It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, for those interested in humanity’s future off the planet.

It’s customary for columnists to take stock at the end of a year–to review the highlights of the year’s events, and put them into a context. For space enthusiasts, particularly human-in-space enthusiasts, 2002 had points both high and low.

Let’s start with the bad news. Our current primary method of lofting payloads into orbit, expendable launch vehicles, once again demonstrated their intrinsic unreliability, with several notable failures, even of new systems that were supposed to provide more assurance of safety.

Perhaps the most notable was the recent embarrassing failure of the European (though really French) Ariane 5. It was only three for four this past year, but that was actually an improvement in its historical performance–it only has a seventy percent success rate since its inaugural flight (which was, typically enough, a failure as well).

Combined with failures of other commercial launchers, the space insurance industry took it on the chin this year, and it’s going to make it much more difficult to get insurance for launches next year–the available investment pool is depleted. Reliability is expensive, but unreliability can apparently be even more so.

In the mixed-results category, the government showed some signs of starting to get its act together after the space-policy incoherence (and often outright disasters) of the Clinton-Gore administration. The Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry finally released its report, and it contained a bold call for radical changes in our national space goals and policies. It remains to be seen, however, if the policy makers will take it seriously, or if it will simply gather dust on a shelf, as almost all previous such commission reports have.

NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe started to get a handle on the agency’s budget problems, particularly the space station overruns, and has at least fenced off the problems of this ongoing agency white elephant from the rest of NASA, and its planning. He’s starting to develop a vision for both ISS, and NASA future plans for manned space beyond earth orbit.

He also euthanized the Space Launch Initiative, which was threatening to become another budgetary black hole of sand boxes for technologists (at least in its prior flawed form) while continuing to dampen potential investor enthusiasm for private alternatives to the Shuttle.

Unfortunately, there’s still little sense that he understands the real issues of the cost of space launch and how to solve them. While it’s not necessary for him to do so (as long as the agency can stay out of the way), progress could occur much more quickly on this front with an administrator who was up to speed. Perhaps 2003 will see him become so.

Fortunately, there are some promising developments on the military side. Despite the adherence of the Air Force to the old expendable-launch paradigm in the form of the EELV program, DARPA (in defiance of the old, disastrous Clinton-Gore dictum that NASA pursue reusables and DoD focus on expendables) has a new program for a small, mostly-reusable launcher that, if successful, could utterly alter the way the world thinks about space launch–in cost, responsiveness and reliability. They will be downselecting to a small number of the existing contractors in the next couple months to further investigate some promising concepts, most of which could probably be scaled up to provide low-cost access not only for significant payloads, but perhaps passengers as well.

President Bush authorized the construction of an initial defense against ballistic missiles this past year. This will have no immediate impact on the space industry per se, but the long-term effects of deploying large numbers of interceptors will surely drive down the cost, and increase the reliability, of delivery systems for them. It will also get people to start thinking of space as just a place to do things (including warfare), rather than as a pristine sanctuary, fit only for scientists and weapons passing through.

Perhaps the most exciting news this past year for Mars enthusiasts was the discovery of vast quantities of easily-accessible water there. It remains to be seen what the long-term effects of this discovery will be, but it’s already caused major rethinking of plans for human missions and settlement of the Red Planet.

Both the threat and the promise of asteroids became more recognized (including a couple close calls) in the past year, and this may result in some promising near-term policy to address both, if nothing else than increasing the paltry resources currently devoted to looking for them.

Finally, in what is to me the most encouraging developments in my experience of following space activities, and advocating a vigorous and muscular space policy, comes the news from the private sector.

TransOrbital, a private lunar exploration/exploitation company, had a successful test launch last week, a key milestone toward an eventual money-making lunar enterprise. Low earth orbit is not the Moon, but it’s a good confidence builder, and companies like them should be encouraged.

On the affordable-access front, the focus is clearly shifting toward the suborbital market. This is a welcome development, because this market has been neglected, and it’s one that promises much more affordable ventures. These will be able to prove out the concepts that can provide routine, reliable, low-cost space launch. The existence of a market for such vehicles means that they can then be bootstrapped up to orbital ventures, once the principle is accepted.

The process will be greatly aided by recently released reports from the Aerospace Corporation and Futron that actually quantify the suborbital market.

The development of this market (particularly the passenger portion of it) may be greatly aided by the fact that, over six years after its founding, the X-Prize is finally fully funded, with ten million dollars available to the first person or company to fly a successful suborbital vehicle.

Overall, we saw both some setbacks, and advances this past year. NASA and the rest of the government continue to flounder to a degree, but things are improving with the new administrator and administration. Meanwhile, private enterprise is starting to pick up some of the slack, and such activities will continue to accelerate into 2003.

To paraphrase the old Jewish toast, “Next year in orbit…”

Irving Berlin’s classic aside, the appeal of a white Christmas is a parochial one–most of the world’s Christian population lives at a latitude and altitude that precludes it, and have never seen one.

As someone raised in the upper Midwest, however, I do have a fondness for them, and a holiday season sans snow always seems to be missing something (though southeastern Michigan wasn’t always cooperative in that regard, either).

I’m spending the holidays this year in Columbia, Missouri. I arrived in St. Louis on Friday, and it was in the forties and fifties, with no precipitation. I’ve been in Columbia since Saturday, and the forecast has been for no precipitation through Wednesday. Until, that is, yesterday afternoon, when a surprise winter storm on the southern plains threatened southern Missouri as well, with a chance for some accumulation into the central part of the state.

I woke up to cloudy skies, and brown lawns, but about mid-morning, it started to snow. It impaired our ability to get to the mall for some last-minute Christmas shopping (and doing our bit to fight terrorism and support the economy via the purchasing brigade). A little after 5 PM, there’s now at least two inches on the ground, and it looks set to hold up through tomorrow, or at least long enough for us to catch our flight back to southern California tomorrow afternoon, where white Christmases are unheard of, barring a trip up into the mountains.

So, just in time for the holiday, we have a beautiful carpet of snow, and it seems a little more like Christmas.

Now, you’ll have to excuse me, because I have to shovel some of the white Christmas decoration off of the sidewalk and driveway. But this is one time of the year that I don’t mind.

I hope that all my readers have a merry Christmas (and a happy holiday for those who don’t celebrate Christ’s birth), regardless of its hue.

Mr. Lott finally smelled the cappuccino.

Out with the old, and in with the new. Happy days are truly here again.

Welcome aboard, Mr. Frist.

A forty-foot crawl-through model of the large intestine goes on a nationwide tour soon.

This reminds me of Bart’s science project of the human digestive system, that Nelson sends into a positive feedback loop and explodes desecrating (defecating?) the interior of the school bus and all contents, human and non-human.

Just too weird for words.

John Carter McKnight says that we have the wrong date. It shouldn’t be in February–we should name December 19 that, for the day we last returned from the Moon.

He also says that the space program is a lot like the Bill Murray movie.

It’s an interesting, and different, take.

[Thanks to Jon Goff for the tip]

Here’s a different and, I think, insightful take on the Lottapalooza, by Robert Tracinski:

…this will hurt the Democrats, in the long run. It will hurt them because it gives them the illusion of having an important political issue to use to their advantage. And thus it will excuse them, for at least another two years, from examining the failed policies that lost them the election.

Here’s a different and, I think, insightful take on the Lottapalooza, by Robert Tracinski:

…this will hurt the Democrats, in the long run. It will hurt them because it gives them the illusion of having an important political issue to use to their advantage. And thus it will excuse them, for at least another two years, from examining the failed policies that lost them the election.

Here’s a different and, I think, insightful take on the Lottapalooza, by Robert Tracinski:

…this will hurt the Democrats, in the long run. It will hurt them because it gives them the illusion of having an important political issue to use to their advantage. And thus it will excuse them, for at least another two years, from examining the failed policies that lost them the election.

Ninety-nine years ago this past Tuesday, amid some windblown sand dunes on the shores of North Carolina, the first powered, controlled heavier-than-air flight occurred.

It was accomplished, as the popular myth has it, by two “bicycle mechanics” from Dayton, Ohio. The reality, of course, was that they almost single-handedly invented modern aerodynamics and aeronautical engineering, and they did it on their own, with their own resources.

They did have government competition, however. The Department of War (what would now be called the Department of Defense) funded a competitor to achieve the same goal (though they were probably totally unaware of the Wrights’ ambitions)–Samuel Pierpont Langley, after whom the NASA Langley Research Center is named. His attempts, occurring just prior to the Wrights’ accomplishment by weeks, were utter and embarrassing failures.

The Wright brothers’ achievement, and example, quickly sparked the imaginations of thousands, then millions. Less than fifteen years later, hundreds of flimsy aircraft were shooting each other out of the skies over France and Germany, and aircraft were dropping crude bombs.

Five years after that, dozens of aviators were barnstorming America in their war-surplus Jennies and other aircraft, offering thrill rides at five dollars a head.

A decade later, there were commercial airlines and airliners, delivering mail and passengers, and thousands of people were spurning trains, flying between destinations, making the country much smaller than it had been only a decade before.

Forty-five years after the first flight, aircraft were propelled by jet engines, and even rocket engines, and the sound “barrier” had been broken.

Compare and contrast to our progress in space.

Forty-five years after the first launch of a satellite into orbit, where are we?

We can launch a couple dozen people per year into space, selected by government bureaucrats, at a cost of almost a percent of the total federal budget.

There is almost no private activity. No one can afford a ride in a space vehicle, unless they made millions in the stock market. No five-dollar rides, let alone regular passenger service to…anywhere.

What’s the difference?

Conventional wisdom is that space is “hard,” and that it’s not surprising that we haven’t made more progress. But such “wisdom” misses the essential point of the government role (and corresponding public expectation) in the two cases.

In the case of aeronautics, other than the failed attempts of Professor Langley, there was very little government involvement in the aeronautics industry. The Wrights had very little luck in persuading the US government to support their efforts, even after their successful flights, and actually ended up going to Europe for support.

In 1915, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) was founded, and it did indeed help the fledgling aeronautics industry. But it did so by providing basic technology, expanding on the Wrights’ early explorations into aerodynamics and propulsion, and putting out tables of data that would aid aircraft designers.

What it didn’t do was tell the industry how to build their airplanes, or actually fund new aircraft types, as a government enterprise. The government didn’t take over the aeronautics business from the beginning, or even now. It remains a private (albeit government regulated) activity.

Instead, the government encouraged private enterprise in aeronautics by means such as subsidizing airmail, which didn’t provide a means for bureaucrats to pick winners and losers.

More importantly, private individuals and corporations supported the activities through prizes and air races.

That’s the fundamental difference between aeronautics and astronautics.

Astronautics was born in the middle of a war, albeit a cold one. From the very beginning in the 1950s, space was a realm of the government. This was not because it was unaffordable to private individuals, but because, under the circumstances, there was a government imperative to be first in space (just as in the early twentieth century, there was no government incentive to be involved in aeronautics at all).

For a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, space was Important. There were races to be won.

Accordingly, it got all of the budget that it needed, and in the process, corporate cultures and system design philosophies quickly adapted themselves to the notion that performance was the highest value, and cost was of no matter, because the customer would not only pay whatever was required, but be pleased if the costs were spread around to favor various congressional districts, even if total costs increased.

We continue to suffer, four and a half decades after the first satellite launch, from this mindset. Why pursue fickle and unpredictable markets among the general public when we have a government customer, stuck in the ways of doing business four decades old, who’s willing to guarantee us our costs plus a fixed profit?

On this anniversary, one year shy a century, it is a good time to look back at how the aviation industry evolved, and see if there are some useful lessons to be applied to the space industry. Is it possible that, with a different, more market-oriented approach, we could have made more space progress in the last half century?

I suspect that it’s not only possible, but extremely likely.