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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
Get the EULA T-shirt
Perhaps along with a sense of humour, and knowing when to quit.
It goes on for too long, and while amusing at first, quickly becomes tedious.
The writer confused making his point and giving an accurate historical perspective.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
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.
Gateway to the rest of the Solar System? Proportionately speaking that would be like me buying a house across the street from me and using that as a point of departure for all my vacations.
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!
They keep the current design because NASA's budget has been slashed to the point where the engineers are practically cleaning their own toilets. THEY have known for many years that the shuttle isn't very good, but in light of congress cutting their budget constantly, I think they didn't want to go to them and say "OK, can we have 25 billion to start researc on the replacement for the Shuttle?
They are finally doing something more than talk about replacing it but the existing shuttles are going to have to last a long time yet.
What did the US get out of the apollo missions? Twelve pounds of rocks?
And it beat the USSR to the moon in the middle of the cold war, which was huge because the USSR was ahead of the U.S. in the "space race" until that point. Back then, space technology was directly relevant to military power (think ICBM's, "star wars", etc).
SUV's support terrorism !
Check out Rotary Rockets and Scaled Composites (the last one is Burt Rutan's baby). Now those are two companies which most definitely deserve funding. Rotary Rockets especiall, as it's a SSTO (Single Stage To Orbit), fully reusable (ie no bits which drop off) launch vehicle. It has working rpototypes, and in 5 years they'll launch...for a measely 7 million dollasr a pop!
But they're both private companies. Now where is NASA's fully reusable launch vehicle? And don't give me Venture Star...that's theoretical work, one (non-fullscale) prototype at best.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
If they hadn't gotten this position back then, they would too have degraded to the "corporations-are-the-basis-for-all" thinking. There would have been very little science done, and because of that, very little technology drive. Basically, you guys are world leaders because of the Apollo program!
Now, I only wish that you had used it for better than get a bunch of religious morons into office.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
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.
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.
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.
That's true, but for any long-term manned exploration we have to start somewhere, and the Moon is magnitudes closer than the next celestial body.
I see short-term missions (like those of Apollo) to be useless unless followed-up by some kind of semi-perminant habitation; even if it's just exploration for the sake of exploration.
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
It falls short far more quickly than that. You can gradually expand into a desert; there is no gravity-well-equivalent to require a geat expenditure for a small gain like the early space missions.
Also, at least while still close by, there's not as much risk of sudden death in a "mission" through the desert. If your wagon breaks down, you can look for sparse-but-extant resources to sustain you until you return (or, you know, given the timeperiod this was written, they could have used shortwave to call base and ask for help). If nothing else, you don't have to carry your environment in your wagon, just food, water, blankets, and some weapons to fend off animals.
You don't make special calculations for every bit of the trip; if you give up, you can return and sneak back into town early Sunday morning, instead of having to arive at one special spot equipped for you at noon on Friday.
Which brings up another point: spacecraft are a bit more different from cars than a long-distance wagon is from a farm wagon. The ultimate failure of this story lies in the pretense that an evolutionary progression is the same as a revolutionary leap, and that the attitudes of the people paying for each should be the same. We want to see real results, whether that be pacemakers, communications satellites, or Tang, that everyone can benefit from.
We don't want to pay for infrastructure for the rich to take vacations, or for pure science experiments that we can't immediately see results from. Give us dreams and the belief that we if we set out in our own creaky vehicles, at least some of us will make it out there, and that we won't be under the thumb of our original governments, and that we all will have a chance at better lives when we get there.
Wagons, ho!
Get off my launchpad!
North America was pretty well known to Europe before Colombo set foot there
Not sure what your definition of 'well known' is, but clearly Columbus himself did not know about America. Nor did his crew, or his fanciers. Had they known, they never would have bothered trying to come here. What distinguished Colubus's visit is that he mistakenly thought he'd found a cheap way to get to somewhere useful: India. Had they known about America, they never would have set out on the journey in the first place.
So where is private advanced spaceflight? Or is your point that the government should give money to a private enterprise just because it probably could do better? Hello? Enron? Worldcom?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Besides tourism, there's no reason for the vast majority of people to go to Florida. We still build highways there, though.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak