An interview with Margaret Lazarus Dean, whose new book
Part-memoir, part-historical document, part-manifesto, Margaret Lazarus Dean’s perceptive new book Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight (which will be released May 19) asks the question, ”What does it mean that we have been going to space for 50 years and have decided to stop?”
Ummmm…we haven’t “decided to stop.” We’ve been going into space continually since the Shuttle was retired. Within two years, we’ll be doing it on American vehicles from American soil.
I do think there is a popular attitude right now, popular among young and old alike, that government always mucks everything up by its very nature, that private enterprise can always do everything better, and that attitude is particularly dangerous to funding big unprofitable projects like spaceflight. I meet a lot of people who are under the impression that SpaceX is going to take over, and improve upon, everything NASA did, but that’s a misunderstanding of the scope of SpaceX’s plans. A project like going to Mars, which is the next logical step, is so massively expensive it can only be paid for by a federal government. So if we want to go there, we are going to have to learn to trust.
Nonsense.
Going to Mars is prohibitively expensive because of government spending insanity, not because it has to cost a hundred billion to get there.
Thanks again for doing the heavy lifting. Now I don’t have to bother with a book that clearly offers little value. That quote was sufficient for me.
Why not trust the people that spend billions to make terrible websites or leave their guns in public restrooms or mistreat the people who pay their salaries?
I don’t get the views that sending people offworld is only the domain of the government or only the domain of the private sector. The reality is that we have used and will use both.
Government isn’t creative and it doesn’t seek to implement the desires of millions of individuals. That is what the private sector is for. Dramatic progress will only be made when individuals, and their companies, will be able to realize their diverse dreams. The government can help that happen or hinder it but it cannot replace it.
“A project like going to Mars, which is the next logical step, is so massively expensive it can only be paid for by a federal government.”
Or, someone can expand space exploration so that it isn’t so massive expensive. When I worked for Bellcore back in the 80’s, one of our major projects was selling solutions to industries that would connect the important players. Let doctors get their reports electronically from hospitals, or lawyers make court filings electronically. There was market interest, but it would be _so massively expensive_ to build the infrastructure necessary to connect them. Other industries had little interest – what could they do with it that would help them? They couldn’t think of anything. No use to them.
We were very jealous of the French Minitel system, where they _gave away terminals free_ to anyone who wanted them. It was an amazing success: within years, there were _literally hundreds_, even thousands, of on-line services available to their customers. We Americans were crippled, though, by the antitrust breakup that made it impossible for us to copy them.
Then came the internet. We gave them DSL/ISDN, and a little bit of software to make the www work, and it happened on its own.
By the bye, my son and I went last week to take his drivers license road test. He had signed on online on the MVA website, signed up for a road test appt, and gotten his email confirmation and confirmation number. When we got there, they had no record of it of any kind. They gave us a number so we could wait to talk to a supervisor (30 minute wait). She was very sympathetic (I made that up), but they are booked solid. She managed to squeeze him in by the end of the month. We’ll see.
[They have this awesome system for waiting where you get a letter and a number; for instance, we were S-16. Then a neat screen where it announces the current calls, F-28, G-52, T-739. Usually the numbers next to the letters grow slowly, F-28, F-29,…, but sometimes they jump unpredictably, like T-739 to T-141. We, of course, cared only about S-?, and we didn’t see any S’s at all till my son’s was called. As opposed to the fairly simple and obvious “take a number” at my local supermarket, where you can tell exactly where you are in the line, this seemed to be a brilliant design to keep everyone from any way of knowing how long you had to wait.]
My son’s comment at the end of all this: Do you really expect me to trust these people with my health care?
I have seen those systems elsewhere. The idea is you have multiple queues for multiple kinds of requests which have different priorities of service. Each queue, in principle, is usually ordered.
I do find the going from T-739 to T-141 weird but it CAN happen. Let’s say someone is waiting for a meeting with a specific person but the virtual queue “T” is for “meetings” in general.
I see these all the time in public services, banks, and any other place which has multiple service queues.
I’m a US ex-pat living in S.Korea. The different codings for different types of licenses sounds similar to the system Korean immigration has for different types of foreign visas. However, if you have a Korean spouse, the process goes MUCH faster.
The ONLY thing the government can do economically is screw things up.
Musk publishes, for anyone to see, 13.2 tons to mars orbit on Falcon Heavy with a price range of $85m to $125m. Not counting payload costs that’s 105 tons to mars orbit for a single billion. Add $75m per lander ($600m) to get perhaps 25 tons to the surface.
That’s about 15 tons per billion to the surface of mars.
NASA might try to put a 23 ton BA330 on the surface of mars, but that’s stupid. A habitat on mars might include a ton of material from earth and another ton of equipment and tools to build a thousand ton, multi-chamber, habitat on mars in a month which could then be continuously expanded from there. That’s just 2 tons of that 15, or just one FH ($200m w/payload.)
We need bigger cluebats.
Musk publishes, for anyone to see, 13.2 tons to mars orbit on Falcon Heavy with a price range of $85m to $125m.
Where’s that? The SpaceX website currently only lists one Falcon Heavy price, $90m for up to 6.4mT to GTO. Based on that, I’d expect them to charge much more than $125m for 13 tons to Mars (presumably they couldn’t recover the first stage cores in the latter case).
I do hope SpaceX gets the FH flying in the next year, and pulls in enough profit launching comsats, DOD satellites and ISS missions to be able to finance a mission to Mars, with or without government funding.
The Falcon Heavy has a GTO mass of over 21 Tons. 13 tons sounds right for TMI.
You sure you ain’t looking at the specs for the single stick Falcon Jim?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy
I’m looking at the posted price for Falcon Heavy; they haven’t posted prices for anything heavier than 6.4mT. I believe that the 21 Ton to GTO figure assumes crossfeed, and it isn’t clear that they’re working on that any more.
Jim, 85 to 125 is the range for all FH missions which is why I used 125 in my calcs. My sentence was clumsy.
Look at technical overview for payload to mars (orbit.)
presumably they couldn’t recover the first stage cores in the latter case
I believe the side cores would be recoverable although perhaps not the central core. I have no link for that.
A project like going to Mars, which is the next logical step, is so massively expensive it can only be paid for by a federal government. So if we want to go there, we are going to have to learn to trust.
Depends on how it is done. Using a stepping stone aproach with use of in-space resources instead of bringing everything along for the ride will be immensely cheaper.
I doubt we’ll see Mars settlement in the next 20 years. Flags and footprints is possible but basically useless. What we could be working now is Moon settlement. The travel times and comms times are a lot shorter and make the possibility of recovery from issues a lot more doable.
Godzilla, Stepping stones is cheaper only after you amortize the up front costs which are considerable. Mars settlement could start today with testing of the Dragon red lander.
Did you see the pad abort test? Imagine it at 38% g.
Also, by keeping incremental steps reasonably you can do things in parallel… both go directly to mars and build infrastructure.
A master plan that doesn’t show ongoing tangible results risks losing support.
“I do think there is a popular attitude right now, popular among young and old alike, that government always mucks everything up by its very nature.”
Well, you know, it might be popular because it’s based on actual experience.
NASA has had its success, of course – we all know that. It has had some successful robotic exploration, some worthwhile research and tech development, and of course there was that whole Moon landing thing. Yet even the Apollo Program showed the pitfalls of Government Space: It was a program ordered to waste anything but time, and given a clear goal and endless cash, it succeeded in doing it, wasting, indeed, everything but time. When it was over, what we were left with, tangibly, was a giant Sunbelt jobs program.
But that old Apollo mindset still lingers, obviously, and entrances many people – even some pro-market conservatives.
I find it interesting how the final remark is “learn to trust”. Learning to trust is easy. Charlie Brown showed us how to do it. Rationalize that this time Lucy won’t take the football away.
I’m not surprised that someone this clueless would think that the fundamental problem is a learning problem. If only we’d learn to be more gullible, then everything would be better. Reality doesn’t work that way.
I meet a lot of people who are under the impression that SpaceX is going to take over, and improve upon, everything NASA did, but that’s a misunderstanding of the scope of SpaceX’s plans.
I don’t think she has any idea what SpaceX’s plans are. Far, far more ambitious than NASA’s these days, that’s for sure.
Rand, I think you tweeted a while back that things will be better when we have the space *economy* instead of the space *program* (if not, 1E6 apologies for putting words in your mouth). Dean obviously thinks the end all/be all point of human spaceflight is a flags and bootprints mission to Mars. She doesn’t see space as an economic frontier, a place to make money. I meet a lot of people like her and I’ve had a hard time swaying their opinion.