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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.
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 don't really think it's about "caring", I think it's more about "importance." The fact is is that space offers nothing to us at the current moment. It only holds the promise of more to come. Think of what's up there currently - defense satellites to protect the Earth's nations. Communications satellites to link the Earth's people. Spy satellites for national security. Our satellites are almost all turned inward, and the relatively rare few which are actually looking towards space are doing pure science, rather than any commercially benefitial ventures.
Apollo was, in my opinion, somewhat of a mistake. We went there to Get There (tm). It served no practical purpose whatsoever, and once we got there, the public was basically done with it. Why? Because our job was to Get There (tm) - and when we did, well, that was that. Good job. Now go home.
Take a good look at the Human Genome Project. It got funding, it still has funding, and it completed (mostly) recently. It'll still get funding for a while, because it can genuinely and completely claim legitimate viable commercial interests.
Take a look at the NASA programs which get funding (and there are quite a few) - Hubble, for instance. Why? Because the public likes Hubble - it generates a commercial product (pretty images). This sounds quite stupid, but it's true, strangely enough!
Personally, if the Chinese get to the moon, I think all they will do is put a Red flag there, then come back. Why? Because we don't have anything else to do there yet that will make the cost viable.
America is definitely not languishing when it comes to space science - it's the entire world. The nations with developing space programs simply have not reached the plateau where 'getting to space' has been accomplished, and 'doing something there' hasn't had to be examined yet.