What's with NASA and those Rockets?

I've been around long enough to remember staring at the family's black and white TV displaying a smoking rocket for hour after hour, listening to some announcer trying to fill up that time explaining NASA nonsense at us. There were countdowns, aborted countdowns, countdowns that were holding at "T minus 6 seconds," and adding time to the clock, like the countdown was some sort of football game and the officials had to put some time on the clock.

All we wanted was to see a huge plume of exhaust shoot out of the bottom of the rocket, hear that loud thundering noise as the rocket, with three totally helpless guys, gets flung into space, or at least real high. After a couple decades, rocket launches weren't that inspirational anymore, and today we rarely see a launch on TV. But, rocket launches are still problematical, dependent on so many factors, and incredibly resource intensive. I'd like to address the whole resource thing.

It's not easy to propel a rocket into space. To get into orbit, you have to accelerate to about 18,000 mph. To escape the pull of the earth's gravity to go someplace else, like the moon or Mars, you have to achieve 25,000 mph. This is a huge job for any contraption NASA designs. And then, there's the energy required. You have to burn tons and tons of fuel to achieve these speeds. You need armies of engineers and support people, and vehicle construction facilities, and on and on and on. NASA's budget for 2009 was $17.2 billion. I guess when you compare that number with the sub-prime bailout, it's a bargain. But, look what it pays for. We have satellites, an international space station, a skateboard-like thing that rolled around on Mars, and some probes, and a few more humans in space, risking their lives to float around in free-fall.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of it. But, any forward-looking, visionary type, like myself, would take a look at the NASA program and ask: What's wrong with this picture? How are we going to truly explore space, like our solar system, our galaxy, and beyond, if we can't get a human past the moon? I don't know about you, but the thought is pretty demoralizing.

As much as we deny it, if we simply abide by Sir Isaac Newton's vision, we truly are alone, separated by vast distances of space and time from any other planet, star, or galaxy. But, we want to get out there something awful. Look at all the movies and TV shows about warp speed, alien cultures, and teletransportation. Well, my friends, right now that's nothing but a bunch of plot devices. Today, if we want to visit Mars, forget it! In Star Trek, if somebody wants to visit Andromeda, hell, just point the Enterprise in its general direction, and in a few hours at warp speed, we are there, having bar brawls with the Andromedans. If you miss by a few parsecs, no problemmo, just make a course correction, and you are there.

I don't know about you, but I don't know anybody who has a warp engine, dilithium crystals, or can fold space. Trouble is, if we don't find another way of getting from point A to point B besides using rockets and space modules, we are going to flash in and out of existence on Spaceship Earth, and nobody will be the wiser, at least nobody on Andromeda.

A while back, I really got concerned about this and wrote a letter to Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer who consults for NASA. I asked him if anybody was working on anything besides the big rocket approach to space travel, he actually wrote back to say that he wasn't aware of such an effort. Later on, NASA did admit to having a small section devoted to "Alternative Propulsion Technologies." Imagine my relief.

Bottom line, from where I sit, forget the rockets. Anybody can see that they can only take you so far. Sure you can throw a bunch of sattelites in orbit, but, getting free of the earth's gravity just ain't gonna cut it.

I do believe that there are alternatives to rockets. I believe there are ways of getting from Point A to Point B, even if they are separated by light years, and I believe I have some very rational, practical thoughts on how to go about accomplishing this. I'm not going into specifics here, because I'd like to bring some of my ideas to fruition, but I'd like to leave you with a question.

What is gravity?

Consider this: Although we know how gravity behaves, and we can predict how one object of a given mass can influence another object from a distance, we don't know what it truly is. For example, the sun exerts such a powerful gravitational field, that it actually holds the earth in orbit. It does this from a distance of about 93 million miles, give or take. Just how does the sun hold the earth; which is hurtling around the sun at over 33,000 mph from flying out into space? Nobody knows.

See, not even the most intelligent physicist truly knows what gravity is. Not even Einstein. Old Al had some ideas about "gravity waves," but, that doesn't explain gravity, does it? My point is that there are some fundamental things going on, things that directly affect us, and we don't know what they are, we don't know what causes them, and we sure as hell don't know how to influence them. Other things we don't really have a good bead on: light and matter come to mind, we don't know what those are, either. We do have a very good idea about what they do.

So, when it comes to understanding our world, when we consider the most fundamental forces around us, we haven't a clue. Any scientist will tell you that we can understand anything using the Scientific Method. However, with all the resources at our disposal, we don't get gravity and other forces. The scientist in me says this: We aren't seeing the whole picture. If we saw the "Big Picture" we might begin to understand some of these fundamental concepts.

There's a story I'm fond of: It's nighttime and Bert is standing under a street lamp, apparently looking for something. Ernie sees Bert, walks up to him and says: "Hey Bert, what are you looking for?"

Ernie replies: "My wallet, I lost my wallet."

Bert inquires: "Where you do you think you lost it?

Ernie points off into the darkness: "Over there someplace, I think."

"So, if you lost your wallet over there, why are you looking here?"

Ernie looks at him like he's from Mars: "I'm looking for my wallet here because the light is much better here than over there."

Is it possible that we are only looking for our answers where the light is best?