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NASA Ares Rocket Specs to Be Open Source
Bruce writes "As a step toward returning to the moon, NASA announced last week that Boeing will be the lead contractor for the Ares I rocket. Interestingly, Popular Mechanics reports that the system's specifications will be 'open-source and non-proprietary' to encourage competition on future contracts."
For mass-produced products, which is what we'd like rockets to become, the cost of the design the parts is relatively minor. So giving away the design does give away that much. Instead, it's the design of the manufacturing systems that determines how cheap and reliably we can make the thing. Cars are cheap because they have almost no labor (most cars take less than 40 labor-hours to build). And what make a Pentium so valuable is not the design layout of the transistors, but the $1 billion fab that can reliably etch all those transistors on a wafer of silicon.
More than a new rocket design, we need a new rocket manufacturing technology that cranks out high quality rockets for very little per each additional rocket.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Don't be silly. As has been pointed out in the past, if you want to design a rocket for military strikes using a Lunar rocket design is an ABSURD way to proceed. The payload requirements are absurd overkill, as is the support infrastructure.
Now, if you want to worry that the technology itself might be adapted to weapons, I point out certain political realities.
1. Anyone stupid enough to launch a rocket at the US or other modern nation is toast. Missles can be tracked back to the origin, and the origin will shortly thereafter be reduced to some rather fundamental particles.
2. Anyone wanting to deliver a doomsday suicide nuclear payload or other payload would do MUCH better at MUCH cheaper prices to smuggle it into a port city or across the border. If they're capable of engineering such an attack they can figure that out - and we have no missle to trace back to the origin. Not to mention we can't shoot it down...
The only concern that I might buy would be China or some other large country we're worried about having to fight on a large scale getting access to modern tech they don't currently have. However, most of what they need to figure it out themselves they already have thanks to loads upon loads of outsourcing and buildup of their own economy and academic brainpower. They're trying their own moon shots already, remember? And one of the founding members of their program we chased out of OUR country.
If you want to limit rocket building potential, you'll have to limit everyone else's access to smart people. Otherwise you'll eventually face the problem anyway, after imposing a lot of pain on your own smart people to no particular purpose.