1% of people to space

I was out at my weekly Thursday lunch with my buddy Bob Lilly. He's a rocket enthusiast who has a lot of industry experience in semi-conductor manufacturing and in commercial airplane stuff (Boeing). We were talking about rocket stuff -- in particular, our department was trying to get a graduate level rocket class "off the ground".

Aside:
[ The dream is that students would have a chance to design, build, and fly a rocket and get all that good experience that comes with putting together such a complex system. Sadly, the project is perhaps too unwieldy for our department to tackle. A graduate student wouldn't be able to do any nitty gritty research. At STC, Phil and I had to put all our effort to the bare bones requirements to get a rocket off the ground and didn't really have time to hash out some of the interesting and crucial details. Which grad students in Aero/Astro would be doing the grunt work -- machining, purchasing, licensing, etc.? The thing to do in an aerospace department is probably to focus on one part of a rocket -- the propulsion, for instance. Or maybe the navigation system. Maybe year after year, different parts could be tackled. ]

Anyway, a friend of mine from international student night at the College Inn (where I have gotten my pool playing fix since being in Seattle) joined the discussion at some point. Bob told the guy I competed for the X Prize and a discussion of the future of space travel ensued. I suggested that it was within the realm of possibility that at some point in the future, 1% of earthlings might make it to space once during their lives. The guy, June, a Mathematician, said he was certain it was impossible. He said he was sure the earth would be destroyed by the resource extraction required for that much space travel.

He has clearly not read enough sci-fi :). 10 billion x 1% = 100 million people. Assuming 100 year lifetimes, that'd be about a million people per year going to space. True, if we had to launch 100,000 space shuttles a year, that'd be tough on the planet. However, what June had trouble imagining was what space travel might be like in 1000 years. One certainly can't be sure what things will be like, but this guy's imagination was like an steel trap. Space elevators might work. High speed orbital planes might conceivably work (burning atmospheric oxygen + some carried fuel in some enviro friendly way??).

The interesting thing about June's viewpoint is that he simplifies things to the following picture: planes, trains and autos have been damned tough on our environment. It's relatively easy to travel by those modes. It's much harder to travel to space. Thus, the burden on the environment must be proportionately larger than the burden due to planes/trains/autos. Anyway, I don't think the burden required to take 1% of people to space once in their lives is more than we can reasonably ask of the planet.