Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

A Harsh Assessment Of The Past Half Century

19 Comments

…in space. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that we’ve pi**ed away fifty years — we did lay a foundation for what’s to come, but we certainly could have been a lot further along with smarter policy, actually focused on opening up space (something that US space policy has never been). Several people at the suborbital conference here have commented (as I often do) that there is very little happening today in the newspace world, at least suborbitally, that we couldn’t have been doing twenty, or even thirty years ago (though modern computer and manufacturing technology has certainly made things cheaper and faster). But we have another half century to start getting it right. I hope.

19 thoughts on “A Harsh Assessment Of The Past Half Century”

  2. Fundamentally the guy’s right, and the variety of opportunities the NSRC has highlighted, along with the announcements from Virgin and XCOR, have put the point in sharp relief.

    We’re in the “multiple providers proliferate multiple ideas in actual flying equipment” era of spaceflight. Like it’s, oh, 1910 for aviation, finally.

    Some of the ‘leftovers’ from the last 50 years have and will continue to be useful. But I can feel the space world really starting to move in the right direction beneath me. It’s exciting.

    I’m also p****d that in the process i’ve ‘lost’ 50 years of my life but I’ve felt we could be on the verge of this for years. Thought I’d gotten over the resentment of the lost years, but there’s still a difference btwn seeing it coming and seeing it happening.

    But I’ll pull together and continue to do what I can to help.

  3. I think we pissed away the last thousand years. It’s just that the last 50 are too obvious to completely ignore.

    The easiest thing in the world is to say, “it can’t be done.” Since the perfect counter argument doesn’t exist yet. Progress happens when people willing to risk the resources swim against the current of naysayers. This is why innovation happens more in garages than skyscrapers.

    If it takes a thousand failures to get one success, we should be funding millions of failures. This is why building and doing are so important, you fail your way to success. Perfection is a brick wall. Failure is how you get things done. “Perhaps steel nuts that don’t corrode are better than aluminum ones that do?”

  4. For the past 30 years NASA has spent >$3B a year in today’s money on Shuttle launches. Imagine what could have happened if they had spent that money on competitively procured launches instead. By now we’d likely have had cheap lift, probably through RLVs, and large scale commercial manned spaceflight.

  5. The industrial revolution so nearly happened in the time of the Greeks/Romans, they had complex gears, primitive engines (Hero’s turbine). Sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health the roads (I get all my history from “Life of Brian”) – we have lost around 2000 years!

    I think the Space Shuttle did demonstrate a lot with regard to reusability. Sure it was a camel and too big to cost effectively do what it needed to do to the extent that it poisoned the well preventing timely follow ons, but at least it actually flew (unlike the rest of NASA’s ill conceived replacements).

    A shuttle with a ~2 ton payload, internal tanks and a fly back liquid propellant first stage (boosters or piloted stage) could have I think been a rather nice vehicle and a good fit to the evolutionary development path. Such vehicles were in consideration at the time – but the heavy lift mafia got their way and that was the end of that.

  6. Thanks for the link to that opinion piece… Very thought-provoking, and I can’t say that I disagree with him. This needs to be quoted in full:

    Now it’s over. Instead of bitching about President Obama “yielding our dominance in space”, you should be breathing sighs of relief. (It’s not his fault anyway; the Bush Administration decreed it, and like everything Barry-O does that actually works, he just went along.) The Ares component of the Constellation program was a hopeless-from-the-start attempt to re-use Shuttle components in a new configuration and save all that lovely pork; the deader it is, the better off we are.

  8. The ultimate futility of Mercury/Apollo can be summarized in a single sentence: It left nothing behind that was usable later.

    I’ve said much the same thing myself, perhaps more harshly than Ric. He’s pretty much bang-on.

  9. The Greeks and Romans also had slaves–huge numbers of them–and it’s been suggested (by a writer whose name escapes me at the moment, unfortunately) that’s exactly why they didn’t create the Industrial Revolution. Why bother with machinery to move a heavy object, when you can just compel a thousand strong backs to move it for you?

    The same writer equates our modern use of oil with the classical world’s use of slaves. Both are vast reservoirs of usable energy. Our version is substantially more humane. OT, but hey.

  10. The same writer equates our modern use of oil with the classical world’s use of slaves. Both are vast reservoirs of usable energy. Our version is substantially more humane. OT, but hey.

    What great advance are we missing out on? Even “green” and nuclear power, “green” transportation, and arcologies progress on their own despite the massive reliance on oil. And to be honest, that’s just pretty much the sum and total of the sort of technologies which would be held back by a oil-plentiful world. In contrast, I have awesome point to point transportation.

  11. Why bother with machinery to move a heavy object, when you can just compel a thousand strong backs to move it for you?

    Actually I suspect this says rather a lot about how the US has lost its way, it is now trying to globally compete with China on low wage jobs.

    One suggestion for why the industrial revolution happened in Europe and not elsewhere was that in Europe states started competing for productive citizens. Productive citizens became highly prized and low productivity citizens were greatly discouraged. While NASA perhaps still has a focus on productive citizens (unlike a significant proportions of the rest of the country), it has not had a focus on productive outcomes for a good fifty years – it has been wasting its productive citizens. Hopefully New Space can change that with a much greater productivity focus, perhaps even leading humanity into a second industrial revolution – in space.

  12. >>We’re in the “multiple providers proliferate multiple ideas in actual flying equipment”

    I mean, i’d love to sing with the choir, but there is not much of an actual flying equipment right this moment, anywhere. For example, Armadillo has been 12 months from an actual space launch for .. past 10 years.

    Not to detract from the visible successes, but its too early to claim any real victories.

  14. Lee, once again, i’ve seen these videos, been to the conference, and fully agree there is room for cautious optimism.

    But with the sole exception of a single flight campaign of SS1 none of the gear shown here has gotten anywhere close to space. Yet.

  16. Shuttle wasn’t a total waste; we got really good at constructing and servicing things in orbit. Of course, Griffin wanted to throw away all that hard-earned skill by re-doing Apollo. So really, the last two years have seen us narrowly avoid p*ssing away some things. Look on the bright side!

  17. Anyone notice that Mercury/Apollo was a Democratic operation? Massively Democratic Congress, Kennedy and LBJ? That’s what Democrats are like. Apollo/Mercury was the High Speed Rail of the 1960s. I’ll bet the guys who advised Pharaoh Khufru to pour twenty years of lives and treasure into building a really f**king enormous pointed pile of rocks were Democrats, too, in all but name.

    I liked this line, too:

    It was the biggest, most extravagant movie ever made

    Again, that’s what Democrats enjoy: movie-making. “Avatar” is far realer to them then some dull little telescope doing itsy bitsy tedious work to find extrasolar planets. The speeches and glorious process of passing Obamacare are far more consequential than any tedious 5% reduction in the size of a check someone writes his doctor, achieved in some boring pedestrian way like free market competition.

    This fellow says Apollo left nothing behind that could be re-used. What many don’t realize is that to Democrats this is a feature, not a bug. It means you get to do it all again! Another Great Pyramid Great Society project, a war to make the world safe, a Grand Project to harness all the squabbling peasants into the one mighty shiny social machine, with I’ll give you one guess who driving.

  18. Carl, I heard Hoover Dam described as the Apollo program of the 30s on a documentary. I guess that makes the ISS the big project of the 90s. So we’re due for another in the 2020s.. Mars?

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