Your field of view narrows as you burrow deeper into your chosen discipline – it got to the point I couldn’t imagine anyone spending their days thinking anything besides blood, disease, virus and sickness. Everyone around me was thinking about something tangential. When I spoke to my beloved Priya and Sonya, our conversations were about viral capsids and DNA sequences and protocols, how many organs we’d had to harvest that day, the mouse spleens like slivers of pumpkin seeds and slick with black-dark blood.
Even among my friends who were, instead, planning on going into medicine, our conversations took the same circuitous murmur: patients who had soiled their bedding, patients who had harassed the staff during their post-ops, laparoscopy and bone plates, blood and vomit and dementia.
And we were all slogging through it, the sludge of organic detritus and decay, driven by a kind of fiery, endless obsession. For success? For the naive hope of helping people, of changing the world? I didn’t know, but I felt that everything fascinating lay within that sludge and finding a way to ameliorate or even cure it. Sonya and Priya and I were so knee-deep in biological research simply because there was nothing as interesting or worth doing, nothing as wonderful or containing their own native intelligence as well as the cells around us. I never imagined that anyone else felt differently.
By nature of my coursework, I didn’t encounter anyone who proposed a counterargument until my first internship at Caltech. It was a research internship, so everyone there was on the PhD track and already in a niche subfield.
Sterling, who I met my second week there, used to say, “Biology isn’t a real science.” He said this, of course, to enrage me (as he frequently did to all of us) but I heard a kernel of truth. He and Noah, who were physicists – shaggy-haired, write-on-whiteboards, dyed-in-the-wool physicists – didn’t care about anything closer than the moon.
Space, with its general absence of carbon-based life, didn’t interest me. It boggled me in a genuine way that there were people who – like Sterling, whose research was on gravitational waves, or Noah, whose research I couldn’t begin to understand but had something to do with the “Neumann boundary condition” – cared more about things I felt to be, essentially, imaginary, as opposed to the tangible viscera of the biological sciences.
Until I met Andres, I had spent so long focused on the minutiae of minutiae, thinking about cells and viruses and proteins and RNA, my eyes big as boats, that I forgot to look up.
We had a lot of conversations that went like this:
ANDRES: “Basically, you know how there’s regenerative cooling channels, right?”
ME: “Uh-huh.” (I didn’t.)
ANDRES: “The nozzle has, like, on the circumference, a bunch of axial channels, and those feed the fuel into the annulus of the pintle injector. It’s also a pintle. The injector of Miranda1 is basically two halves: the actual injector manifold, which clamps onto the chamber, which is what contains the channels.”
ME: “Right.”
ANDRES: “The injector itself has no way of receiving the propellant input without the chamber, so I designed a tooling setup to cold flow the injector by mimicking – by feeding it water in a way that only the chamber can account for.”
ME: “Wow!”
It was in him I finally recognized that same obsession that haunted my friends and I – between all of the everyday thoughts of food and sleep and money, there was always the thrum of desire and anxiety that were the embryonic beginnings of experiments and projects and papers, that undercurrent that kept us doing the science because it was the only thing worth doing – in another context.
For him, it was rocket engines, which I understood. Though the language was different, there were analogues everywhere, and at its most base level, what was an engine except for an enormous heart that ran on liquid oxygen instead of blood?
But space, and more importantly the exploration of space, that I still couldn’t wrap my head around. I think many biological scientists feel an immediate snideness toward modern-day space exploration, viewing it as the billionaires of Earth jumping ship from the great wastes that they have already extracted maximum pleasure from, and left bare. And when they are gone nothing beside will remain.
No, Andres would insist. It’s human nature to explore. Whales swim, bears climb, and humans explore. Why just survive when we should also live?
I hadn’t thought about that. I had spent so long with ecologists, virologists, immunologists, doctors, all trying to continue pumping life into this world, and I hadn’t been looking up.
Should human space exploration, particularly in the form of privatized rocket development, be a part of our collective future?
(My friend Jaim asked me if I was really the right person to be answering this question. But I think love and curiosity are the same. Love makes researchers of us all.)
–
PRIM: Will only the “rich oligarchs” have the pleasure of exploring space and inhabiting our lunar/Martian colonies?
ANDRES: I don’t think so. Exploring space and living on another world, learning how to navigate – that is something you have to have very specialized training for, and just being able to pay the price tag doesn’t qualify you to be an astronaut. So, there will always be, you know, the Elons and Jeff Bezos-es that do the tourist flights to lower orbit or whatever, and there will always be the serious explorer-type people, like astronauts, that actually do the hard work of exploring the universe.
There’s projects making low-cost, high cadence, reusable launch vehicles like Starship, which are revolutionarily cheap. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at the figures, but it’s like, thousands of times cheaper per pound to orbit than previous spacecraft.
(Note: Rocket Lab costs upwards of $20,000 per kilogram versus under $6,000 per kilogram for SpaceX2. Using a reusable rocket over a traditional rocket can be up to 65% cheaper.3)
The point of that project is to make space more accessible to more people, not less. Right now, in the immediate future, that applies more to people who want to deliver their payloads to space. So instead of having to be super rich to pay for Falcon 9, eventually you’ll be able to be a midsize customer who can pay for Starship and you can deliver, like, student projects to orbit. It just lowers the cost to orbit. So the layman can send his payload up for a more reasonable price because the cost is lower, but if you extrapolate years, that’ll mean the layman can afford a ticket to another world. You know, it’s like airplanes. If you make an airplane that doesn’t have to be thrown away every single time it flies, then more people can travel to other countries.
(Note: Falcon 9 is the world’s first orbital class reusable rocket, and is able to refly its most expensive parts, driving down costs and environmental impact. The Falcon 9 booster can be reused over 10 times, with minimal maintenance between flight.3)
PRIM: So you think this compensates for the general ecological impact of rockets right now?
ANDRES: I think people fundamentally misunderstand what that impact is, and maybe part of that is because they see the big plume of smoke coming out and they’re like, “Oh, greenhouse gases.” Most rockets produce water vapor as the vast majority of their exhaust plume, because they burn hydrocarbons and oxidizer. So they’re not, like, polluters. You might be referring to costs, like the monetary resources to build the rocket. Is that what you’re referring to?
PRIM: Oh, um, I was referring to the fact that some rockets have emissions that persist longer in the atmosphere, things like chlorine and nitrogen oxides.
ANDRES: The emissions that are majority water vapor? They can persist. It’ll be okay. There’ll just be stronger rain in some regions. [Laughs] I don’t think pollution is the issue. I think the historical issue is that rockets aren’t recovered and so we create these, like, giant sky scrapers of trash in the ocean, but that’s the problem Starship is trying to solve.
(Note: Nitrogen oxides from re-entry heating and chlorine from solid fuels contribute to 0.15% of the decline of the upper stratosphere. With space tourism, the number has increased to 0.24%.4 Additionally, black carbon comprises 70% of the rocket emissions that contribute to the warming of the atmosphere5. However, all of the rockets discussed here – Falcon 9 and Starship – utilize liquid propellant, which do not emit high levels of greenhouse gases or black carbon. Currently, the impact of GHG emissions by rockets is dwarfed by that of other industrial sectors, such as automobiles5.)
PRIM: Will you expand on the thing you were saying earlier about how, more philosophically, why you think space travel (or at least rocketry) is a good investment for humanity?
ANDRES: It’s a difficult question because it’s very abstract, the material benefits it has on the human race. Like, I think the reason I care about it is because it’s what we’re supposed to do as a species. It’s like I was telling you before, yeah, bees make honey and hives, ants crawl in a line, and beavers make dams. Humans explore and make cool stuff. That’s our purpose and we should live for that. We should go explore the universe, even though the chance we’ll find an inhabitable planet in the next 1000 years that we can actually get to is basically zero. It’s, like, well, just because your house is really swanky and comfortable doesn’t mean you never go outside.
PRIM: [Laughs]
ANDRES: Like, you still wanna take a run in the yard every once in a while.
PRIM: [Laughs]
ANDRES: But besides that, having higher access to space at lower cost has all sorts of benefits. Being able to do in-space manufacturing with different materials – basic manufacturing, but also medicine, in zero-G, that environment’s really valuable for a lot of people. Um, we’ll be able to make cool stuff. But, we’ll accidentally invent really useful technology along the way too. A lot of what we use day-to-day, like cell phones and stuff like that, came as a result of the Apollo projects, just inventing cool technology along the way. So there’s always that. But yeah, many, many reasons, many reasons.
PRIM: Okay, that’s good. I like your, uh, penchant for metaphor. It’s very vivid.
ANDRES: Thanks. [Laughs]
Works Cited:
- “Firefly Aerospace Completes First Miranda Engine Hot Fire Test.” Aerospace Global News, 28 Nov. 2023.
- Lionnet, Pierre. “SpaceX and the Categorical Imperative to Achieve Low Launch Cost.” SpaceNews, 7 June 2024.
- “Reducing the Cost of Space Travel with Reusable Launch Vehicles.” NSTXL, 12 Feb. 2024.
- Ryan, Robert G., et al. “Impact of Rocket Launch and Space Debris Air Pollutant Emissions on Stratospheric Ozone and Global Climate.” Earth’s Future, vol. 10, no. 6, June 2022, e2021EF002612. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021EF002612.
- “The Environmental Impacts of the New Space Race.” Georgetown Environmental Law Review, Georgetown Law, n.d.
UF PRISM 