Mark Steyn reflects on the passing of John Glenn. I don’t agree entirely, and I think he misses some key points, one of which was that Apollo was a battle in the Cold War that didn’t have much to do with space. With regard to Charlton, anyone who thinks we’re in technological decline, and unable to do great things any more hasn’t been paying attention to what’s been happening in microelectronics, microbiology, and yes, spaceflight. I’d suggest that Mark read my recent essay on the need to get over Apolloism.
[Update a while later]
Henry Vanderbilt weighs in over at Arocket:
Apollo was amazing, yes. But it did things the brute-force, massively-expensive way. Just look at the size of a Saturn 5 ready for liftoff, versus how much came back. Multiply that by the size of the payroll for the hundreds of thousands building and operating it, spread over a handful of missions a year. That’s a lot of expensive aerospace talent and hardware spent on every mission – billions worth.
Of course, they had no choice but to do it that way. They had an urgent national goal, a tight deadline, an effectively unlimited budget – and a 1962 technology base. One example: The computer that flew a Saturn 5 weighed as much as a small car – and was less powerful than the chips we put in toasters.
Two things happened after Apollo, one immediately bad, one eventually good.
The bad thing is that in the seventies, bureaucrats took over, and did what bureaucrats do: They carved into stone doing things the Apollo way. Shuttle resulted: gorgeous, yes, but only somewhat less expendable and slightly less labor-intensive than Saturn 5. And, alas, somewhat more fragile.
For decades this bureaucracy defended their billions-per-mission turf and defeated all efforts to do things less expensively. (In fact it’s still trying, with a MANY-billions-per-mission bastard offspring of Shuttle and Saturn 5 called “Space Launch System”.)
But the other thing that happened is, back in the eighties a few of us saw this bureaucratic logjam forming, and looked into whether space really had to cost billions per mission. We concluded it didn’t. We began pushing the different approaches it’d take to get costs down to where all the useful things we might do in space begin to be affordable.
It took a lot longer than we hoped getting into this. But thirty years later, commercial space companies are doing things at a tenth of traditional NASA costs. And that’s even before the really radical new technologies kick in, like the reusable flyback boosters just entering test in the last couple of years.
I won’t defend the wasted decades. (It wasn’t us wasting them, though at a number of points we could have been less naive about how ruthlessly the bureaucrats would defend their turf.)
But at this point, despair over the wasted decades is obsolete. Costs are coming down fast, huge possibilities are opening up. We could still blow it, yes. But compared to even just five or ten years ago, right now the future’s so bright I gotta wear shades.
Henry Vanderbilt
Space Access Society
(founded in 1992 with the intent of being no longer needed and disposed of in five years. yeah well.)
As I said on the Space Show the other week, the future for human spaceflight has never been more exciting.
“One example: The computer that flew a Saturn 5 weighed as much as a small car”
Just to nitpick, the LVDC weighed less than a hundred pounds, and even the Peel P50 (reportedly the world’s smallest production car) weighed 123lbs.
But, yeah, I remember even Arthur C Clarke saying one time that humans went into space fifty years before it was technologically possible. Which explains why we’re seeing a lot of movement in the industry now.
You really need to ask for an “I Corrected Henry” t-shirt, they are as rare as winning a quarter from Kelly Johnson used to be.
Are you confusing him with Henry Spencer?
You’re right, I misread, never mind…..
That’s Henry Spencer, not Henry Vanderbilt.
If you included the wiring and other electronics as part of the computers, the weight would be vastly higher.
Now that the tech is here the men are’t.
Why haven’t they been cultivated and groomed? If the (presumably ‘qualified’) folks aren’t here, whose fault is that?
While I’m not certain, I think he was talking about the Saturn V Instrument Unit. That unit, which included more than just the computer, weighed 4,400 pounds and is what flew the Saturn V.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V_Instrument_Unit
Shrug. Computer, guidance computer, guidance system – when you’re writing to make a point within the attention span of the average comments reader, you go for brevity. The S5 guidance system massed a couple tons, the modern equivalent can fit in a lunchbox with room for dessert, the modern processing-power equivalent fits in a USB dongle.
But yeah, I’m not the Henry with the collectible virtual t-shirts. (Mind, I have a couple of his. Took near thirty years, but I have a couple )
Yes, I have a couple, too, but I only remember what one of them is for.
I have two (actual, cotton) t-shirts from the 1990s that I think might be from you Henry. I know I obtained them via sci.space from the same source. One is a DC-X shirt. The other is says
“HAL 9000 Bulletin Board Systems, Ann Arbor MI” and then a phone number and then v.32bis. 🙂 Are they, in fact, from you? Or if not, does anyone remember the source of these shirts?
We never did t-shirts. I have an old DC-X t-shirt myself, but it was from the White Sands Missile Range people who were testing DC-X. As for the HAL-9000 BBS t-shirt, your guess is as good as mine.
the future for human spaceflight has never been more exciting
Imagine how exiting it would be if the pace were set by capitalism which it now is not. We wouldn’t care how NASA wastes the taxpayers money because it wouldn’t make a dent in actual space activities.
When Dragons start landing on mars every launch window with a diverse customer base of payloads then you will begin to see some real excitement. That’s when normal people will get involved.
What is the value that will cause a diverse customer base to want to pay for Dragons on Mars?
What would anyone ever do on the internet?
Actually when the ARPANET was designed they conceived the e-mail application almost immediately. Sure the Web came up a lot later. But you still need to have an initial use case.
Regarding Mars other than permanent settlement I can’t think of a reason to go there. It would take a lot of work to make it habitable though. You just need to read about early settlement in the Americas or Australia to see the problems and that was on Earth with a lot better living conditions.
Michael, you aught to be able to come up with the answer yourself. With regular red Dragons anybody can put something on mars for a marginal cost rather than a full mission cost. What those somethings might be is almost unlimited.
We could certainly do the precursor missions for a mars colony but that’s just tip of the berg. We could send enough cheap rovers to cover an area without worrying if some were lost. Before a single colonist lands we could know the rate of resource extraction and proportions of various elements in an area.
Robotic surveyors could mark plots for auction. Kids could explore mars with a school rover or play rover soccer against each other! Tanks of liquefied gases and tanks of water and solar power grids could be established and waiting. Structures built. They could fly kites if they wanted. All because the space on the Dragon will be essentially free with the main payload (whatever that may be) covering the cost.
Michael, just ran across this.
As a child of Apollo (I was one of the millions of 10 year olds who watched Neil and Buzz on the Moon) I can understand the attraction of that paradigm. The adult me knows the Apollo way only works in the middle of an ideological life and death struggle between super powers. Minus that urgency of purpose, a government sponsored space program will tend to look more like a high tech jobs program (cough-SLS-cough) than anything else. I see what folks like Musk are up to as the true way for a sustainable space development.
I like Steyn, but I just can’t understand how someone can be oblivious to the incredible things that have happened in my lifetime. Outpatient cataract surgery! Hip replacements that really work! Cell phones! – with more computing power than any computer from my youth! The list is absolutely endless.
When I was a kid, we were going to be living on the Moon, taking holidays on giant space stations, and flying on hypersonic airliners if we were going somewhere on Earth. Cellphones don’t really seem that exciting in comparison.
I think a lot of people would happily trade the future we got for the one we were promised. Heck, we don’t even have supersonic airliners any more.
No, you weren’t going to be living on the moon. The fact you were lied to about those things doesn’t mean there was any realistic chance they were going to happen. Things can be exciting if they don’t have to also be real.
I think a lot of people would happily trade the future we got for the one we were promised.
Is it an either or situation? I would gladly take our current present over the alternative. Cell phones and the internet have been not only revolutionary but have beneficially impacted far more lives than faster planes or some government workers living on the Moon.
I’m not even convinced that living on the Moon would be an enjoyable lifestyle.
But if we live long enough, we will have our cake and eat it too.
I’ll add a couple of things to that list: an actual cure for stomach ulcers (the guys that discovered Helicobacter Pylori’s role even got a Nobel Prize); biosynthetic human insulin; fiber optics; neodymium magnets; LED lighting; solid-state storage (NAND Flash); laser printers; actual flat screens that can hang on a wall like a painting; capacitive touchscreens; FADEC; composites; VTVL orbital rockets.
I can’t help but feel that Steyn’s real lament is with the culture, rather than with the technology (which has, of course, in so many ways continued to advance). I don’t know how vested he really is in Charlton’s theorizing, but most of his comments seem to directed at how American political culture can no longer achieve great things.
And no doubt that culture is moribund in the way Steyn laments because it’s far less homogeneous or unified than it was mid-century. But perhaps it’s also true because, as Deke Slayton (the first of the Mercury 7 to die of natural causes) once observed, America really needs a competitor of some kind to achieve greatness. Without the Soviet space program, there’s no Apollo, a project that arguably (as Edward Grant seems to suggest) had no business happening for a couple generations given the state of the technology on offer.
One thing made Apollo a lot easier. The LOX/LH2 cryogenic technology. It was basically developed for the USAF for the Suntan Program reconnaissance project. The alternative was probably to use staged combustion engines, like the Soviets, but it took them basically an extra decade to debug them. I do agree that without some kind of competition it is hard to find the motivation to excel.
On that regard imagine there was no SpaceX and China launched their Long March 5 rocket… Have you looked at the specs?