Lord British wants to take you to space, and he's closer than you think
Richard Garriott has been to space, but it took his fortune, a few major ...
What we will learn once we go
Your worldview changes significantly after you orbit the planet, but it takes time to sink in. "The Earth changes scale. It goes from being infinite in your mind's eye to now... not only finite, but frankly pretty damn small," Garriott told me. Pollution and forest fires become much more scary. Garriott described just how thin our atmosphere looks from space, and how you can watch the smoke rise from the land, hit the gases in the atmosphere, and spread over large distances. "If that's one fire, think of the amount of industrial waste, the volume of air we're filling with junk over and over again. Your perception of whether or not we can fill the air with crap changes. Of course we do. Every day we fill the entirety of our airspace with crap we're now breathing."
The next big epiphany was weather. Half the Earth is always covered in clouds, and what you notice is that clouds are not the same. "Over the Pacific there are giant laminar fronts, there is nothing but water of relatively similar temperature," Garriott said. Over the Atlantic with more chaotic landmasses with weather formations, the clouds are nowhere near as stable. Garriott described what it was like to learn about meteorology passively, simply by looking out the window and watching how clouds formed, and to observe the very plates of the Earth and how they fit together. He noted the land erosion, long plumes of matter at the mouths of rivers. "You get a sense of the scale, of how much mass is being washed into the world's oceans."
He told Ars that everyone who goes into space not only experiences what he calls the "overview effect," but they also change their behavior back home. He said his lifestyle at home was terrible, despite giving to environmental causes and the fact that he considered himself a conservationalist. He owned multiple sports cars, created large amounts of trash, and lived in large houses with many electronics. Since he went up, he no longer runs the cars, and is building an electric SUV from scratch. He has added solar panels to his property to become energy neutral. "I'm not there yet, but close," he told Ars.
This is where it gets interesting. As he noted, he's a big evangelist for people who can afford to do it right, to choose to do it right. "There's a lot of things we do I'm not sure are very helpful. Ninety percent of the water we waste is from agriculture. I would rather have a toilet that works and fix [the agriculture waste issue] than install a low-flow toilet or shower." If you have the money to make the changes, it's going to spiral out to everyone. "Now, to become energy neutral is not cost-effective on an individual basis. If those who can afford to can get close, to elect to do it, that will help get the industry moving to where it is more and available to a broad audience," he said.
This change in behavior and thought doesn't happen instantly. "It would require everyone to have a few orbits," he explained. It would also take many, many people going into orbit. "More than 1 percent of humanity - it has to be a large amount of people, millions of people into space. I can assure you it will change life on Earth," he said. People who are religious have religious thoughts, but space flight does not cause you to open to the idea of God, according to Garriott. When people get back, they try to share the story, and change their lifestyle. It's a very holistic, apolitical process.
There is also the matter of pollution in space, an issue that's only getting worse. "If you ask where the space station is going to be six months from now, they can't tell you. Every few months they adjust the orbit to remain a safe distance away from a known piece of debris," he said. He claimed it's only a matter of time before someone is killed in space, and it won't be when they're in the spacecraft, noting how you can tell the age of the windows on the space station by how many pockmarks and chunks have been taken out by small collisions. A piece of space junk hitting someone's suit and causing decompression is much harder to survive. Were a piece of junk to hit the space station, fixing the hole is not as difficult as you'd think. "We're only talking about a difference of 32 pounds per square inch pressure. Unlike the movies where you get sucked through the window, that just wouldn't happen."
We'll go
During his talk, Richard Garriott showed video of a vertical takeoff and a landing craft. This is a design that John Carmack, the creator of the DOOM series of games, is working on, and Garriott's company is currently selling seats. "And this vehicle - you can literally just refuel and refly. There's no wear parts on it of any kind," Garriott tells the crowd. "This vehicle will fly so frequently that it really is just the fuel costs that you have to cover because it's so efficient from an operational standpoint."
They have already sold tickets for rides on the ship, Garriott told me later, and the cost is reasonable after the tens of millions he spent to go into space: $100 grand a seat is all it takes. Garriott then told me he believes he can get that down to $50,000 a seat, maybe $25,000. "It's just a multiple of the fuel cost," he told me.
The only cost is fuel The room was spellbound watching the rocket take off, and then land. It's beautiful. This is the magic of speaking with Richard Garriott, and hearing his passion for exploration and for testing the limits of what we can do both inside the planet and out of it. Suddenly we were all looking at the future, and it's a very beautiful one.
"How's that? You want to go for a ride on that one?" he asked, and the room erupted in cheers. I keep my mouth shut, my tongue still, thinking of what it would be like to bite through it.
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