Some thoughts from Jerry Pournelle, in response to the Derbyshire piece a few weeks ago:
Years after Apollo I had a conversation with John R. Pierce, Chief Technologist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. John said that we’d made a mistake. In Heinlein’s future history, we go to the moon in stages first developing sub-orbital capabilities, then satellites, and finally went to the Moon; and we should have done it that way this time.
At the time I get somewhat angry in my disagreement with him, but it’s pretty clear John was right. He really meant that we should have learned to build space ships, real reusable ships that could fly suborbital, then orbital, then be refueled in orbit — rather than developing a bit disintegrating totem pole that could only be used once. I think he was right, and we may have to do it all over again before we can become a space-faring nation.
This will be one of the themes of my upcoming piece at The New Atlantis.
[Monday afternoon update]
Paul Dietz notes in comments that the Pournelle response was actually to a different Derbyshire post, that I hadn’t seen. He says that Apollo wasn’t a mere folly, but a magnificent one.
[Bumped]
I wish I still had my copy of ‘A Step Farther Out’ which was inspiring.
Fuel and go certainly makes sense (that’s the way Buck and Flash did it after all 😉 We can and should do it for ships that travel in space itself and I believe it is already financially viable. We could do it for a ship that goes from the Earth to orbit except Earth’s gravity makes that a much bigger hurdle (not to mention it has to land again to be classified as reusable.)
The argument that we should do things incrementally makes sense as well but I wonder at the increments. Reading the account of the DC-X I seem to remember Pournelle saying it might have been better to skip it and go for a much more functional ship; perhaps not to orbit but close enough to scare it. That would have caught the national conscientiousness a way the DC-X never did.
I agree we should learn as we go, but I also think we should not be so timid. I respect what others have done, but wish I had money of my own to risk. I might fail, but it would be a glorious failure.
Arthur C. Clarke made the same observation in his 1968 book “The Promise of Space.” prior to either Apollo 8 or 11. He noted that if progress were made as it should, we would have evolved rugged, reusable spaceplanes first, then been ready to go to the moon sometime around the end of the century — had it not been for geopolitical rivalry. I had the same negative reaction Jerry did when I first read that (back in 1968), but Clarke had it nailed from the beginning.
Almost nailed, anyway. He appreciated the real motive for the manned space program. However, I don’t think we would *ever* have gone into space if it had not been for the “space race” with the Russians. Ever.
DC-X did some good stuff (among other things, it showed everybody that autocode generation of the GNC SW was a good idea), but I remain unconvinced that SSTO is the right way to go (although I fully admit that I haven’t done the optimization studies, so I’m willing to be convinced). To me, the key thing – and Apollo was NEVER going to give it to us – is doing it over and over and over so that we learn what works, what doesn’t, and how to build a sustainable capability. That’s what we’re doing with UAVs – we’re getting tens and hundreds of thousands of hours on them so that we can make them more-or-less routine. We should be doing the same for spaceflight.
The problem with making a roughed reusable vehicle is that there isn’t a lot of margin with chemical rockets to begin with. Make your vehicle too roughed and it will not reach orbit because it is too heavy.
I think DC-X was a necessary step because many people did not believe you could restart engines like that or make viable control systems for such a vehicle. Once it achieved those goals they should have funded DC-Y as planned. This was prevented by political issues.
FWIW many people still do not believe one can do a usable VTVL SSTO. DC-Y could have shot down that argument. Or it could have been another Spruce Goose. I guess we won’t know.
Apollo could have worked out a bit more useful if EOR was kept, and/or Gemini was followed through to a lunar landing.
We might have routine orbital docking and propellant transfers as an accepted practice over a HLV fetish by now.
The “folly” is entirely upon the side of those who saw the meaning of Apollo as the opening up of the frontier of space (I readily admit that I was one of those misguided individuals). Apollo was not about space at all — it was a battle in the Cold War, a battle that we won. The technical credibility Apollo gave America served us in good stead later when SDI helped bring the Soviet Union down (Q: If SDI was such a stupid idea and would “never work” (the opinion of many space “experts” like Carl Sagan), why was >90% of Soviet diplomatic initiatives in the 1980’s devoted to getting Reagan to abandon SDI?)
This also explains why trips to the Moon were terminated so abruptly — after you win a battle, you don’t keep fighting it.
Derbyshire insists on viewing Apollo as all about space. It wasn’t. It just took place there.
I find myself agreeing with John Derbyshire more then I like. Apollo was a stunt that served as a major geo political propaganda battle of the cold war. But then with a vague sence that we needed a space we built shuttle, but only enough for pollitical pork.
The shuttle was never finished, voters and hence politicians, cared more about the pork from the waste of maintaining the half crippled – half completed – shuttles, to the possibilities of space. Now NASA is trying to replace the shuttle with Constellation. Constellation eliminates almost all space capability, all potential for development that Shuttle offered, but retains almost all the pork from Shuttle. Constellation is superbly designed to deliver the most pork and inefficiencies with the least flights. The development costs for Aries I / V / Orion are projected to cost at least 50% more then a fully reusable, cheap to operate shuttle. Adjusted for inflation the return to the moon program will cost about 60% more then the space race of the ‘60’s. Maximum efficiency on a pork per mission basis.
If this isn’t the wrong path to open up space, I don’t know what could be.
Actually, Pournelle was responding to a different Derbyshire post. Follow the link from Pournelle’s site.
“A “next-generation” manned space program called “Constellation” is on NASA’s drawing board, but nobody thinks anything will come of it, and Congress is already quietly turning off the funding spigots. ”
I am so happy Derb is absolutely certain Constellation=VSE and speaks freely with such certitude for everyone else. Jim Muncy sure seems fooled. I wonder if Shelby got his memo?
Something will survive. The question whether it is pure pork of something semi-functional. I guess it depends on whether the Muncy’s or the Shelby’s win the day.
Constellation does seem to be on its last legs. Aries V no longer shows up on schedules that go out to 2020. The Aries – I contractors are officially neutral on which launch vehicle is chosen. Bolden and Griffen talk about refocusing NASA on LEO and Earth science. Personally a contract I was interviewed for on Orion suddenly went on hold.
Apollo on steroids was only popular with Griffin and he’s gone. Congress has more then enough other pork from the stimulus bill to keep them getting elected for years. …And NASA is to scared of the Aries X demo to fly it for fear it will damage the pad.
Move on, shows over, nothing to see..