Neil Hopcroft

[Audiobook]

Spacefarers, How Humans will Settle the Moon, Mars and Beyond by Christopher Wanjek.

This book fills the gap between the Apollo missions and the world of The Expanse, giving a step by step guide to how our exploration of the solar system could go, and details the kinds of problems we’ll need to solve along the way.

Within these pages are some well researched and well described approaches to space exploration, starting with low earth orbit and why the International Space Station is a limited environment for learning about living in space. He considers what would be needed to set up a moon colony, in terms of location, radiation protection, food and other daily living resources, and many other aspects.

This is followed by a tour of the inner planets and an explanation of the choice of Mars as the target for our initial colonial aspirations, and eventually a tour of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. There are some details about composition of these targets, as well as things like their levels of gravity and availability of water and light.

Some of the technologies cited as aiding our departure from Earth are described and their applicability to other locations considered – with skyhooks and space elevators being less problematic on worlds without continual air transport and latent terrorists. He returns on a regular basis to the difficulty of escape from gravity wells, and the energy needed to accelerate and decelerate.

There are some unknowns, like the effect of different levels of gravity on people, both fully grown and developing – there is likely an optimum point between the Earths 1g and zero g for such development, we have only those two data points at the moment. There has been little consideration of research into finding the gravity response curve for (various aspects of) human development – this would not be wildly difficult to do should we put our minds to it, an orbital rotating loop could be designed to test different gravity levels.

The commercial aspects are considered too, exploration must offer some potential return beyond mere showing off, without that missions to space are follies available only to those willing to spend the money for the sake of spending the money.

This book provides some of the hope that has been lacking from practical talk of space exploration over the last couple of decades, although I fear it is still rather optimistic – he makes predictions throughout the book about what will happen when and what it will look like.

The ten year old me, playing with my space cruiser, would have loved to read this book and think about the boundless future. Now, though, I pick up nuance about the limits physics gives us and my dreams are tempered.