Matt Bowes has an essay on the promise and progress of private spaceflight.

That's a fine collection of cliches.

Overheated language, check: "dawn of a new era... revolution... charge into the future"

Tendentious comparisons to other technologies and markets, check: "Technology has exploded in almost every other sector of the economy... This aspect of the profit motive has been the driving force behind the lowering cost of computers..."

Ideological certainties and putdowns, check: "Enter the free market...large bureaucracies that exist to please trifling constituencies... Where they have failed, the free market will succeed... Whereas the New World Order seeks to conform humanity to a single collective voice, the private spaceflight revolution will preserve the value of individuality" (Watch out for those black helicopters closing in on Kwajalein)

Quantitative bogosity, check: "...an incredible amount of creative and financial capital has been invested" (Yeah, about as much as telecomm or Web services go through on a slow Sunday afternoon)

I want what Matt Bowes wants, and believe it will come about. Where we differ is that he seems to think that this kind of froth is a positive contribution; I think it's one of the biggest reasons for the slow progress he laments.

Monte,
I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I think we ought to cut Matt a little slack. He's 18 and he's just getting into this. As he gets his hands a bit dirtier, I'm sure his analysis will mature. It worked for me after all...

~Jon

Well, to call those of us who have served and who serve now in the military, or as members of the astronaut corps, as "delusional" goes a little beyond the pale in my book. Does he think that volunteers are stupid?

Aleta,

What I called delusional was the belief that the death of public servants can be justified by government, not public servants themselves. I didn't mean to be personally offensive.

Monte,

I could easily provide thorough, drawn out analysis of my points, but this essay was meant to be short. Also, how could my "froth" possibly be "one of the biggest reasons for the slow progress?"

It reads like somebody who has recently discovered Ayn Rand.

Monte, other than his writing style, do you have any specific objections to the substance of his essay? And please explain how this sort of essay has prevented NASA from advancing the state of manned space travel for the last 25 years.

Ed,

Not this particular essay, but the belief system it represents:

– that we’re on the brink of a Great Leap Forward in space activity
– that Apollo as a G.L.F. set the norm, the pace we should expect, in terms of new vehicles/missions per decade
– that someone must be to blame for our accumulated impatience and frustration
– that entrepreneurial New Space will surely deliver where mean old NASA let us down.

I disagree with all of those premises. Routine, robust access to LEO at, say, 10% of today’s median cost/kg is at least a couple of decades away. The Apollo pace was anomalous in too many ways to count. And getting out of the low-payload-volume, low-flight-rate, high-cost corner is intrinsically hard and expensive, no matter who does it and who pays for it, and will stay that way for quite a while.

At NASA, the G.L.F. mindset gave us STS and ISS – the Next Big Vehicle and the Next Big Project – both grotesquely over-ambitious, both sucking up resources that would have accomplished more in modest, incremental, cumulative NACA-style research. And now we have VSE…

Outside NASA but within the small echo chamber of space enthusiasts, you’ve got multiple G.L.F. memes:

- that NASA hasn’t been ambitious enough, that only a G.L.F. to Mars ASAP! or to Confront the Chinese Menace! will restore the Vision of 1961-1967
- that space isn’t really all that hard and expensive, all it needs is the G.L.F. of private enterprise
- that either way, the wider public is just waiting for a stirring manifesto like Matt’s to take a Great leap Backw – er, Forward to match our level of excitement about space again

So… yes, since you asked, the hype and over-selling of space typified by that essay is not just irrelevant, but actively harmful. Outside the echo chamber, the wider public (including taxpayers and leegislators and investors) has long been long jaundiced by NASA’s G.L.F. stories. They could well become so about private space if its frothier advocates keep flogging the hype so far ahead of the accomplishments.

Space would benefit greatly from a lot less emphasis on the Revolution Just Around the Corner, and a lot more attention to boring details. Given 40 years of that, we might look back to see that there actually was steady, cumulative progress adding up to a revolution. Wouldn’t that be a nice change?

Well said Monte. I agree with Ed that it was good for your to spell it all out, but you did, and you did it well.