For this baby boomer who grew up in the Cold War, the world has gone bizzaro. Here is Jeffrey Manber on Russian TV defending the capability of commercial companies to design and fly manned rockets and disputing Alabama politicians who are attacking such companies and claiming that only a government agency can do such things. The irony is manifest when Jeffrey notes that said agency will be paying a Russian company to launch its astronauts.
Heads are exploding all over the place.
Some heads are too rigid and inflexible to explode. For instance, Jim Hillhouse posts in a blog under The Write Stuff article “Bolden: “We weren’t headed to the moon until late next decade, if then”
“The reason Congress and NASA have had to subsidize the so-called “commercial” launchers is because if they went to the market and tried to get investors interested in their business, nobody would sign-up except former dot-com billionaires. Those companies wouldn’t last as long as Roton did and would die from lack of O2.
Why? Because the mass-fraction of mFinal/mInitial in the rocket equation stands at about 0.1 today, with staging. And it has been at this level since the Saturn V. That is pretty bad. The first commercially available airliner, the DC-3 had an effective dry vs. wet ratio of around 0.72 and the new 787 will have about 0.48.
There may be “old ways” of doing things, but old doesn’t go away because being old is per se bad. Rather, “old ways” fade away because innovations offering improvements drive the “old ways” out of the market.
None of the “commercial” launch companies being currently subsidized by NASA has invented a “killer app”, a game changer that makes their rockets more efficient, safer or cheaper than NASA’s. All they have done is made a rocket, sans the vacuum tube controllers and painted-on new markings, that is essentially the same as those made 40 years ago.
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And of course, McDade has gotten more shrill and off-the-wall than ever, if you can believe that. He can pretty much be ignored because of extreme loss of credibility. But Hillhouse has just enough intelligence to half-way get it right, screw up the rest, and sound convincing.
Do people think Columbus sailed across the Ocean to take some pictures and pick up a few rocks? He sailed across the Ocean to open a trade route to China and bring back/create wealth (i.e. a Return on Investment) for his investors (Ferdinand & Isabella).
So how is this any different if you apply it to the exploration of space?
Alan
So how is this any different if you apply it to the exploration of space?
Because “Space Exploration” started as a pissing contest instead.
Because “Space Exploration” started as a pissing contest instead.
And Columbus’ voyage wasn’t about a “pissing contest” between Spain and Portugal? Read up on the history of the Eastern spice trade and Prince Henry the Navigator (Portugal).
… those who do not understand history are bound to repeat it
One thing any rocket engineer knows – the more rigid and inflexible your vessel, the more spectacular is the explosion.
It’s simple, this is like the Viet Nam War all over again. We won all the battles, but lost the war, through the inactions and lack of planning, or lack of understanding by BUREAUCRATS. And that does not exclude all the elected worms who spend our money on worhlessness and who understand even less than the bureaucrats.
… those who do not understand history are bound to repeat it
History seldom repeats, but it often rhymes.
… those who do not understand history are bound to repeat it.
As are those who only understand history, Apollo on steroids anyone?
Those who live in the past, do not live in the future…
History doesn’t always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells ‘can’t you remember anything I told you?’ and lets fly with a club. [John W. Campbell Jr.]
“My interest is in the future because I’m going to spend the rest of my life there.”
– Charles Kettering
The new space policy is utterly absurd. Our leadership has no clue on technology or the impact thereof. Supercomputers, cellular technology, medical advances, and many other technologies trace their genesis back to the manned space program. We are killing both our future and our technology base.
I blogged on this a few days ago at http://oceanaris.wordpress.com
This is a national disgrace.
“… those who do not understand history are bound to repeat it”
The rivalry between Spain and Portugal was not a pissing contest. It was a struggle for power. And that power came from the discovery of new sources of wealth.
So when Columbus was sent over the ocean it WAS to find a return on investment, whereas the space race was never about wealth creation, and only about prestige.
So communications satellites don’t generate wealth?
In space no one can hear your head explode.
So besides satellites what can you make money on in space ? Anyone ???
nothing else is the big fat answer … mining on the moon ? or mars ? Really ???? Does anyone think that mining ores on the moon or mars or the asteroids could ever be a money making venture within the next 50 years ?
grow up … a billionaires toy is what “commercial” space fight is … and will be for the next 50 years … it sucks, I’d love to go into space too but I gave up that childhood fantasy in grade school when I got glasses (no flight school, no astronaut wings, no space via NASA) …
@ RKV: Communication satellite wealth ?
Information is valuable, and has 0 mass;
People will pay for timely transmission,
but it is not wealth in the same sense as a
Gigwatt of microwave power transmitted
from a space solar power plant to earth,
and it is certainly not the same as a kiloton
of structural steel deorbited to a construction site.
RKV — What do communications satellites have to do with launching people into space?
Dollar for dollar the moon missions added more to the US economy than any other government adventure, save the public school system.
The only industry the US has is farming and technology. good luck to us if we piss that away too.
As a libertarian-leaning conservative, I say, “gov, you’ll just mess it up.” And history has proven that largely correct.
As a random observer of logic of some comments here, I note that while Columbus didn’t sail across the ocean for a bag of rocks, he did have government sponsorship. Isn’t that more the point rather than whether or not it was a pissing contest or a way to open a trade route?
Historically, most exploration can be divided into two categories, Easy and Hard. The Easy (I’m speaking relatively, of course) requires only small investments of capital and effort and time, the sort of resources available to individuals and small groups. The Hard kind requires large organizations, large resource bases, and is usually the province of governments and large corporations (or equivalent bodies).
Space flight is Hard. For the near-term future, most space operations will be performed by governments and large private and semi-private organizations, because nobody else has the necessary resource base, and the private-sector profit motive simply isn’t there right now.
That’s not to say there isn’t room for improvement, or that the way the government does what it’s done can’t be improved, and NASA has become an obstacle. But removing NASA from thh equation won’t make space exploration Easy, and won’t end the necessity of govenrment involvement.
(My personal view is that the creation of NASA was probably a mistake, space flight should have been left in the military’s domain. The military is hardly a paragon of efficiency, but they’re better at doing things than much of the government.)
There is potentially a place for private action in space, but we’re not to the point where it’s going to be dominant any time soon.
Whooo…
A lot of bitter, failed astronauts on this thread.
/We will not be shipping gold ore back from the moon.
// Maybe O2 or hydrogen or H2O (either/or) for further exploration?
///Naw, too crazy.
One problem with space efforts is that a number of well-intentioned false hopes have been put into circulation, that keep distracting attention. At one time, Gerard O’Neil’s space habitat vision was such a distraction.
Today, solar power satellites serve the same negative role. They do not make sense, economically or from a security POV, it’s almost inconceivable that they could ever compete with ground-based solar, much less coal or uranium. No matter how many different ways people slice the math, it doesn’t work unless you incorporate radically improbable assumptions.
Sometimes Helium-3 is offered as a potential resource obtainable in space…but we don’t have He-3 reactors yet. We don’t even know if such reactors are possible as a practical, economically competitive source of power.
Right now, the ingredients for an entrepreneurial space boom are simply not visible.
Aside from the philosophical considerations of which course of action (large agency vs. smaller entrepreneurs) is best, it seems that few, if any, of the tech crowd are considering the fact that Obama’s administration has a pretty piss poor track record as to keeping their promises. Everything Obama says comes with an expiration date.
It’s not worth speculating (here, and at this time) on the many different ways that the space initiative could be diverted, gutted, and/or porked into oblivion, but I see that as the most likely outcome, so debating which course of action, neither of which is going to take place, is missing the point. there has not been a Democratic president since Kennedy that gave a crap about the space program, and Obama has made it quite clear where his priorities lie, and despite all his talk about promoting science, domestic policy is where his heart is.
“Skepticism is the mark of a chaste mind, and I bear it’s seal upon my own” – Roger Zelazny (paraphrased from memory)
It’s like that scene in Scanners, that Cronenberg flick, yeah, you know the one…with the exploding heads….
The current administration is doing it’s level best to restore the reputations of both George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter…
there has not been a Democratic president since Kennedy that gave a crap about the space program
Um, you need to look further. Kennedy was not it.
> certainly not the same as a kiloton
of structural steel deorbited to a construction site.
There’s a market in manufacturing craters?
I hope Polywell Fusion gets some of this NASA tech monies.
If that works, it really will be a game-changer.
There is no ROI from space exploration because the property rights issues haven’t been developed yet. No sovereign nation can appropriate property in space.
Nobody knows about companies or individuals, but face it, if you go up there, and you stake a claim, you’re gonna need a lot of backup. And if your nation doesn’t back you up, you’re screwed.
I’ve said it how many times now? $787 Billions for…something or another…and no money for the F-22 or Ares.
Obama is weakness, stupidity, vanity. He hates this country and anything great or exceptional about it.
a billionaires toy is what “commercial” space fight is
If NASA is going to spend the next decade and a half in LEO as seems likely, launching its own astronauts on commercial launchers, taxpayers may start to wonder whether their money is being used to send a select group of privileged government employees on joy rides. The billionaires would be paying for it with their own money, the portion that the government didn’t take away anyway. They would still profit from government subsidies, which are in turn to no small degree paid for from the taxes on their income and that of their fellow billionaires.
The point the Columbus-referrers were trying to make above is a salient one. Namely, things just don’t happen just because they’re “next.” “History” and “the future” are not two parts of a timeline leading us inexorably to Star Trek. People and societies and nations do things – like explore – when there’s something in it for them.
Absent indulging in a pissing contest while the US was a creditor nation on the brink of nuclear war, nothing concrete has come from the space program except “scientific understanding.” You don’t even need to be a cynic to observe that the scientific understanding that’s been gleaned in the last 30 years has not been worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
It may be that, like the blind pig occasionally finding an acorn (hmmm, this may be more appropriate a metaphor than I first thought)) the Obama administration has stumbled on a fairly rational space policy. I think they did it because they want to cut money for space, and steer spending toward PC things like environmental earth observation. Nonetheless, on the merits, doesn’t it make sense to promote private sector space efforts instead of dumping billions into these large, inefficient government programs? Queen Isabella and Columbus didn’t go into the ship manufacturing business…they bought off the shelf vessels. Government purchase of ships during the age of exploration did spur development of maritime technology.
If Obama really wanted to spur development, he could take $1 billion of the money destined for Ares, and put it into a series of prizes for reusable launchers. $10 million got us SpaceSHip One. $2 million got some spectacular results from Masten and Armadillo. Paul Brede got pretty close, too.
There is a role for NASA, but I don’t think that should necessarily be in the construction side of things. Henry the Navigator was not as interested in building ships as he was in buying or hiring ships to send out on explorations. Let NASA fund the deep space probes and those sorts of research activities that have such long timelines that no company would ever invest in them.
But for satellites, and travel into orbit and even to the Moon, I think a case can be made for private enterprise, whether that is carrying space tourists, or resupplying a telescope or research base on the Moon.
Like Jeff, my eyesight blocked my desire to seek a pilot/astronaut career. However, reading Heinlein, especially “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” gave me one other insight- the low gravity on the Moon does make it a grand place for a retirement home. That we don’t yet know if 1/6 g is sufficient to allow calcium to remain in bones is the only show-stopper I know of. IMHO, the Lunar Retirement Home is the ‘killer app’ for human expansion into space; gladly would I putter in my garden to sustain the habitat! And if Heinlein was also right that low g extends the lifespan, Luna can expect a flood of us old fogies willing to give up our Earthly possessions for a second career helping learn what else can be profitable ‘out there.’
rrr.. as a libertarian leaning conservative, you shd know that if Columbus could have afforded the trip through private financing he would have gotten it. he’d have kept more $ for himself w/o the govt messing about. He needed the capital and cheap labor.
Jeff: The industries and technologies spawned through spaceflight have generated billions of dollars on wealth, saved millions of lives and made life more comfortable, yes including 3rd world countries that participated.
Just because you lost your dream doesnt mean you go around pissing on other people’s dreams. Without reaching for it, how’d you know if it works? Btw.. I got glasses at a young age, complete with astigmatism. And if theres a way to get up there, even if for fun, I’d do it! Tourism industry; arise.. you have nothing to lose except gravity!
“I hope Polywell Fusion gets some of this NASA tech monies.
If that works, it really will be a game-changer.”
To me at any rate (and I am scientifically literate but hardly specialist in this field) Focus Fusion looks as if it might be a better bet; it involves pulsed confinement rather than steady-state.
The reason why it looks better to me is that it is probably going to be easier to run a radiation-free fusor by this method – most likely proton-B11 which creates no neutrons, and the side-reaction rate is extremely low. Which means no induced radioactivity in the walls of the reactor vessel; a very big problem for any fusion reactor that produces neutrons.
Small scale fusors like these two would require (at the level of state funding anyway) next to no money – probably not even at the level of NASA’s stationery bill. Why? Because both these methods seem to work in small units. And that leads to another proposition; cease funding for tokamak fusion right now and permanently.
Not because it will never work – it might eventually – but for two other reasons. It’s burning money that would be better spent, and even if tokamak works it will never work in a unit smaller than a ten-story building. Which increases the already strong, and completely undesirable, current trend towards centralisation of power (both physical and political/economic).
As for SPS: Sure, if you loft all the megatons of structure into space from Earth’s surface, it will never be economically viable. However, there are other ways of getting those materials, and using them gives living space for quadrillions as a side benefit.
“There’s a market in manufacturing craters?”
Of course there is. See “Moon is a Harsh Mistress” for details. I can think of at least two places whose gifting places with a megaton or so of asteroidal iron would improve Earth immeasurably. As long as they were delivered at escape velocity.
Jeff Says:
February 2nd, 2010 at 6:10 pm
So besides satellites what can you make money on in space ? Anyone ???
nothing else is the big fat answer … mining on the moon ? or mars ? Really ???? Does anyone think that mining ores on the moon or mars or the asteroids could ever be a money making venture within the next 50 years ?
grow up … a billionaires toy is what “commercial” space fight is … and will be for the next 50 years … it sucks, I’d love to go into space too but I gave up that childhood fantasy in grade school when I got glasses (no flight school, no astronaut wings, no space via NASA) …
If we don’t do it .In 50 years the Chinese will be living and mining on the moon. The automobile was once a rich mans toy.
Absent indulging in a pissing contest while the US was a creditor nation on the brink of nuclear war, nothing concrete has come from the space program except “scientific understanding.” You don’t even need to be a cynic to observe that the scientific understanding that’s been gleaned in the last 30 years has not been worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
A truth every Congressliar and Senator should by now know. But don’t. The US is nearly a quarter quadrillion dollars upside down. Privatize space from ground level to as far as anybody cares to go in it.
Please. Our future is not in technological advancement with silly, unproductive things like space exploration and nuclear energy.
Our future is in non-silly things like entitlement programs, welfare and nannystatism.
Our future is Detroit.
“The reason why it looks better to me is that it is probably going to be easier to run a radiation-free fusor by this method – most likely proton-B11 which creates no neutrons, and the side-reaction rate is extremely low. Which means no induced radioactivity in the walls of the reactor vessel; a very big problem for any fusion reactor that produces neutrons.”
The Polywell people under Navy contract have been working toward aneutronic proton-B11 fusion for quite some time now.
‘You don’t even need to be a cynic to observe that the scientific understanding that’s been gleaned in the last 30 years has not been worth hundreds of billions of dollars.’
Dead wrong, on multiple levels. It would have been worth more than that. And that neglects the role played in weather prediction, national security, communication, and agriculture and geological industries by orbital observation. Space flight has payed for itself in terms of hard money and lives saved.
The trouble is that the profit didn’t come in a direct form. The outlays from the Treasury are immediate and concentrated, the benefits are diffuse and spread out over time. So it looks like a loss when it’s actually a gain.
‘ “there has not been a Democratic president since Kennedy that gave a crap about the space program”
Um, you need to look further. Kennedy was not it.’
Too true. Kennedy was most definitely _not_ a space enthusisast as such. He was a cold warrior and looking for a prestige hit against the USSR, and probably even more he was an elected politician in trouble because of the bungle at the Bay of Pigs and some other things, and looking for something to refocus attention.
It’s come out since that Kennedy considered a number of things that might have served his purposes before settling on the Moon, it’s something of a historical accident that America went to the Moon in the 60s. For that matter, absent his assassination, which made his projects hard to touch afterward, Apollo probably would have been eliminated before we got there in the natural flow of politics.
Dead wrong, on multiple levels. It would have been worth more than that. And that neglects the role played in weather prediction, national security, communication, and agriculture and geological industries by orbital observation. Space flight has payed for itself in terms of hard money and lives saved.
These activities didn’t come out of the US space program of the past 30 years. Weather prediction? NOAA. National security? DoD and NRO. Communication? Commercial space. Agriculture and geology? The industries in question.
The trouble is that the profit didn’t come in a direct form. The outlays from the Treasury are immediate and concentrated, the benefits are diffuse and spread out over time. So it looks like a loss when it’s actually a gain.
In other words, it’s “unaccountable”.
‘And if Heinlein was also right that low g extends the lifespan, Luna can expect a flood of us old fogies willing to give up our Earthly possessions for a second career helping learn what else can be profitable ‘out there.’
They can mine the He-3. (He said sadly.)
Folks, Heinlein has become a big part of the problem for space enthusiasts. His vision of the future was fascinating fiction, but it turns out to have been fiction.
There is no reason whatever to believe that low gravity extends lifespan. Maybe it would, but that’s pure, data-free speculation and what little evidence we have argues _against_ the theory, and it did even decades ago.
We already know, from experience, that extended microgravity is a health disaster, on several levels. We don’t know if any level of gravity below 1G is sufficient to change that, we have no data, and that would IMHO actually be a peice of useful science that could be done in potential in LEO using tethers or some such technique. We simply don’t know how much gravity is ‘too little’ and we need to find out.
But intuition suggests that the best possible environment for a human being would be 1 gravity at standard temperature and pressure, i.e. Earth’s surface. That’s what we’e evolved to fit, at _best_ one would intuitively expect that non-Terrestrial environments would merely be ‘just as good’.
But Lunar retirement homes are not a killer app, they’re a wild-ass speculation, like Helium-3 mining.
‘These activities didn’t come out of the US space program of the past 30 years. Weather prediction? NOAA. National security? DoD and NRO. Communication? Commercial space. Agriculture and geology? The industries in question.’
Do you have any idea how silly the above statement is? I could legitimately accept your concession of defeat in the debate based on it alone.
Those activities _did_ come out of the U.S. space program, or rather the later contributed enormously to the former.
NOAA would have no satellites on their own. They wouldn’t exist, and satellites are _critical_ to weather forecasting. DoD and the intelligence apparat likewise rely on satellites for communications, observation, navigation, and weather. No space program, no satellites. (And military launches are just as much part of the space program as NASA).
As for commercial space, it exists _solely_ because of the previous governmental program. The technology they use was developed for the government’s purposes first, like it or not. Absent the government’s previous work, there would be no commercial space program now.
Agriculture and geology have their own space launch facilities? They would have developed their own earth orbit capabilities on their own? Get serious.
‘ “The trouble is that the profit didn’t come in a direct form. The outlays from the Treasury are immediate and concentrated, the benefits are diffuse and spread out over time. So it looks like a loss when it’s actually a gain.
In other words, it’s “unaccountable”.’
Nope. It’s cold fact. It’s just that the profits didn’t flow back to the Federal Treasury, they were spread across the enbtire country and the rest of the world.
‘As for SPS: Sure, if you loft all the megatons of structure into space from Earth’s surface, it will never be economically viable. However, there are other ways of getting those materials, and using them gives living space for quadrillions as a side benefit.’
Nope, they don’t. This is one of those daydreams that has enabled those hostile to space flight to paint supporters as being clueless dreamers.
O’Neil was economically aware enough to recognize that SPS could not work if based on materials hauled up the gravity well from Earth, so he cooked up the admitedly ingenious approach of mining the Moon. The trouble is that the plan is both somewhat dishonest in its intent, and based on false assumptions.
O’Neil wanted to build space habitats, and saw SPS as the economic rationale to support the idea. The trouble is that from an economic POV, the habitats are extraneous, if you assume that building SPS makes sense economically, it makes almost infinitely _more_ sense to build the Moon base, an orbital construction shack, and construct _just the powersats_ and leave the habitats out of the equation entirely. That way you get more powersats faster and for far less money and time.
(We don’t have the necessary knowledge and technology to build O’Neil’s habitats right now anyway, but that’s another issue.)
But in practice SPS makes no economic sense even assuming we get hte materials on the Moon or the asteroids, they STILL can’t compete with coal and uranium. They can’t even get close to being competitive. Even O’Neil himself admitted that his calculations in later years that his calculations were based on NASA’s predictions about Shuttle performance, and wouldn’t work given the real machine.
And even _that_ assumes that all the unanswered technical, environmental, and security questions associated with SPS turn out to have viable answers.
SPS is a pipe dream for the foreseeable future. I wish that wasn’t true, but it is. O’Neil habitats are even less probable. The space skeptics know that, and every time enthusiasts call for the construction of either, the skeptics gain a little ground.
Why I don’t necessarily disagree, HC, I think you’re tilting at windmills with the Heinlein thing. I suspect Heinlein’s point behind the lunar retirement home fiction is the concept of serendipity and the breaking of a cliche. Even at the time when Heinlein wrote those stories, science fiction had settled into a somewhat cliched vision of space as the American West. You had a bunch of homesteading families and businesses doing much of the same activities, farming, mining, gambling, etc. “Retirement home” is not a typical Wild West activity.
Science fiction stories like those of Heinlein are a large part of the reason we currently have a space program and inspired people to work in the industry. Sure it sucks when you have to deal with someone who thinks we should be implementing Star Trek technologies like warp drives and teleporters (yes, they are out there), but you also get the people who make the satellites and prep the rockets.
But taken to its extreme, you get the anti-hobbyist bias where one must hide any enthusiasm for a field of work.