Here is what I hope to be my last retort in this space-saga between Thomas Keyes and myself. It is a response to this article. The reason it takes me “5000” words, as Keyes said, is because that's simply what I felt it requires to properly flesh out and explain my views to Keyes and to anyone else reading. There are better writers out there. Keyes and I have both linked to articles both for and against this issue. If this bores anyone, stop now and use Google to find better written articles with prettier pictures ;)

Thomas didn't like my analogies:

Robot cars raced for 7 hours. Therefore, we’re practically in the Andromeda galaxy, apparently. I didn’t follow the link. Frankly, I don’t care a bit about the robot cars.

We shouldn’t even talk about the pyramids. They have nothing to do with space travel. Of course, the effort of the Pharaohs was for nothing. What good did the pyramids ever do anyone?

Each was a very specific analogy with a very specific point. Self-driving cars was the “wild eyed dream” of someone 20 years ago, yet, to someone 50 years ago, it was a CLEAR EVENTUALITY. Who doubts that in 50 years, we'll have airplanes without pilots? Isn't that the next logical step? If for some reason it doesn't come to fruition, such a view is eminently reasonable, given even the most modest forward projections based on the plotted past cycle of progress. An interesting side point is what a DISMAL failure the first robot race was. Not a single car finished, they all crashed or broke during the first SEVEN miles. In the second robot race, just one years later, several cars finished the entire race, all 132 miles worth of winding terrain.

Isn't the analogy clear? Doesn't it have some merit? The pyramid example was similar. One can't wake up one day and build the Great Pyramid. One must imagine the building of the great pyramid and then go dig up the stone, figure out how to move incredibly heavy rock for miles and miles and miles, and then lug it up stories and stories into the air, over a period of many decades. Isn't the analogy with space and with a space infrastructure apparent? Of course space has to do with the pyramids in the context of this analogy.

I won't respond to everything Thomas wrote. He is right that I've written enough about the issue in general. I'll write about it again in the future, and I'll write a series of somewhat shorter, more specific articles like this one already posted.

I do want to address a few points however, including my “trickery”. Take this for example:

Smith is full of nonsensical linguistic trickery. For example, he refers to the earth as a ‘speck’ compared with his big picture, space fantasy, and says that an asteroid could come along any day and wipe us out. We’d say, “Well, it is our time. Hey, we had a good run, didn't we! Besides, we can always pray...” Let me remind Smith that somehow the ‘speck’ has managed to revolve about the Sun for 4 billion years, without Smith’s visionary ravings. We managed just perfectly well without a far-fetched space program. But don’t misunderstand me. I would be 100% in favor of a space program that had any real chance of accomplishing the colonization of space. It’s just the fantasies that bore me.

Note the bold faced bit. For what fraction of that 4 billion years have humans been on this speck? History is loaded with mass-extinction events, some with tremendous evidence of a space-based disaster. What matters is the immense death of life that resulted in each case, space-based or not. The Earth will eventually get totally destroyed. Until then, it will just get repeated bio-resets, where most of the life is stamped out, including us unless we have the technology to prevent, or escape, such disaster.

Had we been around when the rock that killed the dinosaurs impacted, we'd more than likely be dead. It took decades of pleading from astronomers and “wild eyed dreamers” like myself before Congress would even pay the relatively paltry sum of a few million dollars per year to begin the very early process of identifying the nearby death-mountains that share this part of the cosmos with us.

By the way, “fantasies” = “plausible projections of technology” that can save the human species. Such ideas don't bore me.

Supposedly, there are plans, possibilities, designs, theories, ideas and projects. There are plenty of if’s, maybe’s, probably’s, may’s, might’s, should’s and would’s. It’s easy to talk about 3% to 80% of the speed of light, but let’s see it. To date, the top speed that has been reached by a spaceship is 250,000 kilometers an hour, which is 0.02% of the speed of light. Smith says, “The craft that go 3 and 4% light speed use existing, already working, technology.” He means, “The craft that somebody claims may go 3 and 4% light speed...” He uses a linguistic trick to add a feeling of reality to an unsubstantiated claim. It always comes down to the same thing. They haven’t done it yet, but they can do it soon, and I shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.

How can someone substantiate a claim for something that hasn't happened yet? All someone can do is give convincing reasons for why an idea is credible. The craft that are said to be able to reach 3 and 4 percent light speed use engines that other craft have used, these faster designs are just bigger versions with more fuel. If Keyes would look into the details, he would naturally concur. It just isn't THAT big of deal to go small percentages of light speed. The real challenge is getting the will and money to actually start construction. Far more modest proposals, like the flight to Pluto which barely made it financially, are often scrapped for similar reasons having nothing at all to do with feasibility.

As for the 10% - 12% range craft, well, I mentioned two. One is “futuristic” because it involves a power source we haven't perfected yet, fusion. Fusion is very plausible, as I've said, and many countries are spending big bucks to back up that “gamble”. Thomas likes nuclear power, I'm sure part of him can't wait for fusion to become reality.

The other isn't futuristic at all. It's nothing more than using nuclear bombs to push against a bumper, thereby moving the rocket forward. In fact, we have DAMN good reasons for thinking this doable with even YESTERDAY'S technology. Here is the evidence. We've already seen nuclear explosions move objects fast enough to escape the Earth's gravity, thanks to high speed photography of nuclear tests. We've already figured out how to keep our “bumper” from getting damaged by the force – it seems a simple layer of oil can do wonders. We already HAVE nuclear bombs, and we already have rockets. In such a system, the most complex components will be those that keep the air and water clean, components that we've had now for decades and use in every human occupied rocket. The “engines” on such a craft will actually be FAR simpler than the chemical rocket mechanisms we currently use and therefore, probably also far safer. This idea was stopped due to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. And although it tears at me, I can see the wisdom of halting those tests, at least in those days. Now I believe we should resume and make nuclear rockets, at first for launching space probes in weeks rather than months or years around the solar system.

Smith is still hollowing out imaginary Moons, “We could hollow out a very small moon or a large asteroid, stocked by nature with raw materials, give it a spin, and attach nuclear engines and nudge it into sling-shot orbits which would cast it towards the target.” Give it spin, just like that! It costs billions of dollars to build a single 2500-megawatt power plant. How much vaster a project is hollowing out an asteroid, with providing not only a power plant, but all of the facilities that go into a city, water supply, sanitation, farms, streets, lighting, transportation, communication, housing, entertainment. A city like must be worth trillions of dollars. Those trillions are merely the measure of the effort that it took to build it. Get real, , you’re a dreamer.

Yet, Chicago was built, and in well under 1000 years. Tokyo was built and so was New York. 1000 years ago, we didn't even have power plants. What reason does Keyes provide that humanity has just plateaued, that the next 1000 years won't have the same kind of staggering advances as the last 1000? Haven't the last 300 or so advanced us more than the previous 100,000? This idea is the least impressive, in some sense, the least imaginative, the most sure fire way and something we can start tomorrow, as was also stated by that NASA fellow I quoted in one of these articles. If we knew that Earth had until, say, until 2100, you can bet your Congressional election cycles that we'd do just that: we'd start tomorrow.

In short, everything that Smith has to offer is something that he says is going to happen. It’s never anything that has already happened. I hope he’s right. There’s nothing I’d love better than to see the human race ruling the universe, endued with all the fabulous wealth of the galaxies. But old ideas about virtual people and unrealized designs for spaceships don’t even amount to a foot in the cosmic door.

Is there any way to talk about the future without talking about that which has not yet happened? If Keyes agrees that this is a worthy goal for humanity, then perhaps he would consider supporting a base on the Moon, something he acknowledges is possible with current technology. That would certainly be a “cosmic foot in the door”.

As for the rest, there is a clear line between today, and “the wealth of the galaxies”. So, if we follow the advice of Keyes and shut down the space program, what will continue that line, that line which he hopes will take us there? Wouldn't it be wiser to try and allow some of these ideas to reach their logical conclusion, even if some turn out to be dismal failures? We haven't yet failed, there isn't any reason yet to give up hope - far from it. We have every reason to have very real, positive, ambitions along these lines.

Keyes started off this series with a dismissive (and even a little insulting), “Fred watches too much scifi” comment, but lo and behold, there is method to Fred's madness. Fred can flesh out many of these ideas, Fred can show how the cost of space launches can drop from 10,000 per pound to 32 cents per pound and find NASA engineers and scientists, and not scifi authors, who agree. In fact, it is they who designed the very craft that make these ideas plausible in the very short term. And, I have yet to mention a single idea that came from a scifi source. Actually, as WikiPedia points out, many modern scifi writers use these designs in their story's and not the other way around! Sure, many NASA types got inspiration for space from scifi initially, but I find it interesting that nuclear pulse propulsion, to give one example, is common in recent scifi thanks to the very credible, real, designs.

I do apologize if my sometimes brass and prickly style offended Thomas Keyes. We butt heads on a few issues, but we probably agree on many more issues. I also apologize for coming off as arrogant, or as someone just trying to kill Keyes with words. It's just that, I happen to know what I'm talking about when it comes to a handful of issues. This is one of them. I really can detail these issues out and nuance them – I can differentiate real ideas from possible but implausible ideas from Star Wars. Further, I'm happy to do it when called upon. Keyes is a buddy, a fellow UK writer, one of a handful who will contact me and ask me where I am if I take a writing break for weeks or months.

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