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How the West Wasn't Won
Nigel Assbackwards writes "Finally, after years of being furtively passed between trusted friends, the legendary NASA satire "How the West Wasn't Won" is available at spacefuture.
And Oh!, if only all space agencies were as loud and as totally ace as WideGroup's MirCorp intro."
Over laboured analogy, more like
Still, amusing non the less
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Standard goatse warning ...
codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
I wasn't reall interested in space tourism before, but I sure as hell am now.
-Skeld
How The West Wasn't Won
(a.k.a. 'NAFA')
A Fable
by I M Patient
Of course the Americans conquered their Western frontier pretty effectively. But there was another country which set about the same task in a different way.....
This country was bounded to the West by a desert. One day a telescope built on one of the country's mountains revealed what looked like sea far away beyond the desert which would have to be crossed in order to discover if there was habitable land on the coast. So the politicians got together and established a government agency to send some people through the desert. They called it the National Agricultural Frontier Administration, NAFA for short, and charged it with a dramatic task to demonstrate the vigour of the nation: it would carry out a "mission" to send people right through the desert to the West coast of the continent and bring them back safely, within a decade.
NAFA got to work. They used the telescope on the mountain bordering the desert to look out and prepare the best maps that they could. They mounted short "missions" of one or two days out into the desert and back again. And finally they produced designs for a special "desert-waggon" that would be able to take a crew of three people across the desert and back again, carrying all its own supplies in case there was nothing but desert beyond. NAFA called the people who were to go on these "missions" "WAGGONAUTS". A special feature of NAFA's desert-waggon design was that as supplies were exhausted, the "waggonauts" would abandon individual parts of the enormous vehicle in order to save taking them all the whole distance, arriving back home in just a little waggon.
So then NAFA divided up the work and gave contracts to companies in every part of the country to help build this astonishing vehicle, and finally they carried out the "mission". The whole nation was fascinated to hear the result, and the public were all very pleased that it went smoothly: The desert-waggon worked fine, and the "waggonauts" returned quite safely, saying that the desert was a truly beautiful place, and there was indeed plenty of land beyond. The bill for the "mission" was as much as the whole nation normally spent in a year on clothing, but no-one minded because it was so exciting.
Then NAFA mounted a second "mission". This was exactly like the first. And like the first it returned safely, with similar reports. The crew of "waggonauts" made stirring speeches about the importance of their great "mission", and the public were pleased that they all got back okay.
Then NAFA mounted a third "mission". People weren't quite so interested. After all, everyone knew what the "waggonauts" would say when they got back: "There's lots of land out there, and the views during the journey are fantastic." This "mission" didn't work so well. Several parts of the desert-waggon and much of the crew's supplies were severely damaged in a fire one night, and the "waggonauts" only just managed to return safely. The public were relieved at that.
Then NAFA mounted a fourth "mission". The public really weren't very interested this time, but it went fine anyway.
Then NAFA mounted a fifth "mission". That was very like the fourth. By now the public were beginning to ask why NAFA kept sending out these "missions". NAFA spoke of their high duty, and said that they had to keep sending "waggonauts" out there in case they discovered something new.
Then NAFA mounted a sixth "mission". This was pretty much like the fifth "mission" except that this time the "waggonauts" took some special bicycles with them and wheeled about in the new land they had found. They said it was good fun. But they didn't discover anything new, and the public began to complain that they shouldn't keep spending taxpayers' money on these pointless "missions". NAFA didn't agree, and spoke of the high duty of their "waggonauts" to explore this distant land. So the public said that if the land was so important perhaps more people should get to go and live there. But NAFA said that this wasn't a good idea. Only "waggonauts" could go on "missions"; it was far too expensive for anyone to go there to live; and the land wasn't actually at all valuable; but NAFA should still be paid to go on sending "waggonauts" out there.
So NAFA mounted a seventh "mission". This was exactly like the sixth "mission". When they returned, the "waggonauts" made stirring speeches about this new frontier, but frankly no-one was very interested in what they had to say about their exclusive, taxpayer-funded carryings-on, and finally they voted to stop the "missions".
But by now NAFA was an impressive organisation. Its desert activities were the largest research effort in the country, indeed in the world, and everyone agreed that "desert engineering" was an important new field. So although the government told NAFA to stop these "missions" to the West coast, . they didn't close NAFA down. In fact NAFA had begun to campaign for funding to enable it to "open up" the desert that their "waggonauts" had begun to explore. They spoke impressively of their high duty, and proposed in particular to build a NEW TYPE of desert-waggon which would carry more "waggonauts", and would be "re-usable": It could be used over and over again, a bit like an ordinary waggon in fact, so that the cost of each mission would be less.
There was a lot of debate over this plan; people weren't sure it would be worth paying NAFA to build a NEW type of desert-waggon. But politicians in every part of the country argued that it would "create jobs" locally. People weren't ENTIRELY convinced by this argument; after all, if you spend money on ANYTHING you "create jobs". Even some politicians understood this, but they argued it anyway. Being seen to "create jobs" was good for getting votes, after all.
And then the military said they wouldn't mind having a vehicle to place large telescopes at certain points out in the great desert. NAFA enlarged their new desert-waggon design to accommodate this, and the government finally voted to pay for it.
The new desert-waggon took a lot longer to develop than the original one. NAFA had scrapped that one and destroyed all the plans (nobody was QUITE sure why) and was starting from scratch. Once again NAFA gave contracts to companies in every part of the country. To cut a long story short, the "new, improved" desert-waggon carried six "waggonauts" instead of three, and it cost TWICE as much to carry equipment with them as the original vehicle.
It also turned out that the new desert-waggon wasn't very reliable. By now the public had grown used to the idea that NAFA continually spent vast amounts of their money to send small numbers of NAFA staff out into the desert, but they were rather-surprised when one of the new desert-waggons burst into flames in full view of the crowd that was waving goodbye, and the "waggonauts" were all killed.
Politicians immediately explained that it would be quite unreasonable of the public to expect desert-waggons to actually WORK. After all, the desert was a "new frontier" (well, only three decades old), and everyone should be grateful to NAFA for, er, something or other (it wasn't QUITE clear what). NAFA officials of course spoke impressively of their high duty to explore this terrible frontier, and built another vehicle exactly like the one that had exploded, at further enormous cost to the public.
Now around this time a number of ordinary waggon-designers, who had been ignored for years, began to say that they couldn't understand what the fuss was all about. Sure, a trip to the West coast was a long journey, so you needed a pretty carefully designed waggon. But, now that they knew what was involved, and ' NAFA had designed a whole lot of systems that worked perfectly well and were public property, it wasn't difficult to design a vehicle that would cost as little as 10% of the cost of the original missions.
Some of these independent designers even went as far as trying to raise the money to do it. They reckoned that if they could make it quite cheap to get to the coast, people would find some use for the desert instead of just driving about in it making scientific measurements. But they had a real difficulty: No-one with any money believed them. After all, NAFA employed 40,000 experienced desert-waggon engineers, If, with all their combined experience, they designed vehicles that cost a vast amount for each "waggonaut" to travel out into the desert, that must be what it cost, mustn't it? When the independents explained that NAFA had no interest in designing cheap desert-waggons, people didn't believe this. And when they pointed out that after 25 years of effort NAFA had actually raised the cost of going into the desert by more than 100%, people thought it was pretty unpatriotic to criticise NAFA, which had done so much to open up this great frontier for, er, for their "waggonauts".
Now, in order to "protect the public", the government had also made it illegal for anyone else to go out into the desert in a vehicle without NAFA's officials okaying the design. And somehow none of the independents' designs ever quite reached NAFA's standards, which weren't actually written down anywhere, but were based on their enormous experience. As a result no members of the public were killed, only NAFA's "waggonauts".
Actually, in private a number of desert-waggon engineers agreed that maybe "desert research" might be done a BIT cheaper. But they wouldn't say this in public. NAFA was the only source of desert-research funding around, and of course they didn't want to lose their contracts.
By now, true to its high duty, NAFA had developed educational programs which they gave to schools across the whole country, teaching children the history of NAFA, and the details of all their past "missions", and how to design desert-waggons, and the names and life-histories of the heroic NAFA "waggonauts", arid the glorious plans for future NAFA "missions", and how to write to politicians to persuade the government to increase NAFA's budget. Taxpayers paid for all this as well of course.
Furthermore other countries with similar bureaucratic tendencies had established their own agency, called FAFA. They were pretty proud when, starting decades after NAFA, they got their "mission" costs to the same level as NAFA! They also called some of their own staff "waggonauts" who had special meetings with NAFA's "waggonauts", while their administrators met and discussed the cost of desert-waggons, and how to get more money from taxpayers.
Like NAFA, FAFA's administrators and "waggonauts" also made speeches about how important their work was. The public in these other countries tried hard to be interested, but they could never really QUITE grasp the bit about why THEY had to pay for the "waggonauts" and their "missions"? "Because it's too expensive for the "waggonauts" to pay for themselves, of course" they were told. "Yes, but, um, why does that mean that WE, have to pay?" "Because of our high duty." So it went.
However, by now NAFA were engaged on developing a "waggonaut habitation facility" at truly stunning cost to the taxpayer.
This would house six "waggonauts" right out in the desert for fully several weeks at a time, and could actually be VISITED by the desert-waggons during their "missions".
The independents were amazed. They pointed out that the "waggonaut habitation facility" was in fact a small house, and could be built and transported out into the desert for little more than the cost of an ordinary house. And they went further. Technology had been developing so rapidly during NAFA's thirty-year life that the independents had improved their own designs of desert-waggon so far that they could now see how to reduce the cost of desert travel by 99% to a level that many of the public could afford. The public were of course fascinated by the idea. They had all heard "waggonauts" giving speeches about how amazing it was out in the desert, and they were keen to see for themselves. So they asked NAFA if they could go too.
At this the officials at NAFA became very solemn. This was ABSOLUTELY out of the question. ONLY NAFA's (and FAFA's) "waggonauts" could go out into the desert. "Missions" were FAR too important and difficult for mere "ordinary members of the public" to take part. But, since this showed that the public were keen for even more space activity, NAFA was happy to propose that the public should pay for NAFA to start a new "Desert Exploration Initiative", greater and more difficult than any previous mission: NAFA would build a fleet of ENTIRELY NEW desert-wagons, which would carry at least six NAFA "waggonauts" right across the desert (something they hadn't done for twenty years now despite the cosmic amounts of money that they used), and then explore RIGHT ALONG THE COAST. This would cost a truly heroic amount of taxpayers' money, commensurate with NAFA's importance, and fully ten times what the original mission across the desert had cost. It would double the nation's debt at a stroke, and demonstrate clearly what a stupendous organisation NAFA was..... or something.
The public were amazed at how expensive this new frontier was. And some of them began loyally campaigning for the government to raise taxes to pay for the new "DEI",
The independents were aghast, not only at NAFA's increasingly insane behaviour but also at the public's gullibility, and they wished that the people did not have such blind faith in politicians and their agencies.
Then NAFA had another setback. They had designed a colossal "desert mirror" that their desert-waggon would place out on a mountain in the desert in order to see the coast better. At a cost to the public one thousand times that of an ordinary mirror, this was put on top of the chosen desert mountain. But when the "waggonauts" got back they discovered that the mirror was the wrong shape. The public were puzzled. Didn't NAFA employ tens of thousands of the most highly qualified desert-engineers? So how come the mirror didn't work? But NAFA explained smoothly that this was an IMMENSELY difficult task, way beyond anything that the public could reasonably expect them to achieve, and that in any case it was really very valuable having a slightly bent mirror on the desert mountain, at whatever cost.
The public weren't all convinced by this, though, and some journalists decided to investigate the story. They discovered that in fact NAFA no longer employed the best engineers. Indeed it was full of elderly managers who had helped with the very first mission over twenty years before, and who liked best to reminisce about those days. And far from being heroic figures, the "waggonauts" were perfectly ordinary, in fact rather boring people, very like people you find in any large government bureaucracy.
All the young engineers - well there weren't actually many young engineers in the country any more. Young people found it more fun to watch fictional movies of what it was like on the frontier, rather than study engineering just to help a tiny number of government "waggonauts" make occasional incomprehensible "missions" out into the desert.
At about this time NAFA started a "commercialisation initiative": They invited businesses to pay for some of their "missions", or bits of equipment on the desert-waggons. This of course made no sense at all commercially since a business has to earn revenues to cover its costs. But NAFA argued that the reluctance of businesses to join in their "missions" showed what a good job NAFA was doing performing tasks too difficult for mere "private enterprise" to carry out.
Some journalists now began to describe NAFA as a "stagnant bureaucracy", and so the Vice-President of the country announced that he would establish a Committee to examine "without fear and without favour" whether NAFA still served the public interest, or whether, as government departments sometimes need, it should be re-organised. This seemed a good idea, and was a popular move.
HOWEVER, NAFA was still a very large and influential organisation, and of course it employed directly or indirectly ALL the desert engineers in the country. So, in recognition of NAFA's expertise, it was decided that NAFA should choose the members of the Vice-President's Committee! And furthermore, as NAFA argued convincingly, the Vice-President was really not expert in desert-engineering matters, so it would be much better if the Committee reported to... the Head of NAFA!! ASTOUNDING though this may seem, this is what was decided!! (Fact is sometimes stranger than fiction!) You can imagine how the Committee's report read when it was finally published:
"Desert-research" is an IMMENSELY difficult undertaking. NAFA is a SUPERB organisation, and it tackles this daunting task with imagination, dedication, and the bravery of its indomitable "waggonauts". NAFA's efforts are however hampered by one problem; its budget is far too small, and it should be increased by 100% - or, er, why not 200%?"
The public were reassured to know that the Vice-President's Committee had examined NAFA closely, and reached this conclusion. Especially when FAFA wrote to the Vice-President adding its impressive voice to that of all the desert-engineering experts who were unanimously praising the report.
Needless to say, the independents and the increasingly sceptical journalists were stunned, and they began to despair of ever escaping from this truly insane situation..... And the public, some of whom could remember thirty years before being promised excitement and wealth on this "new frontier", became increasingly puzzled, and lost any interest in the new frontier. In the schools the nation's children stopped studying engineering and science and turned instead to taking strange psychoactive drugs and following irrational religions, since the future seemed so unutterably boring.
"And so...." sceptical readers might well ask "assuming for the moment that we accept that this preposterous, incredible farce did actually happen, how do you propose that it finally ended?"
Unfortunately the story handed down becomes confused at this point. What seems to have happened is this: By now it could be only a matter of time before NAFA would be closed down - still several years, though, since politicians don't like to admit mistakes, and NAFA retained a great amount of influence to delay its demise. And of course, so long as NAFA continued to exist, no sensible commercial desert waggon business could start.
However, in the meantime NAFA became increasingly irrelevant, because it seems that some of the independent waggon designers travelled to a small country far away beyond the desert. There some ingenious engineers welcomed the independents, and listened to their ideas, and together they built cheap desert-waggons. These were so cheap to operate that they offered rides out into the desert and along the coast for paying passengers, and even built hotels there for people to stay in.
Eventually many ordinary members of the public were regularly going abroad to take trips out into the desert, and even seeing NAFA's "waggonauts" struggling with their strange equipment out there. Then they finally realised that NAFA's technology was not the best in the world, and that as a matter of fact it was over-sophisticated and commercially worthless. Then the politicians finally voted against giving NAFA any more taxpayers' money and it was closed down, having wasted a generation and allowed the country to fall behind other countries in desert activities.
--
But of course this terrible story DIDN'T happen in the USA. Americans didn't do anything so stupid as to entrust the development of the new frontier to a government monopoly. They relied instead on the vigour and ingenuity of the people themselves to find ways of reducing costs and creating commercial opportunities - with great success. And in opening up the West they reinforced the "frontier spirit" that, has maintained the USA's" pre-eminence. And they did the same with equal success in the conquest of the air: It was the brilliant, independent bicycle-makers Wilbur and Orville Wright who invented flight not the government-funded Langley - and within thirty years commercial airlines covered the globe (though it took the US government 45 years to officially recognise the Wright brothers' genius),
And no such terrible thing could ever happen in the USA, could it? Because of course American ideology warns against any such foolish behaviour. The long and bitter experience of the founders of the Constitution led them to warn specifically against trusting government. It's not that people in government are particularly criminal or dishonest or lazy (though they are no less so than anyone else), but "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear", and there are some things that government cannot do.
Once you set up a government monopoly, particularly a large one, it rapidly becomes extremely difficult to control. The monopoly immediately develops its own objectives, the FIRST one being survival, so it NEVER FINISHES ITS TASK, which becomes more and more complex and expensive. It also creates interest groups; crushes incipient competition in order to protect its prestige; and develops power to influence the government, the behaviour of whole industries, and eventually the perceptions of the whole population - particularly if it's allowed to use public funds to campaign for itself. So it can waste ANY amount of taxpayers* money; FAIL to achieve the task it was designed to achieve; and waste DECADES of time in the process.
So of course that's why this never happened in the USA. Lucky for America!
Failure is not an option. It comes automatically enabled in every Microsoft product.
Reading the little fable, I wished some of the "wagonauts" brought back some subtlety to give to the author.
the metaphor falls short with the fact that you cannot send people to harvest the Moon, even if there was an easy way to transport them. ...unless you terraform the Moon and then build a spaceship out of wood pulled by flying animals.
Then you'd have to watch out for titatium-alloy-arrow-throwing Aliun'.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
The mircorp flash intro needs to have an epileptic seizure warning.
My cat was looking over my shoulder and it is now vibrating across the tile floor into the other room.
Umm... Could I have my 30 minutes back? Couldn't the author have made is point in like 5 minutes worth of reading? Maybe this guy is ex-NASA and dosn't know how to be economical with words.
- It's already been posted
- The previous poster did a better job a formatting than you
The moral of this? Check the other comments, and use the preview button.P#34R U$!
Memes don't exist. Tell your friends.
standard gatse link warning
... because there isn't any "west" in space
Wanna bet on how long before this is posted again.
My bet is 22H 43M
Or, this mirror, which kind of looks like the original, but has no images:
http://www.rjk-comm.com/mirror/west_won.html
At this the officials at NAFA became very solemn. This was ABSOLUTELY out of the question. ONLY NAFA's (and FAFA's) "waggonauts" could go out into the desert. "Missions" were FAR too important and difficult for mere "ordinary members of the public" to take part. But, since this showed that the public were keen for even more desert activity, NAFA was happy to propose that the public should pay for NAFA to start a new "Desert Exploration Initiative", greater and more difficult than any previous mission: NAFA would build a fleet of ENTIRELY NEW desert-wagons, which would carry at least six NAFA "waggonauts" right across the desert (something they hadn't done for twenty years now despite the cosmic amounts of money that they used), and then explore RIGHT ALONG THE COAST. This would cost a truly heroic amount of taxpayers' money, commensurate with NAFA's importance, and fully ten times what the original mission across the desert had cost. It would double the nation's debt at a stroke, and demonstrate clearly what a stupendous organisation NAFA was..... or something.
____________________________________
-- I beleve you'll like this -->
I found this a tedious read, heavy handed and predictable.
The Onion packed more humor into one fake headline:
"NASA delays shuttle launch out of sheer habit"
than that essay manages in endless paragraphs. (disclosure: I worked at the NASA Ames Research Center.)
annmariabell.com
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
But is just as overlong, and unfunny. These guys should give Scott Adams or User Friendly a call.
Is there any genuinely funny computer related humour? Or is it just one of those things you never see?
I get emails that are "passed between trusted friends" all the time. If I had known that Slashdot was interested in them earlier I would have sent them in!
The article criticises 'the government-started monopoly' due to the fact such an organisation wants to keep itself alive and thus will never get the job done. It goes on to bewail the fact that third parties with better solutions have been stopped from succeeding, for funding reasons.
Now if the government truly has been witholding monies from really good projects, sure, that's bad. But in my amateur interested following of the space progression, there hasn't been any 'wow' project which has simply been unable to get funding. There's a plethora of interesting designs and ideas out there, but no guarantee they'll work - and the big, bad, beast - NASA itself - does work on the 'crazy' ideas itself.
Small companies and hoobyists are working on alternate designs, such as the X-Plane prize efforts, but they do have a ways to go (Armadillo's latest launch, anyone?). For all it's sins, NASA did a good job early on - not the best, but who can do that? - although I'd agree it needs to start doing some proper advancement now. Less of the old tech, more of the ISS, and a lot more work on actually getting their next-gen designs out there!
But where space is concerned, I'm happy to play the waiting game. Impatient, but happy. The longer we wait, the safer and cheaper the eventual solution will be.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" whilst looking for a rock
He said furtively.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Scanning to the bottom of the article, Orville and Wilbur are held up as model paragons (nuck, nuck).
Pardon me, but weren't the Wright brothers secretive bastards who held up the development of flight with their patent stragety until the government "nationalized" all flight stuff for the advent of WWI? Or something like that.
Of course, I thought the satire was about going to be about Canada winning their West with registered guns, until I got into it. Then I kept trying to find the NAFTA connection. Lamers!
*Ouch* Are they on crack or something?
The writer of the story clearly believed that space flight was a 'mature' technology assuming that commercial organisations could easily fill the void should NASA, ESA et al be disbanded.
To an extent, I agree. But government funded organisations be they NASA, JPL or the universities will always be the primary instigators of new technological achievements.
There is another story about a man name Christopher Columbus (you may have heard of him) who tried to mount similar but purely commercial venture. Unfortunately he failed to acquire enough commercial funds and had to resort to government funding also.
The pressure of 'always turning a profit' will confine companies such as Mir-Corp to feeding off of pure research's achievements. I suspect I am not the only one to see that in such an environment the 'giant leaps' (such as moon landings), are unlikely to occur with out a 'NAFA'. Instead progress will continue at a crawl.
But I suppose 'NAFA' money could always be spent on loftier goals, such as invading another country.
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
I would have more confidence in MirCorp if their tagline didn't abbreviate to 'The MCSE Company'.
The space shuttle was a lackluster design when it was originally built. Yes, it got people into space, which is a sizeable accomplishment, but the track record isn't even close to ideal (Challenger explosion withstanding, you still have numerous delayed/cancelled launches for mechanical failures). The US has a lot of cojones to make fun of the Mir space station. Short of foolish pride, I don't understand why someone would keep the current design as long as they have. It seems to me that healthy competition keeps things new, innovative, and cost-efficient at the same time.
I've heard the arguement that, besides tourism, there's no reason for the vast majority of people to go into space. Perhaps, allowing a larger number of people access would uncover new reasons.
I think NASA needs to be disbanded because they have too much of a monopoly in space travel in the USA.
I don't think that would hold up in court though. Stupid government.
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music." Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989.
And its name is... America...
For those who don't know, North America was pretty well known to Europe before Colombo set foot there. I'll try up some of the data I knew a few years ago.
Well there are lot of stories floating around that America was known to other people before the XIth Century. There are some strange facts about architecture and customs that suggest that African/Mediterranean peoples were in contact with America in a very far past (>3000 years ago). There were some suggestions that Phoenicians and Romans knew soemthing laid in the west of the Atlantic. We had stories about legends from people now living in modern West Africa. We had the famous Irish monks. However the historical mist is pretty thick here. So we just ignore these things for now.
In the XIth century we have the first, 100% data that Europeans reached America. As many of you know, they were the Vikings. Classical History claims that this discovery was lost. Wrong, at least until the XIIIth century, many bigheads in Europe knew about this. However something happened during that time and this data was forgetten for nearly 100 years till Templars/Portuguese reached modern Boston somwhere in 1450s. There is a fact that confirms this, some "signed" rock, which its copies lays now in Lisbon. Note that Portuguese had such a tradition - apart of putting pilars in the seashore, they marked rocks to mention their presence to future expeditions. But that was not all. From that time and until the end of the 1480s Portuguese made several expeditions to North America, and probably sailed over the South. And according to certain stories, they did this taking together dannish and french (why ???) sailors. Besides there is a story that Portuguese possessed maps made in the XIIth century that clearly showed Labrador and regions down to modern New-York. Btw, it was in the middle of the XVth Century that portuguese got used to fish Codfish. Codfish does not live in Portuguese hotter waters. To catch it up, one has to get near Canada. Unfortunately, with the exception of two expeditions, every document concerning these travels probably was destryed during Inquisition times and Lisbon's Earthquake in 1755.
But this story is not the main thing. As you see, I speak about the Inquisition. Why? Because one of the main oppositors to all this was no one else than Roman Church. Fantasy? Absolutely not. Several years ago I got into my hands the story of a french archeologist that made a fantastic discovery. He studied the social-economical situation of Europe during the middle of Middle Ages. In one of his studies he met with people who talked about some wierd documents on Greenland dated to the XIIIth century. These documents were several bureaucratic papers concerning the relation between Greenland people and the Dannish Episcope. It occurs that somewhere after to colonization of Greenland, these lands were offered to the Church. The Dannish Episcopate, as representative of the Pope, ruled in fact these lands.On the papers it seems that there are references to the fact that Greenlanders knew about the existence of other lands in the West. However, somewhere in the middle of the XIIIth century, step-by-step contacts with Greenland started to fade. It is curious to mention that in some point of History, only Church boats had the right to sail to these lands. However in the XIIIth Century, contacts were reduced to only one sail a year. In the end the boat caught fire and no one replaced it. What happened to the remaining Greenlanders remains a mistery.
Frankly this story made me think A LOT. Right now, I don't remeber the name of the french archeologist. But I remember that this was once considered one of the biggest authorities in Middle Ages History. The fact that the Church didn't only knew but OWNED lands that later were considered pure fantasies, rises lots of questions about how and when America was in fact discovered. During the Middle Ages, people had lost of other problems rather to care about something that eroded all foundations of knowledge of those times. However, the Church was The European Center of Knowledge, and even in the most darkest times, they cared to be informed. The fact that they were so near of America, and restricted contacts with Greenland, suggests that they knew about it.
There is also one factor to add up to this story. Portuguese expeditions were directed from a center in South Europe. This center was known as Sagres, but the name of a village that lays nearby. There were stories that this center was a big building laying not far away from the sea. However, since the XVIth century, references to this building disappeared altogether. Today, in the supposed place where this center existed, there is NO OBJECT that would remind of its existence. Until the somehwere in the 1980s... Sagres is a good place for those who fly small motor planes, its windy like Hell. and one pilot noted drawings in the surface. Archeologists came in and discovered the biggest mistery of Portugal's History. The building was completely removed from that place, down to the foundations. A huge Rose of the Winds that layed nearby and was surely made of rocks, could only be seen from the air for the holes on the ground. All the Sagres center was completely wiped up. By who? Archeologists thought that nearby villagers may have used the rock for their houses. However in Sagres there are no clear signs that houses may carry those rocks. Besides some cannot understand why villagers would be so systematic to clean the place completely.
There is one interesting conspiration theory about this. One guy suggested that this was a last attempt to forget America and everything else. However it was too late. Europe went crazy about India. Spanish were making fortunes out of the stolen american gold. English, French and Dutch were already reaching America. the Church lost the battle...
Nigel Assbackwards writes
I'd read the link, but I don't trust guys named Nigel.
More of the ISS? Why? I have yet to hear a good reason for ISS, and I have actually tried to find one© Now there are several good reasons to have a permamently manned space station© It could serve as a construction facility for large vessels, but ISS isn't going to do that© It could serve as a "service station" to all of the other satellites in space, to make it easier to repair them, but ISS isn't going to do that either© It could serve as a sort of "space port" for the docking of ships on their way to and from other interesting parts of space, but ISS isn't going to even do this© It could serve as a first attempt at a human colony in space, but it currently only holds 3 people, and is only designed to hold 7 in the long run, all "astronauts", so it isn't doing that either© It is in the wrong orbit to serve as a manned communications station, so it isn't going to replace any of those© It isn't going to replace Hubble, and it isn't going to replace any of the other scientific satellites either© A few days ago it was suggested that ISS might be abandoned© If it were abandoned, It most likely would never be reoccupied© I don't think that would be all that bad of a thing©
Best Slashdot comment ever
This "legendary satire" merely advocates privatization of space exploration. And it doesn't do it well.
I think it's kind of ironic that some of the same convervative types that would have pushed for increased NASA funding during the Cold War are now criticizing the agency and would like to see it cut.
Bullshit!
Firstly, space isn't that hard. It is non-trivial, but then so is powered flight via airplane. We did it in the 60's with technology so antiquated (from a modern perspective) that most of it isn't even in use anymore. None of what was done back then is even remotely cutting edge now. Which is why there are dozens of groups working on the X-Prize, which is essentially a privately run Mercury/Gemini mission.
Secondly, since I'm paying their bills, I don't care if they're "trying real hard." I care abaout results, and NASA's development efforts have been consistently missing the bottom line since I was born.
The issue is making space access cheap, and that is where NASA has failed utterly. The problem is, NASA is a beaurocracy, and beaurocracy DOES NOT REWARD EFFICIENCY. A beaurocracy is a political organization, and it rewards political skill. Which is how you get the current NASA, which is designed primarily to suck up to senators and representatives by placing jobs in their districts. If a program fails, but its bosses know their politics, they will be rewarded for playing the system properly and not punished for failing. Case in point: the space shuttle was originally supposed to be a cost-saver over the Saturn 5. Instead, it's the most expensive system ever. Did anyone get fired over that?
The other problem NASA has, and it is also symptomatic of being a beaurocracy, is incurable featuritis. You have to have shiny new bullets in your PowerPoint presentations. That's why NASA designs have requirements like reusability, single-stage-to-orbit, hydrogen fuel, scramjets and aerospikes, new materials technology, etc. Making it cheap is a secondary priority that in theory will follow from the new technology, but in practice has not done so to date. (I'm not dissing new technology, I'm just saying that tech for novelty's sake doesn't necessarily get you anywhere.)
NASA is just not the right organization to produce low-cost space access. NASA isn't "designed" to do that.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
but don't you think that the main reason because national governments do not want commercial enterprises to own/operate rockets that can reach orbit is concerns of 'national/global security'?
I bet that every satellite put in orbit right now, is thoroughly scrutinized by the various nations' secret services, and I also bet that satellites that would have 'too sensitive' capabilites would be 'rejected' unless appropriate agreements are made with the satellite's owner/operator.
After all, if I was company X interested in mapping/data acquisition at resolutions much higher than currently offered (say, 1 foot resolution images at different wavelengths etc.) I doubt I would be allowed to launch such a satellite without signing some papers saying that I won't photograph 'sensitive' areas, or that I won't give that info to 'bad people'.
If there was a 'free market', and I was a country that the US wouldn't like to have satellite sensing capabilities, there wouldn't be much they could do to stop me from using, hypotetically, my petroldollars to buy it.
I could also, extremely hypotetically of course, make a bogus communication satellite, which is really a nuke or bio weapon, and get this commercial company to put it in orbit, and from there I can just make it drop anywhere in the world.
While I do believe that there should be commercial competition to lower prices and so on, I really don't think it will be allowed to happen: only state-based space agencies will be allowed to have launch capabilities, and because of the deterrence factor, they will make very sure that the above rogue scenarios won't happen.
-- the cake is a lie
While I agree with the spirit of this farce I have to question the assumption that cheaper ways have been squashed. Granted NAFA... erra NASA budgeting is inflated well over what minimal launch costs. However even an expendable system along the lines of the old Sat V would still be pretty expensive, even if we had kept the assembly sequence rolling.But it would be doubly so now that the tooling for that beast is no more and would have to be recreated.
space needs a kick in the pants from one of the two following and I don't care if it comes via the private entrepanuer or NAFA.
1) We find some incredible new technology or resource that can only be found/created in microgravity and the capital investment returns far exceed the cost... ie a good space buisness venture. Space tourisim is a non starter at its current costs.. even at a 10th the current costs. Do the math.Shuttle launch 400 million/10 makes 40 million. call it two pilots and 8 passengers. 8 passengers to defray 40 million ? a novelty enterprise at best. even if you convert the payload to acomodate max passengers up to say 40 you still have a million per ticket just to meet expenses. Again its a novelty enterprise with no long term future. Get it down to 10k a ticket and a system that can be operated for less than the total ticket cost for a full load and can handle enough flights to pay for itself and make a profit and you start cookin with gas. However Chemical bi-propellant systems just are not that capable.
2) We build a better mouse trap and find a better way than chemicle bi-propellant launch vehicles. Perhaps a more efficient chemcial system or perhaps a new means of generating thrust.
I am just hoping the X-prize contestants are succesfull, but I think the break through there will be when they manage orbital flights, or perhaps sub orbital ballistic hops to distant locations. I think the market for 0 G joyriding is somewhat limited long term, but the ability to get from say california to australia, or similar hops, in less than an hour has a serious commercial market. After all if we could launch multiple nukes to distant lands in 30 minutes... why not people ? Its a small step indeed from something that can do that to something that can make LEO, not much more for TLI to LLO, and not much more for a TMI to a LMO. After all 99% of the problem is getting out of the atmosphere. Once your up there, going elsewhere or comming back takes only a fraction of the Delta V.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
The article criticises 'the government-started monopoly' due to the fact such an organisation wants to keep itself alive and thus will never get the job done.
Are we talking about the "Drug War" here?
It can never be won yet drug war profiteers on both sides depend on the continued erosion of your liberties and the militarization to line their pockets.
What's truly nauseating is that every time there has been an 'alert' about possible terrorist activities instead of having federal officers at airports and public building, they end up sending 30-40 agents to bust dying cancer patients in California compassion clubs on the same day.
Hey, if US fighter planes cant be bothered when 4 hijacked planes are flying around the US, I can understand that those 'security alerts' cant be that serious.
tory
Here's a question: why the hell doesn't the ISS rotate to simulate gravity like every other hard-sci space station I've seen or heard of? You can still have zero-G areas, and it could easily be designed to still dock easily.
To me the ISS is nothing more than a glorified space-borne rat maze.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
As a result, all space vehicles are mostly fuel tank. They all have dinky payloads for their size. They just barely work. They're all weight-reduced to the edge of what's possible, far beyond the weight reduction efforts in commercial aircraft. As vehicles, they suck.
Only some non-chemical propulsion method can possibly get us out of this mess. Orion might have worked. Laser launch is a possibility. Antimatter propulsion is a ways off, but possible. Open-cycle nuclear engines have been built successfully, but they make a huge mess.
Incidentally, the "cheap, dumb booster" is a myth. Most of the cost comes from making boosters light. It's easy to make a cheap, heavy booster, but it will barely get off the ground.
Columbus wandered around Europe until he found a government that would give him ships and crews.
England created crown corporations to create colonies.
When the USA was created Congress made sure that the government and themselves got paid for the land that got settled. West of the Mississippi was largely settled by the railroad companies. The guilded age scandals were largely fueled by the money the railroads passed to members of Congress. They got rich and the poor of Europe got to do the work.
Government will always be involved in the frontiers because despite what people say they are not willing to put up with the expense and dangers to be on the cutting edge. These in power will be sure to get their money and those who are the most desperate will get to do the work. Such is human history. Companies rich off government contracts get to write how they could to it so much better if you just gave them another contract.
The monopoly immediately develops its own objectives, the FIRST one being survival, so it NEVER FINISHES ITS TASK, which becomes more and more complex and expensive.
They're talking about government monopolies and organizations, but it's important to remember that this applies to any organization - government bureau or private corporation. Witness the RIAA/MPAA members trying to save their aging business models. That's only one example off the top of my head that gets discussed here a lot.
All groups of people who get together to do something recognize that what they are doing is their way of life, their means of existence, and they are afraid of losing that, so they try to protect it at all costs. How willing would you be to give up your paycheck if it seemed your organization was obsolete or useless?
Well, I'd be willing, but most people don't seem to be so willing. I think this is harder for organizations that aren't democratically structured... The few people at the top will do what they can to protect their extra-large paychecks, even when it's not in the interest of the lower-paid individuals in the org.
And now I've gone off-topic. Wheeee!!
When I started reading this article, my first thought was "I don't seem the similarity" - but after a few (of the many) paragraphs, I begin to see the similarities between the race to open up the west, and the opening up of the "final frontier".
For example:
Expiditions into the west, just like flights into space today, were enormously sensitive and complex. Just like spaceflight, a slight glitch or design flaw in a wagon could cause the, usually spectacular, instantaneous death of everyone on board the wagon in the first few minutes of the expidition. Often with damage to others who happened to be near the site that the wagon set off from.
Also, before wagons full of supplies started arriving, the American west was TOTALLY devoid of life. In fact, if you just sent a naked person or animal, or even bacterium into the west, it would die almost immediately from any number of causes - asphyxiation, radiation, extreme cold or heat. Before the original Americans started sending wagons into the west, it had been utterly uninhabited, and totally inhospitable to human life.
Thank god private individuals were able to overcome all of these nearly impossible scientific and technological challenges and open up a radiation blasted sterile wasteland to human habitation.
So the lesson is that all we have to do is convince ourselves that space travel really isn't inherently difficult or expensive, and blame everything on big government.
Great article. Great analogy.
Secondly, since I'm paying their bills, I don't care if they're "trying real hard."
You don't have to pay your taxes, you know. There may be some consequences, but you don't have to pay them. You could take a page from the War Tax Resitors' book...
Sex - Find It
Mostly due to this part
:)
However, in the meantime NAFA became increasingly irrelevant, because it seems that some of the independent waggon designers travelled to a small country far away beyond the desert. There some ingenious engineers welcomed the independents, and listened to their ideas, and together they built cheap desert-waggons. These were so cheap to operate that they offered rides out into the desert and along the coast for paying passengers, and even built hotels there for people to stay in.
Right on. It would worth giving the 'small country' some credit for having their own engineering force. Besides, it's not that *small* country after all
3.243F6A8885A308D313
'nuff said.
We can only guess at the author's credentials:
Resume for I M Patient -- (References available upon request.)
2001 - Won third-best fiction story in Mrs. Parson's seventh grade English class, section B. Accuracy of content and knowledge of NASA, economics, and politics was unimportant for this assignment. We intend to submit the final draft for publication at spacefuture.com
2001 - Successfully launched "Honest John" model rocket with 2-stage thrusters.
2000-2001 - School hall monitor. Responsiblities include wearing a badge and maintaining alertness.
For everyone so concerned about free access to space: Would you want Enron launching large things into orbit which might conceivably fall on someone's head? Would you want Microsoft?
Yeah, the government's inefficient... why aren't you calling up your representative and telling him/her to repeal the regressive tax cuts and use the money for space exploration?
[o]_O
The karma whores for YOU!
Very well written story, if a little strong on the sarcastic side. Quite entertaing as well. My collegue has a nuclear engineering background, and he thought it was hilarious.
It's sad that its so true though.
Yeah, my dad works for a company that takes / sells satallite photos. (globexplorer) They have agreements that at certain times and locations they shut off their cameras. Also on an interesting note, they've had the FBI digging through their logs.. apparently some *interesting* people have been buying large number of images of high profile locations from a overseas dialup...
magnanomous.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Why the "West" Wasn't Won:
Because it's not possible to simply travel to "California" in a "wagon", and dump 1000 8 foot lengths of ceramic-coated rebar out the back of your "wagon" and destroy most most of the industrial capacity of a nation.
An aircraft smacking into a sky-scraper is *nothing* compared to the damage that can be done by anoyone who can get to "California".
It's not "NAFA"'s fault. It's an issue of maintaining control over your citizenry, while covering your ass.
The "West" hasn't been won because the people in the "East" are covering their asses, and no Horace Greely is going to talk them into not covering their asses.
-
Imagine if the DC-X had gone forward: they would not have been able to control eventual private ownership of the vehicles, or the launch and landing sites for privately owned vehicles, as a security choke-point.
They would not have been able to prevent people from landing in the crater Aristarchus, and declaring a new state there, through the simple expedient of requiring a runway be built to land and relaunch the vehicle, or the need for the vehicle to have atmosphere on launch/landing, as the X-33 requires.
It's all for your own short-term good.
-- Terry
The other problem NASA has, and it is also symptomatic of being a beaurocracy, is incurable featuritis.
I have to argue that NASA's featuritis is not so much a disease as a stated mission goal. NASA spends >50% of its budget on research projects, a lot of them real blue-sky stuff, like the breakthrough physics propulsion project.
The assumption is that pure research in fields like aeronautics, propulsion, etc., can benefit not only space exploration but more practical projects as well. And what good is funding the research if you aren't willing to be a proving ground for it as well? It's funny to think that the NASA administration has a desire to push boundaries, as well as an ingrained distrust of unproven technology. Seems contradictory.
Very insightful post, btw.
I am sure I have seen the 'Very Special Forces,' 'Male Orgasm,' 'Office Solutions,' and 'Machete Association' stories before. What gives? Usually, when the staff at the Onion takes a holiday, they don't put up any stories. Now it looks as though they are trotting out old stories. Not that that's a bad thing. There are a few stories that aren't in the archives anymore that I would LOVE to see printed again, like the one about the famine-ridden country in Africa getting a new houseplant.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
First of all, just having any quantity of mass outside of Earth's gravity well is a huge plus - mass is absolutely essential for radiation shielding for one, and as reaction mass for rocketry (there are several relatively high-ISP rocket fuels that could be made out of lunar materials, and almost anything would work for nuclear or ion/plasma drives). The biggest component of the lunar surface is oxygen, which has a number of uses... second is silicon. And of course for any sort of significant construction effort you need structural materials in bulk.
/. a few times, is part of a private effort to make the commercial potential of the Moon a reality - they have a test launch coming up December 20th. The Moon Society, where I am currently on the board of directors, is devoted to research and development of the Moon, and recently endorsed the Space Settlement Initiative, one possible way to make all this really happen, and soon.
At first a lot of things will have to be brought up from earth, and there will certainly be human or robotic (tele-operated?) work to actually make the habitats/instruments/spacecraft needed. In the long run what the moon is low on (as far as Apollo measurements could tell) are the volatile elements: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sodium, etc. These may possibly be available in sufficient quantities elsewhere - measurements by Clementine and Lunar Prospector in the last 10 years gave pretty strong evidence for hydrogen (presumably in water ice) at the poles. If not the poles, needs for hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen may have to be met from near-earth comets or asteroids in the long run; in the short run from earth - at least these elements tend to be light!
The space between Earth and Moon has, of course, essentially none of those physical elements, which is why the article (rather overdone) made the analog of space a "desert". It really does make sense to try to get to the other side of Earth's gravity well and get something moving over there.
TransOrbital, which has appeared on
There's plenty of ways for any of you to get involved - all of these efforts and the cheap launch side of things can all use as much support as possible...
Energy: time to change the picture.
Have you ever heard of "skip intro"?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"...every satellite put in orbit right now, is thoroughly scrutinized by the various nations' secret services, and I also bet that satellites that would have 'too sensitive' capabilites..."
You think the US of A or anybody inspects China's satellites? How about (iirc) Pakistan or India's?
I dont think so.....
I think satellites are 'open season' if you know what i mean. Of course commercial co's would be able to refuse on the grounds of (cough cough) safety etc. (Ariene? etc)
Goddamnit. Nearly everyone gets this wrong. Things are *different* in orbit. If you plop 1000 8 foot lengths of ceramic-coated rebar out the back of a spaceship, you'll get...
1000 8 foot lengths of ceramic-coated rebar floating next to you. For a very very long time.
You'll need *energy* to move it into an orbit that will collide with the earth again. However, if you have enough energy to place 1000 8 foot Y.Y.Y. into orbit in the first place, you'll *already have* the big swinging dick in international politics, no need to get all biblical.
Laugh at my Lisp and I keeell you.
the west wasnt 'won' it was STOLEN. YOU DUMB SHITS.
you ignorant dipshits. go read a goddam history book. the west was already inhabited. in the 1500s spain set up towns in the desert. new mexico. california.
and you know where they set them up and who populated them? NATIVE AMERICANS. who has been there THOUSANDS OF YEARS.
No, I mean that the satellites put in orbit by China, will be scrutinized by China's secret service, the ones put in orbit by India, by India's secret service and so on.
The rationale is that if a 'rogue' group put in orbit a weapon that created a lot of casualties, the retaliation would presumably be against the country that launched it, so every launch capable country in the world has in their best interest to make sure that anything that goes up is well scrutinized.
Obviously other countries' militaries are likely putting in orbit military-sensitive satellites *for themselves*, but due to the world balance of power (you nuke us, we nuke you, everybody dies) unsavory accidents don't happen.
The same rationale makes, for example, *extremely* unlikely that a country would put in orbit a commercial imaging satellite with 'enhanced' capabilities and sell the images freely: I bet that if something like this happened, the US of A would remind said country that said satellite could start experiencing 'malfunctions' or have an 'untimely re-entry' unless said images were distribution-controlled.
For all these reasons, I really don't think it will ever, ever, ever happen that private entities will be allowed to develop in space without overt or covert government regulation and/or intervention.
-- the cake is a lie
I worked for a subcontractor on a NASA project many years ago. The prime contractor on the project was Grumman. At one point our software was behind schedule, for the usual reasons, and Grumman offered to "help". Their proposed help? Adding another program manager!
--That's the POINT you moron - IT'S NOT FUNNY!
--Few people realize that this "satire" is the Truth about our U.S. space program. I thought it was *great* - and eye-opening for me personally, since I was pretty awed while touring the Kennedy Space Center in Florida - twice.
--I'm forwarding it to everybody I know who might be interested.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
What ever happened to America? People used to *walk* across America in the search of a new frontier. A bunch of them died. Nobody urged more caution, more safety, and government interference.
People are going to die developing private spaceflight. This is a given. Get over it, and tell the public to get over it.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
"I'm forwarding it to everybody I know who might be interested"
I`m sure all your friends will be very happy to receive another "funny" forward from you.