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.

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!

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.

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.?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.