No, not about Bruno, but about the history of exploration:
There is no nice, clean line between private “buck making” and high-minded government exploration just for the sake of it. From the Wright Brothers making the key advances in aviation to IBM funded Nobel Prize winning basic research, innumerable breakthroughs in science and technology have been led by private non-governmental ventures.
Yes. It’s the post-war government funding that’s been an anomaly, historically. Fortunately, when it comes to spaceflight, that era is ending.
“There is no nice, clean line between private “buck making” and high-minded government exploration just for the sake of it. From the Wright Brothers making the key advances in aviation to IBM funded Nobel Prize winning basic research, innumerable breakthroughs in science and technology have been led by private non-governmental ventures.”
When has there *ever* been “high-minded government exploration just for the sake of it.”?
I can’t recall one time ever.
Governments spend money for exploration because they figure they will get something out of it. If nothing else, our Space Program keeps a cadre of highly educated, highly trained scientists and engineers handy in case there’s some sort of national emergency.
This line of thinking is so absurd. We’re witnessing, right now, how a real, sustained private sector space industry can work. When it happens, at far lower cost, it’ll open up space, not involve us visiting the Moon at great cost and piddling around in LEO for decades.
I get the antagonism that people in the private sector have toward the government but I don’t get the antagonism that people in the public sector have toward the private sector. The actions of government are fueled by the energy of the private sector.
A lot of corporations don’t make long term investments on R&D. They have a short term view of the market. But this does not mean all corporations are this way. IBM is one example but there are more. It does require a commitment for a long term presence in a market and the explicit corporate policy to fund long term R&D even if a lot of the avenues you will pursue turn out to be dead ends. Not all companies are interested in doing that.
I said before and I will say it again. SpaceX is not like most companies. SpaceX is a vertically integrated company with a long term vision and strategy. This means that not only do they actively fund increasingly better technological solutions but that they are able to know what works and what does not work because they have real working knowledge of how to solve the problems.
If they get Raptor to work they will have a state of the art engine. If they make that reusable tens of times and make a reusable vehicle they will have achieved something no one else has achieved before.
Merlin is no slouch either. As it stands it has better performance than any other gas generator LOX/Kerosene engine *ever*.
How many bales of money has the US government spent on full flow staged combustion with nothing to show for it?
SpaceX will of course start using well established technologies but from what I have heard from them they would not be afraid to pursue leading edge propulsion R&D if you could make a business case for it.
“I said before and I will say it again. SpaceX is not like most companies. SpaceX is a vertically integrated company with a long term vision and strategy.”
In relation to the thread the other day about a Falcon X, some people were saying it will never happen and that working on it now is a waste of money. As you point out, they have a long term vision. SpaceX ins’t planning on flying a Falcon X anytime soon but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t lay the groundwork. How many of the capabilities for re-usability were being worked on when the Falcon 9 was just an idea? It is kinda cool they are letting people get a glimpse of what may come a decade or two from now.
In the short term, isn’t the Raptor intended for use on their second stage?
Raptor was originally supposed to be a 2nd stage engine. But 1 million lbf is more thrust performance than that of an RD-180 rocket engine as used on the Atlas V. They are using staged combustion as well so I see little reason for the thrust-to-weight ratio to be anything other than good. There seems to be little reason to doubt that it will be used in first stages.
It seems too overpowered to use in a Falcon 9 2nd stage though. They are supposed to be going to test a downscaled version of the engine first. Is that going to be used on the 2nd stage? Or will they keep using Merlin? Or will they develop something else? That is a good question.
Yes, even with the Apollo example, who, precisely, built everything?
Tyson is reasoning from a single data point (“Columbus was funded by the government”) to his desired conclusion (“all exploration must be done by the government”).
Worse, his datapoint is wrong.
Still, worse, he has been informed that it is wrong, and he continues to use it in his public lectures.
But he’s “the sexiest astrophysicist in America” and has multiple tv shows, which makes him an expert in every field of human endeavor. 🙂
The “single data point” also includes Lewis and Clark, Captain James Cook, the Cabot brothers, and a host of others. Sorry in this case Tyson is correct,
There were many more private than government explorers.
Sorry, but all the Native Americans that Lewis and Clark encountered, and the Pacific Islanders and Aboriginies Captain Cook met, were there because of a massive government exploration program 14,000 or so years ago, run by the
Office of Good Game Over That Hill, I Swear. We Adventure, Yes? (usually abbreviated OgGoThisWay). To claim otherwise would imply that the government exploration program was running a whole glaciation cycle behind the private exploration efforts.
Come now, George. You don’t mean to imply that Paleolithic hunters crossed the Bering Strait without a modern welfare state and social safety net, do you?
Who would create the necessary 5-year plans and ensure that all equipment had the proper Technology Readiness Level? If someone fell through the ice, who would pull them out, without a Department of Health and Human Services and Federal Emergency Management Agency?
I’m just saying that paleolithic people were more advanced than generally credited. If you look at some of the amazing prehistoric cave art in Southern France, you’ll notice it bears a striking similarity to the organizational and data flow planning diagrams for Obamacare, the most sophisticated health system ever attempted.
Certainly such people had to be more competent at government than our current crop of bureaucrats, otherwise all the cavemen would’ve gone extinct from ill-conceived hunting and gathering bans, along with universal spear, ax, and atlatl confiscations.
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Funny but isn’t a tribal system still a form of government?
No, Mark. Tyson did *NOT* include Lewis and Clark, James Cook, or the Cabot Brothers.
His argument was based on Columbus. Period. You were too lazy to read the argument you are defending?
Your knowledge of history is also lacking. John Cabot’s ledger shows that he received financing from the Bardi family banking firm in London. It is believed he may have received financing from Friar Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis as well. (See “John Cabot and his Italian Financiers” by Francesco Guidi Bruscoli.)
As for Lewis and Clark, five minutes of research would show you that the Corps of Discovery were neither the first, the last, or the only expedition to reach the Pacific Northwest. Alexander Mackenzie led an expedition for the North West Company 10 years before Lewis and Clark. (See “First Across the Continent: Sir Alexander Mackenzie” by Barry Gough.)
Like Tyson, you have a fixed ideological belief in government as the source of all human progress. Unfortunately for you and Tyson, history does not support your belief.
Edward,
Last I read, Ferdie and Izzy funded two of the boats and they had to get business people to fund the third. This was not the case?
No, the ships were leased. What the Crown provided was not funds but incentives, in the form of a royal patent. See:
http://rocketforge.org/2013/01/10/lessons-in-exploration-from-columbus-and-the-spanish-crown.html
Edward I used the word “funded” for a reason. “Funded” does not preclude “leased”.
My question still stands:
Didn’t the crown fund two of the boats and private backers the third?
Gregg
“Yes. It’s the post-war government funding that’s been an anomaly, historically. Fortunately, when it comes to spaceflight, that era is ending.”
Sooo you’re predicting the end of the commercial crew subsidy program?
If NASA had not actively forced Mir to be deorbited there would be some other place to send people to than the ISS. MirCorp wanted to buy it. NASA claimed it would ‘distract’ the Russians from building the ISS if they were funded by a private company to keep Mir up. As if the Russians wouldn’t be able to increase production rate as long as there was demand for it. Sheesh.
If MIRCorp were to pick up the Full Cost of running Mir it would have gotten
pricey fast.
2 Progress launchers, 2 Soyuz, plus ground support, logistics, all that’s expensive.
Even if MirCorp were selling a tourist a month that would still need the Mir operating
crew, and RosCosmos overheads.
You can’t end something that doesn’t exist.
Subsidy or no subsidy? It could go either way depending on your skill with grammatical alchemy but it certainly isn’t a subsidy the way the word is normally used. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/subsidy
The critics of Tyson are also oversimplifying. There isn’t just a spectrum between governments and private enterprises for profit. Not-for-profit public charities and private foundations are also part of the effort. Non-government is not the same as private for-profit.
And I think he’s more right than wrong. For-profit private enterprise has a very important role to play in space, but has yet to take the lead. The first artificial satellite, the first man in space, the first visit to an asteroid: private enterprise has shown that it can do the first at a profit, and may eventually do the second and third, but it won’t be the leader.
(Arguably, the Russians can do the second now, but only on a marginal basis after their government paid for the R&D and fixed cost.)
How are we “oversimplifying”? We did not say private enterprise never does anything without expecting a profit. It was Tyson who said that.
private enterprise wants a ROI.
For things that take a few years and are a little risky, it would seem
hard to make the business case.
The claim that private enterprise never does anything without anticipating a direct financial return is a common socialist slander.
In the real world, non-profit non-governmental institutions not only exist, they are quite common.
James Lick did not expect a return on investment from building the Lick Observatory.
“James Lick did not expect a return on investment from building the Lick Observatory.”
Sure he did. It’s just that it wasn’t money.
EVERYONE and every entity wants an ROI.
EVERYONE and every entity wants an ROI.
Yeah. Columbus did go to the Portuguese King first but he refused to finance his expedition. That’s when he went to Spain. A lot of people back then knew Columbus’s claim about the size of the Earth were plain wrong. India was just too far away in a western route.
So which government funded Marco Polo’s trip to Asia then? *crickets chirping*
And don’t forget George Hale, the man behind Yerkes, Mount Wilson, and Mount Palomar. Yerkes was funded by Charles Yerkes, a financier who also built the London underground. The other two were funded by Carnegie. Back then, space exploration was privately funded by the ultra-rich.