Don't Mourn the Space Shuttle. Privatize Interstellar Exploration.
forbes.com
forbes.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And with a potentially large commercial infrastructure in place, assembling a NASA exploration gadget could be done at a fraction of the cost. NASA could in fact do many times the R&D in such an environment and make many Tysons very happy indeed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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&#...
Libertarians certainly have something to crow about! It's amazing how much more can be accomplished by a private, selfish actor compared to a selfless government agency with the same resources.
Once the basic research and exploration has been done, certainly.
It's as if different kinds of organizations were both good at doing different kinds of things, and both worthy of a place in society...
But the Dragon still cost less to develop than a single launch of the NASA space shuttle. That's remarkable.
It's a pretty good day to be a libertarian.
It's called "standing on the shoulders of giants". I'm glad the industry is at a point where it can be run by companies instead of governments, as I'm sure it will be more efficient, and likely innovative as well.
But those of us without an ideological axe to grind are pointing out that it got to this point thanks in no small part to government involvement.
The basic research was done by the Germans at the end of WW2 and dont forget Russia, they got there first. Nasa wasnt even around then.
It's not just a rocket, it's a rocket capable of reaching orbit and returning [1]. But the things that NASA (along with russian space agency and others) did was things like figuring out, e.g., reliable ground-orbit radio communication, deployment and use of satellites, and a hell of procedures regarding pretty much everything from setting up a spacecraft, to lauching it, to orbiting, deorbiting and landing it, not to mention occasional orbital transfers to other planets. And let's not even get started about ground-side logistics.
There is LOT more to a space mission than just building a rocket. NASA and others did a fine job of doing that, and building neccessary experience in the process.
[1] - yeah, I know, ICBMs can do that too.
Libertarians virtually never have valid points, private industry efficiency is one of the most common urban myths. The incentive for efficiency is valid, but the efficacy and safety issues almost always outweigh it.
I'm excited for the future of private spaceflight, but I am hoping that this allows NASA to contract for cheaper launches while maintaining their scientific research ability.
What private company could survive the Hubble debacle, for example?
None of these items were developed in a vacuum; it's almost impossible to separate private and public contributions once you start talking about education and the public safety/infrastructure that created the right environment, but I don't think it's fair to imply SpaceX would never have happened without NASA or other public research. History, at least, has presented some counterexamples.
To be fair, it's less naive than Anarchism. (To be honest, I'm killing with faint praise.)
Yes.
Would SpaceX be happening now if there had never been a Space Shuttle? Quite simply we have no way of knowing and we never will, because we can't roll back history, change variables and make new experiments. But there's no particular reason whatsoever to think that the technology required by SpaceX would not (have been|be) developed just because it wasn't funded by taxpayers. If you're going to play with alternative scenarios, it's equally possible that privatizing space travel research decades ago would have led to more progress, not less.
But, for better or worse, we have what we have here today. I don't think any Libertarians are playing "triumphalism" here, so much as just pointing out that now is clearly a good time to start transitioning certain elements of space travel to the private sector. It's fun to argue about what might or might not have happened under other scenarios, but it's not a very productive discussion.
Always? A far more accurate version of this statement would be "Often, in modern times, ..."
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).
Like it or not, we as a species are stuck here, likely forever.
Once humanity has had perhaps centuries of experience with orbital habitats then the idea of a large "generational" starship won't seem so unlikely. With functional fusion power and highly efficient recycling systems the ability to have an interstellar city ship which spends hundreds or thousands of years isolated from the rest of civilization may not seem so unlikely.
Also consider that interstellar space holds far more destinations than we have currently cataloged. Begin with a colony near a comet out in the deepths of the Oort cloud. Then make a hop to another comet, free roaming planet, brown dwarf, or red dwarf that is very likely to be within a single light year distant. At each destination repair, refuel, resupply and move on.
In a time span of only a fraction of the age of human civilization significant populations of humans will spread out from our Solar System and diffuse through interstellar space.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsi...
It would be unbelievably expensive right now however.
But give it a century or two and things could well change. If a space elevator was built it would slash the cost.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
I appreciate you doing the mathematics, but you don't base it on the 1g acceleration I mentioned, as far as I can tell.
"You're sort of right -- since rapidities are linear in relativity one also has v/c = tanh(a t / c), γ = cosh(a t / c), and that's in principle an exponential growth, so if you can keep up a constant acceleration at this rate for 8 years, you could get to γ ~= 2,000. But here's why maintaining a constant acceleration for 8 years is pretty much totally unfeasible: getting a γ around 2,000 requires carrying 2,000 times as much fuel as spaceship."
At some point I edited this out to focus on that main point without editing out the quote at the front. Sorry if that's confusing.
You're way off, it requires much more than that. See my post.
I would think HN readers would appreciate the futility of scaling up using algorithms that go as O(exp(N)) even if there's nothing in principle that says it won't work. Just saying "we'll wait until the computers are fast enough" is not going to work. Plus, when it comes to rockets, you're much more bound by practical constraints.
Just as an order of magnitude exercise: Suppose you want to accelerate with a super-efficient ion thruster with 16km/s exhaust velocity. To get 1km/s, you need 6% fuel. 10km/s: 87%. 100km/s: a fuel of 518times the payload. 1000km/s: 1e27 times the payload. For comparison, that means to accelerate a ton to that speed, you need a fuel amount equal to the mass of the Sun. (And at that speed, it would still take a millenium to go a parsec. Space is really effing big.)