Opinions

Space colonization is coming and Alaska could be its model

In 1985, a federal commission that included Neil Armstrong and Chuck Yeager invited a University of Alaska Anchorage history professor to advise them on how to colonize the moon. Thirty years later, the Alaska model is relevant again.

The challenges of living in space are huge and won't be solved soon. But spreading humanity has been the true inspiration for the manned space program for a long time, as NASA policy documents quietly acknowledged years ago. Today, a new generation has made the goal of living beyond Earth a hot topic.

We've been here before. In 1914, the federal government decided, against all odds, to build a railroad across Alaska. The total expense of that project, which had little more economic justification than a colony on the moon, amounted to nearly a tenth of a year's federal budget, 20 times the share NASA gets today.

The NASA commission in 1985 located UAA professor Steve Haycox through Mead Treadwell, a technology entrepreneur who would later become Alaska's lieutenant governor. Haycox went to Washington, D.C., to work at a hotel with other experts preparing to present ideas.

"They came to me, probably, because there are so few people in Alaska that purport to know something about its history, and they said, 'Well, is there an analogy here for lunar settlement?' " Haycox said. "And what I got drawn into was the lunar settlement question."

Space optimism still prevailed. The space shuttle Challenger wouldn't disintegrate over Florida until the next year. The commission called for nuclear-powered, self-contained space ecosystems. According to its predictions, we should be living in those facilities today.

In 1989, NASA had firm plans to put us on Mars by 2011.

ADVERTISEMENT

In his comments, Haycox told the commission their concept of a lunar outpost wasn't far enough along to draw on Alaska's experience. The commission wasn't talking about long-term residency and development on the moon but something more like the military outposts in Alaska before the 1898 Gold Rush.

But today, tech billionaire Elon Musk wants to put a city on Mars to stay permanently. Companies including his SpaceX, with reusable rockets, are slashing the cost of launching equipment into orbit, a critical first step.

I talked to Haycox, and visited Musk's SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, California, while working on a book co-authored with planetary scientist Amanda Hendrix, "Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets," which will be published next week. (On Friday at 7:30 p.m., I will present our findings in a public slide lecture and book launch at the Anchorage Museum.)

In our research, we investigated the challenges for space settlement in technology, health, psychology, economics, politics and culture. We looked at past colonies to understand humanity's drive to expand and learn why some failed and others succeeded.

Haycox offered his deep knowledge of Alaska and the American West.

"A lot of people went out and tried things and discovered they couldn't do the big things without federal support," he said. "The infrastructure that it took in order to make the West a viable place for sustained development, not just somebody living in a cabin somewhere … couldn't have happened without all that federal support. Which continues to happen in Alaska today."

Musk acknowledged the need for government support when he made his Mars announcement in September. Commercial space companies have figured out how to operate faster and cheaper but they rely on technology developed by NASA. The government also remains by far the largest client for space launch services.

In the spread of settlers across the West, the government provided massive land grants for railroad companies and military force against the Native Americans who owned the land. New cities formed thanks to federal water projects, roads, courthouses and land offices.

In Alaska, the government went further, building the Alaska Railroad with taxpayer money and installing a farming colony in the Matanuska Valley. Federal railroad spending powered the Anchorage economy until World War II. Then military spending dominated for two decades.

A space colony would long rely on home too but, like Alaska, would develop its own identity. Haycox said historians began chronicling Alaska boom towns soon after they were founded.

"I like to joke, but maybe the third or fourth institution that was established was the local historical society," he said. "What the historical society provides is authenticity. It gives authenticity to the cultural context. It says, 'OK, we have people who came here, and they were just like us, and we are just like them. And they were heroes.' "

NASA has heroes but discourages its scientists from using the word "colony." The word suggests something beyond what we can technically accomplish at the moment. It also has negative connotations for those who were colonized.

But space colonization won't involve theft, as European colonization of North America did (unless we encounter space aliens). Our space colonists will be more like the indigenous people who came to Alaska more than 10,000 years ago, when they entered a continent as unpeopled as a new planet.

Like astronauts, the ancestral Inuit were able to colonize only after they invented the technology to protect them from an extremely hostile environment. Rather than pressure suits and spacecraft, they learned to make skin clothing and boats.

They dug shelter from the ground with stone tools and supported their sod roofs with whalebone. That technology worked so well that the homes could be comfortably heated against Arctic cold with seal oil lamps.

An anthropologist in Utqiagvik (Barrow) once pointed out to me the immense human cost of those houses, including digging frozen ground and catching whales. That cost may have been comparable to a habitat off the Earth.

Like the first Alaskans, the first generation to leave the Earth will face immense danger and difficulty, and many will die. Like those entering an empty Arctic, space colonists will journey deep into an unknown environment that seems utterly unsuitable for human life.

ADVERTISEMENT

But they may eventually succeed. After all, the Inupiat are still at Utqiagvik.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com or click here to submit via any web browser.

Charles Wohlforth

Charles Wohlforth was an Anchorage Daily News reporter from 1988 to 1992 and wrote a regular opinion column from 2015 until 2019. He served two terms on the Anchorage Assembly. He is the author of a dozen books about Alaska, science, history and the environment. More at wohlforth.com.

ADVERTISEMENT