Potentially Transformative Technologies for Twenty-First Century Space
Space as the discipline to demonstrate economic and political might and as military high ground has pushed human ingenuity into developing new concepts and technologies for the exploration and use of this fourth ‘space’, following land-, sea- and air-spac
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Potentially Transformative Technologies for Twenty-First Century Space Leopold Summerer
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Introduction
Space as the discipline to demonstrate economic and political might and as military high ground has spurred human ingenuity to invent new concepts and develop new technologies necessary to take full advantage of it. This ‘fourth space’, following land-, sea- and air-spaces needed to be made reachable, navigable and useable. Driven by governmental ambitions and means, space agencies have thus developed the technologies to reach space (chemical rockets), to navigate in it (electric, chemical, nuclear and direct solar propulsion, position and trajectory determination), to use its resources (e.g. to generate electrical power via photovoltaic cells) and to communicate. In doing so space agencies created and shaped new markets and new industries, typically extending the scope of those already present in the aeronautical sector. Created by governments for governmental needs, some of these have already transitioned from governmental to private sector driven markets, starting with telecom applications in the 1990s. Stimulated by US policy decisions in the early 2000s, the private sector has entered virtually all space domains except deep space exploration. Against this background the present paper attempts to explore potentially game changing technologies for space applications. In one of his excellent 2010 BBC Reith lectures focussed on surviving the twenty-first century and entitled “What we will never know”, UK Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees, traced the origins of all major transformative innovations that shape our lives and economies to three key advances in science and technology that were innovations by themselves.
L. Summerer (*) European Space Agency, Noordwijk, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria 2017 C. Al-Ekabi et al. (eds.), Yearbook on Space Policy 2015, Yearbook on Space Policy, DOI 10.1007/978-3-7091-4860-0_8
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As with most transformative innovations before, the pervasive impact of their initial discoveries was not evident, except to a few visionary scientists. All of these three innovations gestated in the 1950s. In 1953, Watson and Crick published their seminar nature paper on the “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid”, in which they described for the first time the double helix, the biological structure of heredity, creating the foundation of the new scientific disciplines of genetics, molecular biology and biochemistry. Spurred by new manipulation methods such as the CRISPR interference technique1 the full impact of this discovery is likely still to come, contributing to predictions calling the twenty-first century the biological century. In 1958 Kilby and Noyce constructed the first integrated circuit based on the invention of the transistor in 1947, building the precursor of the silicon chip, arguably one of the most transformative inventions of the twentieth century. Similar to the spac
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