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August 20, 2006
Wake me When we Get There
I've been looking at NASA's plans to get us back to the Moon, and prospectively on to Mars. A few thoughts:
1. So much for imagination. The Shuttle was imaginative; it was something new. Deeply flawed, as it turned out, because of politically-mandated compromises, but nonetheless new. This plan is, more or less, where we would have been in 1975-1980 if we had kept expanding Apollo and not gotten sidetracked by the Shuttle program.
2. I'm not convinced imagination is all it's cracked up to be. Certainly, for an engineer, it is better to build on what you know works than to start over. In that sense, I applaud NASA for putting aside Shuttle, which was a dead-end road because we could never get the launch rates to where they needed to be. It's a shame we wasted 30 years, but that time is sunk; let's get on with it.
3. But really, all that is fairly irrelevant these days. What NASA produces is plans and budgets and other useful artifacts; useful, that is, from the standpoint of guaranteeing future funding at a slightly declining rate (real terms) while not actually engaging in any risky endeavors. Bureaucracies are not well suited to exploration work. NASA was successful at Apollo because it had all of the characteristics that bureaucracies generally lack: minimal oversight, young average staff age, time-limited mission, clearly-defined and simple to gauge success criteria, driving ambition to reach a goal. I'm sorry, but those are gone now, and they won't be back to NASA any time soon. Or ever, probably.
4. So might it work anyway? Maybe. It's possible that we can get back to 1975 with some success. We might even land a few missions on the Moon. If we are successful, we might (at great cost) even land a few missions on Mars. But here's the thing: we aren't going to stay. And as long as we are going for flags and footprints, that is what we will get. The government is constrained by inclination and by treaty from doing more than that. Worse yet, you can't get elected spending money on the Moon, while the nice gentleman from the state Capitol will be happy to fund you generously if you would just consider a tiny investment in his home district, Senator.
5. So, how do we get into space to stay? Frankly, without government. We will do it with privately-funded ventures, going for self-aggradizement at first, and profit next. We will have companies that form for the sole purpose of going to the Moon and mining it of everything useful that it contains. And they will have competition. And those companies will establish company towns, and those towns will draw in the wretched refuse of humanity, because they won't have a way back (that's reserved for the precious cargo, not the expendable humans) and there's nothing for them to lose here on Earth. And in near-total freedom, they will build what we cannot now even imagine. At least, that's been the history of the West so far, and I see no reason why that should stop now.
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Comments
I agree with your assessment.
This also means that it will take even longer to colonize space than many current projections.
Most private launch enterprises will fail because they are naive and overly-optimistic in their plans. The better ones will suffer a number of failures before things really click. Also, for privately-funded space-faring consortiums, "colonizing" Mars may prove to be a prohibitive and wasteful enterprise compared to building habitats in free space and on the Moon. Why go tens of millions of miles from one gravity well to another when a sizable free-space habitat can be built for much less expense and expenditure of effort?
Such free-space colonies can be sent on highly-eccentric, asteroid-like orbits that would eventually bring them in the vicinity of places like Mars, the Asteroid Belt, and even Jupiter. By having several colonies sharing an eccentric orbit, you have a kind of "trade and transportation" route. If it's augmented along the orbit(s) by tether "slingshots" (a nearer-term version of the fabled Space Elevator concept), the entire Solar System comes within reach in reasonable amounts of travel time.
Posted by: Roderick Reilly at August 21, 2006 1:46 PM
Well, yes. On the other hand, once we get there, we'll stay. Had private enterprise started alongside Apollo, it's unlikely that a private space effort would have gotten to the Moon prior to the mid-1980s, though they may have had a DynaSoar-type ship much earlier than that. On the other hand, it's likely that the Moon would have been continuously inhabited since then. I think that private enterprise is not as good as government at doing large, never-before-done efforts very, very quickly. On the other hand, government cannot sustain such efforts over a long period of time, while private industry can. It's a kind of tortoise and hare problem.
Posted by: Jeff Medcalf ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.caerdroia.org/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 21, 2006 4:47 PM
Space Elevator! We don't need NASA for rockets. Rocket science isn't, well, "rocket science" any more. Let China send some rockets to the moon. Been there. Done that. We need something different.
Whomever builds the first space elevator will almost certainly have a monopoly. I'd rather it be the US than anyone else.
Posted by: mrsizer at August 26, 2006 3:19 PM
I like the concept of the space elevator, and I think that if it works, it makes space travel routine fairly quickly. Of course, the good thing about it is that it would not be any kind of monopoly. You would want several of these operating. For one thing, it increases the launch rate rather usefully. For another, it means that launches don't stop just because one goes out of operation for some reason.
Posted by: Jeff Medcalf at August 26, 2006 9:27 PM