Slashdot Mirror
Benford on Space Exploration
gid-goo writes "Gregory Benford looks at what we should do in the aftermath of the Columbia accident. Is the shuttle, or the International Space Station for that matter, useful? Or just payola to aerospace interests and a means for keeping Russian rocket scientists employed?" Benford's comments about the necessity of a closed biosphere and of some way for astronauts to stop muscle and bone loss are far more insightful than the usual discussions about where our space exploration priorities should lie.
That the failures are not repeated. I am from India and the first 4-5 attempts by my country to put a so-called 'whistler rocket' failed. But ISRO learnt from the mistakes and successfully launched multiple rockets and are now into commercial launch of satellites. The moral? Never give up, and if you commit mistkaes, find the reasons and learn from them.
"This [going to Mars] is what we should be doing. Such an adventure would resonate with a world beset by wars and woes. It has a grandeur appropriate to the advanced nations, who should do it together."
I disagree. At the risk of sounding jingoistic, I believe that nations should compete with another to explore. This competition is the only way to foster space exploration until space becomes commercially viable.
Last point. What was something on Iraq doing in a space article?
We must revive efforts to design the next generation space shuttle. The current design is far behing what current technology is capable of producing. With enough research, we can build a launch vehicle capable of fulfilling the promises made by the shuttle program.
We must not, under any circumstances, abandon human space flight. We as humans are explorer by our very nature. We cannot allow tragedy to sway us from our neverending quest for knowledge.
"The shuttle and the International Space Station are not helping us. They do remarkably little science--and, as far as I can see, next to none that could not be done by unmanned missions. Like vampires, they suck NASA's entire budget dry."
People who want robots to do the work in space and see no need for humans miss the point - we have no need for humans because of our lack of ambition.
regardless of what the Americans do or don't do in space, I'll be cheering _anyone_ who launches humans and / or robots into space for the purposes of exploration.
-calyxa
Decay! Decay! Decay! -Helium
We need to put a foundry and a small biome on the moon. From those, we can build from those supplies.
A new spaceplane, designed for crew. See the Orbital Space Plane.
A new technology, reusable launch vehicle. See the Space Launch Initiative.
Continuing with the Prometheus Project. We fucked up when we stopped persuing NERVA/Rover.
Mars. Need I say more?
I'd also like to see a space elevator persued, but I don't know that we have the tech yet. Then again, I haven't looked into it that much either.
Yeah, so that's my wishlist. Only a few hundreds of billions of dollars in imaginary cash NASA doesn't have...
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
That's funny. The word "Iraq" seems to be mentioned only once in the third paragraph. And it does have relevance: a major war would both shift public attention away from NASA and could cause budget constraints.
The payoff for continuing involvement in the expensive field of space exploration lie not in the development of a commercially viable model from the exploration itself. Rather, our incentive is a contribution to the great body of knowledge known as basic research.
While I won't deny that it's great to gain knowledge for its own sake, that's really not the point. Governments for years has understood the value in making significant contributions to basic research so that private firms can capitalize on those findings and bolster the economy of the nation making the investment. Whether or not that model is viable in today's global, instantaneous information-sharing age is debatable, but to continue in that mentality, we must look beyond such tragic, yet short-term disasters such as Columbia and understand where we would and would not be without our ventures into space experimentation if we were to cease. Leadership demands sacrifice.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
i hate to be a cynical bastard, but i can't get past the fact that the columbia tragedy is little more than a glorified car accident. i don't want to belittle these deaths--because death is an awful thing--but people die everyday by much more inhumane and unnecessary means. the columbia explosion is sad, yes, but these astronauts are no more saints than the hungry children dying of malnutrition in africa everyday. and we sure as shit don't memorialize them, the thousands that die because instead of buying them bread and milk we use our billions to research why our flying tower of babel got too hot and caught fire on reentry. instead of creatively finding ways to get AZT and other retrovirus drugs across the atlantic, we perfect an unmanned plane capable of launching smart missiles from a few hundred feet at whoever it is we feel like assassinating.
maybe--just maybe--we rally around national tragedies± because we need to create a pain to counter balance the numbness of our mundane life necessary to keep from hating ourselves. or maybe we really are the navel-gazing, imperialistic gluttons that the world thinks we are, incapable of imaging a world beyond Must See TV and the Cosmo sex quiz, too callused to even give a damn. how did we get here? where are we going? where have we been?
boy, this generation needs a hero.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
If NASA came to my house, and said, "dude, we need YOU to go to the ISS to replenish their store of toilet paper."
Without any hesitation, I would agree. Without ANY hesitation.
I have to say that I agree with you, I think it's important to continue space exploration at all costs. I doubt we'll live to see the discovery of alien life form or interplanetary travel, but that doesn't mean there aren't quite a few reasons to keep humans in space if not other "objects".
For one, how many technological advances have been created from our desire to reach into space? How many products have reached the basic consumer market because people at NASA (or wherever) thought them up.
Second, there are too many unknowns. Money aside, there are many reasons to continue space exploration (including the space station) and almost no reasons to stop it.
Third, we have no need to stop exploration. When the gov. runs out of money then maybe I'll concede, but for now, we're all fine and there's no need to stop the programs. If it's not broken, then don't fix it.
So, I don't feel that the Shuttle accident should have any negative impact on any countries space programs. Astronauts know the risk they take, and certainly they understand far better then me how insanely difficult it is to fly into space and back. Frankly, I'm amazed we can do it at all, but hell, the internal combustion engine boggles me sometimes.
I feel that in this situation, it's better to learn from the mistakes that were made instead of refusing to take any more risks.
Especially in the space program, you can not, never in a million years, expect any launch vehicle to have a 100% safety record. Fine, how about 99%? Well for every 100 missions, you'll have another Challenger/Columbia. You figure it out. Disasters like this will happen because in order to get out there, get where we want, do the research we desire, advance ourselves as a species that (sadly too little of ourselves) desire, the risk will have to be taken to get out there.
The internal combustion engine... wonderful invention, and how many people went on to die from trains, cars, and planes. Numbers by now in the *taking a stab in the dark* hundreds of thousands, but look at the benefits, how much more quickly goods and people can be moved from point A to point B. Took a lot of suffering, a lot of checks and rechecks, a lot of "well person x was killed so kill project x" noise from people who can't accept change and their mouthpieces in the media.
My largest hope from all of this is that the end result that is achieved is better, faster, safer, cheaper, more technologically advanced space vehicles will be spawned, and the exploration shall continue.
Read your alternate history... there should have been a story on slashdot sometime in 2000 with a title like "Man Lands On Mars".
We can do a heck of a lot more than we currently do. Somebody just needs the balls to get the ball rolling.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
Having been born in the mid-60's, I really don't have any memory of the golden era of space travel. For my generation it seems that NASA has always been struggling to keep it's budget and to find some purpose worthy of its original mission to get to the moon in one decade. The planetary missions of the late 70's and 80's were exciting to people like me who were interested in astronomy and space, but even these missions seem to be a fading memory.
Now that I have young children, I would truly love to see this nation embark on a bold adventure that will ignite and challenge their imagination. Even if NASA started planning a Mars mission tomorrow it would be at least a decade or more before the first landing. I would relish being able to raise my children against the backdrop of having such a mission planned and follow with them each step necessary to take the next giant leap for mankind. From such an ambitious mission perhaps my children and their generation will learn by example that with planning, courage and commitment this nation can continue to achieve great things. Perhaps, just perhaps, their generation would then be inspired to take the next leap beyond the inner solar system, and so on, and so on.
As I see it, we pay so much in taxes for things that are mundane and temporary. I would not object to a small sliver of my taxes going towards something that is not so much for us, but for the generations to come. Just as our generation does not lament the money and resources spent by our parents four decades ago to reach the moon, our children will not lament the money and resources it will take to reach Mars. They will only lament if our generation fails to have the vision and courage to take the next steps beyond those taken by our parent's generation.
Let's take a holiday from crewed space exploration and put the $ and effort into developing cheaper and more reliable launch and recovery technology, and continue our robotic missions in the meantime. Shuttle launches at $300-$500+ million each are a ticket to bankruptcy for NASA, not a stairway to space. Money matters - ask the folks who used to run the Soviet Union.
We've learned a lot in the third of a century since the Shuttle was designed - new refractory materials, thermal flux reduction by better aero boundary layer control, simpler and more reliable boost propulsion systems (hybrids), aero control through surface plasma generation, orbital reboost using solar electric magnetic thrusters, autonomous robotics, etc. We can build a far better launch system today than we could in the 1970s.
The Shuttle is old stuff. It's neither as good as we need, nor as good as we can do. Whenever we launch one, we loft about 180,000 pounds of mass into orbit that we have to bring back, after delivering a payload of around 55,000 lbs. If the Shuttle were operated as an expendable vehicle, we could put nearly a quarter of a milliion pounds into low earth orbit every time we push the button. Wouldn't you rather put the ISS up with 10 launches than 50 launches?
Rethinking the Shuttle doesn't mean scrubbing human presence in space. It simply means thinking for the long haul, considering how best to get the "stuff" (infrastructure) up there (expendible launch) and add human presence for assembly, test, and operation only as really needed (Shuttle follow-on systems). Expendible launch systems operated in intelligent balance with crewed systems will give us routine access to space lots sooner than "manned every time" systems.
However our nation decides to go forward, we owe a debt of gratitude to our fellow Americans who are willing to hazard their lives in going to space. They are among our best and bravest. For the Challenger and Columbia crews, I hope within the next couple of decades, somebody writes your names on a cliff on Mars in remembrance. With any luck, it will be one of your sons or daughters who does it.
So, als long as there are Communists, manned space flight is safe...
I have never really heard a good explanation, why we need the ISS and Shuttle, and how exactly are they supposed to help us achieve bigger goals like spreading life elsewhere in the Universe or making spaceflight commercially viable.
I'll take a wack at this.
The ISS will allow the space based construction of larger space craft. One of the biggest problems for long range exploration is the cost of sending up large crafts. If instead we can blast small crafts up to the space station with components and build the "Enterprise" in space, it will cost much less.
The Shuttle and its Human payloads are a means for us to learn about the dangers and physical consequences of space on us. Not to mention, that the shuttle is necessary to supply the ISS with the supplies it needs to expand and preform research.
Both the Shuttle and ISS have been used for space based research. It used to be the case that the standards of measurement were based on earth. These were imprecise due to gravity and other constraints. Thanks to research in space (where there is no gravity) certain new measuring standards are being used in scientific study on earth.
The two together work as baby steps on our quest to tame the wilds of space, something that we're approaching responsibly.
My prediction is that it will happen.
They failed 6 times before succeeding in stringing the first telegraph line under the Atlantic Ocean.
They barely had steam engines running and they were already linking Europe to American across an OCEAN. THat is the power of human innovation and drive.
Now everytime we lay down wire across the Atlantic it can hold more bandwidth than all of the other wire previously put down.
This sort of incentives-based policy is in the tradition of American values. It should be no surprise that such values are being eroded as the 'nation of immigrants' changes from pioneering independence to bureaucratic dependence. The use of a socialist bureaucracy to explore space is a fundamentally different experiment that other proven American approaches to expanding the resource base available to humanity.
In 1989 I was working on grassroots legislation to reform NASA's launch services policies. This led to the passage of P. L. 101-611, The Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990which required NASA to procure launch services from private vendors whenever possible. This is common sense if proper boundaries between public and private functions are to be maintained. As radical as this may sound to many who see NASA as a space transportation company, it was, in fact, Presidential policy at the time and the legislation was therefore, in fact, redundant, but bureaucratic inertia demanded separate acts by the Legislative branch to reinforce the Executive's own command structure. This legislative effort started out as an attempt to passsomething along the lines of the Kelly Act of 1925 (which formed the basis for Jerry Pournelle's recommendations first put forth by his Citizen's Advisory Council for Space Policyin 1980), but compromised when it became clear that resistance from NASA, and its contractors, to citizen involvement in space policy was so intense that serious reform would be impractical. My testimony before Congress legislative follow-up to P.L. 101-611 made recommendations for a focus onincentives for commercial investment, rather than plans or "programs". An example of incentives-based legislation, applied to fusion energy policy, was recommended for passage by Bussard, R. W., one of the founders of the US fusion program in a letter confessing some of the subterfuge to which technical leaders resorted. It is still quite relevant today given the reliance on Middle Eastern oil and problems with fission energy. The point here is that incentives are more effective in general than governmental programs.
The first settlers in America experienced enormous causalities their first years they were in America. Entire colonies were lost. The original colonies included a substantial variety of fundamentally differing approaches to settling North America. America's frontier wasn't built by a centrally controlled bureaucracy -- and there is no reason to expect such a bureaucracy will take Americans to their next frontier.
Space policy is a touchstone of American values since Americans are spiritually a pioneering culture. Let's not forget who settled the frontier, how those "immigrants" differed from later immigrants, and what sort of "program" they had to settle the new frontier.
Seastead this.
I couldn't understand at first why the Columbia crash was such a tragedy when so many people are suffering all over the world.
But if you look at the lives of any one of the astronauts you'll see that every day of their lives they worked hard to be the best that they could be. They reached for the stars and sacrificed the comforts of earth to help all mankind in our pursuit of a higher goal. They knew the high risks of space travel and went anyway...to help all of us. I don't mourn their loss, but appreciate their lives for how they lived them. Each of them was a hero.
Wherever you have people you'll have conflict and corruption and evil. The space program gives us some hope of getting away from all of that. Colonizing new places and having new beginnings where just maybe the world won't turn out the way the Earth has.
It'll be a cold day in Hell before we solve ALL of mankind's problems. Giving people hope and a sense of wonder may just help that cause more than throwing money at all our other problems.
I think NASA's current paralysis can be explained in part by their attitude towards money. What I have in mind is the famous space pen story - the Americans spend millions of dollars developing a space-pen, the Russians use a pencil. The article makes some interesting comparisons between the two programs, and it seems that the very budgetary constraints that are causing the Russian program to decay were the driving force behind some of its better/safer innovations. The Russians have always done clever things on a shoe-string, whereas the Americans have tended to go for the white elephants. Perhaps NASA should employ some of those Russian rocket scientists? IN SOVIET RUSSIA.... naah.
I agree with having a long term goal of going to Mars. If it takes 100 years to solve the problems, so be it. However, if we're ever going to do anything noteworthy in space after going to the moon, we need to start getting today's kids excited about space again. I remember how much I was wrapped up in all things space as I was growing up in the 60's and 70's, but I don't see any kids today being engaged the same way.
We need as many as possible to buy a telescope and use it, show what's there to our kids. Share it with the local elementary school (I did this last year and 99% of those attending we're just astounded with seeing what's up there). Attend local astronomy star parties. We need to buy rockets from the hobby shop and launch those things with our kids. Take them to see real rocket launches (like we did recently at Vandenberg) and show them what's happening when they go into orbit (via a space sim like Celestia). Go to see IMAX 3D space shows. If you're in Southern California at the right time, take the kids to JPL's open house or to Vandenberg's open house. Launch ballons with a camera on it and take pictures from the edge of space!
Just do something to get more and more people excited about space and going to Mars. Don't let kids think that Star Wars is the true model of space flight. Don't let people think we know everything there is to know about space. Just do something. Everyone who gives a crap about space should do something, and not just sit there.
You said:
In 1989 I was working on grassroots legislation to reform NASA's launch services policies. This led to the passage of P. L. 101-611, The Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 [google.com]which required NASA to procure launch services from private vendors whenever possible.
You're admitting to this?!?
You must be be asking for a beating. Either that or confessing your sins.
The biggest problem in our corrupt government is that our agencies are forced to farm out to the lowest bidder instead of building the parts that they need themselves for one tenth the price.
If Government agencies were allowed to run their own factories for essential military and space exploration equipment we wouldn't have half of the failures that we do from shoddy equipment in our military. _AND_ it would cost less (in the long run).
But I guess greasing the palms of politicians and getting your buddy or your district a lucrative government contract at the expense of space exploration and US tax dollars is worth it.
I'd like to see them build a few simple bridge cables before trying a space elevator. Those would be a good proof-of-concept before tackling the much harder job. And Catch-22 is that in order to build a space elevator, we'd need fairly good conventional space capability. (Fetching and positioning the counter-weight, etc.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It may be feasible, but it's also insane.
- It would be a money sink that would never pay back its construction costs - a tax money sink, because no commercial firm could ever get investment funding (not this side of AD 3000 anyhow).
- It would be the worst sort of governmental monopoly, a choke point where everyone must bow and scrape to the groundbound owners, in order to get a lift.
- It would be The Definitive Terrorist Target - and the bad guys only have to get lucky once. It would be utterly indefensible from a simple kamikaze attack, being so long that no weapons installation could keep cover over its whole length without weighing it down.
- It would be a murphys-law magnet, untested technology carrying staggering tension loads in atmospheric, vacuum, radiation and electromagnetic conditions that would be experimental at best. And that's even before an orbiting piece of space junk slams into it.
- And it would be a catastrophe waiting to happen, when (not if) it snaps and rains megatons of carbon cable down upon the ground below.
Bleh.
As a South African I am extremely grateful to the USA, and other nations who can afford it, for their continued exploration of space, near and far.
I cannot help but believe that there will no alternative but to find alternative accommodation for a large portion of the human race within the next few generations. Without exploration that will never be possible.
The article says:
The big question that NASA never talks about is: what are we doing dinking about with humans--instead of teleoperated robots--in near earth orbit anyway? What can people do in near-earth orbit that is worth doing that unmanned remote-controlled craft cannot? It never talks about it because it is a question that has no answer.
If NASA has no answer (which is hard to believe) then how about this: there is still a LOT we have to learn about how the human body has to adapt to make life in space possible. Surely each mission outside earth's atmosphere completes another tiny piece of the puzzle?
I salute the astronauts who are prepared to risk their lives to ensure the long term survival and growth of the human race. Thanks, guys.
I think we need to first focus on humanity.
Humanity has to become better at fulfilling our ideals as a species. We need to be hardier, capable of extended periods in micro-gravity without any drugs to keep us from pissing out our bones.
We need NASA to help big energy companies safely deploy technologies which will enable a hydrogen economy, not just for the seven wealthiest nations, but for everyone, because there's no prize for half-assing global technology like automobiles and power-plants. We need to get that stuff out there.
We should park the ISS at L4 and take a decade to scour all our rubbish out of low-earth orbit. Wouldn't it suck if the shuttle was struck by something someone accidentally dropped while working on the ISS months before?
The cool thing about all that "cleanning up LEO" would be that while a bunch of flyboys are playing RPV with radar and massive glad-bags, we could still be doing all the bullshit science that's made NASA and graduate students slaving away at research colleges happy for years.
Maybe we could take a good thirty years to finish that clean-up job, and by that time we'll have the kind of genetics technology which permits us to endure complete weightlessness, and maybe even allow us to hibernate just like bears so we don't need as much food, air, or have to worry about all that pesky psychology and some reality-tv producer buying all the NASA footage and making a tv series out of it.
And everyone here knows that there's absolutely no reason why we can't engineer perfectly good stuctures at the bottom of the well, develop the technologies to sustatin life in them. We could wrap up that knowledge, send it into orbit and create a civilization.
What stops us?
We do. We let clerics and technologists tell us fairy tales and we wet ourselves. Some of us have been trained from birth to entertain them.
We let politicians and their day-to-day pissing contests and in-fighting hamstring us in everything from feeding ourselves to enabling us to justify stepping on someone's face.
We let merchants push our buttons, control what we do with things we own, and we enjoy being controlled in so many different ways that it's become woven into the very culture...what we wear, what we play, and what we drive, what we want to wank to.
Our biggest problem is us.
And since we're quite happy being dipshits, until something happens to change that, solving any of these other little problems isn't going to matter.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
> Is the shuttle, or the International Space Station
> for that matter, useful? Or just payola to aerospace
> interests and a means for keeping Russian rocket
> scientists employed?"
Even if it's true, what's wrong with that?
If you are making a list of Pros and Cons about the space program, "keeping qualified but unemployed people from working for the bad guys" definitely belongs on the Pro list. Access to space, just like nuclear weapons, is something that not all countries have. And it's something that we don't want our enemies to have.
The "payola" thing is just plain stupid. It's a blatantly loaded word that doesn't even describe what he is trying to say. (Payola is a bribe, or an extorted payment. How does that apply here?)
If the aerospace industry is important to national security -- which it unquestionably is -- then so what if the space program is a "subsidy"? It's part of a much larger, overall equation that Congress has to keep in balance. That belongs on the Pro list too.
People who argue that the space program is "too expensive" and "not paying off" don't understand basic economics. The race to the moon didn't really pay off when we landed in 1969. It paid off in the 90s when microchips changed everything.
The worst religion of the lot is materialism. More deaths directly attributable to that throughout history than any other single belief group (except possibly people who believe that smoking won't give them cancer).
Even the Cattleticks fall short, they only (directly) got somewhere between 60 and 100 million, not counting starting or provoking numerous world and `civil' wars. Materialism is evil, convert someone away from it today.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
ok, apparently we've gone to the moon, and thats great, but what is the preoccupation with getting away from, quite possibly the most naturally harmonic, and stunningly beautiful place in the universe. Here the plan guys, lets explore a few barron space rocks, so that we have somewhere to go when we're done wrecking this one!
Take a look at the "off-axis rotator" they used in these Neurolab experiments. It's really *small*... no wonder if it made them sick: Astronaut Training for The Vestibular Team Experiments
Gregory Benford's technical credentials are somewhat better established than yours, Anonymous: Gregory Benford Professor Plasma Physics and Astrophysics And, not that it's relevant or anything, but some of his fiction strikes me as being some of the best SF written in the last several decades (I'm a fan of "Across the Sea of Suns" myself).When I was about 6 years of age, I used to live in Houston, Texas, with the
Johnson Space Center around the corner. I remember my parents used to take
visitors from back home (The Netherlands) to the center so they could marvel at
all the huge rockets and such which they keep around there. I have a fotograph
of me sitting in one of the seats used in the Apollo craft. And after every
visit we made, I remember thinking "When I grow up, I want to sit in one of
those chairs again. Go out there. See the Earth from orbit!" - Basically, become an astronaut.
Then, one morning as I and my mom were watching TV in the kitchen,
the program got interrupted.
"We interrupt this program for a special news bulletin: The Space Shuttle Challenger has just exploded during take-off."
From that moment onward, I never wanted to be an astronaut no more.
Now, being grown up and all, I realise that the only way to go is up.
Everything we as humans do on this world is messing around in the margins.
As some poster before me loosely stated, exploring is embedded in our genes.
NOT going up there would be a grave mistake.
And all those people saying that we should try to fix up stuff here on Earth first, well,
I'm sorry to have to be the one to point out that every time humans have explored
outside their "set" boundries, their own "world" was pretty messed up.
Still they went forward, with a vision that what they were doing might just change their world.
And hasn't the Space Program, even though it's been underfunded for most of it's life,
given us a lot of benefits? Think about medical applications, literal wonders have been worked
in that field just by the Space Program alone. Almost in every field of science has the
Space Program made a contribution. The list of applications directly or indirectly derived from
space development is a very very long one. A lot of common household articles are derived from
the very Space Program that some of the users of these articles attack so fiercly.
If I really thought I could make a difference, I would love to try and convince people of these facts.
Sadly, I know that can never happen. Some people believe so firm in their idea that Man should
not go to space same as some people believe so firm in the Church, or other affiliated mind numbing
programs.
My final point, and one that seems to be forgetten every now and then:
Before everyone starts talking technical stuff, we should be trying to change
the global populations view about space. Things would be a lot easier if large partions of
the world's population could share our firm belief in space and it's benefits.
Sorry if this post seems kind of a mess, I'm not a gifted writer.
Veni, Vidi, Velcro!
If asteroids are part of exploded planet they should be diamonds there right on the surface, and gold and a lot of other valuble minerals. It would make sense to send a robot there with a laser powered spectrum analyzer and check the dust on the surface of the asteroids for anything of value.
It makes much more sense to colonize asteroids because the launching capsules from asteroids to Earth is so easy that any football player can do it. Launching from the Moon is already too expensive unless the crater full of already polished diamonds will be found.
Plus studying asteroids can help us to protect the Earth from meteorite impact. We can learn how to move them or how to break them apart when needed.
I keep saying this, hoping to convince others and thus to start us moving in the right direction.
/.'ser and K5'ers.
A reusable orbital delivery system makes about as much sense as reusable toilet paper - yes it is possible, but the cost to make it reusable far exceeds the savings. Every kilo you boost to orbit costs about ten kilos in fuel. Therefore, adding any weight that is not payload is extremely wasteful. If you add one kilo to make something "reusable", that is a kilo of payload you give up.
The rocket engines on the shuttle are very complex - turbopumps, combustion chambers, cyrogenic fuels. The solid rocket boosters are MUCH simpler - why did NASA not use just them? Simple - solid rockets are not throttleable - one lit off, they make as much thrust as they want to, and while you can to an extent control that thrust by how you design them, there will be unavoidable variations in thrust from unit to unit. You cannot get several of them balanced out - in the shuttle, the main engines are used to balance the load out by shifting their thrust to make up for variances.
However, we have for some time known how to build hybrid rocket - solid fuel, liquid oxidizer. These rockets are throttleable and can be made restartable.
Imagine this: We start making hybrid rockets, roughly the size of the shuttle's SRB's. They are NOT designed for reuse (if they can be made reuseable without weight penalty great, but otherwise fugetaboutit).
For normal, unmanned payloads, you use 1 or more of these rockets (one for smaller payloads like a comsat, up to five or more for big chunks of the ISS). If they go foom on launch it is unfortunate but not catastrophic.
For manned missions, we launch a MUCH SMALLER vehicle, big enough for the (astro|cosmo)nauts and not much else (if they need a big experiment, you launch it as an ummanned launch). Because the launch vehicle is much smaller, you don't need as many of these boosters. You can therefore inspect the HELL out of the ones you use.
Since you are making the boosters by the truckload, you can quickly get the economies of scale to bring the cost down. This argument was also used for the shuttle, but since the shuttle is such a complicated bird this promise never materialized. I assert that BDB's (big dumb boosters) would be able to achive this goal.
Also, since these boosters are standard parts, you could farm them out to several companies (hell, GPL the damn design!) This would allow for competition, as well as innovation. We could even allow them to be build in other countries (e.g. Russia). How about getting a degree of commonality between the Russian space program and the US?
Finally, given the fact that you could use a non-cryogenic oxidizer, you could relatively safely ship these things into orbit, thus allowing (lunar|Mars) missions to use them to provide the delta-V to leave orbit.
NASA keeps focusing on "sexy" technologies like SCRAMjets and such, and those are find as research projects. But for workhorse applications, why not K.I.S.S.?
Big Dumb Boosters. Beat that into NASA, beat that into your Congresscritter, beat that into the National Space Society and the Planetary Society, beat that into your fellow
www.eFax.com are spammers
* This was a letter I wrote to Mr. Bush 3 weeks before the Columbia disaster.
/costs.
Dear Mr. President,
I am writing to you about my disappointment with the stateof affairs in America today. While the media is constantlychurning up images of our faltering economy, corporate CEOs being led away in handcuffs and the constant spectre of additional terrorist attacks. There remains little focus or attention on what made the United States the greatest country in the world.
America's spirit has always been great ideas...ideas that unite the nation and provide a rallying point to focus ourskills, determination and ideals. It began with the Declaration of Independence from Mother England, a bold and audacious move against the Superpower of that era. Later the expansion west and claiming of a continent drove the American dream. World War II and the universal struggle against the Axis forces pushed this country yet futher in greatness. And then in the sixties and seventies it was the Race tothe Moon. It galvanized a generation...I remember as a young boy, being called to the TV by my parents one hot July evening to see live pictures of the first steps on themoon. That moment and the steps that led up to it made me so proud to be an American.
No other nation can or could have done this...yet. While we have forsaken the Moon for other 'scientific pursuits in space', China recently anounced that they intend to put men in space by the end of 2003 AND set up a moon prescence by the end of this decade to in their own words, "exploit its resources" . The thought of that is at best an affront toour astronauts and engineers that made the original journey possible, and at worst a possible threat to our future inspace and our security here on Earth.
NASA's priorities need to be radically re-organized...theyshould be doing great things again, making heros that our kids can look up to , not spending valuable research dollars on hair-brained anti-gravity research, not launching repeatedly the 'Space Truck'(Shuttle) to do heavens knows what and building this so-called International Space Station, that us U.S. taxpayers are paying the lion's share of over $10 billion dollars at last count.(and called by a recent article in New Scientist magazine, "the aimless, cash-guzzling International Space Station" )
Not only has this space station been hideously expensive,and fraught with numerous cost overruns, but what will it really accomplish? What are thy really doing that we really didn't learn or do with SkyLab back in the 1970's, exceptmaybe planning to host pop-stars and other super-rich tourists..?
This nation's destiny is to return to the Moon , and live there...establishing a research station like MacMurdo Station in the Antarctica. The first step in learning how to 'homestead' in space's hostile environment. Mining minerals and water ice for fuel, building materials and life enabling oxygen. Somewhere from which we can properly explore the Moon's history and hidden riches. And re-ignite the American people's imagination of going to the stars. I havea one year old son now, and I want him to imagine and dreamof going beyond earth's problems someday to a bold new frontier and destiny for mankind.
Currently NASA's manned space program is focused only on Mars....a destination we are not ready for nor as economoical as going back to the Moon first. NASA's own people have said the following..
"NASA is misdirected by setting its sights too firmlyon Mars and the search for life on the red planet, said lunar scientist Paul Spudis. NASA's own Office of Space Science, as well as former space agency chief,Daniel Goldin, have "suppressed this [ lunar science ]community in favor of Mars," he said.
"I don't think you can conduct a human mission to Mars for less than a $100 billion in any time shorter than ten years," Spudis said. "The technology base will only marginally support a human Mars mission. It's justa bridge too far. I contend that NASA doesn't have a politically viable mission."
Spudis said that buried within NASA is a progressive plan for placing humans back onto the Moon. NASA Exploration Team (NExT) members at the Johnson Space Center, he said, have scripted a breakthrough strategy.
There is a plan already started, what we need is the will to in these troubled times think of a loftier and bolder goal, that of retruning to the Moon - to stay. Are we too distracted and busy with the war on terrorism and other ills at home? I think not, as we did it the first time through the heyday of the height of the Cold War and its stresses
To summarize, here are the key points I'd like you to consider:
1. Make returning to the Moon a new national goal , to stay this time...to explore , learn its secrets and pave the path to eventually living in space.
2. Immediately re-organize NASAs management, expendituresand focus to pursue this task.
3. Halt the run-away spending on the International Space Station. I don't really think we are getting our money's worth.
What NASA needs a is grand vision in order to survive. "Right now, NASA is just one big accounting problem," saysJohn Pike of the Global Security think tank in Washington DC. "Unless there is some other reason for its existence, some other goal, the easiest way of solving this problem isto shut down NASA."
By setting a new direction and bold agaenda to return to the Moon we can turnaround NASA's flailing , and re-chart its mission as a great quest, one that will capture the imaginations of all Americans, youg and old, to renew the pioneering spirit of America. Additionally, the technologyand lessons learned about living of the Moon will be directly applicable to the next logical goal of a Mars mission.
Thanks for your time, I hope you give this some thought.
Sincerely,
a citizen