I was going to comment on this strange and hyperbolic broadside at the Shuttle, and the manned space program in general from John Derbyshire, but Mark Whittington (who really should spell check his posts) and Clark Lindsey have preempted much of what I would have written.

Briefly, while I agree with his conclusions, he gets there by accident, because his premises are mostly wrong, and his numbers exaggerated beyond any semblance of reality.

The column by Derbyshire is disgusting. That's the kindest thing I can say. What a jerk. (Not you, Rand.)

Derbyshire's column had its over-the-top hyperbole (intentionally, I suspect), but frankly I think it was a breath of fresh air compared to the flaccid rebuttals you cited. Of course, you know where I stand on this issue.

One of the features of good conservative thought is the willingness to take a hard look at sacred cows, and asking yourself if this cause you've been supporting is just sentimentality. The government space program has been rotten to the core for decades, not least because commentators have been unwilling to do this. Eventually, as in the USSR, reality asserts itself. It's a shame it didn't happen sooner.

Anyway -- we are now getting attacks on manned space from both the left (Krugman, for example) and the right. This can't bode well for those feeding at this trough.

Put succinctly, Derb's column is a steaming pile. No numbers, no quoted sources, hyperbolic over-reach of astounding proportions, insults followed by a 'But I support the troops!'-style condescension. Let's not forget the denigration of any sort of long-term space planning - his dig at 'romantic appeals to Mankind’s Destiny'. G-d forbid we actually think more than a few years ahead.

Rand,

Why don't you submit a rebuttle over at NRO for publication on their website?

You have been published there in the past haven't you?

I may do that, if I get time.

Derb's stuff on China is usually insightful but whenever he writes about other topics he shows himself to be a light-weight curmudgeon.

Noah: if the manned space program has been a folly and a fraud, then there's no way to sugarcoat it for the astronauts -- they're either foolish or complicit. Do you propose that because some of them have been killed on the job, that pointing out the program's failings is therefore forbidden, because that would reflect poorly on the dead? I think Derbyshire was trying to spin it for them in the best way he could; obviously, it wasn't good enough for some of the fans.

I would not relish having been an astronaut in the shuttle program. More than one of them must have belatedly realized just what they had signed up for.

The big problem with Derb's spewings is not his attack on the shuttle program, it is the way he superimposes the failings of the shuttle program on to the present and future of manned spaceflight efforts. He assumes that is is impossible to best the shuttle in price and safety. Here he is clearly talking out his ass.

It is like superimposing the Edsel on to the entirety of automotive engineering.

Mike: if the shuttle/Edsel analogy were correct, then Derb's entirely correct. The Edsel wasn't *that* bad, certainly not orders-of-magnitude worse than other cars. We're going to need to do orders of magnitude better than the shuttle (in cost) in order to have a real prospect of mining asteroids, etc.

Anyway, I don't see Derb confusing the shuttle with manned spaceflight. I see him condemning manned spaceflight IN ADDITION to condemning the shuttle as a specific instance thereof.

He was using the Shuttle as the sole foundation for his argument (besides some gross hyperbole). His argument is basically because the Shuttle is a failure, all current and future manned spaceflight efforts will have no better chance of sucess.

His argument against the economic feasibility of certain asteroids was pure bullshit.

Without the shuttle as a convienient whipping boy, he could not make a case.

I certainly hope his political commentary, which I have held in high regard up till now, is truly better crafted than this stink bomb.

One of the features of good conservative thought is the willingness to take a hard look at sacred cows, and asking yourself if this cause you've been supporting is just sentimentality.

con·ser·va·tive
adj.

1. Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change.

lib·er·al
adj.

1. a. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.
b. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.

Perhaps your political parties should change names, or something.

That Gojira, is the problem with modern labels.

American Liberals tend to be more like the classic definition of conservative. They claim to be 'Progressives' but are anything but for actual progress. They are status quo for growing the power of the state at the expense of individual liberties.

American Libertarians fall into the mould of classic Liberal as per your definition.

Modern American Conservatives tend to fall somewhere in between somewhat more toward the Libertarian side of things. Thier failings are on the moral side of things favoring the power of the State over the individual in things like the collosial failure that is the War on Drugs.

Those definitions are so out of date, I wonder why they are still used.

"Put succinctly, Derb's column is a steaming pile. No numbers, no quoted sources, hyperbolic over-reach of astounding proportions, insults followed by a 'But I support the troops!'-style condescension"

Derb did give figures, some specific -- i.e., "14 deaths in 113 flights," "$500 million to put seven persons and 2,000 tons of equipment into earth orbit," -- and others clearly chosen for sounding round and big, i.e., "We could extract every one of that trillion, and make a brooch out of them, for one-tenth the cost of mining an asteroid," and "nothing ... that could not be done twenty times better and at one thousandth the cost, by machines rather than human beings."

He didn't have to convince me, I already think that manned space flight is a gigantic waste of money. Nothing I've read here makes a convincing case otherwise.

Mark Whittington writes, "As for mining the asteroids, Dennis Wingo, whose written an actual book on space mining, suggested that a typical nickel-iron asteroid contains trillions of dollars in usable minerals."

Maybe so... but if it costs tens of trillions to go out and bring the space metals in, then what's the point?

My proposal: freeze all human spaceflight indefinitely and increase resources for robotic exploration and sample return missions.

A hundred years from now, we will have the skills to build cyborgs that thrive in space as their natural habitat.

"Maybe so... but if it costs tens of trillions to go out and bring the space metals in, then what's the point?"

And what basis do you have for this tens of trillions of dollars to do it AC? That number is simply absurd, no one who knowledgible who has lookd at the engineering thinks it will take a sum even remotely approaching tens of trillions of dollars on the high estimate. Derb simply pulled that number out of his ass.

Give me a ten Trillion dollars and I will give you a space elevator and a full blown city on Mars, not to mention develop a hundred or so asteroids. There hasn't been a trillion dollars spent on space since 1957 by the US ans Russia combined.

The 'tens of trillions' from AC was in reference to the 'trillions of dollars' of metals in an asteroid, not to the cost of doing asteroid mining at all (with some smaller amount of mass returned.) The comment was aimed at the silly justifications that take the total value of the materials in some large body and ignore the cost of producing it.

Did you know that if you ground up the moon into gravel, it would be worth 200 quintillion dollars? Wow, what an opportunity!

> He was using the Shuttle as the sole foundation for his argument (besides some gross hyperbole). His argument is basically because the Shuttle is a failure, all current and future manned spaceflight efforts will have no better chance of sucess.

Mike: you fundamentally misunderstand what he was saying. He wasn't stating that manned spaceflight was expensive because the shuttle was expensive. If you complain that he wasn't otherwise justifying that general position at all, so what? It was a short opinion piece, even a rant, not a book-length treatise! He doesn't have to justify every assertion. Insisting that he does is a defense mechanism and not a very good one.