Sure, robots TODAY might be able to do this - we sure as heck didn’t have robots that could do that in 1969 or even into the 70’s. I remember when computers filled a room and had memories smaller than the desktop I use at work today. My cellphone has more computer memory that the Apollo spaceships had on board.
We sent people to the Moon in 1969 in part because we didn’t have the robots to send in our place (political concerns certainly played a part as well).
Ever since Apollo One when three men died screaming on the launchpad, burned alive, astronauts have had a grip on the danger involved - if they didn’t before, which they might well have had. After the Challenger blew up, yeah, the shuttle astronauts knew the shuttle could kill.
I hear a similar argument from folks from the outside of aviation about the flying I do - arguments that I don’t really understand the dangers, that if I did I wouldn’t do it. Well, I’ve been to funerals for my fellow pilots, I’ve seen accidents and their aftermath (some of which I have related in threads on this bulletin board, in fact), and I have pulled a wrecked aircraft off a runway, a wreck so fresh the blood on the struts hadn’t finished clotting yet. Yeah, I understand the dangers. I still fly. Why is it so hard to understand that yes, people in the astronaut program DO understand the danger and yet still continue to fly? It may not be the choice you would make… but then, you’re not an astronaut, are you?
People have TRIED to pay NASA millions of dollars to get a ride on the shuttle… after both the *Challenger{/i] and the Columbia disasters. Those people will be happy to pay Rutan less for a chance to make the trip - even just a suborbital flight.
They did indeed know the risks. Astronauts for the Mercury program came from the ranks of test pilots. I’ve read that the odds of being killed testing new aircraft in the 1940s and 1950s were 25%. Or as Wolfe put it, “How would they feel if they knew that every time their husmand went into a boardroom, there was a one-in-four chance he wouldn’t come out alive?”
I have to say that it was a creepy feeling seeing Doug Benefield’s car in the parking lot outside of the B-1A hangar after he was killed in the crash of tail number 159. I mean, this guy drove his (then-new) tan coloured Porsche 924 to the base just like any other day. A few hours later, he was dead. And there was the car, just waiting for him to drive it home.
Yes, they knew the risks. But they do it anyway. I would.
Loopydude said:
“Boondoggle” is the wrong word. I supported the SSC. What I meant was, it was an example of government not being able to complete long-term projects (‘generational’ projects). After all, it WAS killed.
There are plenty of examples of this. The NASP, the X-33, Yucca Mountain (unless it eventually opens).
I am simply challenging the conventional wisdom that “Only government can do things that take a very long time to do.” I think in fact it’s the opposite. Governments rarely look past the next election cycle. It’s hard to get a politician to spend money on something that won’t show benefits until he’s out of office, especially if that money has to come from something that would.
On the other hand, all business needs is a business plan that will show enough of a profit to make the investment and risk worthwhile, and they’ll take as long a view as you’d like. The Alberta Tar Sands have been under development for decades already. Large offshore oil platforms can take a decade to build, and years after that to repay their investment. Businesses have the added advantage in long-term planning of being able to share the risk amongst partners and shareholders.
BobLibDem said:
Well, you’d be wrong. Go loook at the list of Nobel Laureates in chemistry and physics, and see how many of them come from corporations. You’ll be surprised. Companies like Motorola, Lucent, Microsoft, Dow Chemical, Pfizer, and others invest heavily in very basic research - and lots of it is in areas that have no immediate or apparent commercial benefit. These companies do it for their own reasons - to develop an in-house knowledge base, for prestige, to be good citizens, but mostly because they understand serendipity - sometimes huge payoffs come in areas you would never suspect.
Besides, modern technology is moving so close to fundamental physical limits that even commercial research involves basic research. Nanotechnology, genetics, drug research, computing… There’s a reason why IBM spends huge research bucks on basic physics. Nanotechnology is a perfect example: IBM has been working on it for years already, and no one expects huge profits from nanotech for quite some time.
ElvisL1ves said:
Boeing had other SST development plans, as did the other large aircraft companies. Everyone thought SST was the wave of the future. NASP was a different animal entirely. But you make my point - the fact that the plug was pulled doesn’t bode well for the government’s vaunted ability to undertake very long term projects.
Well, I think you underestimate the risk. Do you build gigantic airliners that will hold 800 people? Or do you focus on smaller ones? Where will the market be in a decade? How many people will be flying? What’s Airbus going to do to respond to competition? Large aircraft companies have gone under, you know. There is clearly plenty of risk. But we’re mostly in agreement, because the risk is clearly low enough to make the investment worthwhile, or they wouldn’t do it.
But that’s really my point - business doesn’t care about development times - that’s just another variable. But long-term projects much show large profits to make not just the risk worthwhile, but the time-value of money. It’s not enough to be profitable, it has to be MORE profitable than alternative uses the money could be put to use to today. (excepting basic research, which is done with the promise of windfalls, new discoveries that can be patented, or improving the scientific base of the company - sometimes when you want the best people, you have to promise them their own research time and resources).
The real problem with business and space is that there simply isn’t a clear-cut path to profit. Long development times are irrelevant - if you can show a large corporation like GE or Boeing a business plan for, say, mining asteroids that is sufficiently well fleshed out and proven in detail that will earn them a 15% per year return on their investment, but won’t pay it for 50 years, they’ll bite. But the plan has to be solid enough to be able to take to boards of directors and shareholders and make a case.
So far, no one’s done that. And that’s why I believe there is still a role for government in space. There are still too many unknowns and risks to attract large-scale business investment, and yet I think it’s important that we continue in space. So we need NASA.
But what we should be doing is constantly moving the bar for NASA, to make sure that it always stays in that part of the envelope that is impractical for private enterprise. Get NASA out of LEO - private companies can and do launch satellites for profit, and there’s no reason they can’t develop the capability to service them with manned missions if need be. Retire the shuttle, turn the ISS over to private researchers once the capability is there, and let NASA blaze new trails. That’s what the new exploration vision is all about.
Science had little to do with the Apollo program. We should all be able to agree about that. Forget about people vs. robots. That wasn’t the issue. Politics, the Cold War, that’s what motivated the the Moon landings. Once the Soviets bowed out of the race, we dropped Apollo like a hot brick. Why? Because it cost too damn much to send people to the Moon, and once we won the race, there was nothing, as far as the funders were concerned, past the finish line. People got bored of the Moonshots. Boredom is a big part of rigorous science, but it makes for really rotten politcs. What’s ironic is we quit just when things were getting interesting. Bush says we should have a permanent base on the Moon. Well, if we’d stuck with Apollo, we’d have one by now. The Saturn V+CM+LEM was the biggest vehicle ever built, and we now literally have to start from scratch to send people to the Moon again. This will be not be trivial by any means. I don’t even know what the cost of the Apollo program was in today’s dollars, but I assume it would be at least in the many tens of billions. We invested all that money to build all that infrastructure, and in one fell swoop scuttled the whole thing for…the Shuttle.
Could real science have possibly motivated any of this? I don’t think so.
I dunno. For every example of a generational project put to death, there’s another, like the Space Shuttle program, which is followed with such determination that all judgement and logic seems to go completely out the window. I think, more accurately, I would say govt. ability to judge which are the correct projects to stick with in aerospace, and which are the boondoggles, is piss-poor.
With this argument I quite agree. Govt. can and does fund much worthwhile generational development. But so can and does industry. They can compliment each other well as long as people use their brains properly. I would argue that the experiment in manned-flight for the sake of science (if that ever was the reason for it, a debatable question) has been, at best, a qualified failure. The cost-benefit simply never added up, and I don’t think it will for the forseeable future. Without some business rationale to help justify the enormous costs, I don’t think people belong in space for the purpose of doing basic research. There’s just no compelling reason for it. OK, maybe there’s one compelling reason: Life on another world, like Mars or Europa. But we should find strong evidence with robotic probes before we send people.
Mining, tourism, manufacturing, transport, these are all business ventures which could pay off some day in space. Sub-orbital flight capability or a hypersonic aircraft has the potential for profit because it gets folks from point A way the hell over to point B very quickly, which some folks value a lot. Such a vehicle might also serve as a launch platform for LEO satelites, again something for-profit businesses are interested in. In this area, govt. aerospace research and the research done by for-profit aerospace dovetails nicely. Seeing private interests trying to go it alone is even more encouraging. Such private ventures indicate some level of at least perceived utility on the part of capitalists. Maybe public researchers can benefit from strides made by the private sector for a change, with better results than the reverse paradigm has proven with, say, the Space Shuttle.
OK, test pilots in experimental aircraft are one thing, but biologists who don’t even have a pilot’s license in a glorified space truck/flying laboratory are quite another.
Thing is the Space Shuttle wasn’t supposed to be a prototype test plane. It was supposed to be a reliable transport, maybe not as safe as an airliner, but nowhere near the 2% LOVAC rate we have seen. Public funds weren’t being spent on this to send people on a risky joyride, and they weren’t being spent on proof-of-concept. They were being spent on what was supposed to be a viable launch and research platform. The Shuttle has proven too costly as a launch vehicle to justify its existence, and I can’t think of a single major scientific discovery to come out of the tens of billions spent on it.
Even if the Space Shuttle astronauts fully understood the danger they were in (something I rather doubt, especially the last mission, where, despite some chilling evidnence something terrible could happen, nobody even tried to do anything about it), we, the public (speaking generally), certainly didn’t. If we did, there wouldn’t be shock, dismay, and big, costly investigations into what went wrong, as if we never saw it coming.
Uh, right… you mean like when an airliner crashes there’s no “shock, dismay, and big, costly investigations into what went wrong”
Average plane crash investigation lasts 18 months to 2 years, last I heard.
In space, even more so than in aviation, when something goes wrong it goes wrong quickly. And safety involves not just avoiding all problems, but also how you handle what does go wrong. Procedures and systems mature over time. A single spark in Apollo One killed everyone quickly. A fire on *Mir * was nothing fun, but everyone survived. A leak on a Soviet re-entry killed all aboard. A leak on the Mir, after a collision, did not result in fatalities. Space is still extremely dangerous, but not as dangerous as it once was.
It breaks my heart to see people die, but you can’t go into space without running the risk, and if you run the risk at some point it will catch up with someone.
I am, however, extremely disappointed with NASA’s performance regarding the last Columbia flight. The effort to find and view potential damage was half-hearted at best. Sure, if the breach in the wing had been known we might not have been able to do anything about it - but no one even tried. It could have been another Apollo 13, where we snatched the people back from the brink and brought them safely home. How it was handled did not impress me - it makes me think they learned little or nothing from Challenger. For that, maybe we should lose the manned program as done by NASA. Seriously, you can’t go to space without being conscientious about the safety - schedule should never trump safety.
I do think people belong in space. Maybe not on the forefront of exploration, but we do have a role. It’s past time for private industry to enter LEO - as pointed out, many if not most satellites these days are commercial. Even programs that are military in origin - like GPS - frequently have commercial spin-offs. Or even non-commerical - GPS is used to locate people in danger and distress routinely.
Let NASA do the pure research - and NASA does do research, not only space but also aviation. Leave the repeatable, commercial applications to industry and other organizations. NASA shouldn’t be making a profit, it should be making knowledge. Let someone else haul the mail.
Aeronautics and astronautics aren’t science? 
All spacecraft are experimental. I have not undergone astronaut training, but you can be sure that candidates are made well aware of the risks and undergo gobs of training in emergency procedures. Much of earning a private pilot certificate is about learning emergency procedures. Cabin crew on airliners are not just pretty faces that are good at dispensing packets of peanuts; they are trained to handle emergency situations.
The Public doesn’t care enough to understand the risks. They just want to see the shiny rocket make fire. Anything anyone wants to know about aviation/space safety is out there if they care to look it up. But that’s too much trouble. In other threads I’ve mentioned “Left Seat Passengers”; people who may have a steering wheel in front of them, but they are not actually driving. They’re just along for the ride. If the general public don’t care enough to understand the risks of driving a car, how can they be expected to care enough to research the risks of experimental flight – something that most people will never do?
As Broomstick pointed out, crashes are investigated thoroughly. The public just don’t hear about most of the investigations because most crashes are not as spectacular as the Shuttle.
A prototype, no. But it is indeed an experimental aerospacecraft. Public funds were being spent on “proof-of-concept”. The Shuttle is a “viable launch and research platform”. I just think that it hasn’t been used to its full potential (e.g., frequent trips ferrying construction materials for the ISS as it was originally planned). Yes, it’s costly. That’s why we need people like Burt Rutan – to come up with better solutions. As for “major scientific discoveries”: What about the discoveried made by using Hubbel? Hubbel would not be up there without the Shuttle.
If you start with the assumption that the only reason for going into space is to do science, then sure, robotic missions are hard to beat.
But that’s not the only reason we go into space by a long shot. We go to open new frontiers. We go to expand our horizons, to give our kids something to care about for the future. We go to learn the engineering required for humans to live and work in space, so when the day comes when we have an opportunity to exploit it, we’ll be able to do so. We go because humans are explorers by nature, and when we don’t have a frontier to challenge our best and brightest and inspire the rest, we become dull and sedentary and begin fighting amongst ourselves.
The Department of Education has a budget more than four times bigger than NASA. And yet, I’ll bet you NASA has had more of an impact on education than the DOE has. Go ask a 40-50 year old engineer or scientist why they studied science and engineering, and the answer you’ll often hear is, “As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut.”
The intangibles have tremendous value. Just the shared human experience of watching pioneers fly to new worlds is tremendously uplifting, and helps bring us all a little closer together.
In all of these areas, manned spaceflight has a tremendous bang-for-the-buck factor.
On Lewis Black’s recent HBO special he talked about a corporate CEO who raided his company for a billion dollars. He asked what he intended to do with all that money, start his own space program? Nice to know the first private space program was started with legitimate (no Microsoft rants for now) money.
The pilots and other aviation enthusiasts seem to think this is a big accomplishment but everyone else seems to jaded. It’s as if technology has made this no big deal. Well it is a big deal. “No problem we can’t lick, we’ll just throw some more technology on it. If they can make a cell phone the size of a Necco wafer it should be trivial to put a man in space in a homebuilt aircraft.”
Actually I don’t know which category spaceship one is in but you get my point.
Johnny L.A., Wolfe is often misquote about what he said in The Right Stuff. It’s been a few years since I read it but the initial vingettes took place in the mid fifties. He mentions that 1955 was the wost ever year for naval aviation accidents. IIRC he said that a career naval aviator had about a 25% chance of not surviving to retirement and about a 50% chance of having to eject, an extremely hazardous proposition in those days, at least once.
The books starts off talking about accidents and funerals at Pax River, the Navy’s flight test station. In the movie they switched it to Muroc AFB but they sing the navy hymn at the funerals because the lyrics were mentioned in the book.
The metaphor of having a 25% chance of being killed every time a man walks into a meeting doesn’t hold water. You can’t sustain anything if a pilot only averages four flights before being killed.
It might actually be “exprimental homebuilt”. I’ll see if it’s listed in the official databases (anybody happen to have a tail number for SS1?)
Huh - wonder what the percentages of the Messerschmidt “Komet” was? Think that probably had the worst accident/fatality rate of any airplane ever put in production and combat. Mano Ziegler in his book about it claims that towards the end of WWII a few men even volunteered for suicide missions in preference to flying the thing.
Well, that turned out to be easy. Here’s the listing I found:
It’s an experimental, but not under the “amateur built” category. Limited strictly to research and development flights. If Rutan wants to use it to haul tourists he’ll have to get the approved operations changed. And, oh yes, it’s listed among the aircraft - don’t know if there’s a “spaceship” listing (yet).
Padeye: I stand corrected.
Nevertheless, test pilots do die. There weren’t that many crashes when I was at Edwards, and the only fatal one I remember was B-1A #159. But in the 1940s and 1950s fatal crashes seemed to have been much more common. In 1966 there was the mid-air collision of the XB-70 and Joe Walker’s F-104. Military aviation in itself (not testing new aircraft) is also dangerous, even in peacetime. How jets have crashed on carrier decks, and how many helicopters have crashed during training missions? Suffice it to say that the early astronauts knew exactly what they were getting into, and Shuttle crews are also well aware of the risks. Even I am aware of the (miniscule) risks whenever I get aboard a commercial jet or a Cessna or a helicopter.
And one of the problems with NASA is that its manned spaceflight program is so politically sensitive to accidents that they have developed a very risk-averse culture. Or as Buzz Aldrin has said, “NASA’s problem is that they aren’t killing enough astronauts.”
Rutan is up-front about the dangers of spaceflight. He says it’s a risky business, and astronauts WILL die. But experimental aviation requires risk - trying to design it out leads to bloated designs and insanely long development cycles.
Perhaps more specifically they’re not killing them in new and novel ways. Which sounds ghoulish I admit. What new methods or technologies did NASA develop out of routinely going back into LEO? The X program at least showed a progression in technical mastery of aeronautics
Which is what the speaker meant (I’ve heard the quote attributed to Rutan), that NASA is not pushing the envelope enough.
Pushing the envelople?
Not only is NASA *not * pushing the envelope, it has wrapped said envelope in bubble-wrap and placed it in a large, padded box.
Then refused to believe their staff when they say “Hey, there’s a elephant stomping around the box room. Think we should move the box with the shuttle’s envelope?” (i.e. frozen o-rings and a hole in the wing)
Feynman said as much. If it’s OK, I feel I should quote him:
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Why should public relations dictate, to the doom of seven of our best and brightest per failed flight? Damned if I know. Seems like NASA, or somebody, doesn’t want us to know the risks of manned space flight. Perhaps legislators would object. If they were misled, and agreed upon tens of billions of dollars in funding because they were misled, that’s wrong, plain and simple.