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

already have a wheel chair race in the Olympics. But in the
Space Games of the mid-twenty first century, there may be
much more handicapped participation. Especially in some zero-
G events, legless amputees may even have an advantage, in
open competition with others. Indeed, it might be more of a
challenge to design events for which legs are an asset than
merely get in the way.
Conclusion: The process of developing and standardizing an
appropriate mix of Olympic level events and games will take a
long time to mature. We can insure a head start in running
computer simulations with gravity level, mass, court size and
configuration, apparatus mass and design, and rules all factored
into the trial model. Such simulations could easily “pre
narrow” the wide range of possibilities into a feasible handful
of games, events worth trying at some nonprohibitive expense.
Such a down select will need the filter of mutual compatibility,
arena-wise as well as sufficiently market-tested player and
spectator interest alike.
Virtual reality games and events built upon such
computer simulations will act as a further filter, though some
physically and humanly possible sports and events, however
popular to VR players, may be a long time coming if the
facilities or equipment they require would be prohibitively
expensive.
Will games and sports described seminally enough in
the pages of science fiction inspire the inventor developers of
real future athletic events? That will depend on science fiction
fans with sufficient creative imagination and computer simulation
skills and determination - an unknown.
Popularity with tourists at orbital and lunar resorts
will have an effect. But this may be probably minor in
financial terms compared to that of popularity with Earthbound
armchair commercial TV or pay-per-view spectators of
space athletic and sports event telecasts.
Beyond Earth orbit, isolation (Lunar and Martian
rural settings, even more so asteroidal ones) will further
experimentation. This should yield second generation events
rather than and work to delay standardization of an initial set.
A major threshold will be the development and
multiplication of megastructures in space (O’Neill type
colonies, Islands I, II, III etc.) and on the Moon (Rawlings-
Bova “Main Plaza” in “Welcome to Moonbase”; LRS’ doublevaulted
rille settlements in the 1989 “Prinzton” Study (MMMs
#s 26-29, 31-33) providing very large Earth-reminiscent
volumes. In such environments, human winged flight will be
one of the oft foreseen possibilities.
Some events will rise to Olympic level play well
before others. New events will be added with each edition of
the Space Games. ABC’s Wide World of Sports, will become
Wide Worlds of Sports. The epic saga of human adaptability
continues.
2046 as a time goal is a very big challenge. By then a
start should have been made on an official Space Olympic
event list, integrated into the overall official Olympics
program, with official sanction.
Finally, the effect of the Space Olympics and Space
sports in general may be to ignite or fan the flames of many a
youth’s desire to settle space. PK
MMM #99 - OCT 1996
The “Tree of Cheap Access”
One thing almost everyone in the space activist
community can agree on is the absolutely vital need to bring
down drastically the cost of getting into space. But it is not
commonly seen that this is not just one problem but several.
Getting “what” into space? And just “where in space” are we
talking about? The challenge is really multiplex. In this issue,
we look at just some of the aspects.
Foreword
Why should we think that it is only a question of
guaranteeing that we find the best combination of features?
Cheap Access To Space, CATS, is not a simple challenge with
a single solution. It is a veritable tree of problems with both
roots and branches spreading in different directions.
That the best CATS solution for large hardware payloads
should by coincidence be the best CATS solutions for
shipping materials to space that can be handled in any quantity,
or that the best CATS solution for either should by some lucky
quirk also be the best CATS solution for sending people,
cabinsfull of people, to orbit - that coincidence would be
bizarre.
Heinlein pointed out that once you are in orbit you
are half way to anywhere. With CATS. we will only have
solved half our transportation problem.
We need Cheap Access from LEO to
GEO, from either to the Moon, from Earth and the Moon to
Mars. These are all different sets of challenges that are likely to
have unique solutions.
If all that the push for Cheap Access achieves is to
make it easier and cheaper to put communications satellites
in orbit, we will have spent a lot of energy without doing a
thing to open the real space frontier.
In this issue, we take a look at just some of the many
challenges and just some of the possible solutions. We’re sure
there are more problems and more good strategies — our
purpose is to stimulate thought and vaporize the current
simplistic hysteria over something that is more important and
far-reaching than most CATS champions have let themselves
realize. In the end, CATS, the effort to insure
ever cheaper access
of everything we want to put in space
to everywhere we want to go in space,
will be an unending story. PK
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 10 - Republished January 2006 - Page 80