Space Forum / Shuttle / September 2007

That's your opinion Paul, and I respect that. The difference between
you and I respect that.
What I don't respect is the insulting tone of you post. I just don't
think that those who did so great on the three previous programs, who
were responsible for the birth of the STS, were dishonest.
Now if you will please excuse me, I have a letter to Santa to write.
Jim in Houston.

Contrary to popular opinion RN does not mean Real Nerd!
Teddy Roosevelt's mother said: "Fill what is empty,
empty what is full, and scratch where it itches"

On Aug 31, 10:39 am, Jan Vorbr?ggen <jvorbrueg...@not-mediasec.de>
wrote:

At the time it wasn't clear that Johnson and the Congress had ceased
their support of the space program.  It is only in retrospect that we
understand what was really spent.

So, in 1968-69 time frame, you'd have to be Carnac the almight to know
how badly Johnson cut the budget.

I recall reading a New York Academy of Sciences report, published in
1968 that assumed growth of the program along 'historical trends' to
achieve some fixed level of the Federal Budget.  The pessimists felt
that 1/3 the size of the US Military budget ($100 billion per year)
about what the intelligenct budget was.  The optimists felt that 100%
or more of the US Military budget was more likely, given that in the
distant future beyond the 1970s the world would be a more peaceful and
rational place ($300 billion+ per year) and would grow from there as
commercial activity took place off world, and the government expanded
its role in space.

haha..

And you may ask yourself, how did I get here?

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the moneys gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

Folks at the time wondered what would be done after they got this moon
business out of the way and got serious about space, having shown
America and the world what was possible.

http://www.abo.fi/~mlindroo/SpaceLVs/Slides/sld001.htm

In February 1969 amid great fanfare, Nixon appointed Spiro Agnew as
head of the Post Apollo Space Task Group.  Basically, according to
private letters Nixon wanted to get away from the Apollo hardware
which was strongly associated with Kennedy and the Democrats.  He
liked the idea of wings and parallel staging for this reason.

But after Nixon the space program never garnered more than 1% of the
US Federal budget.  And if some have their way, it will not even
garner that.

We moved from Kennedy's vision of putting a man on the moon as a
preamble to America playing a leading role in developing the vast new
ocean of interplanetary space, to a Moon Program under Johnson, and
once the moon was achieved, to a Man in Space under Nixon, which
meant, a man in orbit, because no one wanted to risk another Apollo 13
type accident.

Ultimately, Amercia could abandon space altogether - except launching
probes - Dyson's space chicken concept - on 100 year old launchers.

Respected scientific and industrial leaders are blind on the subject
of space travel.  And that's too bad.  The entire subject is
marginalized by science fiction and UFOs - with no real connection to
day to day life.

This cedes the high-frontier to the military and intelligence
communities, which in the US - not counting the Shuttle and ISS
program - has a larger space program and more modern space
infrastrcture than NASA.

The 9.5 million wealthiest people in the world own $32 trillion in
assets.  Most of these are liquid.  We as a planet have the capacity
to fund whatever we like in space.  The only thing we lack is a clear
consistent vision.

http://www.us.capgemini.com/worldwealthreport07/

Here are a few statements I offer to build such a vision;

The fundamental figure of merit for space operations is the cost of
momentum.  Lowering the cost of momentum for space travel is akin to
lowering the cost of a transistor on an IC.  As you lower this cost
what you can do in space grows as a consequence.

Momentum is mass times speed.  Mass tells you how much you can send
somewhere.  Speed tells you how far you can send it.

And since the speed of doing anything in space is approximately the
same for every point on Earth - with only slight variation from pole
to equator - any service delivered using space launch capabilities
affects all people on Earth equally.  So, space development gives rise
to global services, and global insights. and global political
paradigms.

Since the speed to travel from the surface of the Earth to other
points beyond Earth are relatively fixed the order of achievement is
predictable.

Here is the history of space development during the period we invested
as a species heavily in reducing cost of momentum;

1940s - short range missiles
1950s - ICBMs - small satellites
1960s - Larger satellites, manned travel, cislunar travel

This resulted in the following global paradigms;

 (1) ICBMs made everywhere the battlefield.  Any point on Earth could
carry out a successful attack on any other point without any ability
to stop it.  This made global war impossible, and since the 1950s,
despite intense regional and local conflicts, no global thermonuclear
war has occurred and increasing involvement of major powers in the
affairs of smaller powers to limit the spread of nuclear weapons and
missile technology has bee broadly and consistently supported. (we
likely as a nation spend more on supressing rocket development
overseas than we spend on rocket development domestically)

(2) Communications, reconaissance, navigation, satellites.  The
entire surface of the Earth is universally accessible to anyone with
even small capacity to orbit satellites.  This gave us global TV,
global telephone, global navigation, internet.  Global measurements of
pollution, and weather patterns, combined with interpretation of the
geological record on a global scale, inspired by world wide
measurements, gave rise to the Gaia Hypothesis.

(3) Humans in space - observed the Earth from a great distance and
saw the Earth as a single place without borders and boundaries.
Combined with a growing sense of of the interconnectedness of life
these images and the emotive response of lunar explorers (see Ed
Mitchell's Noetic Institute, or the artwork of Al Bean) supported the
growth of the environmental movement and other extra-national and
visionary ideas.

At this point, development in space ended, with notable exceptions
among very strong-willed folks that operated in the interstices of a
deflating space faring capability.

Meanwhile a concerted effort was made to marginalize visionary ideas
by association with science fiction (star trek) and UFO movements
(mufon)- and isolating real aerospace engineering data from the
business mainstream, while spreading the idea that space travel would
never be any cheaper or safer than in the Apollo days and that nothing
in space was worth the cost.  We are doing just about as well as
science allows.  This is the idea reasonable people have.

Such was not the case in the 1950s and even 1960s.

This modern view sees big manned boosters passing into history just as
big manned balloons have already passed into history following the
Hindenberg.  All we need is our Hindenburg of space.

The explosion of the Challenger at launch didn't kill space travel.
The destruction of Columbia didn't do it.  The reporting of problems
(which never really occurred before - the problems - not the reporting
of them) won't do it.  The crash of probes into Mars because a
programmer didn't know how to convert feet into meters didn't do it.
Reporting marital problems and alcoholism or even drug abuse among the
astronaut corps, won't do it either.

Perhaps the total destruction of a Shuttle AT launch, with destruction
of the launch complex, might do it.  Failing that, the crash of a
fully loaded Shuttle into Downtown Miami, might do it - but that would
more than likely launch an intense and serious investigation into the
matter if it should occur.

But I doubt such failures, while bad for the nation and for NASA,
won't kill space travel.

The difference between the Hindenberg and big manned rockets is that
the airplane competed against the Hindenberg, and giving up lighter
than air aircraft didn't mean we had to give up on the idea of
flight.  We only had to give up a mode of flight that was viewed less
practical than another mode.  In the case of space travel, we are
being asked to give up the idea of space flight altogether with no
alternative.  And that people won't do, no matter how marginalized the
space enthusiasts are made to appear.  Because deep in their hearts
and minds, people will realize, there must be a way - all we lack, to
quote von Braun, is the will - and maybe a capable group of men and
women to carry it out at present.

Now there is no reason that the US should spend 5% to 15% of its
Federal budget on developing space travel.  Valid arguments can be
made that the Federal budget should remain at 1% - but if those
arguments are accepted, then we cannot expect the Feds to support
manned space travel at this cost.

That is, we should fund NASA like we mean it, and failing that we
shoudl reassess the role of NASA and how its structured.

Eisenhower worried privately that NASA fueled by American enthusiasm
for adventure, would grow without bound.  He worried that a civilian
program would become an avenue for the US to lose its considerable
lead in ICBMs to the Russians - just as we lost our lock on nuclear
weapons during his administration.  He felt we were being baited into
an avenue that if we followed our natural impulses, we would be
playing into the Russian's hands.  Spending massive amounts of money
on space travel while the Russians spent more money on weapons
systems, using information leaked through the civilian space program.
That's why Eisenhower put the Navy in charge of Vanguard, and why it
was only after the failure of Vanguard, that Explorer 1 was launched
by von Braun's team.

So, NASA, was created after the fact, with these concerns in mind.
And as a result, NASA was cast in a role it could never adequately
fulfill.  It operates at the behest of the President, mostly, and is
captive to special interests in Congress otherwise.  The National
Academy of Sciences urged the President to create an executive
position and a strategic management board - to give the agency an
ability to make long-term goals and elucidate them to the nation.
This Eisenhower REFUSED to do.  He would like to see the agency go the
way of the do-do bird after public interest died down.  This likely
informed any missile proliferation control agencies and activities as
well, and likely still does.

But the development of these capabilities in space will not go the way
of the do-do bird.  They will continue to enliven and inform and
inspire any culture that embraces them.  And we manage and avert
growth in this area at our peril.  Because Kennedy was right - deep
down - interplanetary travel is the next frontier for humanity and we
should be spending our talent and intelligence in figuring out ways to
embrace this frontier, not stem the rising tide of capabilities.

Had we continued investing in fundamental improvements in reducing
momentum cost past the 1960s, we might have expected the following
development arc in the latter half of the 20th century;

  1970s - large interplanetary payloads
  1980s - very large interplanetary payloads
  1990s - widespread ballistic transport
  2000s - widespread orbital access

Here, the cost of momentum keeps falling with basically the increase
in exhaust speed.  This is achieved by increases in temperature and
energy of the rockets involved.  The 1970s involve the development of
nuclear thermal rockets - similar to the type of reactors used today
aboard nuclear subs, but adapted for rocket use.  This program Project
Nerva was steeply cut by McNamara and Johnson in December 1963 less
than a month after Kennedy's assasination, and was finally ended by
Carter.  In the 1980s engineers envisioned the development of nuclear
pulse spacecraft.  Small engineered explosions of tiny nuclear weapons
that could move aircraft carrier sized spacecraft between worlds in
days - or move small planetary bodies around the solar system in
years.   The 1990s and 2000s would see the development of even lower
cost vehicles.  Laser sustained detonation, laser heated rockets,
laser ablation and deflagration, laser powered jets - these combined
with large solar pumped lasers in space, and large nuclear powered
lasers on the ground, would allow very tiny, simple, cheap, yet
capable spacecraft to enter broad use.  Basically, lowering the cost
of momentum ends at the solar system, and shows up again, by another
development cycle, centered on Earth, but at a lower price point.
That's because interstellar travel is impossibly difficult using
anything we know how to build today - despite the claim of the
marginalizers.

Alright, these developments have corresponding global political and
economic ramifications and these are; by the 1970s we could send
expeditions to mars and other planets of the solar system and install
a scientific base on the moon.  This was the vision of Clarke in the
movie 2001.  In the 1980s there was an expectation that an idea
explored in the 1940s and 50s would be developed to practicality.
While nuclear thermal rockets combined with cheap reusable chemical
rockets would allow us to explore the solar system in detail, nuclear
pulse rockets would give us the ability to ship large pieces of the
solar system into Earth orbit.  This would form the basis of a new
industrial infrastructure that would feed into the growing
environmental sensitivity of humanity - as we contrasted the barreness
of the solar system with the vibrantly living Earth.  In short, by the
1990s there would be a movement to remove all industry off Earth.
Paolo Soleri first became famous by promoting the idea of off-world
arcologies in the 1960s = an idea that has become marginalized and
passe in our 'modern' age.

Mapping the riches of the solar system in the 1980s, amd bringing
those riches into Earth Orbit by the 1990s - would allow us to build
space factories and factory towns in space.  People would build things
and deorbit them to consumers with the same precision we now drop
JDAMs on mud huts in Bagdad - at far less cost, with far greater
benefit.

By the 1990s, SSTs and HSTs would be replaced with BTs - ballistic
transports, and they would grow ever more sophisticated - producing
first private ballistic yachts, and finally, a rocket in every
garage.  (check out Boeings BBJ website) - this leads naturally by the
2000s - to an orbital capability, and ultimately to SPOMES -Space
Homes - written eloquently about by Issac Asimov back in the day.
SPOMES are similar to O'Neil's space colonies, but instead of small
cantons that are managed by committee, these are owned by individuals
and are preferred over life on Earth because of the massive increase
in lifestyle as well as opportunity and safety - compared to staying
on Earth.

As a result, we would have seen, what Heinlein termed, Diaspora - the
eruption of the human race - like a dandelion gone to seed - humanity
rises to cross the solar system.

Many reports of the 1950s worried about the long term survivability of
Earth in such an environment.  This is the real fear of the war
planners of that era and informed their long-term thinking.
Basically, you have nuclear rockets and nuclear power to create bases
and cities on the moon and mars and elsewhere.  By the 1960s we
already saw the profound personality changes and religious insights
some had in response to long distance space travel.  This would only
become more pronounced as journeys became longer.  People born on Mars
who have never been to Earth or seen Earth  would have no attachment
to the planet.  But a Mars colony would perforce be nuclear and quite
technically sophisticated compared to Earth.  And because of the
disparity of gravity, it would be far easier for a Mars culture to
reach out and attack Earth with inpunity.  And just as island chains
are still areas for piracy in the modern world (Indonesia being one
example) - sparesely settle asteroidal communities could be even more
of a threat.  It wouldn't take much for a company town of miners to go
on strike and send an asteroid colliding with Earth rather than into a
gentle orbit - see The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Why would a government dedicated to the security and preservation of
America, support such costly and risky ventures if this is the
ultimate outcome?  To follow this line of thinking, the only reason
the British Empire failed was because it gave rise to the United
States in a failed attempt at colonialism!  lol.

But such analysis fails to consider the changing nature of human
sensitivities due to technology development.  The development of
anasthetics in the early part of the 19th century led to the abolition
of slavery by the middle of the 19th century.  It is clear with a
growing human presence across the solar system, there would be a
rising sensitivity to the uniquenes of our situation on Earth - and
with it a rise in the idea that the preservation of the Earth as the
ultimate natural resource is the highest cause of intelligent life.  A
Natural planetary ecology to be studied to learn how to build ever
more sophisticated space ecologies for the growing human numbers in
space.

The world by the middle of the 21st century, with the exception of
historically important cities, and resort areas, as well as research,
reclamation and preservation activity, would be largely abandoned and
become a nature preserve for all of time forward.

Beyond this point, its difficult to predict what will happen as a
result of further development along the momentum curve.

When it costs as much to cross the solar system in a week aboard your
spome as it now costs to drive cross country by automobile, it will
finally be within our grasp to send small probes to nearby stars and
receive useful results in reasonable times.  This will likely not
happen - on this development arc - until the middle of the 22nd
century.

Our present timeline we find ourselves in, it may never happen.

The point is, we can do whatever we want in the solar system, and much
of what we can do could radically transform life on Earth.  We have
had this capacity for 50 years and have lacked the vision, the will,
and the courage to accept the challenges such capabilities present
usl.  As a result we have created a world of ignorance and poverty
that is on the edge of a huge die off, with all the resulting
calamities that entails.

It will cost us far more as a species and as a nation to undergo a die
off, than the development of space travel along the lines described
would cost - technologies which have the capacity to avoid the die off
altogether and make of our species the first space faring species.

I know this was a discussion on flyback boosters.  haha - Flyback
boosters could have been developed in the mid-60s as a natural
consequence of planned an reasonable growth at that time - and would
have been developed too had the National Academy's guidelines of the
time been followed.  They were not.  They were not followed for
political reasons having nothing to do with technology or what is
possible, or what the benefits are long-term.  These decisions were
made by men who lacked the vision to appreciate the opportunities
their time presented them..  And for that reason, they initiated what
Clarke calls our long slow decline back to the primordial seas.

Well, I'm not as pessimistic as Clarke, but we certainly cost the
American culture and the American Century a lot - by killing Kennedy
and the dream of planetary development.