There’s been a lot of talk, with today’s release of the Gehman Report, about NASA’s “culture.” Jim Oberg (who should certainly know) has a pretty good description of it.

I haven’t read the report yet, but I’ve heard nothing about it in the various news accounts that I found surprising. I had a pretty good idea what it was going to say within a week of the event, to a very high confidence level. They examined every possibility, but the prime suspect was always the foam debris hitting the leading edge, and I predicted that it would be a broken leading edge on the day it happened. But this was an interesting comment from Admiral Gehman:

…when asked at a press conference how much of his final report could have been written BEFORE the disaster, Gehman thought momentarily and replied, ?Probably most of it.?

Yup.

But this is the key point:

Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the ?NASA culture? is that its managers act as if they are proverbial ?rocket scientists.?

In late 1999, following the loss of a fleet of unmanned Mars probes, a NASA official was asked at a press conference about what the repercussions might be. Would anyone lose their jobs over such performance, a reporter asked?

There would be no such consequences, the official replied. ?After all,? he explained, ?who would we replace them with? We already have the smartest people in the country working for us.?

There’s an old saying about pride and falls…

There’s been a lot of talk, with today’s release of the Gehman Report, about NASA’s “culture.” Jim Oberg (who should certainly know) has a pretty good description of it.

I haven’t read the report yet, but I’ve heard nothing about it in the various news accounts that I found surprising. I had a pretty good idea what it was going to say within a week of the event, to a very high confidence level. They examined every possibility, but the prime suspect was always the foam debris hitting the leading edge, and I predicted that it would be a broken leading edge on the day it happened. But this was an interesting comment from Admiral Gehman:

…when asked at a press conference how much of his final report could have been written BEFORE the disaster, Gehman thought momentarily and replied, ?Probably most of it.?

Yup.

But this is the key point:

Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the ?NASA culture? is that its managers act as if they are proverbial ?rocket scientists.?

In late 1999, following the loss of a fleet of unmanned Mars probes, a NASA official was asked at a press conference about what the repercussions might be. Would anyone lose their jobs over such performance, a reporter asked?

There would be no such consequences, the official replied. ?After all,? he explained, ?who would we replace them with? We already have the smartest people in the country working for us.?

There’s an old saying about pride and falls…

There’s been a lot of talk, with today’s release of the Gehman Report, about NASA’s “culture.” Jim Oberg (who should certainly know) has a pretty good description of it.

I haven’t read the report yet, but I’ve heard nothing about it in the various news accounts that I found surprising. I had a pretty good idea what it was going to say within a week of the event, to a very high confidence level. They examined every possibility, but the prime suspect was always the foam debris hitting the leading edge, and I predicted that it would be a broken leading edge on the day it happened. But this was an interesting comment from Admiral Gehman:

…when asked at a press conference how much of his final report could have been written BEFORE the disaster, Gehman thought momentarily and replied, ?Probably most of it.?

Yup.

But this is the key point:

Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the ?NASA culture? is that its managers act as if they are proverbial ?rocket scientists.?

In late 1999, following the loss of a fleet of unmanned Mars probes, a NASA official was asked at a press conference about what the repercussions might be. Would anyone lose their jobs over such performance, a reporter asked?

There would be no such consequences, the official replied. ?After all,? he explained, ?who would we replace them with? We already have the smartest people in the country working for us.?

There’s an old saying about pride and falls…

Jeff Foust reports that the OECD is starting to study the issue of commercial space. They’re going to study it and issue a report in a year and a half. As he points out, it’s likely to be too little, too late, and focus on trees while missing the forest.

Assuming the report is approved, the OECD will publish the report by April 2005.

There is an absence of representation by both entrepreneurial ventures and developing countries, primarily because of the high membership fees.

It?s this timescale and lack of inclusiveness that should cause the most concern about the OECD?s efforts. To get the best view of the prospects for commercial space, the project needs to take into account the plans and opinions of those small entrepreneurial ventures that largely operate under the radar of established players in commercial space, but who represent technologies and markets that hold the greatest promise for the future. These companies, in general, don?t have over $50,000 lying around to participate in such ventures, and typically lack the personnel and time required to participate at the same level as large companies and government agencies. The IFP needs to reach out to these companies and solicit their input for the project?s efforts to have the best chance of success.

Meanwhile, the drawn-out schedule of the project threatens it, if not with obsolescence, then at least with being overtaken by events in some arenas. By April 2005 it?s quite possible, for example, that suborbital space tourism will be a real industry with one or more companies offering services, based on the considerable progress made by companies like Armadillo Aerospace and Scaled Composites. Broadband satellite services offered through Ka-band satellites scheduled for launch in the next two years could prove to be a major growth sector for the satellite telecommunications office, or they might prove unable to compete with entrenched terrestrial alternatives like DSL and cable. While the IFP?s 30-year planning horizon is unlikely to make the whole report irrelevant, they will have to take care to keep up with and respond to developments in the industry in the next eighteen months.”

Yes, it’s (happily) a particularly dynamic time to be doing such an analysis.

My latest piece at Tech Central Station is up, about how suborbital space transports may revolutionize space programs overseas as well, and its potential implications for national security.

John Carter McKnight recently wrote an article on the rights of Martian lifeforms, should they turn out to exist.

The question arises because, unlike the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, we haven’t yet reached any consensus on a protocol for how to respond if we discover non-intelligent extraterrestrial life, particularly a physical discovery in our own solar system that could be adversely affected by such a discovery (though people are working on one).

While we may not want to go to the extremes of Star Trek’s Prime Directive, which forbids contamination of another culture with technologies that are beyond it, or knowledge of other species on other planets, it can provide a useful starting point for dealing with other sapient beings. We would presumably treat them differently than non-sapient beings, for the same reason that we make a distinction on earth between humans and other animals. The former are moral agents, and the latter are not.

What, then, should be the basis for developing an ethic with respect to unearthly non-sapient beings?

McKnight lists three broad philosophical perspectives.

• Preservation: the belief that humans should minimize their actions in nature. (The Prime Directive is one example of this)
• Stewardship: a human-centered, utilitarian approach. Stewardship sees humans as the only moral objects, with nature as resources and objects rather than as moral agents with their own rights. Such a view is often biblically based.
• Intrinsic Worth: the notion that humans are not the only creatures with rights and moral standing–that others are equal to humans in the eyes of moral law.

Our current terrestrial environmental policies (at least in the United States) are based on a combination of preservation and stewardship. The Endangered Species Act is an example of the former, while the federal policies for logging and ranching are of the latter. The policy has to maintain a balance between these conflicting views, and the current debate about how much forest thinning to allow, in order to prevent devastating wildfires, is an excellent example of the continual tension between them.

Intrinsic worth doesn’t inform much public policy, but it’s the position of the more radical (and in some cases, terrorist, perhaps because they’ve been so unsuccessful in getting their views implemented into law) environmentalist movements, such as Earth First. These people are often called deep ecologists, many of whom believe not just that man is of equivalent moral standing with other animals, and even all other living things, but perhaps of lower moral standing. Indeed, some of them consider humanity a cancer on the face of the universe, that needs to be quarantined to this planet, if not exterminated entirely, for the benefit of the rest of nature.

Now, suppose that we find, via either a robotic probe, or a human mission, that Mars (or, some other possible locations, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Titan) has some sort of primitive life form, such as bacteria or lichen? What is the implication of each of these points of view for how to treat such life?

The intrinsic worth position would be pretty simple–we had no darned business sending those robots out there in the first place–they might contaminate the ecosystem and destroy it.

But assuming that such a view will be as politically untenable in space as it has proven on earth, likely the policy would be, like here, some combination of preservation and stewardship.

It’s probably possible to establish human settlements on Mars without destroying the indigenous lifeforms, as long as they are sealed apart from the environment (necessary to support human life anyway, given the fact that the atmosphere of the planet is so thin as to mimic a vacuum, as far as human lungs are concerned). As long as we don’t take along any bugs that are particularly well suited for the natural Martian environment, it’s unlikely that earthly life will be able to outcompete life that evolved there. So both goals can be accomplished under those circumstances.

But if we get to the point at which we want to “terraform” the planet, to provide it with a breathable atmosphere, it will prove a death knell for anything living there now, just as the early life forms on earth were wiped out by more advanced forms that created our present oxygen atmosphere, which proved toxic to them. The only way to satisfy the preservationist ethos would be to take the existing flora and fauna, and put it into the equivalent of a zoo, to at least preserve the species.

I would like to propose a possible fourth perspective, based on an interesting recent theory that the universe may have a teleology, or purpose. The proposition is that intelligent life created the universe, and will ultimately help it reproduce itself. Even more controversially, it may be that things can somehow “wrap around” such that we may have reached back in time from other universes to create the one in which we live.

As someone who is not religious in the conventional deistic sense, I can’t say whether it’s scientifically true, but I find it at least a comfortable belief. One of the purposes of a religion is to provide meaning to existence, beyond sitting around chugging beer and watching football. To me, being a part of the process by which the universe attains self awareness and fulfills its ultimate destiny seems as good a goal to which to hitch one’s fate as any.

In this formulation, it is not just our right, but our duty to take such actions as to increase the amount of intelligent life in the universe, and expand consciousness throughout. This means carrying the flame of life beyond the earth, bringing life to the sterile places, and creating new ecosystems first throughout the solar system, then out into the galaxy, and ultimately beyond.

But what happens when we encounter another ecosystem? Well, it depends on whether it’s intelligent (and particularly, if it’s conscious) or not.

If it is (assuming it’s not hostile), we can leave it to do its bit to satisfy the goal, and move on to virgin territory.

But if it’s not, then it has no special claim to existence, or the territory in which it evolved. In the interests of the preservation of knowledge, the ecosystem will be preserved, but its range may be vastly limited in order to carry out the higher purpose. Think of it as “Manifest Destiny” not for white men, but for intelligent life and perhaps the universe itself.

There’s been a debate raging within the space technical community and inside NASA over whether or not the Orbital Space Plane should have wings. Obviously, it was named before anyone realized that there would be a debate and the assumption was that, of course, it would.

Jeff Foust has a good overview of that debate, but I want to make a different point, because I strongly disagree with Bob Walker’s comments here, and if they’re true they’re profoundly depressing.

While OSP is portrayed as an interim vehicle, a stopgap between the shuttle and a future RLV, some caution that whatever approach NASA selects it may be stuck with for decades. ?Whatever we design and spend money on is going to be the vehicle for the next 20 years,? said Walker. ?You can kid yourself that there are going to be follow-on vehicles and all that, but we kidded ourselves that way throughout the shuttle program. So you can depend upon the fact that whatever we do here is going to be around for a long time. It seems to me that you want something that at least will be adaptable.?

Two problems. First, I don’t accept that there will be, or at least that there should be, “the vehicle for the next 20 years.” The notion that NASA should have a vehicle is the source of much of our inability to make major space accomplishments.

We have to get out of this monoculture. We need multiple vehicles. And of course, because NASA has no grand ambitions, there’s no way to support their development.

But even if he’s right, and that NASA will have a new vehicle that will be “the” vehicle, it’s not at all clear that simply putting wings on the thing gives you much leverage into the future. It might be necessary (though I’m not sure that’s even the case) but it’s certainly not sufficient. Some fantasize that they can build this vehicle as a payload for a Delta IV or Atlas V, and then later use it as an upper stage for a fully-reusable system.

The problem with that is it implies that that system will be a three-stage system, because the delta-V capability of the OSP is not meant to help get it into orbit–the expendable launcher is supposed to do that–it’s only enough to meet the requirements for maneuvering on orbit, and deorbiting.

If you were designing a fully-reusable launcher right now, I suspect that it would optimize out to two stages. This probably balances the margins needed for operability (provided by staging) against the operational complexity of too many stages. But an OSP designed as a payload for an orbit-capable launch system won’t be optimized for that future vehicle–it will simply be a payload for it as well–not part of the launch system per se. Thus, the notion of using it as the upper stage of a new launch system is a non-starter. That means that the new system must have enough capability to deliver an OSP sized payload to orbit, and, by the logic above, be a two-stage system itself (meaning that the OSP will be the third stage).

If the goal is really to have a space transport, then they should simply build one, instead of building evolutionary dead ends that they hope can be adapted later on.

Of course, this is all beside the point, because what we should really be doing, as a nation, not just NASA, is figuring out how to encourage and nurture a private industry that can not only satisfy NASA’s requirements, but those of the rest of us as well, something that OSP will never be able to do.

I’ve previously noted the oversupply of astronauts at NASA.

Jim Oberg points out an insidious effect of this–a dysfunctional culture at the agency. This is one of the many reasons that NASA’s manned spaceflight program needs a dramatic overhaul, assuming that it should even continue to exist in anything resembling its current form.

Jeff Faust attended last week’s congressional hearing on suborbital launch regulation, and has a good first-hand report.

It would seem that my post yesterday (and my Fox column) were quite timely.

I’ve often discussed the chilling effect that regulatory uncertainty can have on investing in private space transportation efforts. Usually, I mean that in the sense that it makes investors hesitant, or reduces the potential pool of them. But you can’t get a more clear cut case than what happened yesterday, when Dennis Tito testified to a Congressional panel, with no ambiguity, that he’s ready to invest, and the only thing preventing him from doing so is fear of the FAA.

I hope that they’re listening.

[Update at 8:57 AM PDT]

The testimony is now on line.

Here’s Tito’s. Key graf:

Please understand me: I am not looking for government funding or technology. I don’t need an investment tax credit or a loan guarantee. I’m not even looking to escape the regulations under which other space transportation companies operate. But I would like to know which government agency, and which set of regulations, will oversee this new industry.

You see, I am willing to risk my money on a technical concept and a team of engineers. I am willing to risk my money on the customers actually showing up. And I am willing to risk my money competing against other companies in the marketplace. But I am not willing to risk my money on a regulatory question mark, on waiting for the government to decide who can give me permission to get into business, and what the regulatory standards for my business will be.

For an excellent tutorial on the history of aviation and launch regulation, and the differences between the two, I also encourage you to read the testimony of Jeff Greason, head of XCOR.

The key point is that the mature aviation industry’s goal is to protect passengers and cargo. At the state of development of launchers, we must be prepared to accept much higher risk to (informed) first and second parties, and focus regulations on protecting third (that is, otherwise uninvolved) parties on the ground, as required by the Outer Space Treaty and common sense.

Elon Musk (founder of Paypal, and now President and owner of SpaceX) also has some useful thoughts, with some specific recommendations for making government ranges more user friendly, and with an optimistic outlook for the industry based on his internet experience:

It is worth noting that the perspective I bring to the launch vehicle industry is drawn from a particularly Darwinian experience in the business world, having founded and helped build two successful Internet companies in Silicon Valley. Seldom have we seen a faster moving, more voraciously competitive business environment or one with more tombstones. However, for all the problems associated with that era, the rise and fall and perhaps rise again of the NASDAQ, it is easy to forget that the vast majority of the monumental work required to build what we know as the world wide web was done in less than a decade.

If you doubt that we can possibly see such progress in space access, please reflect for a moment that the Internet, originally a DARPA funded project, showed negligible growth for over two decades until private enterprise entered the picture. At that point, growth accelerated by more than a factor of ten. We saw Internet traffic grow by more in a few years than the sum of all growth in the prior two decades.

John Kutler’s testimony is worth reading as well, providing the perspective of the institutional investment community. Summary: they’re not ready to jump into this yet, so the startups will have to continue to rely on angels for a while.

Finally, read the testimony from Futron on their space tourism market research study.

As I said, I hope that Congress was listening carefully.