Category Archives: Space

Political Commentary, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

“Progressive” Space Discussion

This post by Matthew Yglesias would be a lot more interesting if he explained why it was “advantage, Obama.”

What is Yglesias’ position?

It kicked off a lively discussion in the comments section, in which he doesn’t participate (so we still don’t really know what he thinks), but in which sometime commenter here, Bill White, and Ferris Valyn, do. Ferris has further thoughts, and links.

It also roused a spirited defense of government manned spaceflight programs (at least I assume that’s what he’s defending) by Chris Bowers. I find Bowers’ argument a little (well, OK, a lot) incoherent:

…the space program is about as good an example of stretching and expanding our capabilities as a nation and as a species that one can name. Deciding to not test the limits of our engineering and intellectual potential, and to not explore our surroundings because we have more important things to do, strikes me as a profoundly dangerous path to follow. That is the path of stagnation, and even regression, as a people. Further, it is a terribly utilitarian approach to life, concluding that only bread matters, and that roses are worthless. Personally, I don’t want to live that way, and I don’t think many other people want to live that way, either. Everyone, no matter their financial situation, has aspects of their life that expand beyond mere bread and into roses: art, religion, family, travel, and scholarship are only a few examples of this. To think that we shouldn’t have government funded roses in our lives is to posit a far more dreary nation than the one in which I want to live.

Well, I think that a nation in which one must count on the government to provide either bread or roses a dreary one. Last time I checked, there was plenty of bread, of all varieties, on the shelves of the local grocery, and I suspect that if the government weren’t involved, it would be even cheaper. I also bought two dozen roses last Thursday at the same place–there was no shortage, and they didn’t seem to have a stamp that said they were manufactured by the government. If he means rose gardens, there are plenty of those, too, both government and private. And I sure don’t want the government involved in family or religion, so I guess I just don’t see what his point is.

I do agree with this, though:

Space exploration is not an issue with clear partisan divisions. Some conservatives view it as a wasteful government expenditure that is better handled through private enterprise, while some progressives view it through a utilitarian lens in that it does not provide much direct benefit to humanity.

Unfortunately, this is quite true. In fact, it’s one of the reasons that our space policy itself is so incoherent. The people who promote it don’t generally do so from any kind of ideological base. It’s either a bread-and-butter local issue to provide jobs, or it’s a romantic urge that crosses ideological boundaries. And that’s why the arguments (in both Bowers’ and Yglesias’ comments section) are never ending, and never resolved. Heinlein once wrote that man is not a rational animal; rather, he is a rationalizing animal. Most arguments for a government space program are actually rationalizations for something that the arguer wants to do for emotional reasons, which is why so many of them are so bad. I say this as a space enthusiast myself, but one who recognizes that it is fundamentally an emotional, even religious urge.

I’m not going to beat up on Obama over this (though I’m not going to vote for him, either). Here’s what he reportedly said:

…the next president needs to have “a practical sense of what investments deliver the most scientific and technological spinoffs — and not just assume that human space exploration, actually sending bodies into space, is always the best investment.”

Contrary to what some reading-challenged people write (see the February 16th, 2:22 PM comment), this doesn’t mean that he “hates manned spaceflight.” Those words, as far as they go, are entirely reasonable, and Hillary was pandering for votes in Houston. The rub lies in how one makes the determination of what is “the best investment.”

Unfortunately, in order to evaluate an investment, one must decide what is valuable. That’s where all these discussions founder, because everyone comes to them with their own assumptions about goals, values, costs, etc. But these assumptions are never explicitly stated, or agreed on, so people tend to talk past each other. Until we have a top-down discussion of space, starting with goals, and then working down to means of implementing them, people will continue to argue about what the government should be doing, and how much they should be spending on it.

This is why getting a private space program, a dynamist space program, going is so important. Because it will short-circuit all the arguments, because we won’t be arguing about how to spend other people’s money, which is always contentious. We will be spending our own money, for our own goals, rational or irrational, with no arguments in the political sphere, or blogosphere.

Political Commentary, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

“Progressive” Space Discussion

This post by Matthew Yglesias would be a lot more interesting if he explained why it was “advantage, Obama.”

What is Yglesias’ position?

It kicked off a lively discussion in the comments section, in which he doesn’t participate (so we still don’t really know what he thinks), but in which sometime commenter here, Bill White, and Ferris Valyn, do. Ferris has further thoughts, and links.

It also roused a spirited defense of government manned spaceflight programs (at least I assume that’s what he’s defending) by Chris Bowers. I find Bowers’ argument a little (well, OK, a lot) incoherent:

…the space program is about as good an example of stretching and expanding our capabilities as a nation and as a species that one can name. Deciding to not test the limits of our engineering and intellectual potential, and to not explore our surroundings because we have more important things to do, strikes me as a profoundly dangerous path to follow. That is the path of stagnation, and even regression, as a people. Further, it is a terribly utilitarian approach to life, concluding that only bread matters, and that roses are worthless. Personally, I don’t want to live that way, and I don’t think many other people want to live that way, either. Everyone, no matter their financial situation, has aspects of their life that expand beyond mere bread and into roses: art, religion, family, travel, and scholarship are only a few examples of this. To think that we shouldn’t have government funded roses in our lives is to posit a far more dreary nation than the one in which I want to live.

Well, I think that a nation in which one must count on the government to provide either bread or roses a dreary one. Last time I checked, there was plenty of bread, of all varieties, on the shelves of the local grocery, and I suspect that if the government weren’t involved, it would be even cheaper. I also bought two dozen roses last Thursday at the same place–there was no shortage, and they didn’t seem to have a stamp that said they were manufactured by the government. If he means rose gardens, there are plenty of those, too, both government and private. And I sure don’t want the government involved in family or religion, so I guess I just don’t see what his point is.

I do agree with this, though:

Space exploration is not an issue with clear partisan divisions. Some conservatives view it as a wasteful government expenditure that is better handled through private enterprise, while some progressives view it through a utilitarian lens in that it does not provide much direct benefit to humanity.

Unfortunately, this is quite true. In fact, it’s one of the reasons that our space policy itself is so incoherent. The people who promote it don’t generally do so from any kind of ideological base. It’s either a bread-and-butter local issue to provide jobs, or it’s a romantic urge that crosses ideological boundaries. And that’s why the arguments (in both Bowers’ and Yglesias’ comments section) are never ending, and never resolved. Heinlein once wrote that man is not a rational animal; rather, he is a rationalizing animal. Most arguments for a government space program are actually rationalizations for something that the arguer wants to do for emotional reasons, which is why so many of them are so bad. I say this as a space enthusiast myself, but one who recognizes that it is fundamentally an emotional, even religious urge.

I’m not going to beat up on Obama over this (though I’m not going to vote for him, either). Here’s what he reportedly said:

…the next president needs to have “a practical sense of what investments deliver the most scientific and technological spinoffs — and not just assume that human space exploration, actually sending bodies into space, is always the best investment.”

Contrary to what some reading-challenged people write (see the February 16th, 2:22 PM comment), this doesn’t mean that he “hates manned spaceflight.” Those words, as far as they go, are entirely reasonable, and Hillary was pandering for votes in Houston. The rub lies in how one makes the determination of what is “the best investment.”

Unfortunately, in order to evaluate an investment, one must decide what is valuable. That’s where all these discussions founder, because everyone comes to them with their own assumptions about goals, values, costs, etc. But these assumptions are never explicitly stated, or agreed on, so people tend to talk past each other. Until we have a top-down discussion of space, starting with goals, and then working down to means of implementing them, people will continue to argue about what the government should be doing, and how much they should be spending on it.

This is why getting a private space program, a dynamist space program, going is so important. Because it will short-circuit all the arguments, because we won’t be arguing about how to spend other people’s money, which is always contentious. We will be spending our own money, for our own goals, rational or irrational, with no arguments in the political sphere, or blogosphere.

Political Commentary, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

“Progressive” Space Discussion

12 Comments

This post by Matthew Yglesias would be a lot more interesting if he explained why it was “advantage, Obama.”

What is Yglesias’ position?

It kicked off a lively discussion in the comments section, in which he doesn’t participate (so we still don’t really know what he thinks), but in which sometime commenter here, Bill White, and Ferris Valyn, do. Ferris has further thoughts, and links.

It also roused a spirited defense of government manned spaceflight programs (at least I assume that’s what he’s defending) by Chris Bowers. I find Bowers’ argument a little (well, OK, a lot) incoherent:

…the space program is about as good an example of stretching and expanding our capabilities as a nation and as a species that one can name. Deciding to not test the limits of our engineering and intellectual potential, and to not explore our surroundings because we have more important things to do, strikes me as a profoundly dangerous path to follow. That is the path of stagnation, and even regression, as a people. Further, it is a terribly utilitarian approach to life, concluding that only bread matters, and that roses are worthless. Personally, I don’t want to live that way, and I don’t think many other people want to live that way, either. Everyone, no matter their financial situation, has aspects of their life that expand beyond mere bread and into roses: art, religion, family, travel, and scholarship are only a few examples of this. To think that we shouldn’t have government funded roses in our lives is to posit a far more dreary nation than the one in which I want to live.

Well, I think that a nation in which one must count on the government to provide either bread or roses a dreary one. Last time I checked, there was plenty of bread, of all varieties, on the shelves of the local grocery, and I suspect that if the government weren’t involved, it would be even cheaper. I also bought two dozen roses last Thursday at the same place–there was no shortage, and they didn’t seem to have a stamp that said they were manufactured by the government. If he means rose gardens, there are plenty of those, too, both government and private. And I sure don’t want the government involved in family or religion, so I guess I just don’t see what his point is.

I do agree with this, though:

Space exploration is not an issue with clear partisan divisions. Some conservatives view it as a wasteful government expenditure that is better handled through private enterprise, while some progressives view it through a utilitarian lens in that it does not provide much direct benefit to humanity.

Unfortunately, this is quite true. In fact, it’s one of the reasons that our space policy itself is so incoherent. The people who promote it don’t generally do so from any kind of ideological base. It’s either a bread-and-butter local issue to provide jobs, or it’s a romantic urge that crosses ideological boundaries. And that’s why the arguments (in both Bowers’ and Yglesias’ comments section) are never ending, and never resolved. Heinlein once wrote that man is not a rational animal; rather, he is a rationalizing animal. Most arguments for a government space program are actually rationalizations for something that the arguer wants to do for emotional reasons, which is why so many of them are so bad. I say this as a space enthusiast myself, but one who recognizes that it is fundamentally an emotional, even religious urge.

I’m not going to beat up on Obama over this (though I’m not going to vote for him, either). Here’s what he reportedly said:

…the next president needs to have “a practical sense of what investments deliver the most scientific and technological spinoffs — and not just assume that human space exploration, actually sending bodies into space, is always the best investment.”

Contrary to what some reading-challenged people write (see the February 16th, 2:22 PM comment), this doesn’t mean that he “hates manned spaceflight.” Those words, as far as they go, are entirely reasonable, and Hillary was pandering for votes in Houston. The rub lies in how one makes the determination of what is “the best investment.”

Unfortunately, in order to evaluate an investment, one must decide what is valuable. That’s where all these discussions founder, because everyone comes to them with their own assumptions about goals, values, costs, etc. But these assumptions are never explicitly stated, or agreed on, so people tend to talk past each other. Until we have a top-down discussion of space, starting with goals, and then working down to means of implementing them, people will continue to argue about what the government should be doing, and how much they should be spending on it.

This is why getting a private space program, a dynamist space program, going is so important. Because it will short-circuit all the arguments, because we won’t be arguing about how to spend other people’s money, which is always contentious. We will be spending our own money, for our own goals, rational or irrational, with no arguments in the political sphere, or blogosphere.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Space

What Do They Know?

5 Comments

As Clark says, I don’t know why anyone would think that space scientists or astronauts are experts on business. I don’t really care what Kathy Sullivan thinks the prospects are for suborbital tourism, and if I thought that astronauts’ opinions on the matter were of value, I can find many astronauts (including John Herrington, Rick Searfoss, etc.) who would disagree with her.

And who is this “Alvin” Aldrin of which they speak? Is that Andy’s evil twin? When I do a search for “Alvin Aldrin” I only get one hit–this article.

A couple other questions for Alvin/Andy. What numbers was he using for the Raptor cost? Marginal, or average per-unit? It makes a big difference.

In addition, I always get annoyed when people use a military fighter as a cost analogue for a spaceship. A lot of that dollar-per-pound number for the plane comes from something in it that weighs nothing at all–software. The avionics for the weapons systems, and the defensive systems are non-trivial in cost as well. Designing a combat aircraft, designed to kill other things and avoid being actively killed by other things, is an entirely different problem than designing a vehicle that has to only contend with passive and predictable nature (and pretty benign nature, for the most part, at least for suborbital). I’d bet that Burt’s own cost numbers for the SS2 already put the lie to Andy’s chart.

[Late afternoon update]

Jeff Foust has a much more extensive writeup of the discussion, which he apparently attended. As I suspected, it was Andy, not Alvin, Aldrin.

Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

A Kludge

17 Comments

Is this the future of air travel?

Engineers created the A2 with the failures of its doomed supersonic predecessor, the Concorde, very much in mind. Reaction Engines’s technical director, Richard Varvill, and his colleagues believe that the Concorde was phased out because of a couple major limitations. First, it couldn’t fly far enough. “The range was inadequate to do trans-Pacific routes, which is where a lot of the potential market is thought to be for a supersonic transport,” Varvill explains. Second, the Concorde’s engines were efficient only at its Mach-2 cruising speed, which meant that when it was poking along overland at Mach 0.9 to avoid producing sonic booms, it got horrible gas mileage. “The [A2] engine has two modes because we’re very conscious of the Concorde experience,” he says.

Those two modes–a combination of turbojet and ramjet propulsion systems–would both make the A2 efficient at slower speeds and give it incredible speed capabilities. (Engineers didn’t include windows in the design because only space-shuttle windows, which are too heavy for use in an airliner, can withstand the heat the A2 would encounter.) In the A2’s first mode, its four Scimitar engines send incoming air through bypass ducts to turbines. These turbines produce thrust much like today’s conventional jet engines–by using the turbine to compress incoming air and then mixing it with fuel to achieve combustion–and that’s enough to get the jet in the air and up to Mach 2.5. Once it reaches Mach 2.5, the A2 switches into its second mode and does the job it was built for. Incoming air is rerouted directly to the engine’s core. Now that the plane is traveling at supersonic speed, the air gets rammed through the engine with enough pressure to sustain combustion at speeds of up to Mach 5.

A combination turbofan/ramjet. Hokay.

If I understand this properly, the idea is to fly fast subsonic over land to avoid breaking windows, and then to go like a bat out of hell over the water. When I look at that design, I have to wonder how they can really get the range, with all of the drag that is implied from those huge delta wings, not to mention the wave drag at Mach 5. I also wonder where they put the hydrogen–that stuff is very fluffy, and needs large tanks. It’s probably not wet wing (it would be very structurally inefficient), which is why the fuselage must be so huge, to provide enough volume in there for it.

Sorry, but I don’t think that this will be economically viable. As is discussed in comments and the article, hydrogen is not an energy source–it’s an energy storage method, and it’s unclear how they’ll generate it without a greenhouse footprint. Moreover, it’s not as “green” as claimed, because dihydrogen monoxide itself is a greenhouse gas. I’ll bet that this thing has to fly at sixty thousand feet or more to get itself sufficiently out of the atmosphere to mitigate the drag problem, and that’s not a place where you want to be injecting a lot of water.

This concept doesn’t learn the true lessons of Concorde: like Shuttle, a lot of people have learned lessons from Concorde, but the wrong ones. The correct lesson is that we need to get rid of shock waves and drag. Once we do that, we’ll be able to cruise at reasonable speeds (say, Mach 2.5) everywhere, over both land and water, so we won’t have to build the vehicle out of exotic materials and eliminate windows. We’ll also be able to have fast transcontinental trips (two hours coast to coast) which is another huge market that this concept doesn’t address at all. Finally, it has to do it with a reasonable lift/drag ratio, so that ticket prices will be affordable. And I think that the fuel issue is superfluous–Jet A will be just fine for the planet, as long as fuel consumption is reasonable, which makes the vehicle design much easier, with much more dense fuel.

Fortunately, I’ve been working for over a decade with a company that thinks it knows how to do this, and I’m hoping that we’ll be able to start to move forward on it very soon.

[Via Clark Lindsey]

[Update in the late afternoon]

In response to the question in comments, there’s not much publicly available on the web about shock-free supersonics, but here’s a piece I wrote a few years ago on the subject.

Space, Technology and Society

Never Mind

3 Comments

There was a little bit of a buzz in the blogosphere a few days ago about Gizmodo’s report that the Japanese plan to bombard the planet with frickin’ laser beams from outer space. No word on whether or not they would be attached to the heads of sharks.

I thought it was a little strange, myself. While lasers have been proposed for space solar power, most of the concepts over the past four decades (ed– wow, it’s really been four decades since Peter Glaser came up with the idea? Yup) have been to transmit the power with microwave beams. Lasers (probably free-electron lasers with tuned frequencies) have the advantage of higher power density (and thus less need for large ground receivers). But they don’t penetrate the atmosphere and clouds as well, and they are less efficient for power conversion. Also, they raise exactly the fear described in the Gizmodo piece–that higher power density is a double-edged sword. Microwaves are preferred because the energy conversion efficiency is very high, and the beam density is less than that of sunlight (it’s better than sunlight despite this, because the beam is available 24/7 and the conversion efficiency is much better, at least with current solar cell technology). It’s much more difficult to weaponize, by the nature of the technology.

Anyhoo, I’m assuming that what was actually being referred to was this:

On February 20, JAXA will take a step closer to the goal when they begin testing a microwave power transmission system designed to beam the power from the satellites to Earth. In a series of experiments to be conducted at the Taiki Multi-Purpose Aerospace Park in Hokkaido, the researchers will use a 2.4-meter-diameter transmission antenna to send a microwave beam over 50 meters to a rectenna (rectifying antenna) that converts the microwave energy into electricity and powers a household heater. The researchers expect these initial tests to provide valuable engineering data that will pave the way for JAXA to build larger, more powerful systems.

Microwaves, not lasers, as Gizmodo mistakenly claimed. The article does mention lasers as a potential means of getting the power down, but that’s not what next Wednesday’s test is about.

Space

This Makes No Sense

25 Comments

AP is reporting that the Pentagon is planning to “shoot down” the errant NRO bird.

You can’t “shoot down” a satellite. In order to do so, you have to remove its momentum, so it falls out of orbit. All you can really do (at least with something as crude as a missile) is break it up into smaller pieces. If that’s what they plan to do, they certainly can.

Won’t it make a mess? Yes, for a while. Some of the pieces will enter immediately, others will be given a higher apogee (but lower perigee, so they’ll enter half an orbit later). The orbits of those that aren’t given much of an energy change will continue to decay as the satellite’s original orbit was, except at a higher rate, because they’ll have a lower mass/drag ratio. So in theory, if they do this, all of the pieces will have entered within a month or so (i.e., none of them will survive longer than the satellite itself is expected to).

This just points up the fact, once again, how nice it would be to actually have a robust in-space infrastructure of tugs and servicing facilities that would allow us to take care of things like this in a more elegant fashion. In fact, it would allow us to even go get the thing and put it in the right orbit, so we wouldn’t have to dispose of it, and replace it. Unfortunately, it’s not a capability that either NASA or the Air Force evidence any interest in developing.

[Late afternoon update]

Daniel Fischer is live blogging the Pentagon briefing on NASA TV, here and here.

Media Criticism, Space

Overblown Headline

10 Comments

Sorry, but there’s nothing classified about the Space Shuttle, as this silly headline implies:

Former Boeing Engineer Charged with Economic Espionage in Theft of Space Shuttle Secrets for China

If one reads the article, what is really at issue is Rockwell (now Boeing) trade secrets–that is, proprietary information, presumably on things like materials and manufacturing techniques. Language like this simply reinforces the mistaken notion of many that NASA, and the Shuttle program, are military in nature. Not that that excuses the spy, of course–he should still be prosecuted, because in theory, it could help the Chinese advance their technology. Though in the case of the Shuttle, as Charles Lurio notes in an email, it will probably set them back ten years.

Of course, if we really wanted to set them back and keep them planet bound, we’d send them the current plans for Ares and Orion…

[Update a few minutes later]

Just in case anyone is wondering, while this guy presumably worked in Downey during the eighties, I never knew him, or even heard of him, until now.