Thoughts from Neil Stephenson on how we got stuck with our current space transportation schemes. It’s unclear, though, what he means when he says “rockets,” or what different directions wold be fruitful. If he means “expendable launchers,” then yes, we need to break out, and start building space transports. But those are still “rockets.”
[Update a while later]
Thoughts on the development of reusable vehicles from Clark Lindsey.
Thanks Rand, that was a great link. Yeah, I also wonder if by rockets he means expendable rockets.
~Jon
Good God, for a guy who’s written historical novels, his history of the development of rockets struck me as so cliched and spectactularly wrong as to be astonishing. One of us is delusional about the first half of the 20th century, viz.:
“These rockets, which were known as V-2s, were worse than useless from a military standpoint…Accordingly, the victorious nations showed only modest interest in their development immediately following the war.”
Given the appalling rate at which bomber crews were lost when unaccompanied by fighters — more than 1100 German air crews were KIA in the Battle of Britain — and the extreme difficulty of designing fast agile fighters that could carry enough fuel to fly anywhere near as far as a bomber, this is nonsense. Rockets, i.e. self-propelled and remotely- or automatically-targed bombs — were of great interest because they reduced the need to sacrifice highly-trained pilots, which is why, of course, both the Soviets and Americans made strenuous efforts to destroy the V-2 base, and at the end of the war snag what they could from the V-2 program for their own benefit.
This also makes nonsense of a subsequent statement in which Stephenson suggests no military use could be found for rockets other than as launch platforms for nuclear weapons. Say what? He can’t think of any use for a vehicle that is unstoppable, cheap, reliable, unmanned, and can deliver a few hundred pounds of whatever you like to any location you like several 1000 km away? Give me a break.
“Atomic bombs turned out to be expensive, dirty, controversial, and of limited military use”
Correct on only two counts (dirty and controversial). They were, in fact, amazingly cheap compared to maintaining a standing army of sufficient size of defeat the Red Army, which of course is why the United States went that route. They were of excellent military use, and came in all sizes, strategic and tactical, right down to artillery shells. That they were not actually used is due to their political problems, which to no small extent stem from their very high military effectiveness.
“The rockets of the 1950s and 1960s were so expensive, and yet so inaccurate, that their only effective military use was lobbing bombs of inconceivably vast destructive power in the general direction of large urban areas.”
Gah. A Titan 1 cost $1.5 million in 1954, compared to $8 million for a B-52 (not to mention the very expensive aircrew to train and maintain, the cost of the airbase, the necessary fighter escort, et cetera). Throw in another $1 million for the warhead and the ICBM is still way cheaper. The CEP of a Titan 1 was about a mile, maybe a mere twice that of a bombing crew in the Second World War. The Titan 2, operational in 1963, had a CEP of less than 900m, and the Minuteman III, operational in 1970, at the end of “the 1950s and 1960s” had a CEP of 200m — considerably better than a bombing crew could generally achieve.
The ability to lob 500kt nukes within 200m of your target means the idea that their “only effective military use” was on large urban areas is nonsense. Indeed, while targeting decisions are a deep dark secret, I would be astonished if any early ICBM were ever targeted on a large urban area, when military targets — airfields, ports, sub pens, missile and radar complexes — were much richer targets. You win wars faster by destroying war machines and concentrations of trained soldiers than by simply wiping out women and children in random suburban apartment complexes. Even Hiroshima was targeted in part because it was a military port and contained the headquarters for the army charged with defending the south of Japan, where the invasion would come.
And there are more weirdnesses.
But in any event, I think his ultimate speculation — there is no concrete engineering argument — that we are still launching rockets merely because of contingency, is on its face lunacy. Rockets are quite possibly the most efficient possible means to get to orbit. Not on an ultimate marginal cost per kg of payload basis, of course: if you have a few $trillion in capital, a few decades to experiment, and dictatorial command of all the Earth’s nations, I’m sure you could set up a launch system with lower marginal costs to orbit.
But it’s unreasonable to leave the capital cost of a system out of considerations of its total cost. No one has ever come up with any concrete and practical (i.e. not dependent on the discovery of unobtanium ore in Antarctica) method of getting to orbit that beats rockets for speed of development, flexibility of application, and plain economic efficiency. Indeed, one might argue that the 1970s fetish for doing something “more modern” than staged rockets, which after all dated in their basic design to the 1920s, led in part to the “reusable spaceplane” concept that, in the form of the Shuttle, ended up being so damaging a detour.
It’s bizarre to see Stephenson, of all people, arguing that just because a technological concept is old, it must be possible to do better. Has anyone improved on the pencil lately? Should we search for some other shape for automobile tires, because the wheel was invented 10,000 years ago?
I can only attribute it to his association with programming. Programmers have this strange obsessive belief that if it was invented yesterday, it is by definition obsolete today. Maybe that actually makes sense in programming. Me, I don’t think it’s likely we’ll improve on fire for cooking my meat, clothing for keeping warm, and sex for propagating the species.
War is bad and rockets came from war so they are bad. Rockets were developed to deliver warheads so therefore they must not be the optimum way to deliver a human shaped package.
Peace is good and a launch system developed by peace will be good for the environment and cheaper than war rockets but capitalism (also bad but better than crazy dictators) is standing in the way.
The article does bring up some interesting questions. Without war would we be in space today and if so would there be a launch system other than rockets that would have been used to get us there?
Let’s try to boil down Neil’s hyperbole. The reason why many of the alternatives to traditional rocketry – guns, tethers, the launch loop or fountains, hypersonic vehicles, balloon schemes, exotic plasma physics, or even just nuclear rockets – never get off the ground is because rockets work. It’s very hard to compete with established technology, and the only reason why that established technology exists is because of massive government spending.
Where Neil is wrong is the assumption that rocket technology was a random choice – it wasn’t. The motivation can be summarized as “striking targets far away” and to do that you basically have three options: a really big cannon (supergun), rocket vehicles (V1, V2), or non-ballistic flight (bomber planes, balloon bombs). The last option only works terribly well if you have a person on board to avoid the counter strike, whereas the first two are sufficiently high velocity that no counter strike is possible.
So why weren’t there super gun programs in WWII? There was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerer_Gustav
They had similar capabilities to the V2, except a lot more reliable. The reason why rockets won is because they’re *better*.
A little over-simplified, perhaps, but still thought provoking.
I would follow it up by suggesting another hill reachable by equally odd military circumstances. The Navy is developing megawatt class free-electron lasers to defend surface ships from missile threats, and massive arrays of such lasers have already been suggested for propelling spacecraft into orbit.
Space launch alone wouldn’t justify the development of such lasers in the near term, but defending ships does.
wodun: I suspect we’d have expendable launchers, but we might have had them later (or perhaps earlier, if global economies unencumbered by the expense and destruction of war had grown faster.)
Has it ever been revealed what sort of stuff Neal Stephenson worked on when he was a Blue Origin employee?
“Has anyone improved on the pencil lately?” he writes, on the Internet…
Ha ha, roy. Of course, there are those who would claim the Internet serves purposes quite distinct from those the Internet serves. Or do you feel automobiles made the bicycle, or indeed walking, obsolete?
s/Internet/pencil/
Programmers have this strange obsessive belief that if it was invented yesterday, it is by definition obsolete today.
That’s because programming is a young persons job, while they still know everything. In the late 70s programmers used to say “If it works, it’s obsolete.” I like obsolete things that work.
Programming is about the only profession I know where the majority of workers are taught things that are just wrong and yet it doesn’t seem to have an impact. If what the users sees is satisfactory it almost doesn’t matter how bad the code is that produces it.
The motivation can be summarized as “striking targets far away” and to do that you basically have three options: a really big cannon (supergun), rocket vehicles (V1, V2), or non-ballistic flight (bomber planes, balloon bombs).
Just a minor nitpick – the V-1 was an air-breathing cruise missile. It was cheap but not very accurate.
So why weren’t there super gun programs in WWII? There was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerer_Gustav
There was also the V-3 cannon.
Hey, at least he spells “Messerschmitt” correctly now.
Upon further thought I’m now convinced that what Stephenson is pushing is part of the problem.
He’s arguing that we need to make the next big leap from rockets to something else.
Of course, the shuttle system, the last BIG project to improve launch prices in the west, dates to the 70’s, and was more or less designed in such a manner as that there were no real incremental improvements that could be made to it. You’re stuck with the big airframe, the tank, and the solid rocket boosters, unless you throw everything else out and start over.
What we really need, whether rocket or laser powered, are platforms that can be incrementally improved.
That was the big point behind DC-X, but it got blown up, and then cancelled, with the funds channeled into a vehicle that was much less capable of incremental testing and improvement (that then failed).
Of course, the parent company behind DC-X has been taken apart and handed to a company that doesn’t believe RLV’s are possible. The entire X-rocket program was taken apart and given to the agency (NASA) that doesn’t believe RLV’s are possible.
NASA has yet to, in the dozen or so suggested HLV shuttle follow-on vehicles, generate a design that can be incrementally improved into a sort-of RLV system. The Shuttle “proved” that you couldn’t do it with SRB’s and 1970’s materials, therefore it’s impossible.
I guess if you don’t really want to learn anything, you won’t.
We chase the will-of-the-wisp of the “magic bullet” disruptive technology while ignoring the possibility of incremental improvement. Meanwhile, the guys who do do incremental improvement seem to be much better at generating “magic bullets” than we do, because their engineers actually get practice at bulding stuff.
Our big technological strategy these days is to win the technology lottery, but we don’t get a day job that’ll give us a weekly paycheck with which to buy tickets.
There was also the V-3 cannon.
Historical trivia: Joseph Kennedy Jr (eldest of the Kennedy brothers) was killed on a mission to destroy V3 installations, perhaps through his own recklessness.
Yes, that was part of Operation Aphrodite (or Anvil for the Navy). They took worn out Army B-17s and Navy PB4Y (B-24) bombers, stripped them of unnecessary weight, fitted them with radio control equipment and stuffed them full of explosives. A pilot and copilot flew the plane from takeoff to a reasonable altitude, activated the radio control equipment, armed the explosives, and bailed out. The bombers were then to be flown against targets by remote control.
It was a highly dangerous operation with little success. Kennedy and his copilot were killed when their plane exploded prematurely, perhaps when they armed the explosives. They weren’t the only fatalities in the project. Say what you will about most of the Kennedy family, you have to respect young Joe Kennedy for volunteering for such dangerous duty and ultimately dying in service of his country. I’ve never seen any indication that he acted reckless.
Actually there is another historical fork to consider which he skips. The only reason the German Army pursued rockets were because they were not allowed to develop long range artillery, weapons like the Paris Cannon were outlawed under the Versailles Treaty. (which also prohibit them from developing bombers…) Which was why the German Army invested in Von Braun and company. Of course after Herr Hitler came to power the treaty was ignored, but the German Army already had it secret rocket program going.
By contrast the only folks interested in Professor Goddard’s work was private investors, the U.S. military seeing no value in long range rockets as weapons at the time.
In Russia, in the 1930’s, rockets were only seen as having value as a short range battlefield weapon – “Stalin’s organ”.
Of course after the A-4 (V-2) showed that long range rockets were possible everyone wanted one.
So another question might be where would rockets be IF the German Army didn’t need them as a long range substitute for artillery and bombers? That if the Treaty of Versailles hadn’t restricted Germany?
Of course you could also argue that without the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles World War II might not have occurred and without it the leap forward in jet engines, electronics, aviation, etc. as well.
But both are points to consider beyond his article.
Actually there is another historical fork to consider which he skips. The only reason the German Army pursued rockets were because they were not allowed to develop long range artillery, weapons like the Paris Cannon were outlawed under the Versailles Treaty.
This claim is almost universally made but there is virtually no evidence that this was the case. Germany was quite adept at avoiding the various restrictions of the Versailles Treaty. Submarines and aircraft were developed by subsidiaries in neutral countries like the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden. Fighter pilots were trained in the Soviet Union. If ultra long range artillery like the Paris Gun was deemed to be desirable the Germans would have found a way to pursue it. That they did not was probably due more to a combination of German economic weakness between the wars and the relative ineffectiveness of the Paris Gun in WWI rather than treaty restrictions.
Jim, agreed. After reading a lot of history of von Braun and his team, it’s my opinion that they got funding through making a noise and keeping the anti-military members of the team quiet.
Jim,
[[[This claim is almost universally made but there is virtually no evidence that this was the case.]]]
The mere existence of a German military rocket program at such an early date, while none existed in the other nations, disproves your statement.
Yes, Germany did follow other paths to avoid the treaty, but that doesn’t disprove their motivation for funding the A-4 program. Also common sense will tell you that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The other programs depended on foreign political support, something not necessary with the rocket program.
Also its a story that all the original sources, especially those present at the time, Walter Dornberger, Wernher von Braun, and Willy Ley, report in their writings.
Trent,
Frederick Ordway, who knew most of the principles, wrote in “The Rocket Team” that the Germany’s army’s search for a long range rocket alternative to artillery started nearly 2 years before he met Wernher von Braun, something Walter Dornberger also confirms in his book, “V-2”.
Again, its important to go to original sources not those writing from second and third hand knowledge.
The mere existence of a German military rocket program at such an early date, while none existed in the other nations, disproves your statement.
Nonsense. All the existence of a German military rocket program at such an early date, while none existed in the other nations, shows is that Germany had long term strategic goals vastly different from any other nation. Your falling into the same trap that many fell into during the cold war, that nations have symmetrical strategic goals. It led to nonsensical arguments such as aircraft carriers must be useless otherwise the Soviets would have them.
Yes, Germany did follow other paths to avoid the treaty, but that doesn’t disprove their motivation for funding the A-4 program.
No, indeed it is not disproof. Merely an alternative explanation that fits the available evidence equally well if not better.
Also common sense will tell you that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The other programs depended on foreign political support, something not necessary with the rocket program.
There was no question of putting all eggs in one basket. Germany began the war with lots of weapons, many of which were forbidden by the Versailles Treaty. The Luftwaffe and Ubootewaffe were both forbidden by the treaty. The Nazis came to power with the goal of abrogating the treaty at the earliest convenient moment. It is naive to think that they would have let the treaty dictate weapons development policy. They wanted a means of throwing a 1 tonne warhead 300 kilometers that couldn’t be intercepted. Then, as now, by far the best way to do that is by rocket.
Now, why they wanted such a capability is the question at hand. I don’t think that “because it didn’t violate the Versailles Treaty” is a satisfactory answer. My best guess is that the Nazis realized that their plans of conquest would inevitably lead to conflict with Britain, an island nation that they could not invade and conquer. They possibly believed that the possession of a weapon which could not be defended against would give them a huge psychological, if not military, advantage.
Also its a story that all the original sources, especially those present at the time, Walter Dornberger, Wernher von Braun, and Willy Ley, report in their writings.
You are confused by what constitutes an original source. Dornberger and von Braun are not original sources. (How you imagine Ley to be an original source is beyond me.) They were the advocates, not the decision makers. Possibly being unaware of the Nazi’s long term strategic goals, they might have indeed made the treaty a major selling point. They might have even believed that that was the primary reason the weapon was funded. But original sources would constitute the contemporary, memos, briefing papers, meeting minutes, etc of the decision makers. To my knowledge, no historian has attempted to actually document the reasons that led the Germans to develop long range rockets.
Until such time, I will remain skeptical of the Versailles Treaty rationale.
Jim,
[[[Dornberger and von Braun are not original sources.]]]
I see. You believe the folks who actually ran the program, and MADE the decisions don’t know why they were doing it.
And note that Willy Ley was one of the founders of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt and didn’t leave Germany until 1935, so he was there at the time (1932) that the Germany Army was making the offer to key members of the society which makes him a first hand source as far as the reaction of the society to it, and the political climate at the time.
You remind me of this Park Service archeologist. Some years ago a friend of mine wanted to take his boy scout troop to clean up a garbage dump by one of their old fire watch towers from the 1930’s his grandfather worked at. The Archeologists said it was a historical site and could only be excavated by proper archeologists who could then determine how the fire watchers lived at the tower. He indicated they could just ask his grandfather and his friend who were the ones living there, but he said no, they need original evidence… I guess first hand accounts were against the rules or something.
Yes, there is a place for documentary evidence. But there is also a place for oral history as well, or on this case, the books the principles wrote on it. (Which are actually considered documentary sources by historians since they are first hand accounts of individuals that were present at the time…)
And as I said. I will believe in what the folks actually involved in making the decisions in the program give for its reasons over someone theorizing about it 80 years later.
von Braun and his team were building and flying rockets of military value before the army started funding them. That, and that alone, is sufficient reason for the army to fund them. “Hey, those are weapons you kids are playing with, you either join the army or you stop.” Many of them refused to join the army, and subsequently stopped.
Trent,
Are you kidding? Do you know just how far the rockets they were flying in 1932 went? And how big they were?
Please, buy Willy Ley’s book “Rockets, Missiles & Space Travel by Willy Ley” via Rand’s website and read something on the start of rocketry…..
I’ve never quite gotten around to reading any of Stephenson’s books, but have long planned to get to them, as Jerry Pournelle would say, “Real Soon Now.” After reading the above-linked bit of wackery, I think I’ll just permanently strike him off my prospective reading list. Geez. I mean he could just as easily have noted that airplanes have been using wings for like forever; can’t we come up with something better? What a dipshit.
I wouldn’t let this essay do that. His books remain highly entertaining.