Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures

That is utopia … especially for primitives and scientists, which is to say everybody.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

This project was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant Number NNX15AI31G.

The stories and essays in this report reflect the views of its authors, and do not necessarily represent the views of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or the United States Government. 

Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures.
Copyright © 2017 Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich

The copyrights for all illustrations, including the cover image, are owned by Maciej Rebisz. 

The copyrights for individual short stories and essays are owned by their respective authors, as follows:
“Editors’ Introduction: The Flag and the Garden” by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich. Copyright © Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich. 
“Human Exploration of Mars: Fact from Fiction?” by Jim Bell. Copyright © 2017 Jim Bell.
“Vanguard 2.0” by Carter Scholz. Copyright © 2017 Carter Scholz.
“Reflections on the ‘Dual Uses’ of Space Innovation” by G. Pascal Zachary. Copyright © 2017 G. Pascal Zachary. 
“Mozart on the Kalahari” by Steven Barnes. Copyright © 2017 Steven Barnes.
“Past Empires and the Future of Colonization in Low Earth Orbit” by William K. Storey. Copyright © 2017 William K. Storey
“Expanding Our Solution Space: How We Can Build an Inclusive Future” by Deji Bryce Olukotun. Copyright © 2017 Deji Bryce Olukotun.
“The Baker of Mars” by Karl Schroeder. Copyright © 2017 Karl Schroeder.
“Exploration Fact and Exploration Fiction” by Lawrence Dritsas. Copyright © 2017 Lawrence Dritsas.
“Death on Mars” by Madeline Ashby. Copyright © 2017 Madeline Malan.
“Life on Mars?” by Steve Ruff. Copyright © 2017 Steve Ruff.
“The Use of Things” by Ramez Naam. Copyright © 2017 Ramez Naam.
“Toward Asteroid Exploration” by Roland Lehoucq. Copyright © 2017 Roland Lehoucq.
“Night Shift” by Eileen Gunn. Copyright © 2017 Eileen Gunn.
“Rethinking Risk” by Andrew Maynard. Copyright © 2017 Andrew Maynard.
“Shikasta” by Vandana Singh. Copyright © 2017 Vandana Singh.
“The New Science of Astrobiology” by Sara Imari Walker. Copyright © 2017 Sara Imari Walker.
“Negotiating the Values of Space Exploration” by Emma Frow. Copyright © 2017 Emma Frow.
“The Luxury Problem: Space Exploration in the ‘Emergency Century’” by Kim Stanley Robinson and Jim Bell. Copyright © 2017 Kim Stanley Robinson and Jim Bell.
“The Economics of Space” by Clark A. Miller. Copyright © 2017 Clark Miller.
“High Hedonistic and Low Fatalistic” by Linda T. Elkins-Tanton. Copyright © 2017 Linda T. Elkins-Tanton. 

ISBN 978-0-9995902-1-8

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Credits

Editors

Ed Finn
Joey Eschrich

Guest Editor

Juliet Ulman, http://papertyger.net 

Project Leaders

Ed Finn
Ruth Wylie
Jim Bell
Clark A. Miller

Illustrations

Maciej Rebisz, http://maciejrebisz.com 

Ebook Design

Emily Buckell, emilybuckellebooks@gmail.com 

Cover, PDF, and Print Design

Mark Dudlik, http://markdudlik.com

HTML Design

Nina Miller

Research Assistants

Alissa Haddaji
Mateo Pimentel 

Special Thanks

To Kim Stanley Robinson, for allowing us to use excerpts from his magisterial novel Red Mars throughout this volume, and for making himself available for a fascinating and thought-provoking interview.

A Note on the Epigraphs

We are pleased to pay homage to Kim Stanley Robinson’s visionary 1992 novel Red Mars on its 25^th anniversary. Throughout this volume, at the beginning of each section, you will encounter a brief excerpt from Red Mars, the first in Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, which traces the process of terraforming the Red Planet over 200 years. Robinson’s resolutely utopian, deeply researched stories about human space exploration and settlement are animated by compelling characters and thought-provoking conflicts over values and politics. They also contain moments of arresting beauty and human connection. For all these reasons, Robinson’s visions of the future remain a major source of inspiration for the stories and essays in this volume. Beyond that, they have helped to shape our broader cultural imaginary for human endeavors in space, both in science fiction and technical communities. We are proud to have Red Mars serve as a frame for our work here, and we hope that our readers will seek out Robinson’s entire oeuvre, which encompasses a number of human journeys into space. 

An interview with Robinson and Jim Bell appears at the end of this collection, in the “Concluding Thoughts” section.

Acknowledgments

The stories in this volume are not predictions. None of us know how space exploration, space technologies, and the commercialization of space will play out. Engineers and leaders at NASA and in companies like SpaceX may have clear ideas of what’s possible, and what’s desirable from their standpoint, but not even they know how these technologies will play out in practice, as real people in real organizations put them to work to create a future in space for all of us. In that sense, William K. Storey is exactly right in his essay. If we read these stories critically, we ultimately probably learn far more about ourselves, our societies, and our anxieties today, than we do about how the future of humans and robots in space will play out.

In the end, though, we are less interested in a critical deconstruction of how the stories were written and why they took the exact form that they did. We are much more interested in whether they stimulate creative, interesting, and relevant thoughts and conversations among their readers. And we are interested in whether those thoughts and conversations can help inform NASA and commercial space companies, other national space agencies, Congress, the people of the United States, and the people of the world, as we work our collective ways toward the creation of new possibilities and new worlds. This book is not the end of the experiment. It is the beginning.

Ed Finn

I am deeply grateful to the many people who made this experiment possible. The thread begins with Mason Peck, who first invited us to propose a workshop on the relationship between popular imagination and technical possibilities. That incredibly generative gathering—too heavily populated with wonderful colleagues to list them all here—inspired this project as well as related work on the feedback loop between science and science fiction. The story continues with our colleagues at NASA, Alexander MacDonald, Zachary Pirtle, and Jacob Keaton, who originally supported our proposal for narrative space futures, as well as Ashley Edwards, who helped us shepherd this book out into the world. 

As the work got underway a small army of collaborators from ASU and beyond took a shoulder to this wheel. Clark Miller, Jim Bell, and Ruth Wylie have been wonderful collaborators and co-investigators for this effort. Alissa Haddaji and Mateo Pimentel have bookended the project as graduate research assistants and, respectively, fomented and documented our strange collaborations. Bob Beard, Cody Staats, and the whole team at the Center for Science and the Imagination helped orchestrate our on-site workshop and engage Maciej Rebisz, who deserves his own thank-you for creating the stunning illustrations that accompany these stories. Juliet Ulman played a vital role in editing the manuscript as we moved into the final stretch of the project. Beyond all of these, Joey Eschrich deserves an editorial medal of valor for his work managing, editing, coordinating, and improving this collection in every way imaginable. 

Jim Bell

I would like to thank Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn for significant editorial assistance on an earlier draft of my contribution, and in general would like to thank all of the participants in the Space Futures project for an inspiring and invigorating experience. In particular, interviews and discussions with Alissa Haddaji, Kim Stanley Robinson, Karl Schroeder, and Madeline Ashby have been insightful and darned fun. Let’s do it again!

Joey Eschrich

I would like to thank all of the contributors to this project for their brilliance, patience, rigorous thinking, good humor, and receptiveness to editorial meddling. I became fascinated by space as a bookish kid with a star atlas (but alas, no telescope) in New England. After that I took a long hiatus away from the cosmos, and it’s been thrilling to look up and out again. I owe that opportunity to the generosity and trust of Ed Finn, Ruth Wylie, Jim Bell, Clark Miller, and all of our collaborators and supporters at NASA. 

I’d also like to thank Bob Beard, Cody Staats, Nina Miller, Peter Nagy and the rest of the Center for Science and the Imagination team for their hard work and intellectual companionship, and Juliet Ulman for grappling with a strange and occasionally imposing editorial project at a late stage of the game—and for teaching me some new editorial tricks and habits of mind. Thanks to Kathleen Pigg for providing timely botanical expertise for Steven Barnes’s story. Finally, I’d like to thank my perspicacious wife Jennifer Apple for an endless barrage of incisive comments, helpful suggestions, and reasons to be inspired.

Clark A. Miller

This has been an amazing project to work on. A decade ago, my colleague Ira Bennett and I argued that science fiction stories had the potential to be a kind of technology assessment for the rest of us.^[1] Science fiction has always played this role, in part. Stories such as Frankenstein, Brave New World, and 1984 have become important sources of symbol and imagery in modern societies, especially around the power of technology to shape humanity’s future. Ira and I meant something somewhat different, however. For us, the literary forms of science fiction, which force writers to put new technologies into the lives and stories of people, provide a potential counter to some of the more lamentable characteristics of traditional technology assessment. Rather than dry, technical assessments that divorce the rational evaluation of technology from consideration of the social contexts in which it is applied, science fiction errs in the opposite direction. The stories draw readers in; engage their passions; explore technologies from the perspectives of those who live with, use, and encounter them amidst their lives. Fiction invites readers to participate in a rich, lively world, and draw their own judgments about what a new technology might mean. 

For Ira and I, then, science fiction stories could be a tool through which people who are not experts in a specific technology could:

• Learn about that technology, how it works, how it might plausibly develop in the future, and how it might intersect with other technologies.
• Explore its potential intersections with diverse human values and experiences, ways of living and working, cultures, and/or patterns of social and economic activity.
• Anticipate what it might mean for themselves, their families and communities, or even their countries.
• Discuss with others how the technology should be developed, used, and/or regulated responsibly, either today or in the future.

We all owe a debt of thanks for the opportunity to try these ideas out to Ed Finn, the director of the Center for Science and Imagination at Arizona State University, to NASA, and to the writers who helped us out. I must say, I’m hopeful. I am not an expert in space. Yet, in reading these stories, I explored new territory and found my vision of our future among the stars expanded. I learned how people participating in the commercial space arena think space technologies might develop in the future and interact with other innovations like synthetic biology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrencies. I considered how a diverse array of different kinds of people, living in different kinds of circumstances, might think about, engage, get excited about, use, and even reject different kinds of space technologies. I thought about my son—who is eight, who is constantly making things with whatever materials are lying around the house, and who was deeply engaged by the cartoons and videos NASA created for its Curiosity mission—and what the future of commercial space activities might mean for his life and his future. And now I am writing to you about what I learned and how we might collectively try to make sense of that future.

Notes

^[1] Clark A. Miller and Ira Bennett, “Thinking Longer Term about Technology: Is There Value in Science Fiction Inspired Approaches to Constructing Futures?” Science and Public Policy 35, no. 8 (2008). [back]

Editors’ Introduction: The Flag and the Garden

by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich

Why should we go to space? Our answers to this question have changed significantly over the past 70 years as the people, the methods, and the funding for space exploration continue to change. Many Americans enraptured by the “flags and footsteps” pride of the Apollo landings assumed that we would soon be doing the same on Mars—and yet generations of leaders have failed to galvanize that kind of commitment and excitement, to recapture the spirit of John F. Kennedy’s famous line: we do these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” 

Over the past two decades, private space companies have joined their public counterparts and offered new rationales for their work. Initially dismissed as the hobbies of billionaires, several of these enterprises have had a real impact on the logistics and possibilities of space exploration, and more importantly, they have offered new answers to the question of why. Elon Musk’s claim that he wants to retire on Mars puts space into a very different context: a personal and commercial one, where the notion of planting flags gets replaced by planting gardens. Musk plans to retire on Mars not because he thinks he should, but because he thinks he can.

The idea of space as a canvas for human possibility has proven compelling to those in the nascent commercial space industry, but the vision has not galvanized broad public engagement in the same ways as the iconic era of Sputnik and the Apollo missions. Creating a new collective understanding, a fresh answer to the question of why should we go, is more than just a public engagement project. Until enough people buy into a public and private narrative of space, commerce can only take place in a very limited way. Insurance companies are less likely to underwrite complex, high-risk ventures in space. Legislators and regulators are less likely to focus on or value the potential benefits to society of public-private space exploration. Investors and individuals are less likely to support space ventures with their dollars and their attention. 

This collection takes on the challenge of imagining new stories at the intersection of public and private—narratives that use the economic and social history of exploration to inform scenarios for the future of the “new space” era. The stories in this collection weave together the flag and the garden, the nation-state and the corporation. They also balance the abstract hopes and fears of collectives with the more immediate concerns of individual people. Space exploration is only viable in the long term if enough people feel a personal connection to it, finding a story about the world beyond our atmosphere that they can inhabit and believe. 

And so we are delighted to share this, a collection of space-futures narratives informed by the lessons of the past, the insights of current technical and scientific research, and the eternal hopes and fears of humans facing the unknown. 

The most important lesson we have learned in this project is that people have been thinking of ways to get to the stars for a long time. While an array of new missions, companies, and launch platforms have entered the extraplanetary game, the fundamentals are almost unchanged. The human drive to explore is coupled with an equally powerful impulse to bring things back, to weave our discoveries into the broader web of human civilization. The growth of our species has not been a linear march towards technical knowledge but an omnidirectional expansion, a thickening layer of activities, projects, logistics, conversations, and culture. In that way the commercialization of space will also be, we hope, a kind of domestication—not in the sense of taming nature but in the sense of creating a space for dwelling, a venue for human life to unfurl in all its weirdness and complexity. 

This collection advances the central mission of the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University to encourage more creative and ambitious thinking about the future. Its roots lie in Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, which brought together science fiction writers and scientific researchers to come up with technically grounded, optimistic visions of what might happen next. Each story presented a glimpse of a possible future that a young scientist or engineer might be able to achieve in a single professional lifetime—Thinking Big, but also imagining worlds that are within arm’s reach of contemporary technological development. 

Hieroglyph was not just a book project but an experiment in forging a community that included students, teachers, policy-makers, and working professionals in many different walks of life. It lives on as a collective organized around the idea that we can work towards better futures by working up some better dreams. The stories in that anthology explored futures shaped by synthetic biology, neuroscience, structural engineering, and many other fields.

This book is also an experiment, one that builds on what we have learned from Hieroglyph and many other related projects at CSI. One major change is that we have integrated narratives and nonfiction even more closely than we did with Hieroglyph, asking our various collaborators to engage and share their work with one another at several stages in the project. These collaborators joined four thematically organized teams of writers, social scientists, and space experts: Low Earth Orbit, Mars, Asteroids, and Exoplanets. Together they were able to explore a wide range of questions about the social, technical, and commercial possibilities of expanded human activity in each of these domains. We are also pleased to include all of their final products here, fiction and nonfiction, something we were not able to do with the first Hieroglyph collection because of printing constraints. Here readers can follow ideas and arguments across multiple essays, echoing the circulation of those ideas among our contributors via phone conversations, email exchanges, and a few in-person meetings. 

Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities is an experiment in a second sense, as a research project funded by NASA. In that regard, this is an exploration of the value of using narrative projections about the commercialization of space exploration and public-private partnerships. The act of putting writers, natural scientists, engineers, and social scientists into dialogue around the near future of space has effects on those collaborators themselves, who have grappled with—and we hope, learned something useful from—the exercise of working across disciplinary and creative boundaries. Their work may also be useful to NASA researchers in the future, and will certainly be of interest to scholars of space exploration in relation to science policy, cultural studies, literature, and related fields. Most importantly, we have worked hard to craft this collection for a broad public audience, expanding our collective conversation about the future of space exploration through a series of thought-provoking visions about how it might unfold.

With all of these audiences, we hope the volume will advance several different objectives. First, finding novel perspectives and descriptive structures for some of the classic dilemmas that complicate space exploration: risk, cost, and long-term benefits. The second objective turns that novelty on its head by arguing that many of these dilemmas are not new at all, but instead questions that explorers have faced many times before, from the fourth-century voyage of Pytheas of Massalia and the incredible journeys of Polynesian peoples across the Pacific Ocean to the nineteenth-century Arctic expeditions sponsored by British food manufacturers like Huntley & Palmer and Beach’s. And finally, we hope we have created a collection that draws together our audiences around shared stories—the community of space researchers, policy-makers, and entrepreneurs, on the one hand, and a broader public that continues to be inspired by the discovery and exploration led by NASA and other entities, on the other. 

What distinguishes our experiment is the harnessing of economic history and science fiction to the frame of our current technological horizon: a set of stories that inflect and reinvent the lessons of the past to illuminate possible futures. Imagining commerce in space has its own rich history in the genre of science fiction, from Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s classic satire The Space Merchants to contemporary works like the television series The Expanse, based on the novels of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (writing as James S. A. Corey). These are stories that consider space as a mirror for human culture and identity, a set of environments that, no matter how unfamiliar to us, can become familiar to characters who dwell in them. They perform the crucial imaginative work of placing everyday humans into thriving extraplanetary environments, and thereby allow us to see a very different solar system through their eyes.

This is one of the important functions of science fiction: to take the novum, the “new thing,” and make it familiar through the alchemy of a story. The strange remains strange, but it also becomes known to us, as recognizable as a tricorder or a lightsaber. In this way, science fiction is a genre of exploration. The stories and essays in this volume dramatize and contextualize that reciprocal aim of exploration, to link back, to weave together, and consider how we might voyage into the unknown and forge new kinds of cooperation, commerce, and community.

Human Exploration of Mars: Fact from Fiction?

by Jim Bell

Sending people to Mars or other deep space destinations is no longer solely the realm of science fiction. While NASA or other interested players in the space business don’t yet have a specific detailed timeline for human missions to Mars, for example, they and others are investing heavily in the needed technological, political, and societal resources required to make such missions happen. Ironically, science fiction itself may be at least partly responsible for this recent sea change in science reality.

Numerous potential ports of call await future human space explorers. The next travelers in space may be returning to the Moon after a more than half-century hiatus, making the first visits to low-gravity asteroids that pass relatively close to the Earth, or setting out on a grand adventure of exploration or perhaps even colonization to Mars and its moons. But Mars, in particular, has caught humanity’s imagination as the “next destination” for astronauts, fueled by exciting scientific results from recent robotic space missions, as well as by a renewed fascination with Mars in books, films, and social media.

Indeed, since the earliest telescopic observations, Mars has consistently been a subject of public fascination and wide-ranging scientific interest. The canali of Italian astronomer and civil engineer Giovanni Schiaparelli were sold to an eagerly awaiting early twentieth century public as extraterrestrially engineered “canals” rather than mere geological “channels” by the amateur astronomer and businessman Percival Lowell. Those same Martians invaded Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, as well as many of the panicked households of America, via Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre company’s 1938 radio rendition of “The War of the Worlds.” In the 1950s and even well into the 1960s, some astronomers were publishing papers in Science magazine and elsewhere hypothesizing the presence of lichen or other simple life-forms on Mars based on the latest telescope observations. 

It would take a small initial flotilla of early robotic flyby, orbiter, and lander missions to convince the scientific community, as well as the public, that the surface of Mars is a barren and inhospitable place. Even then, however, the idea of life on Mars was quickly brought back to the fore of public and scientific debate by the 1996 controversy over the possible existence of fossilized life-forms, and other evidence of living organisms, preserved in an Antarctic meteorite that made its way to Earth after being blasted out of the Martian subsurface by an asteroid impact. Despite the initial and continuing scientific skepticism about the veracity of those claims, massive media and public interest in that possibility, fueled partly by the direct involvement of the President of the United States and a supportive U.S. Congress, has inspired the past two decades of highly visible, and highly successful, orbiters, landers, and rovers sent to the Red Planet. The main goal of most of these missions has been to search for evidence that Mars once was, or perhaps still is, habitable.

But the roots of this public support go far deeper than just the scientific motivation. Over many decades now, science fiction creators—including authors, television and film producers, and video game makers—have built stories and drama around space-related themes, and especially around imagined interactions between humans and aliens, helping to prime a far-reaching (and, for those industries, economically rewarding) public interest in all things space. Regardless of whether those interactions have been friendly or adversarial, or whether those aliens have been benevolent or hostile, the basic premise has achieved wide public support and acceptance: people are going to go out into deep space—to explore, to work, to vacation, or just to live a different life.

How much any of those imagined space-related futures that are depicted in literature, film, or television is actually achievable is highly debatable, of course. While the prospects for almost-magical (to today’s physics) technologies like transporters or warp drives or lightsabers seem extremely dim in the near future, if at all, the idea of people traveling by rocket to places like Mars seems not too far-fetched an extrapolation from the Apollo missions to the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And the idea that people would run into trouble during those voyages, or that they would have fantastic adventures, or that they would make astounding discoveries (like discovering other life-forms beyond Earth), seems easy for a now-space-savvy public audience to accept. After all, this same public is bombarded almost daily with amazing and far-reaching actual discoveries in astronomy, physics, biology, and many other fields of science and technology.

Science fiction has created a positive feedback loop that is influencing the future of space exploration. From the routine airline-like space travel and psychedelic alien encounters of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 to the pragmatic heroism and realistic technologies depicted in Andy Weir and Ridley Scott’s more recent The Martian, stories about people in space have spurred conversations, cult followings, and strong emotions in our society. That interest has translated into citizen advocacy for government-funded space activities, as evidenced directly by the creation and influence of nonprofit advocacy groups like The Planetary Society, and indirectly by the massive outpouring of attendance and viewership for major space-related events like the Moon landings, Space Shuttle launches, Mars rover landings, and the recent Pluto flyby. 

Science fiction may even be influencing the development of the nascent private commercial space industry, which has space exploration plans often motivated by different goals than government space agencies. In many of these companies, employees from CEOs to factory floor workers cite books, films, and television shows as motivators of their own passion for space exploration, and in some cases even as models for their future corporate goals. For example, would SpaceX be pursuing its long-term goal of colonizing Mars, or would Planetary Resources be pursuing its long-term goal of mining asteroids, without science fiction creators having established that there is an eager and enthusiastic pool of public supporters (and investors) who will back such ventures?

Coming back to the idea of achievability, how important is it to the future of actual space exploration that science fiction represents and depicts an accurate imagined future? What harm could a few lightsabers or warp drives or transporters do, sprinkled here and there throughout the genre? The answer, I believe, depends on the timescale over which the metric is applied. That is, when considering the potential for the exploration of space in the far future (hundreds to thousands of years from now or more), it is easy to suspend the need for accuracy and assume that we can’t possibly predict technological advances or innovations that far into the future. So why not photon torpedoes and antigravity shielding? But if a story is to have a significant influence on the near-term future of space exploration (within the next few decades, for example), I believe that it needs to be grounded in a defensible pragmatism about what is actually achievable—technologically, scientifically, and politically. This, to me, is the source of the phenomenal public support for The Martian. Author Andy Weir has created an entirely plausible (technically, scientifically, and politically) near-term future for the human exploration of Mars, and in that future there is drama, danger, and discovery—all critical elements in the story’s public success. It is easy—not only for the general public but also for rank and file space scientists and engineers—to believe that such adventures are indeed possible in the 2030s … and so, let’s work to try to make them actually happen! Even when gently pressed to admit that some of the science in the story is not fully accurate (like the intense sand storm early in the story—far, far more powerful than a storm could possibly be on Mars today), Weir told me that he didn’t think that a little scientific exaggeration would matter, given the overall plausibility of the story and the need to establish the premise of an easy-to-understand example of a man-versus-nature conflict. Indeed, amplifying the actual power of the well-known dust storms of Mars is ultimately forgivable, in my opinion, because the details of the storm are irrelevant to the success of the story, or to its ability to inspire people to work towards getting humans to Mars for real. The Martian is a great example of positive science fiction feedback that could very well lead to a self-fulfilling literary prophecy.

The stories in this anthology also provide excellent examples of such potential positive feedback. Carter Scholz’s “Vanguard 2.0” uses the Low Earth Orbit setting to examine questions of wealth and equity in space. The plot takes place in and around two inflatable human habitats in Low Earth Orbit, and follows the machinations of a cryptic trillionaire, Gideon Pace, who uses his riches to launch a thus-far-unprofitable business using drones to deorbit space debris that might pose a threat to satellites or spacecraft. The story raises the specter of space-based weapons platforms and the idea of using orbital weapons to defend Earth against asteroid impacts. Simultaneously, it considers how the role of private interests in space could change the way that off-world areas are governed and, indeed, how power in space might change power relations and dynamics back on Earth. Pace is a clever, if devious, policy thinker: his interest in expanding his presence in Low Earth Orbit is an attempt to maneuver around the terms of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, now that activity in space is a private-sector endeavor, no longer the sole province of government agencies. Scholz’s story offers a useful warning about the risks of dual-use technologies and competing interests that might emerge in the regulatory near-vacuum of Low Earth Orbit as it becomes an active zone of commerce. It suggests that policy conversations about regulating private-enterprise activity in space need to happen before powerful actors establish themselves as providers of essential services. 

In “Mozart on the Kalahari,” Steven Barnes imagines space tourism in Low Earth Orbit expanding rapidly, funded by corporate sponsors like Disney. In this future, exploration and experimentation in space are bootstrapped by a tourism industry that caters to the wealthy. Space is only marginally more accessible than it is today; vacations cost a hundred thousand dollars a day, and the only other routes off-world are through elite universities and fiercely competitive science fairs like the one around which the story revolves. The other scientific phenomenon at the heart of the story is the expanded availability and sophistication of do-it-yourself genetic engineering kits for kids and college students. Recent genetic engineering breakthroughs like CRISPR make the democratization of this technology, and massive increases in its power, seem distinctly possible in the near future. The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition already challenges hundreds of teams of young people to “imaginatively manipulate” genetic material each year. Barnes’ radical point of departure from our current reality turns on genetic interpenetration between humans and other species, and suggests that we might consider genetically engineering human bodies as one step towards creating a thoroughly spacefaring future. 

In “The Baker of Mars,” Karl Schroeder imagines a future where Earthbound prospectors search for mineral and volatile resources on Mars remotely, via computer control of robotic avatars that are actually on the Red Planet, as a prelude to eventual human exploration and settlement. The story presents a plausible extrapolation of current computational technologies, especially the blockchain technology that undergirds the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, to conceptualize a new economic commons applied to pools of extraterrestrial resources. Schroeder also explores the concept of latency—the time between initiating an action and learning of its results—in the context of remote operations of assets on another planet. The idea of doing as much as we can via robotics and telepresence, prior to actual human exploration, is already a fundamental component of the world’s space exploration programs. It’s easy to envision that concept expanding on a more massive scale to include prospecting for raw materials and resources robotically, and then using those resources to develop the infrastructure needed for humans on Mars. 

Madeline Ashby’s “Death on Mars” also plays with the idea of latency. Astronauts are sent out to work on one of the moons of Mars (much easier to get to than Mars itself), significantly decreasing the time delay for operating robotic vehicles that are building habitats for future human explorers on the planet’s surface. This idea has already been gaining some traction in the real Mars exploration world, although mostly in the realm of conducting science experiments and exploration with tele-operated vehicles. Ashby also explores issues of crew psychology and social interactions during the long cruise from Earth to Mars, and beyond. Crew dynamics will be fundamental to the success of future long-duration missions, and one innovation in the story is the concept of an all-female crew, which has physical benefits (lower crew weight and caloric needs) and potential benefits for conflict reduction and social harmony—along with pathbreaking political consequences for the role of women in science. Ashby’s tale turns on one of the most challenging situations astronauts might face, the death of a crew member. The ethical end-of-life issues that bedevil us on Earth only grow more complex in space, where individual and social choices around a terminal illness must be balanced with mission objectives and even the risk of accidentally contaminating another planet with life from Earth. Conversations around this topic could lead to more transparency in and public empathy with the space program, and potentially to deeper connections between the general public and future astronauts. 

In “The Use of Things,” Ramez Naam makes the main source of narrative tension the decision between a space future centered on human exploration and a future dominated by robotic explorers controlled by humans on Earth. Should self-organizing swarms of robots replace human explorers entirely? Are the risks of sending humans into dangerous environments justified, if robots can do the job almost or entirely as well? The story also examines the culture and politics of space exploration, acknowledging the inspirational nature of images of people heroically exploring the cosmos, rather than just sending robotic emissaries to do our bidding. “The Use of Things” is a gripping action adventure, but also a sort of philosophical dialogue between a human astronaut tacked onto a mostly robotic mission for promotional purposes and a cynical NASA administrator who would prefer to be managing a purely robotic endeavor. As Naam touches upon, perhaps it will be easier for future space agencies to build public support for expensive missions if strapping, daring human astronauts are aboard—even if their involvement adds complexity, increases costs, and introduces risks of death or serious injury that are difficult, if not impossible, to mitigate. 

Eileen Gunn’s “Night Shift” places us in a future where Seattle’s software millionaires and billionaires use their riches to build a vibrant start-up culture around nanotechnology, with its epicenter inside the old Boeing Everett factory (once the largest building in the world). Gunn imagines a future for space exploration with humans on Earth overseeing a busy, increasingly autonomous workforce of robotic miners and nanobots, powered by high-efficiency solar cells and using solar sails for long-distance transport. Gunn injects the aggressively quirky energy of the Pacific Northwest’s twentieth-century software coder culture into the space exploration arena, challenging us to think through the power struggle between freewheeling computer engineers and artificially intelligent agents operating off-planet with ever-expanding autonomy and critical thinking skills. If we opt for a space exploration future shaped by human-machine collaboration, it will be crucial to develop protocols for just how much decision-making authority to vest in thinking machines, and how much to retain for human experts. “Night Shift” also dramatizes the opportunities and perils of self-replicating nanobot swarms. If given the ability to replicate at a geometric rate, nanobot swarms could theoretically overrun entire asteroids or even planets while searching for water or other resources that they’ve been programmed to find and process. Gunn treats these weighty subjects with humor and verve, giving us the chance to consider these possibilities in a nonthreatening but exciting technical and philosophical bubble. 

Finally, in “Shikasta,” Vandana Singh invites us to ponder the implications of the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe, and to reconfigure our expectations about what that life might look like, beyond the familiar flora and fauna we encounter on Earth and beyond the gray, saucer-eyed aliens of film and television. Singh’s story likewise reimagines the future of space exploration by centering on a global team of crowd-funded scientists collaborating remotely across continents and time zones, and by making the enigmatic, ever-shifting relationship between the scientists and their artificially intelligent robotic emissary a source of speculation and tension for the reader. Singh’s story also complicates the scientific methods and theories that we use to guide our exploration of the cosmos: her characters bring their rich personal histories and indigenous ways of knowing into dialogue with mainstream scientific and technological practices, which enables them to recognize, theorize about, and study phenomena that traditional approaches might miss. “Shikasta” makes a powerful argument for the value of cultural diversity in space science and exploration, and challenges us to seek new methods in the search for extraterrestrial life that go beyond our preconceived notions about how that life will look and behave. 

As more specific plans begin to emerge over the next few years for the future human exploration of space by NASA and others, it will be important to understand if and how those plans are consistent with the context and expectations for space exploration that have been embraced by our society based on plausible, compelling science fiction. To me it seems likely that the reason society has embraced particular stories and depictions is precisely because they are not fantasy; instead, they can represent a positive and ultimately uplifting potential reality. In a world with so many societal, political, and economic challenges, the idea that we can make it to a better future that has been at least partially enabled by the adventures, challenges, and discoveries of space exploration could be powerfully inspirational. Evidence to date suggests that such inspiration can be turned into advocacy and action, and that fiction can indeed presage fact.