A Dead Space Age Worldbuilding

Okay I need some help working on a setting, it's a bit softer sci-fi so we won't be discussing the full implications of some technologies at further length (long and the short of it don't worry too much beyond common uses).

The setting involved is a bit 21st century but there was a major boon in the race to space during the 20th century which resulted in a lot of space age technologies, space stations, personal ships, landing on other planets before the turn of the century, and so on were all huge accomplishments in this world. But something went wrong and now the drive for space has just... died.

There are countless colonists and robotic entities now drifting around the Sol system, nobody has made any efforts into colony ships to other solar systems, the most space activity now is the occasional satellite launch, debris ships, and a private company trying to kickstart efforts into a new Mars mission (which the current people stuck on the red planet may not appreciate.)

This isn't to say the rest of the Solar system is lifeless, just... lacking in any activity beyond survival, spacers just exist day to day and many aren't returning to earth for whatever reason. Spacers fly their ships around the junk and debris, occasionally fight each other and space pirates and meet at space bars and hotels to rest.

I'm trying to figure out what is the most likely cause for all this technology just falling off the radar and nobody bothering any further with it. Best answer I have so far is cost, it just became too expensive for everyone and now what's left is what's left.

But what are some other reasons it could happen?

Well, what story is being told in this setting?

If it’s a more character-driven or small scale piece, the why might not even be relevant. You could even have different characters speculate on what happened in conversation to help flesh out their personalities. Maybe it’s a conspiracy thriller, and some secretive government agency orchestrated the end of the space rush. Maybe it’s cosmic horror, and there’s something unfathomable lurking out there.

There’s an infinite number of directions you could go, it just depends on what you want to write.

They should have sent a poet.

Cost is a major factor, to be sure. However, you need an explanation for why all of these various outposts all decided to shut down at the same time. If Mars is self-sufficient, for example, then it makes no sense for an Earth crisis to affect it. If, on the other hand, all of these colonies and outposts are dependent on Earth for resupply and manufacturing, then a major crisis could easily have a serious effect on them.

You really only need Earth to fall apart, and there are lots of reasons. Draw a card from the crisis deck: global depression, pandemic, war, climate collapse, a bunch of Trumps getting elected, you name it. If you want exogenous crises, maybe a supervolcano erupts or a big meteor hits Earth that we didn't see coming for some reason.

Absent a major crisis like the above, it seems unlikely that a bunch of nations would suddenly decide to cut the purse strings in the name of fiscal responsibility all at once, especially if that would leave real people stranded and/or hung out to dry in space.

Edited to add: Something that you might see if extraplanetary colonization really takes off is a "brain drain", wherein the best and brightest people all leave Earth for the colonies because they're where the opportunity lies. The result might be that Earth itself becomes significantly dumber and falls into an Idiocracy death spiral.

Of course, that would require interplanetary transportation on a scale that only sci-fi authors have dreamt of and would certainly imply fully or largely self-sustaining extraplanetary colonies. Earth's collapse therefore wouldn't affect them as much since they'd be able to take care of themselves.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 13th 2020 at 8:47:33 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

It's more character driven, the characters are just living in this world and don't really care for Earth (via exile, nothing left there for them, or apathy) and don't care to try to returning to it.

Mars is just barely self sufficient, terraforming isn't gonna be happening at any reasonable point without a major investment from Earth again but for the most part people can live there without dying inside outposts and stations.

War seems like a good choice considering the setting this is in, a major war broke out during the 20th century, perhaps the cold war nearly went hot and in anticipation of nuclear armageddon people abandoned the resources towards space travel and focused more on trying to survive said armageddon. Earth as a result just doesn't have the same resources it does to send back into space, hence the satellite launches that continue.

Edited by EchoingSilence on Nov 13th 2020 at 7:59:22 AM

Sure. You could also have a Kessler syndrome event that renders parts of Earth orbit impassable and requires massive investment to fix before any interplanetary travel is possible.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 13th 2020 at 12:43:27 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

If Earth has a world government or even a centralized space coordinating body, then a change in regime might have resulted in a more isolationist policy.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

I have difficulty accepting that world governments would abandon humans who are already out there on other planets or spacecraft. That's been one consistent element of space policy since we first had one: nobody gets left in space... certainly not just hung out to dry if there are options available to rescue them. It was always possible that the Apollo astronauts could be stranded on the Moon by hardware failure (and they all accepted that risk) but not because NASA turned its lights off and went home.

I suppose it's not beyond reason that we might get another Trump-like leader who simply orders NASA to abandon its astronauts, but for the whole world to do that simultaneously? In a hypothetical global depression, space programs would be a gold mine of guaranteed, high-tech jobs that politicians would be loath to abandon even in the face of austerity measures.

This suggests that the abandonment might come as a result of some disaster not directly related to politics like a pandemic, a meteor strike, or Kessler syndrome: something that makes it literally impossible to launch deep space missions rather than merely too expensive.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 13th 2020 at 2:22:33 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I never said it all died at once, just that it died. I was thinking that slowly support, resources, and funds waned and now Spacers just don't bother with Earth for any number of resources.

Kessler syndrome I wasn't accounting for as debris ships are meant to handle that. Space Garbagemen in short.

That's why the War idea I think could work, resources for space slowly dwindled as Earth prepped for a war that probably never came, and Spacers as a result had to build their own culture among the black just to survive the years until the present day of the setting.

Technological advances could result in this too, if there is some sort of propulsion system that allows space-based populations to sustain themselves, but which can't be used cost-effectively on the surface of the Earth.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

>spacers just exist day to day and many aren't returning to earth for whatever reason.

Also, people would likely adapt to space and would not be able to return to Earth. Low gravity does all sorts of things to the human body like weakening bones and muscles. In The Expanse for instance, people from mars have to undergo harsh training regimes to handle Earth gravity, while Belters undergo treatment to deal with the side-effects of low gravity but simply cannot stand Earth's.

What about people who have access of artificial gravity via rotating habitats? Even at lower Gs it wouldn't be too hard for them to return to Earth.

Edited by EchoingSilence on Nov 14th 2020 at 10:28:52 AM

You would have to be decently close to 1G to avoid needing exercise to go to earth.

Spinning habs are also not without challenges, and need to be fairly big. It's more likely they'd have lower than earth gravity. Especially if they frequently work outside the station say, piloting ships.

But if you can manage a rotating hab at 1G then they should not have big issues returning

It would still be difficult to go from growing up on the Moon or Mars to a 1 G space habitat. One would expect any such environments to have variable gravity zones for each of the various places someone might be accustomed to. For a Lunarian or Martian, the Earth-gravity zone would require extensive (read: months or years) training to feel even remotely comfortable in.

Indeed, think about something as simple as the G-forces of takeoff from the surface. To an Earthling, 4 to 5 G of acceleration (what you peak at during a typical rocket launch) is rough but not much worse than a roller-coaster. To a Martian it would be murder. Maybe even literally. To be fair, I haven't looked at the profile of a surface launch from Mars. Maybe it would require lower peak acceleration.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 15th 2020 at 9:20:21 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

So some form of big disaster (Kessler syndrome, pandemic, war) could cause the space programs to shut down, this could work for how it kind of trickled out and slowly just support vanished. I'll figure out what for the setting but this is genuinely useful as it gives me a lot of info.

TBF, the gravity implications on the human body on other planets is still poorly understood and one that we only base our experience on in purely 0 g. The Apollo astronauts never really stayed at the Moon long enough to notice any improvements, so most of their side effects were from the combined trip drifting through space as a whole, muddling things further. Until we get more precise data from long-term stays on other worlds, this field remains rather ambiguous.

Also, some of the effects of micro-g may be resolvable with medication. Not currently, sure, but scientific progress is ongoing.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

We can safely say that close to 1G would likely not cause huge problems and close to 0G does though. We may not know exactly when things like bone and muscle loss come in, but at half a G you would likely still see a significant influence because you weigh only half as much.

Based on my research for worldbuilding and on our current understanding, I would estimate the gravity tolerance for humans is between 0.50 g to 1.40 g. Out of all the celestial bodies in the Solar System, only four check these boxes.

---

• Neptune: 1.14 g
• Saturn: 1.07 g
• Earth: 1.00 g
• Venus: 0.90 g
• Uranus: 0.89 g

---

The first problem you'll notice immediately is that all those planets are not exactly livable unless we somehow have really advance technology to make them livable. Venus is a Death World, and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are gas giants with no solid surfaces. Venus may be workable with cloud cities and/or terraforming, but the gas giants will need sufficient Hand Waves to justify purely airborne colonies there. Also, the lower limit is a bit arbitrary due to no such planet or moon in the Solar System existing with around half of Earth's gravity. There's a huge gap between Uranus' gravity (0.89 g) and the gravity of both Mars and Mercury (0.38 g). Now this may be subject to change in the future. If it turns out that Martian/Mercurian gravity is perfectly serviceable through exercise and medication like scientists theorize, this could very well expand our lower gravity tolerance range.

Edited by DivineFlame100 on Nov 18th 2020 at 6:35:13 AM

All of which adds up to a set of very good reasons to develop rotating habitats and spacecraft. Artificial gravity solves nearly all of this.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Me, I am thinking folks are overselling the importance of gravity just a wee bit. It's not as bad as radiation sickness or cancer, and some major space health issues are due to radiation or psychological ("overview effect") and can't be tackled with AG.

That I see artificial gravity more commonly discussed in fictional settings than even in Real Life Mars/Moon colony projects makes me think that the engineering/technical issues outweigh the medical benefits, an impression bolstered by Wikipedia's page on it and the sources it mentions. For example, spinning gravity either requires a very large spacecraft or a very fast-spinning one - and the latter would have tidal effects too (i.e gravity strongly varies from one part of the spacecraft to the next). Beyond the practical, anything that involves scientific research or space tourism relies on microgravity, at least to some degree.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

It's entirely within our engineering capabilities to build rotating habitats with at least a fraction of simulated Earth gravity. The major barrier is cost: it's far too expensive to get all that stuff to space. You're talking tens of thousands of tons of equipment.

The ISS masses about 420 tons. At $20,000 per kilogram, that's $8 billion in transport costs alone. ^note When the whole program is factored in, Space Shuttle actually cost $54,500/kg of useful payload to orbit, or $23 billion to loft the entire ISS. Of course, a lot of it was sent by the much cheaper Soyuz rockets, plus European and Japanese contributions, so the real price is a bit lower, but that's not really germane. To get 10,000 tons into orbit would cost up to $200 billion. Nobody's paying that. If we use flight-proven Falcon 9 rockets it would take only $33 billion (15 tons at a customer price of $50 million), but even that's pretty pricey — nobody's recouping that commercially over the lifetime of such a facility.

If we use Starship at its ideal marginal cost of $1 million — mark it up to $5M for commercial use, whatever — that same effort costs about $300 million: literally 100 times less. This is the difference. It also happens much faster: a single Starship/Superheavy stack operating continuously could lift 10,000 tons to LEO in about 22 days. At 24 launches per year, Falcon 9 would take 28 years to do the same job.

Everything we want to achieve at scale in space mandates cheap, fully reusable rockets. It doesn't have to be Starship, but it needs to be something like it. Our interplanetary sci-fi future must be predicated on reusable spacecraft, and preferably ones with better propulsion systems (nuclear thermal at least). Only then can we start even considering Mars colonies or orbiting habitats with centrifugal gravity.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 19th 2020 at 9:27:46 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The start did stipualte to not worry about the technological implications or the technology itself. Just that there was a major race into space and a growing sense of a new space age, but along the way it died off. More a societal question of sorts.

This was talking more generally about artificial gravity in space stations. In your scenario, maybe we solved orbital transportation with a space elevator or skyhook but then the thing broke, forcing a pullback until we repair or replace it.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

With so much cost involved in getting materials up we might as well try harvesting asteroids.

Note that that's also going to be prohibitive without low-cost orbital transportation. It's a bootstrapping problem. To get enough stuff to orbit to kickstart orbital industry, you need to spend way more than you get back in value from that industry. That includes the fuel you use to get to and from the asteroids.

To use an analogy, imagine you had to start an international shipping company when every kilogram of fuel cost $20,000 to get to the port. That's about $75,000 per gallon. You'd be called crazy.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"