That's the title of my column over at National Review this morning.

Great article Rand.

Very interesting piece. It left me wanting to hear more. Rand, can you refer me to another article that more fully lays out your thoughts on what we should be doing in space?

Not really in one place. If you read through the Fox News column archives for the past year, you'll get a good idea, though.

Question(s) for Rand and the crew:

I don't think that the choice going forward has to be manned versus unmanned, though I hope we all agree that the shuttle program should be taken out behind the barn and killed with an axe.

After killing the shuttle program, it IS important to ask not only what are we trying to accomplish, but when. The advantage of unmanned over manned exploration is that you avoid the high engineering costs of keeping people warm, oxygenated and fed & watered in space. Shouldn't there be something we need live humans to do on Mars or elsewhere before we send them there?

But it doesn't have to be either/or - in truth, most of the technical engineering issues are the same: launch energy, reliability, cost, power for the spacecraft, communications and controls. When unmanned exploration uncovers a destination it makes sense to go visit, then go. Or when technology advances to the point where it's faster and less expensive to go somewhere such as Mars, go THEN. But not at this time, at extremely high cost, with today's technology.

BTW, someone over at Brad DeLong's site posted this URL for Feynman's critique of the Challenger:

http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/SocialConstruction/FeynmanChallengerRpt.html

You continue to be stuck in the paradigm of "exploration." Our space activities should be about much more than that. That was the point of the column.

Well, then, what is the right "paradigm"? The article asks many more questions than it answers, frankly.

The only answers provided are given for space missions that will never be jobs for robots: such as building an orbital infrastructure to mine or deflect dangerous asteroids, building orbital laboratories, creating a new leisure industry and establishing off-world settlements.

I think most people agree that the U.S. desperately needs an inexpensive and reliable launch vehicle or new method(s) to get stuff into orbit and beyond. Beyond that, does it make economic sense to build orbiting laboraties today when the potential benefits of space experiments have been so consistently oversold in the past? Or does it make economic sense at this time to try to establish a human colony on Mars given the cost and lack of tangible benefits? The article doesn't say much about that.

Maybe the idea is that space operations are characterized by high fixed-costs, so it's important to build a flexible launch capability up front that can support a myriad of tasks in space and orbit - that's hinted at but not stated explicitly . . . . . .

The article is not meant to provide answers. It is intended to get people to start asking the right questions.

I'll take a stab:

G.Haubold, before you can begin to discuss one vehicle over another you need to lay out a laundry list of what actual activities you want to take place in space given the constraints of budgets and time. As some NSS person said yesterday "I just want a Space Fairing Civilization" isn't sufficient. Do you really want to go to Mars now? Or do you want to develop the Moon first? Do you want to build space power stations or focus on medical research in LEO? Once you have that laundry list, look at them critically and determine which ones just can't be done right now (i.e. anything requiring Star Trek technology is out). Then take what's left and look for classes of things: i.e. are all of your answers pure science such as determining planetary evolution or hubble style astronomy? Or are they all devoted to industry: asteroid mining, space power, microgravity manufacturing. What about tourism and migration?

Once you have that set of problem statements, then, and only then, can you start making determinations about what kind of vehicles and technology you need.

Mr. __ : I think we're in complete agreement. And some of the activities you listed are probably much more attractive at present than others. That should be where the discussion starts.

But when Instapundit and Lileks write of the marvel of a person driving the American flag into the turf on Mars, that seems little different from saying, "I just want a Space Faring Civilization".

To be concrete, let's assume that colonization becomes an important objective. There may be better ways to pursue that goal than by establishing a colony on the Moon, or on Mars, using off-the-shelf technology. Those environments extremely harsh and hostile to humans - so instead of trying to create small expensive colonies now, attention could be concentrated on: (1) technologies that could make the hostile environment more friendly (as with Venter's attempt to use bacteria to convert atmospheric CO2 into starches), (2) searching out moons or planets with more human-friendly environments, and/or (3) developing the technological underpinnings for a very high speed interplanetary transport vehicle. Compared to the huge expense of putting a colony on the Moon or Mars, I'd think other approaches make more sense in the near-term.

(dunno why my info didn't post last time. I'll do it manually this time)
Michael Mealling

rocketforge.org

You are right, while the glamour of "driving a flag into the turf on Mars" can
stir your soul it doesn't make good public policy or business decision. And it
seems that you might focus on the same aspects as I do (to me colonization
is the priority, humans will do the science once they get there are become
curious about things). But these questions should be the core of the debate,
not SSTO vs ELV vs Shuttle 2 or even Moon vs Mars vs ISS.

I happen to be a member of the Artemis Society
so I'm personally partial to a lunar base (which is actually affordable if
you don't mind getting the version without the leather interior and a sunroof).
But again, before I even suggest that as a possible goal, somewhere along the
line we need to have a national discussion on whether or not we should focus on
getting large numbers of humans into space permanently. And that means asking
some really hard questions about just exactly what do we want to do and are
we willing to pay for it. If the goal is to employ people in some house
member's district then I'd personally rather just pay them all to do something
unrelated to space. IMHO, something this important shouldn't be a jobs program.
Ok, now I'm rambling....

-MM

"I just want a Space Faring Civilization," is the unspoken bias, which I share, of the great majority of the people even motivated to comment on this topic. That a market approach will more efficiently allocate resources to the goal is probably also true, but we will be disappointed to see that the two memes here are quite likely to be mutually exclusive. Asteroid mining and residential off-world habitation are solutions to anticipated future shortages that will not be anywhere near severe enough to make spacefaring profitable for generations. Space tourism seems to have a slightly higher profit potential, but that too is probably wishful thinking given that long term Antarctic camping and sea bottom vacation homes still haven?t caught on. The fraction of the hyper rich demographic who can afford the high costs and are willing to take the extreme risks and discomfort and have the physical and technical competence for long tours is not very big. Those of us simultaneously hoping for a break-up of the state space-faring monopoly and rooting for those red blooded American space entrepreneurs need to acknowledge that if we get what we want, we will probably witness the brief blossoming and bursting of a private space travel bubble, and the (hopefully metaphorical, but probably also in some cases literal) flameout of the early private entries. Doomed, romantic aerospace boondoggles litter the imaginative landscape. Zeppelins, Spruce Gooses, Pan Am Clippers, Ekranoplans, ornithropters, hover-cars, and jet belts all have lavish fan websites devoted to technologies that fire the imagination, but will never be commercially viable.

David: excellent post.

As much as I would like a space faring civilization, I don't think it makes economic sense with today's technology.

Past explorers were wonderful, but most of them were either in it for the money, or were financed by people who were in it for the money. And even then, it didn't work until naval technology and economic progress made it possible on a sustained basis (yes, I believe the evidence that Vikings and/or Europeans made it to NA long before Columbus).

The people pushing for colonization soon on the moon, or on Mars are premature optimistists, at best.

Doomed aerospace venture done by private enterprise is perfectly alright by me. All of them put together cost less than what NASA probably spent on toilet paper in its existence. Even if the entire business of spece is doomed to failure (which seems unlikely since satellites has proven immensely useful) the private market will make that clear at much lower cost than the government how to demonstrate anything.

Another reason not to give over everything to robots is that I fear NASA will do for robotics what theyve done for aerospace.

> Well, then, what is the right "paradigm"?

There isn't one right paradigm; that's part of his point.

"Part" of his point? At the roots of the question, that is the point.

I would like to suggest that this argument, "that the space program is perhaps not the wisest investment", is only the tip of the iceberg, in terms of human exploration and endeavors. The "Human Condition" seems to preclude any "real" research and development that benefits mankind in general, in favor of "minor conveniences" that benefit only a few. How does a remote control for a television come before curing cancer, or, that we all have this high speed internet access but people are still starving, even right here in the US? Silly questions? perhaps.

I would even say that although technology has excelled from the industrial to the information age, human interaction and society has barely moved.

I, quite frankly, am dissapointed that we're not a little further along at this point. I mean It's been over a hundred years since the steam engine.

How can we cause research dollars to go to the good of the earth, rather than to the good of the investor? Are these goals mutually exclusive? Is capitalism serving us well in this way? This system we've developed over hundreds of years to regulate our society, can it carry us where we want to go? Or is it dragging us down? Holding us back?

Thank for your indulgence, I've wondered all my life why small inventions get made while the big ones go lacking. Perhaps it's because the small ones are easier. Your discussion reminded me of this question.

The fact is that curing every disease may even be anti evolutionary, weakening our race exponentially as time goes by. Allowing the weak to reproduce as much as the healthy. Utopia will probably continue to elude us. Or is this, as they say "as good as it gets"?