But almost nothing is “pure scientific research”. Hypersonics are studied with a view to a future hypersonic airliner. The commercial application of the topic in question, LEO flights, is obvious. Where the price point is and what sort of level a service could operate at is open to question, but it’s not pure scientific research by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t even think I’d call it “scientific research”. It’s product development. Sure, it’s pretty forward-looking, but to insist that private enterprise will never fund it just seem silly, because that’s exactly what’s happening.
As to guaranteed markets; while a launch partner is considered essential for a major airliner development, one airline does not a market make, nor will it be able to sustain the production line. Indeed, those initial sales are often made at a loss, anticipating efficiency gains as the production process matures. Overestimating these gains with respect to the 777 is a big contributor to Boeing’s present problems, as I understand it. And while there’s no single entity constituting the potential market for an LEO or sub-orbital flight system, the market is undeniably there; Dennis Tito paid a price equal to the entire development cost of Rutan’s SS1 for a single flight. Lots of people want to go into space, and lots of people have the money to pay for it.
Agreed, and what a pity it is. Those answers will be found by those willing to make the investment, but that’s CERN in Europe instead for the most part. It certainly would never have been approved by any corporate board with a fiduciary responsibility to its investors - where’s the predicted return?
The scientific return is not there, I agree, but that’s not all. Without the ISS to provide a reason for the Shuttle and Soyuz to continue, there wouldn’t be a manned spaceflight program at all. The same political pressures that killed the SSC would have killed it too, more slowly but no less surely. I know you don’t think that’s a bad thing, but remember the human spirit that supports the unmanned missions, too - if we can’t go there ourselves, the attraction of sending robots in our place is lessened and so, therefore, is their funding.
Great examples there, too. Cassini, for one, has taken something like 20 years from initial mission planning to arrival at Saturn - what company *or * hobbyist would be willing to wait that long?
That was hardly the spirit of exploration except incidentally - it was all about a way to find a shorter route to the Spice Islands.
I’d always, always bet on the outfit that has money, and a guaranteed way to get as much as it needs over the one that doesn’t. What’s missing, for both sides, is a clear enough and agreed enough vision as to the goals. What you’re condemning as drift and decay in the manned spaceflight program (but not the unmanned one, run by the same damn agency) is indeed drift and decay, but that’s a symptom, not the disease.
I’m sorry, but that just isn’t borne out by the facts. For one thing, private enterprise is not allowed by the US government to explore space without jumping through hoops of fire to obtain special permission. You can’t just launch a rocket into space 'cause you want to. You’ll have federal agents on your ass faster than you can find the applicable statute. Second, history is replete with private enterprises by corporations and even individuals who have made important contributions to science, literature, the arts, and mankind as a whole just because they wanted to.
It could very well be that the same idiotic rationale behind the creeping death of the ISS was also behind the sudden death of the SSC, but if that’s true, it’s the right outcome for the wrong reason. In the case of the SSC, the scientific value was almost self-evident. In particle physics, the more energy you can cram into a smaller space, the more exotic the particles you can create. It’s as simple as that. Basic physics dictates that higher energies means higher velocities/masses. Higher velocities/masses requires both stronger magnets and /or a bigger circumference. If you can get both better and bigger, it’s ideal. That’s it. The rest is engineering the machine. ALL of those bases were covered with the SSC. If completed, it would have delivered exactly what it promised. The only reason some Congressmen chose to kill it is because they valued scoring a few political points over answering fundamental questions about the natural world. In other words, the United States willing ceded its preeminent role in particle physics to the Europeans, wasting billions of dollars in the process, so that certain politicians could appear tough on “big govt. spending” during an election year.
Pathetic.
The ISS is a whole other ballgame. Compare it to the SSC, and it fails every test.
Why build the SSC?
-Well, you need to produce super-high-energy collisions to probe shorter distances and higher energy domains. This is proven. Cosmic rays pack the punch, but are of unknown origin, are extremely messy, and impossible to control. If answers to questions about extensions of the Standard Model are to be answered rigorously, we have no choice but to build bigger and more powerful machines.
Great!
So…why build the ISS?
-Because…you need a human presence in space!
Well, why?
-Because…um…you can manufacture new space-age materials in microgravity that will revolutionize human life!
Oh really? Anything in particular you have in mind?
-Sure…uh…super-high-purity semiconductors!
Great! So you can’t make these on the ground?
-No! Well…yes. Maybe. It depends. But in space it’s easier!
Is it? I mean, putting all this stuff into orbit is pretty tough as it is…
-Look, you’re being too practical, this is about exploration!
Cool! What are you exploring.
-Umm…low Earth orbit…
Uh, been there, done that, right?
-Look, we need a human presence in space!
Because?
-We need to learn about the long-term effects of microgravity on health for future exploration of the Solar System!
Well, the logic here is a bit recursive. You’re telling me we need a human presence in space to study the effect of space on humans.
-Right!
But if there are no humans in space, why study that?
-What do you mean, “no humans in space”? We need a human presence in space!
But WHY?
-To manufacture! To explore! To discover!
But we apparently can manufacture what we need on Earth, and we have explored and discovered a ton of stuff with robotic probes, each of which cost a (sometimes tiny) fraction of what the ISS costs. Plus, no probe ever killed anybody.
-This is about national prestige and international cooperation!
But you told me it was about manufacturing and science.
-Those things too!
Yet you’ve failed to come up with a rational cost-benefit analysis to justify the expenditure on the ISS.
-It’s half-built! To abandon it would be a waste!
But to finish it at the expense of other, more fruitful missions might be a bigger waste!
-But we need a human presense in space!
And so the argument goes.
Maybe there is money to be made in space. Tourism, mining, and so forth. If so, let the capitalists go there! I’m all for it. Once there’s some real infrastructure for human flight, scientists can hitch a ride, maybe, or share the resources. Back when European scientists were studying the New World, didn’t they tag along on merchant vessels or things of that sort? And what’s wrong with that? The Beagle (ridden by one Charles Robert Darwin) was originally built as a brig for the Royal Navy, then used a surveying vessel, and then as a vehicle for scientific exploration.
But until then, I just can’t see anything beating robots when you’re talking scientific bang for the buck. We could crash ten Mars Rovers and have money to burn for what it will cost to send one human being there, and that’s a highly conservative estimate. In the short time since Sojourner crept around on Mars, look how far our robotic cababilities have progressed to give us the two rovers. What if we had ten Mars rovers doing science right now, scattered all over the planet, as opposed to one crew, in one place, if they manage to survive the trip or the landing?
I’m all for humans in space. I love airplanes and rockets and all that crap. The little kid in me simply adores the thought of walking on another world. But the adult in me says the gee-whiz factor isn’t enough to spend public money in such gargantuan amounts under the guise of scientific exploration… Leave gee-whiz to the entertainers and entrepreneurs. Leave science to the scientists.
You make sense of it by also taking into account the vast number of failures in unmanned missions, as well as some spectacular successes of the manned space program. They’re both difficult and expensive. They both have their rewards.
Very possibly yes. Large scale projects are difficult for anyone, and there are plenty of billion-dollar private enterprises that have failed. Look at Iridium, for example - a $5 billion private venture involving unmanned spacecraft that turned out to be a complete failure.
I do agree there should be fewer roadblocks to private spaceflight. What remains of the Beal Aerospace web site mentions many. But it’s way too early to say “governments can’t do manned spaceflight, but private enterprises can.”
Here’s something which can be done with Rutan’s craft, that I’m sure folks would pay lots of money for: Space diving!
Considering folks like Richard Branson (who owns, Virgin Records, Virgin Airways, Virgin Mobile, etc.) tend to enjoy doing crazy stunts, something like that ought to appeal to them, especially when you look at the current record holder’s achievements.
Great point. The Shuttle has had a major failure rate of about 2%. Unmanned Mars spacecraft have failed, what, about 75% of the time lately, even though they’re far less complex. On that basis alone, one might say the JPL crew is screwing up badly while NASA and its operating contractors are doing fine - all we need is to take the crews out of the shuttle and we’d have hjigh manned-system reliability and capacity with unmanned-system, um, expendability.
For The Poster Formerly Known As Libertarian: FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation. The permit procedures are about as onerous as for experimental airplanes, which isn’t very if you use common sense.
What are the spectacular successes of manned space flight that couldn’t have been done with equal scientific value by robots for less money? Landing on the Moon? Yeah, we got Moon rocks back, but a robot could go out, grab rocks, and ferry them back too. That’s probably the next step for Mars. Also, note that a robot is going to bring home bits of a comet in a couple years.
As for all the failures of robotic missions, again, you still waste less money, and nobody gets killed. Each Space Shuttle costs about $20 billion (not counting repairs, refurbishment, etc). Each flight of a Space Shuttle costs about $500 million (original estimate when conceived: $10-20 million/flight). We’ve lost two, plus all crewmembers. The Beagle II, the latest robotic fiasco, cost about $50 million. That’s 1/80th the cost of a lowball estimate of our Shuttle losses. 1/80th! You could drop 40 Beagle II’s on Mars and crash every one of them in one year, and you would still have lost less than flying and then blowing up one Space Shuttle.
Beagle II suffered the same problems NASA’s “faster, cheaper” missions did. In retrospect, the part of NASA that plans robotic missions seems to have learned the valuable lesson that cheap isn’t necessarily frugal, and lowballing costs at the expense of robustness and redundancy can compromise success. Now witness the Mars Rovers: Eash one costs $800 million. There’s two of them in case one crashes. They’re big, tough, and decked-out with instruments. Yet two Rovers costs less than one year of flying the Shuttle to do lackluster science and put satelites in orbit for more than what it costs to use expendable rockets.
If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say all the losses of robotic probes combined probably cost less than the two Shuttles we’ve lost. And again, nobody died.
So at least as far as ground covered, humans beat robots (and the humans were operating in a far more inhospitable climate than the Mars rovers are). The Apollo missions also brought back samples of Lunar materials which can be studied here on Earth in better labratories than we could equip a robot with. Humans can also go places and gather things in manners that robots cannot. Even here on Earth, we can’t build a robot which can move and function half as well as a human. Sure robots can weld cars, but they can’t navigate a fully mapped and laid out course on their own, as the folks at the DARPA Grand Challenge found out this past year. Heck, you or I could do better without a map!
In sending robots into space, we don’t learn about ourselves in the process, we only learn about the things that the robots were programmed to find (and if there’s something really interesting that the robot’s not been programmed to find, we’ll never know about it). Also, if a robot discovers a hint of something important, but lacks the necessary gear to confirm the discovery, it can’t improvise something on the spot to check it out. A robot isn’t going to look out a window and suddenly feel compelled to recite a passage from Genesis, or comment on how small everything suddenly looks and how much we all are interconnected. A robot can’t tell me that the Moon smells like burnt gunpowder, but an astronaut can. If a robotic program goes awry, we just throw up our hands and start building a replacement. If a manned mission goes awry, we bust ass to figure out what the hell went wrong, and do our damnedest to save the crew. The Apollo 13 mission is a prime example of this. No one at NASA thought that the kind of accident which occured on Apollo 13 was survivable, but they found a way to save the crew, and not only that, but the crew was able to do photographic work (helpful for astronomers, geologists and the like) as they swung around the Moon. A robotic mission would have been written off the moment the O2 tank blew.
As for the loss of life, well, I’ll let one astronaut comment on that
Oh, so if a human does something a robot can, it’s not a success? What kind of logic is that? And surely you cannot discount the educational and emotional benefits as completely worthless.
Also, I think most geologists would tell you that it’s difficult to get a “feel” of the land with only remote sensing data. We had an actual geologist walk on the moon and pick out rock samples to bring back. No doubt a robot can bring back some rock samples, but I very much doubt the sicneitic value would be exactly the same.
Manned programs are more expensive. Of course the failures will be proportionally more expensive.
Although you neglected to mention some of the more spectacular failures in the unmanned space program - Mars Observer ($800 million), Galileo ($1.4 billion, data output reduced by a factor of 1000 due to antenna failure), Mars Polar Lander ($200 million), the original Hubble ($1.5 billion, saved by manned flight), Astro-E ($100 million, almost half of it from US), and possibly Gravity Probe B ($700 million, in deep trouble last I heard). That’s just off the top of my head. And I can name at least one person who lost his life for an unmanned scientific program - my advisor’s colleague died of leukemia, caused by an improperly shielded X-ray generator used to test the instruments on the Hinotori satellite.
Well, crap, the Wright brothers 1903 flight was a mere 12 seconds. At the time, no one believed anyone but the governement would ever be able to afford to build/buy/own/maintain an aircraft.
You can buy an ultralight for under $5k, if you don’t mind used.
And, oh yeah - from that 12 second flight nearly a century later Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager flew an airplane nine days without landing or refueling. And that effort was funded without a dime of government money.
Which is why, as soon as I heard Rutan was going for the X-prize, I put my money on him and his team. He’s got a track record for doing things both frugally and well.
Besides which, just about everything else Burt’s ever designed and built has looked like a spaceship, why not go ahead and build the real thing, ay?
Beyond that - yeah, the SS1 is in many ways a one-shot deal. Just like the Wright 1903 flyer. Or the Rutan/Yeager Voyager. But what you learn from achieving that goal has applications elsewhere. Building the Voyager required a better engine - which I believe is not being offered commercially to piston-pilots. It also required solving problems in composite construction - which, it would not surprise me, were applied to SS1. And all those other projects Scaled Composites works on. The rocket Rutan is using uses very different fuels that what any government is using - fuels that, apparently, are much more stable on the ground and much less hazardous to handle. It’s hard to argue that’s a bad thing. Especially with everyone screaming for “alternative fuels” these days.
Sure, SS1 might be a one-off and the technology never go further than filthy rich tourists… but maybe not. You can’t tell at this point. Saying “never” is not only premature, it’s a little foolish considering how far we’ve come over the last century.
And if it IS only useful for the filthy rich thrill-seeker…? So what? It’s no crazier than climbing mountains, buying your own personal submarine, jumping out of airplanes to get your rocks off, or, for that matter, getting a pilot’s license solely for your own amusement. If the price is low enough it becomes a tourist industry and Rutan retires rich.
Well, of course, but robots aren’t too shabby these days. And robots are getting better at a roughly exponential rate. People aren’t.
Well, gee, maybe I shouldn’t think the loss of the Challenger and Columbia crews was a tragic waste that could have been prevented with better conception, design, and management. Hooray for exploration.
I’d be more accepting of the Shuttle losses if I thought the losses were worth it, but frankly, I don’t. Astronauts do claim they understand the risks, but did anybody really know how deadly the Shuttle is? Well, yeah, the engineers, who fought like hell, for instance, to delay the Challenger launch, and lost out to politically-beholden managers who, it seems, thought human life was worth less than keeping on schedule. What’s almost laughable if it weren’t for the loss of life is the Shuttle was supposed to fly something like 25 missions a year. I don’t think we ever got much over 5 per year, and each mission cost about 25-50x what it was supposed to. In other words, the Shuttle, at best, cost about twice as much to achieve 1/5th as much. And its failure rate was estimated by NASA managers (at least publically) to be about 1 in 1000. Engineers put it at about 1 in 100 (see the Feynman’s minority report, relegated to an appendix by the Challenger investigation), but they were ignored. Experience has taught us that, so far, the failure rate is about 1 in 50. 1 in 50! That’s greater than the failure rate, currently, of NASAs unmanned rockets (Deltas). So, basically, you strap human beings on a bomb, send them into orbit to do undergrad science experiments and launch a satellite in LEO, over and over again, to the tune of $500 million a pop, plus one life per roughly seven missions, and it’s worth it?
Bah, humbug, huh? Look, about 50-60 years ago Clyde Cessna and William Piper first launched there 2 and 4 seat airplanes into the sky. So it’s been done, right? By literally thousands of people. I’m still going to get into one this weekend (weather permitting) and do the same. I don’t care that it’s been done before. I want to do it! ME! I want to be there. Got it? Pictures and remote viewing and TV are just not the same thing for me.
If a trip to space - even a sub-oribital trip - cost $50,000 I’d seriously be figuring out how to pay for the ticket, even though it’s more than my gross yearly income. So what? It’s the trip of a lifetime. Hell, I’ve probably spent MORE than $50k on my flying hobby since I started, why not more? ROI? Don’t make me laugh! I’m not doing this for the money, I’m doing it for the adventure, for the personal accomplishment. I’m doing it because I can and because I want to and as long as I can pay the bill and I don’t hurt anyone along the way what does it matter to anyone else?
If I could find a way to put together a resume such that it would impress Mr. Rutan I would not only ride the thing – I’d apply to be the pilot.
The tools humans use are also getting better at an exponential rate. A modern robot can probably explore the Moon just as well as the Apollo astronauts did. But astronauts with the latest scientific scientific instruments can do a whole lot more.
The people who take those risks think it’s worth it. Isn’t that enough?
Of course they did. They’ve been trained to cope with all kinds of emergencies - and anyone who studied the emergency plans know that there are enormous gaps during which an engine failure means a near-certain death. And they would have met with the range safety officers - those whose job is to destroy the spacecraft if it veers off course and threatens to crash.
I don’t think you answered my question in the other thread: what do you propose we do with NASA, given where we are now?
What if the body of the craft could withstand the forces and temperatures involved in the high-orbit return? What then?
You don’t have to solve ALL the problems at once. The Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs certainly didn’t, and neither did this one. They’ve got a rocket engine that works. They’ve gotten into space. They’ve got a spacecraft that can be safely landed. That’s pretty damn impressive for something Rutan only got serious about designing about 9 years ago, and only actually started building a little over three years ago.
Another thing that impresses the hell out of me - SpaceShipOne really is the first one - there have been no other prototypes built. Contrast this with NASA - how many rockets blew up in Mercury/Gemini/Apollo? Apollo One burned up on the launch pad, killing three, and never even got off the ground! Rutan has built just one, and did so sucessfuly on the first try. Sure, he has the advantage of another 40 years of technology - but you don’t get that sort of success by pure luck alone.
Let’s see… there’s Mr. Tito, who paid $20 million for just one ride to space. There’s Branson. Steve Fawcett. John Travolta owns his own freakin’ Boeing 707 and then built a house with a big enough “carport” to park the jet (and another parking spot for his Gulfstream IV). Think he might be willing to fork over some change for a ride to space? Those are just the well-known folks.
If enough people with big bucks want to pony up for the ultimate roller coaster ride the amusement park becomes “commercially viable”. It’s no crazier than the industry built on cruise ships. The ticket price makes a huge difference of course - $100k you have to be really, really rich to do this. $50k brings it into the realm of the average upper class, or the really determined such as myself. Get it down to $20k or even 10k all those geeks supporting the science fiction industry (movies, books, coventions, etc.) start to jump on board - literally. Let people pay the ticket on credit with a reasonable payment plan - heck, I know people who’ve spend more on getting their teeth fixed or their boobs enhanced.
Get a reliable, safe suborbital system not only will tourists pay for it - with a little extending of the range it will do what the SST couldn’t: provide very quick trans-oceanic transport. Part of what killed the SST was that folks didn’t want the sonic booms over their house - well, with a sub-oribtal, particularly using something like the WhiteKnight lifter, you don’t get sonic booms on the ground. Heck, make BOTH vehicles able to carry people (and cargo) for profit - the WhiteKnight does regular jet routes, just happens to drop the SS1 en-route. The SS1 goes tran-oceanic from there. Well, no, it won’t happen in their present form - but if we do get a system like that we’ll see WK/SS1 as the predecessor, just as we see the DC-3 as a precurser to the modern age of airliners, even if it was a prop plane and not a jet.