perfidy

So what does this mean for the frustrated space geek? Well, it's bad news all around. Not only is there no good reason for the government to undertake large scale space colonization, there are several reasons for them not to. 

Firstly, American military dominance is founded to an amazing degree on satellite technology. Our weapons systems use GPS satellites for guidance. Our weapons systems and soldiers communicate with satellites. Our commanders and planners depend on intelligence gathered by satellites. Our Air Forces depend on weather data gathered by satellites. Currently, no other nation has these capabilities.

The Air Force did a study back in the sixties, and realized that a small two man orbital station could do vastly better reconnaissance work with a small telescope than any conceivable (at the time) recon satellite. While computers have vastly increased the capabilities of our spy satellites, the fact remains that if people are up in orbit, a small telescope gives them powers comparable to the most sophisticated military and expensive military or CIA spysats. 

This concept has broad application. People do things better than robots. If people are in orbit, they can do many things that can currently only be done with expensive automated hardware that only the U.S. can afford. If the U.S. government makes it really cheap to get into space, then it will have given away one of the most incredible military advantages ever possessed by a nation. 

Also, when you drop things from very high up, they hit the ground very hard. This basic law of applied physics has already been proven by the use of Concrete bombs in the war in the gulf. Thanks to precision (satellite) guidance packages, a very large lump of concrete dropped from fifty thousand feet (about eight miles) can easily destroy a tank or APC. When you drop things from 150 miles up, in Low Earth Orbit, you can reach out and touch someone, anywhere on the globe, in less than half an hour, with the explosive force of a pony nuke. Access to space gives great power to anyone who can get into there. 

The U.S. Government does not want to lose these advantages. Nor would any sane government. Another reason that the government would be happy with status quo is simply to restrict access to space generally. In this way, only accredited commercial interests will be permitted launch slots. The other three nations that are space capable, China, Russia and France, follow the same restrictive policies. It is an exclusive club, and even run of the mill bureaucratic inertia and turf defense instincts would be enough to shape policy toward keeping things as they are. 

Then, there are all the commonly heard objections: "We need the money to give to crack mothers, or to fund Richard Maplethorpe." Or, "Space is a pristine environment, and we don't want to kill all the space otters with pollution from the combustion of Hydrogen and Oxygen." Or, "Exploiting space is a typical phallic dominance maneuver of the ruling political class, and only perpetuates the oppression inherent in the system." (Johno or Mike, you could probably do the academic bullshit speak better than me, you've been exposed to it more.) Or, "It will upset the French." 

These reasons, as ridiculous as they sound to the passionate space geek, are nevertheless politically potent objections. Along with the first two, they stand as a formidable bulwark against future space development. NASA may continue to design and redesign space vehicles so as to create an illusion of progress, but it truly is not in the government's interest to promote significant space activities. For the near term, government space activities will be limited to satellite deployment - the orbital equivalent of coastal navigation buoys; and the occasional deep space probe.

So what does all of this mean for space travel? Clearly, the American space program of the sixties was part of the larger Cold War. While Kennedy and his successors painted a lot of rhetoric on why we went into orbit or to the moon, the real reason was simply, and always, to beat the Russkies. Regardless of the hopes and dreams of the scientists and engineers working for NASA and the aerospace industry, they were engaged in the same kind of contest as Royal Navy Admiral Jackie Fisher had with his dreadnoughts sixty years earlier. 

Once Cold War political realities rendered the space race superfluous, it was promptly jettisoned. Of course, no bureaucracy ever truly dies; so NASA fought tenaciously to salvage some of its budget, and to come up with reasons for its continued existence. On their reduced budget, they achieved some rather remarkable things. What did they accomplish after the feverish race for the moon was over? Deep space robotic exploration and the shuttle/space station programs.

As we mentioned, exploration is cheap. For chump change in government revenue terms, we could toss out a Pioneer, Voyager, Pathfinder or Galileo probe every year for eternity and not feel the bite. And, like early sailing ship explorations they brought back fabulous images, scientific information, and a sense that we were engaging in something important. 

The Space Shuttle Program is a technological marvel, to be sure. But it is simultaneously a ridiculous compromise, a kludged up rube-goldbergesque vehicle that tries to be everything to everyone, while actually pleasing no one. So, the Space Shuttle is a shuttle. OK, fine, but don't shuttles shuttle back and forth between things? Oh yeah, well, we're building a space station for the shuttle to fly to. What does the Space Station do? Well, all kinds of nifty research, and it will embarrass the hell out of the commies. Didn't the Soviet Union collapse? Oh.

When you recall that the International Space Station, built with the help of every country in the world but North Korea, and cost two hundred trillion dollars because it was redesigned 8,000 times over twenty years, and in any event is smaller than the space station we let burn up and that was built out of spare parts left over from Apollo, having a shuttle to go to it doesn't seem so cool anymore. And then, after two tragic (not in the sense of aw, that's sad but in the original sense of inevitable doom) accidents, we don't even have a shuttle anymore. 

The Shuttle and ISS are the result of bureaucratic inertia, and the fact that the U.S. Government has an obscene amount of money. The exploratory probes are a result of the fact that NASA, in its spare time, is a jobs program for scientists, and the fact that the U.S. Government has an obscene amount of money. 

We should not be surprised that we do not have a space program, or at least a space program that space advocates would proudly call their own. There is absolutely no political reason to have one. The two reasons that governments fund anything beyond exploration of the most cursory nature is strategic competition with rival powers, or to gain control of vital resources or trade. 

But, the United States has no rivals, for we are a solitary superpower. We do not need to beat anyone to anywhere. The only possible rival is China, but this is not going to happen in the near term. There are no easily accessible resources in space. Most of space is, well, space. There is not only no "Gold in them thar hills," there mostly isn't really even a there there. The closest real estate to Earth, our Moon, is covered in Aluminum and Silicon based dirt. Aluminum and Silicon are hardly the most valuable of mineral resources on Earth. Add to that the fact that we would have to transport not merely miners and tools, but every drop of water, breath of air and crumb of food that the miners would consume during their entire Lunar sojourn, this becomes a undesirable investment option for government. Any other usable real estate is even further away. 

And, there are no friendly aliens to go out and trade with either, despite the fervent beliefs of many in this country. 

The final reason the government might agree to allow large scale efforts to colonize space doesn't apply to the United States either. By and large we are a fat, happy, prosperous people, and have no desire to move elsewhere. We've got it as good as any nation in the history of the world, so why should anyone want to leave? There are no Puritans, no Huguenots suffering from religious oppression, and even when things were much worse for blacks in this country, even when there was still slavery, they didn't want to go to Liberia. 

The only way that the U.S. Government will pay for a large scale space program in the absence of traditional motivations, is if we become so fantastically wealthy that a hundred billion dollars is pocket change..

There are many space exploration advocates who bemoan the fact that the American space program was a political entity, born of the cold war and dying with it. But this view is incorrect in that, historically, exploration has rarely if ever been anything but political. When John F. Kennedy launched the American half of the cold war space race, he followed a tradition of politically motivated exploration that stretches back half a millennium.

When Henry the Navigator organized the Portuguese exploration efforts in the late fifteenth century, he did it for an expressly political purpose - to find an alternate route to valuable commodities. The existing, and expensive trade route to the spices that Europe wanted went straight through the Islamic Ottoman Empire, which for reasons of religion, politics and greed restricted the flow of commerce to the Christian west.

When the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus convinced the Spanish to finance his expedition, the Spanish wanted an alternate route to the east as well - because the Ottomans and the Portuguese controlled the other two. French and British, Dutch and Swedish voyages of exploration over the next two centuries were the result of the desire of those governments to establish colonies in the new world, so as not to be totally left out of the game that was dominated by the first two exploring nations, Portugal and Spain. (And to discover new routes to the east, of course.)

While these explorations seemed to lead quite naturally to trade, colonies, empire and the like, it did not spring magically into existence, simply because new lands had been discovered. Gold inspired the Spanish conquistadors, and soon Spain was in possession of vast territories it didn’t know quite what to do with. The vast difference in military capability between the Castilian soldiers of Cortez and Pizarro meant that the Aztec and Incan empires could be conquered by small groups of adventurers, without constant support from the mother country.

But elsewhere in the world, progress toward empire was slow. In the early seventeenth century, the French government could barely convince a couple thousand of her citizens to settle in New France, and even by the time of the American Revolution a hundred and fifty years later, the population of Canada only amounted to tens of thousands. Even in the rich farm lands of what became the Thirteen Colonies, population growth was negative for decades - the colonies only grew through immigration. The first British colony died out altogether, and the second, third and fourth nearly did as well. Setting up colonies was a difficult business, and rarely profitable until decades later. State support for these ventures was minimal, unless placing a colony directly inconvenienced a rival power, or a valuable resource lay directly under it.

In Africa and in the East, outright empire building was slow to develop. The Portuguese, and later the Spanish, British, Dutch and French set up small outposts and forts to guard their trade routes. And even these were only viable because of the vast amounts of wealth that was easily obtained by trading with the nations of the east.

Governments financed exploration for political reasons - but exploration was cheap. A couple ships, crew and an overly brave explorer were easy to come by. Settlements and Empire were much more costly, and usually avoided, unless there was a compelling political or strategic gain to be had. Those colonies usually fell into one of two categories - securing land to prevent a rival power from getting it (usually sparsely inhabited or primitive areas), or smaller forts, treaty ports, and outposts used to secure trade routes to valuable commodities.

As Europe grew richer and more technologically advanced these networks of colonies, outposts and treaty ports eventually evolved into true empires; usually as the result of some ambitious Leftenant conquering or duping local rulers because the local customs offended his sense of propriety. But in the early stages, this process was expensive and run by the government for its own purposes. Merchants, colonists, traders and mechanics followed later, often much later.

Another factor to consider is that most of the early British colonies in America were self financed, and by groups that wanted desperately to leave England; or they were prison colonies. This pattern was also true, though to a lesser extent, in other British dominions, and in the territories of other powers. It was only after the colonies had become established over a period of decades or centuries, and became prosperous that the central government showed any interest in them at all.

Governments can finance exploration easily. Settlement is a tougher and more expensive endeavor, and only undertaken (by governments) when there is clear and immediate gain to be had.

In the mid nineties, there was a brief shining hope for space enthusiasts. The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO), descendent of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, had a spaceship. Known as the DC-X, for Delta Clipper – Experimental, this spaceship could not reach orbit. DCX was a one third scale prototype of a single stage to orbit (SSTO) vehicle. Unlike traditional expendable rockets or even the space shuttle, the full size DCX would take off vertically, travel to orbit, and return in one piece. 

This concept for an SSTO vehicle promised to reduce the per pound cost to orbit by several orders of magnitude, because the program did not entail throwing away large parts of the launch vehicle every time it was used. Further, the vehicle was designed using many of the lessons used in the design of large passenger jets, so that it would require much smaller ground crews and less turn around time than the space shuttle. 

The McDonnell-Douglas engineers who worked on the project had several firm rules to guide them. Most important was this: no new technology. The DCX project did not require a single item of new technology. No research was needed. Every component of the DCX was off the shelf technology. Only a few components even needed to be custom designed, such as the fuel tanks and the outer skin of the craft. The DCX team took the flight control system directly out of an MD80 passenger jet. (One engineer quipped that the DCX thought it was a airliner with a very unusual flight path.) 

For $600 million, the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO), successor to Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) built a working, flying prototype space ship. By comparison to typical NASA expenditures, even in NASA Director Goldin's "Faster, Better, Cheaper" era, this was chump change. The BMDO flew the DCX over twenty times, each time pushing the boundaries, each time learning more of what they would need to know when they built the first full size prototype. (Some of these flights were even broadcast on CNN.) 

However, this happy progress was not to last. With typical government fickleness, the DCX program was transferred to a jealous NASA. NASA crashed the DCX the first time they flew it, and declared that the program was a failure. When the time came for NASA to name a contractor to build an SSTO craft, the contract was awarded to Lockheed's X-33 program. The X-33's success was predicated on the development of novel aerospike engines. At the time that Lockheed was awarded the contract, no one in the world had ever constructed a working aerospike engine. At the time that the X-33 project was cancelled, five years and billions of dollars later, no full-scale working aerospike engine had ever been built. 

Why would NASA, which at least theoretically desired an inexpensive to operate, earth to orbit vehicle, pick the X-33 project over the DCX? Especially considering that the DCX program had actually built a working prototype, and did not require the invention of several new technologies to even have a chance of succeeding? We may never know the answer to that question, but the experience of the last decade should suggest something to those who are planning NASA's next moves. 

Small programs with clear design goals have a much better chance of success than typical NASA programs. Private industry, given a clear mission and a free hand on how to go about achieving it, can achieve wonders. NASA should issue a clear set of specifications, in much the same way that the military does for new combat aircraft. Industry must build a flying prototype (though perhaps with some seed funding from the government.) One of the prototypes will be chosen, and the winner will get a contract to build production versions of the spacecraft. NASA should not have the opportunity to micromanage development, nor to continually change the specifications. And NASA should be forced to pick one of the working prototypes. 

Here is a situation where the government could help the market: primarily by creating a market for SSTO spacecraft. The aerospace industry can justify spending even very large amounts of money designing a spaceship if they know they have a chance of actually selling some once they're done. Boeing spent tens millions of dollars just designing the 777, knowing that they would have a market for them. Boeing would spend at least that much on creating an SSTO, if it were assured that the government would buy them. 

One other important qualification should be that the winning company could also sell the SSTO to private industry. FedEx, among other private companies, did research which indicated if an SSTO with sufficiently large cargo were available at around the price of a 747, they could operate several for point to point cargo shipping on earth, and have a good profit margin. (If you can get to orbit, that same vehicle can reach any point on earth in little over 45 minutes. When it absolutely, positively has to be there in an hour...) But FedEx is not going to pony up the development costs, any more than it would for the cargo jets it flies today. 

Once we have cheap, regular and frequent access to space, then everything will start to happen - orbital hotels, miracle materials developed in zero-g labs, lunar colonies, the works. But we will only get there if NASA is forced to get out of the way, and focus on what it's good at: research and deep space exploration.

...tomorrow, when I'm at my other office. I've got some goodies.

Steve, I totally agree with you about space exploration. As I get older I tend to realize that there is a finite amount of government money out there, and an infinite number of draws on those funds. If the Government can't or won't pay for space exploration, private citizens and corporations should.

Bully for China. I applaud their enterprise and their effort. But I puzzle at the US's space policy. We went to the Moon years ago, which is like getting to second base with the solar system-- pretty awesome, but only the tip (as it were) of the iceberg. What puzzles me is that, after getting to second, we seemingy decided to settle for boobies instead of trying for home. Guh??!?

Unweildy metaphors aside, what gives? Space exploration drives technology and leads to awesome spinoffs like Tang, Velcro, and freeze-dried ice cream! It inspires scientific and engineering feats of genius! It drives young kiddies to enter the sciences! And it keeps us hungry and eager. Yay China! Where's ours?

Exploration of the universe must go forward at all costs, but financed, like the spice trade, by rich people hoping for fun, profit, and the opportunity to have planets named after them. The government apparently has better things to do, such as busting glass-pipe makers and people who download Dixie Chicks tracks. Forget about them. Let's build awesome, new, devices and fly them high, and let's find rich nerds to pay for it all.

China is planning to create a space station and start mining the moon. Meanwhile, here in America, we do diddly.

We could have had a real spaceship seven years ago, but instead we built a lot of nothing.