[extropy-chat] Fly Me to the Moon

[Charlie Stross]

On 5 Jun 2005, at 11:30, Dirk Bruere wrote:

Planet Earth had a greater space capability in the 1960s than it does 
now.
The moon race utterly screwed the entire space program.
The way it should have been done was the way it was done in SF. Namely, 
a fully reusable spaceplane followed by a space station and then moon 
landings and onwards to Mars. The past 30yrs has been a waste of time 
and money.

Au contraire :)

The past 30 years have taught us many things.

1. A spaceship needs wings and a retractable undercarriage like an 
automobile needs oars and sails.

2. Repeated paper studies (in search of the perfect space station 
design) cost more and deliver less than bending metal and patching 
prototypes in orbit (the Russian approach).

3. Putting intelligence into probes is a lot cheaper than adding mass. 
(Note the way Galileo, despite the high-gain antenna failure, managed 
to return masses of data to Earth via the low-gain antenna at a low bit 
rate, by using new compression algorithms that simply weren’t available 
when it was launched. If Galileo had been built with Pioneer 10 levels 
of smarts and launched a decade earlier, it would have been a failure.)

4. 30 years ago the “space industry” then existing was basically the 
military-industrial complex. Today, entirely commercial space 
transportation services are turning over more money than the global air 
freight business. (And you call this an “abject failure”? Put it 
another way, government funding for space could stop tomorrow, and we’d 
still have a presence to  build on.)

5. Materials technology is moving on, and if bonded fullerenes achieve 
their potential -- and there are lots of profitable intermediate steps 
on the way to getting what we *really* want -- then building a space 
elevator should be a civil engineering project on the same order of 
cost as the Channel Tunnel. At which point it will happen. Profitable 
industry #1 that really, REALLY needs a space elevator? High level 
radioactive waste disposal. (You simply can’t trust it to something as 
unreliable as a rocket.)

I don’t call this a disaster; I call this solid progress, given that 
we’re constrained by both physical laws (meaning: chemical rockets 
won’t get us much more bang per buck than we’ve already got) and 
complexity and scaling laws (meaning: as we add complexity, we increase 
the chances of failure dramatically -- and yes, I’m talking about 
direct nuclear-thermal propulsion here).


-- Charlie