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The role of space ethics on the high frontier

Artist concept of a cutaway view of the Stanford Torus free space settlement. Credits: Rick Guidice / NASA

Can humanity explore and develop space responsibly by learning from some of the mistakes made throughout history while settling new lands? In an article called “To Boldly Go (Responsibly)” on LinkedIn, CEO of Trans Astronautica Corporation Joel Sercel provides a vision for how we should conscientiously manage space settlement in a manner that respects human rights and the rule of law, but also maintains stewardship of the space environment.

“Through space settlement, we have a chance to show that humanity has learned from history and is evolving morally and culturally”

Sercel warns of the “Elysium effect”. In the words of Rick Tumlinson, who coined the term in an article on Space.com, “…as entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson spend billions to support a human breakout into space, there is a backlash building that holds these projects as icons of extravagance.” Ironically, these New Space pioneers actually have the opposite goals of lowering the cost of access to space for average citizens and preserving the Earth’s environment by moving “dirty” industries outside it’s biosphere.

Public space agencies and private space companies can help open the high frontier responsibility through cooperation on development of common standards and international agreements in accordance with the Outer Space Treaty. Sercel believes that an urgent need in this area would be establishment of salvage rights for defunct satellites and dormant orbital debris like spent upper stages which under the OST are the responsibility of the nation that launched the payloads.

“That’s a legal impediment for companies developing satellites to clean up orbital debris and firms eager to recycle abandoned antennas and rocket bodies.”

Some work in the area of orbital debris mitigation has already been started by the Space Safety Coalition, an ad hoc coalition of companies, organizations, and other government and industry stakeholders, through establishment of best practices and standardization for space operations. And just last month the Orbital Sustainability Act of 2022 was introduced in the U.S. Senate that will “require the development of uniform orbital debris standard practices in order to support a safe and sustainable orbital environment.”

Good progress on interagency cooperation in space has also been made with the creation of the Artemis Accords, Principles for a Safe, Peaceful, and Prosperous Future. Signed by seven nations thus far, the agreement provides a legal framework in compliance with the OST for humans returning to the Moon and establishing commercial mining rights.

Sercel thinks that before establishing a permanent human presence on Mars we should first thoroughly explore the planet robotically for signs of life to ensure that we do not disrupt any indigenous organisms if a biosphere is found to be present there.

Another example of space ethics, discussed on SSP in previous posts, is determination of the gravity prescription, especially the human gestation component. The answer to this critical factor may drive the decision on where to establish permanent long term settlements so colonists can raise families. It may turn out that having children in less than 1G may not be biologically possible and therefor, for ethical reasons, may change the long term strategy for human expansion in the solar system favoring free space settlements with Earth normal artificial gravity over surface settlements. Sercel believes that determination of the gravity Rx should be a high priority and suggested on The Space Show recently a roadmap of mammalian clinical reproduction studies starting with rodent animal models producing offspring over multiple generations progressing to primates and then, only if these are successful, initiating limited human experiments. Such studies would prevent ethical issues that may arise from birth defects or health problems during pregnancy because we don’t know how lower gravity would effect embryos during gestation.

Dylan Taylor of Voyager Space Holdings has advocated for a sustainable approach to space commercial activities to ensure “…that all humanity can continue to use outer space for peaceful purposes and socioeconomic benefit now and in the long term. This will require international cooperation, discussion, and agreements designed to ensure that outer space is safe, secure and peaceful.”

Sercel is calling for the National Space Council “…to coordinate private organizations to include think tanks, advocacy groups, and the science community to work together to define the field of space ethics…to guide the development of laws and regulations that will ensure the rapid and peaceful exploration, development and settlement of space.”

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A brief history of starship pioneering

The photon rocket on an interstellar voyage exploring exoplanets. Credit: © David A. Hardy / www.astroart.org

Eventually we will get to the stars. It may not happen in our lifetime but its going to happen some day. Adam Crowl has provided a nice historical review of the interstellar pioneers from the last century that worked out the physics of the starships that will take us there. He does this in a chapter he wrote for James and Gregory Benford’s ground-breaking anthology Starship Century which was based on the findings of the 100‐Year Starship Symposium seeded by a DARPA solicitation and executed by NASA back in 2011.

Crowl begins the story with the early days of rocketry pioneered by Tsiolkovsky determining the rocket equation and Goddard and others experimenting with liquid fueled rockets. Tsiolkovsky was the first to come up with the idea of a generation starship (sometimes referred to as a worldship) when he realized that existing chemical propellants would be insufficient to fuel a space ship for interstellar travel.

Artist depiction of an interstellar worldship. Credits: Michel Lamontagne / Principium, Issue 32, February 2021

More practical interstellar craft don’t come on the scene until after WWII when advanced propulsion concepts really take off. The possibility of harnessing light to “push” a rocket, feasible because photons carry momentum, first appeared in science fiction. As it turned out, physicists realized that to generate the needed thrust with light pressure would require enormous amounts of energy, the waste heat of which would vaporized the vessel. Nevertheless, the photon rocket was still being discussed as late as 1972 when I first saw the rendering at the top of this post by David Hardy in the book he coauthored with Patrick Moore called Challenge of the Stars. Fast forward to today, Dr. Young K. Bae’s Photonic Laser Thruster shows great promise if it can be scaled up for interstellar travel.

Diagram depicting the layout of the Photonic Laser Thruster. Credits: Young K. Bae, Ph.D.

In the latter half of the last century, as the physics of nuclear energy and laser technology progressed, we see a proliferation of many concepts for star travel, including various forms of fusion rockets, laser sails, antimatter propulsion and my personal favorite, the Bussard ramjet. Conceived by the physicist Robert Bussard in 1960, the ship eliminates the need to carry fuel by collecting hydrogen from the interstellar medium using a magnetic field as a ram scoop and compresses the gas to fusion temperatures to create thrust. Crowl summarizes some of the physical limitations of the original concept and discusses several physicist’s alternative designs to address them.

One concept that didn’t make it into Crowl’s piece was developed recently by Leif Holmlid and Sindre Zeiner-Gundersen. Called the laser induced annihilation drive, it uses a pulsed laser to initiate “antimatter-like” annihilation reactions in hydrogen fuel producing high velocity K meson elementary particles at relativistic speeds to generate thrust.

Diagram of a laser-induced annihilation generator for space propulsion. Credit: Leif Holmlid and Sindre Zeiner-Gundersen, Acta Astronautica 23 May 2020

When I asked Crowl if he had any updates to some of the starship propulsion concepts he sent me an article penned by an unknown author for Medium that came up with another alternative to address the limitations of the original Bussard Ramjet. The author, who goes by the pseudonym “deepfuturetech”, reminds us like Crowl discussed in his piece, that the cross section ( i.e. the probability that a given atomic nucleus or subatomic particle will undergo a nuclear reaction in relation to the species of the incident particle) of the Bussard ramjet proton-proton fusion reaction is too low to be useful. Deepfuturetech proposes a different fusion mechanism via (p,n) reactions which involve a nucleus capturing a proton and subsequently emitting a neutron. These type of reactions have higher cross sections and could be tested in reactors in the near future. Further analysis is needed to confirm whether these reactions could produce neutrons at sufficiently low energy cost to enable profitable hydrogen fusion.

Artist depiction of a Bussard ramjet. Credits: NASA

Incidentally, Crowl talked about many of these starship concepts at a subsequent Starship Century Symposium held in 2013 by the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination in collaboration with the Benford brothers who shared the highlights from their Starship Century anthology summarizing scientific results from the 100‐Year Starship project. You can also get a “Deeper Future View” of his independent research on interesting items not typically covered by the mainstream science media at his blog Crowlspace.