Jeff Foust has a review of Greg Klerkx' new book, Lost In Space (the title of this post is a subtitle of the book). I read it right after it came out a few weeks ago, and have been meaning to review it myself, but Jeff has mostly done it for me. He's right in that there are some errors in the book that detract somewhat from its credibility. Here was a list that I made as I went through it.

He says that "...at their most basic, tethers are analogous to the wire that runs from a wall socket to a lamp."

Errr, no. At their most basic, space tethers are a line that connects one object to another in orbit. He's talking about a special category of space tethers--electrodynamic tethers, and an uninformed reader might believe that these are the only kinds of tethers that exist, and that their only use is for converting orbital energy to electrical energy and vice versa, when in fact that's only one application.

He repeats the myth that "Even the paper plans for building the Saturns were gathered up and destroyed." Not true. Well, perhaps it may be literally true--the plans exist on microfiche, but the implication is that they are beyond our reach. What really no longer exists is the tooling (at least not all of it), which was expensive to preserve and warehouse for a program that was considered part of the past. Should we choose, we could resurrect the Saturn program. It wouldn't be wise, four decades on, but we have the plans, and there was no conspiracy to burn the bridge over the Rubicon to Shuttle, once across.

He says that "...two congressmen have flown, with little rationale other than their political status..." on the Shuttle. It's wrong no matter how you define "congressman." Two Senators (Garn and Glenn) have flown, and one congressman (now senator)--Bill Nelson. This is a particular perplexing error, because it should have been caught by an editor--later in the book, in discussing Senator Glenn's flight, he writes, "To [Alan] Ladwig, this was Garn and Nelson all over again."

In describing the Kistler K-1 vehicle (a project that recently got a new lease on life with a couple hundred million NASA contract to purchase flight data), he writes that it "would be a lot cheaper to use than the shuttle...because it will not be piloted and therefore will not have need of the extensive 'human rating' requirements that NASA employs for the shuttle."

Here, he's bought into (or at least is implictly endorsing) two myths of spacecraft design.

The first is that pilots add cost to vehicles (including space vehicles). There's actually no evidence for this, at least in any vehicle other than space vehicles. There's actually good reason to believe that piloted vehicles, properly designed, could be cheaper than unpiloted ones--a proposition that the X-Prize and commercial suborbital developers will test in the coming months and years.

The second is that the shuttle is human rated. In fact, it is not, and never has been, by the standards that NASA has established as human rated. For instance, it doesn't have "zero-zero" abort capability (that is, the ability to abort from the pad all the way to orbit, the zeros corresponding to the velocity and altitude of the starting condition). I've discussed both of these aspects extensively in the past.

He states that Columbia wasn't able to reach the ISS orbit. In fact, it was--but its payload would have been much less than that of the other orbiters, so it was designated mostly for non-ISS missions. It was in fact scheduled to go to the ISS had it not been destroyed a year ago.

On page 224, he expresses concern about sending nuclear waste into space that indicates a lack of understanding of the issues--he's a little too prone to buy the scare mongering of some people about this. I do think that it might be financially feasible, and safe, to store nuclear waste in space, but this won't happen until we develop much more reliable vehicles than are available at present. I discussed this a couple years ago in an early Fox News column.

Greg also has a higher opinion of Bob Park's opinions than I do.

Overall, I agree with Jeff's assessment of the book. It's an interesting read, and will provide a lot of background in terms of NASA versus the private sector, but as Jeff says, it's a little schizophrenic, in that he can't quite decide whether the agency is an evil monolith, or a bunch of warring fiefdoms. Ultimately, while descriptive, it's not very prescriptive, or well organized. It's more a compendium of interesting stories than a coherent narrative, and it seems to peter out at the end, with no clear conclusion.

The world still awaits the book that lays out clearly the problems with our space policy, and viable recommendations to address them. This isn't that book. Perhaps mine, if I ever get around to finishing it, will be.

Most of the errors you name are quibbles (though yes, they should have been caught by a careful editor -- not that anyone appears to actually edit books any longer, as editor is apparently now a euphimism for marketing rep). Only two of them were non-trivial, the Saturn plans and cost of putting a pilot into a spacecraft. The "man-rated" issue is a bit of handwaving; clearly NASA's definition of man-rated is simply that which NASA is willing to fly a human on, no matter what they use as a "book" defintion.

Rand, I appreciate the fine-tooth-comb with which you've gone over my book. Obviously, I did my best with fact-checking but even so errors crept in and I'm glad to have them pointed out...there will be a paperback version, and I can correct them there.

However, with regard to Columbia, my very careful check of this issue was that Columbia was unable to dock with the ISS because it lacked a docking port. How is it that there were plans to send Columbia to the station? This is the first I've heard about that. I take on board the other technical issues (although re. tethers, in fact I WAS describing an electrodynamic tether, although perhaps I shouldn't have generalized so with such abandon), but this was one that surprised me. Your thoughts?

I don't have access to the pre-Columbia-loss manifest where I am right now, but I'm reliably informed that it was planned for a space station mission within a couple years of the Spacelab mission on which it perished (and in fact that there would be no other non-ISS missions, other than Hubble, prior to ISS complete).

Columbia didn't have a docking adaptor at the time, but one could be and was planned to be installed. Columbia was the preferred orbiter for non-ISS missions because it was about (from memory) twelve thousand pounds heavier than the rest of the fleet, which mean that much less payload to ISS, but it was capable of getting there.

And to others, I didn't mean to imply (if I did) that Greg's book isn't worth purchasing and reading. With the caveats stated here, it's a worthy addition to any space enthusiast's bookshelf, and the new version should be even better, if it incorporates changes noted here and elsewhere.

Rand wrote:

> [...] two myths of spacecraft design.
> The first is that pilots add cost to vehicles
> (including space vehicles). There's actually no
> evidence for this, at least in any vehicle
> other than space vehicles. There's actually
> good reason to believe that piloted vehicles,
> properly designed, could be cheaper than
> unpiloted ones

As usual, the correct answer is probably "it depends."

If we are discussing current launch vehicles or even relatively modest off-the-shelf extrapolations such as Kistler's K-1, the evidence suggests putting men on board indeed will increase the weight and cost. This is because ELVs as well as virtually all 1st generation post-Shuttle orbital RLV proposals assume a relatively high probability of losing the vehicle, and key subsystems (engines, airframes etc.) tend to have a lifetime of a few dozen to at most a hundred missions even if they are intended to be recoverable. Furthermore, the most important missions (satellite delivery, or transport of cargo to a space station) require little or no "rudder and stick" action by a human pilot. Kistler's already small payload capability would be further reduced, if the vehicle had to provide a pressurized capsule plus life support for a pilot. After all, the K-1 is basically a parachute recoverable pod with non-existent maneuvering capability. The Shuttle experience strongly suggests that putting people on a relatively dangerous vehicle that flies infrequently will increase the total cost.
---
Now, Rand's assumptions are probably radically different. I suspect he is thinking about vehicles having essentially the same maneuvrability, safety & abort capabilities as good experimental or military aircraft -- capable of dropping off fare-paying passengers at Orbital Hilton many times a day. In that case, I agree that a pilot probably would be required. But I think Greg's summary of Kistler's K-1 (which indeed may be "properly designed" to minimize development cost & risk, as far as launching a handful of satellites is concerned) essentially is correct.

MARCU$