Transterrestrial Musings

February 26, 2003
Evitability

"Ignorance is bliss." "See no evil, hear no evil."

How often have we heard those old aphorisms? In many cases, they actually make sense.

There is a disease, named Huntington's Chorea. As the link says, "Genetically, it is an autosomal dominant disorder with complete penetrance." In laymen's terms, that means that it is a genetic defect. If you have it, you will get the disease, and it will be a long and terrible road, including progressive loss of bodily control and increasing dementia, until death. The only uncertainty is when it will first appear. It can occur at any age, but mostly it strikes in the prime of life.

There is a test that can be performed to determine whether or not one carries the ominous gene. Some, whose ancestors carried the gene, or even died of the disease itself, and are thus at risk, choose to take it. Others do not.

There are some genetic diseases that it's important to diagnose early, because genetics isn't always destiny--often a simple change in diet can result in a long and healthy life.

But for Huntington's, from a medical standpoint, there is no right choice as to whether or not to take the test--knowledge that you are so doomed can do nothing to stave off the inevitable, since there's currently no known prophylactic treatment (that is, there's nothing that can be done about it that can't be done after the syndrome itself becomes apparent). Some, however, want to know, so that they might incorporate the knowledge into planning their life.

On the other hand, many choose the blissful ignorance. Since there's really nothing they can do about it, they prefer to live life in the uncertainty. Like the popular notion of the cat in Schroedinger's poison box, that is both dead and alive simultaneously, they live in a netherworld of neither sick nor ill until actually diagnosed, and in the optimistic hope that they won't come down with it. Who is to say that their choice is wrong?

In most cases, of course, ignorance is not bliss at all. There's an accompanying saying about "living in a fool's paradise."

It all depends on the degree to which the knowledge allows us to avoid bad outcomes.

Daniel Dennett recently wrote a book about (among other things) avoidance of bad outcomes. The ability to do so has evolved, and it's what sets the higher animals, particularly conscious ones, apart from simpler organisms.

There are many contrapositive words in English that don't have the positive versions. Have you ever heard someone praised as particularly "ane" or "ept"? Or working hard to keep their employees "gruntled"?

A similar one is "evitable." We're all familiar with the concept of something that is inevitable, or unavoidable, but man has clawed himself up to his present state by learning how to avoid bad outcomes--to make them, in a word, increasingly "evitable."

One of the reasons that our space program is in such a box is that we haven't paid enough attention to evitability. It's starting to look more and more as though, once the Columbia launched in mid January, and suffered damage to the leading edge of its left wing, its destruction on entry was inevitable. Yesterday, yet another NASA memo came to light that some had recognized this, but not passed it up the line.

While this may seem like malfeasance if true, consider the mindset and assumptions that may have laid behind such a decision.

I've written before on the fact that low earth orbit remains a wilderness, into which the shuttle orbiter must be self sufficient in whatever state it departed the earth. There are no maintenance facilities, no motels for the crew to stay at while vehicles are inspected and repaired, so they can return safely to earth.

Because we launched the orbiter into such a wilderness, given its design, its fate was sealed shortly after launch. Imagine yourself in the position of someone at NASA. You know that, if the thermal protection system is damaged, then the orbiter--a quarter of our Shuttle fleet, and seven gallant crew--is doomed, and there's no realistic backup plan. Like a Huntington's Chorea candidate, do you want to run the test? What would you do with a positive result?

Early in the mission, the crew will have two weeks to do nothing except think about their impending fate, and it's unlikely that any useful science will be performed. Late in the mission, they could do nothing except make peace with their god, and say goodbye to their loved ones.

While it's tragic in retrospect that the crew didn't have the opportunity to do that, it's understandable, and human, that NASA officials wanted to avoid having to deal with the unavoidable, that is, the inevitable. In such a situation, groupthink could certainly set in that would make it difficult to break bad news to management, when all knew that it was hopeless if the fatal diagnosis was correct.

The fault lies not with twenty-first-century engineers under the pressure of having to assess and diagnose a situation, that they were helpless to resolve as a result of decisions made decades earlier, but in the fundamental philosophy of our space program, that eventually consigned a crew and vehicle to fiery death and destruction.

Dennett points out that humanity's freedom of action is a result of an evolutionary process that has gradually opened up a virtual explosion of "evitability," a plethora of options for avoiding catastrophe.

Our limited vision of space activities, in which a few astronauts are launched on a fragile vehicle a few times a year, has dramatically constrained the evitability of the new frontier. Disaster has been inevitable. Its rarity is due not to any wisdom in planning or range of options on our part, but only because we do so little, and have so few opportunities.

Until, as we have on earth, we take an entirely new approach to space development, taming the orbital wilderness with a robust infrastructure that can provide safe havens for our people, and facilities for inspecting and repairing our vital transports, we will remain vulnerable to fatal diagnoses for which we have no cure.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:22 PM

February 25, 2003
Light Posting Today

We're driving back up to San Bruno. Maybe something tonight.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:26 AM

February 24, 2003
And Now For Something Completely Different

Warning: If you have a tendency to get songs stuck in your head, DO NOT READ THIS POST!

OK, I warned you.

Here it is, a story from Reuters about songs getting stuck in your head.

Ninety-eight percent of respondents said they had experienced stuck songs. Most said the episodes occurred "frequently," and lasted an average of a few hours.
Songs with lyrics were most often the culprits, a trend that Kellaris said is not surprising. Often what gets sticky is not just a tune, but also lyrics, a trend he calls "stupid lyrics syndrome." Combining a tune and lyrics ups the chance of song snippets staying with the listener for hours, he said.

Episodes of earworms also tend to strike people with neurotic tendencies more often. These people are not seriously neurotic, Kellaris said, but may simply be more prone to worrying and anxiety, and may have neurotic habits like biting pencils or tapping fingernails.

But for something even funnier (as is often the case), here's a great Free Republic thread about it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:03 PM

More Evidence Of Impact

An asteroid came within sixty miles of wiping out Rome in the fifth century.

Just keep whistling past that graveyard, folks...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:06 PM

They're Looking For A War

North Korea just launched a missile into the Sea of Japan, in either a test (likely) or a failed attack (unlikely), or as a means of intimidation and ratcheting up the tension for more blackmail.

They continue to up the ante.

If Japan gets hit by a nuke, what are those who fought so hard against missile defense for so long--you know, the ones who said that it was unnecessary because rogue states didn't have nukes, and anyway, they could be deterred--going to say? What words of wisdom and compassion will they have for the survivors?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:26 PM

"IT" Is A Bust

Despite the big media splash leading up to its announcement, the Segway scooter (aka "Ginger", aka "IT") hasn't come anywhere close to meeting anticipated sales objectives.

It's another case of falling in love with a technology, and ignoring the real business issues. Too bad NASA can't take a lesson from it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:41 PM

New Worm Attack

Lovgate.C is on the way.

Read the article and quit using Microsoft mail clients.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:46 AM

I Hate When That Happens

A car was severely damaged by a rare Norwegian flying moose.

If it were a Frostbite Falls moose, I might have thought that it was shot out of Rocky's arms by Boris and Natasha.

No word from the driver as to whether or not it once bit his sister...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:35 AM

Nanny Knows Best

The TSA is still dragging its feet in allowing pilots to be armed, despite the Congressional mandate, which they continue to interpret, apparently, as an option.

Price said the response to the mechanics of how the weapons will be handled, transported and stored has been mixed.
"We are pleased that we will have immediate access to the weapon on the flight deck," he said. "But in terms of [transportation], it's a huge problem."

Storing the weapon inside a locked box, rather than on their person - where law enforcement officers and armed private citizens transport their handguns - poses a number of problems for pilots, Price believes.

"That just makes us a huge target. It just paints a bulls-eye on every pilot, whether he happens to be an armed pilot or not," he argued.

"Now, all of the sudden, my pilot's uniform gives the criminal element - that may be in the employee parking lot at three in the morning when I show up for work - some idea that I may be carrying a very high-value weapon," Price explained, "and they know that that weapon is unavailable to me to use in self-defense."

Gee, is it possible that they're trying to discourage pilots from carrying guns? Couldn't be...

One of the many reasons to dislike this Administration. Not, of course, that any Democrat would be any better.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:24 AM

Confidence

Bill Whittle has issued forth another gem, perhaps his best essay so far.

We hear of polls saying that upwards of 75% of countries like England and France see the United States as the greatest danger to the world, and it knocks the wind out of us. No, that?s can?t be right. Can it? Can they really believe that?
Some do. Many do.

Some of this emotion is genuine, real fear and panic brought on by our unparalleled success, and our past miscalculations and blunders. Some of it is envy, pure and simple. Some is driven by pain, the pain of lost greatness and glory. Some is projection, a sense of how tempting it might be to hold such power, from countries with histories of real empires, real governors, and real subjugation.

And some of it ? much of it ? is intentionally aimed at our decency, our sense of restraint and isolation, our desire to get back to our own happy and safe lives and turn our back on the world lost in the delusion that we long to possess it.

Go read it, and encourage him to write the book.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:36 AM

February 23, 2003
The Evolution Of Freedom

One of the benefits of spending a great amount of time in Los Angeles is the opportunity to attend lectures like the one I did today at Cal Tech.

I went up to hear Dan Dennett give a talk focused on his most recent book, "Freedom Evolves." Sadly, I've neither read, nor even purchased the book, else I could have gotten his signature. Having heard the lecture, however, I'm now determined to do both.

The lecture was at the smaller auditorium in Baxter Hall, above the Ramo auditorium. It was packed, standing (and sitting in the aisles) room only. I arrived late due to unanticipated traffic situations, so I stood in the back. That turned out to be OK, because the presentation on his laptop apparently hadn't been coordinated with the video computer projector--several minutes were wasted in reconfiguring his machine in video resolution matching that of the projector, while the moderator (the event was sponsored by the Southern California Skeptics Society) read from an updated list of oxymorons to keep the audience entertained temporarily.

I was struck (as I always am at such occasions of meeting of scientists and engineers) by the incongruity of presumably high-tech people being flummoxed by the technological vagaries of modern computer equipment (in this case, of course, being Microsoft, so probably beyond the wiles of the brilliant Caltechies in the audience). It's always interesting to be in a room full of people in which the average IQ is probably about 130. As representative examples, both Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker were in attendance. Fortunately, it wasn't totally inscrutable--after about ten minutes or so, the appropriate menus were dragged down--Program/Settings/Control Panel/Monitor--and the appropriate resolution selected, and all was well.

And so the lecture finally started.

I should preface this by saying that I've read three other works by Dennett: Consciousness Explained, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and The Mind's I (co-edited with Douglas Hofstadter). I admire his work, and consider him one of the most interesting thinkers on the planet on these subjects. That said, while I found the lecture entertaining and interesting, it was ultimately disappointing and unsatisfying. That said, it was, after all, a one-hour lecture, and it would be unfair for me to pass judgement on his theses without actually reading the book, and I hope to do so in the near future, time and dollars permitting.

The fundamental thesis that I took away was that he wanted to blow up the equivalence in peoples' minds between determinism and lack of free will. Here are the most memorable bits (you can be assured that they were memorable because I took no notes, and I have a lousy memory, so anything that's preserved, hours after the fact, and still available for blogging, is by definition, memorable...).

It is possible to have free will in a deterministic universe. (I suspect that if pressed to the wall, he would admit that this isn't true in an ultimate, philosophical sense, but his thesis is about practical senses, as in how should society treat criminals). In an ultimate, philosophical sense, in fact, free will, like consciousness, may very well be an illusion. Of course, that statement always begs the question--who is being fooled?

The important point that he really wanted to make is that a deterministic universe is not only not antipathetic to free will, but actually makes it more useful, in an evolutionary sense.

As an example, he noted the case of walking across a field in a thunderstorm. In an undeterministic universe, a harm-avoiding agent would be at a loss as to what to do, because events would be utterly random. But suppose that lightning strikes could be predicted. In that event, knowledge would be available as to whether or not the trek across the field, at that time, would be safe. Therefore, a deterministic universe, with associated knowledge, could enhance the value of choice, so determinism actually increases freedom.

He has coined a new, and useful, word--evitability. You can figure out the meaning--just think of the opposite of ept, or ane, or gruntled, which are not true English words, but have counterwords.

He believes that contrary to determinism making all of life's actions (including human life's actions) inevitable, evolution, in its growth of complexity, has allowed us to make the unpleasant consequences of life evitable--that is, avoidable, to a degree, and because avoiders have an evolutionary advantage, they have even more of an advantage in a deterministic universe in which outcomes from bad decisions can be actually predicted, given sufficient knowledge and experience.

In his view, free will, and consciousness, like intelligence, are emergent properties of a congregation of entities that do not possess those properties. One of his quotes, in the context of the question about whether or not robots have souls: "Yes, there is a soul--but it consists of tiny robots!"

However, based on the book's title, I think that the important, take-home correlary thesis, is that freedom, which is derived from free will, has evolved as well. It, like consciousness, and life itself, is an emergent property, that is derived from a quality provided by a sufficiently-large quantity. Freedom is more than the sum of non-free parts, just as smart entities can be created by congregating large numbers of non-smart things.

There are conditions that allow life, and there are conditions that permit freedom, not only in action, but in thought, and those conditions must be preserved for freedom of thought, will and action to be preserved. Just as, under certain conditions, life could go extinct, there are certain conditions that might allow life to go on, but for freedom to go extinct.

I found this a particularly topical subject, because in much of the world, the conditions that permit freedom continue to evolve, and we are perhaps on the verge of enhancing the conditions for it in one particular country, as we hope to liberate it from a sociopath who believes that the world exists for the fulfillment of his own desires and pleasure.

While I agree with Dennett's basic idea, it remains a dangerous one to many people, as he admitted himself in the lecture. He believes that the notion that it is dangerous is a mistaken one, but that won't prevent them from shouting him down, because they will sincerely continue to believe that a deterministic universe implies a lack of morality.

Here is the serious problem with it, not in terms of its validity, but in terms of societal acceptance of it.

There are a large number of people who are able to accept both the scientific theory of evolution, and the existence of a Biblical God. I'm not talking about the fundamentalist Christians who object to the teaching of evolution to their children, but the mainstream Christians (particularly Catholics, such as the Jesuits) who have the mental agility to balance these two concepts in their minds, and are not accordingly currently mounting petition drives against the teaching of evolution in the schools.

They reconcile the two seemingly-incompatible beliefs by calling the Book of Genesis a metaphor, and by believing that while man evolved from lower animals, something happened a few thousand years ago that made him unique. God gave him what the AI types call "the juice." Or a soul.

Dennett is kicking the ladder out from under this philosophical balancing act by saying that while humans are special, and they do have a "soul" in some sense, that they are only somewhat more special than their non-human ancestors, who also possessed the same property--just to a lesser degree.

That doesn't grate in any way on those of us who are provisional transcendental materialistic reductionists, but for those who believe that man is unique among all animals, it is not just unsettling--it is indeed heresy and unreconciliable with the foundation of their beliefs, because it doesn't draw a bright line between man and ape. Or aardvark. If it's a gradient, rather than a binary condition, he's opened up a whole new front in the culture wars, drawing in vast new brigades of believers in the concept of man in God's image.

He spent a good deal of his talk in describing how he understands his opponents' concerns, and that they arise only from a mistaken understanding of the implications of current evolutionary theory.

I wish that he were right.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:00 PM

Political Labels And Self Censorship

OK, I attended the LA blog panel last night, and also didn't go to Heather's and get smashed. My excuse for not writing anything about it sooner is the same excuse that I had to not get blotto at Chateau Havrilesky--I'm nursing a recuperating Patricia, who's recovering from some minor surgery. I felt a little guilty about going at all, but in her loving way (of which I am always undeserving) she insisted, so we rented her some movies (it's amazing how much more quickly movies can be selected when they're being selected for just one person...), I made dinner for her, and took off for the event. I left later than I wanted, and LA traffic was typical Saturday night--there was no way to get there quickly, so I missed the first twenty minutes or so.

Luke Ford, who was on the panel (sorry, no permalink), has a good rundown of the highlights. It was a rollicking good discussion, and seemed more focused on the dynamics and politics of blogging, rather than last week's event in Chinatown, which seemed to be more about technology. I didn't attend that one, partly because it looked a little too hip to me, and anyone who knows me knows that I'm the lord of unhip.

That is to say, I'm not down with it. I'm not even with it.

I don't even care what "it" is. I'm just not a hep cat.

From what I heard, my impression was correct, and I've no regrets in not attending, since it would have meant leaving Patricia alone two Saturday nights in a row. I was quite pleased to attend this one, though. Cathy Seipp did a great job moderating, and because the audience was small, and smart, it wasn't just a panel discussion--it was a seminar, with a lot of good, civilized give and take from the floor.

What I'd like to focus on are a couple of issues that came up in the discussion.

The first is that there seemed to me an inordinate amount of discussion about the political leanings of the blogosphere, or at least that portion that seems to get the most attention, some of which was on the panel. It was another display of the sterility and uselessness of political labels like "right-wing" and "conservative" and "liberal." Of the people on the panel, I doubt if any of them would self identify as either "right-wing" or "conservative." (Though it was pointed out that we did have one religious conservative on the panel--Luke Ford, who's an unorthodox orthodox Jew, complete with yarmulke, who also writes a lot about sex and porn...) Like Glenn, I'm always surprised to be called either of those things.

My political views are always evolving somewhat, but if I have to be labeled, I consider myself a child of the Enlightenment (not the French-style one, with the guillotines and all), but a classical nineteenth-century liberal. But I don't think that there's any one label that can encompass any person who thinks broadly and cogently about issues, and to attempt to apply one is self defeating and pointless.

But many people, including many journalists, have trouble describing someone that they can't put into a box, so they come up with various litmus tests that allow them to categorize folks. Example: pro removing Saddam, with or without yet another UNSC resolution="right wing." Another example: no problem with human cloning="left-wing or liberal." Yet another example: Not understanding that the president is a retarded monkey (disregarding the facts that he graduated from Harvard with an MBA, and seems to outwit apparently much smarter non-simians at every political turn)="right wing extremist."

Of course, one then has to be careful not to use too many different kinds of test strips, or one gets conflicting results.

I suspect that this is what happens when many people read weblogs. They read it until they see something that produces a bright color change in the pH paper, and at that point they consider the test completed, and blogger categorized. If you consider yourself a liberal Democrat, right now one of your strongest litmus tests might be the war, or even more specifically, an insufficient amount of antipathy to the war, and specifically to this "unelected Administration." So it's not surprising that many place "warbloggers" (with whom, on many other issues they might find themselves in agreement) in the camp of the "right." But I think that this is more of a perception, focused through imperfect prisms of thought, than any reality.

This morning, Dennis "the Menace" Kucinich was on Meet the Press. Russert challenged him to back up his statement that "it's about oooiiiiilllll!!"

He trotted out the usual (circumstantial only) argument, such as it is: Iraq has oil; the Bush people are oil men; they've offered no other reason: therefore it must be oil.

Never mind that Venezuela has oil, Saudi Arabia has oil, Iraq's oil could be gained without sending hundreds of thousands of troops to the region and risking the lives of military men and women by simply doing a deal with Saddam.

Never mind the fact that the President has been making a case, and that perhaps Congressman Kucinich is simply too dim to comprehend it, or he doesn't believe it, but to say that the President's offered no other reasons is simply untrue.

The argument is simply hogwash. Is to say that to be a right winger?

I don't think that blogging, or success in blogging, is about ideology. It's about clear thinking, and argumentation based on facts as best they can be ascertained. I don't know, perhaps, right now, that looks "right wing," for whatever reason. I still have to go with a much simpler, yet more accurate formulation; in Charles Johnson's words, it's simply anti-idiotarian.

The other issue that came up was as a result of a question by Susannah Breslin to Luke Ford--to wit, since she thought that one of the best things about Luke's blog was his errrmmm...wide range of content, not all of it family rated: was he concerned about censorship in general, and did he feel that he had to self censor?

Fortunately, Eugene Volokh fielded this admirably, because I found the question almost meaningless as stated. Censorship, like "hate," and "racism," has become a dramatically overused word, to the point that it's losing almost any useful meaning. When a woman who wants to be paid by the taxpayer to smear chocolate on her body loses her NEA grant, she cries censorship, and many agree with her, when of course it's nothing of the kind.

"Self censorship" is either an oxymoron, or a tautology, or perhaps paradoxically, both. Every writer engages in "self censorship." Every word I write--even every word that is going into this post, even how to spell it, if you're an avant-gard poet, is a choice. But the word for it is not really "self censorship." It's called editing, and judgement.

I suspect that what Susannah meant was, "do you ever not write something you'd otherwise like to because you fear some kind of repercussions from it?"

And of course, the answer is, of course. All the time.

I also don't go out to the grocery in my bathrobe, though it might be much more convenient, out of similar fears.

But again, that's simply judgement. Every action may carry consequences. I might write something that makes people angry, and not want to read my weblog any more. Or perhaps it will reduce their faith in my knowledge, so that they'll be less likely to take, for example, my space policy advice. I have to judge (and censor, if you insist on using that inappropriate word) whether the words that I'm using, and ideas I'm expressing, are best accomplishing my objectives for that particular post, and for my weblog in general.

Similarly, when I write a column for Fox News, or Tech Central Station, I'm more careful in my word choice and tone than I am on the weblog, because I know that's what those publications expect, and if I submit (at least consistently) material that they feel inappropriate, or of no interest to their readers, I won't be writing for them any more. And once in a while (and fortunately, not very often, so I guess I have good judgement), I guess wrong, and submit something that they do decide to change. But that's not censorship--again, it's called "editing," and that's their job, and I never resent it or consider them censors.

Censorship has a very precise meaning--the prevention, by a government, of a point of view or piece of information being published. Beyond that, everyone has full freedom to publish whatever they want on their blog, and to submit anything they want to other publications. The flip side of that freedom is the necessity to accept the consequences, whether they be loss of readership, rejection of material, or even, in extreme cases, libel suits.

Are these legitimate concerns? Of course. Are they concerns about censorship? Absolutely not. Let us maintain the integrity of the meanings of words; when we lose them, we lose the ability to discuss things intelligently and rationally.

[Update at 8:30 PM PST]

Steven Den Beste has some further thoughts (though probably independently of mine) on the absurdity of boxes for bloggers.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:52 AM

February 21, 2003
More Appeasement

Iowahawk has the story of another rogue regime that hasn't been getting as much press.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:16 PM

In His Name

Rod Dreher has an interesting column on a true American religious war.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:02 PM

More Columbia Info

It's quite clear now that Columbia was shedding parts over California, and perhaps earlier. It's starting to look amazing that she made it all the way to Texas. Very interesting article. Check out the time-lapse photo over California, and the animated radar image over Texas.

[Update at 12:30 PM PST]

It just occurs to me that if the Columbia had been headed toward Edwards instead of Florida, the breakup would have occurred far out over the deep waters of the Pacific, and we'd probably have very little physical evidence.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:47 AM

Whither Space Tourism?

Or instead, wither? Leonard David has a wrap up from some of the industry players post Columbia.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:02 AM

February 20, 2003
It's A Dog

Thomas James has analyzed the Level 1 requirements for the Orbital Space Plane that NASA released this week, sparing me from having to do so.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:58 PM

False Choices

One of the frustrating things about public opinion polls and political debate is the lack of nuance in them.

The potential positions on an issue are generally dichotomized into either a "for or against," or into two (and only two) different positions, usually one on the "left" and the other on the "right." And of course, it's always assumed that if you're not for one, then you must be for the other, though of course it means nothing of the kind, and ignores a third or fourth or fifth possibility that isn't even under discussion.

In addition, even poll results that have well-framed questions are often misinterpreted by the poll takers and pundits. As an example, consider the ever popular "presidential approval rating." The question asks how you think the president is doing. If asked, I would say that I don't approve of Mr. Bush's job performance--there are many problems I have with this administration in terms of overspending, incompetence and annoyance on the homeland security front, the War on (Some) Drugs, positions on cloning and research, etc. So simple-minded political analysts would therefore mistakenly conclude that I'd vote for his opponent if the election were held today, which is, of course, nonsense, because I know that his opponent would almost certainly be even worse in other ways.

The problem is particularly bad when it comes to (you knew I was getting to this, didn't you?) space policy.

There was an infuriating recent Gallup poll commissioned by CNN/USA Today on the future direction of the space program.

The first question was the usual, useless one--would you like to see more, less or the same amount of money spent on NASA? This of course, ignores the issue of whether you approve of the way that NASA spends its money, so it would be hard for me to come up with an answer to that one. It also doesn't take into account that most people have no idea how much money we spend on NASA in the first place. Inform them first, both in absolute dollars and relative percentage of the federal budget, and you'll almost certainly get a different answer.

But the next question is the most problematic:

Some people feel the U.S. space program should concentrate on unmanned missions like Voyager 2, which send back information from space. Others say the U.S. should concentrate on maintaining a manned space program like the space shuttle. Which comes closer to your view?

Ummm....none of the above? The question sets up what logicians call a false choice, ignoring other viable options and implying that these are the only two possibilities--either send robots out to "explore space" (since space has no other purpose than to be "explored," right?) or continue to spend billions of taxpayer dollars sending a few government employees "exploring" low earth orbit.

Given the political vapidity of the questions, the results are encouraging for supporters of the status quo. Even in the wake of the loss of Columbia, support for the "manned space program" remains strong, and support for unmanned space exploration has increased from five years ago.

Of course, the poll is frustrating for those who'd like to see a new direction to our space activities, both because of the results, and the fact that the question of alternatives isn't even asked.

And as usual, the poll reflects the fact that the people who make space policy are similarly stuck in the same stale thought patterns. The usual dumb and pointless debate of robots versus astronauts has reawakened, with no discussion, useful or otherwise, about what we're actually trying to accomplish in space, because everyone assumes, mistakenly, that we already know that.

There was, however, one almost-interesting question. Not as interesting as it could have been, but it's one that was rarely asked a few years ago, before the flights of Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth. It was, "would you like to be a passenger in the Shuttle yourself"?

Not surprisingly, the desire for a Shuttle ride has diminished somewhat since the nation saw seven astronauts incinerated in the skies over Texas three weeks ago, but it still remains high. Three out of ten people would like a ride.

The question, of course, would have been much more interesting if it were more generic. "Would you like to take a ride into space?" "Would you like to visit a luxury resort in orbit?" "How about one on the Moon?"

Here would be my biased poll questions:

"Do you think that NASA should be doing things that make these things possible, or continuing to squander billions sending a few civil servants in circles?"

"Do you want to send your hard-earned money to Washington so that robots can go out to Mars to have all the fun, or would you like to go see the Red Planet yourself, up close and personal?"

"Do you want a space program for robots and NASA astronauts, or do you want one for the rest of us?"

So far, it's clear that these are not the questions on the table in Washington right now. If they were, NASA wouldn't be talking about a multi-billion-dollar Orbital Space Plane (OSP) that will cost almost as much to operate as the Shuttle. Instead, the discussion would be about how to develop a vibrant space transportation industry, that can expand and drop costs with an increasing market.

Until these are the kinds of questions that poll takers ask, and pundits and policy makers debate, we can't expect to break out of the space policy box that we've been in for the past half a century, and we'll continue to make very little progress in expanding humanity, and life itself, off the planet.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:12 AM

February 18, 2003
OK, One More Beating Up On The Frogs Post...

Yeah, kick duplicitous snail-eaters while they're down--that's my motto...

Tony Blankley isn't impressed, either.

The list of countries under the French whip is ironic: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania and Bulgaria. All these countries were on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain during the Age of Communism. They were unlucky enough to be occupied by the Soviet Red Army in the closing months of WWII and thus lived in enforced slavery for half a century. But geography was destiny. France was occupied by American, British, Canadian and other British Empire troops, and was thus saved from such a fate by their English- speaking liberators. It is worth recalling that while French soldiers were throwing down their rifles in 1940 as the Germans advanced, the flower of Polish manhood charged into the invading Nazi tanks on horseback in the last and most gallant cavalry charge in history. Of course, they were killed to the last man. While the Poles were dying with their boots on, the French were living on their knee-pads (during which, they cheerfully ferreted out and shipped their French Jews off to the German death camps). How dare the French attempt to blackmail the Poles -- of all people (and the Czechs and Slovaks, who they helped to sell out at Munich).

Ooohhh, that's gonna hurt tomorrow.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:07 PM

And The Beat Goes On

Apparently, Jacques Chirac is a cowboy.

President Ion Iliescu of Romania led the counter-attack, describing M Chirac's words as an affront to East Europe's newly liberated nations.
"Such reproaches are totally unjustified, unwise, and undemocratic," he said in Brussels, where he was attending a post- summit gathering of East European leaders yesterday which backed the EU's tough new line on Iraq.

"It is unwise to separate countries into pro-American and anti-American. I thought it was outdated to say 'He who is not with us is against us'," he added.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:52 PM

A Perfect Storm

Anyone who's ever gotten sucked into a six-hundred-post evolution thread, or an eight-hundred-post homosexual thread at Free Republic, will love this.

Hilarious.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:43 PM

It's Not About Exploration, Stupid!

The idiocy of this article is in the title itself. I haven't actually even bothered to read the rest, because given such a false premise, it's pointless.

How do we get them out of this futile rut in their thinking?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:47 PM

And Now, Idiots

The Los Angeles City Council narrowly voted down a supposed resolution "against the war against Iraq." Problem is, the drafters of the resolution are idiots. Even if they had passed it, and even if the administration gave a rat's keester about the opinion of the City Council of Los Angeles, it would still have had no effect, because there is no chance of what they're opposing happening anyway.

Here are the key words:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, with the concurrence of the Mayor, that by the adoption of this Resolution, the City of Los Angeles hereby includes in its 2003-2004 Federal Legislative Program SUPPORT for all international diplomatic efforts to resolve the current conflict with Iraq, and OPPOSES a unilateral war against Iraq.

See, here's the rub. We have no intention of going into a "unilateral war" against Iraq. Unilateral means, to anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature in an uninsulated shack at the north pole in January, and capable of reading an English dictionary, "by oneself." We already have dozens of countries signed up to support our actions in the Middle East, but to these cretins, "unilateral" apparently means "without sanction of the United Nations." Of course, as a result of UNSCR 1441, we already have that too, but we wouldn't want to explode their miniscule brains by confusing them with facts and reality.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:40 PM

He Puts The Gall In Gaullist

It's becoming increasingly clear that Chirac has blown it, big time. It's going to be a lot harder to take him seriously when he calls Americans "arrogant."

The eastern Europeans should be feeling a relief similar to that of a prospective bride whose fiancee beats her the day before the wedding. Before, that is, it's too late...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:00 PM

Mosely Braun Caption Contest

Here she is, at her campaign rally that was attended by a single supporter.

..."and I'd like to conclude by saying that if everyone who had intended to attend had attended, this room would be full."

[Update a few minutes later]

There are some good ones over at this Free Republic thread.

I like the one that has her channeling Neil Diamond:

"I am," I said, to no one there, and no one heard at all not even the chair "I am," I cried, "I am," said I and I am lost and I can't even say why.

I also liked "Empty Suit Addresses Empty Chairs."

Here's another great one: "The NAACP estimated the crowd at about ten thousand, however, the parks commission put the total closer to zero."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:34 PM

A Modest Proposal

You know, after that last post, I just came up with an idea that would not only save the taxpayers money, but have a major effect on improving our educational system. Congress should pass a law denying federal aid or loans to students getting degrees in education. Force them to get a real degree, in which they might have to actually learn something.

It would probably put most colleges of education out of business, something that can't happen too soon.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:12 PM

It's Catching On

It's not just UCLA--now they're having an affirmative-action bake sale in (appropriately) Ann Arbor.

Wilson emphasized that the staff of The Michigan Review supports minorities. Profits from the bake sale were donated to the United Negro College Fund - that amount totaled $17 at the end of the sale.
Students' opinions were split on the means and effectiveness of the bake sale. Many students refused to comment on the sale due to personal outrage.

Scott Unger, an LSA sophomore, found the bake sale offensive and ignorant. "I don't think anything's going to happen (as a result of the sale)," he said. "But I don't feel it's right."

Well, maybe if you try thinking, instead of "feeling," you might have a shot at getting it.

Education senior Agnes Aleobua said she hoped the sale made students interested in fighting for affirmative action. "Baked goods are in no way relatable to when a student is admitted to college. It's not a tangible example at all," she said. "What's at stake is that minority students have an opportunity to continue their education past high school."

That's about the kind of logic I'd expect to see from an education major. Frightening to think she'll be teaching kids next year.

LSA freshman Dana Dougherty said she participated in the sale to demonstrate the real-life effects of the University's policies. "I'm participating because I believe affirmative action policies are unconstitutional," she said. "We've had a lot of debate - peaceful debate. The people who stayed to debate the longest are for affirmative action."

Let's see one of these on every campus.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:05 PM

The Delusions Of The Protestors

Mark Steyn describes it to a tee.

Hitler's problem was that he was over-invested in ideology. He'd invented a universal theory -- the wickedness of the international Jewish conspiracy -- and he persisted in fitting every square peg of cold hard reality into that theory's round hole. Thus, Churchill must be a "puppet of Jewry." As a general rule, when it's reality versus delusion, bet on reality. That held true in the Cold War. Moral equivalists like Harold Pinter insisted that America and the Soviet Union were both equally bad. But the traffic across the Berlin Wall was all one way. East German guards were not unduly overworked trying to keep people from getting in. The Eastern bloc collapsed because it was a lie, and the alternative wasn't...
...The new Universal Theory, to which 99% of Saturday's speakers and placards enthusiastically subscribed, is that, whatever the problem, American imperialist cowboy aggression is to blame. In fact, it's not so different from the old Universal Theory, in that the international Zionist conspiracy is assumed to be behind the scenes controlling the cowboys: Bush is a "puppet of Jewry," just like Churchill was -- notwithstanding the fact that America's Jews voted overwhelmingly for Gore. But, if you believe that the first non-imperialist great power in modern history is the source of all the world's woes, then logic is irrelevant. "It's all about oil"? Yes, for the French, whose stake in Iraqi oil is far more of a determining factor than America's ever has been or will be. "America created Saddam"? No, not really, the French and Germans and Russians have sold him far more stuff, and Paris built him that reactor which would have made him a nuclear power by now, if the Israelis hadn't destroyed it in the Eighties.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:27 AM

The NYT Misses The Point (Again, Or As Usual)

Today's New York Times has an article about cumulative effects of outsourcing and privatization on NASA.

As usual, all the assumptions are there: NASA is a science and technology agency, we need to have a centralized government agency for space science, we're losing our nobility of purpose, bla bla bla.

These folks remain stuck in the 1950s.

In a fairly accurate take, over at the Space Policy Digest BBS, Paul Spudis writes:

Here's a summary in 50 words or less...
NASA used to be great, but now it sucks because it uses nothing but contractors. However, JPL, alone among the centers, is God's Gift to Humanity and only screws up when it uses contractors. Eliminate human space flight and give OSS a trillion dollars a year.

There you go. The whole essence in less than 50 words. Saved you a bunch of time and effort.

OSS is Office of Space Science.

Yes, NASA has lost a lot of technical capability, and its work force is aging, but that's not so much because it uses contractors, as the fact that it's not doing much that's technically challenging, exciting or useful. It can't compete with computer graphics and the internet, or nanotech, or the technologies that people perceive as actually being relevant to their lives, as long as it stays stuck in the mode of spending billions of dollars to send a few government employees into orbit a few times a year.

And the authors of this piece have nothing to say about that problem.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:33 AM

February 17, 2003
Choking On His Own Bile?

Here is a "fly-on-the-wall" account of the EU meeting this past weekend. Mssr. Chirac apparently had a less-than-pleasant time.

At Mr Annan's hawkish stance, Mr Chirac stood up and with Gallic passion began a defence of the French position.
Flinging his arms up and down, he declared that war was a terrible thing and that thousands of innocent people would lose their lives in a second Gulf war. "It is a question of life and death," he declared.

Then came the most dramatic point of the evening. Silvio Berlusconi, the diminutive Italian premier, eyeballed Mr Chirac and insisted: "I'm just as concerned about life and death as you are."

Here's hoping that the account is accurate, particularly as regards Kofi Annan's stand.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:14 PM

Penultimatum?

The EU says that Saddam has one last chance to disarm. Hey, I thought that's what we said last fall. Is the next to the last ultimatum the penultimatum? If so, how do we know when we've delivered it?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:11 PM

One Giant Leap Backwards

The day that Columbia was lost, I noted, among other things, that the Orbital Space Plane would be a step backwards for the nation as a Shuttle replacement. Some in the comments section asked why I believed this.

Here's an all-too-credulous article from Saturday's Baltimore Sun about the OSP and NASA's plans. It's unfortunate that reporters are usually unacquainted with economics, or even basic accounting--they often simply accept whatever government agencies say at face value.

In the wake of the Columbia disaster, NASA officials say they're accelerating plans to develop a $12 billion Orbital Space Plane that would ferry astronauts to the International Space Station by 2012 at a lower cost than the space shuttle can.

OK, we have an assertion in the very first paragraph that something that costs twelve billion dollars to develop (and presumably purchase a small fleet of) will be lower cost than something that we already have. Let's see if the claim stands up to financial reality, and if it's worth the money.

Designed to function more like a minibus than the truck-like shuttle does, the lightweight space plane would carry mostly human cargo and rely on rockets and other technology that NASA has developed.
The space plane might not look like a traditional plane at all, but more like an earlier generation of capsulelike craft that were launched by expendable booster rockets in the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo programs.

Ahhhhh...back to the future!

Smith said the space plane would be no more than half the size of a shuttle, which has roughly the same dimensions as a DC-9 jetliner.

What does that mean? The Shuttle is a launch vehicle, one that grosses millions of pounds as it launches. Perhaps he means that it will be half the size of an orbiter. But what does that mean? Wingspan? Weight? Length? How large will the payload bay be?

What!? You mean it doesn't have one?!!

The latter is an important question, as I'll get to in a minute.

It also would cost far less to operate than the shuttle's $500 million per flight. NASA hopes the space plane would shave the cost of ferrying passengers to the station to $100 million per flight or less.
Smith said he expects a flying version of the space plane by 2010 and regular service two years later.

Here is the nub of the issue. The implication would be that we will save four hundred million dollars per flight by using the OSP rather than the Shuttle. Let us examine it.

First, let's figure out where the hundred million figure comes from. If the OSP is to be launched on something like, say, a Delta IV, then we have to figure on the cost of the launch system. Though the Boeing description doesn't have prices, digging around a little, I found this page, which says that Boeing will be paid $1.38B for twenty two launches, which comes out to about sixty million a flight. So that leaves forty million for everything else (and of course, it assumes that no further investment will be needed in the new Delta to "man rate" it).

Let's indulge in a little political fantasy for a moment, and assume that the Congressfolks from Florida and Texas and Alabama, actually allow a significant cutback in the annual budget for fixed costs at the Cape, and Houston and Huntsville, that's currently allocated to Shuttle (over three billion) to, say, a third of that--a billion dollars. Since crew rotate every three months at station, there's no need for more than four flights a year, so we get a quarter of a billion per flight for amortization of fixed costs alone. In order to get it down to forty million, they'd have to reduce the annual Shuttle budget to five percent of what it is currently--a hundred and sixty million dollars per year.

I suspect the reality is that their hundred megabuck estimate doesn't actually include the fixed costs--they're quoting marginal cost for the OSP, and then comparing it to average cost for the Shuttle. If so, I call foul. You've got to compare like fruit to like fruit--the marginal cost for the Shuttle (the cost of flying the next one, given that you're already flying that year) is more like a hundred fifty million.

But OK, let's continue to be generous, and assume that they really are referring to average annual cost per flight. Now we're down to a hundred million per flight, as they claim.

Or are we? Aren't we forgetting something? When the Shuttle launches, it doesn't just deliver people to and from space. It also delivers (and sometimes retrieves) tens of thousands of pounds of payload. NASA is proposing to "unbundle" the cargo delivery and return service from the passenger service. Fine, but now they have to account for getting the cargo up some other way. That means that you can't replace a Shuttle launch with an OSP launch. You have to replace it with an OSP launch plus a cargo launch. Whoops, you just added another sixty million dollars per flight (again, generously assuming that the number above for Delta IV flights is correct).

And what if we were going to retrieve something? We just lost that capability entirely. Not necessarily a bad thing, but we have to understand the program implications of it--remember, the ISS was built partially as a way to justify the Shuttle program, and its design and operations are centered on the assumption of servicing, construction and operation via the Shuttle.

But let's forget about that one as well. Here's the real kicker.

NASA wants to spend twelve billion dollars up front to build a fleet of OSPs.

Where are they accounting for that cost in their estimates? If you're going to justify the OSP based on savings over the Shuttle, then you have to include that up-front cost in the calculation. After all, though Shuttle is expensive, it doesn't require any major capital outlay up front--it will simply continue to absorb its annual budget as long as we continue to operate it.

So what is the internal rate of return on this investment? I'm working on a spreadsheet for a more sophisticated analysis, but if we assume that it flies four flights per year for ten years, and no discounting (i.e., a dollar in the year 2020 has as much value as a dollar next year, another generous assumption) that twelve billion has to be amortized over forty flights. That means add another three hundred million dollars per flight. Considering the time value of money makes the situation much worse, since the development costs are in fact paid for in much more expensive dollars than the out-year operations costs.

But now, even with all of these generous assumptions, we're up from the claimed hundred million per flight to almost half a billion ($160M + $300M). Whoops, that's getting close to what the Shuttle costs, with much less capability. The reality (particularly annual fixed costs, and the cost of man-rating the Delta, and the actual launch price of the Delta) is probably much worse.

At best, NASA sees the Orbital Space Plane as an interim solution for supplying crews to the space station while it develops a more advanced ship that would be launched more like an ordinary plane and would be able to draw oxygen from the atmosphere instead of using heavy tanks of liquid oxygen.

Thus, they propose to spend twelve billion dollars over the rest of the decade, for an "interim solution" that won't fly until the next decade, at which point, they presumably plan to spend many billions more on a true "shuttle replacement"--an airbreather.

Smith said yesterday that the Columbia disaster "validated" plans NASA announced in November to produce the passenger craft.

I can't imagine any sequence of events that wouldn't "validate" NASA's plans in the mind of Dennis Smith.

There is a little hope, though.

Critics called the program shortsighted.

And they didn't even ask me.

"It lacks vision. It's a stopgap measure for NASA so it can fulfil short- term goals of supplying a space station, which has a limited life of its own," said Rick N. Tumlinson, president of the Nyack, N.Y.-based Space Frontier Foundation.
Tumlinson said the space plane would supplement a shuttle program that he called basically an "expensive government trucking service" that could be handled by the private sector.

NASA should focus instead on exploring the planets, he said.

"The space plane is part of an extension of a shuttle program that's been heading in the wrong direction," he said. "The goal should be to make space travel more routine, less costly and safer."

Of course, this then causes a rise to NASA's defense by its primary beneficiaries.

Bruce Mahone, director of space policy for the Washington-based Aerospace Industries Association, an industry lobbying group, defended NASA's plans.
He said that although the shuttle fleet is aging, the three remaining craft are constantly being upgraded and have years of service left.

None of them has flown the 100 missions envisioned for each when the shuttle program began in the 1970s, he said.

The space plane "will be much smaller than the shuttles, newer and more inexpensive if designed properly," he said. "It's a lifeboat for the space station."

This is utterly incoherent. Smaller may be good, or it may be bad. Hard to know, because we don't know what the requirements are. It will certainly be newer, but that's not an intrinsic virtue, either. I've already demonstrated that it won't be more inexpensive, and of course, we have that nasty little word "if."

Based on history, how much faith should we put in that?

Utter insanity.

NASA has to be taken out of the space transportation business, ASAP. Step one of that, of course, is deciding what we want to accomplish in space. This entire episode simply point out the absurdity of our current manned space program. Until we want to have serious accomplishments in space, we need no new vehicles. We don't even need the ones we have.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:21 PM

February 16, 2003
More Idiotarians On Parade

Diablogger has the pics, with some Lileksian commentary.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:01 PM

Paix Pour Petrole--Non!

That's the protest sign that I'd be carrying over at the French Embassy. It would have a picture of the logo for TotalFinaElf on it.

[Update at 8 PM PST]

As I hoped, someone with more time (and talent) than I (specifically, John Weidner) has translated my thought into graphics.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:18 PM

February 15, 2003
Diversity In Pastry

This is great. The campus Republicans at UCLA had an affirmative action bake sale.

The sale, held on Bruin Walk on Feb. 3, offered cookies at different prices depending on the customer's race and gender. Black, Latina and American Indian females were charged 25 cents for cookies that cost males of minority descent 50 cents. White females were charged $1, and white males and all Asian Americans were charged $2.
Students selling the cookies were assigned name tags portraying them as "Uncle Tom," "The White Oppressor" and "Self-Hating Hispanic Race Traitor."

It really knotted up Art Torres' knickers.

Torres, a former California state senator, believes UCLA Republicans have been "emboldened" by the recent race-sensitive remarks by various Republican leaders, specifically citing Trent Lott's, R-Miss., comments and Congressman Howard Coble's, R-N.C., praise of internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II.
"It is a shame that Republicans at UCLA have chosen to mimic the extreme views of their Republican leaders," Torres said.

What a disgusting cretin. Just when did the notion of equality under the law become an "extreme view"? And what does this have to do with Trent Lott?

Juan Carlos-Orellana, president of the Democratic Law Students Association, responded to the event with similar indignation, referring to the bake sale as an "insulting trivialization of the serious issue of race and gender equality."
Orellana sees the effort by the Bruin Republicans as detrimental to the discussion of affirmative action.

"By reducing the complexity of this issue into dollars and cents and cookies they are working to stop discourse," he said.

Translation: "We don't really have a logical rebuttal to the satirical demonstration of the absurdity of our views, so we'll pretend instead that they're censoring us."

They've really got no arguments left, folks.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:43 PM

Totalitarian Appeasers On Parade

The Samizdata folks have a rundown of the day's useful-idiotic festivities in London, with pics. I particularly like the "No War On Iraq" sign by the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament. These people profoundly lack a sense of irony.

There's also a nice street theatre review here.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:58 AM

Not "Going It Alone"

Will miracles never cease? Now AP is admitting that, even without the UN, the U.S. won't be going it alone.

Going to war without a fresh resolution would not mean going it alone, however. Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia, Turkey, Romania, Greece and Poland are among the nations that have indicated they would support the United States.
"If Saddam Hussein is not disarmed and is allowed to develop his capabilities he could strike Romania and the rest of Europe," Romanian Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana said this week as the parliament in Bucharest agreed to provide noncombat troops to a U.S.-led coalition and to permit use of Romania's air space and airports.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:04 AM

A Farcical Parade

David Warren has an unsettling description of the current diplomatic situation. It's not pretty.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:00 AM

Liberate Iraq And Defeat Idiotarianism

As you can see to the upper left, I've added a new graphic to my page, which will remain there at least until the liberation of Iraq. This is a campaign being promoted by Dean Esmay.

If you want to show your support for the Iraqi people, instead of all the people marching this weekend showing their support for Saddam Hussein (in fact if not in intention), then pick up a copy of the graphic and put it on your own page. It is a link to a site that promotes freedom and democracy, specifically in Iraq, but it could become a generic site for all of the subjugated people of the world.

Dean has all the details.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:49 AM

A False Premise

Amidst all of the lunacy on parade in the streets around the planet this weekend, it's important to remember that we are not going to war against Iraq, any more than we went to war against Afghanistan (in the sense that we wish to conquer it and kill and/or subjugate its people). In both cases, we are in fact liberating the people from a band of thugs who had brutally taken over their country, and hijacked it for their own odious purposes.

As we go in, some few innocents will die who might have otherwise lived, but in the long run (and long, in this case, probably means mere months, or even weeks), many more innocents will live, and avoid further torture and deprivation, who would have otherwise continued to suffer, because we finally removed the cause of their misery. There are no cost-free actions.

A couple weeks ago, I put together a game theory analysis of the potential costs and benefits to us of taking out Saddam, for various actions under various states of the world. I ignored the costs and benefits to the Iraqi people in that analysis. It might be useful to do a similar one for them. I would be shocked if the right answer isn't to remove Saddam, as quickly as possible.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:39 AM

February 14, 2003
Rocket Planes

There's a nice survey of what's going on in government and private launch over at Technology Review (apparently finished up in the wake of the Columbia loss, because he puts it in the context of the story).

David Chandler interviewed me for this article a few weeks ago, and it turned out pretty well (though he only has a brief quote from me). There's a lot of discussion of suborbital as a stepping stone orbit, and what XCOR and Pioneer, among others, are up to.

Space Adventure?s backing of Xcor and other rocket companies provides a synergy that might be crucial for realizing the decades-old visions of reusable rockets, says Bruce Lusignan, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and director of the Center for International Cooperation in Space, a worldwide consortium of universities. He says revenues from space-related tourism could be used to finance a new generation of tourist-oriented launch vehicles, and ?that might be the core to building the capability up. That might be the right way to go.? And that means the EZ-Rocket?that unimposing test vehicle at the vast Mojave Airport?just might end up being the first PC of a new space age.

People are starting to get it.

As Glenn says, read the whole thing.

[Via Future Pundit.]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:49 PM

For The Impatient Among You

Kevin McGehee has a bumper sticker.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:41 PM

Paternalism Alert

A researcher at RAND says that if a planet-busting asteroid is discovered to be approaching us, we, the great unwashed, should be kept in the dark.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:10 PM

Saddam's Pope?

Apparently, Tariq Aziz, at a Vatican press conference today, refused to answer a question about missiles by the "Israeli media." To his credit, a German reporter asked if there'd an answer if he asked it. Reportedly, several reporters walked out, but the Vatican let the conference continue.

Pious XII became known as "Hitler's Pope."

It will be a shame, and another blow to the Church, if John Paul becomes known as Saddam's.

[Update at 3:40 PST]

Here's the story as reported by ABC. Apparently I was mistaken--it wasn't at the Vatican--it was at a press club in Rome following a meeting with the Pope. Given the Pope's position, however, my broader point remains.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:45 PM

Apres The UN, The United Free Nations

I've been giving a little (but not much more than that) thought to what comes after the UN, once we give them their walking papers and boot them to Brussels, or Paris, or Lagos.

What we need is an organization of United Free Nations, and this one will have real admission criteria. There's only one country in the Middle East that would currently qualify (guess which one), though in a few weeks, we may have another one, and much of Africa would be out in the cold. As would China.

France would be allowed in, but if it had a security council, they certainly wouldn't be on it.

Anyway, I was just doing a little search, and ran across this piece by Barry Farber from a couple years back.

I also found a reference to the concept in a comment to this post last fall by Charles Johnson.

Here's one more from the International Journal of Social Economics, in 1999.

So, I think it's time to give this some serious thought.

Comments, anyone?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:37 AM

Aid And Comfort?

Or just useful idiocy?

Senator Levin (who every day I'm reminded of his existence makes me ashamed to be from the State of Michigan), has been complaining that we haven't been sharing our intelligence with the "inspectors." Here's an example from a press release on January 9th.

If we prejudge the outcome of inspections or if we don't furnish the arms inspectors with targeted intelligence, we will not be able to obtain the international support, as represented by a U.N. authorization for the use of force, that is so highly desirable and advantageous to us. Forcibly disarming Iraq without international support would be perceived as a unilateral attack by the United States and a few allies. International support is critical to reducing the short term risks, such as a loss of regional cooperation with resulting increased probability of U.S. casualties, and reduced likelihood of international contributions in a post-conflict environment. International support is also important to reducing long term risks, such as a loss of international cooperation in connection with the war against al Qaeda and increased probability of terrorist attacks against us.
In summary, January 27th is the first interim report. It is not decision day as to whether to attack Iraq. We must not prejudge the outcome of the very inspections process that we worked so hard to put in place as being highly relevant to the question of whether we launch an attack on Iraq. We must share all the information we can on suspect sites. If we don't share our information with the U.N. inspectors or if we prejudge the outcome of these inspections, we will increase the likelihood that we will go to war and increase the risks short term and long term to our troops and our nation in doing so.

Just now, I was listening to the stench of crapweasels residing on the East River, and I heard the Iraqi ambassador whining about their innocence, and he said, "Even United States Senators claim that by withholding intelligence, they undermine the the mission of the inspectors."

Thanks a bunch, Carl.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:11 AM

More Easterbrook Critique

Jon Berndt, who works on the Shuttle, has written a lengthy response to Gregg Easterbrook's Time article.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:55 AM

You Tell 'Em, Oz

David Penberthy has John Howard's denunciation of the Axis of Weasels, in his native tongue.

Good on ya, mite.

[Via the Aussie Oppressor, who's running a translation contest, but the link is farked up]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:10 AM

February 13, 2003
It's Not Just About Exploration, Mr. Administrator

Sean O'Keefe needs to have his attitude adjusted.

Even in the wake of the Columbia shuttle disaster, NASA needs humans to do things in space that robotic missions can't do, space agency Administrator Sean O'Keefe told lawmakers Wednesday.
"We know the lesson from this terrible accident is not to turn our backs on exploration simply because it is hard or risky," O'Keefe said. "As John Shedd wrote about the age of ocean exploration, `A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.' "

Nice quote, but as long as you allow people to continue to keep the debate on the basis of exploration, the robot guys are going to win every time. You need to start talking about space development, and civilizing the wilderness.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:13 PM

And Then There Were Three

The Economist has a fairly good story on the future of manned space after Columbia. I take issue with a few points, though. First, a nit:

IT SHOULD have been a perfect day. An exhaust plume was cutting a neat trail across the pale morning sky. All over America, people were watching the remarkable spacecraft zip across the continent, to its final destination on the eastern side of the country. Of course, as we now know, it never landed. In only a few seconds, another emblem of American hopes had disintegrated.

Well, no. There was, or at least, should not have been an "exhaust plume." Shuttle has no exhaust during descent, because it uses no propulsion (other than the occasional reaction control system firing, which wouldn't leave a visible "exhaust plume"). The streak was more likely the plasma sheath that envelopes the vehicle at that altitude, and perhaps a very high-altitude contrail.

The problem, as even the most gung-ho space enthusiasts agree, is that reusable spacecraft do not yet make economic sense. A fully reusable craft is difficult to justify unless it can be flown more than 50 times a year. (The shuttle only manages five to six flights a year.) Over the next two decades, global demand for launches is expected to run at less than this, somewhere between 30-40 shuttle equivalents a year. But launch services for this market are already over-supplied.

That number of fifty is kind of arbitrary. No one knows the right number, but it's certainly much higher than current traffic rates. But the third sentence is curious. Such projections of launch demand, performed by the Teal Group or the Department of Commerce, have built-in assumptions, which generally include no new markets, and continuation of business as usual in the launch industry. This ignores the potential for price-demand elasticity should a new, safe launch system come along.

It's surprising that a publication called "The Economist" would miss the point like this.

Antonio Elias, vice-president of advanced programmes at Orbital Sciences Corporation, a commercial-satellite company based in Dulles, Virginia, said recently that the economic rate for reusable vehicles had not changed for decades. This is because the two fundamental parameters of rocketry?the efficiency of rocket engines and the properties of structural materials?have not changed. It is difficult to see how investing in any spacecraft that could take 25 years to pay back its development costs can be justified.

I've personally had this argument with Dr. Elias (the last time was a couple years ago, when I was back at OSC looking over the X-34, doing research on its potential as a suborbital tourist vehicle). He firmly believes that launch is expensive purely because of physics, and doesn't seem to understand that most of the difference between aircraft ops and space ops are economies of scale. But then, he's a physicist...

But the next couple bits are encouraging.

In the next few decades, the only reusable ?space? vehicles that are likely to make sense are those being designed and built by private industry to take tourists 100km (about ten times higher than an airliner) above the earth.

and

So why are we still there? The technology to do more than briefly visit the moon or Mars does not yet exist. Further ahead, mankind will have a place and a purpose in space, but until technology improves, manned spaceflight will be an expensive luxury. NASA could focus on getting the costs of spaceflight down, and on helping the private sector to get tourists on sub-orbital flights.

So they recognize that suborbital is a key stepping stone to cheap launch, which is amazing progress from Economist editorials of even a year or two ago.

Unfortunately, they remains stuck in the "space is exploration and science" paradigm, as evinced by the graf above, and the ending to the piece.

Any money saved could be used on the more pressing questions of space science: are we alone in the universe, is there life on Mars, could we live there, are there other earth-like planets, where did we come from? In the short term, robots and instruments should tackle these questions. There will be many spin-off benefits that arise from this research in the field of miniaturisation and robotics.
If, later this year, China launches its first astronauts into space, calls to beef up America's manned-spaceflight programme are bound to increase. That would risk missing the real frontier in space over the next couple of decades. This other frontier is not a place, but rather a matter of knowledge. Robots could approach and extend it farther than people could?and at far lower cost, however you measure it.

Yup, Trix are for kids, and space is for robots.

We need to keep working on them, fellow bloggers.

All together now: Economist--We Want To Go!

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:43 PM

Star Ship Troopers?

Nick Denton has some suggestions about our problem with space. I'm not as pessimistic as he is about the prospects for private enterprise, but I don't intrinsically object to his recommendation to increase the militarization of it. Every little bit that makes space more like just another place, and less like a blessed sanctuary for scientists, will help.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:43 PM

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back To TV

Patrick Ruffini has the plotlines for the upcoming sequel to "West Wing," titled "Right Wing."

The West Wing staff entertains the cast of a Hollywood White House drama for a day. Cast members who have signed an anti-war petition confront the President and he humiliates them with a quiz on world affairs, which they fail, concluding ?When you?ve got Bentleys and Ferraris in your garage, you might find it difficult to understand, but we in this country aren?t safe. The very freedom that made your mansions and sportboats possible is hated by a fanatical band of madmen half a world away and I will not rest until they are stopped.?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:16 PM

Gear Down?

NASA is reporting that the left gear was deployed and locked just before the breakup. This doesn't really mean much, since it only confirms problems on the left wing.

It's much more likely that this was a symptom of a problem (the wing falling apart from the inside from all of the heat) rather than a cause, but I've no doubt that tin-foil-hat afficianados will be claiming that someone sabatoged the mission by deliberately deploying the gear. That is nonsense on many levels, least of which is that it's not possible (as far as I know) nor would it be sensible to be able to drop the gear on one side only.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:04 AM

Look On Them, And Despair

Lileks, in a rare visit to another venue, has some poetry reviews, and some good offerings himself.

[Via the Bellicose Babe, who needs to put up a less bellicose-looking picture of herself]

[Update a few minutes later]

I also note that Kathy has taken the trouble to fisk bin Laden's latest rantings, sparing the rest of us from having to do it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:41 AM

The Real Cause Of The Columbia Loss

I was going to link to this David Horsey cartoon earlier, but I wanted to wait until there was a permalink to it (hint, mainstream journalists, don't wait until they're in the archive to provide permalinks, if you want them to be linked in a timely manner).

Anyway, here it is.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:19 AM

Get Organized!

John Carter McKnight has a stern lecture for the space advocacy movement.

I agree, I guess, but it seems kind of short on specifics. I think that there's a fundamental problem in that there isn't a single movement--there are indeed a lot of factions, and they may be irreconciliable.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:12 AM

Columbia Crew, We Hardly Knew Ye

A number of commentators have pointed out that, prior to the loss of Columbia a couple of weeks ago, very few people could have named the crew members.

Many didn't even know that there was a Shuttle flight in progress, particularly because it was a relatively long mission (over two weeks) and memories of the earlier launch had faded.

Despite the fact that we didn't know them, the nation went into shock and mourning, in a way that we wouldn't have if seven people, perhaps even those same seven people, had been killed in an auto accident. Of course, as in 1986, what we were really mourning was the blow to one of the symbols of our nation's leadership in technology--our space program. But it's only human and natural to transfer the grief for lost hardware (we lost a quarter of an essentially irreplaceable Shuttle fleet) and dreams to the more emotionally-accessible humans who rode it and represented them.

But I found the reaction interesting for another reason.

Many of my generation and older, who remember the glory days of Apollo, seem to be indulging in a futile (and potentially counterproductive) nostalgia for that era. They would return to the days when astronauts were on the cover of Life magazine, and the nation watched, breathlessly, their exploits on the new frontier above us. We knew their names, and the names of their wives, and children, and dogs and goldfish, and they were our heroes--our emissaries to the great beyond.

If only NASA could recapture the spirit of those bygone days--then we would once again have a real space program, and move on to settle the Moon, and Mars. It only requires another president with the vision to make it so!

There is a danger in such thinking in that, attempting to avoid the mistakes of the past thirty years post-Apollo, we may be repeating the original mistake that was Apollo, leaping again too quickly to an idealistic goal while continuing to neglect the infrastructure, the foundation required to make it economically and politically sustainable.

The problem with our space program isn't that we no longer know the astronauts' names. We should strive for a future in which we don't know the astronauts' names, just as today we don't know the names of the millions of "aeronauts" (i.e., airline passengers) who take to the skies each day. Our problem is that right now, we have the worst of both worlds--space has become sufficiently routine that it's become boring, except when we have spectacular failures, but not so much so that it's affordable for the rest of us.

I too want to see men (and women) return to the Moon, and walk the red sands of Mars, but I want to see much more. My vision of our space future is not another grand, no-expense-barred, government-funded expedition to another planet, which most of us sit back on the ground and contentedly watch, cheering on our astronaut heroes, and buying baseball trading cards with their names on them.

No, I have a much broader, inclusive vision for space.

It involves a low earth orbit with coorbiting tourist hotels and resorts, with orbital sound stages and sports venues, for filming movies and broadcasting new types of dance and games. There are research laboratories, in which experiments are conducted in biotechnology and nanotechnology, that might be too hazardous to be safely performed on earth. There are interorbital transports to allow easy passage from one platform to another. There are orbital hangars for constructing the ships that will take people off to other orbs, and for inspecting and maintaining the space transports about to undergo the potentially hazardous entry back into earth's atmosphere, avoiding any more incidents like that which occurred on February 1.

There are cruise hotels continuously transiting between earth and Moon, with ports of call to the lunar surface, perhaps to settlements there--more tourist resorts, and perhaps industrial facilities, processing the resources of that sphere into useful products--metal forged for the construction of more ships, silicon for solar cells that will provide power for the spaceborne, and ultimately even provide clean unlimited energy to the home planet, life-giving oxygen and water, food, and rocket fuels.

Perhaps asteroids have been brought into higher orbits to be similarly mined for their own precious metals, or water and carbon compounds. They may even be asteroids that were otherwise potential threats to the planet, now being managed and harvested instead.

And all of it is sustained not by a massive government bureaucracy that must go annually to Congress, hat in hand, begging for the funds to continue it.

Rather, it will largely pay for itself, by providing services, products and entertainment to real markets--the millions of people who would work, play, and yes, explore space if the cost were within their means. And the level of activities implied by it means that it will be within their means, as the unit costs of space operations drop, and the world grows wealthier. And we won't know the names of the people going to and from space, because there will be far too many of them. But we won't need to, and the occasional accident, even a fatal one, will be no more newsworthy than a bus accident.

In a future like that, it won't be necessary for a NASA to ask the government for funding for a Mars expedition--a National Geographic Society, or Planetary Society could afford one. It might even be paid for by television (or Internet) broadcast rights, and of course, we may once again know the names, and biographies of the explorers.

But if people want more than to simply watch, or contribute funding so that "explorers" can go to the Red Planet, but rather, actually stake out land there themselves, in search of adventure or freedom, it could very well be affordable to do so, just as it was for the Mormons and Pilgrims before them. And for them, the most important names will be their own, the ones that they will pass on to their offworld progeny.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:44 AM

February 12, 2003
This Should Be A Laugh Riot

Carol Mosely-Braun is serious about running for President.

The article doesn't mention, of course, that the Dems are encouraging her to run in order to siphon votes from Sharpton, so he can't win any primaries and take delegates to the convention.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:53 PM

Stupid Security Measures

Privacy International is having a contest to find the most egregious examples.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:45 PM

Great Timing

Just in case you weren't mad enough at the pusillanimous burghers in Brussels over the recent antics with the French and Germans, the Supreme Court of Belgium just decided that Sharon can be tried for genocide over Sabra and Shatila.

Like "hate" and "racism," apparently the word "genocide" has lost all useful meaning.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:39 PM

Free Ice Cream Shortage

I know, light posting. I'm busy, and haven't had much to say.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:36 PM

February 11, 2003
A Second Chance?

People are starting to take the notion of recalling Gray Davis seriously.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:35 AM

February 10, 2003
Dividing And Conquering Weasels

It's not just a split within Europe. The German government itself is on the verge of collapse from internal divisions, if the London Times is to be believed.

Germany?s coalition Government was on the brink of collapse yesterday as details emerged of a row between Gerhard Schröder, the Chancellor, and Joschka Fischer, the Foreign Minister, who threatened to quit over differences on Iraq. Herr Fischer, the leader of the Green Party, was enraged over weekend press leaks of a Franco-German plan to establish a UN protectorate in Iraq. The leak, to Der Spiegel magazine, appeared to come from the Chancellery or Social Democrat headquarters.

Ah, yes, the contradictions inherent in the system. It couldn't happen to a nicer government...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:22 PM

You Don't Say...

Some "experts" helpfully inform us that Saddam is trying to stall. Whatever would we do without experts?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:56 AM

February 09, 2003
The New Childrens' Crusade

The human shields are suffering severe attrition in the Balkans and Turkey, from lack of funds, unity and leadership. Some choice bits, for those who don't want to register for the Times of London:

The rows started almost as soon as the group left London a fortnight ago, with arguments over which routes to take. A black bus owned by Ken Nichols O?Keefe, 33, a tattooed former US marine and Gulf war veteran, and full of young firebrands, drove through Germany ? with a sightseeing stop-off at Dachau concentration camp ? to Italy even though the vehicle was too tall for the Alpine tunnels and scraped its roof.
Another bus, one of the lumbering Routemasters owned by Letts, drove through France and waited for Nichols O?Keefe in Milan.

The tension was compounded when a group of Italian peace campaigners in designer clothes joined the Britons, many of whom are elderly activists wearing hippie-style clothes and cooking lentils aboard the buses.

Lentils, eh? Hmmm...are they plotting a little gas warfare of their own?

Instead of heading towards their objective, the peaceniks took a detour to Rome last Sunday for sightseeing.

In addition to taking detours on the excellent adventure, some of the cadres are insufficiently worshipful of their supreme leader.

Most of them eventually caught a ferry to Greece, but Nichols O?Keefe and a handful of others stayed behind with a stricken bus before flying to join the others. He was promptly detained in Istanbul and deported back to Italy.
He has angered other peaceniks by planning to meet Saddam on his arrival in Baghdad. At least five have returned home rather than deal with him and a Welsh couple have set out to reach the Iraqi capital on their own.

?People have got so fed up with him that they have dropped out,? said Letts. Nichols O?Keefe was dubbed ?the messiah? and ?Gandhi? by his less-than- enthusiastic fellow travellers. He had warned them any breakdowns ?would be the work of the CIA?.

Ahhh...the psyops is working.

He is being held this weekend in an Italian jail and is facing deportation to the United States. His mother, Pat, who is continuing on the journey to Baghdad, said: ?That would be the very worst outcome. It would be a disaster for him.?

Yes, and a tragedy for the burgeoning peace movement as well.

Hilarious.

Many participants are concerned they will run short of money and are unhappy at the prospect of a compulsory HIV test on the Iraqi border, about which they were not warned until this weekend.
?We are buying our own hypodermic syringes?, said Williams. ?They could just as easily give you HIV with the needles in Iraq.?

Yes, American smart bombs are one thing, but they didn't think they'd have to face those brutal Iraqi needles...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:14 PM

Manifest Destiny?

Mark Whittington has a nice Columbia follow up in the Houston Chronicle.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:01 PM

The Picture Was Not Lost

Contrary to what I wrote in my Fox column (and this post), Petr's drawing of the earth seen from the Moon was not destroyed in last weekend's Shuttle disaster. Ramon didn't take the original--it was a copy.

[Via Joe Katzman at Winds of Change, who also has links to tributes to Kalpana Chawla]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:12 AM

February 08, 2003
Read The FAQ

Tom over at the Alleywriter asks:

Why wasn?t the flight of the Columbia aborted immediately after that piece of foam struck the craft?s wing? There is, supposedly, always at least two locations set up for emergency landing of the shuttle in case of just such a problem.
The only answer I can come up with is money. It costs a lot of money to get a shuttle mission off. It takes a lot of time and a lot of preparation. Some pencil-necked engineer put money ahead of safety and it cost us a shuttle and 7 astronauts. His penny-pinching has cost far more than a dozens of aborted missions.

I love all these Monday-morning quarterbacks. Particularly when they don't even understand the rules of the game.

Tom, just because you can't come up with any other answer doesn't mean that there isn't one.

Consider the possibility that a) they didn't know if the damage was a problem, since this had happened before with no problems, b) aborts are extremely risky, and have never been even attempted, let alone successfully completed and, most importantly, c) they didn't know about the insulation hitting the vehicle until the next day, after it was already in orbit, because they only found out by reviewing launch films.

In any event, "dozens of aborted missions" would in fact cost much more than the loss of an orbiter and crew, particularly when one considers that at least some of those aborts would probably result in loss of vehicle in themselves, but even without considering that, it would come to many billions of dollars in reflights and ISS program delays.

He also thinks that NASA warned people away from debris because parts of the Shuttle are "classified." This is nonsense. The entire Shuttle design is in the public domain. The only thing that was sensitive was the standard box used for encryption for communications, which, if found, might give someone an idea of exactly how we encrypt data, and thus help them break it.

Consider instead the possibility that NASA didn't want the public tampering with key evidence, and perhaps ruining the investigation, which again, is the reality.

I wish that people would read the damned FAQ, instead of indulging in ignorant speculation and conspiratorial fantasies.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:01 AM

Iraq Glossary Update

Based on this article from the news agency that can't call a terrorist a terrorist, I have to add a couple new (synonymous) phrases to the glossary.

"unilateral" or "on their own":

Taking action with a large number of nations in a coalition, but without Kofi Annan's permission.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:48 AM

No Market For Space?

John McCaslin at the WaPo has one of the last emails from William McCool before Columbia began its fatal descent:

"PS ? As I write, we just experienced a sunset over the Pacific, just [west] of Chile. I'm sitting on the flight deck in the CDR seat (front right) with a view of the Earth moving gracefully by. Sunsets and sunrises from space come every 45 minutes, and last only about 30 seconds, but the colors are stunning. In a single view, I see looking out at the edge of the Earth ? red at the horizon line, blending to orange, then yellow; followed by a thin white line, then light blue, gradually turning to dark blue, then various gradually darker shades of gray, then black with a million stars above. It's breath-taking."

Yet many people still believe that no one would pay for such an experience.

[via Betsy Newmark]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:36 AM

February 07, 2003
Waste In Space

Daniel Greenberg has a good summary of the problem with Shuttle and station over at the WaPo today.

It's all basically correct, but I want to comment on this one point.

Dating from 1981 to 1999, the surveys, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, found that between 9 and 18 percent of respondents during those years believed that the government spent "too little" on space exploration, while 39 to 52 percent felt it spent "too much." Far ahead of space exploration, spending preferences were expressed for "reducing pollution," "improving health care" and "improving education."

I'd be willing to bet that a large number of those respondents who think we are spending too much haven't a clue how much we're spending. My experience with such polls is that large numbers of people think that we spend much more on NASA, as a percentage of the federal budget, than we actually do. Very few people are aware that it's less than a percent. I'd be interested to see if those numbers change if you poll people after telling them that.

Of course, the issue is not how much we're spending, but how (and how poorly) we're spending it. NASA has had more than enough money to make great progress in space over the past few decades--hundreds of billions in current-year dollars. But they haven't had the philosophy, will, or political permission to spend it sensibly, at least if our goal was to create a space-faring civilization.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:22 PM

More Cold-War Thinking From Easterbrook

There's an interesting dialogue over at Slate today, between Nathan Myhrvold and Gregg Easterbrook--an extension of the discussion that Gregg started with his good, albeit flawed, Time piece. It's obvious that Gregg either didn't read my critique (likely) or that he disagreed, though since he didn't really respond to any of my criticisms, most likely he's (not surprisingly, despite Glenn linking it) simply not aware of it.

I want to focus in on three of his comments:

Almost every analyst who thinks rationally about the situation comes to the same conclusion: that what's needed is a new generation of low-cost throwaway rockets for putting payload into orbit, coupled to a small "spaceplane" carrying people only on those occasions when men and women are truly needed in space.

Well, I like to think that I'm an analyst who thinks rationally about the situation, and I do not come to that conclusion. I happen to believe that "low-cost throwaway rockets" is an oxymoron. There are smart people who disagree with me, and some of them are attempting to build such devices. Certainly we can have lower-cost throwaway rockets, but if we want to get truly low cost, for either passengers or cargo, we have to have space transports.

As to the point about "men and women being truly needed" in space, I'll address that after the next excerpt:

Get the payloads off the shuttle and onto unmanned throwaway rockets, and astronauts will stop dying to perform humdrum tasks. The crew of Challenger died trying to deliver to orbit a data-relay satellite; the crew of Columbia died after conducting some minor experiments that an automated probe could have handled at one-tenth the price.

Sorry, Gregg, but people die doing "humdrum tasks" every day. What is so special about space that people cannot risk their lives to accomplish things of economic benefit? Why are space workers' lives so much more valuable than, say, construction workers, or coal miners, or truck drivers?

Yes, I know, astronauts have a high value because it costs a lot to train them, but that's just because NASA has artificially created this myth of a superhuman called an "astronaut." In reality, a lot of the useful things that people can do in space could be blue-collar work.

If you can truly do it at lower cost (and risk) without using people, then fine--that's the criterion on which the decision should be made--not whether or not they're risking their lives. Shuttle is so expensive that it probably does make sense to use other vehicles to deliver payloads, but not because of the risk of astronauts' lives. Until we clarify our flawed thinking on this issue, which is a holdover from the Cold War space program, we aren't going to be able to come up with the right solutions.

But a shuttle replacement is exactly what's called for, and a small spaceplane for people, plus new throwaway rockets for cargo, would fit the bill. Once such systems existed, we could think about going back to the Moon, or onward to Mars. Right now NASA isn't even planning trips to either place, because the shuttle stands in the way.

Gregg continues to believe that there's no private demand for human space activities, and that only NASA can take us to the Moon or Mars, or even to LEO. He's wrong, and his proposed solution, while perhaps an improvement over Shuttle, will simply continue to put off the day that we have affordable, low-cost access to space.

We need to recognize that we have a chicken and egg problem. We will only get low costs and reliability with high activity levels, and we will only get high activity levels with vehicles designed to sustain them, at low cost (and that means not throwing them away). Gregg's proposal does nothing to move us in that direction--it's just a continuation of limited space activities by the government, at a slightly lower cost than the current program.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:34 AM

"A Monumentally Stupid Waste Of Money"

Futurepundit Randall Parker has a good post on inherent Shuttle reliability vis a vis airline reliability, and why we need to abandon Shuttle (and ISS) as quickly as possible.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:59 AM

February 06, 2003
The Economics Of The Space Program

Patrick Ruffini, who by his own admission is no space expert, seems to get it.

What's more striking about this accident is NASA's nonchalance, even now, in the face of the Columbia's known vulnerabilities. NASA wasn't cutting corners so much as it was accepting these imperfections as a tolerable risk. Their attitude seems to be that even attempting to fix them would have introduced other (equally hazardous) safety and engineering problems; either that, or the cost would be so astronomical as to defeat the purposes of the current Shuttle program, rendering utterly academic today's debate about whether a 5% increase here or there could have saved these seven lives. Furthermore, claiming NASA knowingly skimped on needed repairs ? and given the caliber of engineering talent working there, it would have to be knowing ? assumes that the agency didn't even have the autonomy to simply trim back a launch or two and pay for the repairs with that. Indeed, the primary alternative to the budget-cut scenario is potentially more damning: NASA knew about the tile vulnerabilities, and took a calculated risk by not fixing them.

Yup. That's life, in the non-Oprah world.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:11 PM

Ship Those Folks Some White Flags

If this story is true, the Iraqi army is eager to get on with the war. Their families are being held hostage to get them to fight, and they can't wait to surrender.

"They are terrified," said one army captain, clad in a blue beret. "They won't surrender at the first shot. They will surrender when they hear the first American tank turn on its engine.
"...I don't think there will be much fighting here," one UNIKOM captain said during an interview in a coffee shop. "That waiter there looks more together than any soldier I have seen in southern Iraq."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:40 PM

Blather From Calpundit

In response to my NRO piece the other day, in which I wrote:

There are some space missions that will just never be jobs for robots. Building an orbital infrastructure that can both mine useful asteroids and comets, and deflect errant ones about to wipe out civilization, is unlikely to be done with robots. Building orbital laboratories in which biochemical and nanotechnological research can be carried out safely is unlikely to be practically done with robots. A new leisure industry, with resorts in orbit or on the moon, would be pointless, and find few customers, if we weren't sending up people. Establishing off- world settlements to get at least some of humanity's eggs out of the current single fragile physical and political basket is not exactly a job for a robot.

Kevin Drum replies, (inexplicably) incredulously:

That's it? Mining the asteroids? The long-promised pharmaceutical revolution in zero-g? Sex in space?

Well, no, that's not "it." Those are just examples. And I don't know where he got the pharmaceutical revolution in zero-g, or the sex in space. My point about the labs had nothing to do with zero-g. It was that there's some research that might be too dangerous to perform on earth, and that vacuum makes a dandy firewall.

But the worst part is the final sentence, which I've seen repeated over and over: we need to colonize Mars (or whatever) so that humanity will live on in case we blow ourselves to smithereens here on Earth.
There's really no polite way to put this, but the notion is simply nonsensical. Do space enthusiasts keep writing this stuff because their neurons stop firing before they put finger to keyboard, or is it just that they've been saying it for so long that it's become a habit? Do they have any idea how dumb the proposition really is?

No, Kevin, we really don't. One of the reasons we don't is that you don't even bother to put up any reasons to support your statement that it's dumb, or nonsensical. You seem to think that it's so obvious that it requires no explanation, and you think that simply calling it that makes it so. When you're prepared to actually discuss it intelligently, then perhaps I'll find your fulminating a little more persuasive.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:11 PM

Irony

As absurd, almost parodic as it seems now, by May, if all goes well, Iraq may be exactly the right country to be heading up the UN Conference on Disarmament.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:28 AM

Virus?

Have any other bloggers been getting a lot of pr0n spam from Warbloggerwatch?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:19 AM

Into the Wilderness

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Americans are coddled, and take many things for granted.

We get into our cars, and we drive out in the country, or up into the mountains, and we expect to find gasoline, and food at the grocery or general store, and a motel that will have indoor plumbing and bedding for our biological needs. If we're really adventurous, we'll not take a car, but instead a motor home, so that we can stock up on food and supplies, and rough it out in the woods for a while.

But when our country was young, out on the frontier, there were no groceries. There were no conveniences. Sometimes, if one went too far over the verge, there weren't even the basic things that we needed to live, like water. Yet many went out into the wilderness, risking life and happiness, often for no reason than to see what was over the next mountain.

Let's move back into the twenty first, or even the twentieth century, for a moment, and change the subject slightly (but only slightly, as we will see in a few paragraphs).

When a pilot takes off in an airplane, one of the fundamental things he does before spinning up the propellor and becoming airborne is to check out the aircraft. He walks around it, examining the control surfaces, the pressure in the tires, the fasteners that hold vital wings to critical fuselage. He tests the controls, and verifies that his manual activities result in aircraft response--rudder, aileron, elevator.

Then, he knows that the aircraft is ready for flight, and so is he.

Prior to each flight, the space shuttle undergoes the same procedure, except instead of a simple brief walk around by the pilot, it spends months under the tender ministrations of a division of troops, dedicated engineers and technicians, the "standing army" that claims so much of the cost of the system, to ensure that it is ready for its mission.

But consider: there are three phases to a space shuttle's mission.

The first is the launch phase, in which it is thrust out into the universe on a huge flaming tail of fire, briefly generating more power than the entire electrical output of the nation. We lost a shuttle during this phase seventeen years ago, and everyone assumed that it was the most dangerous part of the flight.

The second phase is on orbit, in which the astronauts float, ethereally, accomplishing their mission, and the sense of danger is almost nonexistent, and palliated by the serenity of weightlessness and silence of the emptiness of space, and beauty of the earth passing below, once every hour and a half.

The third phase is actually the most dangerous.

In this phase, the vehicle must reenter earth's atmosphere, and it must slow down by using the friction of that hypersonic air to drag it to almost the halt necessary for it to make final approach to the runway and land. It has an unimaginable amount of energy in orbit, and almost all of it must be dissipated into the thin gases at tens of miles of altitude, and (at least momentarily, until it can cool off) into insulating and heat-absorbing tiles on the hottest portions of the structure, particularly the nose and leading edge of the wings.

The ascent environment, assuming that there are no catastrophic disassemblies of the stressed propulsion systems (as occurred on the final Challenger flight in 1986) is a cake walk compared to the entry, at least as far as the orbiter is concerned.

Yet prior to ascent, engineer spend months refurbishing and inspecting the vehicle, preparing it for launch. In contrast, prior to the much more strenuous descent, after having gone through the rigor of ascent, almost nothing is done, unless there's an obvious problem indicated by sensors. It is simply assumed that the ground preparation readied the vehicle for the entire mission, and that nothing will occur on orbit to make the return problematic.

Why? Because there's no capability in the system to do otherwise. There are no facilities in space to inspect, or repair a shuttle orbiter. There are no tow trucks to rescue it if it has a propulsion failure. There are no motels to spend the night if they can't return on schedule. There are no general stores to purchase additional supplies of food--or air.

Every flight of a space shuttle (at least those that don't go to ISS) is a flight deep into the wilderness of space, in the equivalent of a motor home on which everything has to go right, because there's no other way home, and delay is ultimately death, and "ultimately" isn't very far off.

I've written before about the fragility, and brittleness of our space transportation infrastructure. I was referring to the systems that get us into space, and the ground systems that support them.

But we have an even bigger problem, that was highlighted by the loss of the Columbia on Saturday. Our orbital infrastructure isn't just fragile--it's essentially nonexistent, with the exception of a single space station at a high inclination, which was utterly unreachable by the Columbia on that mission.

Imagine the options that Mission Control and the crew would have had, if they'd known they had a problem, and there was an emergency rescue hut (or even a Motel 6 for space tourists) in their orbit, with supplies to buy time until a rescue mission could be deployed. Or if we had a responsive launch system that could have gotten cargo up to them quickly.

As it was, even if they'd known that the ship couldn't safely enter, there was nothing they could do. And in fact, the knowledge that there were no solutions may have subtly influenced their assessment that there wasn't a problem.

The lesson we must take from the most recent Shuttle disaster is that we can no longer rely on a single vehicle for our access to the new frontier, and that we must start to build the needed orbital infrastructure in low earth orbit, and farther out, to the Moon, so that, in the words of the late Congressman George Brown, "greater metropolitan earth" is no longer a wilderness, in which a technical failure means death or destruction.

NASA's problem hasn't been too much vision, even for near-earth activities, but much too little. But it's a job not just for NASA--to create that infrastructure, we will have to set new policies in place that harness private enterprise, just as we did with the railroads in the nineteenth century. That is the policy challenge that will come out of the latest setback--to begin to tame the harsh wilderness only two hundred miles above our heads.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:09 AM

February 05, 2003
A Key Part Of The Space Solution

Tony Andragna has figured it out.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:16 PM

Peer Pressure

There's some really great commentary (by my readers, not necessarily by me) in this post, particularly toward the bottom, that may contain the key not to what happened to Columbia, but how NASA fooled themselves into believing that it was going to be OK after they saw the launch video.

Imagine that you're an engineer at JSC. The Shuttle is up, and there's no way to bring it back except the way it normally comes back--a hot entry, just as it was designed for. There's no other way of getting the crew out of it, and there's no realistic way to get supplies to them to extend their mission to buy time until you can some up with some way to save them. If there's a problem, you have no realistic options.

Now, you're asked to make an assessment, in the absence of any data except a launch video showing some insulation hitting the vehicle, as to whether or not the damage could be catastrophic. Others around you, whom you respect, are saying that it won't be. You have a bad feeling, but you can't prove anything with the available data.

What do you do? What's the benefit, given that there's no action that can be taken to alleviate the problem, in fighting to get people to recognize that we may have a serious problem?

Moreover, suppose that we do believe that there's a problem.

Do we tell the crew? What can they do, other than make peace with their God and say goodbye to their families? Think about the scene toward the end of the movie Apollo XIII.

"Gene, we think they may be entering a little hot."

"Anything we can do about it?"

"No."

"Then they don't need to know, do they?"

It would make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to perform their experiments, knowing that they may be doomed at the end of it, and much of the results destroyed along with them, so if it turns out to be a false alarm, we ruined the mission.

It's not hard for me to see how a group of smart people, all in the same situation, could reach a consensus that there's not a problem.

The real problem is the fact that we send Shuttles off into the wilderness naked, with too few options.

That's almost certainly tomorrow's Fox News column.

[Update at 9:10 PM PST]

Dave Himrich agrees, and presciently, he did it on Saturday.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:57 PM

On The Verge In Pyongyang?

This thread, over on Free Republic, may explain Kim Il Jung's brinkmanship. He's desperate, because the regime may be on the verge of falling apart.

Calling Trent Telenko...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:43 PM

Don't Betray Another Generation

Glenn already posted on this, but it's worth repeating. It's from a seventeen-year-old high-school student in the Detroit area.

We must achieve the almost impossible to go further then you. To go further then you we have to establish human life beyond the confines of our home. That is a mighty task you have left us with. Hopefully we can do that while finding the solutions to earthly problems in the process. We need a place to go, and we'll find that place. Then we will go there, with our kids in the backseat (of the spacecraft) asking "Are we there yet?"

People like David are why we have to get it right this time. One generation's dreams betrayed are enough.

[Via Kathy Kinsley]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:37 PM

Their Minds Are Made Up

You know, watching events at the UN, you realize that, at some point, it just gets futile. There are some people that are never going to be interested in evidence, or logic, and cannot accept it, because if they do, their own agendas will be put at risk. It's really a waste of time to try to convince them.

But enough reminiscing about the OJ Simpson and Clinton impeachment trials...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:10 PM

Space Entrepreneurs On Cavuto?

If you get Fox News, you might want to turn it on. Neil Cavuto just announced that he's going to talk to couple of "honchos" of space companies that want to privatize it.

I'll listen, report, and you can decide.

[Update, at 2 PM PST]

It was with Mike Gallo of Kelly Space and Technology, and Earl Renaud, from TGV Rockets.

The focus of the interview was whether or not people would be willing to fly on their vehicles after what happened Saturday. The answer, of course, was "of course."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:01 PM

An Extraterrestrial Strike?

NASA is considering the possibility that Columbia was hit on orbit.

Could be. There's a lot of junk floating around up there, though we're doing better at keeping things clean, and most of the older stuff has deorbited. Of course, it could have been a natural object, a small meteoroid, in which case, it really was an act of God.

This all complicates life even more, because it's no longer a matter of just watching launch films to see if there were any problems on ascent. It means that to really insure against this happening again, they have to have a way to do a tile inspection just prior to deorbit, and make it part of the deorbit procedure. Not a problem at station, but it's more of a challenge for a mission like Columbia's, which was on its own. And of course, they also would have to have a contingency plan if they can't come back. More on that later.

On the other hand, one might simply be philosophical, and say that it's not reasonable to design against every possible hazard. After all, my car could also be hit by a metorite, but that doesn't mean that I armor my roof against such an eventuality.

I found this bit interesting.

After the report was issued, Fischbeck said NASA took steps to sharply reduce foam debris. The experts also urged NASA to find ways to improve tile safety, despite budget cuts.
"NASA must find ways of being cost-effective, because it simply cannot afford financially or politically to lose another orbiter," the report cautioned.

Yes. NASA cannot afford to lose another orbiter. Note that it doesn't say they can't afford to lose another crew. Whether deliberately or inadvertently, they get it right. It's the orbiter that has the value, not the astronauts, and reusable vehicles have to be reliable, or they're unaffordable, regardless of their contents. That's why talk of "man rating" a space transport, or that this will add cost to it, is utter nonsense.

[Update at 3:11 PM PST]

Jay Manifold has run the numbers on this.

[Another update at 3:38 PM PST]

Here's a couple-year-old article about the subject, by Leonard David. I found this interesting, because I used to work on debris characterization over twenty years ago, at Aerospace, with Val Chobotov. It was my first job out of college. I worked with Bill Ailor, too, but he wasn't doing debris analysis then.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:46 PM

More Mush From Mandela

The headline is wrong, but he says that Colin Powell is undermining the UN.

Yeah, that racist Powell. Why can't he show solidarity with Kofi Annan? He must be Bush's house nigra.

I wonder if ol' Nelson's become senile?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:22 PM

If It Doesn't Work, Do More Of It

What a shocker. France wants to "strengthen and expand" arms inspections.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:52 AM

Still Missing The Point

Over in the comments section of this post by Dan over at Happy Fun Pundit, Porphyrogenitus writes:

I do think that there will be a viable private space industry eventually. But the costs will have to go down first.

This is one of the many bits of conventional wisdom about space that is wrong, and continues to hold us back. It confuses cause and effect, and betrays a misunderstanding of why the cost of launch is high.

For many fundamental, institutional reasons, costs will never go down as long as the government is in charge. Low cost will only result from the entry of private enterprise.

This kind of thinking assumes that launch costs are high because we don't have the right "technology." This is a mistaken belief. They're high because the market is too small, and there's no competition. There's only one solution for that, and it's not development of another launch system by NASA.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:48 AM

Leftist Groups Decry NASA Demonization

February 5, 2003

HOUSTON, Texas, USA (APUPI)

A number of progressive, liberal, and socialist organizations have banded together to protest the latest slanderous attack on them, and their noble unquestionable principles, this time by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Some of the more prominent groups include Postmodernists for Peace, the World People's Liberation Front, the Liberation Front Of The People of the World, Socialists International, the American Communist Party, International ANSWER, Stalinists for Trotsky, Trotskyites for Chomsky, the NAALPOC (National Association for the Advancement of Liberal People Of Color), the ACLU, and the Green and Democratic parties.

In a press conference in Clear Lake City, outside the front gates of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Emilio Litella, the spokesman for the newly formed "Coalition For Social Justice And Leftist Anti-Defamation" complained that even before the investigation into the Columbia disaster was completed, they were being blamed for it.

"NASA has already started to leak rumors that it was caused by the left wing," he said. "Once again, we're being unfairly libeled by reactionary conservatives with an anti-human, anti-peace agenda. It's obvious that this is part of an ongoing effort by right-wing baby-killing pencil-necked geeks to demonize all progressive forces, just as our pro-peace, no-war-for-oil message is starting to resonate with the American people, on the eve of a brutal and unjust war on the people of Iraq and Palestine."

In Washington, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, a noted expert on demonization of progressive forces by the conservative media, was asked if the Democrats agreed with this complaint.

In a soft, pained, reasonable-sounding-yet-whiny voice, he replied, "Well, I have to say that I'm very disappointed at this rush to judgement on the part of the space agency. They claim to be objective, and that they aren't going to say anything definitive until the investigation is complete, but anyone who reads the papers knows the direction that the investigation has been going."

"Then shrill voices on talk radio and the internet pick it up, and make it sound as though those of us who are for truly compassionate policies, and are against tax cuts for the rich, are responsible for the destruction of the space shuttle. It's just a continuation of the politics of personal destruction."

"I and my family have received several death threats about this in the past hour alone, and that's not even considering the normal daily ones from Bob Torricelli and Jim Jeffords. That was most disappointing."

Senator Hillary Clinton, who happened to be in Mr. Daschle's office measuring the draperies, added, "It's just part of the ongoing vast, right-wing conspiracy against me and my husband, that I still wish that some enterprising reporter would go and dig up the real story on, instead of tarring voices for fairness with innuendo about blowing up space shuttles."

When asked if she had ever had any involvement with the nation's space program, she replied, "Well, I did want to be an astronaut, before I went through the period when I wanted to be a Marine, but the reactionary neanderthal rat-bastards at the space agency told me that girls need not apply. But other than that, I'm afraid I don't recall."

Back in Clear Lake, following the press conference, in response to queries, Kent Lovebreed, a crewcut spokesman from NASA's Public Affairs Office, responded, "We regret that anyone feels that they're under personal attack by our critical investigation into the cause of Saturday's tragedy. We wouldn't want to imply that there is anything sinister here. We are simply objective scientists and engineers, gathering the evidence, and following the trail wherever it leads. Right now, unfortunately, the left wing has to be considered the leading cause of that catastrophe."

Asked if, as a result of the preliminary results of the investigation, NASA was considering laying down a design requirement that all future space vehicles have only right wings, he said, "It's premature to make any kind of recommendation like that, but in light of our experience now, it certainly has to be one of the options on the table."

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:44 AM

Wh@cking Off For Peace

The logical conclusion of inane anti-war tactics can be found here. [Warning, more than slightly risque, particularly some of the links on the page]

My own bumper sticker suggestions:

"Save An Iraqi By Getting All Whacky"

"Bag Balm--not Baghdad Bomb"

"War is Funky, Slap the Monkey"

It's pretty damned funny.

[Via Volokh]

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:14 AM

February 04, 2003
Bruce Moomaw Gets It Not At All

OK, I was gentle with Easterbrook. But Bruce Moomaw is totally out to lunch with this piece. Everything he knows is wrong, other than the title.

The Space Age Born Of The Cold War Is Over
Today's appalling Shuttle tragedy proves -- once again -- that manned spaceflight, at this point in history, is not remotely worth either its cost or its risk of lives. I say "once again" because virtually any scientist worth his salt has been pointing out that fact routinely for decades.

Any skeptic is invited to take a look at what the professional science journals regularly say on this subject.

He says this as though scientists in general have anything interesting or useful to say about the space program. This is an assumption with no foundation. Just as one example, recall UK Astronomer Royal Richard Woolley's comments, a year before Sputnik, about space travel being "utter bilge."

Tell me, Bruce, why should we care what scientists think? What does space have to do with science?

NASA has always been warped by the freakish circumstances of its early development.

Well, I can't deny that. It's one of my fundamental theses.

The Moon Race was originally promulgated by Vice President Lyndon Johnson in 1961 (as he told his friends openly) in order to try to pump more federal money into the South in general and Texas in particular. He managed -- narrowly -- to persuade JFK to go along (the only subject upon which he ever seems to have had any significant influence on Kennedy's administration as Vice President).
Regardless of whether one regards the political goals of the Moon race as worthwhile, it is unquestionable that -- ever since the Apollo program ended -- NASA has been frantically trying to maintain the grotesquely bloated levels of funding it received during those days. It has managed to do so, by a two-stage process.

First, it has told one deliberate and outrageous lie after another about the supposed cheapness and utility of first the Space Shuttle and then the Space Station (overestimates, in both cases and both categories, of over 10 to 1!) in order to narrowly persuade the White House and Congress to initiate both programs.

As one former NASA official told a "Time" magazine reporter shortly after the Challenger disaster, regarding NASA's lies to gain initial approval of the Shuttle in 1972: "We hated to do it, but we were getting SO many votes."

NASA has then resorted, over all the following years, to the time-honored "camel's nose" technique of methodically raising its cost estimate and lowering its usefulness estimate for each program by a little each year, while simultaneously insisting that if Congress didn't go on funding the program ANYWAY, the money already spent would have been wasted.

As a swindle, this has worked magnificently -- in both cases, by the time the rubes have finally caught on to the game, tens of billions in unjustified funding has been pumped into the aerospace-industrial complex.

All true, but does it ultimately support his thesis? Let's read on and see.

Ultimately, of course, the game always unravels. The Challenger tragedy was a direct result of the fact that NASA didn't dare stop launching Shuttles long enough to fix a whole flock of serious design programs which it knew existed -- including a problem with the landing brakes even more serious than the problems with the solid booster O-rings -- because, even by 1986, it was still desperately trying to continue pretending to Congress that the Shuttle could be flown at least a dozen times a year at an acceptable cost.
After it finally became impossible to sustain that lie in the wake of Challenger, NASA switched to saying that the Shuttle program was justified entirely to support the Space Station (if for no other reason).

The supposed usefulness of the Station itself is a comparable lie which has been steadily uncovered to a greater and greater degree for the last 15 years or so -- but never quite fast enough for the Station ever to be canceled (primarily due to its elementary political appeal as pure home-district pork for Congressmen).

Again, all basically correct. But [VOICE=Homer Simpson] Let's see where he's going with this...[/VOICE]

The new tragedy today may change that. At a minimum, it proves that NASA's post-Challenger estimate of Shuttle safety has been as psychotically inaccurate as its pre-Challenger estimates -- with both estimates quite possibly being another set of deliberate lies.
NASA's current estimate has been that the Shuttle has only one chance in 350 of suffering a fatal accident during a launch, and considerably less of a risk during reentry.

Ahh, now here he's simply full of beans. As he himself points out, NASA has been stating all along that Shuttle's reliability was nothing to write home about. I think the most recent estimate was about one in two hundred fifty. A loss after over eighty flights since the last one is certainly not out of bed with NASA's estimate, except to someone utterly innumerate and unacquainted with statistics.

Not quite true. If -- as seems increasingly likely -- the Columbia disaster was due to detachment of some of its crucial belly tiles, then -- whether this was actually due to impact by a lightweight piece of debris from the external tank during launch or not -- it indicates that the Shuttle's entire reentry thermal protection system is incredibly fragile, and always has been.

NASA has always known that this is a likely failure mode, since the beginning of the program. I'm still awaiting some kind of regression analysis from Bruce to demonstrate to me why NASA's estimate was inaccurate. Or even some rationale as to how this statement supports...well...anything else that he's written.

There is also a genuine chance that today's tragedy will turn out to be due to excessive economizing on Shuttle maintenance and safety programs -- economizing which was criticized, explicitly and at length, by both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees last year -- in order to make it possible to continue funding the Space Station, even in some kind of barely scientifically usable form.

There is a chance, but the highest probability remains that the cause of Saturday's disaster (literally "bad star") was due to excessive economizing over a quarter of a century ago, when the Shuttle was being designed. "Send more money to NASA" is not now, and has never been, the key to more reliable, safe, affordable, or often space transportation.

The simple fact is that the average manned spaceflight costs about 10 times as much as the average unmanned space mission, for much LESS scientific and commercial return -- and always has.

True, and irrelevant, since no one has ever done a manned mission in the US other than NASA, and they've never been incentivized to do things at low cost.

As President Reagan's science advisor George Keyworth said: "While all government agencies lie part of the time, NASA is the only one I know of that does so routinely." The reason is simply that it has far less reason to exist at anything remotely like its current funding levels than any other U.S. government agency does.
NASA has been running an gigantic swindle on US taxpayers for at least the past three decades -- at the cost of about $150 billion in unjustified spending, and now a total of 14 human lives.

While I agree with this statement generally, I'm much more concerned with the dollars than the lives. Bruce is just relying here on the irrationality of the people who keen and wail over the deaths of people who signed up for potential death, to engage in rhetorical hyperbole.

Think about it. Fourteen human lives. I'd be willing to bet that we lost more people in traffic accidents yesterday than we lost in the entire history of the space program. The real issue is the money, and the opportunity costs, had we expended it in a manner that would have actually made significant progress in moving humanity off the planet, which that amount of money certainly could have, if not wasted on tech-welfare boondoggles like Shuttle and ISS. But Bruce is too busy crying about the fact that we didn't send robots to think about how the money could have been better spent for getting us into space.

All we can hope for at this point, however, is that the White House and Congress will finally come to their senses and shut the American manned space program down, completely, until radical new technology allows massive improvements in both launch cost and flight safety -- a development which is at least two decades or so off -- while maintaining (or even increasing) its spending both on unmanned space exploration and on that development of aeronautical technology which has supposedly been one of its primary reasons for existing.

Ahhhhhh...finally. Here it comes. People into space is fine, as long as we wait until we have the "technology." Let us all bow down to the god of "Technology." This is the mentality of the cargo cult, and certainly not the product of any informed analysis of the history of spaceflight.

The reason that spaceflight is expensive and unreliable is very simple, and has nothing to do with "technology." It is because we don't do much of it. When you don't do much of something, it will not only be expensive, due to an utter lack of economies of scale, but there will be so little experience with it that there's no opportunity to learn, and improve it, in both the aspects of cost and reliability.

This hope, however, is based on the assumption that the federal government possesses a significant degree of brains and honesty, which has always been open to serious question.

Yes. Unfortunately, those qualities in pundits like Mr. Moomaw seem, sadly, in short supply as well.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:58 PM

Zichrano Livracha (Of Blessed Memory)

The Israeli embassy has set up a condolence page for Columbia.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:03 PM

No Al Qaeda Here

Finally, indisputable proof that Saddam is linked to Al Qaeda. The headline says it all.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:28 PM

An Easterbrook Critique

A number of pundits and bloggers have been citing Easterbrook's piece, so I decided to finally take the time and go through it to separate fact from fancy, so they'll have a better idea whether or not to agree with him, and on which points. It's not a true fisking, because I actually agree with most of it, but I do want to note a few places where he goes off the rails as a result of (as always) invalid assumptions.

The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped
It's costly, outmoded, impractical and, as we've learned again, deadly

A spacecraft is a metaphor of national inspiration: majestic, technologically advanced, produced at dear cost and entrusted with precious cargo, rising above the constraints of the earth. The spacecraft carries our secret hope that there is something better out there?a world where we may someday go and leave the sorrows of the past behind. The spacecraft rises toward the heavens exactly as, in our finest moments as a nation, our hearts have risen toward justice and principle. And when, for no clear reason, the vessel crumbles, as it did in 1986 with Challenger and last week with Columbia, we falsely think the promise of America goes with it.

Unfortunately, the core problem that lay at the heart of the Challenger tragedy applies to the Columbia tragedy as well. That core problem is the space shuttle itself. For 20 years, the American space program has been wedded to a space-shuttle system that is too expensive, too risky, too big for most of the ways it is used, with budgets that suck up funds that could be invested in a modern system that would make space flight cheaper and safer. The space shuttle is impressive in technical terms, but in financial terms and safety terms no project has done more harm to space exploration.

So far, so good. I find little to disagree with.

With hundreds of launches to date, the American and Russian manned space programs have suffered just three fatal losses in flight?and two were space-shuttle calamities. This simply must be the end of the program.

Now I'm missing his point here. Is he saying that we cannot fly unless we can guarantee that we'll never lose lives? Or that the level of safety is unacceptable? What level would be acceptable? One could look at it another way and say that in four decades of manned space flight, we've only had three incidents of loss of life, and only two of them were Shuttle.

Will the much more expensive effort to build a manned International Space Station end too? In cost and justification, it's as dubious as the shuttle. The two programs are each other's mirror images. The space station was conceived mainly to give the shuttle a destination, and the shuttle has been kept flying mainly to keep the space station serviced. Three crew members?Expedition Six, in NASA argot?remain aloft on the space station. Probably a Russian rocket will need to go up to bring them home.

They already have a ride home--there is always a Soyuz docked at station capable of returning three passengers.

The wisdom of replacing them seems dubious at best. This second shuttle loss means NASA must be completely restructured?if not abolished and replaced with a new agency with a new mission.
Why did NASA stick with the space shuttle so long? Though the space shuttle is viewed as futuristic, its design is three decades old. The shuttle's main engines, first tested in the late 1970s, use hundreds more moving parts than do new rocket-motor designs. The fragile heat-dissipating tiles were designed before breakthroughs in materials science. Until recently, the flight-deck computers on the space shuttle used old 8086 chips from the early 1980s, the sort of pre-Pentium electronics no self-respecting teenager would dream of using for a video game.

Most important, the space shuttle was designed under the highly unrealistic assumption that the fleet would fly to space once a week and that each shuttle would need to be big enough to carry 50,000 lbs. of payload. In actual use, the shuttle fleet has averaged five flights a year; this year flights were to be cut back to four. The maximum payload is almost never carried. Yet to accommodate the highly unrealistic initial goals, engineers made the shuttle huge and expensive. The Soviet space program also built a shuttle, called Buran, with almost exactly the same dimensions and capacities as its American counterpart. Buran flew to orbit once and was canceled, as it was ridiculously expensive and impractical.

Capitalism, of course, is supposed to weed out such inefficiencies. But in the American system, the shuttle's expense made the program politically attractive. Originally projected to cost $5 million per flight in today's dollars, each shuttle launch instead runs to around $500 million. Aerospace contractors love the fact that the shuttle launches cost so much.

Yes, this point can't be emphasized enough. The incentives in the system are truly perverse, which is one of the reasons for the failure of the X-33 program. It was more in Lockmart's interest for it to fail than succeed.

In two decades of use, shuttles have experienced an array of problems? engine malfunctions, damage to the heat-shielding tiles?that have nearly produced other disasters. Seeing this, some analysts proposed that the shuttle be phased out, that cargo launches be carried aboard by far cheaper, unmanned, throwaway rockets and that NASA build a small "space plane" solely for people, to be used on those occasions when men and women are truly needed in space.
Throwaway rockets can fail too. Last month a French-built Ariane exploded on lift-off. No one cared, except the insurance companies that covered the payload, because there was no crew aboard. NASA's insistence on sending a crew on every shuttle flight means risking precious human life for mindless tasks that automated devices can easily carry out. Did Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon really have to be there to push a couple of buttons on the Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment, the payload package he died to accompany to space?

No, he didn't have to be there, but he wanted to be. This is one of my pet peeves about the general commentary on the manned space program. The same argument was made after the Challenger was lost--that we shouldn't risk astronauts' lives to deliver satellites. That resulted in a policy decision to no longer allow Shuttle to carry commercial payloads, particularly comsats. This was the right decision, for a dunderheaded reason (as is often the case with government decisions). The right reason to take the commercial payloads away from the Shuttle was to stop the unfair government-subsidized competition with the commercial launch industry, and allow the latter to develop. But the argument that people shouldn't risk their lives to deliver satellites is just dumb, if that's the best and cheapest way to do it (though in this case, it turned out not to be).

That is not a decision for Gregg Easterbrook, or presidential commissions, or Congress, to make. It's not unreasonable, given the expense and difficulty of replacing it, to say that we shouldn't risk expensive orbiters on routine satellite deliveries--that's only fair to the taxpayers who have to replace the thing--but no one can assess the value of an astronaut's life except the astronaut herself. It should be her decision--not some bureaucrat's or pundit's.

Switching to unmanned rockets for payload launching and a small space plane for those rare times humans are really needed...

I have to stop him here, because this is really the crux of the issue. When are humans "really needed"? Why is it assumed that the times that this occurs will be "rare"?

We don't need to go into space at all--we survived millennia without doing it. It gets back to my point in yesterday's NRO column that it's pointless to even have these kinds of discussions in the absence of a national decision about what we're trying to accomplish in space.

Yes, if the goal is simply to support the space station, with a few people changed out a few times a year, then Orbital Space Plane, launched on an expendable, might make sense. If, on the other hand, the goal is to enable large numbers of people to go to space, for whatever purpose they desire (and those purposes would dwarf "science and exploration," other than personal exploration, by orders of magnitude), then such a system makes no sense at all.

...would cut costs, which is why aerospace contractors have lobbied against such reform. Boeing and Lockheed Martin split roughly half the shuttle business through an Orwellian- named consortium called the United Space Alliance. It's a source of significant profit for both companies; United Space Alliance employs 6,400 contractor personnel for shuttle launches alone. Many other aerospace contractors also benefit from the space-shuttle program.
Any new space system that reduced costs would be, to the contractors, killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Just a few weeks ago, NASA canceled a program called the Space Launch Initiative, whose goal was to design a much cheaper and more reliable replacement for the shuttle. Along with the cancellation, NASA announced that the shuttle fleet would remain in operation until 2020, meaning that Columbia was supposed to continue flying into outer space even when its airframe was more than 40 years old! True, B-52s have flown as long. But they don't endure three times the force of gravity on takeoff and 2000*none [sic] on re-entry.

A rational person might have laughed out loud at the thought that although school buses are replaced every decade, a spaceship was expected to remain in service for 40 years. Yet the "primes," as NASA's big contractors are known, were overjoyed when the Space Launch Initiative was canceled because it promised them lavish shuttle payments indefinitely. Of course, the contractors also worked hard to make the shuttle safe. But keeping prices up was a higher priority than having a sensible launch system.

Yes, and again, this point can't be overemphasized. You cannot expect innovation from companies that are doing very well from the status quo. That's why low-cost launch will not come from the existing aerospace industry.

Will NASA whitewash problems as it did after Challenger? The haunting fact of Challenger was that engineers who knew about the booster-joint problem begged NASA not to launch that day and were ignored. Later the Rogers Commission, ordered to get to the bottom of things, essentially recommended that nothing change. No NASA manager was fired; no safety systems were added to the solid rocket boosters whose explosion destroyed Challenger; no escape-capsule system was added to get astronauts out in a calamity, which might have helped Columbia. In return for failure, the shuttle program got a big budget increase. Post-Challenger "reforms" were left up to the very old-boy network that had created the problem in the first place and that benefited from continuing high costs.

Yes, NASA was punished for success, when their budgets were chopped back severely in the late sixties and early seventies, as the Apollo program wound down, and they were rewarded for failure in 1986. Unfortunately, the Administration's knee-jerk response this weekend was to promise to increase the NASA budget. Government space programs are like any other government program. If you measure them by input, rather than output, you'll get very expensive programs that don't generate much value. We have to have a more intelligent response than, "send more money."

Concerned foremost with budget politics, Congress too did its best to whitewash. Large manned-space-flight centers that depend on the shuttle are in Texas, Ohio, Florida and Alabama. Congressional delegations from these states fought frantically against a shuttle replacement. The result was years of generous funding for constituents?and now another tragedy.
The tough questions that have gone unasked about the space shuttle have also gone unasked about the space station, which generates billions in budget allocations for California, Texas, Ohio, Florida and other states. Started in 1984 and originally slated to cost $14 billion in today's dollars, the space station has already cost at least $35 billion?not counting billions more for launch costs?and won't be finished until 2008. The bottled water alone that crews use aboard the space station costs taxpayers almost half a million dollars a day. (No, that is not a misprint.) There are no scientific experiments aboard the space station that could not be done far more cheaply on unmanned probes. The only space-station research that does require crew is "life science," or studying the human body's response to space. Space life science is useful but means astronauts are on the station mainly to take one another's pulse, a pretty marginal goal for such an astronomical price.

Again, an unstated assumption, i.e., the only reason to have a space station is for "science." Until we break out of that mindset, we will not be able to have an intelligent discussion about policy options.

What is next for America in space? An outsider commission is needed to investigate the Columbia accident?and must report to the President, not Congress, since Congress has shown itself unable to think about anything but pork barrel when it comes to space programs.
For 20 years, the cart has been before the horse in U.S. space policy. NASA has been attempting complex missions involving many astronauts without first developing an affordable and dependable means to orbit. The emphasis now must be on designing an all-new system that is lower priced and reliable. And if human space flight stops for a decade while that happens, so be it. Once there is a cheaper and safer way to get people and cargo into orbit, talk of grand goals might become reality. New, less-expensive throwaway rockets would allow NASA to launch more space probes?the one part of the program that is constantly cost-effective. An affordable means to orbit might make possible a return to the moon for establishment of a research base and make possible the long-dreamed-of day when men and women set foot on Mars. But no grand goal is possible while NASA relies on the super-costly, dangerous shuttle.

This is correct. My only issue is that he seems to be implying that NASA should be allowed to build a Shuttle replacement. This would almost certainly be as disastrous as the Shuttle itself, because it will be subject to the same political and budgetary constraints as that program was.

We need to have competition, and we need to have multiple solutions. For that we need markets, which is what we're really lacking, rather than technology.

In 1986 the last words transmitted from Challenger were in the valiant vow: "We are go at throttle up!" This meant the crew was about to apply maximum thrust, which turned out to be a fatal act.

Gregg damages his credibility again here. They had been at maximum thrust since liftoff. They were, in fact preparing to throttle back after passing through maximum dynamic pressure, in order to adhere to the three-gee acceleration constraint as the vehicle grew lighter by expending its propellants.

[Update, late Tuesday night]

OK, OK, numerous emailer and commenters have persuaded me that Gregg is right, and I'm wrong. They'd throttled back for max Q, and were about to throttle back up, until they reached the acceleration limit, which would occur several minutes later. Please quit commenting and emailing.

In the coming days, we will learn what the last words from Columbia were. Perhaps they too will reflect the valor and optimism shown by astronauts of all nations. It is time NASA and the congressional committees that supervise the agency demonstrated a tiny percentage of the bravery shown by the men and women who fly to space? by canceling the money-driven shuttle program and replacing it with something that makes sense.

Agreed. The issue is what makes "sense." And there's no way to determine that until we decide what we're trying to accomplish.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:54 AM

Let NASA Be NACA

Anglospherian (and former space entrepreneur) Jim Bennett has a column in NRO today on the need for NASA to get the Shuttle/ISS monkey off its back.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:46 AM

February 03, 2003
Non-Technical-Speculation Zone

Aziz Poonawala has a theory about what happened to Columbia. He thinks that the left gear door opened in flight.

I've no opinion on that, and it may be true, but it then begs the question...why? How would such a thing happen, on this of all flights? It still doesn't really solve the mystery.

But I'm really posting this to make this point. To me, it doesn't matter that much what the proximate cause of the accident was. As I've said in various venues, what surprised me was not that it happened, but that it took so long to happen, and that NASA was lucky for so long.

The Shuttle, as a program, is now, and always has been, a failure, in terms of the original goals set out for it. Now, it is a dead program walking. It may fly for a few years now, but I suspect that at the end of the day there will be a consensus that we have to have different means (and I mean this word in the plural sense) of getting people to and from orbit. Different in the sense that it is safe, affordable, often, routine, and varied. No more monocultures.

My focus is not on the technical details of exactly what went wrong (I am a recovering engineer, after all) but on what we're going to do to fix it, in a broad policy sense (not a Space Shuttle program sense).

I see this as a rare opportunity to actually change the tenor of the debate about space, and our future in it, and I'm going to emphasize issues relating to that, which I consider much more important. If you want blow-by-blow descriptions and theories of the forensics of the investigation, there will be many places to do so. This will not be one of them. I'm simply not that interested, which means that I won't want to take the time to discuss it, and my opinion won't count for much, because I'm not going to be paying much attention to it, except at the highest level, where there may be policy implications.

That is all.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:43 PM

The Real Scoop On STS-107

For people who want to have the best technical facts available, here's a continually-updated FAQ, maintained by experts, both amateur and professionals, many of whom are regular posters in the sci.space.* newsgroups.

I particularly recommend it to journalists who don't want to say really dumb things, and ask really stupid questions. Many of them will be answered here before you embarrass yourself.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:57 PM

Radio Interview

For any readers in the Richmond, Virginia area, I'm going to be interviewed about space policy on WRVA sometime between 4 and 4:30 EST.

[Evening update]

It might be worthwhile to mention how the interview went. Not well, in retrospect.

I think that, based on my NRO column, he was disappointed, because I believe that he expected me to agree with Gregg Easterbrook and bash Shuttle. Instead, I told him that Shuttle was the most reliable launch vehicle we have (which took him aback quite a bit). I perhaps could have softened the blow by telling him that this was damning it with faint praise.

I then confused him by telling him that Soyuz was the safest manned vehicle, which of course required explaining the difference between safety (ability to survive launch mishaps and not lose crew) and reliability (probability of having a successful flight). I could almost hear the crackling of his eyes glazing over three thousand miles away. I was cut off shortly thereafter, though to be fair, it was only supposed to be a ten-minute interview, and that's about how long it lasted. But the ending seemed somewhat abrupt and, to me, unexpected.

Anyway, I report, you decide...

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:08 PM

Another Sign Of The End Times

Some idiot talk-show host posted an ignorant article blaming the Columbia disaster on Bill Clinton, and most Freepers are appropriately ridiculing it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:39 AM

They Never Saw It Coming

That's what this story in the New York Daily News says, and I think that's right.

But what interested me was a quote from Ari Fleischer:

"The President is dedicated to the mission of science and the marvels of space exploration," spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

Ari, it's about much more than science and exploration. Didn't you get the memo?

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:30 AM

Where No Robot Has Gone Before (Part Two)

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

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:53 AM

February 02, 2003
Disappointing

I'm amazed at how little Andrew Sullivan has to say about this weekend's big story, and how little value there is to what he does say.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:34 PM

Where No Robot Has Gone Before

I'll have a column on this subject tomorrow at NRO, but there's no way (as usual) to say it better than Lileks (sorry, no permalink, he screwed up--maybe I can fix it later, but it's good through the end of Monday...):

...we?re not sending smart toys on our behalf - we?re sending human beings, and one of them will put his boot on the sand and bring the number of worlds we?ve visited to three. And when he plants the flag he will use flesh and sinew and blood and bone to drive it into the ground. His heartbeat will hammer in his ears; his mind will spin a kaleidoscopic medley of all the things he?d thought he?d think at this moment, and he'll grin: I had it wrong. I had no idea what it would truly be like. He?d imagined this moment as oddly private; he'd thought of himself, the red land, the flag in his hand, and he heard music, as though the moment would be fully scored when it happened. But there isn't any music; there's the sound of his breath and the thrum of his pulse. It seems like everyone who ever lived is standing behind him at the other end of a vast dark auditorium, waiting for the flag to stand on the ground of Mars. Then he will say something. He might stumble on a word or two, because he?s only human.

Yes. He's only human. Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:18 PM

American Heroes

I have a special Fox column up for the occasion, if there's anyone who hasn't gotten enough of me from my blog.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:16 PM

More Comments On Columbia

Derek Lowe, bioblogger extraordinaire, weighs in with some insightful, and sadly resigned comments (i.e., he agrees with yours truly). Also, Kevin McGehee has thoughts on the nature of astronauts, among other things.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:01 PM

Columbia Haiku Contest

Here's my first entry to kick it off:

Futility
Fire in the sky
No warning or procedure
Heroes gone to rest

I'll post the best in a couple days as they trickle in.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:42 PM

Another Blog Heard From

In addition to Instantman, you might want to check out Pathetic Earthlings for a lot of good commentary, including a more detailed critique of the Easterbrook article.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:59 AM

No More Manned Trips

Scott Ott has the right take.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:44 AM

The Flight Director's Nightmare

Ever since the Shuttle first started flying, and perhaps even before, I've often thought about a nightmare scenario. I've even thought about writing a SF short story, or even full-length novel about it, except that I can't (intentionally) write fiction (though some would say that I do it often in my attempts to write non-fiction).

A Shuttle launches. Once they attain orbit, it is discovered that they have damage to the tiles that will not allow them to safely enter. In the real world as it existed in the early nineteen eighties, this would be a soul-torturing dilemma, and one that would likely be ultimately passed up to the President. Here's the problem. The Shuttle doesn't have enough consumables to last long enough to launch another one to rescue them. The Soviets might be persuaded to launch a couple Soyuz's, but it's not clear if they can do it in time, either, and there's no way to dock them (though early on, they had the "rescue ball concept" for transfer).

But assume as a given that they cannot be rescued (which really did correspond to reality). They only have two choices. They can cross their fingers, pray, or do whatever non-technical things they wish to maximize their chances, and attempt to come home anyway, or they can run out of air on orbit (or choose some faster way to go), and the vehicle becomes a flying tomb, to be either repaired and retrieved later, or reenter in a few weeks. The ethical question, related to this post, is should we destroy the vehicle in a futile attempt to save the crew, or should we sacrifice the crew, who will die either way, and at least attempt to salvage the vehicle? How do the politics play? How does the public react? To make it more interesting, assume that there really is a credible capability to do such a repair and retrieval--that the vehicle really can be saved, and that the crew really cannot.

Now realize that we just averted this scenario in real life only because of the ignorance of Mission Control about the true situation. Is it possible that the tile damage was ignored partly out of (perhaps unconscious) wishful thinking, because the alternative to ignoring it was to face exactly that ethical dilemma and public-relations nightmare? The only difference is that the likelihood of repairing the Orbiter is small. But depending on the level of damage, it might have been larger than the prospects for a safe entry.

One more consideration. If this had been an ISS mission, the crew would likely be alive today, and wondering what to do with a broken orbiter. It's likely that the damage would have been viewable, and even apparent, when approaching ISS, and the crew would have been able to use the station as a safe haven. But once they launched into an inclination different than that of ISS, if it turns out to be true that the tiles were fatally damaged on ascent, then their fate was sealed, as was their inability to know about it.

All of this, of course, points up the folly of the space policy that we have had in place for the past thirty years, in which we have a single, fragile, unresponsive system to get people to and from space.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:18 AM

Send In The Robots

Well, in some ways I'm glad that I was driving through Big Sur yesterday, instead of listening to the always-ignorant reporting on the latest space disaster. It probably saved my television screen. This morning, I wanted to throw something at Stephanopoulous, when he twice asked the idiotarian question, "is it time to retire the Shuttle and just let the robots do it?"

Do what, George? Do WHAT?

What are we trying to accomplish in space? That is the question that is never asked, and it's the most important one. Everyone simply assumes that they know the answer, and that everyone else knows the answer as well, and that we are all in agreement--we know what we want to do in space (science and research) and the only question is whether it should be done with humans or robots.

If we finally, this time, get a serious discussion going about space policy in this country, for the first time in over forty years, then the loss of Columbia will be worth it, but based on what I'm already hearing from the idiot box, the prospects seem slim.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:41 AM

Hardware Over Humans

Let me preface this post, before I expand on yesterday's apparent political incorrectness, by stating, for the record, that I am not a Vulcan. Nor am I an android. I'm not even a human being whose heart consists of a tiny grain of flinty stone, undetectable except with a scanning tunneling microscope.

I feel for the families and friends of those who lost their lives in yesterday's catastrophe, just as I feel for the family and friends of anyone who suffers such a loss. What I don't feel is a personal loss, as though they were my family or friend. I didn't know them, and neither did ninety nine percent of the American public that now grieves their loss, until yesterday.

I do personally grieve the loss of the space shuttle orbiter Columbia, because I did know it. Very few people saw it both lift off from Florida, on its maiden flight, and land in California, back in May 1981. I'm one of them.

I worked many years for the company that built it. I helped do preliminary planning for some missions for it.

I also grieve its loss as a symbol of what we might be able to accomplish in space, given sensible national space policy (a commodity that continues to remain in short supply).

The crewmembers of that flight were each unique, and utterly irreplaceable to those who knew and loved them, and are devastated by their sudden absence from their lives, and to paraphrase what the president said after September 11, seven worlds were destroyed yesterday.

But, while this may sound callous, the space program will go on just fine without them. They knew their job was hazardous, they did it anyway, and by all accounts, they died doing what they wanted, and loved, to do. There are many more astronauts in the astronaut corps who, if a Shuttle was sitting on the pad tomorrow, fueled and ready to go, would eagerly strap themselves in and go, even with the inquiry still going on, because they know that it's flown over a hundred times without burning up on entry, and they still like the odds. And if yesterday's events made them suddenly timorous, there is a line of a hundred people eagerly waiting to replace each one that would quit, each more than competent and adequate to the task. America, and the idea of America, is an unending cornucopia of astronaut material.

When it comes to space, hardware matters, and currently useful space hardware is a very scarce commodity. People are optional. A Shuttle can get into orbit with no crew aboard. It could return that way as well, with some minor design modifications (actuators for nose-wheel steering and brakes, and gear deployment). But no one gets to space without transportation. Many of us would walk there if we could, but we can't.

Yesterday, we lost a quarter of our Shuttle fleet. The next time we fly, we'll be putting at risk a third of the remainder. If we lose that one, every flight thereafter will be risking half of America's capability to put people into orbit.

So, when I grieve the loss of Columbia, it's not because it was just a symbol. What I truly grieve is the loss of the capability that it not just represented, but possessed. That vehicle will never again deliver a payload or a human to space. It cost billions of dollars to build, and would cost many billions and several years to replace. That was the true loss yesterday, not the crew. I think that people realize this on some level, but feel uncomfortable in articulating it.

But I've always viewed space, and space policy, through a different lens than most people, as anyone who reads this weblog regularly has come to realize.

Why do people so uniquely mourn the loss of astronauts? Before the space program, before Mercury and the Right Stuff, the host of military test pilots that provided that first seven were killed on a regular basis in the exercise of their duties, and their funerals were attended by only family and friends, with little publicity. Something happened in 1960. As Wolfe pointed out, they became the gladiators of our age, in a (hopefully) bloodless competition on the high frontier against our enemy the Soviets. They became a symbol of our technological ability, and in order to win the propaganda battle, they had to leave the planet and return alive. The loss of the vehicles that delivered them to the heavens was insignificant, because they were designed to be thrown away after they served their purpose, once, but if we lost astronauts, it was a sign that we were losing the Cold War.

With the advent of the Shuttle, and even with the end of the Cold War, we retained the same sense that space symbolizes our nation's might and prowess, in a way that an aircraft taking off does not. So, though they've become so seemingly routine that we no longer televise them, our national pride continues to ride with each flight.

But most of us are brought up to believe that "people are more important than things." While true in some abstract philosophical sense, this notion often bumps up against reality--when we decide how strong to build a car door, when we put a dollar amount on the value of a human life for the purpose of determining the cost/benefit of government regulations, etc, but we still believe that there's something unethical or unsavory in valuing inanimate objects, regardless of their ability to provide pleasure, sustenance, or life itself.

So when we are shocked by the loss of something so vital to our national psyche, and so seemingly useful to our ambitions for spaceflight, it is natural to transfer the mourning from the vehicle to its inhabitants.

I don't. I forthrightly state that to me, it was the loss of the vehicle itself that was of the greatest importance, and that we have to build such vehicles to be more reliable, even if they are to never carry crew or passengers, because we cannot afford to lose them. That's why the notion of "man-rating" a reusable launch system, or space transport, is so nonsensical. If it's not reliable enough to operate economically, it's not reliable enough to carry people. The operating economics will be the design driver to reliability, not the payload, regardless of the degree to which it's considered valuable, or even invaluable.

And by that criterion (as well as others), Shuttle has always been a failure, in terms of its ultimate stated program goals of providing affordable, routine, safe access to space. There is plenty of blame to go around for this, but the seeds of that failure were planted in the constrained budget environment of its development thirty years ago, and it's not something that can sensibly be fixed now, regardless of how many bandaids in the form of "Shuttle improvements" we attempt to put on it. We need new vehicles, and new approaches to developing them.

And one follow up from yesterday's flamefest. I received this delightful email from a Douglas Cudd, from League City, TX (presumably a NASA employee or contractor):

Let me just say that I concur and would like to reiterate what Donald Sensing has said before. Also, let me say you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Maybe I'm a bit mad, or maybe it's because I've been in the MCC since last night at 10, but let me just say that as much as I like to criticize NASA management, NOW IS NOT THE TIME when you have a f***ing body count, you heartless pile of s**t.
Columbia, OV102, was not the least valuable, as you put it, because it was oldest and heaviest. The Chandra observatory launched on STS-93 could not have been carried to orbit in any other vehicle OTHER THAN OV-102. And not outfitting it for ISS docking? That again made it perfectly suited for heavy, EDO equipped missions, like 107. It was, however planned to dock to the ISS during STS-118.

So, I don't mind your idiotic, myopic rantings. But in the future, why not at least try to get your facts straight? Or are you one of those guys that got an Estes rocket when you were 12 and never grew up?

Well, I'm sorry that Douglas worked so late in the MCC, and as I said, my heart (I really do have one, honest) goes out to him and all of the people in Houston who did have a deep personal loss yesterday, in both humans and hardware. I'm not sure where I criticized NASA management yesterday. I don't in fact think that they are responsible for what happened, at least not in the way they were seventeen years ago. As I said, what happened yesterday has been a long time coming (longer even than many of us expected back in the early eighties--it was always considered one of the most likely failure modes for a mission), and was a result of decisions forced by pinchpennies in Congress.

As to which orbiter is the most valuable, I would continue to contend that it's easier to outfit one of the other vehicles for EDO than it would have been to put Columbia on a diet, and if some sadistic fiend put a gun to Ron Dittemore's head and told him that he had to sacrifice an orbiter, Columbia is probably the one that he would have chosen, given the current priority of ISS support. But I'm willing to hear counter-arguments.

Not that it really matters, of course, since we did indeed have no choice. I was simply, perhaps inappropriately, in off-the-top-of-my-head comments in the immediate aftermath of the news, attempting to find a silver lining in a very dark cloud.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:21 AM

Shuttle Delenda Est

Gregg Easterbrook says that it's time to end the Shuttle program.

He actually says much with which I agree, but I utterly disagree with his prescription, which is to have NASA build a newer, safer system. He gets it wrong because he continues to fall into the trap of believing that the primary purpose of a space program is for science.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:45 AM

Back To LA

I got in, and was going to follow up on some of the comments from the most recent post, but I have to come up with an emergency Fox column instead, so I'll just note that the Arab News, of all publications, actually had a gracious editorial about our tragic loss.

The immediate lesson remains, however, that this is a tragedy for everyone, not just the United States, India and Israel. We have all lost in this disaster. A technological challenge has been thrown down and once again, a warning given that in the unforgiving region of space, nothing can be taken for granted. The solutions may be a long time coming.
They will come. The struggle to conquer the space will go on. All that we can hope for is that, when the battle is won, the knowledge gained in the process will add to human happiness, not to human misery.

Credit where credit's due, and thanks to them.

More posting tomorrow, as there's much to discuss.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:30 AM

February 01, 2003
History Repeats

I know very little about what happened (even less than many of you, probably), because I just got up and heard the news. I got a phone call this morning from a friend on the east coast.

Like Challenger, this was not a survivable accident. There is no escape system in the Shuttle, for sound engineering reasons.

First my condolences to the friends and family of the crew, and to the nation of Israel, which has suffered so much during the past few years. It has to be a tremendous blow.

I hate to talk about good news/bad news in a situation like this, but let's just say that it could have been worse.

In the "it could have been worse" category, of all the vehicles to use, Columbia was the least valuable, because it was the oldest in the fleet, and the heaviest. For this reason, it was rarely used for ISS missions, because its payload capability was much less (which is why it was being used for this non-ISS mission).

Also, at least the mission was completed before it happened.

Because it was the oldest bird, if it happened as a result of a simple structural failure (e.g., keel or spar), that would have been the most likely vehicle to which it would occur. On the other hand, that would only explain it if it were a consequence of age. If it's cycle fatigue, I'd have to go look it up, but I don't know if Columbia had more flights under its belt than the rest of the fleet.

WARNING: RAMPANT SPECULATION AHEAD

Here are the possibilities off the top of my head.

Terrorism: possible, but unlikely. If it were, it was a result of sabatoge--not being shot down. It would be difficult for us to take out such a target under those conditions (though the missile defense system under test could probably do it). No one else has such a capability, as far as I know. If it were sabatoge, it could have been something done to the vehicle before it left the ground, either a pressure-sensitive detonation (e.g., something that arms itself when it goes into vacuum, and then goes off when it senses atmospheric pressure again). This seems too sophisticated for Al Qaeda. It could also be simply sawing through the wing spar before the flight, because most of the stress on that member occurs during entry.

Failure of TPS: It could be that it lost some tiles during ascent--sometimes ice falls off the ET during launch, and it could have taken some out in a critical area, perhaps along the leading edge of the wings. Since this flight didn't go to ISS, no one would have necessarily seen the damage from outside the Shuttle. This would result in burnthrough of a wing, which would quickly propagate through and then tear it off, after which the vehicle would break up from aerodynamic pressure.

I just heard the CNN announcer say that the airframe was "certified" for a hundred missions. Certification is not really the right word. "Designed to meet the requirement of" would be more accurate. Certification would imply that we had sufficient experience with such things to know that it was really capable of that, and we simply don't.

Next theory, as I already mentioned would be structural failure due to age or cycles. I think that the primary structure is aluminum (though the spar and keel may be titanium--I don't recall for sure). I wouldn't think that this is a likely failure, but it's certainly possible.

The last one I can think of (other than alien attack), would be a loss of the attitude control system (either the flight computers, or an RCS valve stuck open, or an actuator problem on a control surface) which would result in a bad orientation, which again could cause aerodynamic breakup.

OK, one more. Somehow the hypergolics in the OMS/RCS system mixed and caused an explosion.

All of these seem unlikely, but it's probably one of them.

What does it mean for the program?

Like Challenger, it was not just a crew that "looked like America" (two women, one african american) but it also had the Israeli astronaut on board, which will have some resonance with the war.

Instead of happening just before the State of the Union, it occured three days after. It also occured two days before NASA's budget plans were to be announced, including a replacement, or at least backup, for the Shuttle.

The fleet will certainly be grounded until they determine what happened, just as occurred in the Challenger situation. Hopefully it won't be for almost three years. If it is, the ISS is in big trouble, and it means more money off to Russia to keep the station alive with Protons and Soyuz. The current crew can get back in the Soyuz that's up there now. They will either do that, or stay up longer, and be resupplied by the Russians.

The entire NASA budget is now in a cocked hat, because we don't know what the implications are until we know what happened. But it could mean an acceleration of the Orbital Space Plane program (I sincerely hope not, because I believe that this is entirely the wrong direction for the nation, and in fact a step backwards). What I hope that it means is an opportunity for some new and innovative ideas--not techically, but programmatically.

Once again, it demonstrates the fragility of our space transportation infrastructure, and the continuing folly of relying on a single means of getting people into space, and doing it so seldom. Until we increase our activity levels by orders of magnitude, we will continue to operate every flight as an experiment, and we will continue to spend hundreds of millions per flight, and we will continue to find it difficult to justify what we're doing. We need to open up our thinking to radically new ways, both technically and institutionally, of approaching this new frontier.

Anyway, it's a good opportunity to sit back and take stock of why the hell we have a manned space program, what we're trying to accomplish, and what's the best way to accomplish it, something that we haven't done in forty years. For that reason, while the loss of the crew and their scientific results is indeed a tragedy, some good may ultimately come out of it.

I'm driving back down to LA today, but I'll have some more thoughts this evening or tomorrow, particularly as more details emerge.

[Quick update before I leave, about 9:25 AM]

Someone in the comments section asks if the vehicle will be replaced. No, that's not really possible-much of the tooling to build it is gone. It would cost many billions, and take years, and it's not really needed at the current paltry flight rate. Assuming that they have confidence to fly again after they determine the cause, they'll continue to operate with the three-vehicle fleet, until we come up with a more rational way of getting people into space, whatever that turns out to be. Unfortunately, because it's a government program, I fear that the replacement(s) won't necessarily be more rational...

[One more update at 9:49 AM PST]

Dale Amon has posted on this as well. To correct a couple of statements regarding me, however--I'm arriving in LA tonite--I'm leaving San Bruno this morning, and driving down.

And I never worked on the Shuttle directly. I worked for Rockwell, but in Downey, not Palmdale, and on advanced programs and Shuttle evolution, but not on the main Shuttle program itself.

[OK, one one more before hitting the road, at 10 AM]

Donald Sensing says in the comments:

I have read and respected this blog as long as I've been blogging. But today, Rand, I am sorry to say you blew it: ". . . but let's just say that it could have been worse" and etc.
I just don't give care about all that. This kind of "analysis" is not relevant at this point. It doesn't matter. This is a human tragedy in which seven brave men and women violently died.

The social context of these deaths, and the publicly spectacular manner of their deaths, raise the tragedy beyond the personal to a different level. This sad event is a "meta-event," whose significance is not quantitative (seven dead) but qualitative, striking close to the core of certain aspects of the American national identity. So it does not matter that Columbia was the oldest, or that its mission was completed (and the mission's cost money wasn't wasted) and all the rest. At least, it does not matter now, and it may not ever matter, even to NASA. The human scale of the tragedy far outweighs the technical scale.

Donald, thanks for the comments, but with all due respect, I disagree, and that kind of attitude is exactly why the manned space program has been such a disaster for so long. As long as we elevate the humans over the hardware, and emotions over rational discussion, we will never make significant progress in this frontier.

People die on frontiers, (and even in non-frontiers--more died in traffic accidents in the past twenty-four hours than have died in space since we first started going there) and if we can't accept that, then we have no damned business being there.

I'll expand on that in a post later this weekend. In fact, it may be the subject of a (perhaps coldhearted, to some) Fox column.

Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:00 AM