Category Archives: Space

Business, Economics, Space

Flawed Estimating

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A post that starts out discussing how many members the Mars Society has devolves into claims of how much Martian missions will cost.

The cost to the Moon ($150-300 B)or to Mars ($599-899 B, just small change for the better feeling) covers the round trips and the base setup for a period of 20-30 years. It would no longer be to plant a flag there stuff as the last lunar trip did. The cost is the stay and the development the new world for a period of 20-30 years each in this century. For the return to the Moon, it would cost $10-12 B each year for the 20-30 years period. For the Mars cost, it would cost $20-30 B or more each year for the period of 20-30 years.

When I see thing like this, I just shake my head. Beware prognosticators bearing costs of space activities.

No one knows, particularly because the activity itself is often ill defined, but even if not, such estimates do not, because they cannot, take into account future changes in technology, and particularly future changes in launch costs that may arise from much greater private activity. They also often make foolish assumptions about no propellant depots, and multiple launches of a heavy lifter, etc.

John Mankins offers a useful corrective, one comment later:

I’d like to make just a general observation about this topic: there is no one “firm fixed price” way to explore and develop a frontier. There are NO “prix fixe” menus for the future.

However, there are lots, and lots of choices. As it happens, some of these yield lower costs, others yield greater accomplishments, and still others result in faster (or slower) schedules. Examples include:

– What kind of propulsion will be used?
– How many crew members will go on what missions?
– Will we use local re-fueling of vehicles?
– Will missions systems be expendable or reusable?
– Will the program employ ISRU (in situ resource utilization), and if so, how soon?
– Will electrical power cost $100 per kilowatt-hour, or $0.10 per kilowatt-hour?
– Will life support closed or open?
– Will robotic systems be autonomous? capable of learning? or teleoperated? or…?

etc., etc., etc.

There are two extremes to avoid. First, we should never assume that future exploration missions will be “too cheap to meter” in order to make a sale to Congress. And Second, we should never claim that human exploration missions will be unimaginably expensive as a means of indirectly supporting other goals in space.

The space community can be its own worst enemy: we cannot allow this to happen.

We should try to stay focused on the goal of extending human presence and activity into space — using both robots and humans — and work constantly to make the accomplishment of that goal as affordable, beneficial and rapid as possible through aggressive innovation, appropriate technology advancements, and well-managed systems projects…

Not to mention a much greater utilization of the private sector, and particularly that portion of the private sector whose goal is to go to Mars (e.g., SpaceX).

Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

More Danger Than We Thought?

44 Comments

…from asteroids:

To properly explain the crater distribution, Ito and Malhotra say some other factor must have been involved. One possibility is that we simply haven’t seen all the craters yet: the ongoing lunar mapping missions may help on that score.

Another idea is that the Earth’s tidal forces tear Earth-crossing asteroids apart, creating a higher number of impacts than might otherwise be expected.

But the most exciting and potentially worrying possibility is that there exists a previously unseen population of near Earth asteroids that orbit the Sun at approximately the same distance as the Earth. These have gone unnoticed because they are smaller or darker than other asteroids, say Ito and Malhotra.

“More complete observational surveys of the near-Earth asteroids can test our prediction,” they say.

And let’s not waste too much time about it. By some reckonings, asteroid impacts represent the greatest threat to humankind that we are able to calculate.

Even more to the point, it’s not only the greatest one we can calculate, it’s probably the greatest one that we can actually mitigate (short of colonizing the galaxy).

Political Commentary, Space

A Question That I Wish That The Augustine Panel Would Ask NASA

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In light of our mandate to “…ensure the Nation is pursuing the best trajectory for the future of human space flight—one that is safe, innovative, affordable, and sustainable…,” what do the defenders of Constellation think is “innovative” about it?

[Monday morning update]

Clark Lindsey has a summary of Augustine results to date, and some thoughts on their validity, particularly on the Ride subcommittee, which which I agree. They are comparing apples to eggs when they use a standard cost-plus industry analysis of Falcon 9 or a manned Atlas.

[Update mid morning]

John Kelly has some thoughts on what the Augustine options will include:

Yet another bid to replace the space shuttles appears doomed to cancellation.

This happens every time America tries to replace the shuttles. Past tries fell short technically, or blew the budget, or both. Ares is technically feasible. It’s closer to budget than earlier candidates. Still, it’s on political life support.

Panel members are frustrated because changing course means tossing aside time and money invested so far. They say there must be an overwhelming reason to kill it. Then, they keep citing a compelling reason: NASA’s budget can’t field the system on time. Not even close. Orion might not fly with people until 2017 at best. A moon landing? 2028.

Moreover, those dates are only possible if the shuttle is retired in 2010 and the station is forsaken in 2016. Sticking with Ares means a longer — and growing — space flight gap.

The panel is leaning toward a combination of launch systems, maybe including Ares V. The Ares I crew launcher is unlikely to be listed as an option that meets Obama’s goals.

And of course, Ares V makes no economic sense if there’s no Ares I, because much of the Ares I development costs were supposed to be a “down payment” on Ares V and, sans Ares I, it will have to be charged the full development costs on its own, making its cost even more insane. By the time the decision is made to go ahead with its very expensive development, it’s quite likely that private activities will have shown the way to becoming spacefaring, sans heavy lifter.

The reason that every attempt to replace Shuttle has failed is because the very notion of replacing Shuttle is flawed, as I pointed out five years ago in The Path Not Taken:

The chief problem with the Bush vision for NASA is not its technical approach, but its programmatic approach—or, at an even deeper level, its fundamental philosophy. This is not simply a Bush problem, but a NASA problem: When government takes an approach, it is an approach, not a variety of approaches. Proposals are invited, the potential contractors study and compete, the government evaluates, but ultimately, a single solution is chosen with a contractor to build it. There has been some talk of a “fly-off” for the Crew Exploration Vehicle, in which two competing designs will actually fly to determine which is the best. But in the end, there will still be only one. Likewise, if we decide to build a powerful new rocket, there will almost certainly be only one, since it will be enough of a challenge to get the funds for that one, let alone two.

Biologists teach us that monocultures are fragile. They are subject to catastrophic failure (think of the Irish potato famine). This is just as true with technological monocultures, and we’ve seen it twice now in the last two decades: after each shuttle accident, the U.S. manned spaceflight program was stalled for years. Without Russian assistance, we cannot presently reach our (one and only) space station, because our (one and only) way of getting to it has been shut down since the Columbia accident.

Even ignoring the fact that there will never be another Shuttle in the sense of a vehicle that meets all of its requirements, we have to stop thinking in terms of closing the dreaded “gap” with a NASA-developed vehicle with no redundancy. Every attempt to do so will suffer the same failure as the Shuttle itself. If it is to have a robust program, and one that is more than just a jobs program, NASA simply must learn to rely on the private sector for its human transportation at least to LEO, if not beyond, just as it does for unmanned payloads. This should be a prime lesson of the history of the past forty years since Apollo XI.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

An Upcoming Space Debate

3 Comments

This looks ilke it might be interesting. It might even be interesting in a way unanticipated by the folks at The Economist.

If you read the summary, it sounds like the standard media template — humans to the moon versus robots. But I’m pretty sure that Mike Gold is all in favor of sending humans to the moon — he’s probably just opposed to NASA doing it the way they propose to do it. I suspect that the debate will not be at all about humans versus robots, but about the best way to get people back to the moon. Which is a much more useful debate, but it may not be the one that the people who are putting it together intended. I wonder how the debaters were chosen?

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

I’m One, And Didn’t Know It

11 Comments

John Bossard coins a useful concept: Exvironmentalism:

…whereas Environmentalism is focused on conservation and improvement of the environment of the Earth, Exvironmentalism seeks to turn the focus outwards, so that the ideas of conservation, and improvements of terrestrial environments are part of much broader and more inclusive notions regarding life not just on Earth, but also of life in our solar system, and out into the Cosmos.

I think that there is another important distinction between Exvironmentalism and Environmentalism. I believe that Exvironmentalism should see human beings as part of the solution, as opposed to being part of the problem. Humans can and must play an important role in enabling the growth of living creatures, plant, animal, and other, in the otherwise sterile exvironments of the cosmos. As such, human life has intrinsic value and worth, like all living and sentient creatures, and therefore is also worthy of respect and should be valued.

Just the opposite of the misanthropic Deep Eeks. I like the logo, too.