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Why We're Still Stuck On Earth
Once&FutureRocketman writes: "The latest newsletter from the Space Access Society contains an insightful article (the first one after the introduction) on why it still costs so damn much to get into orbit. The reasons are, quite unsurprisingly, much more political and economic than technical."
The only reason the New World Order doesn't want us in space is because then we'd see all the UFO's trying to make contact with us, all the spy satellites, the secret bases on the dark side of the moon, and we'd be able to get a clear view of the face on Mars from space... They don't want us to be able to look down on Area 51 and intercept the MIND BEAMS they use to control earth's population!
</CONSPIRACY>Oh boy, I dread the day when the blueshirts at SpaceFlight, Inc. will start trying to raise profitability by cutting costs. "In related news, an aging Airbus A600 operated by United Airlines has suffered structural breakup during an emergency atmospheric reentry. Large sections of the Boston area reported contaminated by nuclear fallout."
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H. Rap Brown
The Problem: Space travel is costly. We can't lower the price because there isn't enough demand to make up the volume. Furthermore, the last few price drops didn't increase the demand. So space travel will remain costly.
The Solution: Increase the demand in some way other than reducing price. Add value to space travel. Or advertise the value you already have.
Specific ideas: Make a deal with Hollywood to make a space epic actually shot in space ("On location...from the moon!"). Hype some medical device/technique that came from space research ("the defrobbinator, developed by NASA for the Mars mission, saved Joe Schmoe's life today...").
And don't try to tell me this is already going on. I'm not talking about John Glenn commemorative plates. I'm talking about touching Joe Sixpack. Get him to realize that satellite cable depends on satellites which depends on rockets and he will whip his checkbook out so fast it'll make your head spin.
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What chance have we of escaping the gravitational pull of the Earth ?
......
We are incapable of training our kids to resist the gravitational pull of a McDonalds.
We are also incapable of producing policemen who can resist the gravitational pull of a doughnut.
By the time we colonise another planet, if ever, KFC will have already sold franchises there. Mark my words
Stephen Hawking has written another book. It's about time as well.
Why are we still on Earth? Because nobody really cares about space any more. Back at the time of the Moon landings people cared, it was a matter of national pride to Americans to get there before the Russians did, and because of that the Americans were able to spend a rediculuous amount of their national budget on a trophy project with no real value.
But now you can't even get funding for NASA to buy extra pencils without Congress screaming bloody murder, and the public are so jaded by "yet another shuttle launch" that they'd rather watch "Armageddon" than anything happening in the real world. The current generation of Americans seem to have lost their fire; without the Red threat there is no real motivational force in the American psyche.
Of course American is now just one of several players in the space market. Whilst its vast body of experiance languishes, becoming more and more obsolete, other nations are still expanding their space programs.
Who'll be the next on the Moon? The Chinese is my guess. And they'll be doing a lot more than putting a Red flag there, because their space program is still on the up.
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Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
The major established launch contractors have no incentive to invest in lower space launch costs, beyond minor investments aimed at minor cost reductions that show up in higher profits on existing traffic. Large investments aimed at major cost reductions would tend to have the effect of significantly reducing their launch business cashflow, as their largest single customer, the government, would insist on having the savings passed along.
I take it this means that if they get the costs down, the government would insist that they charge less so they wouldn't make any money anyway. It's a fair comment, but I don't completely agree with this.
When polystyrene was invented as part of the space program ages ago, it cost millions of dollars per cubic meter. (Sorry I don't speak imperial well, but that's something like a cube with 3.3 foot edges.) It wouldn't have cost anything to produce, but that didn't mean they made a huge loss on development. It was completely justified to put that price on it until the research and development was paid off.
In any case, even if it costs the government some sort of reward or bonus to the launch companies to make this investment, it would pay off big time for all sorts of business that it would generate when the launch costs come down (eventually) as a result.
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I'm as die hard a capitalist as the next guy, but Earth Orbit can not be the free-for-all that relying on the free market would dictate. The problem is, quite simply, what you stated above. Without a national (global?) agency to control what goes in what orbit, the resulting chaos of independent launches could actually reduce the usefulness of satellites. Plus the free-market is not exactly known for its environmental concern. There's enough junk up there now, wait until Microsoft starts launching rockets......
"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong," said Rep. Billy Tauzin. Gore - 50,999,897 Bush - 50,456,002
Roton
Space planes (X-33)
SSTO articles
HOTOL
Here's a link: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/offic e/pao/History/x-33/dc-xa.htm I can't find any of the movies online anymore, but they are probably hiding somewhere.
This was a good article, with a good analysis of the current market state of space launches. Not all that surprising, in my case - this is what you deal with when you have an out-of-house company doing rocket launches (or a government agency - say hello to pork barrel). Unfortunately, this is the way that economies work in a capitalistic and democratic environment, because, quite simply, people are selfish.
:) That's probably some sort of fraud, however...)
Democracy will always have inefficiencies like pork barrel projects - people do not see 'national' benefits, they see local benefits. This is not a human flaw, this is a sort of information filter. The entire economic state of the nation, PLUS one's normal daily routines would be impossible, so we filter it down to the important issues - the local ones. So, if you want the *people* to govern themselves (and don't even think of doing a true democracy... nothing would get done) you split the country up into multiple sections (states, in our case) and let representatives from each one of those states do the governing. It makes sense - there isn't really a better alternative. However, your problem, flat out, is if you want the body of representatives to deal with the money allocation of the nation, you're going to have pork barrel projects, because in order to stay in office, they need to be noticed. In order to be noticed, they absolutely have to do something that their constituents will see.
That's government for you - but what's causing the capitalist companies to do what they're doing? The same thing - individual short-sightedness. Look at history - history has shown that any time one company starts to make a run at a new market, another one will start chasing after it, and they'll innovate, innovate, and innovate. However, Lockheed-Martin and Boeing et al. aren't chasing after the cheap end of launches. Why? Because there's no guarantee they'll win. It's not safe. Not only that, it's extremely risky. The better method for them is to attempt to slowly cut costs here and there (not showing the dropping cost to the consumer, of course... a price war would be bad. You might not win) and quietly funding research here and there, possibly.
Price wars are bad for the big players in a market - a lot of times they lose. Look at Intel and AMD, Amazon and (insert anyone), Apple and (any of the PC manufacturers nowadays). In each case, a price war started, and suddenly the original big player (Intel, anyone in the book selling business, and Apple) lost out - in some cases almost catastrophically. Price wars are good for upstarts - not necessarily in government spending (sometimes, though) but in the consumer market definitely.
What I take from this lesson in economics and politics is this: if we want to get cheap launches into space, we need to realize two things: don't look to politics, first off. Politics is propaganda, because with a nation of 300 some odd million people, it has to be. And second off, you need an upstart. Someone needs to found a cheap-space-launch business that works. It might not have the highest volume of Lockheed-Martin, or Boeing, but it would make government contracters ask LM and Boeing why their estimates aren't lower. And since LM and Boeing and others will simply buy out the first few upstarts, you need to keep founding them (if you're smart, you'd be one person, founding multiples of them with the same money that the major players give you
It should also be noted that the "flat...flat...flat... holy crap!" cycle is very common. Computers definitely follow that path as well, and we can again see that upstarts coming in were the major players in shaking up industries (first Dell/Gateway/Compaq/Packard Bell, now Emachines).
NASA is also funding a program besides the SLI program - the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program, which is designed to very much so overcome the problems in spaceflight by poking at the holes in science currently.
If anyone out there is a student looking for an area of physics to study, look carefully at the BPP page, and follow my advice - find the 'holes' in physics which were found by EXPERIMENT, rather than by theory, and stab at them several thousand times over until they pop. My personal best bet? Anomalous weight changes over a superconducting surface, and the Casimir effect. Try everything. Literally. Chances are, at some point, you'll get something that makes people go "Huh?" - and at that point, you've hit on something, and go at it like crazy.
(BPP project: http://www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/warp.htm)
(I don't use HTML tags because I'm lazy. Sorry. Chalk it up to humanity.)
Fact: Most of the weight of the first stage is in the oxidizer. (liquid oxygen).
Question: Why are we carrying oxygen around in the atmosphere?
It seems to me that jet engines do a good job of handling the 0 to the speed of sound part of the speed range. Using jets in the first stage has a number of advantages:
Jets are much safer than Rockets.
Jet engines are available off the shelf.
Jet engines have a much higher specific impulse than rockets (Isp = pounds of thrust / pounds of fuel burned per sec)
Jet engines are reusable.
A Beowulf cluster of Jet engines (sorry, I couldn't resist the Joke) would generate large amounts of thrust.
A launch with hybrid Jet engine first stage would be much less expensive than a pure rocket launch.
I suspect that the first stage of boosters use rockets because "That's the way we've always done it".
Comments from veterans at NASA or other space agencies would be appreciated.
I hate to say this, but the country's actually got it right this time. NASA isn't pointing this out to the general populous because the general populous wouldn't take notice. It's not tangible - it's not real. You can firmly say that "Yes, I'm all for space research" but when it comes to funding it, most people would rather have well-kept roads.
Let me put it this way. If everyone on Slashdot donated $500 to NASA for BPP research, that would be a serious hell of a lot of money - probably close to $50 million dollars - definitely not paltry research money! Everyone on Slashdot could afford $500 - really. You might have to tack it onto a credit card bill, or eat a little lightly for the remainder of the year, but you could afford it. But this won't happen. No matter how much I would yell and scream, it won't happen - because, unfortunately, it will not directly have an affect on you. Some of you might do it - those who the $500 is nothing at all - but most probably wouldn't (including me), because the effect is not tangible.
In my regard, this makes sense. You cannot estimate the financial benefits of space research. Period. The estimated benefits to humanity are actually somewhere between 0 and 6 times the cost of it. Note I included zero - it is entirely possible that the research would find nothing.
Has this happened? Oh yes. Tons of people are staring at general relativity, and have been staring at general relativity for dozens of years, trying to find the 'Holy Grail' - a metric which allows FTL travel with normal matter. It isn't going to happen - it doesn't exist. Sometimes we have to accept that life doesn't provide us with an easy way out. (That, and theory has never done much to revolutionize normal people's lives
- it's all experiment).
Research, unfortunately, cannot be looked at logically. It is a potential benefit, rather than a guaranteed benefit.
On a side note, I don't think the US Government is failing. It's working exactly as it always has, and was intended to - media tends to put it in everyone's face more, and so, eh, public opinion is kinda down, but public opinion isn't exactly a 'national health indicator'. I don't know why exactly you think the government is failing (there has always been corruption, immorality in office, and short-term benefits rather than long-term planning) but to me, it just seems running perfectly fine. I don't let a dream of a perfect world (or even a 'better world') get in the way of my view of reality. Fact is, you start dealing with 300 million some odd people, and the government's not going to be great. Especially when (by all standard indicators) the country is exceptionally wealthy.
"Mass Fraction" means you're lucky to get a couple of percent productive payload because you're using a newtonian reaction drive. Unfortunately that's all we know how to do at the moment. But it means you throw 95% of yourself away to get to mars, and then 95% of what's left away to get back.
Clearly the corolory here is you have to start with a lot of stuff, and that's what makes space expensive.
The fault isn't with government or big business, it's with our current state of ignorance of useful physics. What NASA needs to do is more of what it's doing a tiny bit of right now, and that's finance radical new propulsion concepts.
Check out NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program.
Yeah, sure it sounds like star-trek, but remember that landing on the moon sounded exactly like the most fanciful science fiction only a few decades before. Get over reaction drive limitations, and then we're going places! . Keep throwing yourself away to go somewhere, and you're staying firmly at home.
Maybe we should join with the ultra-extreme-environmentalists in an effort to raise the cost of mining on earth :-)
Our read of Lockheed-Martin is that they've reacted to this by a dual-track strategy of, to date, soaking up most available government cheap-launch R&D money so none of their competitors (competitor, now) could get the jump on their existing high-cost launch business, while pursuing government financing for their own "Venturestar" concept in the hope of using other people's money to get the jump on their remaining competitor.
The only remarkable thing about the US government creating a duopoly, IMHO, is that they left a competitor. Anyway, now it seems we're stuck in the middle. Problem with being stuck in the middle is, everybody knows you've got to go somewhere, but they can't agree on which way.
The authors continue to insist that the government must be the investor of last resort in pushing launch costs down to "radically" lower levels - the country and the world would benefit hugely, but getting past the break-point in the demand curve has so far taken too much money and time for private investors in the current climate.
And that's the problem with government involvement in the market; a little is never enough. The author(s) must surely have seen the other road: cut government R&D money. Level the playing field by removing the artificial barrier to entry for private investors. Let the market set the price, rather than expecting the price to create the market.
Now that's a risk. To apply the article's words in a different context, the potential payoff may be huge, but it's a long-term and speculative payoff; the new markets can't be straight-line projected from current markets, and they won't spring into being overnight.
Maybe the barrier to entry will still be too high; maybe government funding to date has made this duopoly too tough to crack. Maybe the lack of support would lead to even worse stagnation than the present "flat demand curve".
On the other hand, maybe it wouldn't. $600/lb. is just a best-guess critical point for spurring enterprise; maybe smaller companies would find cunning paths through the level field; maybe revolutionary growth in the space economy is closer than we think.
I don't know; I'm a libertarian, not an economist. But before anyone goes criticizing the big companies (which these guys don't) for not taking visionary risks with their money, consider how brave you feel taking visionary risks with your vote.
I can certainly see why these guys would be leery of such a scheme. I worked with a small company which created a nifty little program, and the time came when some of us proposed GPL-ing it. Our poor boss, much as he loved the free software movement, underwent visible anguish over the prospect; this was his baby. And I understood; I couldn't promise that freeing the software wouldn't kill the company.
We didn't take the risk. The company's doing... okay.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
I've heard that the ISS will be visible from Earth with the naked eye. This may sound like a silly idea, but I think this feature may be one of the most valuable aspects of the project. The ISS will serve as a very real reminder to current and future generations of what is possible, more than any multi-million dollar sci-fi film or live feed of a Martian landing. Though it may take time, this could help generate more support for space programs. It may seem superficial, but the addition of a new landmark in the sky will make many people dream of what can be.
For a second there, I was afraid this would be an "Ask Slashdot" feature:
Ask Slashdot: Why Are We Still Stuck On Earth?
Posted by Hemos on 07:15 AM July 11th, 2000
from the wanna-go-to-mars dept.
Anonymous Coward writes: "Me and my friends were sitting around and we started wondering, hey! Why can't we go and live on Mars?! I wanna live on Mars. Don't you? Does anyone here have any experience with living on planets other than earth and maybe can give us some pointers?" Anonymous Coward raises some important points. Maybe someone working at Transmeta can steal some tech from work and help us along?
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
When we finally do see Consumer Space flight become a reality, I could easily see the FAA and NASA joining together...as we will need a US agency to make sure everything works well....
It will be called the Federal Air and Space Administration....
Also known as FASA.
(next they'll be designing the next generation of ground transport with large armored walking units....)
-Julius X
-Julius X
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J. Storrs-Hall, until recently the moderator of the sci.nanotech newsgroup, wrote an interesting proposal for what he calls a space dock. It's a platform 300 km long, at a height of 100 km above sea level, where air drag is much smaller. Your spaceship would ride an elevator to get up to the platform, and once there, a linear motor would accelerate it (at 10 G's for 80 seconds, survivable for humans) into circular orbit (8 km/sec), from which it's relatively easy to hit escape velocity.
This does not require nanotechnology. It would be possible (albeit initially expensive) to do it with existing materials and techniques. Once the construction is amortized, the total energy cost of putting a kilogram in orbit (elevator plus linear motor) is 43 cents. With hourly launches, it would be possible to amortize the cost of construction by charging about a dollar per kilogram.
In estimating cost of construction, JoSH writes: The wildcard is the cost of the diamond (and the ability to fabricate it into structural beams). Diamond is a bit expensive today! If an Apollo style (and -cost) project could do for diamond what the original one did for electronics, we could build the tower in the next decade or so, and with regard to near-term feasibility he writes: Even commercially available polycrystalline synthetic diamond with advertised strengths of 5 GPa would work.
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