|
Reader's Favorites
Media Casualties Mount Administration Split On Europe Invasion Administration In Crisis Over Burgeoning Quagmire Congress Concerned About Diversion From War On Japan Pot, Kettle On Line Two... Allies Seize Paris The Natural Gore Book Sales Tank, Supporters Claim Unfair Tactics Satan Files Lack Of Defamation Suit Why This Blog Bores People With Space Stuff A New Beginning My Hit Parade
Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) Tim Blair James Lileks Bleats Virginia Postrel Kausfiles Winds Of Change (Joe Katzman) Little Green Footballs (Charles Johnson) Samizdata Eject Eject Eject (Bill Whittle) Space Alan Boyle (MSNBC) Space Politics (Jeff Foust) Space Transport News (Clark Lindsey) NASA Watch NASA Space Flight Hobby Space A Voyage To Arcturus (Jay Manifold) Dispatches From The Final Frontier (Michael Belfiore) Personal Spaceflight (Jeff Foust) Mars Blog The Flame Trench (Florida Today) Space Cynic Rocket Forge (Michael Mealing) COTS Watch (Michael Mealing) Curmudgeon's Corner (Mark Whittington) Selenian Boondocks Tales of the Heliosphere Out Of The Cradle Space For Commerce (Brian Dunbar) True Anomaly Kevin Parkin The Speculist (Phil Bowermaster) Spacecraft (Chris Hall) Space Pragmatism (Dan Schrimpsher) Eternal Golden Braid (Fred Kiesche) Carried Away (Dan Schmelzer) Laughing Wolf (C. Blake Powers) Chair Force Engineer (Air Force Procurement) Spacearium Saturn Follies JesusPhreaks (Scott Bell) Science
Nanobot (Howard Lovy) Lagniappe (Derek Lowe) Geek Press (Paul Hsieh) Gene Expression Carl Zimmer Redwood Dragon (Dave Trowbridge) Charles Murtaugh Turned Up To Eleven (Paul Orwin) Cowlix (Wes Cowley) Quark Soup (Dave Appell) Economics/Finance
Assymetrical Information (Jane Galt and Mindles H. Dreck) Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen et al) Man Without Qualities (Robert Musil) Knowledge Problem (Lynne Kiesling) Journoblogs The Ombudsgod Cut On The Bias (Susanna Cornett) Joanne Jacobs The Funny Pages
Cox & Forkum Day By Day Iowahawk Happy Fun Pundit Jim Treacher IMAO The Onion Amish Tech Support (Lawrence Simon) Scrapple Face (Scott Ott) Regular Reading
Quasipundit (Adragna & Vehrs) England's Sword (Iain Murray) Daily Pundit (Bill Quick) Pejman Pundit Daimnation! (Damian Penny) Aspara Girl Flit Z+ Blog (Andrew Zolli) Matt Welch Ken Layne The Kolkata Libertarian Midwest Conservative Journal Protein Wisdom (Jeff Goldstein et al) Dean's World (Dean Esmay) Yippee-Ki-Yay (Kevin McGehee) Vodka Pundit Richard Bennett Spleenville (Andrea Harris) Random Jottings (John Weidner) Natalie Solent On the Third Hand (Kathy Kinsley, Bellicose Woman) Patrick Ruffini Inappropriate Response (Moira Breen) Jerry Pournelle Other Worthy Weblogs
Ain't No Bad Dude (Brian Linse) Airstrip One A libertarian reads the papers Andrew Olmsted Anna Franco Review Ben Kepple's Daily Rant Bjorn Staerk Bitter Girl Catallaxy Files Dawson.com Dodgeblog Dropscan (Shiloh Bucher) End the War on Freedom Fevered Rants Fredrik Norman Heretical Ideas Ideas etc Insolvent Republic of Blogistan James Reuben Haney Libertarian Rant Matthew Edgar Mind over what matters Muslimpundit Page Fault Interrupt Photodude Privacy Digest Quare Rantburg Recovering Liberal Sand In The Gears(Anthony Woodlief) Sgt. Stryker The Blogs of War The Fly Bottle The Illuminated Donkey Unqualified Offerings What she really thinks Where HipHop & Libertarianism Meet Zem : blog Space Policy Links
Space Future The Space Review The Space Show Space Frontier Foundation Space Policy Digest BBS AWOL
USS Clueless (Steven Den Beste) Media Minder Unremitting Verse (Will Warren) World View (Brink Lindsay) The Last Page More Than Zero (Andrew Hofer) Pathetic Earthlings (Andrew Lloyd) Spaceship Summer (Derek Lyons) The New Space Age (Rob Wilson) Rocketman (Mark Oakley) Mazoo Site designed by Powered by Movable Type |
And Then There Were Three The Economist has a fairly good story on the future of manned space after Columbia. I take issue with a few points, though. First, a nit: IT SHOULD have been a perfect day. An exhaust plume was cutting a neat trail across the pale morning sky. All over America, people were watching the remarkable spacecraft zip across the continent, to its final destination on the eastern side of the country. Of course, as we now know, it never landed. In only a few seconds, another emblem of American hopes had disintegrated. Well, no. There was, or at least, should not have been an "exhaust plume." Shuttle has no exhaust during descent, because it uses no propulsion (other than the occasional reaction control system firing, which wouldn't leave a visible "exhaust plume"). The streak was more likely the plasma sheath that envelopes the vehicle at that altitude, and perhaps a very high-altitude contrail. The problem, as even the most gung-ho space enthusiasts agree, is that reusable spacecraft do not yet make economic sense. A fully reusable craft is difficult to justify unless it can be flown more than 50 times a year. (The shuttle only manages five to six flights a year.) Over the next two decades, global demand for launches is expected to run at less than this, somewhere between 30-40 shuttle equivalents a year. But launch services for this market are already over-supplied. That number of fifty is kind of arbitrary. No one knows the right number, but it's certainly much higher than current traffic rates. But the third sentence is curious. Such projections of launch demand, performed by the Teal Group or the Department of Commerce, have built-in assumptions, which generally include no new markets, and continuation of business as usual in the launch industry. This ignores the potential for price-demand elasticity should a new, safe launch system come along. It's surprising that a publication called "The Economist" would miss the point like this. Antonio Elias, vice-president of advanced programmes at Orbital Sciences Corporation, a commercial-satellite company based in Dulles, Virginia, said recently that the economic rate for reusable vehicles had not changed for decades. This is because the two fundamental parameters of rocketry?the efficiency of rocket engines and the properties of structural materials?have not changed. It is difficult to see how investing in any spacecraft that could take 25 years to pay back its development costs can be justified. I've personally had this argument with Dr. Elias (the last time was a couple years ago, when I was back at OSC looking over the X-34, doing research on its potential as a suborbital tourist vehicle). He firmly believes that launch is expensive purely because of physics, and doesn't seem to understand that most of the difference between aircraft ops and space ops are economies of scale. But then, he's a physicist... But the next couple bits are encouraging. In the next few decades, the only reusable ?space? vehicles that are likely to make sense are those being designed and built by private industry to take tourists 100km (about ten times higher than an airliner) above the earth. and So why are we still there? The technology to do more than briefly visit the moon or Mars does not yet exist. Further ahead, mankind will have a place and a purpose in space, but until technology improves, manned spaceflight will be an expensive luxury. NASA could focus on getting the costs of spaceflight down, and on helping the private sector to get tourists on sub-orbital flights. So they recognize that suborbital is a key stepping stone to cheap launch, which is amazing progress from Economist editorials of even a year or two ago. Unfortunately, they remains stuck in the "space is exploration and science" paradigm, as evinced by the graf above, and the ending to the piece. Any money saved could be used on the more pressing questions of space science: are we alone in the universe, is there life on Mars, could we live there, are there other earth-like planets, where did we come from? In the short term, robots and instruments should tackle these questions. There will be many spin-off benefits that arise from this research in the field of miniaturisation and robotics. Yup, Trix are for kids, and space is for robots. We need to keep working on them, fellow bloggers. All together now: Economist--We Want To Go! Posted by Rand Simberg at February 13, 2003 03:43 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.transterrestrial.com/mt-diagnostics.cgi/795 Listed below are links to weblogs that reference this post from Transterrestrial Musings.
Comments
I think this approach from the Economist (not a great space advocate in the first place) is a damned sight better than their reaction in 1986 which was a nice cover the week after, with the Challenger fireball and the headline "Still Worth It" - but not a lot of critical follow up. If you can find a copy of that cover -- I haven't been down to the library -- it's quite catching, but I think the Economist is improving on understanding space as it ought to be understood. There was a great Point-Counterpoint on the Onion a while back (it's no longer on their online archive) that basically went like this: Point: The Economist says that unmanned space flight is a far better way to do science than manned space flight, despite the glamour of having astronauts. Counterpoint: Oooo, I'm so smart! look at ME! I read the economist... La de da-dee-da. Etc. Best, Post a comment |