> The space station sparked a lot of interest, but it too was overwhelmingly expensive. Its components would be so heavy, NASA's entire budget would be required to pay for the launch rockets--to say nothing, as space proponents are wont to do, of building or servicing it.
Which is is fact pretty much exactly what happened with NASA and the ISS.
> There is something noteworthy a rocket can do that the shuttle cannot. A rocket can be permitted to fail. What if a billion dollar spaceship wipes out on a "routine" mission "commuting" to space with some puny little satellite? Cooper fears it might drive a stake through the heart of the manned space program.
Nailed this one too.
> But to require six shuttle launches a year, there would have to be 18 satellites. "Barring some extraordinary breakthrough in technology," says an informed communications industry source, "that's inconceivable."
This prediction, though, didn't work out so well. (SpaceX alone has more than 5,500 satellites, and is launching thousands yearly.)
>> But to require six shuttle launches a year, there would have to be 18 satellites. "Barring some extraordinary breakthrough in technology," says an informed communications industry source, "that's inconceivable."
>This prediction, though, didn't work out so well. (SpaceX alone has more than 5,500 satellites, and is launching thousands yearly.)
Easterbrook was writing specifically about the shuttle. As he explains in the rest of the article, the financials of the shuttle as designed just didn't work without a very high launch cadence. Had each shuttle been capable of landing on its own back at the launch site and be reused 18 times and counting over three years as SpaceX has done with Falcon 9, Easterbrook's conclusions would have been different.
Overall, the article is flabbergastingly predictive of every single thing that happened to the shuttle program over its 30-year operational history. In addition to what you mentioned, Easterbrook also predicted
* The lack of survivability of the crew if an SRB failed (Challenger)
* The fragility of the heat-shield tiles (Columbia, and STS-27)
* The danger to the entire US space program—military, commercial, scientific—if the shuttle, intended to be the sole national launch system, was grounded
There was no web in 1980 (that was 1989), the non-web internet was barely getting started and home use of it was science fiction (even home computers themselves were only few years old, 3 years if you take the 1977 release of the Apple 2 given the 1 didn't have a case). Mobile phones had been car phones and experimental devices until just the previous year, they wouldn't become commonplace for about two more decades, and even then wouldn't be significantly bandwidth hogs with video calls and streaming until smartphones three decades after the article.
On the satellite side:
Satellites are mostly powered by PV, which itself was expensive in 1980 (I'm not certain, but guessing from the size of the Starlink satellites and the exponential growth curve for PV production and total installation having been only 105 MW globally in 1992, Starlink might have exceeded worldwide 1980 PV production all by itself). Packet switching comes with computational costs, and the computers in the satellites themselves were expensive (both in dollars and watts) and low performance. Phased array antennas were really hard, computational beam forming moreso. Ion drives existed in various forms, but Hall effect thrusters wouldn't be introduced to the west for another 12 years (1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union). Laser communication was being researched, but the first successful laser intersatellite link was 2001.
Other than a bit more insight on the impacts on human healthy from long term spaceflight.. What are the major scientific insights or developments made thanks to the ISS?
With Apollo there are quite a few, but with the ISS I can't think of anything
I understand why people might feel this way. Esp, if you think of the ISS as "a bunch of tired astronauts in a floating lab box"
But the ISS should be considered a manned instrument bus. Consider OCO-3, a gimballed observer on the exterior of the ISS. It has revolutionized our understanding of global carbon cycles, and local carbon sink/sources.
There are numerous such missions that benefit from a common, well supported platform to operate from.
How incredible it seems today that this story could ever have been written by a mainstream reporter. It tells the story of a technology without any attempt at "human color" or "character portraits" to "interest the public". It is written for an adult readership that seems scarcely conceivable today. A lost artifact of lost social technology that could never be reproduced within the modern West.
i was marveling at that too, and at the reporter who understood the subject matter, which is not unrelated. yesterday i had the displeasure of reading an article that confused risc with risc-v
> When Columbia's tiles started popping off in a stiff breeze, it occurred to engineers that ice chunks from the tank would crash into the tiles during the sonic chaos of launch: Goodbye, Columbia. So insulation was added to the tank.
I didn't realize this was the reason for the thermal insulation. It's ironic how in the end the insulation popped off and crashed into the tiles during launch, causing the very disaster it was intended to prevent.
It did enough damage to cause the heat shield to fail on reentry, so "caused" is warranted. Even if the foam had a purpose, it would have been a reasonable requirement to make sure that it doesn't turn into a risk itself...
> ”You've probably heard, for instance, that the space shuttle will retrieve damaged satellites and return them to earth for repair. Not so. It can't. Simply and flatly, can't.”
Interesting article, but the Washington Monthly’s sources were wrong here. The space shuttles could, and did, retrieve satellites from orbit and return them to earth several times during their operating life:
STS-41-C (launch) / STS-32R (retrieve): LDEF
STS-41-B (launch) / STS-51-A (retrieve): Palapa B-2 and Westar 6
> "Was this a more economical approach than launching those missions on an expendable rocket, and just building brand new satellites?"
Assuming you already have a Space Shuttle, then the answer was apparantely yes. Lloyd's of London, as insurers, paid NASA for the recovery of Westar 6 and Palapa B2. The cost of the recovery was said to be $10m, vs. the $180m insurance value of the satellites (both in 1980s dollars). [1]
I suppose many of today's satellites are relatively cheap and considered more expendable, but back in the 1980s these things were very valuable pieces of kit.
Besides, most of the retrieval missions performed by the Space Shuttles were not "failed" satellites but rather long-life science platforms that were designed to spend time in space and then be returned to earth for analysis. Now days, many of those sorts of missions can be performed on the ISS, but back then the shuttle was the only option.
In this case, hindsight merely justifies the foresight: at no point did satellite return-to-Earth provide any economic justification for the shuttle program, even in conjunction with other imagined benefits.
The part you did not quote is that, at the time the Shuttle was being designed, 2/3 of satellites launched were in geosync orbit. Looking them up now, Palapa B-2 and Westar 6 were both intended to be in GEO but failed, and were retrieved in LEO.
Really remarkable to see the failure modes that caused both the Challenger and Columbia disasters enumerated here, respectively six and twenty-three years ahead of time.
True, on the other hand author seems just negative about everything - he expects just single digit satellite launches a year needed, or expects that a permament space station won’t ever happen
Be that as it may, he was basically right about one thing: that the Shuttle was a technological dead end that cost a lot of money, wasted a lot of time and, most importantly, killed 14 people.
> the Shuttle was a technological dead end that cost a lot of money, wasted a lot of time
This seems to be a popularly held view. But I wonder what you think the last ~40 years of crewed spaceflight would have looked like if the shuttle had never been built?
Would the US still be using single-shot vehicles that are little more than incremental upgrades of 70s Apollo technology, as Soyuz basically is?
Or would some other reusable spacecraft have been built? If so, and given that the STS design was very much a product of the cold war era's military influence, would it have been much different? I dont think it would.
Among many things, the shuttle development produced the RS-25, which is the basis for the engines used on the SLS. So I'd argue that, from that alone, it wasn't a dead end.
Not sure actually - maybe we would have arrived at what SpaceX is doing (reusable rockets and space capsules) earlier?
As for the RS-25, it's used in the SLS mostly because NASA still has left-over engines from the Shuttle program in storage, otherwise it wouldn't make sense to use an engine designed for reusability on a single-use rocket. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25#Space_Launch_System, "Once the remaining RS-25Ds are exhausted, they are to be replaced with a cheaper, expendable version designated the RS-25E".
>Would the US still be using single-shot vehicles that are little more than incremental upgrades of 70s Apollo technology
It would have been better than the road we took. Don't believe me? While NASA Administrator, Michael Griffin wrote in 2007 that the shuttle program had been a colossal mistake and that Apollo-Saturn-Skylab should have continued <http://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_ex...>:
>Let’s assume that we had kept flying with the systems we had at the time, that we had continued to execute two manned Apollo lunar missions every year, as was done in 1971-72. This would have cost about $4.8 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars.
>Further, let us assume that we had established a continuing program of space station activities in Earth orbit, built on the Apollo CSM, Saturn I-B, and Skylab systems. Four crew rotation launches per year, plus a new Skylab cluster every five years to augment or replace existing modules, would have cost about $1.5 billion/year. This entire program of six manned flights per year, two of them to the Moon, would have cost about $6.3 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars. The average annual NASA budget in the 15 difficult years from 1974-88 was $10.5 billion; with 60% of it allocated to human spaceflight, there would have been sufficient funding to continue a stable program of lunar exploration as well as the development of Earth orbital infrastructure. I suggest that this would have been a better strategic alternative than the choices that were in fact made, almost 40 years ago.
SpaceX has finally done reusability the right way, but that does not mean that the shuttle was ever the right way.
The Shuttle had a similar problem to the F-35. It was designed to do everything.
I have no idea if anything linked to the US military could design a specialized device in the last ~40 years. But if you just took the bay out of the Shuttle, you'd get a much more reasonable design.
I worry that the business case for StarShip is similarly optimistic.
Launching once per week, a single StarShip will carry 10,000 tons to orbit. Fully 50% of all mass launched to orbit since Sputnik 1. Given the hopes for even more frequent launches with a fleet of StarShips makes me wonder who is going to pay for it all and why?
I do understand it's supposed to be much cheaper. But someone still has to pay. And that person still has to be sure that SpaceX - as a single, critical, supplier - won't eat their business model any time SpaceX chooses.
So I do hope there's a secret cunning plan I'm not aware of.
"Would the public stand to lose a quarter of the fleet in a single day? Would it fork over another billion dollars to build a replacement? Would it stand for spending millions to train astronauts to be truck drivers, only to lose truck and drivers both?"
Amazingly prescient article, but I don't think the author expected the answers to these heartbreaking questions to be "yes."
Twelve-year-old me stayed up all night to watch Columbia launch in '81, and I watched the last flight of Atlantis in 2011; I still can't watch the Challenger footage to this day.
Highly recommend this irreverent podcast by 2 engineers and former NASA contractors. They get out above their skies on some topics but the shuttle content is fun.
The only thing more ridiculous than another manned visit to the moon is the colonization of mars (especially one intended to "save" humanity). Yet both are being planned. Idiots are just too horny for human space exploration after decades of Star Trek/War consumption.
Don't forget to explain - in detail - how to build a stable, self-sustaining off-world ecosystem with adequate food, air, water, and shelter out of rocks, energy, and expensive and very irregular imports.
You might also want to think about how to keep critical machinery running on the end of a six month - best case - supply chain.
"Take three of everything" might work practically, but will raise some eyebrows economically.
Those are the hard problems. Compared to them, getting there is trivially easy.
Yeah, the comparison to colonization doesn't really makes much sense to me. Using 16th century tech, you could expect to have a profitable trip pretty much every time you managed to come back alive, and you did not have to deal with bringing your own life support systems. With our technology, colonizing Mars is a much, much harder task, which has no foreseeable economic benefits for decades if not centuries.
Heh, I also named some 20th century exploration examples. (eg. Charles Lindbergh's first Trans-Atlantic flight was only in 1927)
Current investment in space endeavors in eg. the USA is around 0.1% GDP. Even if you double it (or 10x it), that's not going to break the bank. If we take your optimistic estimate (profitable after a few decades) it might just be a risk that's worth it today, on a nation-scale.
(Edit: unfortunately I couldn't find good GDP figures for the 1600's , but taking investments in eg british and dutch east india companies vs a guesstimated GDP, I also got to around 0.1% +/- 1 OOM, which seems like a reasonable estimate of exploration costs as % GDP , and thus modern investment levels seem to be reasonably in line with that. )
Air, Water and Shelter are solved and field-proven. (eg. nuclear submarines can theoretically stay out for years, only limited by food)
Food is an interesting challenge, since we haven't done food production at scale beyond earth yet. Small scale experiments and applications seem promising though.
Full self-sustaining is not a requirement provided there is a supply chain. (And vice versa) . Of course: As self-self sustaining as possible as soon as possible would definitely be something to aim for.
The one company proposing to colonize mars in the near future would do so with a fleet of reusable spacecraft capable of 100-metric-tons to mars surface.
"Take three of everything" becomes a bit less of a problem in that kind of situation.
Within those constraints, the challenges are certainly still significant, but need not be insurmountable. Also said ship is -itself- not yet proven, so we'll have to wait and see.
I'd hardly call these innovators, adventurers, (also in some cases profiteers) and dreamers idiots. They may be making all kinds of mistaken assumptions and "overindulging" in optimism, but they're not stupid. They just dream of bigger things and wider horizons with what's at least feasibly reachable, even if right now, some of us, particularly those with a scarcity of imagination, can't conceive the same without dismissing them as stupid.
What a miserly way to look at the world when you yourself live in it benefiting from centuries of similarly flexible-minded people working towards similarly extreme ideas for their time.
There's nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. It's just a hard thing to do for the time being, like so much else was that's now not only accepted but so routine as to be a fundamental part of daily civilization.
> There's nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds.
That is a subject of disagreement. Kim Stanley Robinson depicted a coming clash between proponents of Mars colonization and keep-it-untouched environmentalists in his Mars trilogy. (And from his later novel Aurora, one wonders if KSR has actually gone over to the anti-human-expansion side.) Thirty years ago, that might have seemed fanciful, but not today when environmentalism has made wider inroads, especially among younger generations. It is easy to find rhetoric now about the future of humanity where the writer talks about the need for degrowth, humanity as a virus, etc.
There's still nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds.
Just because certain groups of people have beliefs about the "wrongness" of something, doesn't mean that they're in the least bit rational or need to be given weight. The uh space, beyond the Earth is literally a blasted wasteland created from ancient formation violence. Nothing we do in that sterile, radioactive, chemically toxic vastness of planets, rocks, ice and open void would by any sane definition be comparable to some sort of ecocide on earth, where extremely precious flora and fauna are destroyed.
The philosophy of degrowth is entirely a subjective moral view, no more morally valid than a philosophy of more growth, and humanity is emphatically not a virus, it just is, like any other complex species on Earth.
It's not just far harder than any previous wave of colonisation. The rewards aren't obvious.
A radio telescope on the far side of the Moon would be nice. But there are no slaves or spices, and no gold or other metals at prices that make the economics even remotely sane.
We'd be going for the sake of going - a good enough reason mythologically, but a very tough sell economically.
IMO we'd be better off clawing back the physics PhDs who work in finance and applying them to a blue sky search for new physics. With current tech there's a serious risk of a(nother) Space Winter when the initial wave either fails or doesn't generate any rewards.
>But there are no slaves or spices, and no gold or other metals at prices that make the economics even remotely sane.
Very much untrue, at least in part. The solar system, including the asteroids, moon and other bodies, is absolutely, insanely loaded with valuable minerals and materials to a degree that makes what the old colonial powers sought in the New World and Africa pale in comparison, it's just extremely difficult and expensive to reach, for now, so on the second part of your comment, you're correct.
However, it's worth noting that the technology for extraction absolutely would scale down in cost over time to the point of space mining being as routinely profitable and practical as mining on earth.
I don't like comparing space exploration to the fundamentally cruel and exploitative schemes of Earth's governments during the colonial periods but even they at first had to deal with high costs and little benefit, until they developed scale. Humanity could do the same thing beyond the earth, and without all the grotesque moral failures of destroying whole human cultures in the process.
If Columbus hadn't been a wilful idiot by taking the smallest possible calculation for the diameter of the Earth and the largest available guess for how wide Asia was, he (like everyone else of his era) would have known his galleon couldn't make a trip long enough to sail west to India, and wouldn't have accidentally discovered the Americas in process of making this mistake.
I think Mars is a bad choice for a first attempt at a permanent village in space, let alone colony, because things will go wrong and the distance is so large help from earth can't[0] arrive in less than several months. Moon? Few days. Could fix "our food cargo storage exploded/was infected with deadly mould and now we don't have any" if it's on the moon, everyone dies if that happens on Mars.
Mars does have one advantage for saving the earth, though: even if we never actually go, developing the tech to make a self-sustaining colony on Mars necessary solves the biggest environmental challenges on earth.
[0] with current rockets; in principle faster ones can be made, but nuclear propulsion is frowned on for various reasons depending on exactly which one is under discussion
There’s not likely to be much freedom to be had in space or on Mars, in a situation where life support systems are fragile and need much more protection from careless/reckless individuals.
I think of NASA vs SpaceX as the equivalent of East vs West Germany: a clear demonstration that private companies work better than state bureaucracies.
There are plenty of inept private bureaucracies. Free market doesn't always clear them out, cash cows can support a lot of waste.
The orbiters were built by Rockwell International, the external fuel tanks by Martin Marietta/Lockheed Martin, the SRBs by Thiokol/ATK
United Space Boosters Inc./Pratt & Whitney.
Why even look as far as space, you can see this principle producing tremendous value to millions of ordinary people in the brilliant effectiveness of America’s private healthcare industry.
Which is is fact pretty much exactly what happened with NASA and the ISS.
> There is something noteworthy a rocket can do that the shuttle cannot. A rocket can be permitted to fail. What if a billion dollar spaceship wipes out on a "routine" mission "commuting" to space with some puny little satellite? Cooper fears it might drive a stake through the heart of the manned space program.
Nailed this one too.
> But to require six shuttle launches a year, there would have to be 18 satellites. "Barring some extraordinary breakthrough in technology," says an informed communications industry source, "that's inconceivable."
This prediction, though, didn't work out so well. (SpaceX alone has more than 5,500 satellites, and is launching thousands yearly.)