Work in Progress: Potemkin Space Programs
Friday 14 April 2023
After last week’s newsletter in which I presented the idea of eschatological value and mused about the parallelism of putting golden death masks in tombs and golden records on spacecraft, both bound on a one-way trajectory into eternity, a correspondent wrote to me about some of these themes, and this gave me more to think about. I came to the idea of eschatological value because of my recent blog post about the ISS, which I am now turning into a paper. I made progress on this paper this past week, but it’s not yet fit to be read, and I am mulling over how much to put into it and what to leave out. As I noted in last week’s newsletter, I’m not going to give any kind of detailed exposition of what I mean by eschatological value; rather, I will drop the idea at the end of the paper, as something that might be taken up again later, elsewhere. Which is what I intend to do.
Because these ideas of eschatological value are wrapped up in my thinking about the long-term future of the ISS, if it is not deorbited as is planned, I see the possibilities of the present as entangled with future scenarios that may or may not come to pass, but all of which grow out of the fecundity of the present. For example, I had another idea about the future of the ISS which is relevant to this, but which I may, like the idea of eschatological value, just drop it into the paper and continue to think about it. One of the possible uses for the ISS post-mission would be to develop techniques and technologies for mothballing spacecraft in space. While there is not, at present, enough activity in space for mothballing to be a thing yet, in a spacefaring future there may come a time when the fate of some piece of hardware is being decided, and in addition to the obvious options of disposal, recycling, re-purposing, or continued use, there will also be the possibility of mothballing.
I did some casual reading on mothballing, and the techniques and technologies are very different for the different facilities being mothballed. Thus there is an historic preservation literature on mothballing historic buildings, there is a power industry literature on the mothballing of power plants, there is a manufacturing industry literature on mothballing manufacturing facilities, there is a naval literature on mothballing ships, and so on. The priorities for preserving a facility during a period of disuse vary considerably because the use varies considerably. This suggests that the mothballing of spacecraft will eventually and ultimately involve a number of distinctive techniques and technologies found in no terrestrial mothballing activities. Therefore, these techniques and technology will need to be developed at some point in time.
Such a use of the ISS as a platform to develop and to test spacecraft mothballing techniques and technologies would preclude (at least in part) the use of the ISS for astrobiological research, which is at the heart of the paper that I am writing. From a mothballing standpoint, historical values and scientific values are mutually exclusive: mothballing would preserve the historic values while ruling out many if not most of the scientific values of studying the structure for the development of its microbial contamination over the long term. The two need not be exhaustively exclusive, however: developing the techniques and technologies of mothballing could still be consistent with some level of scientific study. A lot would rest on how we would define the mothballing of spacecraft. If our definition of mothballing a spacecraft means sterilizing it so that its microbial contamination is entirely eliminated, then the achievement of this goal would preclude the possibility of studying these microbes, sometimes called the bioload, or bioburden, or biocontamination.
Even given such a severe definition, the initial development of the techniques for sterilizing an unused spacecraft would provide a lot of opportunities to test whether the sterilization was successful. It is surprisingly difficult to sterilize things. Working on my astrobiological argument for the preservation of the ISS, I have been reading this paper:
Glavin, D.P., Dworkin, J.P., Lupisella, M., Kminek, G., and Rummel, J.D. (2004). Biological contamination studies of lunar landing sites: implications for future planetary protection and life detection on the Moon and Mars. Int. J. Astrobiology 3:265–271.
Which includes the following, in which “VLC” means “Viking Lander Capsule”:
“After assembly of the Viking spacecraft, the VLCs were then subjected to a terminal dry heat sterilization cycle that led to all portions of the spacecraft reaching at least 111.7 C for 30 h which was credited with a 4-log reduction of the initial bioload to the level now required for category IVb missions (NASA 1990). The pre-launch bioload of the Viking spacecraft would have been reduced even further on Mars due to the biocidal effects of UV irradiation on sun-exposed surfaces (Schuerger et al. 2003). Nonetheless, even after the significant bioload reduction accomplished for Viking, non-volatile organic compounds (e.g., amino acids and nucleobases) derived from both culturable and non-culturable species would not have been destroyed during dry heat sterilization.”
Thus even the attempt to sterilize a spacecraft falls short of perfect sterilization. This brings me back to last week’s reflections on tombs. My correspondent mentioned in the first paragraph above sent me a link to a letter in The Lancet, Lord Carnarvon’s death: the curse of aspergillosis? by Sherif EI-Tawil, and also mentioned the incident of opening the tomb of King Casimir Jagiellon, which deaths may have involved the fungus aspergillus. I had heard about the death of Lord Carnavon, but the story about the other more recent tomb opening in the 1970s was new to me. I found a paper that discusses both of these events, “Analysis of the incidence fungi in a crypt cemetery” by Cecylia Łukaszuk, Elżbieta Krajewska-Kułak, Andrzej Guzowski, Bogumiła Kraszyńska, Magdalena Grassmann, and Radosław Dobrowolski. Not surprisingly, the air in tombs is filled with fungi, and if you open a sarcophagus and breathe in the dust, you are putting your life in danger. Now I wonder if the distinctive smell that one always finds in the crypts of cathedrals and churches is the smell of these fungi.
The Lukaszuk et al. paper also cites a case in Egypt in 1962 of a researcher who found fungi in ancient tombs and mummies which had apparently remained viable over thousands of years. So we know that attempted sterilization of microorganisms is difficult, and it also turns out that sealing a chamber and leaving it for thousands of years isn’t sufficient for sterilization. Microorganisms are very difficult to kill, which poses a danger to us on the one hand; on the other hand, that microorganisms are so robust in the face of attempts to exterminate them, and despite the passage of time, suggests that, once life begins and gets a foothold, it persists with tenacity. This has implications for the search for subsurface life on Mars, as it is frequently speculated that Mars was once much more habitable than it is at present.
Microorganisms in a future post-mission ISS moved into a graveyard orbit might prove to be similarly tenacious, hanging on despite the extremely hostile conditions. Further, these microorganisms would be subject to greater influxes of radiation at a higher orbit, and this radiation could function as a directional selection pressure, which could serve to push these microbes in the direction of radiotolerance or even radiophilic forms of life. Even if we don’t see the speciation of microbial life under the selection pressure of space, we could still have a situation as with the opened tombs noted above. Astronauts periodically visiting a mothballed ISS to sample for microorganisms could return with the spacesuits covered by potentially hazardous microbes. One might simply assume, with the exterior of the spacesuit being exposed to space, that it had been sterilized by this exposure, and then remove the spacesuit in a pressurized cabin and be exposed to deadly spores. To avoid this, it might be necessary to decontaminate the exterior of the spacesuit prior to removing it.
An astrobiological research program involving the post-mission ISS could monitor the microbial life onboard for such possibilities, as well as any unanticipated developments that may have significance for long-term human life on artificial structures in space. It could also monitor the monitoring of the ISS to see if the researchers bring back anything with them. While the public imagination focuses on the possibility of human settlements on the Moon or Mars, or even in the clouds of Venus, our best chance for a livable environment away from Earth will be to build artificial settlements, where we can mimic gravity, air pressure, and all of the comforts of our biosphere of origin, which we will never be able to produce on another world. But the possibility of artificial habitats for human beings (and all the other life we will need to take with us, whether for food or to keep our microbiome in balance) will pose a lot of unprecedented research questions. The only way to answer these questions will be to study actual artificial structures in which human life is possible. The future de-commissioned ISS will be our first opportunity to pursue this research in a robust fashion.
It has been widely reported that NASA expects to spend about a billion dollars to deorbit the ISS. I have no doubt that mothballing the ISS would be more expensive than its disposal in the South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area (SPOUA). I also have no doubt that an astrobiological research program involving the de-commissioned ISS would be more expensive than its disposal. The two together would be much more expensive than deorbiting the ISS, but these research programs would also return a body of knowledge that could be acquired in no other way. There are cheaper alternatives, but they are politically unrealistic.
It is a shame to have to discuss the costs of doing the science that would prepare us to live beyond Earth, but it is an unavoidable part of the political equation, so it is necessary. What is even more regrettable is that the costs of pursing the kind of research proposed above can’t be discussed honestly within officialdom. The reality is that all legacy space programs of nation-states are structured around continuing to fill the pockets of well-connected bureaucrats and legacy contractors. I’m not saying they aren’t interested in space, but they are interested in space and in feathering their nests, and it is often difficult to distinguish which of the two is the priority. NASA is wholly captured by entities that have no intrinsic interest in space exploration; Carroll Quigley would say that the instrument has been institutionalized.
The political and financial reality of the ISS would mean that any repurposing of the mission — even, if not especially, a repurposing intended to lower or eliminate upkeep costs, like putting the ISS in a graveyard orbit and effectively abandoning it — would be an excuse for everyone associated with it to keep the gravy train flowing. It would be like the US military after the Cold War, when they were tasked with shuttering a large number of military bases. This closure of bases turned into a major undertaking that unfolded over years and cost billions of dollars. When a self-perpetuating bureaucracy is tasked with shutting itself down, this is exactly what happens, and a similar scenario can be reliably expected to recur with any parallel attempt in the future.
In my long blog post about the Stagnant Era of the Space Age, Bound in Shallows: Space Exploration and Institutional Drift, I had some angry words about this, but I get angrier every time I think about it. It is all-too-easy to imagine a history of space exploration in which we have the Apollo Program, and then more than fifty years later we have the Artemis Program (with a disposable rocket that represents no technical breakthroughs over Apollo hardware), and then maybe another fifty years on we have a Mars mission, and so on. This schedule for space exploration would literally be perpetuated for centuries, and we could find ourselves in the twenty-second century, and then the twenty-third century, and then the twenty-forth century with only a few flags-and-footprints missions to our credit. All the while, each of these incremental steps will be treated as great events, when in fact each step, more tentative and hesitant than that last, is like an admission that we are never going to get serious about space exploration. We would be justified in calling this a Potemkin space program. It is important to note in this connection that a Potemkin space program is a threat to no one, and a challenge to no one, and that makes it a politically valuable tool. The reality of the status quo can continue indefinitely, while giving that status quo the appearance of bold exploration and adventure.
There are many people who would be perfectly happy with this outcome, i.e., an all-but stagnant space program for the foreseeable future — not only the legacy bureaucrats and contractors, but everyone who can’t understand that humanity has no future if we do not develop the technologies to live beyond Earth. To the billions living on Earth with no hope for a better life, as the world’s governments tighten their collective grip, relentlessly transforming themselves into total surveillance states, any incremental space program such as I have described will seem like an insignificant detail with no meaning for them… and they will be right. A space program (or programs) conducted in this way will accomplish little; humanity’s fate will be tied to the Earth, and the wider universe will remain innocent of us. No one’s life is going to be changed by a Potemkin space program.
