Читать книгу Life Under Glass - Марк Нельсон - Страница 9

EACH MORNING as I leave my home for work, I drive past the outdoor exhibit of a giant Saturn 5 rocket sitting beside the NASA/Johnson Space Center here in Houston. This dinosaur of launch vehicles and its smaller cousins form a kind of Jurassic Park celebrating the time when humans first left our home for bold but fleeting journeys to the moon. In the reddish, early morning glow of the August sun rising with a vengeance above Galveston Bay, the rockets take on a surrealistic look. Did we actually use nine of these behemoths to travel a quarter of a million miles out from Earth?

Such treks are difficult to imagine now that human activity on the space frontier has become so limited. NASA, a federal agency once known for its vision, imaginative engineering, and bold execution, nowadays devotes the bulk of its resources to planning projects which probably won’t be implemented. This circumstance should not be surprising, since the demands made by an ever-changing, politically oriented space policy leave the beleaguered agency little extra resources to attempt something new. With such political impediments to overcome, will we ever again undertake space missions out to the moon and beyond? And if so, could we establish permanent human habitats out there?

Reflecting upon the heritage of these magnificent Saturn 5 rockets and fretting about the current uncertainties of our space program lead me to think more and more about a totally different kind of spaceship, Biosphere 2.

Strictly speaking, of course, Biosphere 2 is not a spaceship because it does not travel. Nonetheless, I am intrigued by the similarities of experiences of the Biosphere crew members with those of astronauts and cosmonauts aboard their ships in outer space. In spaceship terms, the people aboard this unique creation have been ‘underway’ for nearly two years now; and one month from the day I write this, they will open the seal which separates them from planet Earth and will exit from their world into an atmosphere as foreign to them as if they had been cruising out to Mars on the far side of the solar system. Does their speed increase now that they are homeward bound? Of course not, since Biosphere 2 has literally not budged one inch since the day the experiment began. Yet figuratively, at re-entry minus thirty days and counting, I picture the psychological calendar of the biospherians, having earlier crept forward with agonizing slowness when the Biosphere’s food production waned and its oxygen level dropped, now flipping past pages with quickening speed.

I am also intrigued by this enormous experiment because, for the first time, it addresses the missing link of space colonies. By the missing link I mean the understanding of the closed sustainable ecologies needed for human habitation in space. All other technologies needed to live off Earth—rocket travel, for example—were proven during the golden years of the Space Age. But no understanding about closed ecologies was gained in those years because all space missions to date have relied on a rigid system of consumable stores: food, water, propellants, and so on carried according to a complicated flight plan and meted out piece by piece until they are exhausted about the time, one hopes, of Earth re-entry. Consequently, the single unanswered question still before us would-be space colonists is: can a closed ecological system be devised to be resilient enough to sustain human life for years at a time, yet of a dimension small enough (Earth-sized is clearly too big) to be constructed and maintained by normal human activity?

That this last and perhaps most complicated question would be explored first by a private venture rather than by a well-funded albeit ponderous government research establishment is, in my view, quite remarkable. Regardless of the outcome of these first experiments, the fact that steps toward understanding large biospheres have now been taken is to me both audacious and exciting.

As you read here about life under glass, you may find it difficult to imagine Biosphere 2 as another world. It is, after all, just there, separated from our own world only by a simple airlock. To go from one biosphere to another takes just minutes. On the other hand, space is surprisingly close by as well. The space shuttle, for example, travels out beyond the edge of Earth and into the vacuum of space in just over eight minutes, not much different than the time needed to pass through the two hatches and cross the anteroom of the Biosphere’s airlock.

But major differences between Biosphere 2 and a spacecraft in orbit do exist—relative size and speed, for example. And there is always the non-trivial matter of the complex physics of rocket propulsion that launch a spacecraft into orbit, inherently dramatic in concept and still bold in execution even in this fourth decade of space travel.

The memory of a rocket launch is not something a person forgets. During powered flight aboard the space shuttle, the engines’ roar pervades the crew quarters and the thrust of acceleration holds you against the launch seat at three times your normal weight. After the requisite velocity is achieved, the engines suddenly cut off leaving behind the eerie silence of coasting in unending Earth orbit. The three Gs of acceleration disappear as quickly as the sound. You unbuckle the safety harnesses holding you during launch and float from your seat to the nearest window. You, the space traveler, are now out of this world, privileged beyond all measure to gaze through a window that will forevermore change your perspective of both yourself and your home planet.

Watching Earth from orbit is breathtaking, awe-inspiring, tantalizing, and frightening—all rolled into one complex emotion continually evoked by the panorama before your eyes. Picture yourself floating at that window. Peering out, you watch the oceans and islands and landforms of Earth passing by your window at unimaginable speed. I want to write ‘below your window’, but in the weightless world of space you have no sense of ‘up’. Thus there is no ‘above’ and no ‘below’ in orbital flight. You just float at the window and look out on the scene moving past at about five miles per second. Are you speeding by oceans and continents, or are you just hovering in a magical gondola and watching the world turn beside you?

The viewing angle of any part of Earth as seen from the spacecraft window is forever being changed by the relentless pace of orbital mechanics. You are constantly moving your head and hurriedly changing your body position, pressing always closer to the protective glass to catch the last glimpse of your favorite island cluster or to see precisely where your family and friends live there in Houston, marked by Galveston Bay and arrow-straight Interstate 10, the circle of the 610 Loop, and the familiar patterns of the runways of the city’s airports. Within hours, the inside of all viewing ports of any spaceship are covered with forehead, cheek, and nose smudges which must repeatedly be wiped away.

Biosphere 2, of course, is not moving. Rather, it is firmly fixed in the hard-packed scrabble of the southwestern desert of North America, a beautiful part of Biosphere 1. The crew within the Biosphere views the outside scene, itself changing with the tempo of the seasons, at a leisurely pace. I suspect that most motion observed outside Biosphere 2 would be the parade of curious Earthlings peering through the glare of the glass walls to catch glimpses of the alien pioneers at work inside their independent ecology.

Along one wall of the living quarters, however, there is a special window through which inhabitants of both worlds can get a closer look at each other and engage in face-to-face conversation of a sort, the words carried by speakerphones, the images of the people slightly distorted by the internal reflection of the glass. I had the great pleasure of visiting with the biospherians through the conversation window, an occasion which started with greeting them by matching hands, a right hand flat against the left hand and left against right with the palms and fingers separated only by glass. Because of this rite of greeting, the conversation window is constantly covered with smudges of hand prints inside and out, quite unlike a spaceship. As far as I know, you will never find hand prints on the outside of a spaceship window.

The book these biospherians have given us here is also a special window of sorts. It gives us insight into the other world in which these unique pioneers have worked and lived for two years.

– Joseph P. Allen, former US astronaut August 1993, Houston, Texas