[extropy-chat] Fly Me to the Moon

[Dirk Bruere]

Charlie Stross wrote:

>
> 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.
>
I'd dispute that.
Almost all designs for a fully reusable spacecraft have wings.

> 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).
>
And also the US approach up to (around) the mid 1960s.
That's why we went from piston engined aircraft to manned orbital flight 
in less than 20yrs.

> 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.)
>
That's thanks to the semiconductor industry and would have happened anyway.

> 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.)
>
That's a capability that existed in the mid 1960s. Or don't satellites 
get lofted by Titans anymore?
The market is comsats, weathersats and spysats.
It is not what I call a 'real' space program.

> 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.)
>
All this would have happened without any investment in space tech at all.

> 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).
>
I call it billion (trillions?) of dollars down the drain with nothing to 
show for it except some old footprints in the Lunar soil.

-- 
Dirk

The Consensus:-
The political party for the new millenium
http://www.theconsensus.org



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