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Because It Was Hard

On September 12, it was forty years since John F. Kennedy made his famous Rice University speech, in which he supposedly laid out the rationale for the Apollo program.

The words are noble, and inspiring, but in some ways false or misleading, and they set us off down the wrong road, at least for those of us interested in a vibrant space policy–one that opens up vast new economic, political and spiritual opportunities for humankind off planet. Here is the paragraph that I have always found most troublesome:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

There are two problems with it. One is that, though the words are lofty, they don’t really stand up to any critical analysis. “Because it is hard” is not, in and of itself, a good reason to do something.

It would be hard to move Pikes Peak from Colorado to Florida. It would be even harder to build a life-size replica of the World Trade Center with used q-tips. Those things would also serve to “organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” That doesn’t make them worth doing.

No, there should be intrinsic reasons for these national endeavors. The journey is important, but so should be the destination. Unfortunately, it wasn’t, as evidenced by Kennedy’s reason for choosing it. There were two main options in the early sixties as goals for the space race with the Soviets: a space station, or a Moon landing. Wernher von Braun, the nation’s leading rocket engineer, told Kennedy that he couldn’t guarantee that we could beat the Russians in building a space station. So the Moon it was.

And the fact that the destination wasn’t important is the second problem–it is why our space program is, and has been, relatively moribund for decades. We seem to remain hung up on doing it just because it’s hard.

Yes, there is no doubt that in 1962, sending men to the Moon was hard. Astronomically hard.

We had barely learned how to launch a man into low earth orbit. We had no experience with space operations. We didn’t know how long man could survive in weightlessness. We didn’t know what the composition of the lunar surface was like. We didn’t understand the radiation environment between the two orbs. We were still learning how to miniaturize electronics, and computers still used discrete transistors for processing, and iron pellets for memory.

There were a lot of things that we knew we didn’t know, and there were even more things that we hadn’t even learned that we needed to know, and didn’t.

But that was then, and this is now. Unfortunately, we still reach back to that speech for a crutch, and it still provides a flawed foundation for our space policy.

“Because it is hard” has long become a convenient mantra for the current way of doing business.

“Because it is hard,” when things don’t go right, the people doing them always have a convenient excuse for failure, even forty years on, and even in the face of obvious management disasters. They can ask for billions for a new program, “because it is hard.” And when it screws up, they can say, “see, we told you it was hard–we just proved it. Apparently, you have to give us even more money.”

It makes it harder to get other funding sources, or try other approaches, as well. “Because it is hard” means that only a government agency can do it, and any investor who puts money into a private space venture might as well throw it on the table in Vegas, or onto the compost pile.

“Because it is hard” means that very few get to go, and that the only way to do it is the NASA way–study your math and science, figure out what kind of personality traits and characteristics they want, and then apply to be an astronaut, and hope that, against all odds and the other hundreds or thousands of applicants, you’re accepted. Then hope that they eventually get from a three-person station to a six person station, and you actually get a chance to fly sometime before you have grandchildren and retire.

But there’s a problem with this argument. “Because it is hard” doesn’t really explain why you do a controlled flight into the terrain of Mars, destroying a hundred-million-dollar probe, because one group of engineers is using metric, and the other is using English units.

“Because it is hard” doesn’t provide an excuse for pouring a billion dollars into a single hangar queen in Palmdale, California called X-33, that had so many risky (and unnecessary) technologies in it that its failure was almost assured from the beginning.

It’s not 1962 any more. It’s the twenty first century. We have more computer power in our kitchen toasters than the Apollo capsule had. We have new materials that were barely imaginable then. We’ve learned more about the space environment in the last couple decades than we had learned in all of history leading up to that point.

Folks, it’s not that hard any more. The only thing that’s really hard is getting people to think about space in a different way, and raising the money for the real market. That market is the millions of people who actually want to do things in space, as opposed to simply assuring jobs in certain Congressional districts, and supporting foreign policy objectives (goals which can be accomplished without actually launching anything, as the space station program proved for a decade and a half).

After four decades, we need to give the “space is hard” mantra a rest. Try these on for size.

“Space is fun.”

“Space is adventure.”

“Space is new resources.”

“Space is American free enterprise.”

“Space is freedom.”

“Space is important.”

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Separate Passengers And Luggage

The Senate has, unusually, bowed to reality, and extended the deadline to have baggage-checking equipment in place at airports.

I’ll bet this won’t be the last time. This part of the legislation (like most of the airport security legislation hastily rushed through last fall) is severely flawed. Even if the equipment were in place, it would only give a false sense of security, and dramatically increase delays and costs. My understanding is that the state of the art of the machinery still provides a high number of false positives (inconvenient). I don’t know if they also provide false negatives (deadly), but if so, it would be as bad as the passenger-screening system.

I was thinking about this coming back from Hawaii. We had an opportunity to get an earlier flight out of Honolulu, but we’d already checked our bags. Accordingly, we had to stay with the flight that our bags were checked on. Just one more example of how we’re being inconvenienced by conventional thinking in airline security policies.

It made the notion of separating baggage and passengers more and more appealing, as suggested by Richard Wainwright a few months ago (look for the message titled “Airline Security” dated April 25, 2002).

I started giving it some thought, and it’s not obvious to me that such a system would be worse than the current paradigm (luggage and passenger on the same airplane), and it might actually be better, and even cheaper.

We already have an infrastructure for moving passengers in place (the airlines). We also have in place an infrastructure for moving cargo, same day if necessary (Fedex, UPS and their competitors). Why not allow both to specialize on what they each do best?

Taking the luggage off the planes would have the effect of removing any risk of baggage bombs. They could only be slipped aboard carry-ons, and there would be no more need to match luggage and passengers. The luggage would be carried on cargo aircraft, where the only risk is to the crew (a risk that cargo crews already carry).

Potential objections are, of course, increased costs and decreased convenience. But I’m not sure that it’s true. The current system of schlepping your heavy bags to the airport, standing in line to check them, and standing in another line to wrestle them off the carousel and into your car isn’t particular convenient. I’d prefer to have it picked up at my home, and delivered to my destination.

Would it increase costs? Probably, but not as much as one might think, and probably one of the effects would be to do more carry on, and more efficient packing. The current model of baggage charge bundled with the ticket isn’t necessarily the only or best one.

Since I avoid checking when I can, I subsidize the people who have two (or any) heavy bags, because we both pay the same fare, or more precisely (since probably no two people pay the same fare, given the arcane pricing schemes airlines use) there’s no relationship between my fare and how much luggage I have (unless I exceed allowable numbers of bags or weight). Restoring that relationship would make for a more efficient market.

A different model might be to have a price for a passenger ticket, which includes your carry on, but have a separate fee for luggage. That way, only those who actually have luggage will have to pay for it.

The passenger tickets would now be cheaper, since they don’t have to cover the costs of the luggage handling infrastructure, and the aircraft can either fly lighter, saving fuel, or more efficiently, perhaps by putting in a separate sleeper or steerage class in what’s currently the luggage compartment. It might also allow the passenger fleet size to be reduced as a result.

The luggage would be handled by either an existing cargo operator, like Fedex, or a new entrant specialized for that market, or the airline itself with a separate aircraft fleet. You could either drop off your luggage at the airport, and pick it up at your destination airport, or for an additional fee it could be picked up at your house and dropped at your destination. If you can pack a couple days ahead of time, you’ll save money–the price will go up for overnight or same day, just as it does for package delivery.

I don’t know exactly how the industry would restructure, but I’ll bet it would, and it would solve the luggage bomb problem once and for all. I would be very interested to see the industry response if the FAA were to put out an NPRM (Notification of Proposed Rule Making) stating that as of, say, January 1, 2004, no passenger aircraft would any longer be allowed to carry luggage, other than carry on.

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Blogspot Watch

I’ve gotten a couple emails indicating that Blogspot Watch is showing that blogspot is up when it’s clearly down for maintenance, according to their web site.

I could in theory refine it to account for this, but it would both involve more sophisticated programming, and increase the bandwidth load from the checking, because right now it only looks at headers, rather than the full page. The latter is probably not a real concern, given the millions of hits that they get daily, but it was one of the considerations when I refined the original design, per the suggestion of one of their programmers.

Its basic purpose was only to determine whether or not the server was available, not whether or not all was going well on it. So when there’s a maintenance problem such as today’s (or whatever it is), it’s going to give a false positive. I’d like to do better, but as one emailer suggested, I don’t have time right now to increase the quantity of free ice cream.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!