Lucky Starr's lessons for life in space - a tribute to Isaac Asimov

Like many an archaeologist, as a child my fascination with the past went hand-in-hand with a fierce desire for the other worlds of the future. And like so many others of my generation and before, the fiction of Isaac Asimov was massively influential. In his sparse prose and sardonic humour, he opened up realms of philosophy that extended from the surface of the Earth to the furthest reaches of space and time.

My favourites included short stories Nightfall (1941), The Last Question (1956), and The Dead Past (1956), and novels The Stars Like Dust (1952), the Lucky Starr series and the original Foundation trilogy. I read them over and over again (and still do, to be honest).

(And just quietly, Jonathan Nolan, writer of Interstellar, may be going to make a film of Foundation ....).

Some of them stand the test of time better than others, and I guess that is why they stay favourites. The Lucky Starr young adult series is still a very entertaining read, and there are some aspects of it that I've often found in the back of my mind when writing about space archaeology. My two favourites are The Oceans of Venus (1954) and The Rings of Saturn (1958).

Lucky Starr and life in the solar system.

Venus was a mystery until the 1960s. With an impenetrable sheath of clouds and limited data, no-one knew what surface conditions on Venus might be and there was much room for speculation. Was Venus a dry desert planet, awash in oceans of carbonic acid, studded with pools of molten metal, or lush and swampy, a bit like Palaeozoic Earth (from 542 to 251m years ago)?

Asimov's Venus is an ocean world inhabited by telepathic frog-like creatures. Over the surface of the ocean grows a crust of seaweed that forms the main resource of the human colonies, living in domes on the ocean floor. Lucky and his sidekick Bigman find out that the V-frogs have been manipulating the human inhabitants to protect their own interests, and needless to say, they foil the plot. The V-frogs are rare examples of Asimovian aliens; he stopped writing about them in the 1960s.

This is actually Sealab 2021 ... but you get the idea. Nowadays it's all about floating cities.

The enticing vision of a Venus teeming with life was dented by NASA's Mariner flyby mission in 1962, and destroyed by data from the USSR's Venera missions from the 1960s onwards. Sadly, Venus had surface temperatures of around 430 C and pressure over a ninety times that of Earth, and not an ocean in sight.

So no Venusian frogs for us. But I still love this novel for the suspenseful plot, and for the sense it gives of just how quickly our knowledge of the solar system expanded from the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957. For later editions, Asimov had to write a preface explaining why his Venus was so different to that revealed by the orbiters and landers. It makes me long, though, to have experienced the days before I was born when Earthlings could dream of wonders in the rest of the solar system, before we found out that we were effectively alone.

Lucky Starr and territorial claims in space

The Rings of Saturn is interesting for a completely different reason: the underlying theme is who owns space, and the justification for territorial claims. This is a theme particularly relevant in the present, when we may see a radical revisioning of our current treaties and agreements about the exploitation of resources in the solar system.

In the Rings of Saturn, the evil Sirians from the Sirius system build a secret colony on the Saturnian moon Titan. (One of the reasons they're evil, incidentally, is because they practice eugenics. On the upside, their robots are accorded rights. Lucky is told that roboticide is considered almost as serious a crime as homicide). It has been an unwritten principle that a solar system is the territory of the first colonisers or original inhabitants, whether or not they have a presence on all bodies within it, or make use of any of the resources.

 Lucky Starr discovers the Sirian's plans and an interplanetary crisis ensues. The Sirians declare that 'An empty world is an empty world, regardless of the particular route it travels through space. We colonized it first and it is ours'. Earth had not paid any attention to the Saturn system, so it was 'use it or lose it'. However, the wily Lucky had previously planted an associate on one of Saturn's other moons, Mimas. When the Sirians remove him as a spy, Lucky argues, at an interplanetary conference before the representatives of the Outer Worlds, that the Sirians have revealed the hypocrisy of their intentions, as they were not prepared to harbour another sovereign colony within the same system.

What I find really interesting is the development of a gravitation-based principle of space tenure, if you like. The objects orbiting a more massive object are held to be part of the same entity, whether on planetary scale or solar system scale. This entity then assumes a customary law status.

At present space, and the celestial bodies of the solar system, are considered to be the common heritage of humanity and a global commons. According to existing treaties and conventions, which came into being after Asimov had written The Rings of Saturn, no-one can make a territorial claim on space and the resources of space are meant to be equitably distributed among the inhabitants of Earth. How exactly this might happen is not clear, and there are many who regard this principle as a major impediment to state-based or private organisations seeking to develop resources in space. At some point 'use it or lose it' might be back on the table.

Science and governance

In the Lucky Starr universe, Earth's Council of Science is one of the most important organisations in the solar system. Lucky is a member of this august body which is part interplanetary intelligence agency and part international advisory council. This is how James Gunn describes it:

With humanity flying about among the planets and even among the stars, science has become of constantly increasing importance, for solving both internal problems of health and energy and external problems of scientific and alien threats to Earth. So the Council of Science has become a major political force on Earth, and Starr is its best roving investigator (Gunn 1996:144-145).

The subtext is that scientists are not swayed by politics and emotions in the same way as politicians, and hence can be trusted to enforce goodness and niceness across the solar system (even if this means resorting to subterfuge from time to time). Indeed, Lucky has been referred to as a 'two-fisted philosopher king' (Weinkauf 1979-1980:130). The philosopher king is a concept from Plato's Republic: the person best suited to leadership is a philosopher who really doesn't want to do it, and has to be compelled. Because the philosopher cares nothing for personal gain, they will govern with fairness.

In Asimov's faintly utopian vision, the Council of Science represents the ascent of rationality in the world's affairs. This rationality, however, is compassionate, in contrast to the cold utilitarianism of Sirian culture. (Cold War much?)

With the current anti-science sentiment of governments in Australia, Canada and elsewhere, I've been reflecting on the importance Asimov gives to role of science in governance. We do actually have the International Council of Science, which represents all the international scientific unions, but it's not really political in the way that Asimov's Council is.

Space is no place for a girl - OR IS IT?

Let's not forget that Asimov was not writing Lucky Starr adventures for me and other girls like me. John H. Jenkins, in his fascinating account of the Lucky Starr novels, notes that they were aimed towards 12-year old boys.

Justine Larbalestier has documented a letter exchange in the pages of Astounding Stories magazine that demonstrates Asimov's opinion of the role of women in science fiction. While all very tongue-in-cheek, the exchange demonstrates some deeper issues about how women were portrayed in the genre and women as readers.


Females can breathe in a vacuum, doncha know

In 1938, Donald G. Turnbull opined in a letter to the editor (the famous John W. Campbell), that:

A woman’s place is not in anything scientific. Of course the odd female now and then invents something useful in the way that every now and then amongst the millions of black crows a white one is found.

The 18-year old Asimov could not have agreed more, replying 'When we want science-fiction, we don’t want swooning dames, and that goes double'.  Women only appeared in science fiction as romantic interests, and what had that got to do with science? In later letters, he complained that few writers wrote good female characters and everyone would be better off just leaving them out. Of course, he conceded,

we could have women-scientists. Madame Curie is immortal, so are many others. Unfortunately, instead of having a properly aged, resourceful, and scientific woman as a savant, what do we have? When there is a woman-scientist (which is very rare in fiction, believe me) she is about eighteen and very beautiful and, oh, so helpless in the face of danger (gr-r-r-r).

Another reader, Mary Evelyn Rogers, responded that the solution should be to write more realistic women into science fiction rather than doing away with them altogether. The young Asimov, however, couldn't quite untangle women from romance - he called for better written love interests, rather that giving women a role as scientists.

A decade or two later, he didn't seem to have advanced on his youthful position much. In the Lucky Starr novels, Mary S. Weinkauf observes that

there are two females here, a clinging vine and a cat (1979-1980:130).

Blissfully unaware of such gender politics as a pre-teen, I WAS Lucky Starr. I was the resourceful, scientific, two-fisted philosopher king, outwitting the thugs in space battle through my knowledge of Newtonian mechanics.

It was only later that I realised my choices were rather the clinging vine or cat. By then it was too late. I was set on the path to science.

I might even be considered, now, to be "properly aged".

Happy birthday, Isaac Asimov - long may you continue to inspire!




References
Gunn, James 1996 Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction. Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press (Revised Edition)

Larbalestier, Justine 2002 The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press

Weinkauf, Mary 1979-1980 [2006] In Neil Barron and Robert Reginald (eds) Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review. p 130 The Borgo Press

Voyage to Venus: an archaeological survey of the Venusian surface

Introductory note

This was written as part of a book chapter, but as it developed Venus became increasingly irrelevant, so I took it out. I've been meaning to do something with it ever since. Posting it here might remind me!

Our tropical twin sister

Although Venus is a close neighbour, and had been the subject of speculation and study since ancient times, very little was known about it in the late 1950s due to the impenetrable cloud layers above the surface (Burgess 1985:8-9). Exploring Venus would be a scientific first as it was considered to be critical in understanding the evolution of the Earth (Dorfman and Meredith 1980:773). Our “twin sister” (Marchal 1983:269) had similar mass, gravity and volume.  Before the first missions, Venus also held the promise of life ….

Speculations ranged from a warm, swampy world that resembled Palaeozoic Earth, dry dusty mountains, oceans of carbonic acid, a surface covered in hot oil or puddles of molten metals (Burgess 1985:13, 131). C. S. Lewis (1943) created a lyrical sensorium of fragrant floating islands, a new Eden; Isaac Asimov (1954) imagined telepathic frogs swimming Venus’ warm oceans.  But when the first missions returned data, the dream of Venusian life was dashed.

Sapphires, diamonds and Daleks

The earliest missions were flybys. Venera 1 (USSR), launched 1961, failed to return data and entered a heliocentric orbit. In 1962, the US Mariner 2 flyby of Venus discovered that the surface temperature was likely around 430° C (Burgess 1985:2).  Venera 2, launched in 1965, also failed.

Venera 3 was a landing mission: the spacecraft crashed on the surface but also did not return data (Burgess 1985:22; Figure 1).  Venera 4, which reached Venus in 1967, was the largest interplanetary spacecraft yet launched at 1100 kg (Burgess 1985:22).  It had a more sophisticated heat shield, developed from experience with re-entry studies on ICBM warheads (Burgess 1985:38).  Venera 5 and Venera 6 (1969; Figure 5) were even heavier, and designed to resist up to 27 atmospheres (atm): but it seemed that the Soviet designers were reluctant to accept the estimation of a surface pressure of around 100 atm.  Both spacecraft were crushed before they reached the ground (Burgess 1985:40).

Venera 7, in 1970, was the first to land intact and return data from the surface (Basilevsky et al 2007:2097).  This time the landing capsule was designed to resist 180 atm, had stronger insulation and a titanium pressure sphere core (Pauken et al 2006:2).  Finally, the surface temperature and pressure were confirmed, and Venera 8, launched 1972, was designed to withstand only 105 atm (Burgess 1985:43).

Veneras 9 and 10, in 1975, were redesigned with a circular ring shock absorber.  They returned the first pictures of the surface.  In these extraordinary images, we see a field of flat rocks, with curve of the shock absorber visible on the lower edge.  The perspective, as if a person is looking down on their feet, gives the photographs a personal feeling.  The Veneras, in appearance, are not unlike the cyborg Daleks:  they almost seem as if they could start moving of their own volition, uttering some staccato imperative (Figure 2).  The images give a sense of the spacecraft orphaned on a strange planet.

Figure 1:  Venera 3 spacecraft.  Image courtesy of NASA

Figure 2:  Venera 9 spacecraft.  Image courtesy of NASA

In 1978, both the US and USSR sent missions to Venus.  Veneras 11 and 12 weighed in at 5000 kg each (Burgess 1985:48).

Figure 3:  Landing sites on Venus. Image courtesy of Philip Stooke

Pioneer Venus has been the only US program to place material on the surface of Venus.  Arriving at Venus in 1978, a bus delivered one large (called Large), and three small probes to the surface:  the engagingly named North, Day and Night for their proposed destinations.  The large probe was 1.5 m in diameter; the three small ones were 0.8 m.  Each had a payload of scientific instruments.

The spacecraft were designed and developed by the Hughes Aircraft Company.  The large probe was a pressure vessel module 73 cm in diameter and a deceleration module weighing 317 kg.  The heat shield was carbon phenolic with aluminium and fibreglass fittings. The pressure module containing the instrumentation was a titanium shell with ports and four sapphire and one diamond window for the instruments.  Internal shelves were made of beryllium (Dorfman and Meredith 1980).  The small probes were also titanium pressure modules with carbon phenolic heat shields, internal beryllium shelves and two diamond windows each.  The Large probe jettisoned its heat shield on the way down to the surface; the small probes retained theirs (Burgess 1985:82).

The last human artefacts to land on Venus were the Vega 1 and Vega 2 probes, released by rockets on their way to a rendezvous with Halley’s Comet.  They were essentially developments on the basic Venera lander type. Launched in 1984, both Vegas successfully landed on Venus in 1985 and returned data.  All subsequent missions have been flybys or orbiters.  Table 1 shows the all the Venus missions which have left material on the surface of Venus.

Date    Nationality    Mission    Components on surface

1965    USSR    Venera 3    Hard lander

1967    USSR    Venera 4    Hard lander

1969    USSR    Venera 5    Hard lander

1969    USSR    Venera 6    Hard lander

1970    USSR    Venera 7    Soft lander

1972    USSR    Venera 8    Soft lander

1975    USSR    Venera 9    Soft lander

1975    USSR    Venera 10    Soft lander

1978    USA    Pioneer Venus    4 probes

1978    USSR    Venera 11    Soft lander

1978    USSR    Venera 12    Soft lander

1981    USSR    Venera 13    Soft lander

1981    USSR    Venera 14    Soft lander

1984    USSR    Vega 1    Soft lander

1984    USSR    Vega 2    Soft lander

Table 1:  Missions with surface components on Venus

Archaeological sites of the future

The data returned by the Venera, Pioneer Venus and other missions revealed a fierce environment with the most corrosive upper atmosphere in the solar system: Venus’ yellow clouds are concentrated sulphuric acid (Reddy and Walz-Chojnacki 2002:36-37). On the surface, pressure from the predominantly CO2 atmosphere is 90 times that on Earth; Veneras 3-6 were crushed as they descended through the atmosphere.  The surface temperature is 430° C (740 K), above the melting points of lead, tin and zinc.  In such conditions, is it possible that the landers and probes have survived?

There is no evidence of plate tectonics and only “modest” evidence of geological activity on Venus (Jones 2007:169).  Erosion processes are slow, as there is no water, and surface winds move at human walking pace (Saunders 1999:100, 108, Jones 2007:343).  While the winds can move sand and dust, “the slow speed makes the particles ineffective as cutting tools and agents of erosion (Saunders 1999:108), so much so that craters a few million years in age appear fresh (Jones 2007: 275, Saunders 1999:100).  There is also little danger from the upper atmosphere.  The cloud layers start at around 45 km from the surface.  Droplets of sulphuric acid do leak downwards, but evaporate as the temperature rises towards the surface – they do not survive below about 25 km (Jones 2007:342).  Being on the surface would be like immersion in a hot dry ocean with slow currents of air (Burgess 1985:132).  There is no reason why archaeologists of the future should not find the Veneras, the Vegas, and the Large, North, Day and Night probes exactly where they landed, the diamond and sapphire eyes gazing sightlessly at the dull brown terrain (Figure 3).

The Venera and Vega spacecraft can be seen as representing the Cold War battle to imprint space with ideology (Gorman and O’Leary 2007).  Burgess even conceptualised the Veneras as “Red flags on Venus”, and each Venera mission carried Soviet emblems to commemorate the landing (Burgess 1985:35-36).  But they are much more than that.

The spacecraft also represent an evolution and adaptation to increasingly more accurate information about the nature of the “errant twin”:  each set of returned data enabled the design of spacecraft more suited to surviving Venusian conditions.  Like the early Cold War launch sites, and the cloud of orbital debris surrounding the Earth, they have made Venus a cultural landscape where the interaction of the environment and human material culture have formed a new entity.

References

Asimov, Isaac  1954  Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus.  Doubleday and Company

Basilevsky, A.T., M.A. Ivanov, J.W. Head, M. Aittola and J. Raitala  2007  Landing on Venus:  past and future.  Planetary and Space Sciences 55:2097-2112

Burgess, Eric  1985  Venus:  an errant twin.  Columbia University Press, New York

Dorfman, Steven D. and Clarence M. Meredith  1980  The Pioneer Venus Spacecraft Program.  Acta Astronautica 7:773-795

Gorman, A.C. and Beth Laura O’Leary  2007  An ideological vacuum:  the Cold War in space.  In John Schofield and Wayne Cocroft (eds) A fearsome heritage:  diverse legacies of the Cold War.  Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California

Jones, Barrie W.  2007  Discovering the solar system.  Second Edition, John Wiley and Sons Ltd, Chichester UK

Lewis, C.S.  1943  Perelandra.  John Lane, London

Marchal, C.  1983  The Venus-New-World Project.  Acta Astronautica 10(5-6):269-275

Pauken, Michael, Kolawa, Elizabeth, Manvi, Ram, Sokolowski, Witold and Joseph Lewis  2006  Pressure vessel technology developments.  4th International Planetary Probe Workshop, 27 June – 30 June 2006, Pasadena, California.  Available at ppw.jpl.nasa.gov/20070607_doc/6_2PAUKE.pdf.  Viewed 15 September 2008

Reddy, Francis and Greg Walz-Chojnacki  2002  Celestial delights:  the best astronomical events through 2010.  Celestial Arts

Saunders, R. Stephen  1999  Venus. In J. Kelly Beatty, Carolyn Collins Peterson and Andrew Chaikin (eds).  The New Solar System.  Fourth Editions, Sky Publishing Corporation and Cambridge University Press, Cambridge pp 97-110

Venus is so bright tonight

A lovely spring evening - as the sun set, I was sitting in the garden with my good friend the geophysicist I. Moffat, drinking red wine and watching how Venus caught the light of the dying sun. Mercury, also pretty spectacular. I thought to myself: I am looking at the planetary surface where the Veneras and the Vegas (complete with their diamond and sapphire windows) are sitting on the surface letting the slow winds caress them, an erosion process that will see them still intact when the solar system is at its last gasp.

Remembering also, that as a child I was fascinated by Babylonian observations of Venus. They seemed all the more mysterious, scientific and profound because I myself could not really see the stars. I was short-sighted from early childhood, and everything in the sky looked blurry to me. I also could not understand how my father recognised species of bird (he was a Neville W. Cayley fan from way back), assuming that some people could see things in patterns of flight that I was simply not capable of. Well, all that changed when I got glasses at age 11 - I could tell a planet from a star after all! And I could tell those bloody birds apart. Perhaps the heavens were so entrancing because I could not really see them. Perhaps the allure of science was all the stronger because of blurry vision ....

But possibly I digress. Venus is so bright tonight and I imagine myself a Babylonian astronomer, observing its phases. Taking the accumulation of traditional knowledge, thinking Tiamat (or whoever it was), and arriving at plausible theories for what was happening. Those guys were way cool.

I mentioned the red wine, right?

From Earth to space and back again

Last Monday my colleague Marc Twining, Senior Geologist with Iluka Resources Ltd, spoke to my Indigenous Heritage Management class about how mining exploration and heritage intersect. Iluka principally mine heavy mineral sands (HMS). Now I've done my research, so was well aware that these minerals (like rutile and ilmenite) end up in white pigments - paint, ceramics - this is why toilet bowls are so shiny and white! - but when Marc mentioned titanium being extracted from HMS, I made an obvious connection that had escaped me before.

Titanium is a metal very important to spacecraft manufacture. Pressurant tanks are usually made from it, and the USSR Venera series, which had to withstand the high pressures and temperatures of the Venusian surface, were constructed around titanium shells.

So there is, to my mind, a lovely symmetry here. Titanium is extracted from HMS on ancient beaches far below the present surface of the Earth, made into spacecraft which enter Low Earth Orbit, and when those spacecraft re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, the titanium spheres survive and fall back to Earth. If undiscovered, they may well become buried in their turn .....

This is my terrestrial/celestial dynamical system in action, complete with taphonomy.