[X] My Assistant

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060...lantis_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.
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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.)

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

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.

[David]

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.

[dvandorn]

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