Trade-offs
The Long Haul Versus the Quick Call
One road gets six hand-picked astronauts there fast. The other gets everybody there for good. Why Star Bound takes the long one.
I've been listening to Beyond Earth by Charles Wohlforth and Amanda Hendrix on my drives. 1 It's a good book, and it makes a strong case for Titan. Somewhere in the middle, though, I realized we're on two different roads. Not about where to go, but about how to live on the way there.
The quick call
Their road, and NASA's, goes like this. Build the lightest, fastest ship you can. Keep the crew small and hand-picked. Give them gravity like a dose of medicine, an hour a day in a spinning chair, or a small spin at a third of Earth's pull, just enough to keep their eyes and bones from falling apart. Then get there before the radiation, the weightlessness, and the boredom catch up with them.
The engineers aren't wrong about the physics. NASA engineer John Zipay worked out that a full Earth-gravity spin, at the four turns a minute people can handle, takes a ship about 120 meters long, nearly 400 feet. 1 Every foot of that costs fuel. So the cheapest ship to build is the one with the least gravity for the least time. That's the quick call: get in, get it done, get out.
What the quick call costs
It costs people. In a Russian experiment, six fit, hand-picked men lived sealed up for 520 days to simulate a Mars trip. Only two came through without trouble sleeping, sluggishness, short tempers, or depression. 2 Out in weightlessness, astronauts are coming home with swelling at the back of their eyes and pressure on the optic nerve. 3 Their bones thin out even with two hours a day on the treadmill.
The answer in the book, and in the research it quotes, is to pick better people. Screen for radiation resistance. Screen for eyes that hold up. Screen for minds that don't sag in the dark. Add a row to the checklist for every problem.
But the book says it plainly itself: there aren't enough perfect people in the world to fill every box. NASA already whittles tens of thousands of applicants down to a handful. 4 Every new test just makes the door narrower.
The long haul
Our road is different. We're not trying to hurry. We're trying to stay.
If we're going to be out there for good, there's no sense putting our people through harm we can avoid. So build a home, not a capsule. A big cylinder rolling like a barrel, spinning on its long axis, with full Earth gravity on the inside wall, all day, every day. 5 Not as a treatment. As a place to live. Fields, water, trees, sunlight, and thick walls of water and dirt between the people and the radiation.
Then build it big enough to take a whole town at once, not six astronauts. Think less space capsule and more Battlestar Galactica: a whole community traveling together. A big crowd is healthier than a tiny crew. There are more hands to share the work, more faces, more room to walk off a bad day. It's the opposite of six men in a can.
And when the ship is the home, travel time stops mattering. Seven years, seventy years, it doesn't matter. Nobody's waiting to land so they can get better. They're already living.
Anybody who wants to go
This is the heart of it for me. When you start disqualifying people, saying your eyes aren't strong enough, you're not healthy enough, you're not the right stuff, you're doing the same thing that got done to a lot of us growing up: “That's not realistic.” I don't buy it.
Anybody who wants to go should be able to go. We plan on taking everyone who wants to come.
That does put a responsibility on us. In a closed habitat, one person's illness uses the doctors, the food, and the hands everybody else depends on. So the answer isn't to screen people out. It's to build the habitat strong enough to carry them. Real gravity, real shielding, real medical care, and room to grow food. Make the place fit the people instead of forcing the people to fit the place.
If you can live on Earth, you can live in the barrel.
Who we are
That's the line I want Star Bound to stand on. We're here for everybody, not just a few elite who passed every test.
We're not trying to build a super race. We're just trying to keep the human race going.
The quick call gets a few people there for a little while. The long haul gets all of us there for good.
From one explorer to another, we appreciate you reading this far. We are excited about what this endeavor brings, and we would like you along for the rest of it.
Come join us. Because we are Star Bound.
John LangEditor
Ideas in Star Bound are published open — take them, build them better. Our open proposal.
A note on where this comes from. I am not a metallurgist, a spacecraft engineer, or a degreed engineer of any kind. But I am a practical one, with more than forty years in heavy industrial construction: welding, millwright work, hydraulics, mining, and thirty-three years of electrical construction and commissioning on the North Slope of Alaska, in a place that punishes anything built wrong. Much of that time I have worked as a field engineer, which means I am the one standing in front of the equipment when the drawing turns out to be wrong, and the fix has to be made on the spot, with what is on hand, and has to work the first time. Anyone who has done that long enough learns that a lot of engineering gets corrected in the field by people with more experience than the people who drew it. That is the eye I bring to these subjects: not what should work on paper, but what actually gets built, and what breaks. The facts I take from other people are footnoted so you can check them and read further. The ideas built on top of those facts are my own, and I would rather see them knocked down by somebody who knows better than left standing because nobody looked.
Sources
- Charles Wohlforth and Amanda R. Hendrix, Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets (Pantheon, 2016) — the artificial-gravity, radiation, crew-selection, and Mars-500 discussion, including John Zipay’s spinning barbell spacecraft. ↩
- "Mars-500," Wikipedia — the 520-day isolation study in Moscow, 2010–2011, and its findings on crew sleep, activity, and mood. ↩
- "Spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome," Wikipedia — optic disc swelling and eye changes in long-duration astronauts. ↩
- "NASA Astronaut Group 23," Wikipedia — ten candidates chosen in 2021 from more than 12,000 applicants. ↩
- "O’Neill cylinder," Wikipedia — Gerard O’Neill’s 1976 rotating-cylinder habitat with full gravity on the inner wall. ↩
The open-crew position and the habitat-as-home argument are this magazine’s own, and offered to be argued with.
More from Star Bound
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- Light Is the ThrottleWhat a mine in Idaho and a garden in Alaska taught us about growing things fast — and what continuous daylight does to a plant that never gets to sleep
- Commission It FirstWe have already run phase one. It cost one man 150 million dollars of his own money, and it very nearly killed the people inside.
- Life in the BarrelO’Neill gave us the barrel in 1976 and got very little of it wrong. What he did not finish was the inside — and the standard the inside has to meet isn’t twenty years. It’s forever.
- Worms: The Backbone of CivilizationWhy the first Martians will need a bucket of worms more than another rocket
- Send the Robots FirstWhy the road to Mars runs through the moon, and why the first lunar miners will never leave Earth
- Wet the Ground and WaitA passive water generator for the desert, and why we should build one before we need one on Mars
- Send the Refinery, Not the OreWhy the belt gets mined by factory ships, and why that is the one job we cannot run from a chair
- Grind the Asteroid, Print the PartWhy there will never be a steel mill in space, and what replaces it
- A Thousand GaragesBefore there is a printer in space, there has to be a shipyard on the ground, and the shipyard does not have to be in one place
- Powder or WireThe two ways to print metal, why neither one is ready for the Belt, and the questions somebody has to answer first
- Bones Don't Travel WellThe one problem no rocket solves, and why Gerard O'Neill worked out the answer in 1976
- Blow the Rock Like GlassMy father's answer to how you build something big enough to spin, and the man who worked it out in 1963
- Built for Earth, or Built for Something Bigger?The tools a colony needs are being perfected right now, by people who say they are building them for us
- Mission Watch: September 2026What private enterprise and the agencies actually did this summer, in the order that matters
- The Question I Asked Buzz AldrinIn 1996 I asked the second man on the Moon what part private enterprise would play in space. Thirty years later, the answer is checkable
- Sixteen Inches of SteelThe number that breaks the mile-wide barrel, four ways around it, the one we would bet on, and a file you can print tonight
- Launch the Parts, Not the ShipYou cannot launch a habitat big enough to spin. So you launch a shipyard, and you let the robots build it.
- Fish, Salt, or DirtThree ways to feed a habitat, what each one costs you, what each one can't survive, and a question for the reader.
- Thirty Thousand Volts and a Piece of Tin FoilI drove an hour and a half to call a man a liar. He turned on a computer monitor instead, and I have been thinking about it for twenty years.
- The Box Nobody TestedIn 1991 eight people were sealed inside three acres of glass to prove a closed world could keep them alive. It nearly didn't, and the reason was sitting in the walls the whole time.
- Out the Side of the MountainTwenty miles of vacuum tube under a Hawaiian volcano, and a freight train that never comes back down. What a ground-based mass driver would actually take, and why it exits the flank instead of the summit.
- That’s Not a Rocket, It’s a Freight TrainHow I wired the one on my bench in 1994, the one I drew and never built, and why a mass driver runs on railroad logic, not rocket logic.
- Cold, Vacuum, and a Hundred Thousand JointsWhat geosynchronous orbit does to the ten-inch panels in "A Thousand Garages," starting with the question every steel man asks first — and one thing that article got wrong.
- One Press or Ten ThousandElon Musk casts a car underbody in one shot with a machine the size of a house. We proposed ten thousand garages. It turns out we may both be right, on different walls — but nobody knows until somebody breaks fifty panels on purpose.
- Cast It or Print ItThree ways to make a hundred thousand habitat panels. What each one buys you, what each one costs you, and where each one belongs. The first entry in a department that exists to write both columns down.
- Powder or PlateThe garages stay. What's in them changes.
- Refuel It or Strip ItThe graveyard belt is the closest junkyard we've got.
- A Message in a Bottle, Thrown HardEvery article in this magazine is about how to build something. This one is about how to pay for it.
- The Crew That Never Leaves the GroundThe first people to build a space station will clock in on the ground and drive home for dinner. Why geosynchronous orbit, why robots, and why the operator’s seat is a brand-new trade.
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