Powered Human Flight to Mars Orbit
by Lyndon H.LaRouche, Jr.
July 25—In the "Basement Program" the time has come to return to one of my favorite topics from the 1980s work of the Fusion Energy Foundation: the subject of powered manned flight, by means of successive phases of acceleration and deceleration between our Moon and the lunar orbit of Mars, a subject which I brought up in Basement discussions earlier today.
Back during the 1970s and 1980s, I emphasized that the delayed priority of development of "crash programs" for controlled thermonuclear fusion, showed a kind of indifference to the role of fusion power in manned flight within the Solar system (in particular), and also in dealing with the role of power sources of qualitatively higher energy-flux densities for human life in general.
Among the presently visible advantages accessed from the vantage-point of the accumulated developments in the Riemannian physics of Albert Einstein and Academician V.I. Vernadsky, is that the mere study of manned flight and habitation in the nearby interplanetary domain, can be approached more advantageously from the vantage-point of my emphasis on the significance of personality types "A" and "B" in dealing with the aspect of physical relativity from the great relative advantage of standpoint "B," rather than "A," particularly when we pay attention to the way in which physical relativity in nearby interplanetary space among the planets looks, when we contrast the reactions of type "A" and "B" personalities to the notion of flight under suitable choices of powered orbits.
This defines suitable thought-experiments which fit the psychological capabilities of a Type "B" personality, but not Type "A." The idea of true physical relativity, when "large" is first considered, in approximation, from a Riemannian outlook on the very large and very small, as in respect to optical choices for interplanetary flight by human crews, fits the developed personality of Type "B," but tortures a mind conditioned to a Type "A" notion of "sense-certainty." This problem comes to the fore as soon we contrast the situation for Moon goals with interplanetary ones.
The notion of physical relativity can be defined meaningfully only when we craft a setting in which relativity is the existential setting of human survival, No doubt, persons could be synthetically conditioned to accept powered interplanetary space travel, but I doubt that they could actually believe it. Whereas, a personality which is of the "B" type could be educated to accept the experience of true relativity more or less readily, with aid of the type of some relevant experience along the lines of a child first learning to walk.
If we are going into nearby space in practical ways, we had better learn to live in that domain. This applies not only to the actual space-travellers, but to all persons capable of comprehending what it means for the society of the Earth-lubbers, to think of existing in a society whose "territory" of habitation lies essentially beyond Earth's local experience of gravity in the course of the kind of travel which is an included, and increasingly significant part of the very principles of existence within that society as a whole.
We need to re-educate people in general, from thinking of themselves and their experience in terms of today's commonplace Type "A" mentality (of "sense-certainty"), to thinking in Type "B" terms.
That development, in and of itself, is the next great giant step for all mankind.
