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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."
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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Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
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
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.
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.
Unfortunately, that is the current financial situation "enjoyed" by government contractors today. This sort of ass-backwards thinking has been true for the last twenty years or so.
The idea used to be that the government would simply buy a product from government contractors, and it was up to the goverment contractors to figure out the cheapest way to fulfill their end of the contract. If a government contractor could make a huge profit by figuring out a cheaper way to do things, then they got to pocket the profits as a reward for innovation.
As far as the government was concerned, this created two "problems." First, bureaucrats were uncomfortable with the notion that a contractor would use it's profits from a prior assignment to perform R&D on a future assignment in order to maximize profits. (Yes, I know--this is how the private sector works. But from a government bureaucrat's point of view, this is the same as stealing from Peter to pay Paul.)
The second problem was that the public (read: politicians) disliked the notion of people getting rich off doing government work. Something to do with class envy or some such bullshit. At any rate, the notion that several companies could make billions by providing the government inexpensive state of the art products ahead of the and under budget is evil to many politicians.
So now modern government contracts have built-in profit margins, and are required to pass on savings back to the government or being penalized by lower contractually mandated profit margins.
That is, the government in essence requires the savings to be passed back to the government. That's why no-one cares that we're one mega-merger away from a monopoly in the airospace market--because government contract work is so heavily regulated it makes the electric company regulations of a half-dozen years ago seem like Lassie-Faire Capitalism by comparason.
The upshot of this is that it is in the best interest of Lockheed to keep launch costs at the top of the inelasticity plateau, because it maximizes their profits given the current regulatory environment.
Personally I think it's stupid--and it's why we see things like $8,000 toilets and $600 wrenches. It's also why we see an absolute lack of interest on the part of Lockheed to innovate except in the more esoteric areas of DoD spending--because all financial incentives for Lockheed to do anything other than what Congress directly mandates has been stripped from it.
That, combined with the "spend it or lose it" mentality of the Federal government's budget spending process, explains in large part why we can have so much waste while we simultaneously shackle some of the brightest minds on the planet.