2008_02_01_archive

what's in it for me?

A few weeks ago Leonard David pointed out a National Science Board

report which among other things stated that

Scientific research ranks about on a par with mass transit (38%)

and well ahead of space exploration (14%) and assistance to foreign

countries (10%) in the proportion of the U.S. population favoring

increased spending.

Leonard David called this a "kick in the head for space fans".

Well, it might be a kick in the head for NASA, but the U.S. space

agency is not synonymous with "space", and the lack of enthusiasm for

increased funding for NASA is not synonymous with a lack of enthusiasm

for space projects.

At one time, Americans could be convinced that NASA == space, but that

time is long past. When the Collier's articles by Wernher von Braun,

Willy Ley, Fred Whipple, and others were published in 1952-54, people

paid attention. When the Russians launched Sputnik, people sat up and

took notice. And then came Kennedy's speech:

Well, that got people excited. And that race to the moon gave people

more than the impression that NASA == space. It gave them hope - hope

that one day they too could go to space. How many kids went into

science and engineering because of the work that NASA did in the eight

years following the Kennedy speech at Rice university? I can't

quantify that, but I bet it was a lot. And, in the years during and

immediately following the Apollo missions, people were excited about

the apparent progress, the seemingly inexorable movement of man into

space.

2001: a Space Odyssey showed routine flights into space to a gigantic

wheel-shaped space station, multiple bases on the moon, and a manned

voyage to Jupiter. In 1968 these seemed plausible enough, certainly

not laughable. There were proposals to build enormous space colonies

("L5 by 95!"), and it seemed as though nothing could stop us. We were

going to be a spacefaring civilization, and in a hurry. In the 1960s

and 1970s kids could realistically dream of a career as an astronaut.

Thirty-five years after the last man set foot on the moon, it seems

that we are further than ever from becoming a spacefaring civilization

- that is, at least with NASA as a driving force. NASA is in fact

going backwards, struggling to recover ground that was won nearly four

decades ago after having wasted the intervening period going around in

circles. A kid today has a greater chance of winning the Powerball

lottery than of being a NASA astronaut. Why bother doing something as

hard as science or engineering if the chance of a payoff is so remote?

Why is support for NASA so low? Perhaps it is because one can only

rest on one's laurels for so long. One needs to actually do something

in order to engage the public and convince them that you are doing

something worth their tax dollars. And, if all you are doing is

putting a handful of government employees into low earth orbit a few

times a year, then convincing people that you are indeed doing

something worthwhile is a pretty tough sell.

I have to feel sorry for Damaris B. Sarria. She writes a blog entitled

How I Am Becoming An Astronaut - and she's doing it by working for

NASA. She's not in the astronaut corps yet, and it is sad to say but

if NASA's present course is continued then she will never become an

astronaut. The agency already has far more astronauts than it will

need for the shuttle program, some of whom will never be launched into

space. By the time that the Ares series of boosters is finally

developed - the schedule slips by more than a year every year - NASA

will have had to defend its funding and indeed the entire raison

d'etre of US Space Exploration Policy through several presidential

administrations and congresses. At the current rate of schedule

slippage, budget woes, and obvious problems with the Ares it is a

crapshoot whether NASA will even exist in 2020, never mind be sending

anyone to the moon.

But, as I said, NASA is not "space". Robert Bigelow has already done

something that no government space agency has ever done: he has two

space stations in orbit simultaneously, right now. Elon Musk of SpaceX

has developed two completely new rocket engines and begun launching

rockets, from a standing start five years ago, using the amount of

money that NASA consumes in about eleven days. Burt Rutan has put two

people into space (only spending about what NASA spends every 14

hours), and is developing a bigger craft capable of carrying paying

passengers into space as early as next summer. Google has put up a $30

million prize for a lunar robotic rover, and private companies are

lining up around the block to compete for that prize. There are over

80 private space companies at my last count. And even in the realm of

government space activity, the cool cutting-edge stuff isn't being

done by NASA; it is being done by the Pentagon in partnership with the

Space Frontier Foundation.

Support for space hasn't died; it has shifted from an increasingly

irrelevant NASA to the private sector. There is a good reason for

that. People can see that the private sector work in space has

potential to offer them. There's something in it for them - they once

again have the possibility of going to space themselves. They have the

possibility of making money on space. And, they don't need to go

through an ossified government space agency whose glory days were over

before most people alive today were even born. It is no wonder that

support for increasing NASA's budget is so low.

Labels: bigelow, NASA, private spaceflight, scaled composites, space

business, spacex

posted by Ed at 2/01/2008 07:01:00 PM

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Whittington swings and misses

It was so predictable. Rand writes something that points out some of

the shortcomings of NASA's implentation of the [DEL: Vision for Space

Exploration :DEL] U.S. Space Exploration Policy and Mark Whittington,

in his usual rebuttal, gets something completely wrong:

It is noted that no one who is having Internet vapors over the Ares

is having the same over the Falcon. There seems to be, perhaps

because of a double standard, more of an understanding that

problems will occur in rocket development in the private sector

than at NASA.

There is no double standard at work here. SpaceX used its own money

for the Falcon-1 tests. NASA is using taxpayers' money for the

obviously flawed-from-before-starting Ares. The difference is not

subtle.

Update: An anonymous commenter (whom I am certain I have met before on

Rand Simberg's blog) saw fit to use a scatological rhyme for

Whittington's name in a comment on this post. The rest of the comment

had some good points, but I simply will not tolerate such juvenile

name-calling on my blog. Anonymous, if you choose to re-post your

comment without the ad hominem, then I will allow it through