It was going to be a grand and glorious adventure, remember? The dawning of a new Elizabethan Age of exploration: first the Moon, then Mars, then perhaps the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and eventually the colonization of the stars. The late twentieth century and afterward would be the Age of Space. We all wrote stories about it, imagining what it was going to be like—Heinlein, Asimov, Williamson, Bester, Sturgeon, all the great writers of science fiction’s golden age, and on and on through my own generation of writers to the winners of last year’s Hugo and Nebula awards.
As we all know, most of yesterday’s science fiction is still science fiction today. The Age of Space—by which we meant the era of manned space flight to far horizons—got as far as the Moon, back there in 1969, and after a handful of manned landings there we turned our backs on the whole enterprise and called it quits. Of course, things aren’t going to stay that way. What we’re going through right now is a sort of quiet interlude in that grand and glorious adventure, an odd little phase of inactivity, and sooner or later spacefarers from Earth will be heading outward again, bound for the sort of exploits I used to read about in Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories when I was a kid. The promise of the first moon landings is eventually going to be fulfilled, I have no doubt. But for the time being, not much is going on for us along the frontiers of space.
Meanwhile we have www.collect space.com and www.hobbyspace. com and www.thespacestore.com and www.lovaura.com as the bleak, ironic residue of the first phase of our grand and glorious Age of Space.
Www.collectspace.com and hobby
space.com and the rest of them are web sites, just a few among many, that deal in space memorabilia, by which I don’t mean merely back issues of Astounding Science Fiction and postage stamps depicting space satellites, but actual artifacts that have been to space. More than half a century ago, Robert A. Heinlein wrote a stirring novella called “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” about a wily entrepreneur who sells man-kind on the idea of voyages to the Moon—not so much for the romantic grandeur and gloriosity of it all as for his own personal profit. Heinlein himself, very much a romantic but also a free-market capitalist if there ever was one, and an energetic propagandist for space exploration, would be angered to learn that here in the twenty-first century, two decades after his death, we still haven’t taken the first step beyond those early Moon landings. But I’m sure he’d find wry pleasure in the knowledge that somebody is cashing in on space exploration, if only by selling the detritus that our space flights so far have generated.
Consider: three or four years ago, a California auction firm called Aurora Auctions sold a brown M&M candy that had traveled beyond the Earth’s atmosphere aboard the privately financed SpaceShipOne. It went for fifteen hundred dollars. “It was flown on the very first mission,” the head of the auction house said. “That’s very important.”
More recently, Aurora auctioned off the documentation concerning a urine-measuring system that was keeping track of astronauts’ body functions on one of the Gemini missions of the 1960s. “Excellent condition,” the auction catalog declared. “Answers those delicate questions.”
The collector market for space junk is infinitely voracious. A toothbrush that Buzz Aldrin used during the Apollo 11 mission—that was the big one, the one that made the first landing—went for twenty-three thousand dollars. The same enthusiast—a retired New York lawyer—paid twenty-six thousand dollars for a flashlight and cord that went to the Moon with Apollo 15. Astronauts’ autographs, of course, are always in heavy demand, and so are peripheral items like NASA tote bags and DVD recordings of press conferences involving Lisa Nowak, the hapless astronaut who was arrested a few months ago on charges of attempted murder growing out of a love triangle she was involved in. But the big action is in the precious items that fall into the “flown” category—artifacts that have been to space and back, and particularly those that have been to the Moon.
Most of this stuff gets into public hands because NASA doesn’t consider it important enough to donate to the Smithsonian Institution’s space museum. Everything aboard a space mission is carefully catalogued and the Smithsonian gets first pick. Whatever is deemed superfluous—those flashlights and toothbrushes, etc.—is donated by NASA to other museums, or sold at government auctions. NASA employees are forbidden to sell space artifacts themselves, although plenty of items do get smuggled out. (Heinlein, that old free-enterpriser, probably would approve.) It’s permissible for astronauts to sell their signatures and other memorabilia once they retire, and a lot of them do. And so, even though not much is going on right now in the way of space exploration, the stock of space junk that today’s space entrepreneurs are offering for sale is constantly growing. If you Google up “space memorabilia,” you’ll find all sorts of sites peddling things like thermal tiles from the space shuttle, cell-phone holsters used by astronauts, parachute fragments from the Soviet Soyuz expeditions, and baseball caps that come with impressive-looking “flown in space” certificates of authenticity. (Certificates of authenticity are a major feature of this particular area of collecting.)
Some of the astronauts find this kind of mercantile activity distasteful, but most take a laissez-faire attitude. “It’s business,” said Alan Bean, the fourth astronaut to set foot on the Moon. “Isn’t that the American free-enterprise dream, to buy something low and sell high?” On the other hand, Neil Armstrong, the very first man on the moon, no longer will sign autographs because he thinks the prices they fetch are obscenely high. Jim Newman, though, who was aboard the 2002 space-shuttle mission that repaired the Hubble telescope, signs autographs all the time, deliberately creating a huge supply to keep prices low. “It’s very important to acknowledge there are collectors of things in the world,” he said. “When there is no one left who collects things about space flight, that’s because space flight is no longer important.”
Myself, I don’t see much appeal in a spacegoing M&M or a used toothbrush, but they’re about as good as one can hope to get right now if one collects that sort of thing. However, the most fertile territory for the dealers in space artifacts is still untapped, and we had better start tapping it soon. I’m talking about space itself, a well-stocked repository for highly marketable space debris of all sorts.
There’s so much of it out there now that it’ll soon be a threat to further space exploration. NASA keeps a list of detectable space objects in our vicinity that are more than four inches wide: at the moment upward of three thousand spacecraft are in orbit around Earth, two thirds of them no longer active. There are seven thousand items of miscellaneous man-made debris of lesser size but large enough to be tracked, everything from spent rocket stages to stray hand tools and a camera. And in January 2007, China tested its new anti-satellite rocket by using it to blow up an old weather satellite up yonder, thus creating, in one fell swoop, close to a thousand new orbiting fragments 530 miles above us, which by now have spread out over a belt stretching from a hundred miles up to more than two thousand. Low-altitude debris drifts toward us and eventually burns up in the atmosphere. The loftier chunks don’t. They’ll remain in orbit for hundreds or perhaps even thousands of years.
Our cosmic junkyard isn’t just an esthetic disgrace. Littering one’s own backyard is at best a tacky thing to do, and space is our planetary backyard. (Remember Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, and all those empty bottles and tin cans that our guys scattered around the landscape?) Space is a big place, and even ten or eleven thousand pieces of orbiting junk in our vicinity take up a very small segment of the available territory. But the quantity keeps growing, not only because the various spacegoing nations of the world keep sending more of it aloft, but because what’s already there is constantly being subdivided into lesser junk, either by design (the Chinese rocket shot) or by accident (the fuel tank of an old American rocket engine exploded a few years ago, smashing it into 713 detectable chunks.)
As the clutter population keeps growing, there’s a real risk of collision between one hunk of debris and another, causing a troublesome multiplier effect. With more and more space garbage accumulating around us, creating something like Saturn’s belt of rings but not as pretty, the spaceships we send up there (including the manned ones that someday will be zipping through the Solar System the way we thought they would in our stories) are going to need a lot of shielding, and some clever navigational techniques, in order to avoid getting bashed. And if the present rate of debris creation isn’t abated, it will eventually become impossible to send anything into space at all. We will have sealed ourselves in with our own garbage.
What to do? NASA people have begun talking about “environmental remediation”—removing some of this stuff from our vicinity, perhaps by using ground-based lasers to destroy it, or sending drone rockets up to collect the bigger items and nudge them into the atmosphere to be destroyed. But, says a NASA paper on the subject, “For the near term, no single remediation technique appears to be both technically feasible and economically viable.”
Perhaps the free-enterprise system will provide a solution: privately financed space expeditions whose purpose is simply to gather up spacegoing junk and bring it back to Earth for sale to collectors—a kind of profit-based cosmic salvage operation akin to the currently lucrative business of bringing up sunken ships laden with lost treasure from our oceans. It’s hard to argue that a program of sending missions into space to recapture this junk for resale on Earth could be anything but virtuous. And it might just jump-start space exploration, finally putting an end to the current long hiatus. I know that Robert A. Heinlein would be pleased by that.
