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Fox Feedback On International Cooperation

OK, I've gotten several interesting and thoughtful responses to my Fox column, so I'll publish and respond here.

BTW, in response to popular demand and threatens of lynchings, I'm going to start using blockquotes for excerpts, rather than italics--I'm told that it's easier on the eyes.

Scott Abercrombie writes:

I agree with you that competition is the way to go in space exploration. Unfortunately, there are many idiots out their who wouldn't want us to be "insensitive to the feelings" of other nations. They would demand that we must continue sharing with the other nations in order to promote world harmony. To hell with that. Let's bury them in our discarded booster rockets, then worry about their feelings.

Of course, that would all be a moot point if private industry took over space exploration. Then maybe we would see some real progress.

Yes, that's another subject for another column--the fact that NASA itself doesn't have any real domestic competition, and how we've locked ourselves (at least until now) into that situation.

By the way, you forgot that third primary fuel for human progress - pride. It seems to me that that is what got us to the moon, along with the fear you mentioned.

Perhaps, but it doesn't seem all that effective since then. I don't think we're any less proud of our space program now than we were then--the difference was that, back then, we were scared. And we were really racing.

Steven Rogers says:

Though we both see the same problems, I do not see competition as a solution. The link between commerce and competition is a common fallacy that is best not perpetuated. The essence of commerce and capitalism is freedom of thought and action, not competition.

But freedom of thought and action will inevitably lead to competition (and also to cooperation, where it makes sense).

There is *always* competition, even in socialism, the mafia, totalitarian regimes, or bureaucracy. It is completely wrong to identify competition with capitalism or commerce (as the conservatives do). In our current space program, there is certainly intense competition within government agencies for budget dollars, competition within agencies to see who gets funded, and competition within the contractors for program funds. Competition itself won't fix any problems.

Well, actually, that's not true. Oh, it's true that agencies compete for funding, but that's not the kind of competition that I'm talking about. The socialist mindset in Washington sees competition among agencies as "needless duplication of effort." One result of this in the 1990s was the granting of an exclusive charter to NASA for all resuable launch system development, with the Air Force responsible for expendables. This resulted in, among many other things, the X-33 fiasco.

Of course, the people who speak favorably of competition don't mean *that* kind of competition - they mean the "good" kind. All this confusion about competition wouldn't be necessary but for the fact that both liberals and conservatives don't really want to name the issue at stake: freedom. If things are ever going to get better, we have to state out loud the real nature of the issues at hand.

I agree, but the fact remains that freedom generally results in competition. And anyway, it's pointless to talk about freedom in the context of government space programs, but it is possible to talk about whether they are done cooperatively, or competitively with other nations. Of course my preference is for free markets in space. My column was in the much narrower context of what the goverment seems to be determined to do.

Capitalism is not primarily about competition - that happens in every social system. It is primarily about who makes the decisions about capital and risk. What capitalism brings (and what we need in the space business) is the ability for people to act on their own judgment. This includes those who want to explore space - they should be free to invest and profit by it. But it also includes those who do NOT want to invest in the space business and shouldn't be forced to.

Again, possibly correct, but irrelevant to my point.

If we want space to be successful, that's what we who are pro-space have to face up to. We have to demand the freedom to live by our own judgment, and also accept the responsibility for it and quit expecting a free ride from the taxpayers. If the space business rides the bureaucratic bandwagon and fights for a share of the tax loot, then it shouldn't be a surprise to find that it has inherited the other problems that go with it - like having the space program being run as a money laundering outfit to funnel foreign aid money to Russia.

Of course. But that's, as I said, a different column.

As far as I can tell, the Soviets won the space race. We were the first to the moon, but we have adopted the Soviet's ideological approach to space. It is particularly disheartening to see the consequences of this in the intellectual leadership of what might someday be a space industry in America.

Now that's actually an interesting point, and one that I hadn't thought of in quite that way. I might even use it as a future column...

I got a very interesting email from France, from a Franck Marodon (at least that's the name in the email address):

That was an interesting article you wrote. I am myself an aerospace engineer, and I can tell you you no longer have to fear anything from Europe in general and France in particular. The main problem I see in your article is that you consider competition between nations, rather than between teams. The point is, France has been leading the european launcher effort, sometimes with arrogance with respect to our german partners. This arrogance carries on to the point where the French space agencies dictate to the European Space Agency how to do launchers, and particularly what next-generation launchers should look like (partially reusable, vertical take-off rockets launched from Kourou, i.e. something that would not damage our current industry, rather than something efficient). But I'm sure there are plenty of German, British or other European engineers with interesting ideas which will unfortunately never make their way to ESA H.Q.(what about an air-breathing TSTO like the once envisioned "sänger" that could take-off from europe for instance ?).

Again, that's true, but it's again a little off the point from my article, which is that these are all government programs being discussed here, and thus, by definition, they're competition, or cooperation, between nations. I absolutely agree that we need to have competition among international teams. I wasn't proposing that we should only have national space programs.

In any case, it is doubtful that we could afford any of these systems on a national basis, and therefore MUST cooperate with other EU coutries and probably Russia. But more fundamentally, do not expect NASA, ESA/CNES EADS, Boeing or Lockheed Martin to come up with anything innovative : they are just used to manage/sell big, expensive things, and do not give a damn about developping what is really needed for mankind to become a truly spacefaring species. All they are interested in is to please their shareholders, keep their dominant market position and suck public money...

Gosh, you broke the code. ;-)

What we all need are competing teams of highly motivated people, backed up by true entrepreneurs, investors willing to take part into mankind's next move. These team must be made of young engineers and supported by experienced ones. Who cares where you come from? The average level of non-US or non-EU scientists and engineers is usually much higher. Dedication to the people you work with is more important than to the country you live in. Having spend some time in the army, I can tell you I felt much closer from my student mates who came from all over the world, than from my supposed army "fellows".

Yup. Right on the money.

One last thing, L.E.O. business might be more efficient on a competitive than cooperative basis, but when mankind goes to Mars or beyond, as a moral obligation, it HAS to be an international move. Just think about how well Arabic is suited to describe the desert features of Mars, how the Japanese way of life (and therefore philosophy) could benefit crewmates who have to live for months together in a confined environment.

Well, I don't know about that. But again, I have no problem with having different cultures going to space (other than Islamism)--I said that I wished all nations well, and if they think they can truly achieve their goals better by teaming up, then more power to them. I just object to the notion that that's the only way it can be done.

I don't know what civilization could emerge once settled on another planet, what language will be spoken and which god(s) our followers will worship but I don't want it to be just another europe or another america.

I wouldn't worry about that too much, but I suspect that it will be a culture that attempts to take the best from both those places, just as America was founded on ideals originally developed in Europe.

I don't want Mars to be a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant world.

That's unlikely. It's a big planet.

best wishes, and sorry for my english when it's incorrect (no time to read it all over again)

Your English is excellent--much better than my French is, or ever will be.

Finally, I got an email from Joe Gurman at NASA Goddard (though he doesn't speak for NASA):

I read your June 20 Transterrestrial Musings column, "Can't We Just Stop Getting Along?," with great interest, since I have been involved in international efforts in space science for over twenty years. While I agree with much of what you say, I think you miss a major positive in international cooperation (at least in unmanned space science): even regardless of budget concerns, such cooperation enables us to do things, and learn things, we apparently never could on our own.

The SOHO project, on which I work now, is a good example. Nine of the twelve Principal Investigator (PI) instruments on board have European PI's; three have US PI's. All twelve, however, have Co-Investigators who provided hardware or who provide scientific analysis of the data, and I frankly don't think we or our European partners (ESA and the many institutions providing instrument hardware and science) could have done the mission by our/themselves alone (once again, ignoring the money issue).

I would go so far as to claim that SOHO has been a resounding success in several scientific areas. The simple reason is that there just aren't that many scientists in the field, so we're simply getting the benefits of a bigger pool of largely non-overlapping expertise. The only slightly deeper reason is that science is not done in ivory towers, it's done by discussion, argument, and synthesis, and the more good people you have working on a problem, the more likely you are to get a good result. (Einstein may be an exception, but Einsteins don't come around very often, and even he went to scientific meetings and attended seminars regularly to share ideas with colleagues from all over the world.) A more serious problem is that kids in the US no longer see science, or space science in particular, as quite the draw they did in "my day" as a kid (the late '50's and early '60's, when space was very, very sexy). Who can blame them, though? There's a lot more hard cash for video game programmers than for astronomers, and a lot more glory.

Although at times during the development of SOHO we suffered from the disadvantages of international cooperation (two distinct bureaucracies, each with its own absurdities), in all phases of the mission, we've benefited from a larger pool of talent, and more ways of looking at problems, than we would have alone. As an American scientist, I would also cite two very tangible benefits: at a time when it's been extremely difficult to recruit American students into scientific research, we have had a continually refreshed pool of graduate students and postdocs from Europe who see much better opportunities, personal and scientific, in the US than at home (where typically there's a single professor per department who dominates all research there for 30 years or more), and who, by becoming US citizens, strengthen our nations scientific and technological base; and the advantage of differing views of what's important in science: in 1995, when SOHO was launched, NASA's plan for what we call "Sun-Earth Connections" was simply to go out of business after SOHO. Thanks to the spectacularly visible (to the public as well as the space science community) success of SOHO, however, NASA began to reconsider its research priorities. We now have a booming Sun-Earth Connections program, with new missions recently launched (IMAGE, TIMED), and more on the way (Solar-B --- a Japan/UK/US collaboration, STEREO, and the ambitious "Living With a Star" program, that promises to turn research into improvement in space weather predictions). Without this "mission of international cooperation" (as SOHO is officially billed), I don't think any of this would have come about.

We in space science certainly don't have the budgets or well-reported problems that the ISS does, but we do benefit, tangibly, from international cooperation.

Those are all good points, and I would certainly didn't intend to imply that there is never a role for international efforts, either government funded, or private.

The point of my column was that it shouldn't be the default, as many in the space and diplomatic community seem to think. And if we are going to do an international space venture, it should be because it makes sense to do it from the standpoint of achieving the mission objective--not as a sop to various space agencies, or as foreign aid, or as diplomacy by other means.

The International Space Station is a programmatic disaster for many reasons, but the fact that it's "International" is certainly high on the list, because that goal took precedence over actually building a space station that would do something useful in space.

Posted by Rand Simberg at June 22, 2002 11:53 AM

Comments

Totally tangential to the whole point of this excellent post (about an excellent column), but videogame programmers get neither cash nor glory. We make a small fraction of what the more "boring" programmers make, even though as a profession we tend to use Computer Science more than **most** of our bretheren. There are no available entry-level jobs in the industry, either; MAYBE work your way up from a pay-nothing tester, be someone's friend, or win the lottery (as I did ;) ). Any "glory" in this insular little world comes to the titles, not the people (if any does come to us, it is from our peers, and that is rare as well). If anything, we are looked down on by our non-industry peers and often family ("why don't you get a real job" - something I've been fortunate to avoid). If you do it, you do it for the love - I can't imagine being happy doing anything else.

A small nit and COMPLETELY unrelated, but our friend from Goddard shouldn't delude himself about the nature of that industry. Perhaps some deeper introspection (which I remember you doing before, Rand) is required about how our kids are being brought up wrt space. In fact, there was an excellent column by you with associated response posts not too long ago...

Posted by Matthew Picioccio at June 22, 2002 07:24 PM

> but videogame programmers get neither cash nor glory

Well, that's not COMPLETELY true... :-)

John Carmack
www.idsoftware.com
www.armadilloaerospace.com

Posted by John Carmack at June 28, 2002 02:34 PM

Aviation boomed in the early 20th century through the efforts of a small group of highly devoted, highly motivated inventors and barnstormers. They flew by the seat of their pants, literally! Small groups, or even individuals, were sucessful at building flying machines in small hangars or on farms. (Don't forget that a large portion of them were killed during this explosion of inventions). This is how humans built up an enormous database of flight information in a short, few, decades.

One cannot expect an analogous situation for 21st century space explorers. The complexity and cost are orders of magnitude larger. This is due to the simple, unavoidable fact that the amount of energy required to reach orbit is orders of magnitude greater than a barnstormer needed to reach 3000 feet altitude at 90 knots.

One cannot expect to reach orbit by means of anything other than the extremely well funded, large-budget operations, such as those that have made it so far, (e.g. large governments or large aerospace corporations). Even Burt Rutan cannot reach orbit without the proper amount of energy, and no matter how well designed, a fiberglass shell will not get him there, nor will it get him back through the atmosphere safely. More power to Burt Rutan, and all small entrepeneurs, for making minor miracles happen in the air. Lets just not overlook the physical requirements that are necessary for flight at Mach 25 out of the atmosphere. These are challenges that will require large efforts, large fuel tanks, exotic technologies, and concurrently large development and operations budgets.

Don't get lost in a barnstorming fantasy. Those days are over.

Now let's get a commercial rocket into LEO.

Posted by at July 8, 2002 07:33 PM

Shuttle Crack
One more data point why there MUST be a crew escape module for this launch vehicle!!! See http://www.nasaproblems.com

Posted by Don Nelson at July 10, 2002 10:11 AM


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