By Jeff Lewis
Patricia Reiff has a hard time watching sci-fi movies set in space. “Very few get it right,” she says. What might otherwise be easily dismissed as a nerdy critique, the sort that crops up regularly on esoteric message boards with entire forums devoted to the finer points of Jean-Luc Picard’s monologues, carries a certain amount of gravitas coming from Reiff. She is, after all, the director of the Space Institute at Rice University in Houston, ground zero for studying the great black void since NASA announced it would build, for the modest sum of $60 million, what became the Johnson Space Center on 1,000 acres of real estate donated by the academic institution in 1961.
A professor of physics and astronomy, Reiff has spent the better part of 40 years studying space weather. Her specialty is solar flares, galactic plasmas and the Earth’s magnetic field. (For the record, her favourite space flick is Contact, starring Jodie Foster, in which the actress encounters aliens by passing through a series of wormholes. “It had enough plausibility,” Reiff says. “People have thought about a wormhole in space being a portal to go from one part of the universe to another.”)
Pinpointing the future trajectory of human spaceflight is not as easy as picking a favorite movie, though. The difficulty stems not from an imaginative lapse so much as the nature of the destination itself. “Every time we’ve been to a new planet, a new moon, a new comet, we’ve been surprised,” the professor notes, echoing British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane: “I think the universe is not only stranger than we imagined – it’s stranger than we can imagine.”
But there are clues as to what job-seekers can expect from tomorrow’s employment pages. Frontiers have a storied history of creating new opportunity, born of hardship as much as organic ingenuity. “There’s always going to be a crowd that’s ready to accept the danger and privation for the sake of being the first colonists,” Reiff says.
These days, there’s also a crowd willing to fork over vast sums of money for the perceived privilege of being among the first to send postcards from the moon. Space tourism is set to take off as the 21st-century equivalent to eco-adventures in sunny climes. Virgin Galactic unveiled VSS Enterprise, the company’s first stab at a passenger spacecraft in December 2009. An updated version of the craft has since been released. Test flights are ongoing, but company founder and billionaire Richard Branson promises amateur cosmonauts the “instant silence”, “instant weightlessness” and “instant elation” of space travel – all for the princely price of $200,000 a pop. “I will experience what it means to make a childhood dream a reality,” crows a 33-year-old woman identified as Sonja in a sales brochure. “To be so closely involved in this historic project from the very beginning and to witness each milestone on the way into space firsthand is fascinating! I am able to see from very close up how a new era of space travel begins.”
The dawn of commercial flights to low-Earth orbit, as opposed to deep space, coincides with an entrepreneurial shift in space research. In a 2010 address at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida, U.S. President Barack Obama pledged, among other things, “to make getting to space easier and more affordable” by working “with a growing array of private companies.”
“I believe that space exploration is not a luxury,” the president intoned. Indeed, employment in space could bear an uncanny resemblance to jobs that already exist, says Bob MacDonald, a science writer and host of the CBC radio program Quirks and Quarks. “In the same way that people maintain airplanes and keep the airline industry flying, there will be lots of jobs in engineering, in maintenance and all the logistics,” he predicts. “But in terms of actually going into space, other than the tourists, it’s going to be a while before we go anywhere.”
Flight simulations to Mars under way in Russia bear this out. Crewmembers involved in a virtual flight to the Red Planet “landed” on its surface this past February. In fact, the six astronauts had been isolated for more than eight months during a simulation. The landing took place at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow. The crew was holed up in a facility comprised of four hermetically sealed “habitat modules” measuring 2.8-by-3.2 square metres that each contained a bed, desk, chair and shelves for personal belongings.
Studying the long- and short-term effects of prolonged stretches of isolation associated with deep-space voyages could be among the first growth fields of space employment: psychology. “That is going to be one of the biggest challenges,” MacDonald believes, “almost as large as the technical challenge of getting to Mars.”
Astronauts stricken by loneliness and longing for Earth have always taken solace in the stunning sight of the great blue planet outside their portholes. The scenery is decidedly less impressive – never mind heart-warming – on missions to Mars. The Earth drops out of sight roughly three days after launch. After that, crews can only stare at “the blackness of space and a few stars and it doesn’t change,” MacDonald says. “They don’t see Mars until they get there. They’ve got six or seven months of nothing out the window and the same faces inside, and that is going to be a huge problem.”
The sometimes bleak and potentially mundane side of future space travel is seldom captured in Hollywood dramas. Jobs like spacecraft air traffic controller or simply bellhop – to carry luggage at a proposed space hotel planned by Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace – don’t exactly capture the imagination. It’s unclear whether space travellers will even be permitted to carry luggage. “You tend to travel pretty light when you travel in space,” MacDonald says, only half-kidding.
Most of the work will actually be concentrated on the ground, he says. “There’s a lot of work from the people on the ground that are traveling virtually in space, not just the ones who put on a space suit and hop into a rocket.”
That is precisely where Jeffrey Bridge imagines himself; more lab coat than space suit. An undergraduate student at Rice University in electrical engineering, he has been working with a team for several years to develop an electronic system to pilot unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, used by NASA for exploring Mars. “It’s not going to look like a Boeing jet or anything,” he cautions, heading off a question about the UAVs’ design, which a writer unaccustomed to space travel might think was modeled on the Millennium Falcon.
Regardless of their appearance, UAVs will play a critical role in surveying the Martian surface, transmitting images and air-quality samples to scientists in the fashion of a futuristic cartographer. While NASA has discussed the role of in-space refuelling to help propel spacecrafts into the far reaches of deep space, a student like Bridge laughs at the thought of attendants schlepping at lunar gas bars. What about space farmers to grow crops – maybe oxygen – on a lunar colony? Someday, perhaps, the young scholar says. For now, “I like to keep both my feet planted on the ground,” he says, adding mischievously, “metaphorically speaking.”
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Hmmm….too bad Reiff didn’t mention Alien, another solid space film.