The Challenges of Space

When looking forward to space exploration, you first need to understand the challenges and advantages space brings. Looking at the advantages of space can give us reason to fun space exploration and habitation, and seeing the challenges that exist can tell us what we need to do it.

Advantages everywhere:
1) Less gravity to launch into space. Earth is one of the two the most massive rocky planets. Because of the rocket equation, 83-96% of launch mass must be fuel on earth.
On other, less massive bodies, this is significantly decreased.
2) Structural integrity in low gravity is easier. In order to build things on earth, you have to design around earth’s gravity. In space or lower gravity planets, gravity is much weaker compared to the strength of materials.
3) Other humans haven’t gotten to the good stuff first. On earth all the pure lodes of iron/gold/platinum etc. just lying around on the surface, have been claimed and used already. In space, you can be the first to get to some of these rich natural deposits.
4) Stronger sunlight. The earth’s atmosphere blocks 77% of sunlight. Additionally, the earth rotates and has weather, blocking the sun for half of the day or more. If you are using solar power, this means you can get between 4 to 10 times as much energy from sun in space.

Challenges everywhere:
1) Gravity. The only planet where the gravity is the same as earth is Venus. Everywhere else you need to increase the gravity, usually with giant centrifuges to get earth normal gravity.
2) Air/water/food. Acquiring these means creating an artificial biome. As biosphere 2 proved, this is a non trivial task.
3) Self-sufficiency. All places that are not earth would need a greater degree of self-sufficiency than anywhere on earth. You cannot rely on shipping stuff form earth except for the most expensive and rare goods. Both the travel time and costs are too high.
4) Protection from cosmic rays and micro meteoroids. Without Earth’s magnetic field and thick atmosphere, you would need to create your own protection from the common small meteors and charged particles. Both of these can be done with a few meters of rock or water.
5) Initial setup cost. To build in space, we must first get out of Earth's gravity well. The first few expeditions will have an increased cost until space based infrastructure is built.

As we can see, there are both many reasons to go to space, and many challenges to overcome before space habitation becomes common. I can only hope that we put forth effort to overcome these challenges as a speices in the future.


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