
Don't Mourn the Space Shuttle. Privatize Interstellar Exploration. - tokenadult
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamespoulos/2012/04/18/dont-mourn-the-space-shuttle-privatize-interstellar-exploration/
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bane
I flew in from New York last night and saw the Shuttle sitting on top of its
747 at the end of the taxiway. Awe inspiring and very sad for me to see. The
entire plane literally jumped out of their seats to look out the windows on
the side of the plane with the view (while the flight attendants hopelessly
told us not to unbuckle).

But then I read about the pending Dragon missions to the ISS and I suddenly
feel more hopeful than ever before and even the _sniff_ of an asteroid mining
company in the news today has me ecstatic. I feel like a boy again, watching
shuttle launches on TV and excited about the future of space.

It's a great feeling to have after so many years of seeing it all get pissed
away.

I think Tyson is wrong here in a way
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_F3pw5F_Pc>, he needs to be spending his
energies promoting commercial space development and just move on from the NASA
model.

It'll be better, 30 or 40 years from now, to look back at NASA like we look
back on ARPANet today -- as an interesting high risk R&D project that lead to
transformative technologies that revolutionized humanity.

~~~
wlesieutre
On the other hand, there are plenty of reasons that NASA could still be
important moving forward. Commercial launch vehicles might be the way to go,
but commercially funded space telescopes sound less likely. I don't see any
organizations better suited to work on space research, and Tyson would be
pretty disappointed if we stopped it.

~~~
nkoren
Just so. NASA's truly great impact has been with the Hubble, Cassini, Voyager
probes, Mars Exploration Rovers, etc. There's certainly no commercial interest
in the foreseeable future for doing missions like that, and I certainly think
its important that those kind of projects (and the primary R&D behind them) to
continue (and proliferate!). That should be NASA's job.

Where NASA went _wrong_ , however, was in trying to build its identity around
the frankly rather prosaic business of trucking stuff to and around space.
That's what the private sector really ought to be doing, with NASA as its most
mind-blowing customer. I'm very excited to see things heading in that
direction.

~~~
jaredsohn
While NASA's greatest impact from a scientific standpoint has been through
those programs, its greatest impact from a "get people excited about space so
that they'll fund NASA" standpoint has come from the shuttle program, which is
why NASA has spent so much money and resources on it over the years.

Edit: I referred to the shuttle program because it is the means through which
we've gotten humans into space for awhile and I was contrasting it with the
other list of programs.

~~~
nkoren
Ah, that's the "no Buck Rogers, no bucks" school of thought -- which,
actually, I agree with. There are several reasons why humans in space are a
good and necessary thing, but as you say, people just need to relate back to
the human experience in order to get excited enough to fund the thing.

The error you/NASA made is in believing that this excitement came from the
shuttle program itself. No, it came from having humans in space, and the
shuttle just happened to be the only way for Americans to do that. This
doesn't mean that the excitement ever came from the _shuttle_.

Commercial vehicles such as the CST-100, Dragon, Dream Chaser, etc., will also
all take people to space -- not only the same sort of astronauts who flew on
the shuttle, but a far greater diversity of private astronauts as well. I'm
certain that this will only get people _more_ excited about space.

~~~
bane
"Commercial vehicles such as the CST-100, Dragon, Dream Chaser, etc., will
also all take people to space -- not only the same sort of astronauts who flew
on the shuttle, but a far greater diversity of private astronauts as well. I'm
certain that this will only get people more excited about space."

Yes exactly. Becoming an Astronaut has always been for a select, highly
qualified few. And it comes with tremendous terrestrial sacrifices. Commercial
travel suddenly makes is possible for anybody who can buy a ticket (and can
sign the waiver forms) to go somewhere in space.

More importantly, the kinds of jobs that we've been putting our astronauts to
work on seem mostly like their terrestrial equivalents of "truck driver",
"construction worker", "janitor" and now with asteroid mining "miner". Some of
those are high risk jobs here on Earth, but there's never been a shortage of
people willing to do them in the commercial sector. There's no reason that
those job categories require the creme-de-la-creme from humanity...with
multiple Masters and Phds, decades in the military with multiple medals for
bravery. That model came from the 50's.

Let's look for the guys that'll go to Afghanistan and drive a truck to deliver
cigarettes to a remote Operating Base, or build whiskey bars in the Arctic.
That's the new model for these kinds of space jobs. Hardy pioneer types with a
healthy survival instinct and pants full of bravery.

------
andrewfelix
I don't really understand the Space Shuttle nostalgia. As a kid growing up it
was such a disappointment. It looked bad ass. It looked like it could take off
and land under it's own power. It looked independent and manoeuvrable. In
short it looked like a spaceship. But in reality it needed giant external
boosters to get anywhere. It had to have most of it's shielding replaced and
be delicately positioned vertically before every launch. When it came into
land it was an unimpressive glide.

The rockets and modules of past made so much more sense to me, they got people
onto the moon. They got rovers onto mars and took photos of distant moons.

I'm kind of glad the shuttle is gone. It was an expensive and disappointing
distraction.

I often wonder what NASA would look like today if it had gone in a different
direction.

~~~
hahainternet
There's much debate about this issue, and it's hard to come down on one side
or the other, but the Shuttle had unique capabilities that no other system has
had.

Imagine building the ISS without the shuttle, for example. Imagine servicing
Hubble. Imagine returning large objects from orbit safely.

The shuttle cost NASA a lot of money that's true, but it cost the US
relatively little, and NASA did a bunch of truly amazing things with it.
There's good reason to be nostalgic.

------
guelo
Libertarian triumphalism always strikes me as so naive. Does anyone think
SpaceX would be possible without decades of taxpayer funded research?

Or the freaking Web for that matter. Ground breaking research always seems to
be funded by society at large and then spat upon as inefficient and stupid by
the manly men who will now make a profit off of it.

~~~
nkoren
Nobody is spitting on the ground-breaking research that NASA has done, and
Elon Musk takes every opportunity he gets to thank NASA for doing that
research and making their results available to him.

For the Shuttle, however, that research occurred in the early 1970s. The $200B
that has since been spent flying the shuttle did _not_ constitute ground-
breaking research in any respect. It's simply operating a tragically expensive
space truck. I'm thrilled to see the back of it, and hope that this will allow
NASA to return to its primary mission of doing ground-breaking research, while
buying its space truck services far more cheaply on the open market.

~~~
iwwr
Consider that the same money could have paid several times over for a Mars
Direct style program and permanent stay on Mars. The key to Mars (as opposed
to the Moon) is being able to make your fuel from the Martian atmosphere, with
an input of (solar?) power and some materials brought from Earth (5-25% of
total mass). That means vastly cheaper upper stage, allowing for a for a
continuous presence for a fraction of the Shuttle budget.

More here <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDWvsdEYSqg> Also, a presentation on
Mars Direct [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T52-Qu78TjQ&feature=BFa&#...</a>

------
rbanffy
"Interstellar"?! Aren't we feeling overly optimistic today?

With current technology (and not inventing too much new physics) interstellar
travel takes so long that, in order to be an effective investment, it would
require an out of this world ROI.

Say you can launch an expedition to the closest solar system for a billion
dollars (NASA certainly can't, but we are talking privatization) and have it
return to Earth in four (I want to keep my numbers round) hundred years. In
order to be preferable to US Treasure bonds (generally considered a lame
option, but we are thinking very long-term), our expedition would have to
bring back about about 3.7 billion dollars worth of stuff.

The billion dollar figure and the 400 years period are both ludicrously
optimistic. In order to be back in 400 years, you'd have to fly at 0.02c
meaning you'd have to spend 18,000,000,000 Joules _per gram_ of spacecraft for
_each delta-v_. That's 72 GJ, or 20 MWh _per gram_. And that's with a 100%
energy efficient propulsion system (which would require some new - and very
fancy - physics anyway).

------
redthrowaway
"Interstellar" travel will likely never happen. The distances involved are so
vast as to boggle the mind. Private ventures offer the promise of opening up
space, but they won't break physics.

Like it or not, we as a species are stuck here, likely forever.

~~~
hahainternet
This is remarkably negative. There are a number of ways to explore without
having to break physics.

Constant 1g acceleration makes nearby _galaxies_ accessible, nevermind nearby
solar systems.

Returning from exploration? Reporting results? That isn't going to happen.

Colonizing the universe? There's nothing at all stopping it in physical law.

~~~
drostie
_Constant 1g acceleration makes nearby galaxies accessible, nevermind nearby
solar systems._

"Break physics" is relative -- things which can be allowed by the laws of
physics can be so humanly implausible as to be useless to discuss.

I mean, let me just be totally clear about this. In relativity, to get your
time dilation factor γ up, you need a lot of kinetic energy K. How much? Well
E = γ m c² = m c² + K, so K = (γ − 1) m c².

If you wanted to go to the nearest _galaxy_ \-- which is 25,000 light years
away on the other side of the Milky Way -- and you wanted to do it with _any_
sort of vehicle in 25 years -- you would have to take along about 1000 times
the mass of your vehicle as fuel. More importantly, whatever fuel you're using
to accelerate you're also using to decelerate, so you actually need 1,000,000x
fuel to start with, to get your 1,000x fuel up to speed for most of the
journey. So your 10^5 kg shuttle orbiter would need to come with 10^8 kg
slowdown fuel. That's what we're sending around, you've got to build the Great
Pyramid at Giza out of antimatter and find a way to carry it with you, just to
get the shuttle to do this in a reasonable time.

Now c² is about 10^17 J/kg so we need about 10^25 J to slow down, and to send
this would require 10^28 J. For perspective, our largest nuclear blasts (Tsar
Bomba's 50 megaton yield) are 2 * 10^17 J, so you'd need fifty million of
those to launch. Or you could just carry the US with you, that has an annual
power consumption of 10^22 J -- wait, make that a million copies of the United
States, before you could launch.

Of course, antimatter is unstable and you might want to carry the Tsar Bomba
around as a massive fuel source instead, but the Tsar Bomba actually only
carried an energy yield of around 10^-4 m c², so you would need to have 10,000
times more mass (10 million space shuttles to decelerate your one) if you
wanted to do it with nuclear bombs.

~~~
stcredzero
I don't think rockets are feasible for interstellar travel for the reasons you
state. Beamed propulsion is probably the way to accelerate. Magsails can be
used for deceleration. This gets around the nastiness of the rocket equation.

~~~
lutorm
Beamed propulsion gets around the rocket equation, but trying to beam energy
to something receding at exponential speeds doesn't sound that much easier. It
would pose an exponentially decreasing target, so to get around the
diffraction limit you'd need an exponentially increasingly large collimation
mechanism.

~~~
stcredzero
_Beamed propulsion gets around the rocket equation, but trying to beam energy
to something receding at exponential speeds doesn't sound that much easier._

If you're making a mathematical argument, be sure to do the math. Nothing's
going to be receding at >exponential< speeds. (It would be nice if we could do
that trick.)

 _to get around the diffraction limit you'd need an exponentially increasingly
large collimation mechanism._

Yes, this gets pretty freaking huge. Robert Forward worked out the mathematics
for this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail#Interstellar_flight>

Change targets to Proxima Centauri, use magsails to decelerate instead of
jettisoning the outer mirror, and the power and lens requirements go down by a
lot. I suppose your point would be that they remain freakishly huge. True, but
if humanity continues to progress into the solar system, it should be feasible
for the much larger and more advanced economy.

~~~
lutorm
_be sure to do the math. Nothing's going to be receding at >exponential<
speeds_

Yeah, my bad. Momentary loss of order-of-magnitude sense. Speed will go as _t_
, distance as _t^2_ , so solid angle subtended as _t^-4_. That's still pretty
rapidly shrinking, though nowhere near exponential of course.

