Lamenting the Tyranny of Low Expectations
I was thinking a bit about an idea I've heard Mark Whittington bring up repeatedly over the last several months over on his blog, and in comments here and elsewhere. Basically the idea he keeps putting forward is that the best way to involve private industry in the return to the Moon is for NASA to carry out their plans based on ESAS, build a base on the Moon, and then have a COTS like program for inviting private companies to resupply that base.
Mark's plan might just work, but if it does, it will be another tragic waste of billions of dollars and decades worth of time. Look at COTS itself for a moment. The amount of money that NASA is providing for development is actually fairly decent for two teams. But the total amount of demand they'll be providing is only a couple of launches per year. When you think about how many billion dollars have been spent on the Shuttle and ISS over my lifetime, it comes out to well over $100B in 2006 dollars. Maybe even as high as $150B in current dollars. Think what would've happened if NASA had taken seriously the part in the very legislation that created it that states that NASA is to "seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space."
If NASA had spent even a tiny fraction of the amount it has spent on the Shuttle program instead on actively promoting and enabling the creation of a robust private space transportation industry, think where we would be today. NASA might be able to purchase tickets to send hundreds of astronauts per year into space, send many times as many space probes out every year, and would have had a robust transportation infrastructure to utilize for its exploration purposes. Both manned and unmanned exploration would be flourishing, very possibly on less money per year then they are receiving today. Heck, with a real thriving space transportation industry, private entities like National Geographic, or Nature, or Scientific American, could have likely sent out some of their own missions or expeditions by now. There would be no talk about a "gap" in US manned space transport capabilities because there would be so many customers and providers in a robust and competitive industry that such talk would be as ludicrase as a "gap" in US manned air travel. Instead, NASA took the route of political expediency. They decided that keeping team Apollo together, and keeping high-tech jobs in as many congressional districts as possible was more important than actually following the mandate given in their authorization bill. They decided that rather than encouraging and unleashing private enterprise to find the best ways (note the plural) of accessing space, that they would design the US "Space Transportation System" that was going to be the way that everything in the US got launched into space.
26 years later, we're now supposed to be estatic and cheering about NASA providing demand for a half dozen small payload deliveries per year? We're supposed to giddily await the day when NASA's small 4-man outpost on the moon needs a flight or two per year of food and toiletpaper, and decided to throw a scrap to the private sector?
The fact that COTS is pretty much the best attempt NASA has done in my lifetime to pay any heed to the "seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space" part of its authorization legislation is sad. COTS is a step in the right direction, but looking back at what could've and should've been and comparing it to what we've got, it's hard not to feel seriously cheated.
Talk about the tyranny of low expectations.
Mark's plan might just work, but if it does, it will be another tragic waste of billions of dollars and decades worth of time. Look at COTS itself for a moment. The amount of money that NASA is providing for development is actually fairly decent for two teams. But the total amount of demand they'll be providing is only a couple of launches per year. When you think about how many billion dollars have been spent on the Shuttle and ISS over my lifetime, it comes out to well over $100B in 2006 dollars. Maybe even as high as $150B in current dollars. Think what would've happened if NASA had taken seriously the part in the very legislation that created it that states that NASA is to "seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space."
If NASA had spent even a tiny fraction of the amount it has spent on the Shuttle program instead on actively promoting and enabling the creation of a robust private space transportation industry, think where we would be today. NASA might be able to purchase tickets to send hundreds of astronauts per year into space, send many times as many space probes out every year, and would have had a robust transportation infrastructure to utilize for its exploration purposes. Both manned and unmanned exploration would be flourishing, very possibly on less money per year then they are receiving today. Heck, with a real thriving space transportation industry, private entities like National Geographic, or Nature, or Scientific American, could have likely sent out some of their own missions or expeditions by now. There would be no talk about a "gap" in US manned space transport capabilities because there would be so many customers and providers in a robust and competitive industry that such talk would be as ludicrase as a "gap" in US manned air travel. Instead, NASA took the route of political expediency. They decided that keeping team Apollo together, and keeping high-tech jobs in as many congressional districts as possible was more important than actually following the mandate given in their authorization bill. They decided that rather than encouraging and unleashing private enterprise to find the best ways (note the plural) of accessing space, that they would design the US "Space Transportation System" that was going to be the way that everything in the US got launched into space.
26 years later, we're now supposed to be estatic and cheering about NASA providing demand for a half dozen small payload deliveries per year? We're supposed to giddily await the day when NASA's small 4-man outpost on the moon needs a flight or two per year of food and toiletpaper, and decided to throw a scrap to the private sector?
The fact that COTS is pretty much the best attempt NASA has done in my lifetime to pay any heed to the "seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space" part of its authorization legislation is sad. COTS is a step in the right direction, but looking back at what could've and should've been and comparing it to what we've got, it's hard not to feel seriously cheated.
Talk about the tyranny of low expectations.
posted by Jon Goff at 9:07 PM
8 Comments:
If NASA had spent even a tiny fraction of the amount it has spent on the Shuttle program instead on actively promoting and enabling the creation of a robust private space transportation industry, think where we would be today...
It's not clear from this just when you're hypothesizing that NASA might have taken that tack. But hindsight is 20/20; it may require an aging perspective like mine (at 56) to recall just how different the climate of opinion was when STS started.
Apollo was considered a success, NASA and its contractors the champs of "can-do." The idea that Big Government/Big Aerospace are hamstrung by their very nature, and that small entrepreneurs have an inherent edge, has evolved gradually over decades, in step with broader ideological changes in the country and the world.
I once knew a wise old woman. When she heard someone say "You should have known better than to do X," she would murmur: "You don't know better 'til you've done worse..."
"Gentlemen, congratulations. You're everything we've come to expect from years of government training." ... Zed, while rejecting a batch of MIB trainees from various government agencies, "Men In Black"
While I'm glad Jon has come around to kind of sort of liking my idea for a lunar COTS, I need to offer two points.
First, Monte is quite right in that in 1972 the idea using NASA money to foster private space development was about as foreign as--well--privitizing social security or instituting a flat tax. It was a matter of holy writ, at the time, that only governments could do space. It took decades to figure out that maybe that aint so.
(A shameless plug. In my alternate history novel, Children of Apollo, I do a little hand waving to suggest how early commercialization of Earth to LEO travel might have happened. The development turns out to be a crucial plot driver.)
Second, establishing a NASA base in the old way, with all of the "wastefull big gummit" implications is, in my judgement, a necessary condition to having a lunar COTS program. As if the COTS now in effect, companies vying for the prize will have to find private capital. Now, venture capitalists are not known for their imagination. They are not paid to be too imaginative, as therein lays a tendency to blow too much of their customers' money. If you tell a venture capitalist that you are raising money to build a Moonship, then he will ask you how do you intend to make money? If there is no NASA base extant, then one would have to do a lot of hand waving about helium 3, tourism, etc, that will likely get one shown the door.
On the other hand, if there is a ready made market, one that is sure to pay money, and one that has already been shown to work in LEO, then the venture capitalist might be persuaded to loosen the purse strings.
Only a few flights a year? Jon, I'm ashamed of you. Once one gets a space craft that is of orders of magnitude cheaper to operate--and that is what alt.space has been promising since before I had gray hair--then there are surely lots of other things one can do with it to make money.
COTS will help prime the pump for Robert Bigelow even if the ISS contract turns out to be small.
These craft developed in part with .gov money now will help meet his needs too.
Jon, the only slight flaw in your argument is that what you quoted [Sect. 203 (a)(4)] seems to have been added only recently; late 90's, I think.
Having said that, I agree with your analysis though, as Monte said, hindsight is 20/20.
Dave
> Think what would've happened if NASA had taken
>seriously the part in the very legislation that
>created it that states that NASA is to "seek and
>encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the
>fullest commercial use of space."
Sadly the point of the excersize now is not to use the money to do space, but to use space to justify the money in the "correct" districts.
IMO the "killer app for going back
to the moon" might be astronomy:
a light-gravity vacuum environment
could have certain advantages over
either earth-surface or LEO for
Really Large Telescopes...
-dave w
IMO the "killer app for going back
to the moon" might be astronomy:
a light-gravity vacuum environment
could have certain advantages over
either earth-surface or LEO for
Really Large Telescopes...
The rough concensus among astronomers (of which I am one) is that the Lagrange points are generally preferable locations for telescopes than the Lunar surface.
While certain telescopes may benefit from niche environments on the moon (polar zenith-pointing deep IR observatories, farside radio observatories), there are no known benefits to operation on the surface sufficient to justify spending the additional $\Delta v$ to deploy most telescopes there, or to justify coping with the massive problems of day-night thermal cycling, night-time power supply, day-time cooling, and, perhaps most seriously, dust.
In fact, many astronomers are terrified that people will claim such benefits exist, whether they are correct or not, in order to rationalize crewed missions to the moon, just as HST was used to justify the shuttle and b.s. science arguments were used to justify ISS. We need non-scientific reasons to go instead (which, in my opinion, are plentiful).
PSS
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