Leave your old life behind, take part in wonders to come

September 27, 2009 | Posted by Paul Wolborsky

Here is a little known fact. Many of the grand projects once the sole property of NASA and other gov’t agencies are now being carried out by individuals like you and me.

Think about Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites. Never heard of him? Burt and company built Voyager, Global Voyager and SpaceShip One. It’s still a small company located in the Mojave Desert, but it is now an international Space powerhouse.

NASA announced it’s new Lunar exploration craft and intention of a trip to Mars. Both will take decades to happen. In the meanwhile, people are waiting for the building of vast habitats, hotels, solar power satellites, and thriving industry in orbit, and do not want to wait for NASA.

In 1971, Gerard O’Neill released ‘The High Frontier’. He was an astrophysicist who laid out the technological and economic scenario by which all this could happen in 30 years (by 2001). It didn’t happen because it was up to NASA, a very large gov’t bureaucracy held sway by politics and an unsteady budget that’s constantly under the axe. NASA has many brilliant people, but is hostage to public opinion which is ever changing.

NASA no longer has a monopoly on Space. Burt Rutan proved it. Now there is a patchwork of individuals, businesses, nonprofits dedicated to grand enterprises. The Space Elevator is a great example.

The Space Elevator is a slender filament connecting Earth to satellite orbiting 22,000 miles above, in Geostationary orbit, or GEO. Supplies are lifted to space, and the journey takes up to 3 weeks to GEO. But the first floor is lower earth orbit and can happen from a few hours to within a day. This means humans could go up too. This would happen at a fraction of the cost, energy, and environmental damage from a Space Shuttle launch today.

They’s be by far the largest structures ever built by man, 22,000 miles tall, 22,000 miles long. It would surpass the Kuala Lumpur towers by nearly 22,000 miles. 19,000 miles longer than the Great Wall of China. Long enough to gird the Earth above the equator, it would look like the mystical noodle factory – we could call it the Space Noodle.

Fantasy? It isn’t. People are working on it. We have the technology for it, it’s a matter of figuring out how to produce the carbon nanofiber ribbon, and what system of laser-propelled climbers will serve as the elevator. We’d launch a satellite or something already in orbit, (the counterweight) with a huge spool of ribbon to GEO. It would unplay the ribbon Earthward, describing a long, gentle curve. Slowly the ribbon goes down until we catch it. And the Ground floor? 2 vast aircraft carrier-sized rafts tied together on the Ocean near the equator.

And guess what? If you want to be involved, there are non-profits, small businesses, individuals working on this and other projects. All you have to do is look for them on the net. And volunteer, using whatever skills you have. It may take as short as 15 years to happen, and in those years, you can grow and contribute more to the project and end up as one of the proud parents sitting on the podium on opening day.

Whether it’s space, or fighting global warming, or biomedical research, or the fight against overpopulation, hunger, cruelty, greed, unhappiness, dysfunctionality – you can take on something grander than yourself, and your old life. A grand challenge, and a grand passion to go with it. To do these two things is to live a life rich beyond dollars, to put behind you all the petty worries that eat you alive and leave you dead inside.

And in this day and age when individuals have access to the technology to work together on these projects, they are all available to you, at anytime. An age of miracle and wonder, bought to you by… you.

Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)

Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)