nearly impossible to perform without the space

systems, as ground-based systems atrophy and wither away.

Exploitation of space is thus also a dependence on space. More

specifically, it is a dependence on the security and dependability of

space-based assets against all threats, both man made and natural. As

these dependencies grow, so too do the vulnerabilities and—for

anyone wishing us ill—the temptations. The vulnerabilities can be

exploited along a full range of power, from publicity-seeking and

thrill-seeking spoofing, to blackmail or terrorist-motivated

interference, to national-policy-influencing damage, to intentional

crippling assaults coordinated with earthside actions.

Before examining more closely the specifics, we must review the

unique characteristics of “space” and their implications on space

operations. This is also important because of the time-honored human

practice of thinking by analogy, of speculating based on perceived

parallels. Because space is quite literally “unearthly,” such attempts to

extend earthside experience to space often are misleading, sometimes

spectacularly and dangerously so.

And while we’re at it, it’s also important to define certain terms

used freely about space, such as “space control,” “space power,” etc.

These common terms often seem to have different meanings and

reflect different assumptions from different users. This ambiguity may

hide true disagreements or may allow the appearance of a counterfeit

consensus. Certainly, poor definitions prevent the construction of

reliable theories on top of them.

Space Power Theory

“Understanding space” is still a challenge today not because

people know so little about space, but because they know so much

about space that isn’t accurate. “It ain’t what yuh dunno what’ll make

yuh look lak a fool,” goes the old Appalachian proverb, “It’s what yuh

DO know, what ain’t so.” And joking about “rocket scientists” rests on

the unspoken assumption that ordinary citizens won’t EVER be able

to understand space, which is a dangerous abdication of their

responsibility as citizens and as customers.

Whether it’s the still widespread notion that spacecraft float in

space because they are “beyond Earth’s gravity,” or the still-seen

misconception that rockets need something external to push against (as

in the notorious

New York Times

put-down of Robert Goddard), or the

more subtle misunderstanding that the reason objects heat up when

hitting the atmosphere is “air friction,”

most of us still are burdened

with inaccurate ideas about space. These misunderstandings—this

knowledge that isn’t so—lies in wait to ambush, deflect, and divert

people from adequate understanding of space and from the sound

decision making that such understanding enables.

“Space” is disconnected from most of the complexities of “earthly”

life, and so its parameters and principles can be listed—it’s a short

list—and understood relatively quickly. Here are some of the key

characteristics of “space” along with a few implications for operating

there.

Space really IS “unearthly.” It’s not LIKE our earthside

environment. There are some obvious differences, and some not so

obvious ones. The implication is that much ordinary “common sense”

doesn’t apply. One has to be cautious at making analogies with

“everyday life.” This implies that while it’s true that space is a physical

frontier, it’s also a mental one.

Space is BIG. Most of the Universe is “space.” Solid objects like

planets or other globs of matter (“the thick stuff”) are tiny dust motes

1 Objects heat up when hitting the atmosphere because the shock wave that forms

around the object compresses the atmosphere. When a gas is compressed, it gives off

heat. That heat is transferred to the object by conduction through the atmosphere,

raising the temperature of the object. That’s different from the heat that aircraft

experience, which is caused by friction in the laminar ﬂow over the aircraft’s surfaces,

which is also conducted to the aircraft.

The Impact of Space Activities Upon Ordinary Citizens and the World

in a universe consisting mostly of space. This implies that once you

know how to operate in one area of space, you basically can operate

anywhere in the Universe that you can get to. Its very size imposes a

new form of isolation in terms of communications time delay. This

time delay is enough to be noticed and to irritate customers using

geosynchronous satellites for two-way telephone conversations.

Space is NEARBY. Just a hundred kilometers above us, the

physical conditions are those of “outer space.” Neglecting air drag, a

cannon shell fired vertically at 1,600 m/sec (about one mile per

second) will reach “space” in about three minutes. Space is as close as

your pager, your mobile telephone, your GPS navigator, and your

television remote, and it will soon be as close as your laptop computer.

Space used to be a barrier, but like the oceans, it is being transformed

into a medium for transportation and a medium for harvesting.

Since space extends “up” forever, so “high above” the rest of Earth,

objects in space have a VANTAGE POINT for viewing large areas on

the ground, or for being seen by two different areas on the ground so

as to relay signals. So it’s often the best place from which to view the

“big picture” of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere, or the “little

picture” of specific areas of high interest. Like an antenna on a

skyscraper or a mountain, it can serve as a location for

communications relay equipment. Furthermore, the global coverage

provided by space includes areas of the world that are denied to

earthside elements of US national power.

Space is mostly EMPTY of matter. There are random molecules,

atoms, and ions flying around, but no “air pressure”—it’s a “hard

vacuum.” This implies that there is no physical “speed limit” since

there’s nothing to slow down fast objects; also, there’s nothing to

“push against,” so wings and rudders and parachutes and things like

that don’t work. On the other hand, without crosswinds and currents,

future flight paths are simple to predict because there are few forces

acting on objects. Also, the emptiness means there’s nothing to absorb

radiation, either as protection or as veiling of our view of distant

objects.

Space is often FULL of energy flow. Usually, there’s uninterrupted

sunlight (except when in the shadow of a stray piece of matter).

Ultraviolet rays can give unprotected skin a sunburn in seconds, and

Space Power Theory

cause severe eye damage in minutes through a too-transparent

window. In fact, as Ted Johnson of Boeing puts it, those of us in space

are bathed in energy. There is more than enough energy to sustain

billions of lives, if we could learn how to efficiently harness it. BUT

paradoxically, space can also be very cold since it’s an infinite heat

sink. The temperature of an inert spacecraft at Earth’s distance from

the sun will stabilize passively slightly below the freezing point of

water. The temperature of the unlit floors of craters at the Moon’s

north and south poles have cooled far lower and created “cold traps.”

These “cold traps” catch and accumulate passing water molecules to

form the ice layers recently confirmed by space probes (the same logic,

and some intriguing radar data, suggests that sun-scorched Mercury

also has ice in its polar craters).

Space has physical effects on people who travel there and the

hardware that we send there (since it’s different from conditions we

evolved under). It will quickly kill an unprotected human being and

may disable unprotected equipment. The concern for space engineers

is how MUCH of Earth’s natural environment you need to carry with

you to keep you and/or your equipment functional.

Next, after looking at the characteristics of the space environment,

what are the characteristics of SPACE FLIGHT?

Spaceflight is NEW. After millennia of dreaming, there’s been no

more than half a century of human physical access to “space.” This

means it’s still often SURPRISING, both in scientific terms and in

unpleasant discoveries of new ways to “crash and burn”—and we

should expect it to keep surprising us for a long time to come. And

since it’s so strange, most earthside analogies are strained at best, and

are misleading at worst. Spaceflight is only a few decades younger

than powered flight within the atmosphere. This chronological

relationship has led to some of the strained or misleading analogies.

Spaceflight is EXPENSIVE and HARD. As a result, new

technologies are required which often have later, wider applications in

earthside industries. This implies that no known raw material is costly

enough to be profitably exported to Earth from space. However,

INFORMATION is precious and massless, and there’s where the

profits are—space often provides information-transfer services much

more cheaply than corresponding earthbound alternatives. In the

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

11TheImpactofSpaceActivitiesUponOrdinaryCitizensandtheWorldÒLetusconquerspace!ÓwastherallyingcryofafactionintheUSCongressearlyinthe19thCentury.TheirstrategywastousefederalfundstobuildapavedroadwestwardsfromMarylandthroughtheCumberlandGap,towardtheopenspacesofOhio.Inproportiontomodernfederalbudgets,t...

展开>> 收起<<

Oberg, Jim - Space Power Theory - 06 - Text.pdf

共172页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Oberg, Jim - Space Power Theory - 06 - Text

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: