The “Space Industry”

Jeff Faust has an interesting piece on what is, and isn’t the space industry:

When the space industry is defined in this manner, it becomes clear why it lacks influence in Washington: it?s very small. At just $37 billion in worldwide revenues in 2002, the space industry is smaller than many corporations. For example, US automaker General Motors records more revenue in a single quarter?an average of $47.5 billion per quarter in the last year?than the entire space industry made in all of 2002. Even if satellite service revenues are added into the space industry?s total, it still comes to less than half of GM?s total revenues for the year. In Washington, money talks, and the space industry is whispering. No amount of space industry organization consolidation can solve that problem.

There’s another point to be made here. In fact, though it’s small, it seems generally to get what it wants, by bribing powerful congresspeople with jobs in their districts. Unfortunately, for the most part, what it wants has little to do with space, and mostly to do with rent seeking from the taxpayer.

Consider one more point that Dr. Patrick Collins makes often. We have spent hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars on civil space over the past four decades. Yet we’ve only managed to create an industry valued in the tens of billions annually (and much of that is defense contracts). Is such poor leverage typical, or are we doing something wrong?

I think you know my opinion on that subject.

[Update at 1:35 PM PDT]

Another sign of the incredible shrinking space industry. Boeing is pulling Delta IV out of the commercial market, which has a glut of launchers. They’re going to stick to government contracts.

Scuttle The Shuttle

That’s the title of a press release I received from the Space Frontier Foundation:

Los Angeles, July 14 ? The Space Shuttle system should be retired, and all further investments in the Shuttle ended, argued the non-profit Space Frontier Foundation today.

?A growing consensus in Congress and the space community affirms that the Shuttle system is hopelessly inadequate to our needs and cannot be made safe or affordable,? stated the group?s founder, Rick Tumlinson. ?It?s time for the venerable Space Shuttles to make way for the improvement in safety, innovation, and competitive pricing that would occur if the private sector were to be given the chance to do for space travel what commercial aviation has done for air travel.?

The Foundation points out that while NASA spends billions maintaining and flying the Space Shuttles, a new generation of privately funded commercial spaceship firms has sprung up to fly people on sub-orbital flights, conceivably for mere hundreds of thousands of dollars per ticket. Rather than continuing to waste taxpayer funds, the group believes an era of commercial orbital space flight could be in the making, if the government would nurture it using the money currently spent on government-only space systems.

?NASA should not be in charge of designing, building and operating what is essentially a glorified space truck/bus,? added Tumlinson. ?Imagine if the government had done the same thing with an airline. With no competition it would never get cheaper, better or more efficient?and no one would be able to afford to fly on it. That?s the socialist monopoly we have in space flight. It has not improved safety or access and wasted billions of tax dollars.?

To begin the hand off to the private sector, NASA should be banned from developing any replacements, and should be made to examine every alternative to safely end the Space Shuttle era, including ending Shuttle flights upon completing the international ?core? of the International Space Station (ISS); flying the Shuttle using its remote control systems in the meantime; and/or mothballing the ISS until commercial LEO transportation becomes available.

?None of the Shuttle?s capabilities are indispensable,? argued Tumlinson, ?and the ISS should not be used as an excuse to keep flying it at the risk of more astronauts? lives. If needed, the Russians can keep it going, or it can be mothballed until it can be taken over by a private Space Port Authority, and then operated, serviced and expanded by private spaceships and cargo vehicles. Now is exactly the right time for a change that can eventually open space to the people who have paid for it all.?

I agree generally, but as usual, I disagree with the part about the “risk to astronauts’ lives.” I’ve no problem with risking astronauts’ lives, nor do the astronauts, as long as it’s in a worthy endeavor. Shuttle and ISS, at this point, may or may not be, but the real risk of continuing to fly Shuttle is losing more orbiters, not losing crew. We somehow have to change this bizarre mindset that space can be made risk free.

Also, as Burt Rutan says, one of the reasons we don’t make much progress is that we don’t kill enough people (i.e., we aren’t pushing the envelope enough, and too much resources are going into safety, instead of cost reduction and performance).

I’m referring to the people who have signed up to be pioneers, of course, not third-party innocents on the ground, which is why I support AST’s launch licensing procedures (as long as they don’t attempt to get involved in certifying safety for crew and passengers).

Aerospace Engineering In The Blogosphere

Here’s a new blog. It’s not that new, actually–I’ve been meaning to blogroll it for a while, but its proprieter went on vacation, so I decided to wait until he got back, so as to not send folks to stale and static content.

As we all know, many law professors have been blogging, but this is the first blog that I know of from an aerospace engineering professor. It’s Spacecraft by Professor Chris Hall, at Virginia Tech in (I assume) Blacksburg. Hopefully, this is a start of a trend, because it seems to me like an excellent way to communicate with the students, as well as the rest of the world.

He’s off to a good start, with this post about timeless aerospace design laws (somewhat like Augustine’s Laws, though the latter are more about aerospace policy than engineering per se). Like him, I like this one:

6. (Mar’s Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

He seems to specialize in spacecraft dynamics, orbital mechanics and general spacecraft design. A man (again, I assume, since the given name “Chris” isn’t gender specific) after my own heart (except I was more of a systems engineer than a designer, i.e., I was better at critiquing others’ designs than coming up with my own, other than in broad concept).

I had a lot of gripes about the aerospace engineering curriculum when I was in school, and I suspect that many of them still apply, so there may be some interesting back and forth in the future. Anyway, go check it out.

One Last Shot

I’ve been having an argument with someone in the comments section of this post. So for his benefit, and that of others who may have missed the point of that post, I’ll try to lay it out logically and clearly.

Case 1:

Owner (A) has material property, valued to him at some quantity, which may or may not be the same as its acquisition cost. Person (B) decides that he wants said property and doesn’t want to pay for it. Because of its material nature, the only way for this to occur is for B to steal it from A.

He does so.

Now B has increased his wealth by the amount that he values said material property, and A’s wealth has been decreased by the cost of reproducing it (assuming that it’s not a priceless heirloom, in which case he’s been devastated).

Case 2:

Owner (A) has intellectual property, valued to him at some quantity, which may or may not be the same as its acquisition cost (the marginal cost, in this case, being zero). Person (B) decides that he wants said property and doesn’t want to pay for it, and would not under any circumstances. Because of its intellectual nature, this can occur by B making a copy of it.

He does so.

Now B has increased his wealth by the amount that he values said material property, and A’s wealth has not been decreased in any way.

Which is to say that, in case one, A has clearly suffered harm, and in case two, he has clearly not.

This argument has nothing to do with property rights, which is an utterly distinct issue. It is simply making a delineation between the two situations, and it has to do with whether or not the original owner has been harmed.

Some people have trouble seeing this, and claim, for some bizarre reason, that Case 1 and Case 2 are exactly equivalent. I contend that they are not, and to make such an argument is clearly, at least to me, absurd.

The Noble Slipstick

I was the last of my generation to use a slide rule in college. Scientific calculators had just become affordable during my sophomore year, and the sound of keys clicking during a physics exam was pretty intimidating to those of us still sliding bamboo or twirling plastic.

I think that the younger generation has lost something in not learning to use one–it gives you a powerful insight into the nature of logarithms and mathematics in general, and it enforces an intuitive feel for orders of magnitude, because it doesn’t keep track of the decimal point for you. I recall grading exams as a TA that had utterly absurd answers on them because someone made a mistake on their calculator and didn’t bother to check it for reasonableness (example: the diameter of a copper atom is 1.3 x 10^12 meters…)

Anyway, they’re no longer manufactured, but predictably, people still collect and use them.

[Update on Monday afternoon]

Bill Simon (not the one who ran the incompetent campaign against Davis–the one who is my site designer) sends me a link to a virtual slide rule that really really works (for those who don’t even know what one looks like). It’s also the most precise slide rule ever designed.

Idiotarians Gone Wild

Well, that’s actually paraphrasing the title of the latest lunatic column by Ted Rall, in which he asks if George Bush is going to cancel the elections next year.

Yes, Ted, he’s going to cancel the elections. That’s why he’s out raising a quarter of a billion dollars in campaign funds.

Well, OK, at the end of his little binge of mindlessness, he does come back to within screaming distance of reality:

Bush may be the kind of guy who sees 99 percent odds as 2 percent short of a sure thing, but I bet he’ll look at his $200 million campaign war chest and decide to let the people decide. He’ll surely want to win legitimately in 2004–albeit for the first time. Though they’re capable of anything, Bush’s people probably know that Americans wouldn’t stand for two putsches in four years.

They still can’t get over the fact that the Supreme Court wouldn’t allow Gore and his brigade of lawyers to steal the election…

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!