MMM Classics Year 10: MMM #s 91-100 - Moon Society

new gravity situation as if by second nature, “instinctively
knowing” how to take advantage of everything of every potential
asset of the new environment. Standards of performance,
required maneuvers etc. will inexorably change for dancers,
gymnasts, etc. as more “natural” expertise develops.
Given the relatively small populations living or just
working off planet by the end of the first half of the next
century, there will necessarily be a very high contestant to
population/spectator ratio. But with the pervasively felt need
to not take physical condition and muscle tone in space or on
the Moon for granted, the percentage of off planet populations
engaged in athletic physical activities is sure to be at unprecedented
levels. Couch potatoes on the new frontier may constitute
a minority. True, there will be other demands for off duty
energies like arts and crafts and development of new cottage
industries. Still, fitness consciousness will run high.
A large enough pool of physically talented people
does not guarantee a Space Olympics, of course. Events and
Sports designed for an Earth-normal gravity environment (“1
G”) will be totally in appropriate for “zero-G” venues, and
come off in pathetically ludicrous manner in the Moon’s 1/6th
G or in Mars’ 3/8ths G. In other words, new sports and events
appropriate to the gravity situation of each type of space venue
must be developed, standardized, and their level of performance
matured, before we can have an event worthy of sanction
by the Interplanetary Olympics Committee. We will need
major experimentation.
To this end off-planet Sports Development Societies
may sprout up with various chapters in each new venue or class
of venues. They in turn will be divided into various “sections”
(e.g. concerned with the guided development and evolution of
venue-tailored gymnastics, dancing, and skating; with swimming
and diving and flying; with track and field type events,
with apparatus co-development; with spectator team sports, etc.
For the latter, team sports, a successful formula
might involve simplicity with yet enough complexity to allow
interest-holding variety of outcome. Of course, as more athletes
need to be involved in team sports than in individual competitions,
they may as much as a generation behind.
Equally critical to the rise of new appropriate events
and games will be the material-physical standardization of
facilities, that is of “tracks”, “fields”, “arenas”, and “courts”.
Since facilities dedicated to athletics and sports on a full-time
basis will be significantly more expensive as a percentage of
overall venue and settlement development expenditures, multiuse
gyms and arenas will certainly be the rule. One can design
or invent a totally appropriate event or game, which however
will not soon, if ever, become real simply because its fieldneeds
are as yet financially or architecturally impractical or
incompatible with other more modest, more easily accommodated
events and games.
Along with event and sport development, evolution,
and maturation, there needs to be then a co-standardization of
multi-use facilities and practice courts. As the cost of suitable
pressurized host volume comes down, new differently configured
and sized facilities can be built and new families of
events and sports developed for them, or vice versa.
The Space Games of the future then will be strongly
grouped by the arena type for which they are codesigned.
Multi-use will be the order of the day, and any arena, court or
field analogs that are developed will have to be reconfigurable
for a large variety of athletic events and games. The profligate
stadium specialization we see today (especially in the light of
more urgent social needs for public dollars) is not an example
we will soon seen misfollowed on the space frontier.
It will be hard enough to design, build, and financially
justify orbital and surface facilities for athletes and contestants
themselves. Yet we must provide co-space for judges, referees
or umpires, and sports reporters. And what about spectators?
By far the greatest portion of sports facility expense on Earth
is dedicated exclusively to the accommodation and comfort of
spectators. Will we need to reduce gallery size to the point
were only token proxy spectators can be accommodated? In
fact, in the beginning, the on site population will be small and
much gallery space not needed. Live telecasts to others in the
host venue watching at home or in the local sports bar can be
tapped for combined audio-feedback to the players and contestants.
Certainly that kind of feedback will be essential in inspiring
Olympic-caliber performances.
Potential Space Venues are several, and their individual
Prognoses for Olympic class event development differ.
First will come LEO [low Earth orbit], GEO [geosynchronous
or Clarke orbit], LLO [low lunar orbit], and other zero-G
venues, including deep space vehicles on long duration coasts
without artificial gravity (via rotation). But for suitable athletic
activities to evolve in such venues we will need a lot bigger
pool of talent than the handful provided for in the budgeted
International Space Station Alpha [ISSA]. Once complementary
commercial sibling orbital facilities start to appear, the
prospects will pick up. Meanwhile, the ISSA handful are surely
likely to experiment.
On the lunar surface, the outlook is similar, dim at
first, much brighter later if a token scientific outpost is followed
by a real permanent town of sorts and further improved
as secondary sites appear here and there around the Moon. For
nothing accelerated development (and/or evolution) like
competition.
The same can be said for athletic and sports
development on the Martian Surface. As to potential Olympic
style activities in “mini-G” asteroid-sized environments, they
are likely to get their first real boost from personnel stationed
on the Martian moonlets, Phobos and Deimos. Mini-G can be
defined as 3% of Earth-standard or less, that maximum being
what we’ll find on Ceres, the atypically largest asteroid of all.
Because potential asteroid are manifold and all over the graph
on their precise levels of mini-G, standardization will be difficult.
Perhaps the right approach is to treat mini-G as an
“English”, not unlike the coriolis effect, on what for all practical
athletic purposes is a near zero-G environment.
Rotating Space Facilities (Lagrange or other space
settlements; tether-rotating deep space cruise ships, and
rotating space stations and resorts) may mock terrestrial (1-G),
Martian (3/8ths G), or lunar (1/6th G) gravity levels, but events
and games in played in them will have a sometimes decisive
“translation” that will make them more than subtly different.
That will be the result of coriolis forces: causing a different
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 10 - Republished January 2006 - Page 75