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« Keep It Up, Terry | Main | In Memoriam »

Oops, He Did It Again

I'm a little delinquent in responding to this, because Adam Keiper pointed it out to me last weekend, but it's been a busy week. Gregg Easterbrook is determined to waste my time having to correct him.

There's no reason right now to go back to the moon, other than as make-work for aerospace contractors. For 30 years, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa) has sent no automated probes to the moon, because no one has proposed anything compelling for even robots to do there.

There are many reasons to go back to the moon. We (literally) barely scratched its surface thirty-plus years ago. There are abundant resources there to potentially establish settlements, to produce clean abundant power, to produce propellant, and for the narrow-minded people (like, apparently, Gregg) who think that the only reason to spend money on space is science, there remains a great deal of science to do there.

Gregg is simply wrong. Many people have proposed things for both people and robots to do. They may not have been compelling to NASA, or Gregg Easterbrook, but neither of those two entities have shown themselves to be reliable indicators as to what is, or should be, compelling to others.

Going from Earth's surface to orbit requires a lot of energy and is very expensive with existing technology. At the current space shuttle launch price of $20 million per ton, merely placing 1,000 tons of Mars-bound equipment into orbit would cost $20 billion--more than nasa's entire annual budget. And that's just the cost to launch the stuff. Design, construction, staffing, and support would all cost much more.

The problem with this is that Gregg remains mired in the belief that Shuttle is "existing technology," when in fact for the most part it is thirty-year-old technology. As I've pointed out before, Shuttle is an absurd benchmark for cost of launch in estimating costs of doing things in space in the twenty-first century.

These are reasons why, when Bush's father asked nasa in 1989 about sending people to Mars, the Agency estimated a total program cost of $400 billion for several missions. That inflates to $600 billion in today's money and sounds about right as an estimate

Yes, Gregg, there are reasons why the agency estimated that cost. Reason 1: they decided to use the program to justify everything that every center was doing. Reason 2: they didn't really want to do it, desiring to continue to focus on space station instead, and they in fact actively lobbied against it on the Hill, an act for which Dick Truly was later canned by George Herbert Walker Bush. Non-reason: it bears some resemblance to what such a program would have to cost.

In fact, it's absurd to worry about the cost of such a program right now, or to try to stretch absurd examples to attempt to estimate it, as Gregg mistakenly does, in this and other recent articles. We have no idea what it will cost, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be a goal of the nation. When it comes down to actual designs, and plans, and cost estimates, then will be the time to criticize it and decide whether it's worth the money at that point in time, or to wait until some better plan (or technology) comes along. But it's pointless to take potshots at it now, and to say that we shouldn't do it because the Gregg Easterbrooks of the world can't figure out how to do it cheaply.

One of the frustrating things about Easterbrook is that in any wrongheaded column, he always somehow finds a way to say things with which I agree:

...while a Mars visit would be an exhilarating moment for human history, planning for Mars before improving space technology is putting the cart ahead of the horse. Nasa's urgent priority should be finding a new system of placing pounds into orbit: If there were some less costly, safer way to reach space than either the space shuttle or current rockets, then grand visions might become affordable.

But it's still not quite clear if he's got it right, because I don't know what he means by "find." If he means develop a Shuttle replacement that somehow operates more cheaply, this would be another programmatic disaster, but if he means to simply put out basic requirements to the private sector and purchase services from whoever can meet them, then I am in a hundred percent agreement. But I've never seen anything in any of his writing to indicate that this is what he as in mind. He seems to remain in the mindset that NASA should do the thing, it's just that they're not doing the right one.

As long as he remains stuck in that stale, four-decade-old paradigm, he'll continue to write uninformed articles like this, in which he occasionally arrives at the right result, for entirely the wrong reason.

Posted by Rand Simberg at January 29, 2004 09:51 PM

Comments

Mr. Easterbrook's estimates of the costs of space travel a decade or more hence remind me powerfully of one of Mark Twain's amusing passages, found in "Life on the Mississippi". Here's the link:

http://www.mtwain.com/Life_On_The_Mississippi/17.html/

Here's the passage:

"In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,' just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. "

In like manner, Mr. Easterbrook chooses one particular number for one particular method of going to orbit, and extrapolates it forward way beyond its statistical relevance.

Suppose NASA made an estimate of the cost of going to the Moon. I'm confident Mr. Easterbrook would immediately agree that their estimate could easily be too low by a factor of 5-10, e.g. as it was in the case of ISS. For that very same reason, there is no reason to believe his estimate is anything but equally fanciful. No one will know what it costs to go back to the Moon until it is tried, or at least the trying has well begun. That's the nature of frontier engineering.

Posted by Stephen Maturin at January 30, 2004 01:01 AM

If Easterbrook spent $50 to register for LPSC some year, or even just spent an hour or two investigating online, he'd learn about scores of proposals for lunar missions. And the price of a Proton launcher is around $3,000/kg to LEO, less than 1/6 the Shuttle (rumor has it that it's actually much lower than that, Russians and Ukrainians having a need for cash). This stuff just doesn't take much time, effort, and money to learn about. Sigh ...

Posted by Jay Manifold at January 30, 2004 05:25 AM

Hello Rand, I came over from Fox hoping to find some interesting tidbits for my discussion group. You are bookmarked, which is my best compliment.

You have do better than this though. Gregg's article is good--full of facts, math, and reason. Yours is not. His point that lunar missions are not compelling has been perfectly established by recent history. If you feel that NASA has erred by neglecting good lunar missions, tell us which ones and why. Want a human presence on the Moon? What will these folks do besides absorb radiation? And resources. Are there important scientific questions that can only be answered by risking human space flight? I am anxious to learn about those. You get extra points for examples that are more compelling than the Hubble work being sacrificed.

My point is that space exploration fans need to recognize that our experience with human space flight has been a complete disaster compared to the robotic missions. Safety, expense, scientific/commercial product are bad jokes. Need I mention ISS?

I think human space flight retards space exploration, but maybe I am being narrow minded too. I look forward to being ever less stupid.

Posted by Helen at January 30, 2004 07:29 AM

Sigh. And this guy gets paid to write about this stuff?

Posted by Andrew at January 30, 2004 07:31 AM

" What will these folks do besides absorb radiation?"

Two fairly realistic goals: radio telescopes on the far side of the moon, and infrared telescopes in permanently shadowed craters near the poles. Both of those would gain benefits that are difficult or impossible to get here on Earth or in near-Earth orbit. Shielding from human-made radio interference and very low, very stable temperatures, respectively.

A third, long term benefit would be manufacturing re-entry heat shields. Apparently if you hit loose Lunar regolith with microwaves you can weld the individual particles together into a fairly decent heat shield.

Posted by Andrew Salamon at January 30, 2004 07:57 AM

Quote: "Are there important scientific questions that can only be answered by risking human space flight?...My point is that space exploration fans need to recognize that our experience with human space flight has been a complete disaster compared to the robotic missions. "

I don't know if you can just squarely but the loss of life in failed human space flight missions across the scale of failed robotic missions and expect those to balance out of some point. I mean does one failed human space flight mission equal ten failed robotic missions. Whoops 3 failed human space flight missions and only 25 failed robotic missions, the robots are winning, I repeat - the robots are winning.

Plus think of it this way, where there are greater risks there is a potential for better rewards. One reward being that we will be able to emphatically share that moment when someone steps foot back on the Moon and we see that enormous big grin of an astronaut as he gazes out across the landscape of a whole other world.

Posted by Hefty at January 30, 2004 08:56 AM

Screw "science" and screw "exploriation" unless such supports colonization and utilization.

Robots can't colonize space for us.

Posted by Mike Puckett at January 30, 2004 09:43 AM

"Gregg's article is good--full of facts, math, and reason."

Helen,

Disinformation does not = facts

Bad analogies doe not make good math

Easterbrook has shown himself incapable of reason every chance he has been given to demonstrate it.

But lets focus on "Math".

What is so wonderful and correct about his so-called math?

Posted by Mike Puckett at January 30, 2004 09:47 AM

Ultimately, space exploration cannot be justified on a cost-benefit basis. Space travel is (and is likely to remain for our lifetimes) a hideously expensive and inefficient process. That's the primary reason that private industry so far has failed to get into the game: on the short time-horizons of most shareholders and boards of directors, space exploration is a complete pig, ROI-wise.

So why do it?

Well, you can use "Science" as your main driver, but this is a loser as far as the public is concerned. Unless it leads in some obvious way to a better mousetrap, the public really doesn't care to spend billions on pure science. When you say "science", the public imagines lots of nerds with glasses who spend stupefying amounts of money on things almost no one cares about. The fact that science really *is* the main driver has little to do with it -- science is not going to sell space travel.

Terms like "exploration" and "discovery" have more frisson with the taxpayers. It puts them *as individuals* into the picture. That's why the Mars landers have grabbed the public's attention in a way that orbiters (however successful they are) never do: rovers are like extensions of ourselves. When we see some high-tech four-wheeler tooling around on the surface of Mars -- emphasis on "see"! -- we can imagine ourselves in that picture as well. When you sell space travel as a grand adventure, a "vision", Americans are more likely to buy in, even on long time-horizons.

This is the primary reason why I think the whole "private corporations" push is misguided -- until access to space is made cheap enough to make ROI faster, no private company is going to step up in a major way. Only an entity with the resources of the United States Government is going to be able to do the fundamental R&D required for space travel. This R&D step cannot be skipped, although it can be shared with private industry (so long as the fruits of the R&D process are profitable in a short enough term to make the investment a profitable one).

Going to the Moon is an obvious first step in engineering a whole new space exploration apparatus. Better to work out the kinks at a place only four days away rather than six months away.

And it's not just hardware. It's NASA itself: can it manage a program and the tens of thousands of employees and contractors it will take to do this job? It's the US Government: can it sustain a program of this scope across different administrations and earthly crises? It's the US taxpayer: will people keep funding a program whose fruits may not appear for decades, if not longer?

Going to the moon first will prove that this whole enterprise is not just smoke and mirrors. It will prove that it is *possible*.

But more than that: the Moon is a world unto itself. People tend to forget that. It didn't stop being interesting just because we stopped going there with Apollo 17. To imagine we know the whole story of the Moon after investigating less than 1% of the surface is just silly. The moon may yet have prodigious treasure for those intrepid enough to reach out and take it.

Posted by Monty at January 30, 2004 10:25 AM

Monty - I, personally, think your comments are right on target.

Posted by Reid at January 30, 2004 10:44 AM

I find Easterbrook a damned frustrating writer to read on more than one subject. He does manage to get some things right. He also seems to think frequently along the same lines as I do. The biggest problem is that he just doesn't seem to look far enough.

Take this column for example. He expresses at least some positive thoughts about going out into space. Unfortunately he takes a thoroughly establishment view of how its going to be done. His reporting of these plans is thoroughly accurate. His biggest problem is that he doesn't go far enough. I'd raise the question of why progress in space has been so slow. The establishment will claim that's it's just so hard to do. And, unfortunately, their way of doing it is. But it's also true that the existing establishment is hardly a wonderful model of a human organization. They might portray themselves that way, but we know it's not true.

Summing up, I think Easterbrook needs to dig deeper -- either that or quit writing on the topic entirely.

Posted by Chuck Divine at January 30, 2004 10:50 AM

Clementine. Lunar Prospector. Two US lunar spaceprobes of the 1990s.

Easterbrook lies. . (Admittely Clemintine was DoD with heavy USGS and NASA involvment)

OT: Rand, any comment on Keith Cowling's latest.

Posted by Duncan Young at January 30, 2004 01:23 PM

Looks like Cowing is grasping for straws. What is the point of this entire article, apart from trying to cover NASA's ass on this particular technical detail? Tumlinson never said that anything in space is "easy". I dont think anyone with sane mind would say that.
Its just nowhere near that hard as NASA makes it out to be. 20 thousand highly paid engineers to operate three vehicles, anyone ?
If anyone is perpetuating false myths, then its NASA. Their twenty plus years of botched attempts to come up with a workable alternative space launch system and then claiming that its impossible because of lack of technology is one of the worst myths around.

Posted by kert at January 30, 2004 02:12 PM

Duncan, it so happens that I just got an email from Bill Haynes, that he sent to Keith:

What your carefully crafted piece failed to note, or deliberately ignored, is that my source WAS producing NASA carabiners in accordance with NASA specs and for use in space by astronauts, and he said that the difference between the perhaps, $100 he could have delivered them for and $1,095 he had to charge was in the excessive and unnecessarily demanding need to track the metal used from the mine, etc.

I never suggested, nor did Rick Tumlinson, that NASA should buy available REI carabiners for use in space.

Posted by Rand Simberg at January 30, 2004 02:30 PM

Glad to see so many who agree that Easterbrook is full of little but himself. Even one of his "friends" has mentioned that he should not write without the benefit of a good editor. For someone who is billed as a "Brookings Institute Scholar", he sure misfires off some key non-points that illustrate the depth of his incomprehension. For instance, right off the bat he writes:

Easterbrook: "Rather than spend hundreds of billions of dollars to hurl tons toward Mars using current technology, why not take a decade -or two decades, or however much time is required -researching new launch systems and advanced
propulsion?"

He must not have heard Bush's statement clearly:

GWB: "Our third goal is to return to the moon by 2020. ... With the experience and knowledge gained on the moon, we will then be ready to take the next steps of space exploration: human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond." [some estimates put the hoped-for Mars mission around 2030 -- over _two_and_a_half_ decades away]

Also, Easterbrook must not have heard of Prometheus.

Next:

Easterbrook: "And Mars as a destination for people makes absolutely no sense with current technology."

This is true. But did anyone claim that we'd go to Mars in 2030 with 2004 technology?

This isn't the first time that Easterbrook has gotten a lot of his facts wrong on space matters (see, for instance: http://www.hal-pc.org/~jsb/ShuttleRebuttal.pdf). A healthy discussion with varying viewpoints is good for everyone, but basing the arguments (and advancing them publicly) on phony or misleading statements does nobody any favors - in fact it is counterproductive.

Jon

Posted by at January 31, 2004 01:25 AM

Glad to see so many who agree that Easterbrook is full of little but himself. Even one of his "friends" has mentioned that he should not write without the benefit of a good editor. For someone who is billed as a "Brookings Institute Scholar", he sure misfires off some key non-points that illustrate the depth of his incomprehension. For instance, right off the bat he writes:

Easterbrook: "Rather than spend hundreds of billions of dollars to hurl tons toward Mars using current technology, why not take a decade -or two decades, or however much time is required -researching new launch systems and advanced
propulsion?"

He must not have heard Bush's statement clearly:

GWB: "Our third goal is to return to the moon by 2020. ... With the experience and knowledge gained on the moon, we will then be ready to take the next steps of space exploration: human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond." [some estimates put the hoped-for Mars mission around 2030 -- over _two_and_a_half_ decades away]

Also, Easterbrook must not have heard of Prometheus.

Next:

Easterbrook: "And Mars as a destination for people makes absolutely no sense with current technology."

This is true. But did anyone claim that we'd go to Mars in 2030 with 2004 technology?

This isn't the first time that Easterbrook has gotten a lot of his facts wrong on space matters (see, for instance: http://www.hal-pc.org/~jsb/ShuttleRebuttal.pdf). A healthy discussion with varying viewpoints is good for everyone, but basing the arguments (and advancing them publicly) on phony or misleading statements does nobody any favors - in fact it is counterproductive.

Jon

Posted by Jon Berndt at January 31, 2004 01:26 AM

The Easterbrook column appears in the print issue of The New Republic.

One good thing about Easterbrook is that he puts his math on paper, where it is easy to see his mistakes.

There is a BIG mistake that is readily apparent. The $400 billion figure from 1989 that he claims was for a Mars mission was actually for _both_ a Mars mission and a lunar base. He then adds in a lunar base later in the column.

In other words, he counted the cost of a lunar base twice. Twice.

There are other mistakes in the article as well. He claims that NASA has not sent a probe to the moon in 30 years, forgetting Lunar Prospector and BMDO's Clementine mission. He also says that the Moon orbits within the Earth's magnetic field. It only crosses through the tail, which offers little protection.

I think Easterbrook gets away with these kinds of errors and mistaken assertions because nobody calls him on his mistakes.

Posted by Dwayne Day at January 31, 2004 10:37 AM

Well, BMDO's Clementine was...BMDO, not NASA...

Posted by Rand Simberg at January 31, 2004 03:42 PM

Going to come back and play Gregg..errr....Helen?

Posted by Mike Puckett at January 31, 2004 06:15 PM

Monty, you had such a good start. The US government has been in space R&D for a long time. All we get is projects that are "successful" and then vanish. The problem isn't the research, but making cheap launch capacity. NASA can't do that. We don't need a massive government funded R&D splurge.

If the US "needs" to spend in order to help develope space, then guarantee some business - even a billion USD a year to the lowest competent bidders would be a good start.

Posted by Karl Hallowell at February 3, 2004 12:39 PM


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