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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.
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
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.
Did you read the article, Omkar? Evidently not; Benford wants humans to go to Mars. His objection to the current shuttle-ISS program is that it offers absolutely zero progress towards getting there: no experiments with true recycling, no experiments with generating artificial gravity by spinning the station. Instead, we're spending billions to have people do trivial stuff, and if you're going to do trivial stuff, it's better to have machines do it.
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 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...
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 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.
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
Astronauts risk their lives for the best of motivations-- they want to advance science. You can question if the space shuttle is the best way to do this, but I don't think you can question the motivations. And maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but the advancement of science is a great thing. NASA wants to make the world a better place by furthering our understanding of the universe. They want to expand the notion of what it means to be human. They want to visit the stars, and this is the first step.
And when the space program suffers a setback, when these men who are carrying the hopes and dreams of a better future for everyone die, it's pretty discouraging, and worthy of my grief. There's that moment of doubt -- maybe we are just glorified fucking monkeys who should give up and stop trying to be anything more.
But I'm convinced that man has done great things, and these great things always started with men and women willing to push the notions of what these monkeys can do. We need a hero? We already have them.
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.
No offence but _yes_, you SHOULD get modded down for this. Not because what you say is *unorthodox* but you have got the wrong *reasons* for your argument
Pushing the envelope is always done by a select few. Thats why they are heroes. Why are Formula-1 drivers heroes ? They are ready [sorry for the cliche] to "go where no man/woman has gone". Every advancement _especially_ space is taken with risks and the people who come forward to shoulder the risks for the first few times - cheaply put , those who are ready to be guinea pigs for the betterment of humans _ARE_ DEFINITELY heroes in my book. right ?
Why dont we mourn the death of starving kids? I come from India and I have seen what you say exactly. You bet I agree with you and we should mourn them. But you shouldnt ask why we _are_ mourning the death of the shuttle astronauts. They _were_ pioneers who died for a cause.
Thanks.
vv
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.
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).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
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