Over at USA Today, I say that after four lost decades, it’s time to end it:
After over four decades, it is time to stop awaiting a repeat of a glorious but limited and improbable past. We must, finally, return to and embrace the true future, in which the solar system and ultimately the universe is opened up to all, with affordable, competing commercial transportation systems, in the way that only Americans can do it.
I’ll have some other stuff up later, in other venues.
All I see is one of those annoying pop-up commercials when I follow the link….
And folks wonder why fewer and fewer folks are visiting main stream media websites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Advisory_Committee_for_Aeronautics#mediaviewer/File:NACA_credo.jpg
Note the word: “practical”….
…the solar system and ultimately the universe is opened up to all, with affordable, competing commercial transportation systems,
Now that’s the nail we need to keep hammering. Solid article.
The cargo cult of Apollo won’t really go away until after the 50th anniversary, which people are already starting to think about.
When the Frontiers of Flight Museum approached me back at the 40th anniversary to help put together an event, I told them I had no interest in doing yet another Apollo retrospective. I told them that flogging children with Apollo to get them interested in space or STEM fields doesn’t work. Outer space doesn’t need Apollo to be interesting, so let’s just use the anniversary as an excuse to have a celebration about space exploration and its future. So that’s what we did, and we’re still doing it six years later, tomorrow, on the 45th anniversary.
Now we’ve got the biggest annual celebration of space exploration in Texas (and, therefore, the Universe), put together with an operating budget of $0. Thirty exhibitors, four classrooms of educational space content, a Girl Scout patch program, three inflatable planetariums, spacesuits, solar telescopes, Lunar Sample Bag swag bags (just under 2 kg this year), and much, much more. Our participants include universities like UTD, UTA, TCU, and UNT, corporations like TI, Lockheed Martin, and Mad Science of D/FW, non-profits like NSS, TMS, DMS, DARS, TASD, FWAS, CAP, DPRG, SWE, NSBE, and others, and museums like the Perot, the FW Museum of Science and History, and the Sci-Tech Discovery Center. If only I could get the Texas space companies to start showing off their stuff…sigh.
Apollo cult? Not here in North Texas. We’ve got our eyes firmly fixed on the future.
Ken, All,
Let me point you to a blog posting of mine I titled A Tale of Two Space Days. Yes, I led a team that got 2,000 people to come to a museum that, on a normal July Saturday, drew 50 to 75 people.
A number of people in aerospace want me to go away. They really don’t like my calls for open, democratic reform. They think my going away will be free. It won’t.
As I’ve mentioned before, the Apollo model is wholly inappropriate for the sort of exploration and other activities actually required in space. Apollo type projects are useful almost exclusively for PR, as the program was designed for. We do not need traditional manned “exploration” in the form of sailing or walking over the horizon to find out what, and who, is there. It’s not 1900 or 1500 anymore. We don’t need to walk across a continent to map it, we don’t need to sail into the unfilled in parts of the map. We’ve mapped the moon, we’ve mapped Mars, and Venus, and Jupiter, and Europa, and Ganymede, we’re going to map Ceres in a few years, etc.
If we are to “explore” space using humans they need to live in space for months or years at a time, they need to be able to put thousands of man-hours into in situ exploration and research. The Apollo model would allow us to do such research at a cost of around a billion dollars per hour (for EVAs). That’s simply not a feasible way to move forward. We need to reduce the costs and increase our capabilities in manned spaceflight, the Apollo model just isn’t good enough. We can and should do better. And there are dozens of ways to do so, none of them requiring expenditures on the scale of Apollo. We can develop and prove orbital propellant storage and transfer technologies. We can develop and build long duration, high reliability, low loss next generation life support systems. We can develop and build low cost, high reliability, partially reusable launch vehicles. We can research and develop in situ resource utilization on Mars. We can research and develop next generation space based propulsion and power systems (such as SPS, pulsed plasma thrusters, NTRs, space fission power reactors). We can research and develop systems and techniques for protecting against interplanetary radiation. We can research the impact and health effects of long duration zero-g and low-g living on the human body.
We could do all of these things for less than the budget of the SLS alone. By 2025 we could be able to look at a checklist and go down the list one by one: automated production of rocket fuel on Mars and use in a vehicle that returned to Earth: check; demonstrated on orbit propellant transfer, use, and storage for periods of up to several years: check; creation of next generation EVA suits with many hours of real-world on orbit testing validating their capabilities: check; demonstration of space based solar power systems for providing 24/7 power to surface locations on Mars: check; demonstration of the ability to shield against the vast majority of the most dangerous interplanetary radiation while in travel to/from Mars using active shielding: check; development of low cost launch vehicles: check. None of this is science fiction, these are things we can and should be doing right now but for the fact that manned spaceflight in the US has been beholden to petty political squabbling over the money trough of federal spending since the Johnson administration.
And we need to come out and say it that we’re not doing this for exploration, we’re doing it to lay the groundwork for colonization and utilization of the entire solar system. The exploration and science and so forth are just beneficial byproducts of that goal.
Apollo was a boon to STEM education. That is, it was for a while. In the 60s and early 70s kids could see the advances being made and extrapolate that into the future, and envision themselves living and working in space. However, instead of an increasing number of people going into space, with a launch to an orbiting space station as routine as a transcontinental flight by 2001, we got a handful of astronauts going to space year after year after year… after a while those years add up to decades of stagnation.
Ed, a number of years ago I posted a wicked comment on Facebook about this. What did I say? I said “If you told a resident of Haight Ashbury in 1969 that 40 years later none of the space exploration stuff in 2001: A Space Odyssey would have come true 40 years later but that General Motors would be in bankruptcy and Lincoln would be selling luxury, high end pickup trucks, they would have told you to ease up on the LSD and go talk to the nice people down at the free clinic.”
I hope people here get the point.