Uncategorized

Misleading Costs

One more lunchtime post.

First of all, go check out The Space Review. Jeff has some more good pieces up, and he’s written one on Saving Private Hubble. He’s got some alternatives to it (as does Jay Manifold). Clark Lindsey agrees that it isn’t worth a half a billion dollars to save it (see February 3rd entry).

But it’s worth pointing out a fallacy here, that’s a consequence of the weirdness of space budgets and costs. We won’t save half a billion dollars by not saving Hubble. That’s the average cost of a Shuttle flight, not the marginal cost, and most of that money will get spent regardless. If we’re going to fly Shuttles at all, we’re going to spend a few billion dollars a year, regardless of flight rate or where they fly to.

The real factor in deciding whether or not to fly the mission is a) whether or not we’re willing to risk the vehicle (I’m already on record as thinking that a reasonable bet, particularly considering the fact that we’re going to shut the program down in a few years anyway, and wouldn’t necessarily miss it that much) and b) the opportunity cost of flying to Hubble, versus flying somewhere else (in this case, ISS is the only alternative). If all conceivable ISS missions are each more valuable to the nation than continued Hubble operations, then Hubble should die. In my opinion, however, a Hubble servicing missions has more value than the delay of any single ISS mission. And risk to crew shouldn’t be a consideration at all. If it’s a valuable mission, it’s their job to risk their lives to carry it out.

Of course, the value of coming up with an innovative way to save Hubble without using a Shuttle launch would be highest of all.

Uncategorized

The Panel

Thomas James has a good rundown on the composition of the Aldridge Commission to flesh out the president’s new space policy.

I’m again underwhelmed, but not disappointed, because I didn’t really have high expectations. The only name that I see here as perhaps representing the potential for new thinking is Bob Walker (and Paul Spudis), but since I’ve never heard of many of them, it’s probably best to reserve judgement for now.

Space

Oops, He Did It Again

I’m a little delinquent in responding to this, because Adam Keiper pointed it out to me last weekend, but it’s been a busy week. Gregg Easterbrook is determined to waste my time having to correct him.

There’s no reason right now to go back to the moon, other than as make-work for aerospace contractors. For 30 years, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa) has sent no automated probes to the moon, because no one has proposed anything compelling for even robots to do there.

There are many reasons to go back to the moon. We (literally) barely scratched its surface thirty-plus years ago. There are abundant resources there to potentially establish settlements, to produce clean abundant power, to produce propellant, and for the narrow-minded people (like, apparently, Gregg) who think that the only reason to spend money on space is science, there remains a great deal of science to do there.

Gregg is simply wrong. Many people have proposed things for both people and robots to do. They may not have been compelling to NASA, or Gregg Easterbrook, but neither of those two entities have shown themselves to be reliable indicators as to what is, or should be, compelling to others.

Going from Earth’s surface to orbit requires a lot of energy and is very expensive with existing technology. At the current space shuttle launch price of $20 million per ton, merely placing 1,000 tons of Mars-bound equipment into orbit would cost $20 billion–more than nasa’s entire annual budget. And that’s just the cost to launch the stuff. Design, construction, staffing, and support would all cost much more.

The problem with this is that Gregg remains mired in the belief that Shuttle is “existing technology,” when in fact for the most part it is thirty-year-old technology. As I’ve pointed out before, Shuttle is an absurd benchmark for cost of launch in estimating costs of doing things in space in the twenty-first century.

These are reasons why, when Bush’s father asked nasa in 1989 about sending people to Mars, the Agency estimated a total program cost of $400 billion for several missions. That inflates to $600 billion in today’s money and sounds about right as an estimate

Yes, Gregg, there are reasons why the agency estimated that cost. Reason 1: they decided to use the program to justify everything that every center was doing. Reason 2: they didn’t really want to do it, desiring to continue to focus on space station instead, and they in fact actively lobbied against it on the Hill, an act for which Dick Truly was later canned by George Herbert Walker Bush. Non-reason: it bears some resemblance to what such a program would have to cost.

In fact, it’s absurd to worry about the cost of such a program right now, or to try to stretch absurd examples to attempt to estimate it, as Gregg mistakenly does, in this and other recent articles. We have no idea what it will cost, but that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be a goal of the nation. When it comes down to actual designs, and plans, and cost estimates, then will be the time to criticize it and decide whether it’s worth the money at that point in time, or to wait until some better plan (or technology) comes along. But it’s pointless to take potshots at it now, and to say that we shouldn’t do it because the Gregg Easterbrooks of the world can’t figure out how to do it cheaply.

One of the frustrating things about Easterbrook is that in any wrongheaded column, he always somehow finds a way to say things with which I agree:

…while a Mars visit would be an exhilarating moment for human history, planning for Mars before improving space technology is putting the cart ahead of the horse. Nasa’s urgent priority should be finding a new system of placing pounds into orbit: If there were some less costly, safer way to reach space than either the space shuttle or current rockets, then grand visions might become affordable.

But it’s still not quite clear if he’s got it right, because I don’t know what he means by “find.” If he means develop a Shuttle replacement that somehow operates more cheaply, this would be another programmatic disaster, but if he means to simply put out basic requirements to the private sector and purchase services from whoever can meet them, then I am in a hundred percent agreement. But I’ve never seen anything in any of his writing to indicate that this is what he as in mind. He seems to remain in the mindset that NASA should do the thing, it’s just that they’re not doing the right one.

As long as he remains stuck in that stale, four-decade-old paradigm, he’ll continue to write uninformed articles like this, in which he occasionally arrives at the right result, for entirely the wrong reason.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!