Statement of Purpose

 

 

I have an old suitcase in my basement that is full of scrapbooks that I made over the course of several years starting when I was eight years old. They are all full of newspaper articles about the US space program, the first article being a Sunday color supplement about the Gemini 11 mission.

 

Going Places

 

The suitcase also contains a newspaper article about me. The local paper sent a reporter to my school when I, at the age of eleven, wrote a letter to the federal government asking whether it might be possible for me to purchase a small piece
of the Moon.

I received a response from the State Department explaining that, while I was certainly free to visit the Moon, an international treaty prohibited anyone from claiming any of it. The photographer's picture shows me reading the response, looking mildly irritated.

In spite of such bureaucratic intransigence I was confident, in the summer of 1969, that it would prove to be no more than a minor speed bump on the road to the future.

 

 

It was only three years later, on 13 December, 1972, that Gene Cernan stepped off the surface of the Moon to climb the ladder into the Apollo 17 Lunar Module, and Project Apollo was terminated. I quit clipping out newspaper articles after that, because there weren't any more stories worth saving. It has now been forty-eight years since the last human being left the Moon.

 

I wanted to stay a while.

As I entered high school I began to understand that my future would not be full of rockets. But in my freshman year I read a book by Gerard K O'Neill called The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, and I started dreaming of building islands in the sky using nothing but sunlight and asteroids.

 

Islands in the Sky

Eventually I found my way to grad school where I fell in love with the highest-tech field I had ever heard of: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Vision. Hope in American space efforts was fading, weighed down by the miserable performance of the Space Shuttle. 

At the dawn of the decade we had been told that the Shuttle would fly five hundred missions in the Eighties, would reduce launch costs to a fraction of what they had been, would usher in a new era. But by January 1986, we'd had only 24 flights. Less than a tenth of what had been hoped.

 

I was on a lunch break from my first high-tech job, at a startup called Machine Vision International in Ann Arbor, sitting in my car in the drive-up line at the local McDonald's, when I heard on the radio that Challenger had died. When I pulled forward to accept my little bag of lunch from the McDonald's woman at the window, I was weeping.

When I got back to work some of my colleagues in the Research Department were standing outside and they asked if I had heard the news. Yes, I said, and now it's over. We just lost the US space program. Nancy said, "Oh, no, don't worry. They'll fix it and have it flying again in a couple months." "No," I told her. "More like two years."

I was close, if a little optimistic. It took two years and eight months before the shuttle flew again. By the end of the Eighties we'd had a grand total of thirty-two flights.

The Day the Future Died

Life went on: marriage, jobs, moving to California just in time to for a Michigan boy and girl to see what a real earthquake feels like, fleeing back to Michigan, bringing a new baby girl into the world.

The Nineties passed, and then the Oh-Oh Decade. 9/11 came. 

Then it was winter again, in early 2003, and I was in my car again -- this time getting the oil changed -- when Columbia broke up during reentry, raining its ruin upon east Texas.

Columbia, falling.

More years, more jobs. The Global Financial Crisis A good job at Red Hat! Our daughter going to college, and then finding her way to grad school. My wife rejoining the workforce. The Grandparents dying.

Until one day in early 2018 -- it was winter again -- I saw on the internet the most amazing video. I saw two rockets, made by a private company, after having delivered their payloads and reentering the atmosphere --- decelerating to a landing on their tails.

Just like they did in the science fiction movies when I was eight.

Over the next year, I think I watched that clip a hundred times.

 

They're here.

They're using vision systems to help land those rockets, I thought. Yes, OK, but too many years have gone by. Everything just took too long. Too much water over the dam. Good luck, younger people, and may all your rockets fly true.

Until the foul year of 2020 dawned, with viruses and riots and the biggest economic convulsion since the Fall of Rome. And the month of June came along and I was poking around the internet, daydreaming of rockets, when I came upon an interesting article.

Space is back, baby, she said. It’s back in the news, back in our thoughts, and back in the culture.

I read with interest.

The key is private industry: What used to cost the government $54,500 per kilogram of payload lifted to orbit now costs SpaceX $2,720, saving 95 percent.

That really got my attention. A factor of twenty reduction in cost.  I had just a short time before learned about the Erie Canal that opened almost two hundred years ago. It reduced the cost of westward travel by a factor of twenty-five or thirty -- and that's what opened my home state of Michigan to settlement. Back when it was the West.

If that has already happened because of SpaceX, I thought, then the road has opened. 

 

Fifteen years on the Erie Canal

 

She even mentioned the Outer Space Treaty, my source of long-ago irritation, and said that recent legal thinking is that just because states cannot lay claim to heavenly bodies like the Moon or Mars doesn't mean that private individuals can't have property rights over things like asteroids -- and the materials they might take from them.

See? the eleven-year-old said. I told you.

And then the author said:

Space law used to be entirely academic, but now it’s a rising field. NASA is funding asteroid-mining research. The Colorado School of Mines now has an asteroid-mining program of study.

When I read that last sentence it was like hearing a great bell toll. I'm going there, I thought, age be damned.

If I drop dead halfway through the program, that's fine with me. Well, you know. Fine-ish. What is not OK is not trying. I don't think eleven-year-old Mike would be happy with that, no, not one bit. So we're going.

They even have the same block-M as Michigan. I can re-use all my old school stuff.

I finished my application two days ago.

 

Go West, old man.

This is why we're doing this blog, and why we're processing images of stars. And why later we'll be trying to track things like the Lunar Landers moving against a background of stars, features on an asteroid's surface, structures taking shape in free space.

When we send machines out there to start exploring and mining and building for us, they might end up half a light-hour away from the nearest human being -- much too far to phone home for instructions for your every move.

Our machines will need to be able to see.

It's time to be making vision systems for the asteroids.