A Twinkle of Hope
Obama has moved space policy in the right direction, but we still have a long way to go.
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GoogleBy any reasonably objective measure, U.S. human spaceflight policy is an awful mess. We have spent hundreds of billions of federal taxpayer dollars during the last half-century, with little to show for it in terms of significant human expansion off the planet. In some ways, we have gone backward.
The United States sent a dozen people to the surface of the moon more than four decades ago, at horrific cost. Next December it will be 40 years since the last man kicked up the dusty lunar regolith, with only a few hundred people going into space in the ensuing four decades, at an average cost of about $1 billion each. We have spent $100 billion to deploy a space station that we cannot support without purchasing rides and lifeboat services from the once-feared Russians, who have accordingly been jacking up the price. Every time the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) renews the ferrying contract, Congress must waive the Iran/North Korea/Syria Non-Proliferation Act, which bans purchases of goods or services from countries who aid any of those countries in developing missiles or nuclear weapons, since Moscow continues to help Iran do both.
There are near-term, cost-effective solutions to our space problems, but the people who guide policy in Congress aren’t interested in them, insisting instead on pouring further tens of billions into a giant rocket that probably will never fly and that internal NASA documents show is unneeded. Maintaining existing aerospace jobs—“the seen,” in Frédéric Bastiat’s famous formulation—trumps the unseen jobs and wealth that won’t be created due to the forced misallocation of resources. And none of this gets us any closer to the moon or Mars.
Whether the federal government should be sending humans into space at all is a legitimate question, but not for the purposes of this article. Instead, our question is this: Given that human expansion into space is a good thing for both preservation of the species and for the future of freedom, what federal policies would best accelerate that outcome in a market-oriented fashion and at a reasonable cost to the taxpayer?
Space Policy Takes a Wrong Turn
To answer that question, we have to diagnose the problem by examining the historical roots of current policy dysfunction. Human spaceflight in America got off on the wrong foot, born as it was in the national Cold War panic over Sputnik and the space race with the Soviet Union. In our rush to beat the godless commies, instead of focusing on the steady long-term establishment of a competitive launch industry that would eventually make spaceflight affordable, Americans used unreliable ballistic missiles to transport people into orbit. With the “success” of Apollo, false lessons were cemented into place. We achieved John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him to Earth before the decade was done, but in doing so we created a space policy monster.
The problem is that sending people into space was an urgent national priority for a decade at most. Since the late 1960s, it has no longer been a pressing issue for most people or their elected representatives. The spending persists because Americans have a vague sense that it is important to have a space program, but few can articulate why. The result is policy inertia: Since NASA has always sent people into space (as far as Americans with limited historical knowledge are concerned), and no one else has done it, NASA must always send people into space, even if in reality the agency fails at even that.
This mind-set helps explain the overreaction to the Obama administration’s 2009 announcement that it would pay commercial providers to get astronauts into Earth orbit so that NASA could focus on getting them beyond Earth orbit. When the sense that the United States should rule space combined with partisan revulsion at Obama, the result was unhinged commentary about “the end of American human spaceflight” and other canards.
There was a third, more powerful source of pushback against the new policy, one that shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the economic theory of public choice. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned the American public about the military-industrial complex. Less familiar is the Apollo-born iron triangle of the human spaceflight industry, NASA, and Congress, an arrangement that has lived on through the space shuttle and space station programs.
The model was that NASA would dictate requirements and design, then hire contractors to develop, test, and operate the system. This would be accomplished via cost-plus contracts, in which bidders were reimbursed for labor and materials, with a fixed fee for profit, plus overhead that funded research and marketing for new work (which created a significant barrier to entry for newcomers who didn’t have existing contracts to help pay for their own R&D and bids). The work would be spread across as many states and congressional districts as possible (sometimes beyond practicality) to maximize political support for the program, although this practice also maximized costs through travel inefficiencies and the confusion caused by complex interfaces and subcontracts. The best part for the contractors was that their reimbursement was based mainly on labor and materials. Although they could get a bonus for hitting a deadline or staying within a budget, they generally got paid regardless of results.
In addition to the financial motives of contractors, NASA has an intrinsic conflict of interest because it decides whether it needs to develop new hardware or can instead use equipment off the shelf. This isn’t a problem for other operational agencies. The Coast Guard, for example, doesn’t do vehicle development—it relies on shipyards. Like any bureaucracy, the agency has a bias in favor of commissioning new equipment, even if existing solutions will do the job, because the more expensive option gives it more control and justifies higher budgets.
This system made some sense in the context of Apollo and the space shuttle, and perhaps even the space station, where new things were being tried and program risk was substantial. But when President George W. Bush announced his new Vision for Space Exploration in 2004, a year after the loss of the shuttle Columbia, NASA persisted in its old cost-plus ways, despite the fact that building new rockets and capsules was no longer rocket science.
By the time the ensuing return-to-the-moon program, Constellation, was canceled in 2009, it had only a low probability of flying in 2017, three years later than originally scheduled. It had expended more than $10 billion with little to show for it except a half-finished capsule and a flawed suborbital test flight of a mock rocket that differed from the final design in every important respect except its shape. But the contractors got paid, and they provided campaign contributions to the representatives and senators on the committees that authorized and appropriated funds for NASA.
After the Obama administration announced its modest policy changes, the space policy establishment disingenuously and often mendaciously sought to preserve its decades-long rent seeking by feeding into national anxieties about American exceptionalism and the president himself. Sadly, the old guard has had some success.
The few members of Congress who pay attention to space policy (because it benefits their states and districts) reinstated an unneeded heavy-lift vehicle, which they called the Space Launch System (SLS, known to cynics as the Senate Launch System) and a lunar capsule, which was part of the original Constellation program. This forced NASA to waste billions of dollars a year indefinitely, even though the SLS has no funded missions and will not fly for many years. Meanwhile, in pending appropriations bills, Congress is not even providing sufficient funding for the rocket itself. Worse, it is shortchanging the only initiative—the Commercial Crew Program—with any prospect of eliminating our reliance on the Russians anytime soon, while essentially eliminating funding for the advanced technologies needed to get humans beyond Earth orbit. In mid-November, Congress appropriated about $400 million, less than half NASA’s request for the Commercial Crew Program.
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" A lively trade in lunar property " which lead to the economic collapse of 2034...
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We achieved John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him to Earth before the decade was done, but in doing so we created a space...monster.
And I for one welcome our new space monster overlord.
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Never!
"I still have a trick or two up my sleeve. Watch as I fire upwards through our own shield! "
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"Increase speed, drop down and reverse direction!"
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"I could never get the last one! My brother always got it for me!"
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Give me a Rush mix tape and a bottle of Shasta!
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"Good evening, ignorant pigs. Put down your crack pipes and your beer bongs and pay attention, as I sign a historic peace accord with ambassador Kong of planet Nintendo 64."
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OT: http://tinyurl.com/87tcvuv
"OK, 'fess up — some of you know that I thoroughly detest libertarianism, that reactionary political movement that seeks to elevate greed and selfishness as a ruling principle, and I suspect one of you got me a subscription to Reason magazine a few months ago, just to taunt me. If your goal was to persuade me to come over to the side of unbridled anti-social self-centeredness, you failed. The issue comes, I glance through it, find a few little bits and pieces I can agree with, but because they're all imbedded in this thick tarry fecal sludge of libertarianism, I end up throwing the whole thing away in disgust."
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Cool story bro.
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Maybe you should start a newsletter.
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RACIST!!
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Cool band name bro.
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I suspect one of you got me a subscription to Reason magazine a few months ago, just to taunt me.
Just a ploy to get you on all of those other strange snail-mail marketing lists.
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PZ Myers is one of those people who thinks he's Smarttm because he learnt a lot about squids and got a few initials after his name, thus he feels qualified to bloviate about everything and anything.
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Make that "Smart(tm)"
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How about Smart™?
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I tried the tag but I guess I fucked it up.
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because he learnt a lot about squids and got a few initials after his name, thus he feels qualified to bloviate about everything and anything
That does make him more qualified, you ignorant buffoon!
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Then get thee self over to Huffington Post righ away and hang out with the other illiterate fools that believe the government should provide everything for you.
vejo você mais tarde, espero que nunca, idiota
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Three pages on what's wrong with the U.S. human spaceflight program? The problem is that it exists! Human space flight, as many commenters have pointed out in response to Reason's "other" space flight article today, is massively impracticable. The magic of the marketplace doesn't give us everything we want. Where's my jet pack? Where's my anti-aging pill? My Leo DiCaprio look-alike pill? My flawless replica of Angelina Jolie robot? Why aren't these products on the market? Are you telling me there's no demand?
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Why don't you shut the fuck up Vannemen. There have been humans in space for 50 years now. It is hardly impractical. And there is a way that impractical things become practical, it is called technological advance.
You really are the biggest douchebag ever to post on Reason. Don't you have a new Sherlock Holmes story to write or something?
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I dunno John, there are good reasons to be skeptical about space travel in general.
Great article from sci-fi author Charles Stross about the impracticality of it: http://www.antipope.org/charli.....redux.html
The moon is about 1.3 light seconds away. If we want to go panning the (metaphorical) rivers for gold, we'd do better to send teleoperator-controlled robots; it's close enough that we can control them directly, and far enough away that the cost of transporting food and creature comforts for human explorers is astronomical. There probably are niches for human workers on a moon base, but only until our robot technologies are somewhat more mature than they are today; Mission Control would be a lot happier with a pair of hands and a high-def camera that doesn't talk back and doesn't need to go to the toilet or take naps.
When we look at the rest of the solar system, the picture is even bleaker. Mars is ... well, the phrase "tourist resort" springs to mind, and is promptly filed in the same corner as "Gobi desert". As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach." In other words, going there to explore is fine and dandy — our robots are all over it already. But as a desirable residential neighbourhood it has some shortcomings, starting with the slight lack of breathable air and the sub-Antarctic nighttime temperatures and the Mach 0.5 dust storms, and working down from there. -
It is a long ways away. But I would never write it off as totally impractical. At some point in time man will do it. Man has to. The earth only has so many years left. Of course, the good news is we have a few billion years to figure it out.
Maybe from a Christian perspective, God will return and end the earth before we figure it out. We live such short lives on the cosmic scale it is hard to know. What is a hundred thousand or even a million years to the universe?
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He actually says almost the same thing in Saturn's Children, too, in explaining why space travel fucking sucks even for androids.
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Ultimately I guess transhumanism is the necessary step towards space travel. Our bodies are not cut out for such things. So why not get new bodies?
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I agree with you 100% on that, John. And it completely changes space travel from "so difficult and impractical so as to be effectively impossible" to "difficult and impractical, but doable".
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This idea was explored in Macroscope by Piers Anthony (it was nominated for a Hugo that year). It's one of the best Anthony novels he wrote before he started writing the kind fantasy novels.
In the novel they essentially build a device reducing their bodies to a liquid state, which then allows them to accelerate past the speeds that would normally destroy our physical bodies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroscope_(novel_by_Piers_Anthony)
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Hey look guys, Tman just said something good about Piers Anthony! What a jerk!
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I enjoyed the Incantations of Immortality. series.
There, I admit it.
Of course I was twelve when I read them, but still, I did enjoy it. I'm not ashamed.
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I did the same thing, but I have the decency to be ashamed.
(not really)
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It does baffle me that it's the same guy who wrote Macroscope and the Xanth series.
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I can't for the life of me remember the title, and looking up his bibliography isn't helping, but didn't he write a series of novels that started with a game that all the poor people can play, and the one winner each year (?) is given just enough money (it was in the form of some precious material) to be at the very bottom rung of the upper classes, and then tries to make it from there? And the main character wins right at the beginning of the first book?
I recall thinking that was pretty good at the time, but I can't even confirm it was Anthony.
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I've read most of his stuff, but I don't remember that plot set up. Might have been someone else.
(I might be ashamed that I read most of the Xanth series, but again I plead age ignorance -I was twelve man! I didn't know any better!!!)
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(actually, I just checked, I only read the first 11 of the Xanth series. Apparently that's when I figured out how certainly biological functions work and naked Unicorns just weren't getting it done I suppose).
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Xanth started out dumb, and after a few books, went FULL RETARD. Terrible. Those books are what made me hate him, Robert Jordan-style.
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I think it was called Juxtaposition or something like that.
IIRC the poor guys had to run around naked as they were not allowed to have clothing. And they had to compete in everything from the high jump to violin playing. If that isn't weird enough there was an alternate fantasy world the protagonist would go to (I forget how) where he could perform magic by singing in rhymes.
No I did not just make that up.
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That was it. Apprentice Adept series. Good call, dude.
Yeah, I read it when I was really young so my recollections of "pretty good" might be a little off.
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Funny, I picked up a Xanth novel a few years ago and within about five minutes managed to question everything I at one time believed was good about science fiction.
I wonder if people have the same feeling with the Harry Potter series?
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Phase something? Yeah, I read them all. The first three Xanth books were good. After that it was an excuse to write horrible puns.
I gave up on Piers halfway through Incarnations and Bio of a Space Tyrant and haven't looked back. Any comments are tinged with 25 years worth of nostalgia.
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It's worth noting that Charles Stross is a Brit, i.e. a descendant of those Europeans who felt it was not worth emigrating to those "few acres of snow" known as North America.
As I've argued before, those who first travel and colonize space won't be doing it for any "rational" reasons. They will be motivated by political or religious ideology.
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Voltaire was French.
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descendant of those Europeans
France is not in Europe?
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I would agree with this line of thinking. Historically colonists leave for religious or ideological persecution, real or perceived. Whether it will be materially better isn't as much of a concern provided certain basics are provided. This is the main reason why there was so much English colonization compared to other countries, even those with more of an incentive to exploit the potential resources.
While the moon and Mars are less hospitable than any place on Earth, they also are less governed.
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You missed the point, which was correct. Just because a thing exists, it does not follow that it is, or ever was, practical, or that it would have occurred regardless of the injection of force into the equation. When that force is removed, it becomes possible to make this determination.
Which is to say that the effect of force is to a) bring into existence things which should not exist, or b) to skew the time-to-market of things which should.
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Clearly human space flight is not impracticable, considering that there are half a dozen people on the space station right now.
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By any reasonably objective measure, U.S. human spaceflight policy is an awful mess.
Deaths per passenger mile still looks pretty good.
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Round and round we go.
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"Some would say that the Earth is our moon."
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But do not believe in those false choices.
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DRINK!
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"But that would belittle the name of our moon, which is: the Moon."
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While I agree there's no sense in wasting billions in sending astronauts up, I do like the idea of the James Webb Space Telescope since it's poised to give us an unprecedented look at deep space.
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Nothing to show? How about technology?
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It is definitely impractical for people who, because of the constraints of a peculiar dogma, are not allowed ever to pool their resources for purposes other than the protection of property and a couple other narrow-minded concerns.
Granted, purely speaking of human exploration of space, the program hasn't been terribly productive for its cost, but how many innovations have come from that research that created new industries and improved the quality of life for human beings? Pooling resources for the purpose of scientific advancement is one of the most useful things governments do and perhaps the most important infuser of productivity and progress in markets.
The libertarian world, where such things aren't allowed because of a terribly misguided (and crankily selfish) definition of freedom, is a dismal place. The ability of markets on their own to innovate is wildly overstated--almost every major innovation of the last century or two (and the industries that they spawned) had help, or was outright created, from an initial investment of government dollars. No matter what advances come in space exploration or space science, you will never be able to say a laissez-faire market delivered them. The laughably inept Ayn Rand worldview is a childish thing, and isn't it about time to put it away?
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Allow to speak for everyone for a minute if I may.........
STFU Tony.
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Nobody's forcing you to believe in childish bullshit. Life is so much better over here, where things like railroads, highways, space travel, the microchip, the Internet, not dying in a smallpox pandemic, and countless other wonderful things are not disallowed under the iron fist of free market dogmatism. You have nothing to offer but empty promises of utopia, like every cult. Why do you guys not see this? How can you believe in such a specific fringe stuff and not ever question why it doesn't catch on? More fundamentally, how can you know it's true when, because it never really catches on, it's never been tested? That's irrational belief right out of the gate.
How frustrating it must be to have to believe that academia is in a giant conspiracy to oppress you, rather than simply acknowledge that you hang onto an untenable philosophy.
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Nobody's forcing you to believe in childish bullshit.
But yet you lap it up like a good dog, don't you tony?
yesyourareagooddoogtony.....yesyouare....now go fetch me that copy of the federalist papers so I can hit you with them.
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Sorry but you don't get modern American libertarianism from the Federalist Papers, seeing as how they were written before modern capitalism existed, and were a treatise on how to make a bigger and stronger federal government, and were opposed to enumerating the Bill of Rights. I can list the ways in which the Federalist Papers specifically contradict the tenets of libertarianism. They're almost a direct refutation of it!
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Jeez, man... there are gross externalities to feeding the trolls. Just don't do it. Please don't do it.
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I don't think I've been remotely trollish... though substanceless insults and other childish behavior might qualify.
If I'm here for any reason it's to get some kind of a grasp on how living in an intellectual bubble can possibly appeal to people.
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though substanceless insults and other childish behavior might qualify.
Such as:
peculiar dogma
terribly misguided (and crankily selfish)
worldview is a childish thing
childish bullshit
irrational belief
Mote, beam, etc, etc.
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Those are not empty name-calling, they are accusations backed up with explanation. A dogma is a specific thing, and libertarianism is it. Childish might be taking license but at some point one must realize that most normal people stop finding Ayn Rand interesting sometime in high school.
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Yeah, I should know better. It's just that this version of Tony is so much more annoying than past versions.
It's tough sometimes to just ignore what a hypocritical asshole he is.
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I know it's difficult, but everything worth doing is difficult. Just hold on to that.
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What have I done that's hypocritical? You don't know how I live. I can think of few things more hypocritical--at least ironic--than using the government-invented Internet to indulge in dogmatic antigovernmentism.
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Stay strong, Tman. Count to 10. Take a walk around the block. You can get through this.
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I love how Reasonable will just leave a ghost of who I'm ignoring. It's like someone you hate shouting at you, from the outside, through a closed window in a loud, busy diner, which just makes them angrier.
WHAT'S THAT YOU SAID, FUCKWAFFLE? I CAN'T HEAR YOU!
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"Just walk away, Tman...just walk away."
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(walks away Eastwood style...shoots a hippie for good measure...)
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It really pisses you off that others can dream about things that you could never even fathom and that they might actually even have the balls to try it, don't it?
No surprise, you are the stereotypical type to sit in the corner of you mommies basement afraid to try anything that you might fail at, which I am guessing by your whining attitude, would be pretty much anything.
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"not allowed ever to pool their resources"
You said this, but you meant something else. As usual.
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human expansion off the planet
That's never been a goal of NASA. Such a goal is certainly unfeasible at this time and for the foreseeable future. Private space "exploration" in the near future will focus primarily on satellite boosts and suborbital joyrides for the wealthy. Huzzah!
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Personal computerized phones in everyone's pocket
That's never been a goal of the FCC. Such a goal is certainly unfeasible at this time and for the foreseeable future. Private "telecommunications" in the near future will focus primarily on more FAX lines and radio car phones for the wealthy. Huzzah!
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Now thats what I am talking about dude.
