Space Rage
John Derbyshire has an article in National Review Online in which he condemns the manned space program, and calls for it`s dissolution. Normally Mr. Derbyshire is a lucid and brilliant thinker, but I bitterly disagree with him on this. Below is an e-mail I sent him. If he responds I`ll post it up:
Dear Mr. Derbyshire,
I am normally a great fan of yours, and agree with you on most issues. I have to take umbrage, however, with your article about the space program. I believe it is myopic and narrow, and I think you should re-evaluate your position.
You trumpet the fact that 14 people have died in 113 flights, but you fail to mention that those were 2 shuttle trips out of the 113, which means that out of 791 people who have flown on the shuttle, 14 have died. Granted, this would be an abyssmal record for a commercial airline, but it is not that bad considering the complexities of space flight. How many people died in crashes of the old biplanes? How many deaths in the early days of ballooning? Space flight is in it`s infancy. For that matter, how many ships sank on the way to the New World in the 16th Century? Pioneering is often dangerous.
You complain that the costs are too high for the return, and you point to experiments on Osteoperosis. Granted, we are not seeing overnight miracles, but we have seen a plethora of technological developements which have spun off from the space program. Teflon, of course, is one example, but we have special heat shielding which was developed for Nasa, fuel cells were developed for the space program, advances in material science, in computers, in ergonomics (the science of engineering equipment to human ability), in rocketry. The space program has yielded in abundance. That we haven`t cured Osteoperosis is hardly a rational reason to scrap the entire program. I would like to point out that we haven`t cured cancer yet, either. Does that mean we should shut down Johns Hopkins?
You state:
There is nothing — nothing, no thing, not one darned cotton-picking thing you can name — of either military, or commercial, or scientific, or national importance to be done in space, that could not be done twenty times better and at one thousandth the cost, by machines rather than human beings.
Is that so? Why did we have to send the Shuttle to repair the Hubble telescope? Robots don`t make very good repairmen, Mr. Derbyshire. In fact, the shuttles have repaired numerous satellites through the years-some of these being critical to our national security or communication net. Robots have a hard time conducting anything beyond ``black box`` experiments. Remember the trouble with the Viking probe on Mars? A guy with a wrench would have fixed that in 15 seconds. Ditto with the problems with the current Mars rovers.
I agree we need to streamline the manned space program. The addition of ``international`` to our space station has turned that into a white elephant. The Shuttles are 25 years old, and based on technology even older. We were working on their systems when Nixon was in office! Of course we`re having problems. What we need to do is modernize, not discontinue.
The fundamental flaw in your thinking, as I see it, stems from a short-term view. You say that mining asteroids would be cost prohibitive. That is true today, at any rate. If we had proper facilities and equipment in place the costs would drop drastically and asteroid mining could become a very lucrative business. How about Solar Power Satellites; they would be enormously expensive but would generate free power virtually forever. How about producing silicon or graphite compote whiskers; these have the highest tensile strength of any materials we can produce and they require hard vacuum and microgravity helps.
The problem is infrastructure. The Shuttle was designed to carry massive loads into space to build things. (The Shuttle was intended to have a manned booster which would land and be reused; it was drastically scaled down to cut costs.) If we had the bases and equipment in place we could accomplish much more. We would have these things if the politicians and media weren`t so damn shortsighted. You seem to think that, because we don`t have them, they are not worth having.
What the President understands (or at least gives lip-service to) is that these are all secondary purposes. The real reason to go into space is to live there. Mankind has been expanding for literally millions of years. America has always been a frontier nation, and settling the wilderness used to be at the heart of the American experience. Now the Earth is full, the wilderness is gone, our frontiers are closed. We have lost a vital piece of our national purpose-unless we head up! We have an entire planet sitting within a months car ride over our heads (if we had a road), we have a half-dozen other worlds we could settle, plus millions of asteroids, plus we could build settlements in space itself. Someone is going to go there, and (hopefully) someone is going to colonize the High Frontier. If we fail to do it, perhaps the Chinese will take our place? I want to see America build the future. I want the Solar System settled with our values and beliefs. That is our new frontier. Our future lies above!
The Chinese had an age of exploration. They sent ships out to search the farthest corners of the Earth, then they quit. Europe sent ships out, and stayed to build a new world. It was hard; ships sunk with such frequency that only governments could afford to do it at first. The joint-stock company was created to reduce the financial liability on shipowners who faced complete ruin if a ship sunk. We are in an analogous position today. The time will come when private concerns can take the ball and run. We just haven`t reached that point yet-and never will if we follow your advice. Do we want that? Do we want to sit here while our resources dwindle and our spirits waste away while others inherit the Solar System? Do we want to become the Chinese, while they become the New Europe?
Manifest Destiny was the American dream of colonizing the Continent from coast to coast. We can have a new Manifest Destiny; colonizing space. Will we have the courage to do this, the faith to do this, or will we be content to sit comfortably in our beds while we wither away?
Thanks for your time,
Tim Birdnow
Dear Mr. Derbyshire,
I am normally a great fan of yours, and agree with you on most issues. I have to take umbrage, however, with your article about the space program. I believe it is myopic and narrow, and I think you should re-evaluate your position.
You trumpet the fact that 14 people have died in 113 flights, but you fail to mention that those were 2 shuttle trips out of the 113, which means that out of 791 people who have flown on the shuttle, 14 have died. Granted, this would be an abyssmal record for a commercial airline, but it is not that bad considering the complexities of space flight. How many people died in crashes of the old biplanes? How many deaths in the early days of ballooning? Space flight is in it`s infancy. For that matter, how many ships sank on the way to the New World in the 16th Century? Pioneering is often dangerous.
You complain that the costs are too high for the return, and you point to experiments on Osteoperosis. Granted, we are not seeing overnight miracles, but we have seen a plethora of technological developements which have spun off from the space program. Teflon, of course, is one example, but we have special heat shielding which was developed for Nasa, fuel cells were developed for the space program, advances in material science, in computers, in ergonomics (the science of engineering equipment to human ability), in rocketry. The space program has yielded in abundance. That we haven`t cured Osteoperosis is hardly a rational reason to scrap the entire program. I would like to point out that we haven`t cured cancer yet, either. Does that mean we should shut down Johns Hopkins?
You state:
There is nothing — nothing, no thing, not one darned cotton-picking thing you can name — of either military, or commercial, or scientific, or national importance to be done in space, that could not be done twenty times better and at one thousandth the cost, by machines rather than human beings.
Is that so? Why did we have to send the Shuttle to repair the Hubble telescope? Robots don`t make very good repairmen, Mr. Derbyshire. In fact, the shuttles have repaired numerous satellites through the years-some of these being critical to our national security or communication net. Robots have a hard time conducting anything beyond ``black box`` experiments. Remember the trouble with the Viking probe on Mars? A guy with a wrench would have fixed that in 15 seconds. Ditto with the problems with the current Mars rovers.
I agree we need to streamline the manned space program. The addition of ``international`` to our space station has turned that into a white elephant. The Shuttles are 25 years old, and based on technology even older. We were working on their systems when Nixon was in office! Of course we`re having problems. What we need to do is modernize, not discontinue.
The fundamental flaw in your thinking, as I see it, stems from a short-term view. You say that mining asteroids would be cost prohibitive. That is true today, at any rate. If we had proper facilities and equipment in place the costs would drop drastically and asteroid mining could become a very lucrative business. How about Solar Power Satellites; they would be enormously expensive but would generate free power virtually forever. How about producing silicon or graphite compote whiskers; these have the highest tensile strength of any materials we can produce and they require hard vacuum and microgravity helps.
The problem is infrastructure. The Shuttle was designed to carry massive loads into space to build things. (The Shuttle was intended to have a manned booster which would land and be reused; it was drastically scaled down to cut costs.) If we had the bases and equipment in place we could accomplish much more. We would have these things if the politicians and media weren`t so damn shortsighted. You seem to think that, because we don`t have them, they are not worth having.
What the President understands (or at least gives lip-service to) is that these are all secondary purposes. The real reason to go into space is to live there. Mankind has been expanding for literally millions of years. America has always been a frontier nation, and settling the wilderness used to be at the heart of the American experience. Now the Earth is full, the wilderness is gone, our frontiers are closed. We have lost a vital piece of our national purpose-unless we head up! We have an entire planet sitting within a months car ride over our heads (if we had a road), we have a half-dozen other worlds we could settle, plus millions of asteroids, plus we could build settlements in space itself. Someone is going to go there, and (hopefully) someone is going to colonize the High Frontier. If we fail to do it, perhaps the Chinese will take our place? I want to see America build the future. I want the Solar System settled with our values and beliefs. That is our new frontier. Our future lies above!
The Chinese had an age of exploration. They sent ships out to search the farthest corners of the Earth, then they quit. Europe sent ships out, and stayed to build a new world. It was hard; ships sunk with such frequency that only governments could afford to do it at first. The joint-stock company was created to reduce the financial liability on shipowners who faced complete ruin if a ship sunk. We are in an analogous position today. The time will come when private concerns can take the ball and run. We just haven`t reached that point yet-and never will if we follow your advice. Do we want that? Do we want to sit here while our resources dwindle and our spirits waste away while others inherit the Solar System? Do we want to become the Chinese, while they become the New Europe?
Manifest Destiny was the American dream of colonizing the Continent from coast to coast. We can have a new Manifest Destiny; colonizing space. Will we have the courage to do this, the faith to do this, or will we be content to sit comfortably in our beds while we wither away?
Thanks for your time,
Tim Birdnow
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 1:28 PM
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