Outer space or bust
Matt Towery has a piece on Townhall.com about the space program.
But after the shuttle returns safely, NASA and the Bush administration absolutely must re-evaluate the value of the program versus its risks and costs.
…
And the billion-dollar price tag that American taxpayers have picked up since the last tragic loss of shuttle and crew raises the biggest issue of all. Do we keep blindly spending mountains of cash on the space shuttle program without any regard for a cost/benefit analysis?
Consider that the fundamental developmental technology on which the shuttle program was initiated was the result of 1970s research and development. Today, the shuttles are referred to as “glass ships” because of the fragile foam tiles that protect them from the extreme heat of re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere.
As Jerry Pournelle has pointed out (and will point out again, any time you care to ask him), NASA’s main purpose is not to explore space — it’s to provide full employment for NASA engineers. That’s why any NASA launch requires a ground crew of hundreds of people, and Space Ship One got away with a much smaller crew.
We won’t have the kind of space program Towery wants without a lot more research on construction and propulsion systems, and we won’t get the kind of research we need to see from NASA, because success would mean a lot fewer engineers are needed to babysit each launch.
What they don’t see is that cheap space travel would eventually employ many times more engineers than NASA ever will. (To be fair, maybe some individual NASA engineers see this, but the bureaucrats aren’t paid to see it, so they don’t.)
Although I disagree with his opposition to the war in Iraq, Jerry Pournelle has one point I think is worth looking at. For less than we’ve spent in Iraq, we could orbit enough solar power satellites to provide for all our energy needs. Solar energy would be converted to microwaves and beamed into uninhabited areas of the country. (Area 51 in Nevada, for example.) In fact, we could become a net energy exporter.
It’s raining soup up there, and NASA launches the occasional fork.
Government programs gave us a “proof of concept” for space. NASA got us to the moon. But now, the imagination has dried up.Â
It’s time for private enterprise to pick up the concept and provide it’s own imagination. And it’s time for government to get out of the way.
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Stumble It!
June 29th, 2006 at 10:55 am
I agree. I think, since there IS still a considerable monetary risk at the moment with space programs, that a good possibility would be to locate a few companies to subsidize for space programs of their own, and then contract out a bunch of the NASA engineers to them. That way, the engineers get to stay employed, and we would have people who have an incentive to produce a more cost-efficient system running the show.
June 29th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
I discussed the solar power idea with a crazy leftist (no slur against Pournelle or Karl, just that whenever this leftist friend of mine said something, it always wasn’t backed up by any clear or truthful numbers or facts or detailed analysis.)
While there might be some energy increases by locating a solar panel collector station outside of the atmosphere, I wonder if the total energy and financial cost of putting them in orbit would offset just building more of them on the ground (as in area 51.) Silicon based solar panels are already net energy “losers” which is why they’re not yet a viable replacement energy source. Would microwaving energy down to the surface be 100% efficient? I don’t think so. What gets hot in a microwave oven? WATER! What substance is a gaseous vapor in our atmosphere?
Then there’s the cost of maintaining such stations: Even if cheap private space travel becomes possible, whose going to fix these panels as meteorites hit them, they have problems, etc? The hubble space telescope has broken down all over the place. Power plants on the earth’s surface are not “turnkey” and it’s doubtful one could be build in space.
I love the typical tactic of always “budgeting” proposed ideas by comparing them to a miliary budget therefore implying that the military budget is a wash. They never compare it to, say, the cost of social security. Or welfare. Or the amount of money that teacher’s unions collect…
June 30th, 2006 at 7:11 am
Actually, there are three main reasons for putting Solar Panels in space: More consistent solar energy striking the panels because of no weather variability, arrays can be put into orbits that allow them to collect through the night, increasing overall efficiency, and using diffuse, rather than focussed, microwaves, allows low-tech receivers, so energy can be sent to third-world countries who can put up what are essentially horizontal fences to catch the energy being beamed down.
I just looked up a NASA page, which also gives some information on how the panels would be more efficient than on Earth:
http://www.nasaexplores.com/show2_articlea.php?id=01-052