Two alternate metaphors for the planet. I disagree with Lovelock that there are too many people, or that there is some magical “right” number of them. It’s all a function of technology level. And I disagree with Ward, too:
In his view, the costs and distances involved in moving outward from the solar system – or even terraforming the moon or Mars – just don’t seem worth the effort.
Obviously they don’t now. Technology advances will change that.
Henry Spencer says that it’s time to give up on Ares I:
NASA, predictably, is not happy about being forced to change. NASA’s ex-administrator, Mike Griffin, has been a particularly vocal opponent of the idea, claiming that outsiders shouldn’t try to second-guess NASA on technical decisions, and that it’s cheaper to stay on course after four years of effort than to start over from scratch. Sorry, but that’s not the way it looks to me.
I’d agree that it would be cheaper, if I thought NASA had made four years of progress. But Ares I is the International Space Station of rockets: redesigned again and again, justified using assumptions that no longer apply, and already escalating mightily in cost (and already well behind schedule). There comes a time when it really is cheaper to start over in some more sensible way, because banging your head against the wall harder and harder isn’t getting you through it.
Mike Griffin is employing the sunk-cost fallacy — that the fact that we’ve already invested a lot in something justifies further expenditure. In this case, though, the investment isn’t just taxpayer dollars, but his personal pride and reputation.
Let’s hope that Norm Augustine comes to a sensible conclusion.
So, I was talking about (among other things) NASA’s lack of resiliency in its transportation plans yesterday, and I come across this short article on the value of resilience in sustainability:
Sustainability is a seemingly laudable goal — it tells us we need to live within our means, whether economic, ecological, or political — but it’s insufficient for uncertain times. How can we live within our means when those very means can change, swiftly and unexpectedly, beneath us? We need a new paradigm. As we look ahead, we need to strive for an environment, and a civilization, able to handle unexpected changes without threatening to collapse. Such a world would be more than simply sustainable; it would be regenerative and diverse, relying on the capacity not only to absorb shocks like the popped housing bubble or rising sea levels, but to evolve with them. In a word, it would be resilient.
Sustainability is inherently static. It presumes there’s a point at which we can maintain ourselves and the world, and once we find the right combination of behavior and technology that allows us some measure of stability, we have to stay there. A sustainable world can avoid imminent disaster, but it will remain on the precipice until the next shock.
Lynne Kiesling has some related thoughts on loosely coupled systems:
Loose coupling means that entities that are engaged in exchange have to understand and exchange certain kinds of information to make those exchanges happen, but these requirements are explicit, and they are not exhaustive. When I buy milk at the grocery store, I don’t have to know the name of the cow whose milk I’m buying … but I do want to know some product features, such as its fat content, the sterility of its production environment (here, admittedly, aided by safety regulations), as well as its price. If my transaction relies on that specific cow, that’s a more tightly-coupled relationship, and if she dies and the transaction relies on it being her milk, then the transaction fails. A simple-minded example, but you get the idea.
Loose coupling is like having shock absorbers at the interfaces between different entities and different systems in a complex “system of systems”. Loose coupling can help prevent the negative consequences of unexpected actions from propagating through the network, and that’s how it contributes to resilience.
[Both links via La Dynamista]
As for how this applies to NASA, I’m pretty sure that I’ve written about the subject before (google, google…)…yup, here it is:
I’ve written before about the high costs of space due to lack of economies of scale, but our minimal activity level causes other problems as well. It makes it difficult to afford a robust and resilient space transportation infrastructure.
In 1979, when a DC-10 literally lost an engine and crashed in Chicago, the whole McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 fleet was grounded. But this didn’t shut down the airline industry because there were hundreds of aircraft of many other makes and models which weren’t affected.
In contrast, we learned with the Challenger breakup the danger of relying on a single launch system. With a small number of vehicles, grounding means putting all activity on hiatus. A loss of an Orbiter would constitute the loss of a quarter of our fleet. The loss of another one after that would be another third of the remainder. And grounding the fleet to avoid this may result in more delays to the beleaguered space station program.
NASA has studies underway to look at solutions to this problem, such as the Space Launch Initiative, or the Alternate Access to Space program. But these programs seem to be stuck in the same mode of thinking that gave us Shuttle. People talk about “the” Shuttle replacement, or “the” next-generation launch system, as though there will be only one, because no one can imagine a market or funding for more. And all the focus remains on technology and vehicle concepts, which are beside the point.
No one in the government seems to recognize our real problem, which is the currently infinitesimal market size for space transportation. NASA continues to pay the traditional aerospace contractors for traditional solutions, and ignores the fact that we need a diversity of approaches and providers. Such a diversity can only be supported by a large, vibrant and growing commercial demand for space transportation services.
There is an old tale, about “for lack of a nail…a kingdom was lost.”
As long as we, as a nation, refuse to acknowledge the problem with our space markets and approaches, we will remain in our current state of fragility, in which the fate of a multi-billion-dollar space station which, for all of its cost, can only support three people is held hostage to the whims of microscopic slivers of metal in frigid propellant ducts.
This problem persists, in which NASA is developing two new launch systems, neither of which can replace the other. Beyond that, there are plans for only one lunar lander design, one earth departure stage design, etc. The failure of any one of these components means that we will be unable to go to the moon, so if we had a base there, it would be subject to being abandoned in the event of a Challenger-like event.
If we are serious about becoming spacefaring, and actually having and supporting bases in extraterrestrial locations, we have to have multiple means of getting to them (which is why being capable of using both EELVs would be a good idea). If NASA comes to its senses and builds depots, they will have to be redundant as well. If not, we will continue to have a very brittle (and unsustainable) infrastructure.
I don’t know if Mark Whittington gets enough readers to even make it worth responding to this nonsense that he wrote in response to my Constellation piece:
In one of his periodic rants against NASA’s apoach [sic] to returning to the Moon, Rand Simberg states something that is just incredible:
In my mind, what Constellation should be is the development of an infrastructure that allows us to go anywhere we want in the inner (if not outer) solar system, and then let the national priorities determine what we’ll do with it once it’s in place.
This statement is fantastic because Rand seems to expect that a government agency is going to do this. The problem is that it is not NASA’s job nor is the space agency institionally [sic] capable of building and operating transportation systems in the manner he seems to want.
I don’t understand what he’s saying here (which is often the case, though it’s far more often the case that he doesn’t understand what I’m saying…).
What is the difference between the space transportation infrastructure that NASA is currently building (Constellation) and what I’d like them to apply the money toward instead, other than that the former is horrifically expensive to develop, and will be equally horrifically expensive to operate, assuming that it can make it past the technical problems inherent in the fundamental approach? Is it NASA’s job to build an expensive space infrastructure that only it can afford to use (if even it can) but not to build one that’s useful to the nation at large?
Nor should we want NASA to do this. It would be sort of like asking the Department of Transportation system to build a national, high speed rail system.
You mean the way that the DoT built and continues to help maintain the Interstate Highway System? Does Mark think that’s not working out? And does Mark think that Mike Griffin was wrong when he said that NASA was building the space equivalent of the IHS? I do, not because that’s not NASA’s job (it could possibly be) but because the way he proposed to do it is a bad joke.
Look. I don’t want NASA in the space transportation business at all. But if they’re going to spend billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money on space transportation, I don’t think that it’s unreasonable to ask that it be spent sensibly, and not have the architecture driven by Alabama and Florida (and Utah) politics and pet designs of individuals, while keeping hidden from the public the technical and economic assumptions behind their choices.
I think that the Shuttle was a tragic error of historical proportions. But the error wasn’t in the vehicle design per se (though it was a flawed concept as well). The error was in the notion that the government could build a launch system that would serve all of the nation’s space transportation needs. Now, Constellation isn’t quite as erroneous as that — this time, NASA is only indulging in a conceit that it can build a single launch system for its own needs, and to hell with anyone else’s. But we cannot have a monoculture. NASA has repeated the mistake of the Shuttle by making its plans and architecture dependent on a single vehicle type (actually, two vehicle types, either of which will shut them down if it fails). There is no resiliency to it, any more than there is currently with the Shuttle.
What I want NASA to do, and would be just as much “NASA’s job” as building an entirely new redundant launch system, is to invest in the technologies and hardware needed to allow us to leave LEO, given that private industry has largely solved (and will continue to improve on solutions for) the LEO problem.
NASA has proven that it is pretty good at exploring space, which is what Constellation is all about. Mind, a lunar base (and Rand is quite wrong again; Ares V could deliver inflable habitats to the lunar surface to create a small, lunar base) can be he destinition [sic] of a lunar COTS program that could grow into a commercial space tansportation system.
Mark can’t read again. Nowhere did I say that Ares V couldn’t deliver lunar base elements to the moon. But Constellation has nothing to do with “exploring space.” To the degree that NASA is good at that, it is good at it with unmanned systems on (now) commercial rockets. We got a lot of good science from Apollo, but that wasn’t the reason for Apollo, and if it had been, it would never have happened. Similarly, “science” and “exploration” are not the justifications for Constellation — jobs in Huntsville and Utah are.
We have to decide whether or not becoming spacefaring is important. Policy decisions made to date, over the past half century, indicate that it has not been. I see nothing in Washington, even with Mr. Hope And Change, to give me hope that that has changed. But it doesn’t hurt to continue to demand it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Is “radical sanity” coming to NASA?
[Early evening update]
Oh, this is precious. Mark has a couple new posts up. First, in response to the news that the government has come to its senses and that the Ares decision is going to be revisited, he hilariously complains:
…the only thing I can say to my friends in the Internet Rocketeer Club is careful what you wish for. The idea of the administration that inflicted upon us the stimulus bill, among other things, now doing rocket engineering should fill everyone with dread. At the very least it will cause months of delays.
Ignoring his imaginary friends, if I could get just months of delay, it would be a huge improvement over Constellation, which seems to be delaying us more than a year per year. Then he goes on (get ready to hold your sides):
At worst, it will open up the return to the Moon to the political process to such an extent that we might have to start learning Mandarian [sic] if we ever want to see the lunar surface.
One of the most amusing things about the ongoing train wreck that is Mark’s blog is his complete indifference to spelling, despite the fact that Firefox has a spellchecquer built in. Perhaps he’s stuck on IE. Anyway, the notion that a private company is going to have to speak Mandarin to land on the moon, in ten, twenty or fifty years is side splitting. I wish that Mark would explain how that works.
And then, he moves on to pathetically attempt to respond to this post (and I’m always amused that any time I write something with which he disagrees, it’s a “rant” — apparently his vocabulary is as limited as his spelling ability):
Rand is proposing that NASA repeat the same mistake it did with the space shuttle, build some kind of system that everyone can use. Not jst a national space line, but a national lunar line.
The mistake of the Shuttle was not in “building some kind of system that everyone can use.” It’s probably too nuanced for Mark to understand, but the mistake of the Shuttle was in building a system that everyone would be required to use, with no other options. Their current mistake, with Ares, isn’t that bad, but the other mistake with the Shuttle was thinking that a single system, with no redundancy or resiliency, would be sufficient. They repeat that mistake with Ares. He goes on:
…leaving aside the quaint notion that private industry has largely “solved” the LEO problem (strange, my trip to the orbiting hotel is not on for next week)
My point is that private industry can get payloads to LEO, and is not far off (certainly not as far off as NASA is) from getting humans into LEO, given that SpaceX is much further along with Dragon development than NASA is with Ares/Orion. That Mark can’t afford to go is his problem, not private industry’s.
…what Rand seems to be saying is that NASA should just get out of the exploration business and be a technology hobby house for private industry and that we should wait until private industry deigns to build lunar craft.
I only “seem to be saying that” to someone with a native inability to comprehend written English. I said nothing of the kind, as anyone who scrolls up can see.
Rand’s big problems is that he thinks that the commercial is all. All other considerations, especially national security, are bogus. It would be like campaigning against the Lewis and Clark expedition because it would not build the transcontinintal [sic] railroad while pushing west.
I think nothing of the kind, and no one who reads what I write for comprehension could believe that. I simply think that commercial is not negligible. Moreover, I think that national security is extremely important, but NASA has decided that it will have nothing to do with it, not even using the same rockets that carry military payloads and thereby reducing overall costs.
The Lewis and Clark analogy is completely bogus. We don’t need to “explore” the moon. We understand the moon in great detail, and if we don’t, we aren’t going to learn a lot more by sending a few astronauts to it a couple times a year. Now is the time for the transcontinental railroad (which, I’ll remind Mark, was built by private enterprise, using government incentives). There are many ways to build it. Constellation is not one of them.
Mark lives in this continual delusion (“commercial is all”) that I think that the government has no role to play in opening up space. I can’t imagine how anyone who reads this blog regularly can believe this. I’ve stated repeatedly, including in this very post, what I believe that the appropriate role for government in space is, to make it effective in actually opening up the frontier. I won’t repeat it here, because clearly Mark wouldn’t understand, anyway.
Shoveling corporate welfare to rocket companies is not the way to incentivize commercial space.
Does he mean like giving a sole-source cost-plus contract to ATK? If not, what is he talking about?
Perhaps some of my commenters are right. He’s just trolling for hits because he can’t get them any other way.
[Update late evening]
Mark continues his delusions:
Rand is really mad now…
No, Mark. I continue to be both calm and amused. Like Democrats who accuse me of “rage” and “hate,” and (my favorite) “racism,” you seem to have a problem with recognizing and identifying emotions. Perhaps you should see a therapist. Or something.
[Wednesday morning update]
The hilarity continues:
Now Rand takes his inevitable trip back to the eighth grade by boasting of his own humor and then suggesting that your humble servant is mentally unbalanced.
I’ve no idea what he’s talking about (as usual), at least with regard to “boasting of my own humor.” And obviously, if you don’t want people to think you mentally unbalanced, don’t talk about your imaginary friends who are “full of rage.” Particularly when no one else can see either the friends, or the “rage.”
Dennis Wingo says it’s time for NASA to come clean. Actually, it’s years and billions of dollars late.
Neil Armstrong’s sherpa has died. It’s a shame he didn’t live long enough to see the fortieth anniversary this July.
No one seems to know, even though it’s been pretty well defined by NASA. If we are to believe this web page (and it seems consistent with what I’ve always understood it to be) it is the set of hardware elements that are to get us back to the moon, and eventually to provide the basis for missions “beyond,” whether Mars or other objects in the inner system. These include the Ares I and Ares V launchers, the Orion capsule, and the Altair lunar lander (it also of necessity includes the Earth Departure Stage, though it’s not mentioned at the top level, and remains unnamed, as far as I know).
But apparently people, and people who should know better, don’t read that web page. One of them is Andy Pasztor of the Journal, who I had to correct the other day (I sent him an email — he never responded).
Someone else who should know better is Glenn Smith (who I’ve known for a couple decades, though we haven’t had any interactions since the early nineties), who wrote an editorial last week that implies (well, OK, actually states) that Constellation is a moon base:
It is time to reconsider whether we want to go ahead with the Constellation program to place a base on the moon. Many of us in the space community would be eager to recreate the thrill of Apollo. However, from the public’s standpoint, going back to the moon in 2020 would not invoke the same sense of awe and inspiration it did 51 years earlier when it was a seemingly impossible task.
The Constellation program is not to place a base on the moon. The Constellation program is to develop the capabilities to get humans back to the moon (and perhaps beyond it). To actually build a base would require much more than Constellation, at least as currently defined. There is in fact no funding in the budget plans that I know of for a lunar base (there’s not really enough to even do Constellation in the manner in which NASA has insanely and duplicitously and disingenuously defined it).
At this point, arguing about whether or not we should do a moon base is utterly beside the point, because there are no concrete plans as to what NASA is going to do once it has the trivial capability to get a handful of astronauts to the moon once or twice a year, at a cost of billions per flight, which is all that Constellation in its current incarnation provides.
And notice the last two sentences. They don’t seem to jibe with the first one. “Going back to the moon” is not the same thing as building a moon base. After all, we went to the moon once, and Mike Griffin advertised this plan as doing that “on steroids,” and there may have been a base implied, but there may also not have. Unfortunately, the VSE wasn’t sufficiently specific about what we were supposed to do after we got back to the moon, other than as to use it as a basis for going on to the other places, but there are lots of ways to do that.
Now, I’m not necessarily opposed to lack of specificity, because I don’t believe in socialistic/fascistic five- and ten- and twenty-year plans. I was happy with the president’s general goal that man was going out into the cosmos, and I wasn’t unhappy with the idea that we’d get back to where we were forty years ago and use that as a basis for going beyond.
What I am unhappy with is the cargo-cult mentality on the part of NASA that, because we got to the moon forty years ago on a humungous launch system with a crew capsule and service module and expendable lander, that this is the way to do a reset of history and reestablish a forty-year-old baseline.
In my mind, what Constellation should be is the development of an infrastructure that allows us to go anywhere we want in the inner (if not outer) solar system, and then let the national priorities determine what we’ll do with it once it’s in place.
But it must do so in an affordable and sustainable (and, I would add, scalable) way, which means you can’t throw the hardware away. In repeating Apollo, we are doing exactly the opposite. We have to develop a system that has low marginal costs, which means reusable hardware, which means in-space refueling, and depots from which to do so scattered (at first) in cis-lunar space. Until I see NASA plans to do so, I won’t take their multi-decade plans seriously.
[Tuesday morning update]
Paul Spudis (who was on the Aldridge Commission) says that NASA has managed to subvert the intent of the VSE:
The Vision was never intended to be a repeat of Apollo – the idea was to use the Moon to create new spacefaring capabilities. This is a task that’s never even been attempted in space, let alone accomplished. It is the antithesis of “been there, done that.”
The administration may have thought that the issue was settled after the VSE announcement and the Aldridge Commission, but it wasn’t, and there continue to be warring factions within the agency. It was pretty clear (and one can even recall quotes from Doug Stanley to that effect) that some saw the lunar mission as nothing more than an excuse to develop Mars hardware (a heavy lifter, that just happens to be named “Ares”), which is ironic, because the Ares V will not perform a Mars mission in a single launch, and it’s impractical (short of something like Sea Dragon) to build a launcher that will. And yet they avoid the technologies (in-space assembly and fueling) that are enabling for Mars, though this would make the moon more practical and sustainable as well.
This is quite literally lunacy.
Things are still hectic here preparing the house for the party after the communion, but for those who hadn’t seen it, NASA Space Flight has finally acquired the heretofore hidden appendices to the ESAS report that supposedly justify their selection (i.e., the work that I asked Mike to show us). Jon Goff has a sneak preview. Clark Lindsey has more thoughts. More thoughts from me will have to await my return to Florida tomorrow.
It looks like, at least tentatively, COTS-D (or something resembling it) is moving forward using some of NASA’s “stimulus” funding, though more money would be nice. As Charles Lurio notes in comments over there, this is sort of a stalling tactic to make some progress until they decide what to do with Constellation.
[Update late afternoon]
Rob Coppinger says that NASA tells us not to get our hopes up.
Here’s a nice animation of ISS assembly. One of the most tragic things about the current approach to the Vision for Space Exploration is that it completely ignores all of the experience gained in orbital assembly over the past decade, instead reverting to Apollo on Geritol.
[Update a couple minutes later]
What a coincidence. I just got an email titled “Gee, Scolese Sounds Like A Critic Of ESAS” (I don’t know if the sender wants to be attributed):
I’m watching the Appropriations hearing, and in response to a question from Chairman Mollohan re plans for moon exploration, etc… Scolese talks about ISS as an example of success at assembling complex systems in LEO and that he would like to see NASA come up with an architecture to build things and then go explore.
Gee. What a concept.
You’ll have to get the transcript, but it sounds pretty treasonous…
At this point, just making Scolese the formal administrator is sounding pretty good to me.
[Update early afternoon]
Rob Coppinger is live twittering the hearing (not a permalink). And he has some thoughts on Scolese’ testimony as well:
In an extraordinary exchange between NASA acting adminisrator Christoper Scolese and the US House of Representatives’ committee on appropriations’ subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies chair, Scolese said that the agency was still working on what “return to the Moon” meant and whether that was a outpost, which he went on to describe as expensive, or an extended sortie like Apollo
So much for Apollo on steroids…
Let’s hope.
[Late afternoon update]
Here’s more extensive coverage of the testimony:
“We were looking at an outpost on the moon, as the basis for that [2020] estimate and that one is being revisited,” he said. “It will probably be less than an outpost on the moon, but where it fits between sorties, single trips, to the moon to various parts and an outpost is really going to be dependent on the studies that we’re going to be doing.”
“Recall [that] the Vision [for Space Exploration] was not just to go to the moon as it was in Apollo, it was to utilise space to go on to Mars and to go to other places,” he added. “We’ve demonstrated over the last several years that with multiple flights we can build a very complex system reliably – the space station – involving multiple nations…and we’ll need something like that if we’re going to go to Mars.”
Scolese’s further comments hinted that the agency’s plans might shift to include a greater emphasis on destinations beyond the moon. “So what I would like to see from NASA over time is an architecture that…will give us flexibility for taking humans beyond low-Earth orbit and allowing us to have options for what we can do at the moon as well as other destinations…[like] Mars or an asteroid…so that there are options on what we do in 2020,” he said.
Good news, bad news. The good news is that (as noted up above) he’s more interested in building an in-space infrastructure than Mike Griffin ever was. The bad news is that he’s backing off from the commitment to a lunar outpost. On the other hand, the in-space infrastructure may allow a revisiting of that issue if it can be shown to reduce the costs of lunar operations. And ESAS would never have allowed an affordable lunar outpost in any event. The activity rate would have been far too low.
[Bumped]