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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Manned Spaceflight _ The Last 10 Days In The Space Shuttle's Bunker?

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 21 2006, 03:05 AM

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060220/atlantis_spa.html :

"Under orders to retire the shuttle fleet by 2010, NASA plans to cancel shuttle Atlantis' next scheduled overhaul and mothball the ship in 2008.

"Rather than becoming a museum piece, however, Atlantis will serve as a spare parts donor for sister ships Discovery and Endeavour to complete assembly of the International Space Station.

" 'People are already calling us and asking us can they display one of our orbiters in their museum after we're done. I'm not giving anybody anything until we're all agreed the station is complete and the shuttles' job is done,' shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told Kennedy Space Center employees during a televised address on Friday.

" 'We're going to keep (Atlantis) in as near flight-ready condition as we can without putting it through a (modification and overhaul) so we can use those parts,' Hale said.
____________________

Jeffrey Bell has recently finished a piece for "SpaceDaily" proclaiming that the wholesale cancellation of other NASA projects in the FY 2007 budget to keep Shuttle and ISS going is actually just part of Michael Griffin's Machiavellian strategy to get both of the cancelled, by making it clear that they can be saved now only at the cost of a swarm of other projects (including Bush's lunar program) which are now more popular. Certainly that is the overwhelming message being conveyed, whether Griffin planned it that way or not -- I haven't seen a single newspaper editorial yet that favors retaining Shuttle at this point.

(Bell also claims to see other, subtler evidence of this strategy in Griffin's moves over the last few weeks -- and also signs that he definitely plans to throw ISS from the train as well, by just giving it to the Russians half-finished in a few years and paying off the ESA and Japan for their unlaunched space lab modules. These include the fact that he's cancelled work on the unmanned cargo variant of the Crew Exploration Vehicle that will be necessary to take up replacement Control Moment Gyros to the ISS after the Shuttle is no longer available.)

Posted by: Richard Trigaux Feb 21 2006, 05:49 AM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 21 2006, 04:05 AM) *
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060220/atlantis_spa.html :

"Under orders to retire the shuttle fleet by 2010, NASA plans to cancel shuttle Atlantis' next scheduled overhaul and mothball the ship in 2008.

"Rather than becoming a museum piece, however, Atlantis will serve as a spare parts donor for sister ships Discovery and Endeavour to complete assembly of the International Space Station.

" 'People are already calling us and asking us can they display one of our orbiters in their museum after we're done. I'm not giving anybody anything until we're all agreed the station is complete and the shuttles' job is done,' shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told Kennedy Space Center employees during a televised address on Friday.

" 'We're going to keep (Atlantis) in as near flight-ready condition as we can without putting it through a (modification and overhaul) so we can use those parts,' Hale said.
____________________

Jeffrey Bell has recently finished a piece for "SpaceDaily" proclaiming that the wholesale cancellation of other NASA projects in the FY 2007 budget to keep Shuttle and ISS going is actually just part of Michael Griffin's Machiavellian strategy to get both of the cancelled, by making it clear that they can be saved now only at the cost of a swarm of other projects (including Bush's lunar program) which are now more popular. Certainly that is the overwhelming message being conveyed, whether Griffin planned it that way or not -- I haven't seen a single newspaper editorial yet that favors retaining Shuttle at this point.

(Bell also claims to see other, subtler evidence of this strategy in Griffin's moves over the last few weeks -- and also signs that he definitely plans to throw ISS from the train as well, by just giving it to the Russians half-finished in a few years and paying off the ESA and Japan for their unlaunched space lab modules. These include the fact that he's cancelled work on the unmanned cargo variant of the Crew Exploration Vehicle that will be necessary to take up replacement Control Moment Gyros to the ISS after the Shuttle is no longer available.)


Bruce,

I am not a hardline opponent to human spaceflight like you, but in the case of the shuttle I must agree that it was a mistake since the beginning (nobody was to blame at that time, we simply did not knew the incredible cost) and that stubbornly clinging to the ISS/shuttle program now can be done only at the cost of any rational space program.

NASA will sooner or later have to develop another way to go in space. This will have a cost, and delaying this step can only increase this cost and further delay all the useful activities. Clearly, maintaining the shuttle program is delaying any other activity, and to this delay we have to add the time to develop another transportation mean.

In Europe we had a hot debate about doing or not the Hermes shuttle. After years of political struggle, the decision was made to do it, with an overal agreement on a budget that everybody was already considering very high, a considerable effort. So industrials began the development of Hermes, but only some month after they came with a bill 50% more than expected. So the decision was taken not to pursue further, and to abandon Hermes. A sad decision certainly, especially for advocates of human spaceflight. But a wise decision, everybody agreed.

So, today, whatever the future plans, the wisest for the NASA, and by far the less expensive, would be to abandon the shuttle right now. Certainly a sad decision, but a necessary one.

Posted by: djellison Feb 21 2006, 08:17 AM

One of Maggie Thatchers few highlights - not involving the UK in Hermes and infact, despite there being a Union Jack in the ISS, as I understand it, we're not involved in Columbus either. We don't spend much on space here, far far far too little, but what we do spend, at least wasnt poured down that particular black hole...

HOWEVER...

I still maintain that the US HAS to complete it's obligation to international partners with ISS. Bush called for international cooperation in the VSE, and he's simply not going to get that if they scew over Japan and Europe with ISS. NASA can do that however it wants - using STS or something else - but it HAS to do it. ITAR makes international cooperation harder now than ever before ( ask the Canadians working on PHX ) - so the US, if it is serious in wanting future involvement with other agencies, HAS to do what it signed up to many many years ago. Reading the excellent 'Titans of Saturn', I'm more convinced of that than ever,

I take little notice of what Bell says, he has an agenda in everything he says and interprets everything to support his agenda, it's hard to take him seriously as a result. He occasionally flags up a good point, but rarely more than that, his article reads more like a forum ranting than a piece of journalism.

The early Atlantis retirement makes a lot of sense, and shows to me that Griffin really does want to get rid of STS as quickly as is reasonably possible.

The scrapping of plans for a cargo CEV shows, perhaps, that he's prepared to take commercial options for shifting smaller loads into orbit (Delta 4, Atlas 5 etc ). An alternate interpretation of that particular piece of evidence.

Doug

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 21 2006, 09:24 AM

"I still maintain that the US HAS to complete it's obligation to international partners with ISS. Bush called for international cooperation in the VSE, and he's simply not going to get that if they scew over Japan and Europe with ISS. NASA can do that however it wants - using STS or something else - but it HAS to do it. ITAR makes international cooperation harder now than ever before ( ask the Canadians working on PHX ) - so the US, if it is serious in wanting future involvement with other agencies, HAS to do what it signed up to many many years ago."

That depends, I think, on whether NASA is willing to cover the costs that the ESA and Japan ran up building their lab modules -- which Bell thinks it can easily do with a small fraction of the money it will save by cancelling Shuttle/ISS. If it does, then -- given the Gordian-knot mess which the entire ISS project has degenerated into -- I think ESA and Japan will be a lot more willing to forgive us for jumping ship on this one. (They would certainly have taken America's cancellation of its half of Ulysses better in 1981 if we'd covered their costs for THAT one -- they lost half of their own planned experiments!)

QUOTE (djellison @ Feb 21 2006, 08:17 AM) *
The scrapping of plans for a cargo CEV shows, perhaps, that he's prepared to take commercial options for shifting smaller loads into orbit (Delta 4, Atlas 5 etc ). An alternate interpretation of that particular piece of evidence.

Doug


Bell says -- and I haven't double-checked this yet -- that there is no other cargo-carrier satellite big enough to carry replacement CMGs.

He has told me in an E-mail tonight, though, that he doesn't regard the scrapping of Atlantis as corroborative evidence that Griffin is planning to zap Shuttle/ISS:

"No real news here. Space Cadet chat groups had figured this out long ago. Clearly there is no point in starting a 2-yr overhaul of Atlantis in 2008 when the system is closing down in 2010.

"And stripping an Orbiter for parts isn't new either -- parts are constantly swapped between the Orbiters. This isn't a pointer to an early Shuttle termination."

Posted by: djellison Feb 21 2006, 09:47 AM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 21 2006, 09:24 AM) *
Bell says -- and I haven't double-checked this yet -- that there is no other cargo-carrier satellite big enough to carry replacement CMGs.


They are 281kg. I assume by 'big enough' he means dimensions, not lifting capacity. And even so, it's not a dimensions issue - it's simply that the russian docking ports are smaller than a CMG. There is no external cargo stowage capacity on LV's - that's the problem.

What we don't have is a US unmanned ISS vehicle. There is an ESA one in the works, and a Russian one that's is very very relaible. There is no doubt that a means could be found to carry many CMG's to ISS using one of those vehicles. Similarly, it would not be the work of billions of dollars to build a simple unmanned bus that operates like progress, to have externally stowed cargo to launch via a EELV. It really isnt a big technical challenge.

What Bell is saying is that they are going to intentionally launch the next shuttle knowing that it will shed foam and thus he is alledging that NASA is knowingly and intentionally endangering the lives of astronauts. It's not just idiotic, it's sick. He's sensationalising in the extreme to draw attention to himself, that's all.


Doug

Posted by: edstrick Feb 21 2006, 11:15 AM

One big lesson of the post-Columbia "test" flight and post-flight research was confirmation that there are two essentially different foam loss mechanisms. <There could be more but there's 2 main ones>

There is a *LOT* of "popcorning"... small foam bits shed semi-randomly from the tank at high altitude in near vaccuum. They could see it on the radar with the new high-sensativity instrumentation. This stuff's simply no problem. There's not enough air to sweep it past the shuttle with enough speed that impacts have the force to do damage.

The other foam loss, cryo-pumping, apparently with chill-formed liquid air trapped in small cracks and voids in the foam, then heated during ascent and blowing foam chunks off, is the biggie, and they had 2 remaining sources of foam loss last flight. Identified. Fixed. There may be others, I suspect there will be, but we've probably gotten the biggies.

Bell has good points, but too much of it is a pure rant. Hard to sort the foaming bits from the stuff that makes sense.

Posted by: Richard Trigaux Feb 21 2006, 03:15 PM

Without entering into the "gordian-knot mess", I would say that the cost of today situation is the result of decisions which were taken 10 to 20 years ago. Lack of prevision, stubbornely ignoring warnings, refusing to come back once engaged into a dead way... The bill increases as a power of passing time.

There is a constant trend for politicians to make bear the costs of their decisions by the future generations. But now WE are their future generation...

As I said further, the cancellation of the Hermes shuttle project by Europe was certainly a sad decision, but at least we are getting out of this at NO COST and with all our freedom.

Posted by: PhilCo126 Feb 21 2006, 03:58 PM

As we already mentioned in the 2nd BIS book on the International Space Station, a down-sized ISS will do fine, just get the major components up there and scrap the STS shuttle program ( NASA might not survive another shuttle disaster ! )...
It looks NASA is going in the right direction ... turning attention to the new crew vehicles and launchers...
On to Mars !

Posted by: MahFL Feb 21 2006, 05:23 PM

Its going to take much much longer than anyone thinks to land a human on Mars, my guess not before 2050.
pancam.gif

Posted by: Richard Trigaux Feb 21 2006, 05:34 PM

When I think back twenty years ago, when the shuttle program was starting, all the hope we invested in it: cheap, easy, safe access to space, going in orbit as easily as we go in holidays, send up there tourists, scientists, artists, space stations, large science facilities, factories... and where we are now...
NASA is not the culprit: all the other shuttle programs were canceled, and space remains expensive, dangerous and difficult. There will perhaps not be a PRACTICAL space station and flight to Mars before several decades, and, unless something really new is discovered, there will never be easy cheap access to space.

In facts the idea of the space shuttle came not from scientists and not from engineers, it came from science fiction. And we all tried to realize a scifi dream. Sometimes it is a good idea. Sometimes not. Let us search for something else for an easy access to space. Starting with what we know to do. Large aircraft or huge baloon at high altitude, perhaps? Would a very large aircraft such an A380 be able to hauld a rocket stage at high altitude? Certainly yes, but how large? For small satellites perhaps.

Posted by: dilo Feb 21 2006, 09:33 PM

QUOTE (Richard Trigaux @ Feb 21 2006, 06:34 PM) *
...In facts the idea of the space shuttle came not from scientists and not from engineers, it came from science fiction. And we all tried to realize a scifi dream. Sometimes it is a good idea. Sometimes not....

Agree, Richard. And I'm worried by this fact, because I'm convinced that also the new USA exploration program is something like this. Recently, I hear "expert" saying it will be easier (and cheaper) to launch satellites and spacecrafts from the moon, and make astronomical observations from it's "dark side". But a scientist, or even a space enthusiast, undertsands that this is not true: a base on the moon will be very hard to make and will cost a lot, making very difficult to pay back construction expenses (ISS should teach us something!); and best place to observe universe is far from any celestial body!
And yes, I share with MahFL the impression that we will not see a man on Mars in our lifespan. sad.gif But we have MER images! biggrin.gif

Posted by: Bob Shaw Feb 21 2006, 10:32 PM

QUOTE (Richard Trigaux @ Feb 21 2006, 05:34 PM) *
In facts the idea of the space shuttle came not from scientists and not from engineers, it came from science fiction.


Richard:

No, I don't really think so!

The 'spaceplane' concept came largely from German engineer Dr. Eugen Sänger who researched many rocketry technologies, such as regeneratively cooled liquid-fueled engines. After WWII, Bell Aircraft Corporation undertook the BOMI and ROBO studies of round the world spaceplanes, which appeared to offer many advantages of artillery-derived rockets. From these seeds came a whole range of spaceplane projects, and science fiction merely reiterated the concepts - remember that Arthur C Clarke was active in the BIS before he wrote fiction!

http://www.luft46.com/misc/sanger.html

Bob Shaw

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 22 2006, 01:19 AM

While I will agree that it's insane (even given NASA's past actions) to say that Griffin would DELIBERATELY pass up an opportunity to minimize the dangers of more falling Shuttle foam before the next launch, there's another possibility: we may very well have no choice but to do so if we want to keep the ISS going at all.

The best weblog page on the ISS ( http://www.geocities.com/i_s_s_alpha ) says flatly that the only possible carrier right now for the Control Moment Gyros, except for the Shuttle, is Japan's HEV cargo carrier -- which won't be ready until 2009. (Europe's cargo carrier module can't do it.) NASA released a solicitation for "Commercial Orbital Transportation Services" carriers that might be able to do the job in October, with the proposals due this May -- so how long will it be before one of those can possibly fly? Surely 2008 at the absolute earliest.

And the CMGs have proven very fragile. Quoting last Sept. 5's Aviation Week: "The CMGs are too large to fit through the Progress vehicle hatch, so the Shuttle is the only option for replacing them. The combination of their ability to save propellant and their apparent fragility makes CMGs the long pole in the tent for continued Station viability without Shuttle support.

" 'If we went down to one CMG we couldn't last very long, says Mark Ferring, lead ISS flight director during the EVAs [on last year's Shuttle flight]. That's the thing that we had to get done.'

"NASA is already looking for smaller, lighter gyros to use on the Station after it retires the Shuttle. But for now, the only option available to the Station program is getting the most use out of the current model. Controllers were surprised when CMG-1 failed -- the victim of a bearing failure that gave only a few hours' of warning -- and they still don't have a full understanding of the breakdown. As soon as the spacewalkers restored power to CMG-2, ISS controllers took CMG-3 offline for attitude control because it was showing unusual vibrations and current pulls, although they let it continue to spin. Engineers at NASA and L-3 Communications, which supplied the CMGs, were eager to get a look at the original CMG-1 in the hope it would hold clues to the cause of its bearing failure. Noguchi and Robinson carefully bolted it into the aft end of Discovery's payload bay for the trip home.

" 'Bringing one back is actually one of the biggest priority things that we have on this flight, not just installing a new one, but getting the one that's failed on the ground so we can do analysis on it', Ferring says."

So. If they get down to only two working CMGs on the ISS again and they don't have a flying Shuttle before 2008, they are up Excrement Waterway -- they will have no way to prevent the sudden reduction of the ISS at any moment to only one CMG, after which it "can't last very long". For this reason alone, NASA may very well have to fly Shuttles again as soon as possible even if they don't -- or can't -- solve the foam problem. Unless, that is, they're prepared to dump the ISS at any moment.

As for Griffin's Jan. 19 interview with the Orlando Sentinel that Bell mentions ( http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_space_thewritestuff/2006/01/mike_griffin_af.html ), he makes it pretty clear that --while he hopes they've solved the problem of big pieces of foam falling off -- he is by no means confident of it:

"Orlando Sentinel: What is the likelihood of making May?

"Griffin: We don’t know. I think you’ve been covering this long enough to understand that in order to even find out, you have to set a date and then you have to start working toward that date. We know what our processing flow is. We’re not going to make it up on the fly and the process flow either makes May or it doesn’t. But on the other hand, if we don’t set a date and try for it, we know we won’t make one. So that’s the plan. In brief summary to the question, yes, we think we understand the mechanism. Yes, we have mitigation based on that understanding of the mechanism. And we think we’ll get back to flying in late spring or early summer. We believe things will go well after that and we’ll be on our way to completing the [international space] station.

"Orlando Sentinel: What happens if on the next mission, STS-121, things don’t go well and you see big pieces of foam come off the tank again that are in excess of your design restrictions?

"Griffin: I can’t get into that kind of speculation. Obviously, it would be a major hiccup and we would have to deal with it.

"Orlando Sentinel: Could the program survive that politically?

"Griffin: I just don’t even know. I’m not going to speculate. I just can’t. There are too many branch paths. Right now, we are devoting our resources to flying and flying well. That’s how you have to think."

In a situation like that, if YOU were Griffin, wouldn't YOU be eager to get rid of this whole thing at the slightest opportunity? It's not only a white elephant; it's a dangerous rogue white elephant. Griffin, contrary to Bell, surely isn't deliberately making the next Shuttle flight more dangerous than it needs to be -- but it is unavoidably extremely dangerous; he knows it; and I think at the slightest indication that the foam problem hasn't been completely solved he will seize the opportunity to say it's time to kill Shuttle-ISS completely.

Posted by: gpurcell Feb 22 2006, 07:01 AM

Look, the simplest explanation for the official announcement for retiring Atlantis NOW is that it significantly degrades the option of trying to continue flying the shuttles post-2010. Griffin wants two solutions:

1) Develop CEV
2) Stop manned spaceflight

without option

3) Keep the shuttles staggering along until the next disaster.

The problem with option three is that it is, year-on-year, cheaper then option one...but it does, however, inevitably lead to option 2!

Posted by: Richard Trigaux Feb 22 2006, 07:47 AM

QUOTE (gpurcell @ Feb 22 2006, 08:01 AM) *
Look, the simplest explanation for the official announcement for retiring Atlantis NOW is that it significantly degrades the option of trying to continue flying the shuttles post-2010. Griffin wants two solutions:

1) Develop CEV
2) Stop manned spaceflight

without option

3) Keep the shuttles staggering along until the next disaster.

The problem with option three is that it is, year-on-year, cheaper then option one...but it does, however, inevitably lead to option 2!



Yes this is the problem: they think "what is the cost this year " or "what is the cost during the time I am the responsible" and not "what is the overal cost of the program, spin-off and inconveniences included".


sad.gif

Posted by: dilo Feb 22 2006, 08:46 AM

QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ Feb 21 2006, 11:32 PM) *
The 'spaceplane' concept came largely from German engineer Dr. Eugen Sänger who researched many rocketry technologies, such as regeneratively cooled liquid-fueled engines.

Perhaps slightly OT, I knew the Sanger project and I remember also a modern spaceplane project called "Sanger", in honor of this projectist. In the image I saw, it was a beautiful, very aveniristic model but I cannot find any info on that. Someone can help?

Posted by: edstrick Feb 22 2006, 08:57 AM

We have to remember that the IDEA of a space shuttle is a good one. The one we got is a bad one.

Shuttle was supposed to 1.) provide access to and from space and serve as a work platform in orbit. 2.) Fly frequently. 3.) Fly Cheaply. 4.) Fly Safely.

It is about 80% successful at #1. Fails #'s 2 and 3 by 10x each, and Fails #4 by 100 to 10,000 or more times (depending on which early reliability claims you pick)

Why? 1.) We'd never built any reusable spacecraft or launch vehicles. Building shuttle right would have been like building a DC-3 Goonybird in 1925 instead of 1935.
2.) We had to enlist all possible customers to get the political support for the $ to build it, so it was designed to satisfy every one's hypothetical needs (especially the military's). The design was over-constrained by trying to please everybody.
3.) We tried to build it on the cheap.

Any of those 3 things inevitably would have compromised what we got compared with what we wanted. Together, they turned a great idea into a 35 year disaster.

From orbit insertion to atmosphere interface, the shuttle is wondererful. The rest of the time it's a disaster, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Posted by: PhilCo126 Feb 22 2006, 09:45 AM

After 25 years of Space Transportation System (STS) it looks like NASA is going to use ATLANTIS for spare parts wink.gif

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 22 2006, 11:21 AM

An excellent case can be made that the basic concept of the Shuttle was disastrously dumb-ass from the very beginning -- and Robert Truax made it in his January 1999 "Aerospace America" article, "The Future of Earth-to-Orbit Propulsion" ( http://www.teamprincipia.com/space/eto1.php ), which has been one of my Holy Tracts ever since I read it. Truax's most important point is that putting wings on a reusable LEO vehicle -- as opposed to a 2-stage vehicle in which the first stage parachutes into the ocean, and the second stage may or not be reusable -- is a breathtakingly idiotic notion from the start. Wings cut the vehicle's orbital payload by 2/3 (Griffin himself has memorably described the Shuttle as "a 100-ton shroud for a 30-ton payload"); they require absolute stability during reentry (whereas a capsule virtually stabilizes itself); they make a crash during the final landing vastly more likely; and they tremendously complicate any manned abort-and-escape (to the point of making it frequently impossible, as on the current Shuttle). They make sense on a vehicle that spends all its time moving horizontally through the atmosphere -- NOT on one that goes up through and then comes down through the atmosphere as fast as it reasonably can.

Actually, to quote his entire list of condemnations:

"Many flawed design choices were made in arriving at the Shuttle's final configuration:

"(1) Wings and landing gear are the heaviest of all possible methods of recovery.

"(2) Parallel staging is less efficient than tandem. More importantly, it also prevents the upper-stage engine from being optimized for vacuum operation. [He details this at some length, pointing out that it's particularly true for hydrogen-fueled engines.]

"(3) Use of two boosters doubles the probability of catastrophic failure. Multiple main engines increase probability of catastrophic failure by a factor of three, even though they may reduce the probability of noncatastrophic failure.

"(4) Opting for segmented booster cases increases the probability of case failure by unnecessarily complicating case design. Monolithic cases were proposed but rejected because Thiokol, a Utah company with no access to water transportation, had to propose a take-apart design.

"(5) Putting a crew on the first flight requires a very high reliability based on ground tests alone. A more sensible procedure would have been to fly the vehicle unmanned for cargo missions until an adequate degree of reliability could be demonstrated, as was done with the Saturn V (the Soviets, incidentally, did fly their shuttle Buran, for the first and only time, without a crew).

"(6) Use of solid propellants in the boosters minimizes the savings that can be had through recovery and reuse. Pressure-fed liquid-propellant boosters, as initially recommended by NASA-Marshall, would have required little more than a wash-down and refueling before reuse. Solids require disassembly and return to the factory, along with replacement of many parts. The cost of solid propellants runs about $7/lb vs. an average of about 10 cents for liquids.

"(7) Throwing away the largest part of the system, the main fuel tank, adds about $50 million to the cost per flight.

"(8) People and cargo should never be mixed. Payloads to be transported to orbit, even for missions requiring a human presence, are 95% 'stuff' and at most only 5% 'meat.' The provisions and safety requirements for the latter cost an order of magnitude more than for the former. Mixing the two burdens cargo flights with the same elaborate safety measures required for people."
________________________________

Some of Truax's arguments are open to question -- in particular, his belief that rockets should not only be recovered in but also launched from the ocean, and his belief that pressure-fed stages are better than turbopumps. (He got five approving letters from engineers in the April issue of the magazine, but also one detailed critique of that particular idea by an engineer who had worked on pressure-fed boosters and found out the hard way that they must be heavy and thus inefficient.) It may also be workable and economically effective to use the same booster for people and cargo, provided that any manned capsule is equipped with an escape rocket (which by itself will massively increase the safety of any manned mission, without having to go through the phenomenal expense of man-rating the booster to the degree that's necessary for the Shuttle).

And he was saying all this, loudly, in the 1970s, proposing an alternative to Shuttle called "Sea Dragon" that would have had these traits.

Posted by: dvandorn Feb 22 2006, 03:43 PM

And you can add to Truax's comments the comment, made in the mid-90's by one of the main NASA designers of the Shuttle system, that they "got exactly the system (they) wanted." He went on to say that the designers knew exactly how infrequently this Shuttle would be able to fly, and how expensive it would be, and that's exactly the system they wanted. (If someone could recall the designer's name for me, that would be appreciated -- I just don't recall it at the moment.)

I seriously disagree with some of Truax's comments, and I also believe that his comments were designed solely to attack a competing concept -- i.e., he, Truax, was looking at getting a few billion dollars from the government in his *own* pockets, which motivated him to make some unsubstantiable attack statements. Obviously, his attacks didn't work, probably because everyone at the time realized that he had an axe to grind on this particular issue.

However, I take *strong* exception to the statement earlier in the thread that eliminating manned space flight is one of Griffin's goals. I dare anyone to produce a statement by Griffin that supports this. I also put up against it the fact that Griffin put a Shuttle servicing mission of Hubble back on the schedule, even after O'Keefe and his minions had killed it.

Once again, I will say it -- eliminate manned spaceflight from the U.S. budget, and you'll be left with Russia, ESA and JAXA for *all* of your unmanned probes. Congress will *never* see the sense of continuing unmanned exploration unless there is also a manned space presence; they will see bowing out of manned spaceflight as a statement of our intention to abandon space exploration entirely. If you sell the first, the second will follow automatically. So, if you want to see American unmanned spaceflight brought to a complete halt, go ahead and lobby for an end to American manned spaceflight.

Pardon me if I don't join y'all in that.

-the other Doug

Posted by: mcaplinger Feb 22 2006, 04:03 PM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 22 2006, 03:21 AM) *
An excellent case can be made that the basic concept of the Shuttle was disastrously dumb-ass from the very beginning -- and Robert Truax made it in his January 1999 "Aerospace America" article...


Regardless of the merits of Truax's technical points, the first rule of aerospace is that paper studies like his Sea Dragon are worthless by themselves. Until you have actually built, tested, and flown a system multiple times, you are only extrapolating based on incomplete data how it will perform, how well, and how cost-effectively. Talk is cheap, and aerospace is riddled with large and embarrassing failures based on ideas that seemed great on paper.

There's no shortage of people who trash the Shuttle with 20-20 hindsight, but the engineers who designed and built it did the best job they could under the technical and budgetary constraints at the time, and it's quite an achievement in that light. Within the limits of statistical error, its failure rate matches pretty well with the original honest assessment of 1 in 100 flights. If you want higher reliability than that, you'd better be prepared to pay for it, in money or capability or something.

Posted by: Bill Harris Feb 22 2006, 05:24 PM

It will be an endless debate of whether or not the Space Shuttle is/was a good idea or not. Nonetheless, it has been a part of the US space program for two decades and it stands on it's own, good or bad.

However, my view is that it should not have been the _sole_ vehicle for US manned spaceflight and LEO cargo. We should have developed and utilized a "Gemini/Apollo/Soyuz" vehicle for routine manned launches, and an unmanned cargo ship for cargo. What we ended up doing with the Shuttle is equivalent to a young family selling it's Toyota sedan and buying a Winnebago RV as it's sole transportation.

The Shuttle program has been wonderful, but tunnel-visioned.

--Bill

Posted by: Bob Shaw Feb 22 2006, 10:55 PM

QUOTE (dilo @ Feb 22 2006, 08:46 AM) *
Perhaps slightly OT, I knew the Sanger project and I remember also a modern spaceplane project called "Sanger", in honor of this projectist. In the image I saw, it was a beautiful, very aveniristic model but I cannot find any info on that. Someone can help?



Marco:

Try looking at:

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/saegerii.htm

Bob Shaw

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 23 2006, 01:00 AM

QUOTE (mcaplinger @ Feb 22 2006, 04:03 PM) *
Regardless of the merits of Truax's technical points, the first rule of aerospace is that paper studies like his Sea Dragon are worthless by themselves. Until you have actually built, tested, and flown a system multiple times, you are only extrapolating based on incomplete data how it will perform, how well, and how cost-effectively. Talk is cheap, and aerospace is riddled with large and embarrassing failures based on ideas that seemed great on paper.

There's no shortage of people who trash the Shuttle with 20-20 hindsight, but the engineers who designed and built it did the best job they could under the technical and budgetary constraints at the time, and it's quite an achievement in that light. Within the limits of statistical error, its failure rate matches pretty well with the original honest assessment of 1 in 100 flights. If you want higher reliability than that, you'd better be prepared to pay for it, in money or capability or something.


The trouble with Shuttle is not its reliability rate -- a failure rate of less than 2% does compare well with any unmanned booster. The trouble, as should be obvious, is everything ELSE about it: its disastrously low cost-effectiveness per kg of payload carried, and, oh yes, the fact that when it fails it usually kills people, which another type of booster would not. (Had the Shuttle been a CEV-type design -- that is, a reusable booster carrying a capsule with an escape rocket -- it would have killed NOBODY by this point. The Columbia accident would never have occurred; in the case of Challenger the escape system, if designed with even minimal competence, would have detected the leak and rocketed the crew to safety about 15 seconds before the explosion.)

In fact, these flaws -- basic to its fundamental design -- WERE clear to a lot of people at the time besides Truax, which is why NASA had to lie about the Shuttle to a degree that would have made Baron Munchausen blush to get it through Congress. Robert Thompson -- the program manager at the time -- actually guffawed while he was telling CAIB about the size and absurdity of the claims NASA was successfully feeding to Congress at the time: "Hell, anybody with any sense knew we'd never fly that often." He thought it was a terrific joke.

And the responsibility for the crime (which is not too strong a word for it) lies not with engineers frantically trying to do the best they could with such an absurd design -- it lies with the leadership of NASA, who deliberately, from the very start, set out to create a massively expensive and unjustified program to try and keep the agency's funding level as close to the bloated levels of the Moon Race as they possibly could, and who were willing to tell absolutely any lie necessary to achieve that goal. As Reagan's science advisor George Keyworth said during his frantic but futile attempt to keep Reagan from swallowing NASA's similar outrageous lies about the cost and utility of the Station: "Every government agency lies part of the time, but NASA is the only one I know that does so most of the time." (He could have added that the reason for this is simply that it has far more reason to lie than any other government agency, because its total spending level has made far less sense than that of any other agency since the historical freak of the Moon Race ended.)

The one piece of actual new news in Thompson's testimony was his revelation that President Nixon, instead of being another victim of NASA's scam, was in on it from the start. He knew that the Democratic Congress would never approve what he and NASA really wanted -- a super-expensive Shuttle/Station program -- so he collaborated with NASA's lies about the supposed economy of the Shuttle as a cargo carrier, in order to increase the chances that Congress would agree to pony up the additional money for the Station before the end of his second term. Watergate put a stop to that plan; but NASA kept it in mind, and finally successfully staged part 2 of their Master Plan by exploiting the gullibility first of Reagan, and then of Al Gore.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 23 2006, 01:17 AM

You can find an overall summary of Thompson's CAIB testimony in my May 2003 "SpaceDaily" article: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/shuttle-03p1.html . When I get another few minutes free, I'll locate the URL of the transcript of all his testimony.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 23 2006, 01:29 AM

QUOTE (dvandorn @ Feb 22 2006, 03:43 PM) *
Once again, I will say it -- eliminate manned spaceflight from the U.S. budget, and you'll be left with Russia, ESA and JAXA for *all* of your unmanned probes. Congress will *never* see the sense of continuing unmanned exploration unless there is also a manned space presence; they will see bowing out of manned spaceflight as a statement of our intention to abandon space exploration entirely. If you sell the first, the second will follow automatically. So, if you want to see American unmanned spaceflight brought to a complete halt, go ahead and lobby for an end to American manned spaceflight.

-the other Doug

_______________________________

Why? ESA and (to a lesser extent) JAXA have fairly big unmanned space programs without much if any manned component. Why should Congress be unwilling to follow suit? (Especially given the continued existence of its very large Space Pork Faction, who would be eager to keep total space spending as high as possible and would therefore certainly support an enlarged unmanned program to partially compensate.)

What is true is that we might very well end up with a shrunken unmanned space program, along the lines of ESA (although probably not nearly that small, for the reason given above). So what? The right question is not what I and the rest of you in this little group get a kick out of watching -- the right question is the extent to which space exploration really is justifiable, on practical, rational and moral grounds, as opposed to other uses for the money. To the extent that it has practical benefits, it should compete on an equal platform with other governmental spending on engineering projects and scientific research. To the extent that it's a form of public entertainment, the public should decide how much of their taxes they want spent for that purpose.

Posted by: AlexBlackwell Feb 23 2006, 01:38 AM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 23 2006, 01:29 AM) *
Why? ESA and (to a lesser extent) JAXA have fairly big unmanned space programs without much if any manned component. Why should Congress be unwilling to follow suit?

Because the vast if not overwhelming majority of their consituents don't care what "ESA and (to a lesser extent) JAXA" do.

Posted by: lyford Feb 23 2006, 02:06 AM

QUOTE (AlexBlackwell @ Feb 22 2006, 05:38 PM) *
Because the vast if not overwhelming majority of their consituents don't care what "ESA and (to a lesser extent) JAXA" do.

I would wager the vast majority of them would not even know what ESA and JAXA are...... mad.gif

Posted by: mcaplinger Feb 23 2006, 03:47 AM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 22 2006, 05:00 PM) *
Had the Shuttle been a CEV-type design -- that is, a reusable booster carrying a capsule with an escape rocket -- it would have killed NOBODY by this point. The Columbia accident would never have occurred...


No doubt this explains why the Russians have never lost people on Soyuz flights. (Well, no: four people dead in two entry accidents. Would you argue that the US would never have accidents like those? We came fairly close to losing the US crew of Apollo-Soyuz to an accident similar to Soyuz 11.)

Forgive my lack of confidence in your ability to flawlessly predict these alternate-history outcomes. And I'm not sure what this CEV-type vehicle would have been doing; certainly neither DOD nor NASA had any interest in such a thing in the time frame we're discussing. For that matter, I'm not sure what the current CEV is supposed to be doing either smile.gif

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 23 2006, 04:37 AM

QUOTE (mcaplinger @ Feb 23 2006, 03:47 AM) *
No doubt this explains why the Russians have never lost people on Soyuz flights. (Well, no: four people dead in two entry accidents. Would you argue that the US would never have accidents like those? We came fairly close to losing the US crew of Apollo-Soyuz to an accident similar to Soyuz 11.)

Forgive my lack of confidence in your ability to flawlessly predict these alternate-history outcomes. And I'm not sure what this CEV-type vehicle would have been doing; certainly neither DOD nor NASA had any interest in such a thing in the time frame we're discussing. For that matter, I'm not sure what the current CEV is supposed to be doing either smile.gif


"Flawless prediction" has nothing to do with it. The types of accidents that happened on Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 were the result of the incredibly shoddy design and assembly techniques used by the Soviets, as opposed to the US -- and those kinds of accidents, and ALL the kinds of dangerous accidents suffered by US capsule missions, are the sorts of things that could also have happened on a Shuttle. I never said that capsules equipped with escape rockets are totally safe; I said that they are by their basic nature much safer than a large winged craft, and the fact that neither fatal Shuttle accident would have happened on a capsule vehicle is further proof of that.

You are, of course, right that NASA had no interest in that kind of vehicle in that time frame -- because, and only because, there wasn't enough taxpayer-provided money in it. As for the DoD, see my article for one other fascinating little tidbit from Thompson's testimony:

"We then [after Nixon's secret decision] undertook obviously to build the Shuttle first, and then a modular, zero-gravity space station second...As the thing evolved, we started with the Shuttle, and the requirements for the Shuttle were driven 99 percent by what we wanted to do to support the space station. It also happened to give the Air Force the kind of payload volume and the kind of capability they wanted, although they really wanted to be at higher orbits for their work.

"So the Air Force came in and said, 'We will plan to use the Shuttle, and we will also take on the task of building the Interim Upper Stage, which was part of the low-Earth-orbital infrastructure. So NASA embarked on the Shuttle. It wasn't necessary to commit to a space station at that time because the Shuttle had to be built and operational before you commit to the space station, and the President at that time -- Nixon -- had other things on his mind. He didn't get up and make a great big speech about low-Earth-orbital infrastructure.' "

Thus we have further confirmation that the Air Force didn't demand that specific design for the Shuttle; NASA told them that it was a magic Dr. Feelgood elixir for all the Air Force's needs (and so safe, too -- only a 1 in 100,000 chance of a launch accident!); and so the Air Force agreed to go along, although even after that sales job it wasn't really what they wanted. By 1985 -- before the Challenger accident -- they had already realized that NASA had royally screwed them; the vehicle wasn't even remotely as capable and cheap as NASA had promised it would be, and their own estimates gave it a 1 in 56 chance of launch failure. So, thank God, by mid-1985 they had already demanded that the Titan production line be started up again -- and if they hadn't done that, the Challenger disaster would have had much worse consequences for this country than it actually had.

As for what the current CEV is "supposed to be doing": why, it's supposed to be doing exactly what Shuttle and Station were always supposed to do -- siphon massive amounts of taxpayer money into NASA and into the Space Pork Complex. Like them, it has no other real purpose. But at least it's safer and more economical than they are, and it has the potential to gradually evolve into future types of manned vehicles that might someday actually be useful for something.

QUOTE (AlexBlackwell @ Feb 23 2006, 01:38 AM) *
Because the vast if not overwhelming majority of their constituents don't care what "ESA and (to a lesser extent) JAXA" do.



Of course, the same thing is true of the vast majority of European and Japanese citizens. Lo and behold, their nations have fair-sized space programs anyway. So I repeat: why wouldn't the US? Are we supposed to believe that the US government and its citizens are THAT idiotically addicted to purposeless manned space flights?

Incidentally, the Huygens and Hayabusa missions seem to have attracted considerable interest and support from European and Japanese citizens, without a single astronaut being involved -- just as the Voyager, Hubble and MER missions did here.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 23 2006, 04:52 AM

QUOTE (dvandorn @ Feb 22 2006, 03:43 PM) *
However, I take *strong* exception to the statement earlier in the thread that eliminating manned space flight is one of Griffin's goals. I dare anyone to produce a statement by Griffin that supports this. I also put up against it the fact that Griffin put a Shuttle servicing mission of Hubble back on the schedule, even after O'Keefe and his minions had killed it.


-the other Doug


Neither I nor Bell said that Griffin intends to "eliminate manned space flight" as a whole for now -- although, like Freeman Dyson, I would have no objection to that happening for the next several decades. What I and Bell said was that we have every reason to think that Griffin despises Shuttle/Station, and would jump at any opportunity to kill it. And that is beyond question -- Griffin has written precisely that, in public reports that he issued before being picked as NASA Administrator.

As for his supporting a Hubble repair mission for Shuttle: that, I imagine, is a separate issue, based on his assumption that if we're going to retain the damned thing anyway as part of what he sees as the unjustifiable ISS project, we might as well use it for ONE thing that might perhaps be worthwhile (especially since, actually having technical training, he instantly realized how harebrained O'Keefe's proposed robotic Hubble repair mission was). Whether if -- after the cancellation of ISS -- he'd try to fly one last Shuttle mission just to repair Hubble (as Robert Zubrin proposes in "Space News") is uncertain; but I imagine we'll never get the chance to find out. When they finally are zapped, Shuttle will get the ax first, then ISS will.

Posted by: dilo Feb 23 2006, 07:12 AM

QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ Feb 22 2006, 11:55 PM) *
Marco:

Try looking at:

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/saegerii.htm

Bob Shaw

Thank you very much, Bob.

Posted by: Stephen Feb 23 2006, 10:33 AM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 23 2006, 04:52 AM) *
Neither I nor Bell said that Griffin intends to "eliminate manned space flight" as a whole for now -- although, like Freeman Dyson, I would have no objection to that happening for the next several decades.

With all due respect, if NASA's manned spaceflight were ever to be "eliminated...for the next several decades" that abolition may well turn out to be pretty much permanent, whether that was intended to be so at the time or not.

Abolishing manned spaceflight would not just mean sending the shuttles off to museums (or the breakers yards) and pensioning off a few astronauts. It would also impact on the associated infrastructure, personnel, and industrial capacity. Allowing those to wither away would mean that if and when somebody did want to put manned space flight put back on the national agenda again they may well have to be rebuilt from scratch.

For example, what do you do with the VAB at KSC? Put it in mothballs, demolish it, sell it to land developers for transformation into condominiums, or leave it to slowly rot away as another of the KSC's collection of antique lawn ornaments? smile.gif

What would happen to manned spaceflight's funding? Does it go to the unmanned program or will Congress use much of it to fund better welfare, more hospitals, and tax cuts for American voters? Conversely, where will the funding come from to start it up again? From widows and orphans, the terminally ill, and American taxpayers? More likely it will be at least partly funded by cuts to the unmanned program, even if it received not a penny from the original disbandment of the manned program. That in turn is not likely to endear the return of manned space flight to the American science community.

BTW, if you want an example of a country which abolished a space program (albeit not a manned one) and now finds it pretty much impossible to put it back together again check out what happened to Australia's.

======
Stephen

Posted by: AlexBlackwell Feb 23 2006, 04:12 PM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 23 2006, 04:37 AM) *
Of course, the same thing is true of the vast majority of European and Japanese citizens. Lo and behold, their nations have fair-sized space programs anyway. So I repeat: why wouldn't the US? Are we supposed to believe that the US government and its citizens are THAT idiotically addicted to purposeless manned space flights?

Incidentally, the Huygens and Hayabusa missions seem to have attracted considerable interest and support from European and Japanese citizens, without a single astronaut being involved -- just as the Voyager, Hubble and MER missions did here.

You know, Bruce, for someone who claims a political science degree, you are stunningly (if not purposely) ignorant of http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19970917 as it applies to space programs. Often, comparative rationality, whatever that means, has absolutely nothing to do with political decision making. No doubt there are a few U.S. senators or representatives who make political decisions on a "logical" basis, but the vast majority are guided by parochial concerns. For instance, if a Member of Congress has a company in his/her district that manufactures components for manned space flight, then that fact will trump anything related to, say, whatever "considerable interest and support from European and Japanese citizens" have about their respective space programs.

Frankly, I think your argument is a typical case of oversimplification. There are enough differences (political, cultural, historical, etc.) among the various space-faring countries of the world that drawing direct comparisons is, at best, problematic. At worst, it's simple hand waving.

Posted by: The Messenger Feb 23 2006, 05:44 PM

QUOTE (Richard Trigaux @ Feb 22 2006, 12:47 AM) *
Yes this is the problem: they think "what is the cost this year " or "what is the cost during the time I am the responsible" and not "what is the overal cost of the program, spin-off and inconveniences included".
sad.gif

Last Summer, twice I had cynical space camp kids ask what was the point of the ISS - and it shocked me, how much they disdain the shuttle: Anything flying before they were born isn't high tech.

Post shuttle babies are voters now, and will soon be populating congress.

What good is the ISS? I avoided the question and launched into a discussion about Cassini, and all the questions that are yet to be answered.

Posted by: ljk4-1 Feb 23 2006, 05:53 PM

QUOTE (The Messenger @ Feb 23 2006, 12:44 PM) *
Last Summer, twice I had cynical space camp kids ask what was the point of the ISS - and it shocked me, how much they disdain the shuttle: Anything flying before they were born isn't high tech.

Post shuttle babies are voters now, and will soon be populating congress.

What good is the ISS? I avoided the question and launched into a discussion about Cassini, and all the questions that are yet to be answered.


Fear not - their children will disdain their current technology
because they didn't have quantum teleporters:

Quantum teleporter creates laser beam clones

NewScientist.com news service Feb. 21, 2006

*************************

Quantum physicists have moved
beyond teleporting individual
photons to imitating a classic
science-fiction scenario -- a
teleportation machine that generates
two near-identical copies of the...

http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=5325&m=7610

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 24 2006, 01:55 AM

QUOTE (AlexBlackwell @ Feb 23 2006, 04:12 PM) *
You know, Bruce, for someone who claims a political science degree, you are stunningly (if not purposely) ignorant of http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19970917 as it applies to space programs. Often, comparative rationality, whatever that means, has absolutely nothing to do with political decision making. No doubt there are a few U.S. senators or representatives who make political decisions on a "logical" basis, but the vast majority are guided by parochial concerns. For instance, if a Member of Congress has a company in his/her district that manufactures components for manned space flight, then that fact will trump anything related to, say, whatever "considerable interest and support from European and Japanese citizens" have about their respective space programs.


Alex, that is exactly what I said earlier in this thread -- if by some (desirable) miracle, the US manned space program WAS shut down, the huge size of this country's existing Space Pork Complex would cause us to have a considerably bigger unmanned program than Europe and Japan have. NOT a smaller one, as dvandorn suggested.

I take for granted that the manned space program in this country will actually not be shrunken until the fiscal strains on the government from other sources (the coming glut of retirees; rising oil prices; the costs of the Megaterrorism War) force it to do so -- and that the government will probably then respond as irrationally as possible by cutting the unmanned program to a comparable or greater extent, regardless of the actual cost-effectiveness of the two programs. But I reserve the right to continue yelling that shutting down the manned program is what SHOULD be done. And it is not at all unrealistic to hope that we may at least be about to get the incubus of Shuttle/Station off our backs -- and that it may not be replaced with a manned lunar program as bloated in size and speed as Bush's absurd version is.

Posted by: AlexBlackwell Feb 24 2006, 02:08 AM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 01:55 AM) *
Alex, that is exactly what I said earlier in this thread -- if by some (desirable) miracle, the US manned space program WAS shut down, the huge size of this country's existing Space Pork Complex would cause us to have a considerably bigger unmanned program than Europe and Japan have. NOT a smaller one, as dvandorn suggested.

I just don't buy that. You and I depart company in believing that a "considerably bigger unmanned program" is a logical result of a shrunken (or "shut down") manned space program in this country. Until I see hard evidence (not hand waving assertions) that U.S. politicians would naturally follow your scenario, I'll remain skeptical.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 24 2006, 03:17 AM

You've just said yourself that American politicians are eager to keep the level of space spending flowing to their particular districts big. Most aerospace firms involved with manned spaceflight are also involved in a major way with the unmanned variety, or could very easily switch to it. Give me one reason why they WOULDN'T have a very strong tendency to demand a compensatory rise in unmanned spending if manned spending declined -- and why their puppets in Congress wouldn't go along.

But then -- to repeat -- that's not the real phenomenon we may be on the verge of seeing, which instead involves the elimination of Shuttle-Station and simultaneous compensatory rises in both unmanned space spending AND Bush's new manned program.

Posted by: RNeuhaus Feb 24 2006, 03:21 AM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 23 2006, 08:55 PM) *
I take for granted that the manned space program in this country will actually not be shrunken until the fiscal strains on the government from other sources (the coming glut of retirees; rising oil prices; the costs of the Megaterrorism War) force it to do so -- and that the government will probably then respond as irrationally as possible by cutting the unmanned program to a comparable or greater extent, regardless of the actual cost-effectiveness of the two programs. But I reserve the right to continue yelling that shutting down the manned program is what SHOULD be done. And it is not at all unrealistic to hope that we may at least be about to get the incubus of Shuttle/Station off our backs -- and that it may not be replaced with a manned lunar program as bloated in size and speed as Bush's absurd version is.

I think that the next biggest goberment money glut is the conversion of any oil energy to a non-pollutant energy. That would be the top priority since without this program, the Earth will go with a crazy weather.

Rodolfo

Posted by: dvandorn Feb 24 2006, 04:21 AM

Watch it, Rodolfo -- if you worked for NASA, this U.S. administration would be trying to censor you for mentioning anything about "crazy weather"...

How in the WORLD can anyone take this administration seriously when they think they can play politics with science, if science happens to reveal something that's *inconvenient* for them? Sorry to get a touch political, here -- but this is a case where a group IN POWER is trying to silence science with politics and doublespeak. And it threatens us all.

-the other Doug

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 24 2006, 04:02 PM

If I may make a smart-alecky crack, the world has been "going with a crazy weather" for a very long time now.

But R. Neuhaus actually does have a relevant point to make. Thanks to man-made global warming (which now seems extremely likely), the human race may well be faced in the coming decades (or centuries!) with an extremely ugly choice: either impoverish itself or cook itself. Any hope we have of squirming off the horns of that dilemma lies in discovering new technologies for CO2-free but cheap energy production, energy conservation, and pulling CO2 back out of the atmosphere ("sequestration") cheaply. If ever there was a cause fit for another Manhattan Project, this is it. And if the scientific and technological spending we need for such work cuts into space spending, we had damn well better cut away.

Most space spending, that is. We need to know as much as possible about the extent to which the problem actually is likely to be serious -- and that means climate-monitoring satellites. (It wasn't until ERBS was put in orbit in 1984 that we could even answer such a basic question as whether Earth's current cloud cover is cooling or further heating the planet!) Last year this [extremely bad word] administration made a major effort even to cut that research -- even though there's a small chance that it will end up telling us that the danger really is a false alarm and that we need not carry out major anti-warming efforts. Thanks to an uncharacteristic determination by Congress not to be pushed around on that subject, the White House finally backed off, and climate-research space spending hasn't been significantly cut this year -- but its efforts last year have managed to delay several very important missions on this subject by a year or so. Meanwhile, space spending as a whole is being rediverted from this sort of thing to such tripe as Shuttle/Station, the manned lunar program, and even (dare I say it?) a lot of unmanned space research whose actual practical importance to humanity is infinitely smaller.

Posted by: djellison Feb 24 2006, 04:11 PM

So what you're saying is that NASA should be doing NOAA's job?

Doug

Posted by: AlexBlackwell Feb 24 2006, 04:20 PM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 03:17 AM) *
You've just said yourself that American politicians are eager to keep the level of space spending flowing to their particular districts big. Most aerospace firms involved with manned spaceflight are also involved in a major way with the unmanned variety, or could very easily switch to it. Give me one reason why they WOULDN'T have a very strong tendency to demand a compensatory rise in unmanned spending if manned spending declined -- and why their puppets in Congress wouldn't go along.

Forgive me if I don't defer to your "expertise" in this matter but, in my opinion, you're just waving your arms, as usual.

I have yet to see evidence that shrinking a country's manned space program automatically results in a commensurate increase in its unmanned space exploration efforts. The two examples that you offer in your ahistorical "analysis" (Europe and Japan) are irrelevant. Neither have ever had any real type of manned space program to begin with (other than flying "guest astronauts/cosmonauts"). And it's no surprise that your cherry-picking left out Russia. Its current manned space program has severely contracted; indeed, it's a shell of what it once was. So, under your theory Russia should have a booming unmanned space effort as a result, right? In fact, the former Soviet Union's unmanned space exploration efforts flourished at the same time as did its manned space exploration program.

And so did the U.S. programs.

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 03:17 AM) *
But then -- to repeat ...

This statement (or variations thereof) seems to be a mantra with you. Perhaps you could adopt it as a signature line, preferably IN ALL CAPS SHOUTING MODE.

Posted by: djellison Feb 24 2006, 05:00 PM

We all know that Bruce is just someone who has to criticise. Nothing sneaks under the radar with him. Whatever is in the news, Bruce thinks it's wrong. If something goes wrong, Bruce knew it would and could have told you 5 year previous. If something totally and fundamentally unexpected happens that could never have been forseen, Bruce wants to know why they didnt know it was going to happen, and he knew it would happen all along.

I've said it before, and I'm NOT going to say it again Bruce - if you want to exercise your habbit for unjustified ranting, do it elsewhere. Alex, myself and others had to put up with it for too long elsewhere, and I wont let the same mistake happen here. I'm posting this publicly so everyone can be a witness to it.

Doug

Posted by: AlexBlackwell Feb 24 2006, 05:08 PM

QUOTE (djellison @ Feb 24 2006, 05:00 PM) *
We all know that Bruce is just someone who has to criticise. Nothing sneaks under the radar with him. Whatever is in the news, Bruce thinks it's wrong. If something goes wrong, Bruce knew it would and could have told you 5 year previous. If something totally and fundamentally unexpected happens that could never have been forseen, Bruce wants to know why they didnt know it was going to happen, and he knew it would happen all along.

I've said it before, and I'm NOT going to say it again Bruce - if you want to exercise your habbit for unjustified ranting, do it elsewhere.

Doug, far be it from me to tell you how to run your own discussion group (and you're doing a great job, by the way), but in no way am I trying to run Bruce off. I've been debating with him online for, I believe, over six years now, and I have fairly thick skin. I agree that his style can be a little irksome, okay more than a little irksome, but I don't see anything approaching "L'affaire Moomaw" over in Yahoo! Groups planetary_sciences.

P.S. I totally agree with your first paragraph above biggrin.gif

Posted by: djellison Feb 24 2006, 05:22 PM

You have to be stern and strict with him or he wont learn....

smile.gif

Doug

Posted by: Richard Trigaux Feb 24 2006, 05:25 PM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 05:02 PM) *
But R. Neuhaus actually does have a relevant point to make. Thanks to man-made global warming (which now seems extremely likely), the human race may well be faced in the coming decades (or centuries!) with an extremely ugly choice: either impoverish itself or cook itself. Any hope we have of squirming off the horns of that dilemma lies in discovering new technologies for CO2-free but cheap energy production, energy conservation, and pulling CO2 back out of the atmosphere ("sequestration") cheaply. ....


Although this is not the topic of this thread, I think important to correct what is said here. We have a third alternative: becoming less dumb, less arrogant, and heed what ecologists and scientist are shouting since now 30 years: there are solutions to the greenhouse problem, without reverting to a Middle Age life level or democracy level: -energy savings in home heating -train transportation (containers) -helio-geothermy -cogeneration -Atkinson cycle car engines -less car commuting -saving methane escaping from oil wells -cracking oil, methane and sour gas to make hydrogen, and put back the soot or carbon dioxyd in the wells -aerothermic plants -solar plants used to crack water and make hydrogen at 950°C (process developped by the french CEA using SO2 as a catalist)... No need to "discovering" anything, no sci-fi projects or pharaonic funding, just some imagination... and some political will.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 24 2006, 07:31 PM

At the risk of getting thrown out of this group by Doug for actually replying to Alex:

Of course the ESA and Japan are irrelevant to my argument, since they never had a manned space program to begin with and so there is no way they can be used to judge whether a nation that shrinks its manned space program will expand its unmanned space program to compensate. But Russia is also totally irrelevant, since their economy collapsed utterly and forced them to virtually end their space program completely -- EXCEPT for their involvement with the Station, which they use quite openly and unashamedly as a parasitic way of sucking money out of the US government. Without that freakish parasitic setup (enabled by Goldin and Al Gore), they would have ended their manned space program totally as well. Thus they too provide no conceivable guide to how the US Congress would respond to a shrinkage of the US unmanned program.

Which means -- to repeat (sorry, Alex, but repetition seems to be necessary) -- that the only guide we have to how Congress would react is that very clue you yourself mentioned: the space program as a whole is supported by Congress primarily as pork and patronage, and so if the manned portion of it was by some miracle ended, the Space Pork Contingent in Congress would probably try to expand the unmanned space program to compensate for that loss. My reasoning in this case is not exactly complex.

But then -- to repeat again -- this whole issue is irrevelant to what may be about to happen in any case: to keep Shuttle/Station going, Griffin has had to pull $2 billion out of the unmanned program AND $1.5 billion out of Bush's manned lunar program, and he himself has already made it clear in writing, in the reports he co-wrote just before becoming NASA Administator, that he would dearly love to cancel Shuttle/Station at the slightest opportunity, after which (if and when it happens) both the unmanned program AND the manned lunar program would have that money restored to them.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 24 2006, 08:03 PM

QUOTE (djellison @ Feb 24 2006, 05:00 PM) *
Whatever is in the news, Bruce thinks it's wrong. If something goes wrong, Bruce knew it would and could have told you 5 years previous. If something totally and fundamentally unexpected happens that could never have been forseen, Bruce wants to know why they didnt know it was going to happen, and he knew it would happen all along.


The only thing I can say in reply to that is that you're wrong on all three points. If I thought I knew what was going to happen in advance in regard to the space program, I would never have been interested in it in the first place, dammit.

What is true is that I have been OCCASIONALLY correct in predicting that the design of the space program was wrong and needed to be corrected -- which is itself not exactly controversial. On the subject of the idiocy of Shuttle/Station, I've been no more than one of a large swarm of people who have been pointing out the glaringly obvious for over 15 years now; and on the subject of the idiocy of the manned space program as a whole at this point in our history I'm only one member of a crowd that is almost equally big (and includes Freeman Dyson, whose arguments on the subject strike me as bulletproof).

On smaller issues I am SOMETIMES correct -- as with the possibility of a much cheaper design for the Pluto probe than Dan Goldin was blatting about as supposedly necessary in 2000. (I found out a few months after publishing my article on that subject that -- as I had always assumed -- a hell of a lot of engineers had come up with the same excruciatingly obvious idea. What I HADN'T known was that Goldin was shutting them up by threatening to cut off all their NASA grants if they opened their mouths on the subject, because his line about a Pluto probe supposedly requiring expensive new technology was actually a deliberate lie on his part to force cancellation of any Pluto mission just because he personally didn't want one: "Nobody gives a damn about Pluto", as he told one aide. So Simon and I -- entirely unintentionally -- ended up belling the cat by running that article; after we'd put it out, he couldn't keep the idea hushed up any more.)

But I'm wrong with metronomic frequency -- and if I wasn't, I would never, from my childhood on, have found space exploration unpredictable enough (in both its scientific revelations and its historical developments) to be interesting in the first place. It's precisely, and only, when I AM wrong in predicting something that things get interesting for me.

Posted by: AlexBlackwell Feb 24 2006, 08:09 PM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 07:31 PM) *
Of course the ESA and Japan are irrelevant to my argument, since they never had a manned space program to begin with and so there is no way they can be used to judge whether a nation that shrinks its manned space program will expand its unmanned space program to compensate. But Russia is also totally irrelevant, since their economy collapsed utterly and forced them to virtually end their space program completely...

So you concede, despite initially offering the examples of Europe and Japan, that there are no real examples of other countries' experiences to support your assertion? Great. Now we're making some progress.

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 07:31 PM) *
Which means -- to repeat (sorry, Alex, but repetition seems to be necessary) -- that the only guide we have to how Congress would react is that very clue you yourself mentioned: the space program as a whole is supported by Congress primarily as pork and patronage, and so if the manned portion of it was by some miracle ended, the Space Pork Contingent in Congress would probably try to expand the unmanned space program to compensate for that loss. My reasoning in this case is not exactly complex.

I agree. In fact, your "reasoning" is entirely too simplistic. I just don't accept your contention that converting the huge, complex manned space program support infrastructure to one exclusively supporting unmanned space missions would be "easy." Nor have you convinced me that the funds available for manned space flight in this country, if eliminated, would automatically be re-programmed into unmanned space flight instead of, say, defense, homeland security, social programs, deficit reduction, etc.

Not that I expected any, but I was hoping for some evidence, not more assertions.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 24 2006, 08:13 PM

QUOTE (djellison @ Feb 24 2006, 04:11 PM) *
So what you're saying is that NASA should be doing NOAA's job?

Doug


What I'm saying is that SOMEBODY should be doing NOAA's job. I've said before that I wouldn't at all mind seeing NASA broken up and all or most of its functions distributed among other government agencies -- including all space science funding coming from either a new Cabinet-level Department of Science or (if that doesn't come into existence) out of the National Academy of Sciences, and all space-based climate studies being done by NOAA. Bush, however, has been singularly reluctant to let ANYBODY -- whether NASA or NOAA -- fly climate-research satellites.

Posted by: AlexBlackwell Feb 24 2006, 08:22 PM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 08:13 PM) *
What I'm saying is that SOMEBODY should be doing NOAA's job. I've said before that I wouldn't at all mind seeing NASA broken up and all or most of its functions distributed among other government agencies -- including all space science funding coming from either a new Cabinet-level Department of Science or (if that doesn't come into existence) out of the National Academy of Sciences, and all space-based climate studies being done by NOAA. Bush, however, has been singularly reluctant to let ANYBODY -- whether NASA or NOAA -- fly climate-research satellites.

You know, at first I thought you were just being argumentative. Now, I believe that you really believe that a Balkanization of the U.S. space program would be beneficial. Unreal.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 24 2006, 08:27 PM

QUOTE (AlexBlackwell @ Feb 24 2006, 08:09 PM) *
So you concede, despite initially offering the examples of Europe and Japan, that there are no real examples of other countries' experiences to support your assertion? Great. Now we're making some progress.

I just don't accept your contention that converting the huge, complex manned space program support infrastructure to one exclusively supporting unmanned space missions would be "easy." Nor have you convinced me that the funds available for manned space flight in this country, if eliminated, would automatically be re-programmed into unmanned space flight instead of, say, defense, homeland security, social programs, deficit reduction, etc.

Not that I expected any, but I was hoping for some evidence, not more assertions.


How long, O Lord? The only reason I mentioned the ESA and Japan at all is that the fact that they have unmanned programs without having manned ones is strong evidence that the US would not automatically and mindlessly kill its unmanned program completely once the manned program was eliminated -- which is what Dvandorn was claiming (without trying to provide any evidence).

As for saying that "converting the huge, complex manned space program support infrastructure to supporting unmanned space missions would be 'easy' ": I never said anything of the sort, because it's obviously untrue. What I said was that the aerospace giants who are currently getting a lot of their contracts in the manned space program would obviously be eager to acquire substitute work if they lost those contracts, and that one consequence of this would be an increase in the number of their contracts for unmanned space work. (Another consequence would doubtless be some expansion of their defense-industry work.) Obviously not all of the funds currently going to the manned program would be rediverted to the unmanned program -- but SOME of them would be; and if the Space Pork Congressmen had their way (which they very often do), quite a bit of them would be.

My "evidence" is the evidence you yourself have provided, with your (correct) observation on Congress' inevitable and large appetite for pork.


QUOTE (AlexBlackwell @ Feb 24 2006, 08:22 PM) *
You know, at first I thought you were just being argumentative. Now, I believe that you really believe that a Balkanization of the U.S. space program would be beneficial. Unreal.


Why? It only exists in its currently freakishly swollen form in the US because of the Moon Race. If that hadn't happened -- and it wouldn't have happened, if it hadn't been for the combination of Khrushchev and LBJ -- America's space program would indeed bear a strong resemblance to that of Europe. That is, it would be much more rationally proportioned to the actual national benefits from it.

Posted by: AlexBlackwell Feb 24 2006, 08:42 PM

I'll leave you with the last word in our debate in this thread, Bruce. Bitter experience has shown me that you will not be budged from any position in which you have a great deal of emotional investment, especially when you're convinced that you're absolutely correct, a not-too-uncommon occurence, I might add.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 24 2006, 08:54 PM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 08:03 PM) *
But I'm wrong with metronomic frequency -- and if I wasn't, I would never, from my childhood on, have found space exploration unpredictable enough (in both its scientific revelations and its historical developments) to be interesting in the first place. It's precisely, and only, when I AM wrong in predicting something that things get interesting for me.


On this subject: I've just finished plowing through as many of the new LPSC and EGU abstracts as I can without endangering my already precarious mental health, and one of the most dramatic revelations I've found in them is Brett Gladman's new LPSC abstract ( http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2006/pdf/2165.pdf ) showing that one of my most cherished beliefs about astrobiological research may be totally wrong. I've been claiming for years that the discovery of life on Europa would actually be far more important scientifically than the discovery of life on Mars, because Martian life might very well have evolved on Earth and just been transferred to Mars via meteorite (or vice versa!); whereas Europan life, if we find it, must have evolved separately and would thus prove that life had evolved twice in the same solar system -- thus proving that life must indeed be common in the Universe, instead of just evolving on one world in this particular solar system by extremely long-shot luck and then getting meteor-mailed to a second world in the same system.

Well, sir: Gladman and Luke Dones have just finished their long-promised study of the frequencey with which Earth meteoroids may get transferred all the way to Europa -- and it turns out that hundreds of meteoroids from Earth have probably hit Europa during its history. Admittedly they all hit at very high speed -- 20-30 km/sec -- since Europa (unlike Mars) has no atmosphere to brake them; and that impact speed alone will greatly reduce the chances that any one of them could deliver living Earth germs to Europa. But the possibility really does exist, and so the importance of finding Europan life has just been perceptibly reduced -- if we find it, we can NOT eliminate the possibility that it came from our own world (or that both terrestrial and Europan life both originally came from Mars!)

There are quite a few other very interesting abstracts from both conferences; and I've already been planning to try to point some of them out to this site's other readers in the next day or two. (If, that is, Doug doesn't kick me out of it first because of my statements on this thread -- on a subject, which, frankly, is beginning to bore the hell out of me, since we all know damn well that the US government will never develop a remotely rational space program in any case.)

QUOTE (AlexBlackwell @ Feb 24 2006, 08:42 PM) *
I'll leave you with the last word in our debate in this thread, Bruce. Bitter experience has shown me that you will not be budged from any position in which you have a great deal of emotional investment, especially when you're convinced that you're absolutely correct, a not-too-uncommon occurence, I might add.



Why? Show me where my arguments are wrong; as I've said before, I find that revelation interesting more frequently than I find it insulting.

Posted by: djellison Feb 24 2006, 09:59 PM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 08:54 PM) *
a subject, which, frankly, is beginning to bore the hell out of me


A subject you started, you posted many many times about - you really do make for entertainment, I'll give you that much.

Doug

Posted by: David Feb 24 2006, 11:21 PM

I don't see why the U.S./Soviet space race was such a bad thing; it certainly accomplished more in its dozen or so years (let's say 1957-1969) than has been accomplished since. Obviously, we've done a lot with unmanned spaceflight since 1969; but all of that was built on the incredible accomplishment of getting anything into space at all. And I don't think that would have happened as early as 1957 without the superpower rivalry. I can easily imagine a modest, rational space program waiting until 1970 before actually orbiting a satellite. Why rush things? In fact, it's even easier to imagine a world in which national governments have no interest in space at all, and rocketry is totally in the hands of privately funded Raumschifffahrt clubs. In which case we would probably still be waiting for the first "man-made moon".

My biggest quarrel with the American-Soviet competition is that it didn't go on long enough, and the Americans won too easily. Perhaps if the Russians and the Americans had landed on the Moon at about the same time, there would have been an extra impetus to keep on exploring. Or perhaps it would have been better if the real goal had been a long-range one, or a series of goals, rather than the one-success goal of "landing a man on the Moon before the decade is out", which encouraged a tailoring of the manned space program to that one goal, and finding a way to do it as cheaply and easily as possible. Looking back at the far more audacious plans of the late 1950s, which involved landing multiple crews in enormous craft with huge amounts of supplies, aiming at lengthy stays and even the building of small cities on the Moon -- well, it's clear that Apollo, even an extended Apollo, was going to fall far short of that. And of course after Apollo the whole thing fell apart.

Sure, it would have been costly. But when you think about where the Soviet and American money actually went, being used to fund proxy wars in various parts of the planet, it's hard not to see the space race as a far better form of competition.

Getting back to the shuttle, the concept of a space-plane that would bring people and supplies to and from an orbiting space station is actually quite an old one. But what I'm a little puzzled by is figuring out what the space station was actually intended for, even in those early plans. I understand that it's "cool" to have a big building-sized structure flying around the earth, but it seems to me that spacecraft assembly, fuelling, and all the other things that we see these proposed stations being used for can be done just as well without the station. What am I missing?

Posted by: dvandorn Feb 25 2006, 02:01 AM

Well, Bruce, since *no* country on Earth has ever developed a manned and unmanned spaceflight capability and then gave up one of them, we neither one of us have any precedents to draw from.

So, without a specific example from which to draw conclusions, I'm doing a poor imitation of the same -- I'm drawing from the length and breadth of human history.

Look at all of the great empires that have arisen since humans started arranging themselves into tribes. Every *single* time an empire begins to cut back on one area of exploration, it signals the beginning of the end of *all* exploration attempted by that empire. Followed, usually fairly shortly thereafter, by the fall of that empire.

Why does this happen as empires fall? Because only empires at the height of their powers can *afford* exploration, simply for the sake of exploration. It is only after the fall that anyone ever realizes that their empire could have stood a bit longer if they had just understood that the cost of failing to explore is actually higher, in all senses that make a people *great*, than the cost of continuing their explorations.

Obviously, you don't think America is likely to follow the same pattern as every previous empire in the history of mankind. That much is obvious. So, here you can serve yet another glorious purpose -- to prove, once again, that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it...

-the other Doug

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 25 2006, 02:23 AM

QUOTE (djellison @ Feb 24 2006, 09:59 PM) *
A subject you started, you posted many many times about - you really do make for entertainment, I'll give you that much.

Doug


Yep, I started it. I had no idea, however, that it was going to turn into a religious war. (As for my "ranting" on the subject, it consists of exactly the same arguments used by such dread figures of anti-space evil as Freeman Dyson, James Van Allen and Alex Roland. But, in any case, I started this thread talking about a separate subject from opposition to manned spaceflight -- namely, whether Shuttle/Station in particular will and should get the ax soon, in a move that would benefit both the unmanned program AND Bush's manned program. And both issues are of course also separate from the question of whether NASA's functions should be broken up and redistributed among other governmental agencies, and to what extent.)

David's argument that keeping the Space Race going -- and amplifying it -- might have distracted the US' and USSR's attention from carrying out actual wars unfortunately misses the point that both nations decided pretty quickly on their own that those actual wars were more cost-effective from their point of view. Khrushchev got the Space Race rolling initially by deciding to emulate the Wizard of Oz, using the USSR's early space successes to try and persuade the US and the rest of the world that the USSR had far superior missile technology, and thus intimidate us militarily. After our spy satellites and his own Cuban missile fiasco exposed that as a lie, there really wasn't much purpose in the Soviet Union trying to sustain it -- which is why the Soviet Union (as we learned afterwards) never really poured very much money into trying to beat the US to the Moon (although they decided to use just enough to keep us spending like crazy to try and beat them in a race which, it turned out later, we were always virtually certain to win even if we'd spent far less on it). And after Nikita's attempted deception was exposed, it made far more sense for both nations to resume devoting their attention entirely to what they had been doing before the late 1950s -- namely, carrying out genuine if indirect military actions against each other, with Indochina of course being the main attraction.

Indeed, even given Khruschchev's actions, the US might not have gotten into the Moon Race if it hadn't been for the frenetic efforts of Vice President Johnson to get us into it. Eisenhower, Nixon, and (as we now know from his released White House tapes) JFK himself were not enthusiastic about the idea. LBJ, however, was absolutely wild about it -- although, as he privately told some of his acquaintances at the time, he actually decided to launch it largely as an attempt to increase federal pork spending in the South. (The Manned Spacecraft Center was supposed to be built in Vallejo, California; LBJ moved Heaven and Earth to get it reassigned to Houston.) He managed -- just barely -- to talk JFK into the idea (it was apparently the only respect in which he had any effect on US policy as Veep). But almost as soon as he himself became President, he found himself embroiled in a very real and very expensive war, which pretty much finished off the national political support for a simultaneous symbolic one -- especially given the collapse of Khruschchev's ICBM charade by then. So, unfortunately, saying that we should have tried to keep the Space Race going is rather like saying that we should have tried to divert the Soviets away from military efforts into a worldwide flower-gardening contest to prove their superiority to capitalism.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 25 2006, 02:58 AM

QUOTE (dvandorn @ Feb 25 2006, 02:01 AM) *
Because only empires at the height of their powers can *afford* exploration, simply for the sake of exploration. It is only after the fall that anyone ever realizes that their empire could have stood a bit longer if they had just understood that the cost of failing to explore is actually higher, in all senses that make a people *great*, than the cost of continuing their explorations.


In the past, nations have almost never "explored for the sake of exploration". They've explored for the sake of economic development. Columbus, Magellan and the Conquistadores -- and the nations that backed them -- were in it strictly for the money. In cases where national governments have financed plain "exploration for the sake of exploration" -- which is pretty much limited to polar expeditions and the Moon race -- it was as a political Muscle Beach prestige contest with other nations, which makes much less sense in today's age (and those polar expeditions cost a far smaller percentage of their sponsoring nation's GDP than space exploration does).

So: to the extent to which going into space makes economic sense, nations will do it -- just as they "explored" the New World, the East and Africa only to the extent that they had something to gain from it economically. But that's ALREADY happening with space; absolutely nobody questions the worth of communications, reconnaissance, weather and navigation satellites. If -- and only if -- space industrialization makes sense economically will we (and should we) establish a really huge presence in space. A better analogy to non-economic space exploration for purely prestige or artistic purposes is the Pyramids; it would be rather hard to claim that ancient Egypt would have fallen sooner if it hadn't built those.

Posted by: David Feb 25 2006, 03:46 AM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 25 2006, 02:58 AM) *
In the past, nations have almost never "explored for the sake of exploration". They've explored for the sake of economic development. Columbus, Magellan and the Conquistadores -- and the nations that backed them -- were in it strictly for the money.


I think the (original) nature of the expeditions was somewhat different. Columbus certainly thought he could make a fortune by trading to "the Indies", but then Columbus was half-mad. From Isabella of Castile's point of view, the affair was purely speculative (which was why Columbus only got three ships) and the most likely consequence was that Columbus would disappear over the horizon and never return.

When Columbus did return with a story of land -- easily accessible land, too -- across the ocean, to the surprise and chagrin of everybody except Columbus himself, Spain got interested; only to find, in short order, that what Columbus had discovered was neither China, Zipangu, nor the fabled Spice islands, but a handful of very unhealthy mosquito-infested jungle rocks.

For all that, they went and planted colonies there anyway, claimed all the land beyond a vast imaginary line, and kept exploring. Part was the hope that -- eventually -- they'd be able to discover a route to China (not to be realized until Magellan, who discovered how very difficult that route would actually be). Part was the desire to keep the Portuguese (who in 1498 discovered the really worth-while route to the Spice Islands, via the Cape of Good Hope) from getting a jump on them. Part was the residue of the crusading fervor of 1492, the patriotic concept that Spain had the right and duty to Christianize the heathen. Thus, they kept sending knights and priests across the ocean, to get killed fighting the Caribs, or die of malaria -- or of syphilis.

In short, for the first several decades, Spain's American adventures looked like dismal folly -- certainly when compared to Portugal, who in the same period had taken over the Indian Ocean trade from the Arabs, and together with their control of African gold exports, were raking in money hand over fist. But the Spanish kept at it, for the reasons mentioned above, and sheer bloody-mindedness, until they conquered the only two considerable states that existed in the Americas -- Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru. They had come looking for gold, and were able to loot the comparatively little that had been gathered by the despots of these states; but the real wealth of these empires was in the silver mines of Mexico and the Andes. Only when they had got the silver extraction up and running -- about fifty years after Columbus -- did they begin to turn a profit on their American venture. (The huge amounts of silver they coined would turn out to cause disastrous inflation for Spain, and ruin their economy while tempting them to spend vast sums on continental wars, dropping them from the top power in Europe to a second-rate satellite state in a hundred years; but that's another story.)

So the motivations here were more complex than Bruce suggests. Any rational person would have given up on the Americas by 1520 at the latest. The Spanish -- happily, in the short term, for them, very unhappily for the native Americans -- were not terribly rational decision-makers. Their empire was not founded upon sound financial advice and sensible prospectuses, but upon romantic fantasies of cities of gold in the jungle. That they actually found and were able to exploit a real source of cash was no more than luck -- but it was luck that a less bull-headed people (my apologies to the descendants of the 16th-century Spaniards!) would never have stuck around to run into.

Is there a lesson for space exploration in all this? Very possibly not. The only point is, I suppose, that you can explore, and explore, and find nothing of value; but you never know whether something of value might eventually turn up, whereas if you do the smart, sensible thing and cut your losses, you can rest assured that it never will turn up.

Posted by: dvandorn Feb 25 2006, 04:39 AM

QUOTE (David @ Feb 24 2006, 09:46 PM) *
Is there a lesson for space exploration in all this? Very possibly not. The only point is, I suppose, that you can explore, and explore, and find nothing of value; but you never know whether something of value might eventually turn up, whereas if you do the smart, sensible thing and cut your losses, you can rest assured that it never will turn up.

Very, very well said, David. I couldn't have said it better myself.

-the other Doug

Posted by: Richard Trigaux Feb 25 2006, 06:39 AM

About the motives of exploration (Earth exploration some centuries ago, space exploration now) Bruce says there were very interested motives. Other say it was for knowledge only. I would not make so much simplistic statements, as reality was (and is still) very complex: different individual people can have very different motives, and a given individual can have several motives, conscious or unconscious, idealistic motives that they keep in their mind and down-to earth motives that they put forward to earn funding (or the countrary).

That people have power or money motives is pity for them. Anyway when these people pass, they ultimately have earned nothing. What I retain is that there are worthy motives to keep exploring: knowledge, emotion of discovering the universe we are living in... even if our lives are a glimpse of light between two eternities, at least this light is beautiful. That we need to put forward money motives to earn funding from politicians is pity for them.

By the way, we can still vote to select those politicians...

Posted by: hugh Feb 25 2006, 07:03 AM

I wouldn’t have called Bruce’s posts a “rant”. I don’t find his tone helpful, but neither is this:

QUOTE (AlexBlackwell @ Feb 23 2006, 04:12 PM) *
you are stunningly (if not purposely) ignorant .

A bit touchy, no..? There is no way we can be sure if congress would react in the way Bruce described, but the assumption that the end of manned spaceflight would mean the end of ALL spaceflight seems a stretch. The Russian experience doesn’t help, because their record of failure after failure with unmanned probes compared so badly with their relatively successful manned program-the opposite of the American experience. The economy collapsed, something had to go- which program would you expect to be cut, in those horrible circumstances? They punished failure and rewarded what looked like success. If that happened with NASA, what would the space budget look like?

In any event, I find this thread provocative and thoroughly entertaining. How the Manned Spaceflight mess is resolved affects planetary exploration so profoundly that I don’t see how you can stop people getting obsessive and emotional. It’s important stuff, and how it all plays out is going to be fascinating.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 25 2006, 11:47 PM

Well, I guess I'll have to stay "provocative" without "ranting", which will be an interesting balancing act.

Frankly, I'm a little baffled that I've set off such indignation here. Go to virtually any political blogsite on the Web. THERE, by God, you will find ranting. Most political blogsites serve not as a site for reasoned debate, but as coffeeklatches for people who already had the same ideological belief to congregate and stroke each other's egos by agreeing with each other, in much the same way that troops of chimpanzees cement their social ties by grooming each other. Occasionally a member of another rival ideological troop comes over and challenges the blog group, at which point there is much screaming and jumping up and down and throwing of sticks until the intruder retreats again. Two nights ago I read the suggestion that the main achievement of the Web will turn out to be the extent to which it's made it easier to assemble lynch mobs on a worldwide basis, and I'm afraid he's right. But the extent to which the members of this particular group are upset by any forceful comments at all -- by anyone, with any belief -- seems to me to have a certain Girlie Man quality to it which I really think we can't afford intellectually.

Posted by: Bob Shaw Feb 26 2006, 12:21 AM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 25 2006, 11:47 PM) *
Well, I guess I'll have to stay "provocative" without "ranting", which will be an interesting balancing act.

Frankly, I'm a little baffled that I've set off such indignation here. Go to virtually any political blogsite on the Web. THERE, by God, you will find ranting. Most political blogsites serve not as a site for reasoned debate, but as coffeeklatches for people who already had the same ideological belief to congregate and stroke each other's egos by agreeing with each other, in much the same way that troops of chimpanzees cement their social ties by grooming each other. Occasionally a member of another rival ideological troop comes over and challenges the blog group, at which point there is much screaming and jumping up and down and throwing of sticks until the intruder retreats again. Two nights ago I read the suggestion that the main achievement of the Web will turn out to be the extent to which it's made it easier to assemble lynch mobs on a worldwide basis, and I'm afraid he's right. But the extent to which the members of this particular group are upset by any forceful comments at all -- by anyone, with any belief -- seems to me to have a certain Girlie Man quality to it which I really think we can't afford intellectually.


Bruce:

Chimps *are* fun, but Bonobos have a better way of dealing with conflict!

There's something about the WWW which causes mild remarks to be taken as gross insults, and gross insults to be taken as far worse. Perhaps it's the lack of social cues, perhaps it's the *truth* leaking out. Maybe we do all want to eat the brains of every stranger from the next valley, and rape our sisters. And then our brothers. Oh, joy!

In the meantime, may I say that I, personally, appreciate heresy. I like provocation. I enjoy robust, cruel and entirely unforgiving debate. The only thing I don't enjoy is... ...boredom. Going on and on and on and on about some fixed notion, without any let up - now, that *does* bug me! But earnestly giving hell to the sloppy-minded, no problems!

Please keep up the iconoclasm!

Bob Shaw

Posted by: lyford Feb 26 2006, 01:47 AM

I appreciate the range of opinionated opinions expressed by fellow members, and a little "energetic" bumping of elbows and egos I think is to be expected when we have invested so much into these topics. This board is the height of civility compared to the Wild West of teh intenets out there, but even so, I do feel that this particular thread has gotten more off track and the tone uncomfortably close to ad hominems than others.

I want to chime in on some of the exploration qua exploration discussion, but this thread has been hijacked enuf. We have a whole Policy and Strategy section. Wouldn't it be more apropos to go off http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showforum=49

PS -But cripes, if you can rant against manned spaceflight on a BBS called UNMANNED SPACEFLIGHT, where can you do so? blink.gif

Posted by: David Feb 26 2006, 03:06 AM

QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ Feb 26 2006, 12:21 AM) *
There's something about the WWW which causes mild remarks to be taken as gross insults, and gross insults to be taken as far worse. Perhaps it's the lack of social cues

My impression is that some people find themselves in interactions on the internet which they would not normally engage in -- perhaps they have little social interaction outside of the 'net and therefore have little practice in arts like politeness, tact, and diplomacy in speaking; or perhaps they are under the impression that ordinary rules of social interaction do not apply on the internet, because you cannot see the person you are talking to -- and you are frequently disguised by one form or another of voluntary anonymity.

The truth is, of course, quite the reverse; print tends to be a harsher medium than speech, and it takes all the tact you can manage not to come across as a fool, a buffoon, or someone careless of others' feelings. Frustration with discovering that people may take offense where you believe yourself to be doing no more than speaking the unvarnished truth may lead some to adopt intentionally abrasive personas; but this is probably not the best response. It's good to remember that what seems trivially obvious to one person may be a difficult and controversial point to another; and that minds are changed, not in a flash of logic, but through the slow persuasion that comes through an accumulation of irrefutable evidence. Or, as the old adage has it, more flies are trapped with honey than with vinegar.

Posted by: mcaplinger Feb 26 2006, 03:56 AM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 25 2006, 03:47 PM) *
Well, I guess I'll have to stay "provocative" without "ranting"...


I don't take issue at all with the crux of your argument in this thread; I agree with some parts of it and not with others. What I object to is that you rarely acknowledge that anyone else's insight has any validity or adds anything to the discourse. You're pretty well convinced you're right about most things, and for you that's usually the end of it.

Of course, the rest of us might learn to just read your messages without responding, because your initial messages are usually worthwhile at least at some level, the subsequent responses unfortunately less so. I try to follow that strategy as much as I can, but sometimes, like now, I can't help myself.

Posted by: Richard Trigaux Feb 26 2006, 07:55 AM

QUOTE (David @ Feb 26 2006, 04:06 AM) *
My impression is that some people find themselves in interactions on the internet which they would not normally engage in -- perhaps they have little social interaction outside of the 'net and therefore have little practice in arts like politeness, tact, and diplomacy in speaking; or perhaps they are under the impression that ordinary rules of social interaction do not apply on the internet, because you cannot see the person you are talking to -- and you are frequently disguised by one form or another of voluntary anonymity.


I thinnk that respect of the others still apply on the internet. In the beginning there was some idea as the internet was a "free" space, so that social rules such as politeness would not apply. This is not true, as people can still be vexated by words, and it is worse because these words are in public, and public defamation is added to public insults. It is even still worse on a forum where the webmaster allows for such behaviours: even in the case you are frankly and unfairly attacked, you cannot make this recognized. I remember once I was purposelessly attacked and grossly insulted on a forum, by several persons, and the webmaster was doing as if there was no problem, I had to threaten him of a legal action to make him remove gross personnal insults and gratuitous accusations. Why it is so? Because distance or anonimity allow for sadistic people (this is not for you, Bruce) to stalk others freely and without fear of reprisals. And this situation can be very painful for the victims.

So, knowing this, I now seldom engage in an internet forum, unless I am sure that it is fairly moderated (this is for you, Doug). Discussing on Internet with people of far countries and very different cultural/experience background can on the countrary be a very pleasant and useful experience, so long as we don't enter into useless conflict.

Bruce, you should look here: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=2260&st=30If you read my interventions, especially the last, I say: I think that Homeplate is the most interesting site around, they should not depart so fast, and take the time to do what there is to do, without planning to come back one day (Spirit could stop working before). What is there to see in the hills that was not yet seen? But just after Doug comes with right the opposite argument. Would I engage in and endless debate? No, it is useless, because he is right. I am right too, but this rightness cannot stand in front of Doug's argument. So the discution naturally stops at that point.

Still for you, Bruce, please consider this thread: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=2286&st=15 where we discuss the possibility of an ancient greek philosopher (Democritus) had some kind of primitive telescope. I started the discution on this point, post Feb 23 2006, 11:41 AM. Further tty expresses some doubts in his post Feb 24 2006, 09:34 PM, Further I to find an explanation, but without contradicting him on his assertion. Then the discution stops. Why? Because I "won" and intimidated tty? so that he don't dare to reply? No, definitively not, the discution stops here because nobody have something more to add. We considered the different arguments, pro and con, and this ended the discution. Anyway it is a speculative matter and we have no evidence about what actually happened and it would be dogmaticism to grasp to such or such oppinion. But it was a pleasant exchange for me and for tty and for the others who contributed to the discution. We all won, in knowledge and in pleasure. Perhaps one day we shall find democritus tomb, with some strange lens-looking pieces of glass assembled in a bamboo tube, but this is just a wishful speculation. My opinion was rather the second alternative I evoked in this tread: Democritus pushed the use of his naked eyes to their extreme possibilities, and he made clever inferences.

You see, Bruce, how expressing opposite opinions can be a pleasant exercice, not a fight, not a vexation, if we just abandon the useless and troublesome desire of "proving that we are right and we are never false"???

Posted by: djellison Feb 26 2006, 09:41 AM

QUOTE (lyford @ Feb 26 2006, 01:47 AM) *
PS -But cripes, if you can rant against manned spaceflight on a BBS called UNMANNED SPACEFLIGHT, where can you do so? blink.gif


That was NEVER what this place was intended for. I'm having very serious thoughts at removing the political, observational and manned subforums as it is.

Doug

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Feb 26 2006, 10:42 AM

I think the trouble stems from the fact that E-mail is the very first basically new form of human communication invented since writing. It combines the swift response of the spoken word (which, throughout human history, has always included a hell of a lot of impulsive insults that get removed from books, essays and letters after the writer thinks it over) with the permanence of print (allowing the recipient to reread and mull over those insults in detail, and get madder and madder). Abe Lincoln used to let any angry letter he intended to send to anyone sit in a drawer for 24 hours, while he reconsidered whether he REALLY wanted to send it. Nowadays nobody lets an angry E-mail wait for 24 seconds. The Internet needs its own Emily Post, although I have no idea who it could be.

As for Mike Caplinger's response: I am -- genuinely -- interested in what parts of my line of reasoning you agree and disagree with. And I will repeat that I think the accusation that I never back down on anything I say is nonsense -- although admittedly, out of insecurity and fear of criticism, I rarely say anything in the first place unless I'm solidly convinced from the start that I'm probably right, which may be a recipe for trouble.

Posted by: lyford Feb 26 2006, 04:57 PM

QUOTE (djellison @ Feb 26 2006, 01:41 AM) *
That was NEVER what this place was intended for.

Understood. I don't want to do anything to jeopardize welcoming http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=675&view=findpost&p=43303 which is WHAT I assume you intended this place for. smile.gif

Posted by: djellison Feb 26 2006, 04:59 PM

Bingo.


Doug

Posted by: mchan Feb 27 2006, 07:09 AM

QUOTE (djellison @ Feb 26 2006, 01:41 AM) *
That was NEVER what this place was intended for. I'm having very serious thoughts at removing the political, observational and manned subforums as it is.

Doug

I don't take Bruce's posts as rants. Strongly opinionated, yes. I very seldomly join in the debates, but Ihey do bring up thought provoking points, and I do learn from them. Manned spaceflight and politics, directly or indirectly, for better or for worse, do have an impact upon unmanned spaceflight. While we enjoy the fruits of the ongoing missions and the discussions on the forthcoming (or not) missions, we should not be unaware of external influences upon them.

I understand the point of this forum is the exchange of technical and scientific information in an informal setting. Coming from 15 years of experience with Usenet, this forum is remarkably civil, and a joy to read. I have noted times when posts have been heated, and I think you have applied just the right control in keeping folks at an even temper. This IS more work for you as a moderator, and I thank you for your efforts.

Posted by: Richard Trigaux Feb 27 2006, 08:36 AM

Doug,

I would like to back mchan's last post, about what he says on the forum.

And, about the topics, of course, on this forum it is clearly unmanned spaceflight. And, as the forum owner, you have the full right to define the exact topic and its boundaries. But spaceflight don't emerge from nothing, there are political, economic, human, aesthetics, philosophical implications around, which constrain it on one hand, and which give it its meaning and purpose on the other hand. So it would be a pity not to allow discutions on politics, philosophy, etc, so long as it is about their implications on spaceflight.

You perhaps noted that I most often reply to threads like the Intelligent Design or SETI. The basic reason is that they are though-provoking and hope-conveying topics. Of course they are a bit far from spaceflight, but without such "more philosophical" discutions your forum would be globally less interesting. If you now feel regrets about having allowed such discutions about ID, please don't let start such discutions in the future. But It would be a pity.

Consider that the discutions on ID or SETI remained remarkably civil and focused, despites these topics are prone to hateful fights and stubborn opinions. So I think that if such topics are to start in the future, you can allow them. Cautiously, but not a priori remove them.

Posted by: helvick Feb 27 2006, 06:13 PM

QUOTE (mchan @ Feb 27 2006, 07:09 AM) *
I understand the point of this forum is the exchange of technical and scientific information in an informal setting. Coming from 15 years of experience with Usenet, this forum is remarkably civil, and a joy to read. I have noted times when posts have been heated, and I think you have applied just the right control in keeping folks at an even temper. This IS more work for you as a moderator, and I thank you for your efforts.


I whole heartedly agree with this.

Doug - there is a fine line in figuring out what to allow and what not but for what it's worth I think discussions like this are very beneficial provided all parties know that you will come down hard if folks cross the line.

I've really found the discussion in this thread worthwhile. I don't know how much moderating you've had to do on it but from where I'm reading the end result is a useful contribution by all to this board.

Posted by: djellison Feb 27 2006, 08:39 PM

The discussions about ID or SETI may be civil and focused, but I remain very uneasy with their existance here, and the sort of traffic they might attract. Civil or not, they're highly OT for what this place is intended. On that basis - you could have a debate about cricket here, because hey - it's civil. Yeah - but totally outside the remit of what this place is about.

95% of the moderation that has to be done here, has to be done in the manned and off topic forums, and that says a lot.

I don't want to close them down - but I may well do at some point in the future, at the moment they are 'ok' - but little more.

I know more than ANYONE here what the 'fine line' is - I've drawn it for two years with more than a little success. But if the more off topic sections begin to take more of my time, I wont moderate them, I'll just cull them - it's a matter of balance. If other sections suffer because the off topic forums are taking too much time, then there's no decision to be made - they're gone.

Doug

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Mar 1 2006, 11:53 PM

OK, acceptable. I can always go rant elsewhere... biggrin.gif

P.S.: I'm going to get you for making me use one of those smiley faces.

Posted by: AlexBlackwell Mar 18 2006, 12:50 AM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 08:54 PM) *
On this subject: I've just finished plowing through as many of the new LPSC and EGU abstracts as I can without endangering my already precarious mental health, and one of the most dramatic revelations I've found in them is Brett Gladman's new LPSC abstract ( http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2006/pdf/2165.pdf ) showing that one of my most cherished beliefs about astrobiological research may be totally wrong. I've been claiming for years that the discovery of life on Europa would actually be far more important scientifically than the discovery of life on Mars, because Martian life might very well have evolved on Earth and just been transferred to Mars via meteorite (or vice versa!); whereas Europan life, if we find it, must have evolved separately and would thus prove that life had evolved twice in the same solar system -- thus proving that life must indeed be common in the Universe, instead of just evolving on one world in this particular solar system by extremely long-shot luck and then getting meteor-mailed to a second world in the same system.

Well, sir: Gladman and Luke Dones have just finished their long-promised study of the frequencey with which Earth meteoroids may get transferred all the way to Europa -- and it turns out that hundreds of meteoroids from Earth have probably hit Europa during its history. Admittedly they all hit at very high speed -- 20-30 km/sec -- since Europa (unlike Mars) has no atmosphere to brake them; and that impact speed alone will greatly reduce the chances that any one of them could deliver living Earth germs to Europa. But the possibility really does exist, and so the importance of finding Europan life has just been perceptibly reduced -- if we find it, we can NOT eliminate the possibility that it came from our own world (or that both terrestrial and Europan life both originally came from Mars!)

As much as I hate reviving this thread, Mark Peplow has a http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060313/full/060313-18.html on this.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Mar 18 2006, 03:45 AM

Yeah, I saw that, and was cranking up to comment on it. I will do so, however, in some part of the "Titan" section.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Mar 21 2006, 04:45 AM

Jeff Bell has for some time been confidently predicting that Mike Griffin (who undeniably hates the Shuttle personally) will soon execute a Machiavellian scheme to get rid of it -- which will have to be done one step at a time in order to whittle away gradually at its political support (and to give all those Congressmen who made fools of themselves by funding it for decades better political cover to get rid of it gradually and quietly).

I don't know how accurate he is in saying that Griffin CAN do this; but yesterday another of the predictions he made to me some time ago came to pass. NASA, which had already announced that the Shuttle's main engine will not be used after all on the second stage of the small CEV launcher (a new version of the Saturn 5's J-2 engine will be used instead), is now saying that SSMEs may very well not be used on the first stage of the big Heavy Lift Booster either -- they may be replaced by the same RS-68 engines used on the first stage of Delta 4, since those are designed to be expendable and are thus cheaper to manufacture than the reusable SSMEs (which would never actually have been reused on either the HLV or the CEV launcher):
http://www.space.com/spacenews/businessmonday_060320.html

This would, of course, allow a shutdown very soon of the production line for the Shuttle's SSMEs. But the article says that there are some genuine technical stumbling blocks -- and Bell himself says that one reason for the RS-68's low cost is that most of its parts are currently being made by Russian workers who are as atrociously underpaid for their skills as the inhabitants of Termite Terrace were during the golden age of Warner Brothers cartoons.

Posted by: The Messenger Mar 21 2006, 09:08 PM

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Mar 20 2006, 09:45 PM) *
Jeff Bell has for some time been confidently predicting that Mike Griffin (who undeniably hates the Shuttle personally) will soon execute a Machiavellian scheme to get rid of it -- which will have to be done one step at a time in order to whittle away gradually at its political support (and to give all those Congressmen who made fools of themselves by funding it for decades better political cover to get rid of it gradually and quietly).

This is one of many reasons all the pan banging over the shut down of scientific missions should be carefully orchestrated. Space funding is controlled by members of congress who have wedged into the fray to protect their base constituency. Whether or not Griffin's goal is to pull the plug on the shuttle and ISS sooner-than-announced, he is already facing a 'i will not take one penny from science to fund...' credibility gap.

On the bright side, have you watched the NASA channel lately? It may just be an accident, but I have caught a lot less ISS bonzola, and a few more good science & engineering documentaries lately.

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Mar 21 2006, 10:41 PM

Well, my God, that's because at this point the only thing they're doing with the Station is throwing golf balls and used spacesuits out of it. (That, and trying to keep the life support system from falling apart.)

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