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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.