Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Time Warp

18 Comments

I just noticed that space historian Roger Launius has a blog, which I’ve added to the roll on the left. And last week, he had a very peculiar post.

It’s actually a generally not-bad history of NASA’s (and the nation’s) continued attempts to replace the Shuttle, but it contains these words:

Without a doubt, moving to a next generation human launcher will cost a significant amount of money. It always has.

…No doubt, building a new human-rated launcher will require a considerable investment. If the United States intends to fly humans into space as the twenty-first century proceeds it must be willing to foot the bill for doing so.

There are two striking omissions in the narrative. First is the complete lack of mention of commercial space or privately developed systems, even failed ones. They don’t exist at all. It might have made sense to write such a piece in the early eighties, maybe even the early nineties, when it was still unimaginable in the conventional wisdom that there would be multiple solutions to the Shuttle replacement problem, let alone private ones.

But this is 2010. And this blog post was written only two days after the successful flight of the Falcon 9 and Dragon. It’s as though it didn’t happen, and remains so unlikely to that it isn’t worthy of mention in the context of the discussion.

So what does he think is a “significant amount of money”? Or a “considerable investment”? Because any rational analysis, based on SpaceX’s costs to date, would indicate that they are less than a billion dollars away from having a “new human-rated launcher” (ignoring the archaic and useless notion of “human rating” a twenty-first-century launcher designed to the current state-of-the-art in reliability). But no, because “it always has,” it always will.

It’s amazing how myopic the conventionally wise can be.

[Update a while later]

Speaking of myopic space historians (or policy analysts or both, depending on what you think he is), I hadn’t previously seen this quote from John Logsdon cited by Jeff Foust at today’s issue of The Space Review:

Others question just how “commercial” such systems could really be. “I think one of the worst things that happened in managing this revolutionary proposal with respect to human spaceflight is to call the transportation service ‘commercial,’” John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said in a space policy forum earlier this month hosted by the Marshall Institute. “There is no obvious market” right now for crewed flights beyond NASA’s needs, he claimed, and allowing that question to dominate the policy debate “is one of the policy failures of the last year.”

Well, let’s see. Space Adventures has had several customers for the Soyuz flights, and has more who would like to fly, but the supply seems to be the choke point. Bob Bigelow has MOUs with several nations who would like to lease his facilities who clearly can afford it, but in order to use them, their “astronauts” (or whatever they want to call them) will need rides to and from. In addition, Bob has offered hundreds of millions of dollars of his own (existing) money for the capability to offer such rides. Maybe John doesn’t want to call that a market, “obvious” or otherwise, “beyond NASA’s needs,” but it sure looks like one to me.

18 thoughts on “Time Warp”

  2. Myopic, I think. It simply isn’t visible through the prism of his comfortable historical narrative. If it were deliberate bias, he would have had all sorts of excuses why the SpaceX launch didn’t invalidate his thesis, because he’d realize how strange his piece looked in historical context without mentioning it. Instead, he’s simply blind to it.

  6. I’d like to expand a bit on the “human rated” issue;

    It’s not what most people seem to think it is. For example, when was the Shuttle human rated? The answer is “It never has been”.

    Falcon 9 probably can be human-rated (I believe it was designed with that in mind). However, that doesn’t change the fact that Shuttle was never human rated (and never could be).

    My hunch; if politicians try to kill off a manned Falcon 9 option in favor of pork, they’ll do it by applying overly rigorous “human rated” standards, ones that NASA has no intention of even trying to meet for itself.

    Personally, I’d like to see more than one type of manned launcher (Perhaps a manned EELV) available, so an accident won’t leave us totally grounded for years (as we saw with Shuttle).

  7. John Logsdon and Scott Pace of the GWU Space Policy Institute sometimes will intentionally deliver quotes to the press that support the positions of the people that fund them or have funded them in the past.

    Remember that Lori Garver at NASA was one of their students at GWU. They know and understand SpaceX very well, but there is a $100-Billion political constituency behind the traditional way of doing things and a tiny constituency behind SpaceX. It will be a long time before SpaceX pays enough money to GWU researchers before they start openly discussing alternatives to NASA’s traditional $100-Billion path.

  9. Without people holding politicians accountable things will not get better by politician’s hands. Companies like SpaceX will eventually replace the old pork systems, but not with any government help, and indeed against government obstruction.

    SpaceX just nullified half of Constellation in half the time and 10% the cost, and what change is it making? Almost nothing. It is just barely replacing Ares I and Orion. Shelby and all those guys are re-elected and/or poll as high as ever. And nobody outside NASA center states even know the debate exists.

  10. NASA’s already embraced commercial spacelift as far the sector can manage right now. Let’s revisit the point when Shuttle and Soyuz competitors on are actually on the pads.

  12. Orbital Sciences Corp. is proposing a new lifting-body spacecraft capable of carrying at least four passengers to orbit

    Well, between the hybrid problems, the Branson video at Burt’s retirement dinner, and this, sounds like Sir Richard’s given up on Scaled to get him to orbit. Which is wise, since they’ve never had a real plan to do it.

    Also, interesting that everyone loves Atlas.

  13. the Branson video at Burt’s retirement dinner

    Missed that one. What was the significance? Didn’t he show up in person or something?

  14. At some point, with increasing numbers of folk living their lives off planet, there will come a time when said numbers of off-planet folk will realize that a) they don’t need the home world and b) the home world can’t do anything effective about it. Perhaps someone in gummint is thinking far enough ahead to be trying to toss monkey wrenches into non-governmental attempts to get potentially permanently off this rock? This does appear to be the age of the Precautionary Principle run amok, after all.

  16. Perhaps someone in gummint is thinking far enough ahead to be trying to toss monkey wrenches into non-governmental attempts to get potentially permanently off this rock?

    You grant far too much foresight to people in government, or their ability to persuade other people in government to go along. Never attribute to malice that which can be accounted for by stupidity.

  17. it is discouraging how little regard the mainstream seems to have for SpaceX’s achievements. Myopic IS perhaps best word to describe it, and that includes the media as well as politicians and many analysts.

    It’s understandable, if no less aggravating, why the politicians have every incentive to keep the brakes on commercial human space flight development (just follow the money). The media’s relative inattention is less so. The short NY Times story on the Dragon’s maiden flight (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/science/space/09rocket.html) seemed as much concerned with Elon Musk’s perceived arrogance as with anything else. That sort of thing puts a damper on what should be seen as a historic day.

    Regardless, SpaceX WILL get people into orbit with or without mainstream support, although it might get dicey if NASA is forced to pull its funding. I don’t think that won’t happen, though. Once Shuttle is gone and we’re paying the Russians for rides, logic will prevail. We’re already on our way toward a sustainable space flight infrastructure, and there’s no stopping it.

    The real debate is whether NASA’s human space flight program will continue to be relevant, or whether it will get left in the commercial space flight industry’s exhaust plumes.

  18. Several years ago I was on the production floor quietly chatting with one of the other engineers about a small test set problem. When a slightly heated argument erupted between a different group of three engineers a few feet away. I don’t recall what they where arguing about but one guy finally realized that he was losing the argument even as he said it, “But that’s the way we have always done it…” Seeing the opportunity the other engineer yelled really loud “THAT’S BAD F***ING ENGINEERING, and you know it.” Imagine a huge room full of air tools, pneumatics and the general manufacturing noise dead quiet for about 15 seconds. For some reason this has always stuck in my head whenever anyone says “It’s always been done this way.” I instantly want to come back at them at full volume. I figure people that live in the past, will wake up one day and notice that they and most of their life’s work don’t matter. Sadly, I see NASA in such light.

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