Jeffrey F. Bell is a commentator and critic who’s articles are periodically featured in the Space Daily online site. His writings largely consist of rebutting the “true believers” and “space cadets” who insist that only a lack of committment has prevented the ambitious dreams of manned space exploration from coming true. Since they haven’t come true, obviously something went wrong; and Bell offers compelling arguments why this is.
But Bell’s outlook is SO negative that it’s hard to give his ideas full credence without concluding that manned spaceflight is a futile fantasy. NASA, the DoD, aerospace firms, the scientific community, would-be space entrepeneurs- everybody gets shot down. According to Bell, the shuttle doesn’t work, the Space Initiative won’t work, private spacecraft won’t work, spaceplanes won’t work, heavy expendable launchers won’t work- on and on and on. It’s hard to say just what, if anything, he does approve of.
So can anyone else who’s read his opinions offer their comments?
A bit of both, it seems. He does exxagerrate his point considerably, but he does have a point. It is very difficult to accelerate mass enough to escape the atmosphere. It is very difficult to land mass safely.
However…
Both of these are ultimately engineering troubles. It is possible, just expensive. I think he overestimates the difficulty, and I’m generaly opposed to a lot of the wilder schemes. Certainy, I think ideas like space elevator and L% type projects should give way to things like laser containment boost and railgun acceleration. Also, the nature of spcecraft means that it actually becomes easier, in many ways, to land if you can more easily take off.
I’m a long way from expert in the field but it does seem to me that manned exploration of Mars using propulsion by chemical rockets is rather far out. The probablities look pretty high that those who volunteer for such a mission should expect it to be a one way trip with a rather good chance that it will end before Mars is reached.
In practical terms, once we get it started, it will probably get there all right. And we are mostly pretty good about checking trajectories. I would not want to do it with checmical rockets, but with fusion in 50 years…
My feeling is, right now and for the foreseeable future, manned space travel is excessively risky and excessively expensive.
That’s not to say space exploration isn’t worthwhile. It is. But MANNED space ships aren’t the most practical way to explore space right now and won’t be practical for many years to come. If we can learn just as many useful things about the universe around us with unmanned ships and probes, that’s the way to go, for now.
When easier or less expensive ways of maintaining life support are available, by all means use them. But as it is, we seem to be sending humans into space for no good reason. The experiments being performed on space shuttles are rarely of great importance, and many of them could be carried out under different circumstances or with computer simulations.
I am NOT against risking human lives in the pursuit of important scientific knowledge. I simply question whether there’s any real NEED to risk human lives in that pursuit, and whether we could learn just as much WITHOUT putting lives at risk?
Wow, that’s a big assumption. Practical fusion could be 50 or never years away. Remember when superbatteries were just an engineering problem that could be solved in a few years by consortiums of auto manufacturers? We’re still waiting.
We already pretty much have profitable (in energy terms, not money terms) fusion. And we are making slow progress. It’s not that it’s impossible; it’s just been much slower than we originall expected. But there’s no practical reason we can’t build a fusion reactor, and there don’t seem to be any serious cost obstacles to eventually putting them into use.
This is taking place in a vacuum? I see that this guy has a theory to create an expanding gas from the bomb, but it just seems really inefficient to me.
Plus, you have to deal with the politics of sending many nuclear warheads up through the atmosphere. There’s a lot of resistance to their sitting on the ground, much less riding a rocket to possible abort and widespread debris.
I see your point, but you have to send the fissionable material in the rocket, a difference that is unlikely to matter much to the people who really opposed the first idea to start with.
Well, in theory you can build afusion bomb with no fissionable material at all.
They had some testing labs in Canada which, a few years ago, were definitely doing promising work. They’re still doing it, but the American gov was providing a lot of the funding and that got removed. I think we should be ponying up a lot of dough for the studies.
I don’t know if you can get asteroid mining before your Project Orion. Isn’t the whole idea that we can’t do things like mine asteroids, colonize Mars, etc. because our current rockets are too expensive to launch a lot of men & material into space?
Sure, we could do robot mining, but we’ll have to wait a while before our robots are up to that.
I was informed that our H-bombs use an A-bomb to get the fusionable material hot enough to pound the protons together hard enough to fuse. That’s why I mention the fissionable material.