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The outposts of the Final Frontier. The way
station. The army fort on the edge of the unknown. The
trading post. Last chance for gas next ten light years.
Clean restrooms. No Pakmara allowed.
A permanent settlement in Earth orbit was the
one part of the whole space travel equation that did not need to be
sold to the public. If you could show that you could loft a
rocket into space, of course a space station was going to be needed.
The experiences of the American West, Antarctic exploration, the
conquest of Everest, and the far reach of the Royal Navy all
demonstrated that if you're going to head off into the unknown you
needed some sort of a staging area from which to start.
Exploration was a matter of moving forward, securing a claim and
moving forward again. It was all so obvious.
So what the heck happened? Technology,
That's what. When you have rockets that fire payloads into orbit
at caviar prices, you have to save money. That means relying on
automation, and by the time everyone got around to taking space
stations seriously, the Americans had become very good at automation.
Almost everything that Von Braun mentioned as a reason for building a
station was now being done by machine better and more cheaply than a
man in a spacesuit ever could. That left only one major area:
the study of man in space. Okay, so we're studying man in space.
Right. Why? Because we need people in space. Why?
To study them. My brain hurts.
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