Successful test launches of the Delta Clipper X last August and September - capped off with the rocket vertically landing on its haunches in the classic science fiction style - have rekindled enthusiasm for human penetration of the cosmos and raised anew the question of whether space is best explored by people or telesensory equipment. In fact, the success of the Delta Clipper may bring the worlds of outer space and cyberspace into conflict.
Privately financed until now, designed by a breakaway team of scientists and science fiction writers who believe that our trips to the moon may be our last gasp in space unless we do something very different, McDonnell-Douglas's Clipper impressed federal legislators enough to elicit a preliminary commitment for some US$40 million in funding in 1994. To understand the pathbreaking significance of the Delta Clipper and its single-stage-to-orbit rocket logic, we need to see the error of its predecessor, the space shuttle.
NASA's shuttle suffers from the venerable rocket tradition of delivering a payload of ammunition - the vehicle goes someplace, explodes, and never returns. Thus, although the shuttle was bravely intended to be reuseable, in actual operation none of its equipment can be employed as is after a flight: The huge fuel tanks disintegrate in re-entry; the rocket boosters, jettisoned during launch, require extensive reconstruction after retrieval; and the shuttle craft itself needs months of work after each mission. No wonder that each mission requires a ground crew of more than 10,000 people and costs as much as a billion dollars.
In contrast, the Delta Clipper is completely and almost immediately reusable. Taking advantage of recent material and design improvements, and of a transportation rather than a weapons logic, the Clipper can be launched with a handful of ground support personnel at a cost of about $5 million. Like the train, the automobile, and the airplane before it, this new lightweight rocket is designed to bring people and cargo from place to place, back and forth - in space and on Earth - with only fuel and seven days of prepping per flight.
This quick refreshability parallels the advantage of the computer screen, with its capacity for displaying an infinity of letters, over the book and the newspaper, which carry the burden of printing a brand new page for every set number of letters. Indeed, the Clipper is very much a rider of the new in-formation surf: Its first "flight" was piloted from a "virtual cockpit," a screen on the ground that allowed the ship to be controlled as if there were a pilot actually on board. Ironically, the very test flights that demonstrated the feasibility of a rocket construed and employed as a transportation vehicle were conducted with no people aboard.
The capacity to see a world on our computer screen has many rewards. When that world is of our own making, we learn a lot about our internal processes. When that world is of external origin, as it is in space exploration, we can explore it from the safety of our home planet. Indeed, vicarious exploration has been providing evolutionary advantages for eons: Unlike the amoeba, which can know its world only by physically bumping into it and is often obliged to die when it thus encounters something noxious in its environments, higher organisms can know their world from afar via vision and hearing and smell. And humans can know worlds from further away still - via representations replayed in the mind and via all means of communications media.
But we pay a price for the safety of all this indirectness. The further we are physically from a world on our screen, the less we are able to directly interact with it. And with our inability to sense all there is to sense of a new world on a screen, to directly do things there, comes a restriction on our capacity to truly learn more of the unknown. As John Dewey pointed out early in this century, the most profound knowledge often comes from doing rather than seeing.
Cyberspace may reach its true limit in outer space. For these reasons - aesthetic as well as philosophic, practical as well as theoretical - I hope that the promise of the Clipper and its new mode of flight is not thoroughly consumed in virtuality. Let the new worlds that the Clipper brings us be seen via real old-fashioned windows - as well as computer screens.
