You know, correcting Gregg Easterbrook’s malanalysis of space issues could be a full-time job in itself. It’s dismaying that people who should be intelligent enough to otherwise know better glom onto them in order to validate their own unknowledgable preconceptions on the subject. And by the way, it’s no insult to be called unknowledgable on these issues. Few people are, even many in the space industry. To become so requires a huge investment in time and study that few have the time for.
I find it particularly frustrating, because there is so much to legitimately criticize in the recent proposal, NASA, and space policy in general, but the opportunities to do so are drowned out by better known, but far less knowledgable people who rest on their laurels from a few lucky shots against the shuttle a quarter of a century ago.
I don’t really have time, but since he gets entirely too much credibility in the blogosphere and elsewhere, I’ll take apart his latest bit of misinformation.
Just the cost numbers for the Crew Exploration Vehicle alone–forget all the probes, colonies, and other stuff–make Bush’s announcement yesterday an all-time monument to budgetary low-balling. He declared that for the next five years, $12 billion will be devoted to the Moon-Mars initiative. That, the president said, is enough to fund new the Moon probes and development of the ill-named Crew Exploration Vehicle. This figure is utterly ridiculous, a mere fraction of what will be entailed in anything beyond some “paper spacecraft”–engineers’ lingo for studies and Power Point presentations of hardware that never gets built. Boeing expects to spend around $7.5 billion merely to develop the new 7E7 jetliner, which will stay within the atmosphere and use very well-understood engineering. The development cost of the Crew Exploration Vehicle will be several times greater
This paragraph is chock full of nonsense. He’s doing something worse than comparing apples to oranges–he’s comparing space capsules to commercial airliners. There is no way to infer the costs of one from the other–they are totally irrelevant to each other. One carries hundreds of people, has to fly thousands of times, provides its own propulsion, has to meet all requirements of FAA certification. The other is simply a can that carries four people or so, with basic subsystems like a reaction-control system, avionics, life support, with thermal protection and a recovery system if it’s going to do an entry. And in fact, it’s also “well-understood engineering,” and has been since 1968 or so. It may be expensive, but there’s no way to tell by looking at airliners.
The best way to tell is to do a parametric cost analysis on it. It’s basically an upgraded Apollo capsule (and perhaps service module for modest propulsion and additional consumables). We know how much that cost the first time, and it should be easier now, particularly considering the technology advances over the past four decades (e.g., computer microization). If NASA can’t develop that vehicle in a few years for a few billion, it should be disbanded.
The timetable is also a low-ball. Bush declared that the Crew Exploration Vehicle would be tested in 2008, just four years from now. There’s no way on Earth, as it were, this could happen without a cost-no-object crash program to rival Apollo. The Air Force’s new F22 fighter has been in development for 13 years; an entire new spaceship can be developed in four years?
I didn’t hear Bush say that. 2008 was the first robotic probes of the moon in anticipation of a manned return seven years later.
If we could develop such a thing in four years the first time on an Apollo budget, why couldn’t we affordably do it again in ten years (first flight is supposed to be 2014) on a less urgent basis?
[Update]
Commenter Duncan Young says that Gregg is right on this point, but that doesn’t make him right that it can’t be done. As I said, it’s perfectly feasible to develop and test a capsule, and associated service module, in four years, particularly since we already know how to do it, and have done it before. Apollo was a crash program, but the capsule itself wasn’t really a long pole. As an aside, this is probably the only major development that will have to occur during Bush’s term of office.
[/Update]
It may be that we can’t, but Gregg certainly offers no coherent reasons why we can’t, except with another absurd comparison–to a multi-mission fighter that’s gotten into a lot of political problems with interservice rivalries, and which again, fly hundreds of sorties and have to be maintainable by high-school grads.
And I don’t know what Gregg means by “spaceship,” unless it’s a way of intimidating his readership into thinking that he’s one of them there “rocket scientists,” and knows what he’s talking about. If he means a “ship” that flies in space, there’s nothing inherently expensive or difficult about that.
It’s just a capsule. It’s not a launcher.
But if, as Bush declared, it will be capable both of flying back and forth to the space station and of flying to the Moon, we’re talking quite a machine.
You mean, like the Apollo capsule, which was capable of both flying back and forth to the moon, and to Skylab (and to meet a Soyuz)?
Quite a machine. How ever will we do it?
Alternatively, a smarter approach might be to construct one spaceship that always stays in space, looping back and forth between Earth and Moon; people, supplies, and fuel would be launched to meet the ship in Earth-orbit, but the ship itself would never come down. (This was a Werner von Braun idea.) That would mean design, engineering, and construction of a type of flying machine that has never existed before. Development of the space shuttle cost between $50 billion and $100 billion in current dollars, depending on whose estimate you believe. The idea that something more challenging, the first-ever true spaceship, can be developed for $12 billion is bunkum.
I hesitate to call ideas loopy, but this one is literally. He says that it would be smarter, then he says it would “mean design, engineering, and construction of a type of flying machine that has never existed before.” He’s criticizing a plan that doesn’t require that as being unaffordable and requiring decades, and then proposing one that’s undefined and has never been done before as somehow “smarter.” On what planet?
Again, this is not a Shuttle. This is not an airliner. It’s not a fighter jet.
It’s a supersized Apollo capsule. We have an existence proof that we know how to build them. It will be easier now than it was forty years ago, honest. If we need a separate lander to get down to the lunar surface, we know how to build those, too. It’s even possible to develop things in parallel, though I suspect that only the capsule will be required for the 2008 date, so they have something to replace the Shuttle capability for crew transfer in 2010.
And what’s going to put this Crew Exploration Vehicle into orbit? No rocket that exists in the world today is capable of lifting the Apollo capsule and Moon lander of the late 1960s. Unless the Moon-bound twenty-first-century Crew Exploration Vehicle is going to be significantly smaller than the Apollo of a generation ago–carrying just one person and no supplies–a new, very large rocket will be required.
No, Gregg, we have acquired no experience with docking vehicles, or orbital mating over the past four decades. It’s inconceivable that we could launch a capsule on one flight of a Delta or Atlas, and a service module on another flight, and hook them up in LEO. We have to redevelop Saturn.
And of course, even if one is truly unknowledgable enough to believe that, we could develop a Shuttle-derived launch vehicle with Saturn-like capability in about four years for a billion or three (though that’s a separate budget than the one for the Crew Exploration Vehicle). We’ve known how to do that since the eighties. We haven’t done it because there’s been no need, not because it can’t be done, or because it’s unaffordable.
We shouldn’t expect George W. Bush himself to know that $12 billion is not enough to develop a spaceship. We should expect the people around Bush, and at the top of NASA, to know this. And apparently they are either astonishingly ill-informed and na