Star Dreck: It’s High Time For a New Space Policy
Several important events in human spaceflight occurred in 1961. The first man and first American were shot into space fifty years ago this spring — but the most important anniversary is May 25th. Half a century ago today, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech before Congress in which he famously announced that the nation should, “before the decade was out,” accomplish the goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” Thus was the Apollo program born — and thus, many believe, we began to get serious about space.
But they are mistaken. That day was actually the beginning of a long national detour in space development, at least for human spaceflight. It’s one from which we are only now emerging, with the change being fought in a rear-guard effort by entrenched interests in a few key states and Washington.
There are a lot of myths about Apollo and human spaceflight, starting with the speech itself. Many believe that the moon announcement was the focus of the speech, but it was actually more of a supplemental state of the union message. The space policy was just one of nine areas covered, and the last one at that. Nor was it really about opening up the frontier, as others continue to imagine. It was about winning a crucial battle in the Cold War, in a technological area that was viewed to be of high military significance. The speech was not spurred by visions of a new ocean, but by yet another defeat in the space race (Yuri Gagarin had beaten Alan Shepard into not only space but orbit a month and a half earlier), and by the ignominious failure at the Bay of Pigs a month before, which was viewed as another lost battle in the Cold War to a Soviet proxy. The moon announcement was viewed as a means of trying to regain the initiative.
Of course, as it turned out, Apollo was a spectacular success, both in terms of winning the Cold-War battle and (a secondary goal, vigorously pursued by Texan Vice President Lyndon Johnson) in creating a “Marshall Plan” for the industrialization of the American South, with new high-tech activities in Houston, northern Alabama, and central Florida, among other places.
But in terms of actually opening up the space frontier, it was nothing short of catastrophic. We have spent hundreds of billions on it over the years, to send a few hundred government employees into space, at a cost of over a billion dollars a flight. And in July, with the last flight of the Shuttle, we won’t even be able to continue to do that.
In fact, from that standpoint, the speech itself carried the seeds of destruction. The very next words after the statement of the goal quoted above were the following:
No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish [emphasis mine].
As a cautionary tale of what happens when a nation ceases to be visionary, many space enthusiasts note the abrupt end to seafaring undertaken by China’s Ming dynasty. With its advanced ship technology, it sailed to not just only the east coast of Africa but the west coast of America — only to retreat back to its own shores and await the European age of exploration. But as I wrote years ago, those critics draw the wrong lesson:
The fact was that Zheng He’s journeys were a failure. They sent out vast amounts of the nations’ treasure with which to impress the heathens and gain tribute and the appropriate respect (just as is the goal for the current Chinese space activities). But when trade occurred at all, the ships often came back with items that were perceived to be of less value than what had been sent out to the ports. The trade was not profitable — it was draining vital resources. The bureaucrats [who shut down the program] were right.
Their problem was that they were doing it for the wrong reason, just as reaping prestige and proving prowess are the wrong reasons to have a space program — if, that is, one expects it to be both effective and cost effective. Kennedy was even more wrong when he put it this way, in his Rice speech of a year and a half later:
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too [my emphasis].
I rebutted this logic a few years ago, too:
The idea that competition in the space industry is driving down costs and bringing innovation is a fiction based on a delusion. No one has built or launched humans into space besides government sponsored huge corporations and no one will ever be able to do that. The thousands or millions of details required to safely launch and support people in space is far beyond one company’s capability and unless you are a believer in make believe programs like the 1970s Salvage 1 (Andy Griffith builds a space ship out of junk) you would know that even the smallest program to put items into space have costs in the billions for them to be successful. No one has ever prohibited companies from developing human spaceflight, yet no company today has ever accomplished it without the government footing the bill. Even Virgin Galactic, bound and determined to launch people into low earth orbit has never gotten their “spacecraft” into an altitude above 50 thousand feet, not even in the neighborhood of space. I think that those who think that the government has delayed and distracted us from true space travel need to do better research into what has worked, and what has not, and ask why there is ANY commercial need to go into orbit.
Bob Singer-Satellite Systems Engineer with 28 years experience
What are you talking about Bob? A bit of quick math would tell you that 112.014 km altitude is easily more than 50 thousand feet. Hell, it’s more than 50 miles. You may have 28 years as a satellite system’s engineer and I respect that that’s hard work. It’s so hard that you missed the headlines on Oct. 5, 2004 when Spaceship 1 piloted by Brian Binnie rocketed to 69.6022 miles above the earth to claim the Ansari X-Prize. Hell, if you want to get technical, Spaceship one did it 3 different times with the first hitting an altitude of 100.124 km on June 21, 2004. Not only that, but Spaceship 1 was launched on Sept. 29, 2004 AND Oct. 5, 2005 in order to meet the criteria for claiming the prize. That’s a launch of the SAME ship twice in less than a week. What is the fastest ever turnaround for a NASA shuttle orbitter (hell, for any NASA funded ship or capsule?)?
I’ll grant that it falls short of Alan Sheppards 187km, but it is well beyond the Kármán line which is the accepted standard for the boundry of space. In 2005, 3 X-15 pilots were retroactively awarded astronaut wings for altitudes between 90 and 108 kilometers altitude.
The impression I get from you is that you see guys like Burt Rutan as “heaven storming” as Nietzche said regarding the Tower of Babel. Who do these upstarts think they are to dally in the part of the pool that is considered the sole province of NASA and the federal government, eh?
As to your claim that no one has ever prohibited companies from putting anyone in space, I give you the FAA which throws a massive bureaucracy in the way of amateur rocketry. If the FAA had been around in the 1920′s, Robert Goddard would never have been allowed to conduct his experiments that directly influenced German rocketry in the 30′s and 40′s which directly influenced the American space program in the 50′s and 60′s which directly contributed to there being a market for your job! How much innovation was brought about by turn of the century Americans tinkering in their garages. Well, there’s rockets, Apple computer, the Wright Brothers….
It’s because of attitudes like yours that Americas reputation as a leader and innovator is slowly slipping away. Unfortunately you and your ilk are so quick to say what can’t be done while trumpetting your credientials as an authority, you fail to know what CAN or HAS been done.
Shame on you for trying to discourage the dreamers.
Good reply. The logical extension of which is that the space program, contrary to conventional conservative wisdom, is a vast wasteful boondoggle waiting to happen all over again in order to serve some misplaced sense of nationalism. It’s vastly expensive and it accomplishes nothing that couldn’t — and shouldn’t — be done by the military.
Even the notion that space is this rich, fertile ground for scientific development is a laughingstock among scientists.
There’s nothing out there but abstract experience and knowledge, folks. Space is a hard vacuum that’ll kill you dead. Most planet’s atmospheres are even more hostile, and the relatively benign ones that simply kill you with atmosphereless vacuum instead of burning your lungs out and crushing you to the thickness of a dime are not terraformable except in your fantasies. We can’t get anywhere of note or importance, and the recent revelation that the only way to visit useless Mars was to plan a one-way trip should light some mental lightbulbs.
Space is desert to the power of infinity. Why does this conversation even arise if not for flag-waving?
We don’t have the money. Combining all debts and unpaod obligations, federal and state, we owe a quarter quadrillion dollars. What’s all this reoccuring nonsense — including the mindless, pointless bleat below:
…about blowing a wad more on dangling around in the literal middle of absolutely nowhere? Aw, it’s about our reputation.
As wasteful egotists who can’t even bail out their wallowing, sinking welfare State.
“There’s nothing out there but abstract experience and knowledge, folks.”
Oh, is that all? God forbid one should find that worth having…
So it’s the State’s business to undertake that risk, underwritten by our money? Where is that in the Constitution?
Promote the general welfare. Provide for the common defense.
Roads and armies have always been the province of Kings. Satellite capability has made so much of our lifestyle possible. It also gives us a HUGE advantage in warfare. Someday, the roads will go through the frontier of space. This is exactly what the government should be doing. The government’s job is to do the vital things that we as individuals cannot do ourselves.
The military developed the Internet. Privatizing it after the massive initial cost resulted in unbelievable wealth to the the individual, the country, and the entire world. Space will have an even greater initial cost… orders of magnitude greater. The wealth we receive by the government having primed the pump is immeasurable.
The problem is, Kennedy was after symbolism, not permanent achievement or long-term gain. A far lesser expenditure was indicated. Do the initial research with a longer view. Plan an approach to space exploration for the next 50 years. Fully assess the problem first. Learn what works and what does not. Build the infrastructure. Take your time. Forget the politics. Get it right.
In other words, as I have been saying, it is unchecked progressivism — any damn fool thing a voter majority can insist its federal masters owe it. Kinda like ObarkyKare. Thanks for the confirmation.
I already regarded the military’s right to work in space. Preferably under very strict congressional control in a land that’s regained its fiscal sanity which we show little to no sign of doing.
Bull. You sound like the other trekkers on here — are they headed there to glean the free energy? Shoot back boxcars of free asteroid ore? Going through the frontier of space, whatever that means, to where? Why? For what purpose?
You’re as undefined (and without scientific and economic grasp) as the fools who infest DC but sell us up the river every day they’re in session.
You need to get a grip on government because what this is is unbridled progressivism. You can’t even explain why you’d unleash this waste and inefficiency, and you surely cannot make a case for the science behind the harebrained escapades you propose.
We all need to get a grip on government. We don’t need a dime more of the bankruptcy they’ve inflicted us with.
That’s a fair question, I guess. And I’m not sure I’ve got an answer that’s wholly satisfactory to you OR to me. It’s not clear that great (monetary) profits lie in wait for space explorers, or that a free market will ever find compelling reasons to explore space that outweigh its drawbacks and difficulties. It’s FAR from clear that extra-orbital space will ever have enough strategic value to be worth a government’s while on geopolitical grounds. And the Constitution isn’t hugely encouraging on issues like this: how far do you stretch the point of “the general welfare”? Not certain.
On the other hand, manned space exploration—visiting other planets in particular—seems like an inherently worthy thing to do. I’d rather some private party came up with the means or motive to do it, but it’s not certain that’ll ever happen. As a citizen and political thinker, maybe I ought to leave it at that.
But as a man, I cannot. Outer-space exploration, setting a man on Mars, etc.: these strike me as the sort of thing that a civilization ought to do, and that any civilization worthy of the name by-God SHALL do. And it seems like one of the handful of tasks for which a chartered government is essential. I’ve never been accused of “unbridled progressivism” before, and never thought that supporting space programs qualified a person as a leftie. But if it does, bring me my red kerchief.
Funny how we can afford trillions in bailouts for corporate failures and welfare for millions of foreign nationals living in our country illegally.
Bob, I also have over 20 years of military satellite experience. In that time, I’ve seen nothing but massive cost overruns and years long delays before programs ever fly or get cancelled. If all of your experience has been in the traditional “cost-plus” side of the business, then I can see how you believe that’s the only way things can be done. However, it isn’t true. NASA has validated SpaceX’s costs as being 1/10th to 1/4th of what it would’ve taken for them to achieve the same thing in building the Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule. Do try to keep up. From Aviation Week: SpaceX Might Be Able to Teach NASA a Lesson:
Administrator Charles Bolden apparently agrees, saying that the SpaceX approach to management is “disruptive technology” that can bring “great gains” to the space program.
“They don’t spread things all over the country the way that NASA and defense contractors tend to do,” Bolden told the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology on May 19. “They’re very focused in two locations in the country. They bring everything in-house. They have no subcontractors, so everything comes to them. That’s disruptive.”
As NASA struggles to restructure itself with the government in a cost-cutting mood, agency analysts have put some numbers behind Bolden’s view, notes Christopher F. Chyba, a professor of astrophysics and international affairs at Princeton University. Chyba played a key role in the 2009 deliberations of the panel headed by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine.
Testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee on May 18, Chyba repeated his 2009 warning that NASA has never been able to develop one vehicle and fly another at the same time, and is unlikely to be able to do so today (AW&ST Aug. 3, 2009, p. 28). But he says NASA may be able to learn from SpaceX as the agency develops the heavy-lift launch vehicle Congress has ordered it to build for missions beyond low Earth orbit (LEO).
“I think one would want to understand in some detail . . . why would it be between four and 10 times more expensive for NASA to do this, especially at a time when one of the issues facing NASA is how to develop the heavy-lift launch vehicle within the budget profile that the committee has given it,” Chyba says.
He cites an analysis contained in NASA’s report to Congress on the market for commercial crew and cargo services to LEO that found it would cost NASA between $1.7 billion and $4 billion to do the same Falcon-9 development that cost SpaceX $390 million. In its analysis, which contained no estimates for the future cost of commercial transportation services to the International Space Station (ISS) beyond those already under contract, NASA says it had “verified” those SpaceX cost figures.
For comparison, agency experts used the NASA-Air Force Cost Model—“a parametric cost-estimating tool with a historical database of over 130 NASA and Air Force spaceflight hardware projects”—to generate estimates of what it would cost the civil space agency to match the SpaceX accomplishment. Using the “traditional NASA approach,” the agency analysts found the cost would be $4 billion. That would drop to $1.7 billion with different assumptions representative of “a more commercial development approach,” NASA says.
Just yesterday, NASA announced the design of a new deep space exploration capsule based on Lockheed-Martin’s Orion. They’ve already spent $5 billion on Orion and it’s nowhere near flight ready, nor is there anything to launch it on. With billions more money, they think it’ll fly by 2016 although past performance suggests this may be optimistic. At the same time, the Senate has directed NASA to spend $10 billion to cobble together a heavy launch capability out of left over Shuttle parts by 2016. The best NASA is likely to do is fly it four times before running out of SSMEs. That works out to $2.5 billion per flight of a vehicle that has no defined payload or mission other than to protect jobs in Florida, Alabama, and Utah.
By way of contrast, SpaceX has spent somewhere around $800 million (mostly private investment) to design and develop the Falcon 1 (two different engine designs), the Falcon 9 (two versions of the same engine design) and the Dragon capsule. They’ve announced the Falcon Heavy with a payload of 113,000 pounds to LEO for perhaps $100 million per flight with the first flight likely in early 2012.
There’s an old song titled “Old Time Religion” that says “It was good enough for Grandpa and it’s good enough for me.” Well, the status quo isn’t good enough anymore. We simply can’t afford to keep paying too much for too little from the old guard space manufacturers.
Both NASA and NOAA are government welfare programs for scientists and engineers. I don’t propose eliminating them entirely, but a 50% cut in budgets, especially with our mounting deficits, is a good place to start. Especially now, that one of their prime objectives is Muslim outreach. I agree with Rand Simberg, NASA was initially established for political purposes. And they still delve in politics, in the form of Jim Hansen, GISS and support for the global warming hoax.
Corrections: My reply was to Bob, not James. James is simply wrong.
Wrong? About what exactly?
Um, about what of your comment I excerpted, at the least.
No, you made the assertion “Ten”. Elaborate. What about it is wrong?
Wrong, James, and kindly stop trying to tie this up in linguistic knots. YOU made an assertion that is demonstrably false in at least a few ways. Referring to my excerpt:
Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.
First, whatever reputation we had is tarnished due to innumerable problems with our ruling class behaving badly on our dime. The idea that a space program will somehow restore that alleged image is an unfounded claim supported only why wish and whim. You cannot defend either and you have not.
Second, our national reputation is not slipping away. It’s gone and it’s gone due to the above. Secondarily, there’s nothing we can do or should care to do about that lost reputation in parts of the world that despise us simply on face. Personally, I don’t much give a damn what people think and neither should you. This is another whim on your part and you have not defended it nor can you.
Third, your better on the matter, Bob Singer, suffers from no such evident delusion that you can either identified or can therefore debunk. Your meager opinion does not trump his experience and it does not trump even his apparently considered opinion, technically speaking, and you have not shown otherwise.
And last, I’m quite confident his experience and credentials — the things you foolishly discount — lend him a profoundly more realistic view of what can and has been done — and how and why — then anything you’ve yet asserted to the contrary.
Your little explanation of amateur aeronautics is adjunct to the issue here: The utterly bankrupt and essentially adrift US cannot justify — not on any grounds — running a massive federal space exploration arm. No entity on earth can unless displays of unbridled national ego are somehow both attractive and can be undertaken within anything approaching a balanced budget.
Neither are or have been the case.
No, James is right and Ten is wrong.
Ten, you are so quick to trumpet credentials, what makes you think you know more than Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Robert Bigelow? Three self-made Billionares.
…and then there’s STILL that tiny matter of — if not for pride and bluster — why go to space at all? It’s phenomenally expensive and, like war, you leave the hardware (and lives) to forever rust out on the frontier. You take back nothing except your damnable honor, you being so convinced that your peers will somehow see you as superior for having prevailed…against a foe of your own making. So I guess that in a way it’s actually worse than war.
It’s like being the last man standing after an all night bender, only with a way better light show and some really cool reels of film to account the whole fiscal fiasco.
Hubble is a slightly different matter, provided we can justify paying nationally for a glorious National Geographic of the sky. But then if we can, what else can we nationalize? Some stuff? Lotsa stuff? Damn near everything, thanks to no discipline and some clearly fantastic “thinking”?
And should anyone care, I grew up as a young male in the age of Heinlein, Bradbury, Niven, Pohl and the like. I’m a rabid scifi film-goer. I have witnessed shuttle launches and was steeped in the space race nearly from birth. I remember the night (here) we landed on the moon — I heard the immortal words of July 20, 1969 on AM radio in a ’67 Ford Fairlane and I still have the gas station drinking glass to commemorate the day.
But we cannot justify this wretched national excess. Its because of a sound perspective on the physics of charging around in hard vacuum mere millimeters from Earth (in galactic terms) and the costs pursuant them that we cannot.
Your insistence is touching, Mark Turner, as is probably your faith in, as Seth rightly put it
…but the answer to your question I’ve already alluded to. (Oh, and to Seth’s observation I’d ad “political arm, dedicated to spreading the lie of global warming.” See how bureaucracies go, Mark Turner?)
Anyway, the answer to your question is simply ego and opportunity. That’s why these guys do this thing. And more power to them.
I wish private industry all the success in the world kiting millionaires along on high-altitude plane rides and I wish industry continued success (just like the military, which I also mentioned upthread) in its endeavors to orbit satellites and other devices.
But this madness about tooling around out there and paying for it by the least efficient, least productive means known to mankind is just that: a nationalistic folly borne out all the worst ideas about progress and humankind.
I’m afraid I’m not wrong about this, Mark Turner, but if I am, surely I can be corrected.
@ Ten:
Whatever you are smoking, you might want to lay off.
Listen crazy man: I am advocating privitization of the space program! I am in no way saying the government should be doing it!
Regarding “reputation”, I in no way linked it to “Space”. It is in response to Bob’s attitude that his “experience” somehow renders null the reality that Burt Rutan with the help of Paul Allen were able to put a man into “space” for about $27 million. So I ask you some question “Ten”:
Did they put a man into space ot not?
Is Scaled Composites a private entity?
If those answers are “Yes” and “Yes” (which they are) then Bob doesn’t know his ass from his ear and apparently neither do you! Neither Bob’s experience as a systems engineer nor your loving support of his uninformed opinion change the fact that Scaled Composites did indeed put a man 112 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. It happened. It’s historical record. The ship is in the Smithsonian. I take issue with blatant appeal to authority to promote unfounded positions. Using ones education or background as a means of dissuading or outright misleading others about reality or to say what is not possible is shameful. I wouldn’t have even said anything if Bob had said that, to his knowledge, no man had been to space without government involvement. But Bob said it hadn’t happened and, he that knows because he’s a systems engineer. This reasoning is so amazingly fallacious and his conclusion is so demonstratably false it’s amazing that you choose to continue aligning with him! Yours and Bob’s willful ingnorance of the facts in favor of a denial circle jerk so severly hampers any credibility you hope to maintain that perhaps you should just pretend this exchange never took place and just fade away lest people start to realize that you even exist!
Also, I don’t bear your idea of shame. I’m not ashamed of being American and I’m not ashamed of this country, its exceptionalsim and the fact that we have contributed a hell of a lot more positive to this world than negative, so you feel free to go sulk in the corner over our “tarnished” reputation because I’m not going to waste too much time on that or you other than to point out the amazing irony that, in principle, your apologetic, self-loathing argument is no less opinion than what I have said. It doesn’t matter how adamently you say it or how many responses you say it with.
As to the question of why go to space at all, well gee, unlike you a lot of us use GPS, cable/satellite TV, have OnStar in our cars, Use the internet, like to know the weather and all other manner of things made possible by these little follies into space. Apparently, you don’t consider the irony of your opposition as you sit there and bang out idiotic responses on your computer that the whole world can see (due in large part to satellites in OMG, space).
As to why send men to space? Why does there have to be a reason? Why watch TV or ride a roller coaster, climb a mountain or surf. Why buy a Porsche when you can get your travelling done in Chevrolet?
Because sometimes people just want to! What? Just because you live your life strictly by utilitarian principles, everyone else must do so also? Are you a commie?
You said, “But we cannot justify this wretched national excess.” Who is the one defending NASA here? It’s not me? Aparently, in your long and legendary (in your own mind) life, one concept you never grasped is that if someone wants to piss away their own money on stupid endeavors, they have the freedom to do so and just who the f*ck are you to walk around high and mighty and say it shouldn’t be allowed? The government needs to get out of the space business! But it doesn’t mean get out of space! What the hell is the matter with you?
It’s no one’s fault that, based on your unsolicited personal history, that you are a worn out old scag who has surrendered your national pride in favor of some politically correct Euro-induced sense of self hatred and you have forgotten that it is not capitalism that destroyed this country but rather the bureaucracy that was introduced to save the likes of you from yourself. Fine, you’ve given up on your country. I haven’t. I still believe that an individual America with the desire and a little elbow grease can make something of himself and change the world for the better and do it more effectively that a giant government program. No amount of your whining will change that so go ahead and hop in that clapped out Fairlane with you commemorative glass and pedal your ass on down the road. Apparently your of no further use to yourself.
I’ll gi
James, I agree with you. Privatization of space is the way to go.
So you want to get personal. I see.
You’re an evident room-temperature thinker, foolish enough to keep returning to the same failed arguments…when you’re not bitching that others haven’t read your mind well on the basis of your first failures in this thread.
That’s a nice ploy.
I refuted your assertions. So deal. Reloading the deck ain’t that thing.
Good for you. Was there something I said that led you to think I failed to comprehend that premise? Or that I disagreed with it? In fact I encouraged you and “your ilk” to have at it, whole hog.
So stop preaching.
You are some kinda dense. Burt and Paul, like any other two guys with a plastic plane that flies up to vacuum and descends, are welcome to fly the thing to the Moon for all I care. But that does not prove the fiscal, scientific, or collective merits of this vaunted space race that, according to you, is going to restore American pride and, presumably with it, economic sanity.
There’s always that little matter of feasibility, isn’t there Jim?
Who cares? I rebutted your assertion. Four ways. And showed that a gussied up Estes kit can be made, by any of a hundred individuals with enough resource, to poke a slightly loftier hole in the startosphere than the guy last month.
Zounds.
Again, who cares? Simburg used the words “space development” to define something. That something is either the unjustifiable running NASA debacle or various tourist groups tossing the idle rich up in the air (AND BEYOND, TEN!) in fancy planes.
This isn’t space development. There is no space development. It’s a fallacy: There’s basically nothing to develop except government make-work or private dick-waving (except, in the fantasies of some posters here, free energy, FTL, star-mining, ringworld building, and eventually universe creating. If only we have the intensity of vision to assume that mankind could take his bankrupt systems and leverage them one more time to perform literally the ludicrously impossible.)
And this all makes me a Luddite. Gotta love the unrelenting grasp some of us have on reality. PHYSICS BE DAMNED! TO INFINITY AND BEYOND!
That’s all correct except the part between if and you! Like I say, you’re running around with the goalposts stuck in your backpack.
Fabulous. I’m breathless.
You are one sophisticated thinker, Jim. Let’s try this for about the sixth time.
What. Is. The. Point. There is no “space development”. There is no positive fiscal return. We shall have precisely none of the physics-defying, economy-burning Jetsons-level fantasies some folks like to think The Final Frontier contains just for whizzing by and scooping them up.
We can’t even get back from Mars, Jim. And it’s DEAD.
What you’re proposing is…nothing. Proof that some guys shot a rocket to a sufficiently high trajectory to record it a penetration of vacuum. After which it fell back down. This isn’t space development.
It is a singularly self-indulgent effort on your part to “disprove” a guy with seventy different kinds of knowledge, I’m guessing, you’ll never comprehend. Except that you win a semantic point. What Bob observed, basically, is that all you have are these parlor tricks you can semantically mangle into calling space travel and be ever so slightly technically correct.
They were space travel. But they leave you with precisely nothing with which to defend extra-terrestrial activity of virtually all kinds and that is clearly what Bob (based on his experience, I’m just guessing here) posited.
Justification, Jim. Not model rocketry.
How about you, fallacy-hatin’ Jimbo, go make love to that strawman, denial boy. I despise what’s happened to this country, that making me the realist and you the, well, stars-in-your-eyes lunatic. Don’t even go there with me, son.
Satellites, Jim. Not space development. Not NASA. Not the Moon, stars, or that nifty FTL and Free Energy.
And I’ll accept your conceding the argument right about here and spare myself any more of your contortions and slanders.
The answer being, if you want my opinion, is only because we can legislate it. Which is to kinda settle the matter, isn’t it?
Thanks, Jim. Was that so hard?
@ Ten:
“I refuted your assertions. So deal. Reloading the deck ain’t that thing.”
You avoided reality.
“Was there something I said that led you to think I failed to comprehend that premise?”
Pretty much everything you refuse to address demonstrates your failure to comprehend.
Regarding “reputation”, I in no way linked it to “Space”. It is in response to Bob’s attitude that his “experience” somehow renders null the reality that Burt Rutan with the help of Paul Allen were able to put a man into “space” for about $27 million.
“Burt and Paul, like any other two guys with a plastic plane that flies up to vacuum and descends, are welcome to fly the thing to the Moon for all I care.”
What you care about is irrelavent in the scope of Bob’s denial that no private entity has put a “spaceship” higher than 50 thousand feet. It happened. Your decision to shotgun the thread with a bunch of nonsense than has no bearing on this one single fact speaks very loudly that you realize you stoked Bob’s crank and lost.
“But that does not prove the fiscal, scientific, or collective merits of this vaunted space race…”
What the hell are you talking about? I’m not even talking about a space race you moron! I’m simply saying that an organization other than the government was able to put a man into space! Bob says it hasn’t happen yet it has! Bob says it would take billions. Yet, it only took millions. What don’t you understand about that?
“There’s always that little matter of feasibility, isn’t there Jim?”
No, there’s not. It’s a matter of did it happen or not. Don’t put words in my mouth. Go back and read Bob’s post and try to keep your comments on point!
“Did they put a man into space ot not?
Who cares? I rebutted your assertion. Four ways…”
Apparently, you need a history lesson: “Your meager opinion does not trump his experience and it does not trump even his apparently considered opinion, technically speaking, and you have not shown otherwise. And last, I’m quite confident his experience and credentials — the things you foolishly discount — lend him a profoundly more realistic view of what can and has been done”
Those are your words Ten. Here’s Bob’s: “No one has built or launched humans into space besides government sponsored huge corporations and no one will ever be able to do that. The thousands or millions of details required to safely launch and support people in space is far beyond one company’s capability …you would know that even the smallest program to put items into space have costs in the billions for them to be successful…Even Virgin Galactic…has never gotten their “spacecraft” into an altitude above 50 thousand feet, not even in the neighborhood of space….Bob Singer-Satellite Systems Engineer with 28 years experience”
You’ve rebutted nothing.
“Simburg used the words “space development” to define something. That something is either the unjustifiable running NASA debacle or various tourist groups tossing the idle rich up in the air (AND BEYOND, TEN!) in fancy planes.”
Great…and when I get around to talking about Simberg, you’ll finally be on topic! I’m talking about what Bob said!
“This isn’t space development. There is no space development. It’s a fallacy…private dick-waving …assume that mankind could take his bankrupt systems …(associated nonsense)…”
Again, get on track. Where in my response to Bob’s false claims does this even enter the discussion?
“And this all makes me a Luddite.”
Well, if that’s how you choose to view yourself, I won’t stop you.
“That’s all correct except the part between if and you! Like I say, you’re running around with the goalposts stuck in your backpack.”
Again, did a nongovernmental entity launch a rocket into space for $27 million? It’s a simple question. I’m not asking about purpose. I’m not asking your opinion.
“Fabulous. I’m breathless.”
You should be.
“What. Is. The. Point. There is no “space development”. There is no positive fiscal return.”
Let me say it really slow for you. Did….Scaled…Composites…put….a….man…in…space…? What does that question have to do with “positive fiscal return”? It’s a simple question.
“We shall have precisely none of the physics-defying, economy-burning Jetsons-level fantasies some folks like to think The Final Frontier contains just for whizzing by and scooping them up.”
What does this have to do with anything?
“We can’t even get back from Mars, Jim. And it’s DEAD.”
Congratulations Ten! You realize that there is, in fact a Mars. This is progress.
“What you’re proposing is…nothing.”
Wow, 2 in a row! You finally realized I didn’t offer a proposal but rather pointed out how Bob was wrong. I think the prescription is almost figured out.
“This isn’t space development.”
Too good to last I see. When did I EVER talk about developing space?
“It is a singularly self-indulgent effort on your part to “disprove” a guy with seventy different kinds of knowledge, I’m guessing, you’ll never comprehend. Except that you win a semantic point.”
There’s nothing semenatic about Bob saying “no” and me saying “yes”.
“What Bob observed”
Bob didn’t observe me “anything”. His was the first comment and he was factually incorrect. End of story.
“But they leave you with precisely nothing with which to defend extra-terrestrial activity of virtually all kinds and that is clearly what Bob (based on his experience, I’m just guessing here) posited.”
And here is where you reveal the problem with your thinking. I’m not defending “extra-terrestrial activity”. I’m just saying it has happend without government involvement. As I’ve said many times, you’re not even responding to what I said.
“Justification, Jim. Not model rocketry.”
And yet, Bob never mentions “justification”…he just says it hasn’t happened and that he knows because he’s a “systems engineer”
“How about you, fallacy-hatin’ Jimbo, go make love to that strawman, denial boy. I despise what’s happened to this country, that making me the realist and you the, well, stars-in-your-eyes lunatic.”
Fantastic! Keep on embracing the Ptolemic universe as well. Damn those Copernicans!
“Don’t even go there with me, son.”
Go scare some children junior…nothing but man over here.
“As to why send men to space? Why does there have to be a reason?
And I’ll accept your conceding the argument right about here and spare myself any more of your contortions and slanders. ”
So you’re surrenduring and trying to spin it as if I have conceded? That’s laughable!
“The answer being, if you want my opinion,”
If you recall, your opinion is irrelevent to my initial comments “which is to kinda settle the matter”, doesn’t it?
“Was that so hard?”
You tell me. You’re the one who seems to be struggling here.
^ Word salad, Jim. Not doing it again. You lost.
Nice try Ten…keep shouting “you lost” over your shoulder as you run away.
Oh wait, I get it…You’re not retreating, your just attacking me from behind by traveling around the f*cking world.
It’s ok, I’ll be here waiting.
Let’s develop a sport for space.
http://backwardsboy.blogspot.com/2011/05/sports-in-space-why-not.html
It seems true to me that in creating our space program the government created a monster, a gigantic, money-devouring government/NASA/contractor bureaucracy that, from what I can see, is hide-bound, “risk averse,” wants to bet on “sure things,” and is no longer innovative and willing to take chances but is increasingly cautious. Prime example, our ancient fleet of 70s technology shuttles that are about to be retired so that, from now on, we will have to beg the Russians or Chinese to “pretty please” take us to the International Space Station—such as that apparent lash-up is.
It seems to me that in all this national pride, prestige and economic stimulus fueled scramble to get into Space, several reasons for going into space have been lost sight of.
First and foremost, we must always keep in mind that while our species is confined to Earth–an Earth that is periodically slammed into by asteroids, asteroids that several times in the past have wiped out a good portion or even most of the life on our planet—we are vulnerable to the possibility that our entire species could be destroyed by such bombardments or perhaps other life killing events and processes. Thus, it should be our number one priority—no matter how difficult, dangerous, or prolonged the task might be–to establish viable colonies in our Solar system—on the Moon, and Mars, orbiting the Earth, and perhaps in the Asteroid belt, with the possibility of ultimately spreading to other solar systems–to insure that such total destruction of our species is no longer possible.
Then, there is the question of Energy sources and various materials—water, gases, metals, radioactives—which we do not have in infinite supply, but which we may be able to find in Space. Other than the expensive, clunky, and inefficient solar panels we use within our obscuring atmosphere, can we go out into Space and capture and use the undiluted power of the Sun to drive our technological civilization? We can’t know until we have the tools and methods to get into space in a sustainable, permanent way and can start to develop the kinds of experience, tools and techniques to try.
Militarily, there is no substitute for the “High Ground,” and whoever controls the space around our planet de facto controls the planet, because they can threaten to just rain down low-tech, hyperkinetic chunks of rock–equivalent in impact and destructive force to nuclear weapons—on their enemies. Do we want any nation besides ours—say, the Russians or the Chinese–to have that power? If not, we had better get our asses in gear and get out there.
Finally, there is perhaps the most interesting aspect of this “New Frontier.” Our scientists keep upping the estimate of the number of planets in our Galaxy and the percentage of them that could possibly sustain life. Moreover, discoveries in the last several decades have shown just how tough and adaptable life is, even under the most extreme and hostile conditions. Thus, it is looking more and more likely that our Galaxy and the Universe is teeming with Life, and I think we should visit the neighbors, or to be ready to be visited by them and–whether they are friendly or hostile–we cannot deal with such neighbors on something like equal terms if we continue to just sit, uninformed, unskilled, and vulnerable, on our own little rock.
Yes! This. We must get off this rock.
If NASA was really ‘wasting anything but time’ we’d already have all this.
For investment scale, remember that a modern cruise ship [e.g. Oasis of the Sea, Queen Mary2] is a billion dollar capital investment. Some cruise lines [e.g. Carnival] have dozens of vessels in their fleet.
Years ago [this link is from 2003 http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail242.html#prizes ] Jerry Pournelle proposed a series of prizes to provide incentives for private industry to develop space access technology.
[Quote]
I can solve the space access problem with a few sentences.
Be it enacted by the Congress of the United States:
The Treasurer of the United States is directed to pay to the first American owned company (if corporate at least 60% of the shares must be held by American citizens) the following sums for the following accomplishments. No monies shall be paid until the goals specified are accomplished and certified by suitable experts from the National Science Foundation or the National Academy of Science:
1. The sum of $2 billion to be paid for construction of 3 operational spacecraft which have achieved low earth orbit, returned to earth, and flown to orbit again three times in a period of three weeks.
2. The sum of $5 billion to be paid for construction and maintenance of a space station which has been continuously in orbit with at least 5 Americans aboard for a period of not less than three years and one day. The crew need not be the same persons for the entire time, but at no time shall the station be unoccupied.
3. The sum of $12 billion to be paid for construction and maintenance of a Lunar base in which no fewer than 31 Americans have continuously resided for a period of not less than four years and one day.
4. The sum of $10 billion to be paid for construction and maintenance of a solar power satellite system which delivers at least 800 megaWatts of electric power to a receiving station or stations in the United States for a period of at least two years and one day.
5. The payments made shall be exempt from all US taxes.
That would do it. Not one cent to be paid until the goals are accomplished. Not a bit of risk, and if it can’t be done for those sums, well, no harm done to the treasury.
I had Newt Gingrich persuaded to do this before he found he couldn’t keep the office of Speaker. I haven’t had any audiences with his successors.
Henry Vanderbilt points out that having a prize, say $1 billion, for the second firm to achieve point (1) above will get more into the competition, and produce better results. I agree.
[/Quote]
When I first moved to Jacksonville, Fl., the local paper ran stories about the town. One story is akin to what ten says. When Jacksonville decided to build the Matthews Bridge across the St Johns, many opined about what a terrible waste of money to build such an expensive bridge to the other side of the river where there wasn’t anything. Today, it is a beeline to the beach with the area’s largest mall and some of the county’s most expensive housing.
I do not see space travel as it is today, I see it as it will be as the technology advances to bring star travel to life. I have no doubt we will invent it. My guesstimate is within the next century. As time passes, that does not mean we should sit on our hands and wait for that technology to be discovered. The skills and lessons of simply being in space will be very usefull when the time arrives we can truely conquer space.
To call space a desert is pretty lame thinking. It shows a very limited view of the universe.
I’d be delighted to learn, DVG93, how local government, acting a portion of the time on the right motives, principles, and vision (think bridges to nowhere and the proud American tradition of thousand dollar toilet seats and hundred dollar hammers) is akin in its regional planning for clear commercial gain to national policy gone awry building exponentially more expensive highways to hard, empty vacuum. To, literally, absolutely nowhere. On vast columns of flame, transporting six people at a time and maybe a revolving tin can of transistors and antennae in a decrepit, now-obsolete transporter that’s killed more than a few of its pilots and technicians.
In other words, your analogy is wholly fallacious. I could just as easily compare the space program to the welfare state and probably come away with a far better meshing of logical gears.
Oh, for crying out loud. FTL, in other words. Then the difference between us is that I came away from scifi with a working knowledge of what could not be done while you interpreted it as imminent reality.
Somehow I think you’re serious. I’ll wager my “my limited view of the Universe” against your unbridled view of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s works any time you like.
Given that all of this is and will remain sheer fantasy, the rest of us will thank you to not to go wasting our money on your Star Trekking.
Again, another Strawman Orgy. arguing against your own feeble constructs.
Except for when they obliterate the point the guy thought he made, you mean.
Go join Jim, Mark. Over in the corner sulking.
Really; it’s okay. Sometimes we investigate our previous assumptions to learn that they really were luxuries we couldn’t afford. On a few levels, apparently.
“I’m afraid I’m not wrong about this, Mark Turner, but if I am, surely I can be corrected.”
They obliterate nothing save their own straw-anuses. Try discussing the real world instead of debating your own delusional fantasy arguments.
Again, I will put more faith in the wisdom of Jeff Bezos and his 17 Billion dollar net worth over your phantasmagorc syphallic constructs.
“Sometimes we investigate our previous assumptions to learn that they really were luxuries we couldn’t afford. On a few levels, apparently.”
Great Ten! Got it! “We can’t afford it”…Who is the “we”? It is amazinf that you are so hung up admiring your own BS that you fail to realize that the collective “we” you keep whining about is something most everyone else here agrees with you about! No one here as saying that space exploration is something the federal government ought to be doing. But if people want to spend their own money to do so then this “we” you keep invoking is a moot point unless you believe that their money is not their own!
Get off your f*cking high horse!
Don’t shout, Jim. You can’t produce one valid scientific justification for going into space. Undoubtedly there are some, but no private sector force can justify the damn cost.
For the tenth time, you have no feasibility. If you did, you’d produce that argument. NASA didn’t produce those results in fifty years.
Are you hard of hearing or just dim.
WTF does “feasibility” have to do with anything?
What is the feasibility of a guy who builds a ship in a bottle? Maybe he just does it because he wants to! Some people build ship in a bottle, some build Spaceship 1. It’s absolutely no different as long as they are not doing it on the taxpayer dime!
You are asking for some sort of scientific justification of what? The ability to profit? The benefit of having access to space? You won’t say except to demand they be presented while clinging to the desparate hope that there will be no fruition to the research. There really wasn’t much immediate benefit or justification the James Maxwell developed his theories on electromagnetism but not a day goes by that you personally don’t benefit from his research. There wasn’t much immediate payback for Eratosthenes of Cyrene when he paid a guy to pace the distance between Swenet and Alexandria after which he successfully calculated the circumference of the earth. Sometimes folks do stuff just because they want to know. Sorry if no one has developed a way for you to scratch your ass with a laser from outer space. But that’s your hang-up, not everyone elses so pop a Geritol paps and go take a nap. Geez you’re like the internet version of Gilbert Gottfried (never funny or particularly witty but always hugely annoying)!
1. The Feds shouldn’t be in it.
2. The for-profits can’t.
So shut the hell up already, Jimbo. You’re debating the meager contents of your own skull.
Why is it the slow-witted always go all-in for stupid stuff. Oh, never mind.
One more thought Ten:
What is the feasability and scientific justification for you visiting Pajamas
Media?
The “for profits” ARE doing it. It goes back to what I said your problem is earlier: it’s willful ignorance.
If your really indignant about feasibility and scientific justification, go beat up on the folks who got $500k to study shrimp on a treadmill. At least the space program got us satellite TV!
For the rest of us, Slow Jim here, despite his high anxiety and screeching like the four-eyed teenager whose boyfriend just banged the prom queen, hasn’t yet realized what functioning minds already know:
-If it were feasible, Samsung would have been strip mining Mars for the rare earths or something since the seventies.
-Boeing would have been sending tourist ships around the backside of the Moon.
-General Electric would have perfected freaking warp drive and been out — for the sheer bloody joy of it, sezs Slow Jim, you know, like Maxwell and Descartes and Lady Gaga — driving around the galaxy harvesting giant dangling globes of unobtanium and all that free energy.
In other words, screw Einstein.
But to Slow Jim feasibility doesn’t count. Because to morons like him, Lockheed shareholders always sign on for bases on Jupiter for the sheer exhilarating hilarity of doing so.
You cannot make this stuff up — keep it up Slow Jim, because you write your own rebuttals 24/7.
Good thing Slow Jimbo doesn’t vote. Or we’d be $250,000,000,000,000 upside down in combined debts and unpaid obligations. Oh, wait…
TO INFINITY AND BEYOND! BECAUSE WE CAN! FEASIBILITY?
Wrong premise, Slow Jim. The for-profits are poking teensy holes in the terran stratosphere. Only you would prop that up and call it The Final Frontier. Dick Branson is also going to the Marianas Trench, clown boy, for the miniscule tourism revenues I keep slapping you between the eyes that they should go have themselves a ball with.
That’s “you’re”. But indignant? Know any GM shareholders, flush with that mad federal bailout money, folks seriously debating parking so much as a trash can on the international space station?
And foil teevee dinners! And golf balls on the Moon! And exploding orbiters! Keen!
And yet it is you that cannot answer a simple question Ten, choosing instead to keep humping the straw man.
Let me keep it simple:
What was the feasability and scientific justification for Maxwells theory of electromagnetism in 1873?
It’s a very easy question and cuts right to the crux of your moronic ranting.
^ In which Turgin Jim Slow assumes the properties of molasses on the dark side of oblivion.
Judas Maude, man, are you dense. A sphere of you a yard wide would suck up all the matter in the solar system in fourteen seconds, thereby proving you right in disproving Albert’s quaint ideas on relativity and all that jazz so that you really can lease yourself to NASA and they could tow you to Pluto, hook you up, and suck the entire contents of Cape Canaveral into deep space.
They could call you Slingshot Turgid Jim Slow.
Who the hell cares why Maxwell had sausages and eggs that morning, or why Branson takes two fiberglas dingies epoxied together into the deepest ocean?
It. Doesn’t. Apply. None of it applies. People do things for a variety of reasons. They just shouldn’t do the most harebrained of them on tax-paid dime, capiche?
You impossibly dim extraterrestrial: What possible component of “the Feds shouldn’t be in it and the for-profits can’t make a dime in it” is still orbiting your brainpan looking for the airlock?!
You aimless little mind. I ENCOURAGE YOU AND MAXWELL AND RUTAN TO FLY TO ALPHA CENTAURI AND THERE PERFECT SLINGSHOT JIM’S FALLACIOUS COUNTERROTATING MAGNETIC ENGINE, PATENT IT, AND PEDDLE IT ALL THE WAY TO THE EDGE OF THE KNOWN UNIVERSE.
Just without my dime.
“the Feds shouldn’t be in it and the for-profits can’t make a dime in it”
First, please quote me exactly when I said the feds “should” be doing it. You can’t because it didn’t happen.
Second, please point to some sort of evidence that clearly shows that [i]specifically[/i], that there will be no financial benefit to what Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic are doing. Please take into account the halo effect of such work. Again, you cannot.
Third, please apply your overall premise (which is what I quoted) to Maxwell’s theory. You afraid to because you are smart enough to know where the question leads (yes I realise the risk I am taking by labelling you “smart enough”).
You can keep spouting rediculous psycho-babble about Rutan flying a Long-EZ to the stars, but ultimately you really just advocate doing nothing at all. It’s very homer Simpson-esque, “If you tried and you failed miserably, the moral is never try.”
Let me make it easy on you. Just pick any one thing from this comment and respond to that. If you’re scared, say you’re scared.
The above comment is mine!
You want me to prove something can’t happen? Wow. Turgid Slingshot Jim Slow, you’re simply an idiot – nobody’s going to prove your negative.
Scared? Laughing too hard, my friend.
That’s nice Ten…When your done laughing, perhaps you’ll provide that quote where I supported federal spending onthe space program. You’ve somehow got it in your head that I do. Show me where it came from…
It’s not hard junior.
Oh, I for got…I want you to prove what can’t happen?
OK, you have a degree in science….that’s great. I am happy for you. I have a degree in history and a Series 7 for investing. So maybe you have an edge in technology, but have little vision. The analogy is not flawed as you continue to prove my point.
That it will not be me to invent the technology for advanced space flight does not mean I cannot forsee it being done. I accept the amazingness of what I say will be our destiny. You are unwilling to accept that the expansion of knowledge and insight has exponentially expanded. There are a great many obstacles and derailments in the path. The path to star travel is going to happen all the same. I cannot build a car or jumbo jet, but I do have enough scientific knowledge to not regard these things as wizardry which apparently is how you see star travel.
Your childlike response to the nature of the universe will stand by itself, unanswered.
I have a degree in reality, DV.
That little turd fairly well rebuts itself. Nicely done, DV, nicely done.
No problemo
As per “old bear” above it appears that Pournelle owns this thread. Read his “strategy of technology” and apply this thinking to space in general. Essentially the idea is that R&D pays for itself. Technology development is and has been the key to human progress. Pournelle’s SoT merely formalised the idea and applied this to national (cold war) strategy, but it isn’t limited to winning a cold war. It is the blueprint for advancement.
Today we have the know-how to build solar power satellites for energy. We lack only the political will. R&D needs to be applied to addressing the access to space problem. Cheap access to space will make a huge difference; it’s calculated that a medium sized asteroid has more usable materials in it than man has mined.
The key to economic growth is and has always been energy. Combine this with space. The direction is clear.
“Your insistence is touching, Mark Turner, as is probably your faith in, as Seth rightly put it
a monster, a gigantic, money-devouring government/NASA/contractor bureaucracy that, from what I can see, is hide-bound, “risk averse,” wants to bet on “sure things,” and is no longer innovative and willing to take chances but is increasingly cautious.”
Whom are you addressing? I mentioned no such animal.
“I’m afraid I’m not wrong about this, Mark Turner, but if I am, surely I can be corrected.”
If one’s entire Thesis consists of a serial Strawman cluster-orgy, one can safely assume they are wrong.
But Seth did. That being the guy I quoted, Mark Turner. Didn’t he?
What are y’all arguing about? Now that NASA has been directed to make muslim outreach a primary mission our tax dollars are being wisely spent.
see the story on the nazi’s talking dogs and my comment there.
1. Remove all bureaucratic obstacles to private enterprise in space.
2. Remove all obstacles to making profits in space – in fact make them tax free to encourage them.
3. Build the infrastructure – like we built the interstate highway system in the 50′s. In this case the infrastructure would be space elevators.
4. Stand back and watch.
Once we are able to achieve orbit easily and cheaply, space can be profitable. Why carve mines into earthly mountains when there are asteroids free for the taking? Why build coal-fired plants when you can just aim some mirrors in space?
Wow. And who ever said we outta make solar technologies pay before inflicting them on the taxpayer?
Are you really Obama, Old Soldier? Or are you just angling for the next scifi epic, because not one of those “technologies” is even a tenth of a percent of remotely economically possible.
Are you somehow not aware of the distances? The costs? The transport infrastructure?
For Pete’s sake; we can’t even make a field of reverse hotplates hooked to extension cords back to the grid pay!
Free energy.
Virtually unlimited materials.
No gravity to limit economies of scale.
Some insurance against life-destroying astronomical events.
If not the final, at least a new Frontier.
Space is the Place – Ten and Bob Singer, Luddites at best, are welcome to stay behind.
Actually, Ice, you’re welcome to demonstrate your vision and go. Send back pics.
Or you could, you know, admit all of that is technical hogwash.
Nah, just send back the pics and you’ll be vindicated. Waiting…
Rand’s assertion that Apollo “in terms of actually opening up the space frontier, it was nothing short of catastrophic” is sheer nonsense and he should know better.
We’ve been following “flexible plan” to nowhere now for about 40 years … and that is exactly where we have gone … nowhere. Apollo wasn’t a mistake. Depending on an experimental program called the Shuttle for launch services and then on the ISS as a purpose for the Shuttle sucked the life force (and money … about $256 billion) out of any real exploration program. THAT was the mistake!
The planned evolution was to take the basic Apollo hardware forward to the Apollo Extension Systems (AES). Next would have been the Apollo Logistics Support System and then to the Lunar Exploration System for Apollo. The end result would have been continuously expanding permanent stations on the moon.
Just imagine where we’d be if the $256 billion (Shuttle and ISS) had been spent on NERVA and the AES.
I agree with regarding the shuttle and the ISS. One of the Appolo astronauts put forth a good case for establishng a mining base on the moon. His idea was that nuclear fusion is possible, but only with minerals available from the moon as our atmosphere did not allow this mineral to exist large quanties as does the moon. It would lower the cost of energy on earth while paying for itself. That’s vision!
“That’s vision!”
Just because you say so, won’t make it so. That’s reality! Get the government out of space research and development. When has the government ever done anything better than private industry? And don’t tell me Obamacare. That hasn’t started yet, and will fail just as certain as a dog returns to his vomit.
I would half way agree with you. Read my post from yesterday’s discussion re NASA for clarification.
It’s not really a mineral it’s an element called He3 that is much more abundant on the Moon than on earth. The problem is that we don’t have a fusion reactor that can generate more power than it uses on a sustained basis … Tho General Fusion may be close to a solution. http://www.generalfusion.com/
That being said, there appears to be a lot resources available on the Moon that could provide the raw material needed for a spacefaring society … It’s just too costly to keep bringing everything up from Earth.
We could have already been there, exploiting these resources had we not been diverted by the Shuttle and the ISS.
Reading this reminded me why I hate everything Rand Simberg writes. He’s such a pessimistic, depressing defeatist.
Oh … And here is my idea for the purpose of forming a Space Patrol:
http://lupussolusluna.blogspot.com/2011/02/do-we-need-space-program.html
One might ask the obvious question.
Having spent many tens of billions of dollars, created a whole new infrastructure primarily devoted to the creation of the hardware, control systems, and training regime to get us out into space, and employed armies of supposedly very intelligent, educated, organized, talented, and bright people to create our “space program,” in which each and every detail was meticulously and carefully thought out, examined, planned, and charted, how is it that fifty years or so after the beginning of the “Space Race” we are standing here, left with nothing, zip, nada; an idle, aging “space” infrastructure but no follow on spacecraft to succeed the Space Shuttle, nor any abuilding from what I can see?
So, all we got for our multi-generational effort and the wagon train of 16 wheelers full of money we spent are some pictures of a flag planted on the Moon and of some footsteps in the dust there, a few Moon rocks, and a dead Rover or two on Mars, plus some increase in our knowledge about Space, the moon and the planets, and a beautiful picture or two of space phenomena, but no present way to get out to Space again, and that is it? For all our money and effort we got the equivalent of a colorful tee-shirt that says “we went to the Moon and back and now we’re staying home”?
I’d haul everyone involved into court and prosecute then under the RICO statutes, because the whole crew involved was criminally negligent, and obviously scammed us taxpayers out of our money. The contractors made out well, the cities/areas where they were located no doubt got a boost, and the politicians no doubt got votes from their grateful constituents in those prospering cities and donations from the contractors involved. But, what did the taxpayers of the United States in general receive that was of major and continuing value or utility commensurate with all those billions and all that effort? Heh?
For a contrary view, see three Men Who Walked on the Moon:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2011-05-24-Obama-grounding-JFK-space-legacy_n.htm
OK,…Shall we get back to discussing the article Rand wrote?
As long as the thread continues to be hijacked by Ten’s fantasy world where pols give up the power, that NASA’s $18 Billion dollars/year gives them, to stay in office, then we are not coming anywhere near the topic of the article. What is that? As far as I can tell, it is that *given* that the pols *will* spend public monies on spaceflight, we need to have a policy for that which will do the least damage to human expansion into the Solar System, and if possible, provide the most benefit to it.
First, I will note my belief that as long as the Senate’s NASA policy is in effect, we stand all too good a chance of sliding backwards into not only the depths of the Shuttle era’s bureaucratic stagnation, but also into the anti-commercial attitude and *actions* privately taken by NASA officers between 1979 and 2004.
As of 1979, I was still hoping for a “neutral” NASA, in regards commercial spaceflight, in spite of what I knew of bureaucratic turf warrior tendencies. I hoped the agency costs of this NASA hierarchy would be balanced by the idealism that most of NASA’s engineers began their careers with. I was wrong. As related to me in 2000, … by 1979, Max Hunter, who brought the Thor IRBM from contract signing to launch in 15 months during the 1950s, was button-holed about the first overtly commercial space-launch company, SSI, by a then high NASA official.
That worthy’s words were,..”Max you’ve gotta help us,…these SSI amateurs will blow up rockets left and right, and sour the whole nation on spaceflight, if they are not stopped,…Will you help us Max?” When Max refused, this official of NASA was displeased. That did not stop him, from rallying others to do what they could to undercut the trust of the investor in the chief engineer of SSI. This eventually lead to SSI’s abandonment of low operation cost liquid rockets for ex-Minuteman first stages with inherently higher costs for replacement when the supply of such stages ran out all too soon. Eventually, SSI closed because of these high costs, which precluded commercial activity.
This incident was repeated at least 4 separate times between 1979 and 2004, in variations on the theme, with both private and public possible competitors for NASA’s pre-eminence in the Space spotlight, and in spite of the Challenger disaster. Then came Spaceship 1, and the Columbia disaster, in 2004. Those 2 events got the door open, at least inside the White House, for a new positive policy that would allow the rest of the Republic to participate in human spaceflight.
Unfortunately, with the distractions of WW IV, the White House did not keep tabs on NASA, and a new Administrator responded to congressional pressures by nearly junking that portion of the Vision for Space Exploration, while exhalting his plan to engross NASA bureaucrats and a few congressional donors and voters in “the right congressional districts”. Still, the extremes of the 1979-2004 era in anti-commercial turf war did not return.
However, now that these congressional pork projects are at risk because of their budgetary incontinence, and the private spaceflight performance, the slanders and libels of the 1979-2004 era have returned with a far more public effort than before. The presently mandated Senate Launch System is a remade Ares V, with all the chances for GS 13s with experience on the Shuttle, who want to retire as GS 15s, to have a go. Neither they, nor their congressional patrons, are willing to brook competition from private entities, and the slanders and libels of the 1979-2004 era have returned as a bulwark protecting these pork projects.
The institutional incentive to launch yet another assault on private spaceflight is by far the most dangerous thing about the Senate’s Space Policy. This time it will wound NASA at least as much as it does private space launch companies, because the hierarchs no longer control flows of information about spaceflight. That may well preclude NASA from playing a positive role in the future, by developing technology for both exploration under their carter, and for the settlement of the Solar System. It may also convince the space activist community finally that they should have listened to Jim Davidson’s cry during the 1990s,…”NASA,…Delenda Est!” I really hope it does not come to that.
This is why Rand’s call for getting on with a new Space Policy that is definitively friendly to the rest of the Republic participating in spaceflight is so important. The pols can live with a NASA that spends its money to potentiate private groups filling in the sphere behind them as NASA expands its exploratory reach into the Solar System. They must be convinced to cease engrossing their clients in the bureaucracy alone, and support the rest of the Republic as well.
Obviously NASA will never give up a dime it doesn’t have to, Tom.
(Your dissertations carry more weight when you don’t lead them by lying through your teeth in order to misrepresent someone else.)
Gee, Ten, I don’t think that paragraph was a lie at all. It was the gist of every post on this article I have seen you make before mine.
I’ll try to condense it more.
You have stated that NASA will not give up a dime it does not have to.
That was not the point.
This is not about NASA giving up money, because, as you state, they will not. It is about where and how that money is spent within the NASA/Congressional complex, as a matter of policy. It is the guiding policy that is important, because of its affect on how the NASA bureaucracy acts towards others in the Republic doing things in Space. Rand has argued for a guiding policy that gives NASA an incentive, as an institution, to be at minimum neutral, and at best positive, about others in the Republic doing things in Space.
You have responded with a series of rants about how *you* don’t see any benefits in spaceflight worth the time of day, even where others do, and have shown they do with their own money. You are contributing simple noise to a policy argument between 2 policies, by running on that you think they are both worthless. Thus, you have diverted discussion from the contest between those 2 policies, and taken attention away from them. That shows a lack of courtesy to the author of the article, and is not a useful thing in the context of the article. Note that it is the context provided by Rand’s article that these comments are supposed to be about. That is the assumption of courtesy inn such comments.
So, given that the pols *will* spend a NASA budget, should Space Policy be such that the NASA hierarchy funded by that budget is encouraged to be hostile to commercial and other space activity? Or, should it be such that the NASA hierarchy is encouraged to be friendly, and even helpful to the rest of the Republic as it moves into the rest of our home, the Solar system?
Did you have any opinions about this, the core of the article, at all?
Let’s try this another way.
Apparently you have a talent for compounding a false attribution with ten red herrings.
You’re right; it wasn’t. Except you said that, Tom. I could only agree.
Of course, I didn’t once make a point about NASA money-grubbing it’s way to its present state (nor is it pertinent that you can elaborate on how the corridor between it and DC actually works.)
What matters is that your parsing the relationship of the policies involved doesn’t constitute an argument that A) national space should exist in any form, and 2) any space racing has a valid principle supporting it, save for indulging eccentrics or gathering bits of knowledge at vast cost, depending on who does it and why.
I’ll give you credit of a type for using this diversion to try and narrow the discussion to only your interests, such as they may be, but greater points remain.
These aren’t rants, Tom. They’re ridicule against progressivism. Against waste and self-deception. Against folly and habit. And you cannot refute this ridicule with evidence that any of this rubbish will ever come to pass. Space is terminally hostile. It is devoid. It does not return treasure because it cannot.
I’m not aware of a constitutional principle that makes scouring this emptiness at colossal cost by a federal agency a mandate — and sure enough, like someone said upthread, both NASA and NOAA are merely government welfare programs for scientists and engineers — but then when we’re really talking about the intricacies of a needless bureaucracy, which is your riff, I’ll be happy to accept your resigning my point and step out.
Since you tacitly asked, where Simberg gets discontinuous is here, between these two paragraphs:
There was a “catastrophe” because there is no space frontier, unless you want to defend a nationalized space race on the grounds that it’s just a whale of a ride that, as Simberg observes, works to redistribute wealth from one region to another in the proud tradition of progressivism.
As I said hours ago, it’s all make-work.
There is no industry beyond the one determined, as is all but alluded in these two paragraphs, to be operated waiting for something that will never come. Will never come without a thousand or million-fold higher investment in time and treasure in a nation awash in a quarter quadrillion dollars of progressive red ink, if it comes at all.
If you want to come at the discussion by first thoroughly reframing it as how best to operate a progressive boondoggle, Tom, I suggest you address both sides of that strategy. Sift just this one thread for all the utterances of faith in ridiculous technologies just lying around Out There and when you’ve debunked them, then come back and take me to task for doubting the validity of the agency that, sure enough, never turned up a single one of them in half a century of wasteful trying! Try absorbing Seth, upthread. I’m not the only one pointing out the naked emperor.
How’s that for addressing the core of the article? Seems to me it beats insulting someone for refusing to, in effect, take a pleasant ride on the Welfare State based on who’s going to drive it and how. I won’t. Plenty of us are too fed up for that so you might want to consider dropping the cheap ploy.
Anyone who thinks that anyone in this country outside of NASA or government control will be allowed to successfully develop any real space flight capacity is on crack.
Not only do too many politically important entities and persons have a stake in killing any competition, THINK about what government bureaucrats would salivate over doing to anyone launching large bits of high-speed explosive ordinance over the Continental US even BEFORE any accidents happened (imagine after the inevitable accident does occur!). Columbus would have been banned from reaching the New World – some raft-builder would have found a way to declare the Nina and Pinta as unseaworthy.
Not only that, any company who looked to succeed would have been hit with a bunch of diversity demands to provide equal access to space for minorities, gays, and the transgendered.
Finally, the coup-de-gras will be a “cease and desist” from the EPA for excessive greenhouse gas emissions released during lift-off.
Wayne, you sound very much like a friend of mine when he talks about the Republic as a whole. He rants about how he doesn’t like a particular policy, but when you propose an alternative that may be feasible in the current political climate, he begins to moan about how the Republic is all lost already, so efforts towards real life policies are in vain. It’s a nice way of avoiding the responsibility of using some skull sweat figuring out the answer to “OK, that was horrid,…what now?”
Do you have *anything* positive to contribute?
Hey, Tom, I work in this industry and before you go getting snarky and accusing me of being negative you should know some things.
I wish to Hell I was wrong, but, after 10 years in the Navy and 15 years in Aerospace I know our government and how it works in this industry.
You have no idea how many really good components, some of them which have worked fine for decades, have either been killed by eco-nazi bureaucrats or degraded to the point that either they are so bad that its as effective to use even unacceptably dangerous crap from China.
If you have any doubts about how effective these clowns are at killing both competition AND technological progress there are 2 ready examples I can show you:
First – find the cemetery where they buried the crew of the last Columbia mission – whose deaths were the direct result of a CPC-reduction directive that banned the original chemical mixture used to make the main fuel tank insulation that now shreds off on launch on every flight.
Second- there is an area in one of the aircraft graveyards in the desert out West that holds an entire fleet of RUTAN’S (remember him?) the competition for high speed small passenger / luxury aircraft that were killed by the FAA using obscure safety regulations requiring materials and designs that Rutan’s beautiful, much more fuel efficient, reliable, advanced, aircraft were created to improve upon by NOT using.
I have spent years of my own life working on parts that got eliminated or degraded due to eco-freak mandates that we all knew were driven mostly by politics so as to help win a contract for or to protect the contract of some company from our competing.
So Tom, before you get up in my grill about a negative attitude, walk a mile in my shoes.
Don’t feel bad, wayne; Tom likes to use the word rant whenever he can. It’s kinda ironic.
“Hey, Tom, I work in this industry and before you go getting snarky and accusing me of being negative you should know some things.
I wish to Hell I was wrong, but, after 10 years in the Navy and 15 years in Aerospace I know our government and how it works in this industry.”
That’s nice, Wayne. Space has been part of my life for 50 years by now, and like many, I too have seen bitter disappointments in it. That does *nothing* to change my point that both you and Ten have been trying to hijack the comments thread away from discussing the article Rand wrote, and turn it into your personal bitch fest about something else. Whether your examples of agency cost in government hierarchy, or Ten’s certainty that there is nothing there anyone could see profit in, it doesn’t really matter.
Now, as I asked Ten, and to which question he has failed to reply, given that the pols *will* spend a NASA budget, should Space Policy be such that the NASA hierarchy funded by that budget is encouraged to be hostile to commercial and other space activity? Or, should it be such that the NASA hierarchy is encouraged to be friendly, and even helpful to the rest of the Republic as it moves into the rest of our home, the Solar system?
Did you have any opinions about this, the core of the article, at all?
If not, then why are you so discourteous to the author as to try to hijack the thread? If nothing else, I believe there is still sci.space.policy Usenet group? You can start your own thread there.
Or you can answer the question about the article.
I really don’t take you seriously, Tom, because the only point you think you’re making demands that the topic of a federalized, progressive boondoggle like NASA continue to waste taxpayer resource remain off the table because you say it must.
I posted a rebuttal to your thin stuff three times and the WP blog here has yet to publish them.
Correction: the only point you think you’re making demands that the topic of a federalized, progressive boondoggle like NASA continuing to waste taxpayer resources remains off the table because you say it must.
Ten finally ended with:
“the only point you think you’re making demands that the topic of a federalized, progressive boondoggle like NASA continuing to waste taxpayer resources remains off the table because you say it must.”
No, Ten. I requested you show the author the simple courtesy of addressing the topic he spent his effort to write about. Apparently, courtesy is not in you. I suppose you were never taught that playing nice does more than just make your mother happy. Since the courtesy to actually converse with others on the author’s topic is not in you, I will leave you to howl at the wilderness, while the rest of us get back to work in the world already built around us. Perhaps we will even be able to make some contributions to spaceflight policy, the topic of Rand’s article, if we can have the courtesy to work together.
Tom, Rand is just rehashing the argument that Von Braun had with NASA back in the 1950′s – manned space verses “visionary” robotic exploration and then jumping into the “it would be great but for the politics of money” and then you blast anyone who steps in to ruminate about the stupid politics and how corrupt our culture is. You just want a bunch of folks to wax poetic about how great the future and how brilliant this article is when the future of space is dead – just like the future of aviation, and a whole bunch of other visionary ideas.
WHY?
Because the limits of technological progress have been limited making banal BS where 16 year old girls can engage in a universal group giggle on Titter over photo/video sharing and adults go on treasure hunts for for faster porn downloads. These are places where creativity and genius neither gets you piled on by 50,000 class action lawsuits or your project stolen or killed to enrich Senator Billybob’s cousin.
We as an explorer culture were already doomed when the Apollo project got started – it was the last gasp of the progress of this civilization before its gaze turned to its naval – and everything immediately below that. In the Moon project they went for the last thing they could get the public interested in (and the funding for)…and the public bailed before Apollo 13.
You aren’t the only one whose loved and dreamed of space since the 1960′s, Tom. I was born in 1961. I dreamed of Space when I watched Neil’s first step, imagined over Star Trek, when I launched my first and last Estes rocket into the sky. But is is a dead love. We are at an impasse – too afraid of lawyers, public ridicule, and frankly too lazy to go anywhere but down.
The only way back to the future is after the survivors of our culture had to climb back out of a Continent-wide catastrophe that eliminated the weak, the lazy, the stupid (all the “community organizers” and their “organized communities”) and left behind the ruthless, the impatient, and the motivated – the kind of folks that aren’t particularly deterred by a crew-killing launch accident or a re-entry mishap.
That’s touching, Tom. In spite of there being, you say, no option to fiscally limit your favorite failed agency, my tone stands in the way of just maybe Doing The Work of a project that can’t produce a justifying feasibility analysis.
I requested that you rectify two of the author’s paragraphs: The claimed promise of blasting stuff off into hard vacuum for a grand an ounce and the resultant folly of just that very make-work, Cold War thing. If it all went tits-up so nicely, what makes you think America’s finest somehow knew less about making sensible moves with their huge budgets than you insist you do?
“Spaceflight policy”? Really? I was born half a decade before wayne. I comprehend the numbers, the distances, and the available resources, both in the federal pocket and Out There. I’ve seen waste and I’ve surely seen the unchecked arrogance that rolls it out, over and over, time and again.
Forget my tone, Tom. For a real son of a bitch, the country needs to scrape together a quarter quadrillion bucks to make itself whole again. Every federal social program is bankrupt. Had you missed that?
First you frame the debate, now you whine about tone while still doing your damndest to, you know, frame the debate. I’m still not buying it. Go talk to your mother, son; mine’s gone.
Don’t lecture on delivery unless you can develop a little sterner perspective. You haven’t made that investment. The space program is welfare for the scientific class.
I beg to differ with your Chinese analogy to NASA and the moon program as the detour paradigm to failure. The more appropriate analogy is those free enterprise, free booty capitalists that pre-dated the state subsidized Columbus expeditions, otherwise known as the Vikings. The Vikings failed to take the New World, and its energy sources, after milking the Roman investments in England, just like your low earth capitalists, milking the prior American state trillion dollar investments in space that they didn’t have to make, will also fail as they exploit the low hanging fruit on the government teat. Your heroes will not make the grade anymore than the Vikings did. Of course, Spain went on to blow its New World investments, competing against the English, French, and Dutch, investments intended to pay the costs for kicking the Muslim invaders out of Spain; costs of empire the British, Dutch, and French didn’t have to pay. Hum.
Let me nitpick your analogy. The Vikings didn’t fail to exploit Vinland because the free enterprise system was lacking. It was internal Viking politics and the end of the Medieval Warm Period.
And let’s face it, the Spaniards got lucky in that Columbus tripped over a unknown region that was full of resources that were easily available for the taking. And they did one hell of a job exploiting them too. Say what you will about Spain but most of the Western Hemisphere speaks Spanish as a native language and not English.
So I guess the question is … What language will they be speaking on the Moon … English or Chinese? Or some odd Firefly mixture?
Awesome! The United States of America’s Space Program in the hands of those who got rich inventing the flying toaster! Next thing you know Disney will be filing for the exclusive rights to the name Space Cadets. What makes you (the author) think that we would be confident when NASA is in the hands of those who created the Dot.com BUST. And don’t pretend that Silicon Valley wasn’t and isn’t benefiting from reaching into the pockets of Uncle Sam.
Finally, I have been thinking lately: What in the HELL is wrong with fighting for one’s JOB??? This is about more of our money, and our jobs, and now our astronauts, taking flight and landing overseas. You make it so easy for them. Kind of like how they got us to invest in our future by investing in the markets so that our portfolio looks better when we lay ourselves off. I think I hate you.