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The Shape of Things to Come



I have recently had the opportunity to visit London, Paris, and Edinburgh. That is why my blog has been absent the past couple of weeks. One of the things my wife and I did was to ride the Eurostar train from London to Paris (through the “chunnel”). Something that struck me, is the similarity between a high speed train and an airliner. The interior cabin looks very similar. Walking into the train, if you didn’t know better you might think you were on a plane. But it is the external appearance that I want to talk about. Both the high speed train and the airplane need to be streamlined to minimize wind resistance. You don’t want a lot of wind resistance (except under the plane’s wing where wind resistance is a good thing). The streamlined design carries with it an inherent beauty, symmetry and smooth lines.

Space ships also need a streamlined shape if they are going to be travelling through an atmosphere. But if they are not going to be travelling through an atmosphere, they can be as haphazard as you like. Look at the international space station (ISS); there is nothing streamlined about that. But wait, you say, that’s not a space ship; it is just a platform. Well, it is a space “ship” in that it is not fixed. It is a vehicle moving in Earth orbit. Since it is travelling through space you could call it a space ship. As technologically innovative and advance as the ISS is, there is nothing terribly aesthetically pleasing about its appearance. It is just an agglomeration of pods, platforms and panels. But that’s okay. It does not need to be anything else.

The day will come when we have ships whose sole function is transferring passengers and cargo from an Earth orbit to the orbit of  the Moon, Mars, or other objects. There is no telling what these transfer ships will look like. Since they are not going into an atmosphere, they can be just about any shape you like. Even something like the Borg cube from the Star Trek series might not be unreasonable, though I suspect a sphere might be more practical, or something with a rotating ring that can produce a partial artificial gravity. The point is that while we don’t know what they will look like, they won’t look like space ships from the 1950’s and '60's movies, or the things that I envisioned when I was growing up.

In my novel, Star Liner, most of the action takes place on just such a transfer ship. When my main character, Jan, first sees the ship, he is not overwhelmed by its beauty. “It was essentially a fat cylinder with extensions sticking out in various places . . .” There is no need for it to be streamlined, no need for it to be pretty. On the other hand such a ship does not necessarily have to look ugly either. I am reminded of the “Discovery”, the ship from Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A space Odyssey. That ship is a pleasure to look at, yet at the same time its form is logically constructed. A sphere at the front that allows rotational artificial gravity for the astronauts, and a long superstructure that separates the living area from the nuclear powered engines (probably a good thing to have some distance there).

When it comes to building any kind of contrivance, form is dictated by function and environment. We see it in nature as well. It is true of animals as well as space ships. Birds and fish are streamlined because of the medium they have to travel in. Perhaps this is why the streamline appearance is so appealing to us. It looks “natural” to our human psyche because we have seen it so often in nature. As we move out into space, the rules change. Who knows what we will consider appealing after we have lived out there for a while.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon, or the other usual online sources)

Star Liner

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