Beckoning cosmos

THREE DECADES AFTER the historic landing on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, space travel continues to be a very highly restricted programme for astronauts chosen by the U.S. National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) after extremely rigorous training. If space travel still remains a dream for all the others who are Earth-bound, NASA and the other space agencies would probably tell them that they will just have to wait before they could take off as easily as they could board a train or a plane. They would probably be reminded that it took well over three decades after the Wright brothers successfully took to the skies in a frail, single-engined plane. It took still longer for wide-bodied jet aircraft with a seating capacity between 150 and 250 to fly passengers non-stop around the globe to their destinations. The demand for aviation fuel could be met only when there was a huge expansion in the setting up of petroleum refineries and this had to wait for a big increase in world crude oil production. Plans for the making of still bigger aircraft which could fly around 500 passengers are still on the drawing board. Only the Concorde with its very limited fleet could fly supersonic - and the saving of time, which alone could justify the high cost of such travel, is lost when the planes become subsonic while flying over populated areas.

If these were the limitations which slowed down the emergence and expansion of commercial air services, with the military aircraft claiming priority for supplies of aviation fuel, Dr. Aldrin would indeed seem to have been very optimistic with his hopes about space travel becoming a possibility for every one within the next 12 or 15 years. Among the exacting challenges which will have to be met is the designing of a reusable launch vehicle to shield it from getting burnt on its re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. The demands which this would make on science and technology for the design and development of the cladding that would be needed for ensuring the safe re-entry of the launch vehicles would be staggering. The fail-safe fire-proof material which will be needed to make this possible will have to be of a new generation wholly different from what is now available for meeting terrestrial demands.

Whoever is planning to make space travel possible for everyone will also have to think of the purpose which it would serve. Those who are now seriously interested in such space flights are mostly scientists who would reap it rich from the big exposure of space they could get. The rest will just get a magnificent view of the cosmos. However, their final destination in a two-way ticket for commercialised space travel would still be the Earth with the known planets of the solar system being uninhabitable and there could be no excursion to the distant stellar systems for quite a few generations until space technology takes a quantum leap and becomes immensely far more advanced than it is at present. While science fiction writers have dreamed about migration to the planets of distant stars, the reality is that the ``common man'' Dr. Aldrin has spoken about would continue to be Earth-bound during the foreseeable future.

A more cheerful way of looking at space travel would, however, be to take note of the fact that the cosmos has remained unchanged for the millions of years which have spanned the evolution of life on Earth from the amoeba to the humans. With Time being placed in a frame of millions of years, the pace of changes in the cosmos stretches over several lifetimes. From terrestrial perceptions, the space-time continuum moves very slowly as it is in no hurry to hasten anything - least of all the waiting period of a few generations for the humans for their journey to the cosmos.

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