THE THIRD WAVE
The space industry forms a second cluster in the emerging techno-sphere. Despite delays, five space shuttles may soon be moving cargo and people back and forth between the earth and outer space on a weekly schedule. The impact of this is as yet underestimated by the public, but many companies in the United States and Europe regard the “high frontier” as the source of the next revolution in high technology and are acting accordingly.
Grumman and Boeing are working on satellites and space platforms for energy generation. According to Business Week, “Another group of industries only now is beginning to understand what the orbiter may mean to them—manufacturers and processors whose products range from semi-conductors to medicines… Many high-technology materials require delicate, controlled handling, and the force of gravity can be a nuisance… In space, there is no gravity to worry about, noneed for containers, and no problem with handling poisons or highly reactive substances. And there is a limitless supply of vacuum, as well as super-high and super-low temperatures.”
As a result, “space manufacturing” has become a hot topic among scientists, engineers, and high-technology executives.” McDonnell Douglas offers to pharmaceutical companies “a space shuttle device that will separate rare enzymes from human cells. Glass manufacturers are looking at ways of making materials for lasers and fiber optics in space. Space-produced single-crystal semiconductors make earth-made models seem primitive. Urokinase, a blood clot dis-solver needed for patients suffering from certain forms of blood disease, now costs $2,500 per dose. According to Jesco vonPuttkamer, chief of space industrialization studies for NASA, it could bemanufactured in space for less than one fifth that amount.
More important are the totally new products that simply cannot be made on earth at virtually any price. TRW, an aerospace and electronics company, has identified four hundred different alloys that we cannot manufacture on earth because of the pull of gravity. General Electric, meanwhile, has begun the design of a space furnace.Daimler-Benz and M.A.N. in West Germany are interested in the space manufacture of ball bearings, and the European Space Agency and individual companies like British Aircraft Corporation are also designing equipment and products aimed at making space useful commercially. Business Week tells its readers
THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS
that “such prospects are not science fiction and a growing number of companies are deadly serious in pursuing them.” Equally serious, and even more zealous, are the supporters of Dr. Gerard O’Neill’s plan for the creation of space cities. O’Neill, a Princeton physicist, has been indefatigably educating the public about the possibilities of building very large scale communities in space—platforms or islands with populations in the thousands—and has won enthusiastic support from NASA, the governor of California (whose state economy is heavily space dependent) and, more surprisingly, from a band of vocal ex-hippies led by Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog.
O’Neill’s idea is to build a city in space, bit by bit, out of materials mined on the moon or elsewhere in space. A colleague, Dr. Brian O’Leary, has been studying the possibilities of mining the Apollo and Amor asteroids. Regular conferences at Princeton bring together experts from NASA, General Electric, U.S. energy agencies, and other interested parties to swap technical papers on the chemical processing of lunar and other extraterrestrial minerals and on the design and construction of space habitats and closed ecological systems.
The combination of advanced electronics and a space pro-gram that moves beyond terrestrial production possibilities carries the techno-sphere to a new stage, no longer limited by Second Wave considerations.
INTO THE DEPTHS
The push into the depths of the sea provides us with a mirror image of the drive into outer space, and lays the basis for the third cluster of industries likely to form a major part of the new techno-sphere. The first historic wave of social change on earth came when our ancestors ceased to rely on foraging and hunting, and began instead to domesticate animals and cultivate the soil. We are now at precisely this stage in our relationship to the seas.
In a hungry world, the ocean can help break the back of the food problem. Properly farmed and ranched, it offers us a virtually endless supply of desperately needed protein. Present-day commercial fishing, which is highly industrialized—Japanese and Soviet factory-ships sweep the seas—
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