Now that NASA has formally released its Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS)—even though many of the details of plan had been leaked to the public weeks, if not months, ago—members of Congress are weighing in. Nor surprisingly, people like Reps. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) and Ken Calvert (R-CA) are supportive: Calvert said he “welcome[s]” the study while Boehlert calls ESAS “an effective way to move forward”, although he cautioned that “there is simply no credible way to accelerate the development of a Crew Exploration Vehicle unless the NASA budget increases more than has been anticipated.”
Not everyone shares their enthusiasm, though. Florida Today reports that some Republicans and Democrats are critical of the plan and its $100-billion price tag. This includes both liberals like Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), who said that the plan is “a terrible misallocation of scarce resources”, and Rep. Jeff Miller (R-FL), who believes that NASA should not “be immune to the budget knife.”
Somewhere in the middle is Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. In a statement the avid supporter of the shuttle program said she would “do everything possible to keep the shuttle and crew exploration vehicle programs on course”, a declaration the Washington Post calls “enigmatic”.
Will the $100-billion price of the ESAS plan (quoted in nearly every news report about it) be an anchor that fatally weighs down the plan in the eyes of the public and Congress, in a time when hurricane relief and other programs compete for funding? Or, can NASA and its supporters make the plan so compelling the cost becomes much less of an issue? Those are the issues that will play out in the weeks and months to come.
Yes other than Griffin’s poor presentation that one clumsy $104 billion comment did more harm than anything else he said. Why oh why didn’t he simply say it would be funded totally out of the existing budget. As every salesman knows you don’t quote prices just over the magic 100 mark, it sounds horrific; and X per year is always better received than X*12.
There again Griffin shows us he is a true engineer not only by the way he talks about money and but also by the way he gave comprehensive detailed technical answers to every question. On the other hand he my be more adroit than meets the eye in his strategy of leaving Congress to press for a faster program and to supply the bucks.
The networks are certainly highlighting the $104 billion angle, contrasting it directly with the assumed $200 billion Katrina bill, failing to mention that it isn’t additional money.
THe fortunate thing about Griffin’s presentation is that hardly anyone saw it. His detailed responses should appeal to those folks who were watching, and I agree he’s clever enough to know his real audience is Congress, not the public. His so far unspoken potential ace is this: Rolling back VSE means no American human spaceflight capability after 2010.
Meanwhile, he should have been slapped for the “Apollo on Steroids” headline.
I have been listening to some of the talk radio reactions to the VSE and it is important to note that it is not specifically the cost of the program that is criticized but the fact that it will take 13+ years to essentially duplicate what Apollo accomplished in ~7 years. This discrepancy is used to highlight the ineffectiveness/incompetence of Government programs. While not wholly fair, this is what the general public is going to perceive.
…he should have been slapped for the “Apollo on Steroids” headline.
Really? Was it a faux pas (defined as someone accidentally blurting out the truth)?
After looking over NASA’s plan for returning to the moon for me there is a lot to like and there is some disappointment. I like the development of the HLV from shuttle components as I believe that should have the shortest, least expensive development track. I’m still not convinced that the CEV on a stick (5 segment SRB) is the right way to go. For one thing the boosters are a notoriously bumpy ride.
I like the idea that we’re not trying to re-invent the wheel. At this phase discoveries should be coming from the exploration not the technology. Development problems and rising costs have killed to many other manned vehicles in the past.
Limited reusability is a good thing. A CEV should be good for UP TO 10 missions. This should keep acquisition costs relatively low. NASA will have to keep an eye on refurbishment costs.
I would have liked to see some sort of infrastructure built in space like a reusable lunar transfer stage, lunar lander or lunar base. I hope these will come very soon after the initial missions to keep the momentum going.
The biggest mistake made during the presentation was the price quote of $100 billon dollars. That seems to be the issue that the news media has focused on. It would have been much better to mention that NASA was going to do this with their present budget. It’s easer to sell the Ronco rotisserie at 5 easy payments of $39.95 then at $200 bucks.
Same with space missions which have now been lumped into the $200B for Katrina rebuilding and $250B for Iraq.
The timetable is worrisome also. The target date for first launch of the CEV should have been early to mid 2009 with a phased shutdown of the shuttle beginning in 2008. That would have made it harder for the next congress and administration to kill it.
“Or, can NASA and its supporters make the plan so compelling the cost becomes much less of an issue?”
Not a chance!
— Donald
I think NASA HQ should hire Edward Tufte for a short course on “the cognitive style of PowerPoint”, then they should do ESAS and the rollout again.
In particular, they should look at The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation:
http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm
and then go back and study the expressions and body language of the reporters in the ESAS Q&A session relative to the ESAS PowerPoint presentation.
Next time, they should do more with models than keep a few small ones at their feet.
Incidentally, I do think Griffin handled the Katrina recovery question well, and I also note that he was honest and straightforward in giving the $100bn figure.
So, billg, do you think he picked the wrong illegal drug too?
I listened to Bortz talk for a little while about it taking twice as long for this “Apollo”. I guess that’s what all our technology brings to the table, it takes longer and costs more. He doesn’t get any points with me for the $100 billion figure, because it’s spitting in the ocean compared to what it will really cost. Conservatives are increasingly skeptical about NASA and that used to be their fan base. They’re in big trouble, and this ESAS thing ain’t going to help any.
Apollo on Xanax?
Actually, legend has it that the Florida pharmacists could deduce when Apollo launches were just from the spikes in tranquiliser sales.
>>While not wholly fair, this is what the general public is going to perceive.
It isn’t fair, but i wouldn’t equate today’s talk radio spin with public opinion. Most of the public isn’t listening. Besides, even talk radio hosts ought to be smart enough to understand, first, that Apollo went faster because it was time-centric (Kennedy did set a deadline, after all), while VSE is budget-centric. The schedule will slip in response to funding shortfalls. Second, we replaced the infrastructure capable of going to the Moon with on capable only of LEO just about 25 years ago.
>>Really? Was it a faux pax?
No. It was bad PR. That’s why Griffin was there. The entire presentation was amateurish.
I fail to understand the rap on this as Apollo Redux. So what? What’s a rocket with a payload on top supposed to look like? What’s a payload supposed to look like if it needs to go from 25,000 mph to zero in less than an hour? As long as we’re launching rockets from Earth’s surface and recovering the payloads, they’ll look and behave like this. (Assuming, of course, we don’t build some Rube Goldbergian contraption like Shuttle again.) One might as well pan the billion dollar B-2 as the “Wright Flyer on steroids”.
>>The target date for first launch of the CEV should have been early to mid 2009 with a phased shutdown of the shuttle beginning in 2008. That would have made it harder for the next congress and administration to kill it.
Maybe. but Bush has always constrained this to current NASA funding levels. It is rather perverse that he has been so profligate elsewhere but still wants to play the role of conservative tightwad with NASA.
>>…it’s spitting in the ocean compared to what it will really cost
Fine. How do you know? Access to Mike Griffin’s Secret Budget?
>>Conservatives are increasingly skeptical about NASA and that used to be their fan base.
Fine, again. What are they going to do? Eliminate it and turn the money over to a band of Earthbound Powerpoint mavens? That might work if the private sector has actually managed to fly something beyond Rutan’s one-off gizmo. In truth, a good chunk would end up in Tom DeLay’s bank account, and a lot of the rest in his defense fund.
I don’t want any taxpayer money going to the private sector until they’ve actually demonstrated the capablity to do what they’re being paid to do. I know the rules are different for Boeing, Lockheed, etc., but that’s tough.
Billg: “I don’t want any taxpayer money going to the private sector until they’ve actually demonstrated the capablity to do what they’re being paid to do.”
I agree. I’ve never bought all this nonesense about NASA or the Shuttle or whatever standing in the way of the glorious march of private enterprise. Certainly today, there are plenty of markets not under NASA’s direct control. If the alt.space crowd could really deliver the goods — a launch price of, say, fifty percent of what it is now — the world would beat a path to their door and trample the Shuttle in the stampede. What the alt.space crowd wants is free development money and their ain’t no free money in this world. What the they are actually demonstrating is that it is, in fact, awfully tough to get into orbit using chemical rockets.
All that said, though, I would not be opposed to NASA _promising_ money to innovative launch companies through guaranteed purchases or whatever. I’m very uncomfortable with Mr. Griffin insisting the NASA maintain Earth-to-orbit capabilities duplicating what private companies can and should provide. One of the things I like least about Mr. Griffin’s plan is how hard it makes it for entreprenurs to get a leg in. What part of placing SSMEs at the bottom of an ET allows for innovation?
We’ve had some unfortunate timing regarding the dot.com crash. Anyone know whatever happened to SpaceX? The last I heard they were supposed to launch in “late September.”
— Donald
Maybe. but Bush has always constrained this to current NASA funding levels. It is rather perverse that he has been so profligate elsewhere but still wants to play the role of conservative tightwad with NASA.
Tightwad? At least Bush has increased NASA’s budget every year of his presidency. Although at the rate he’s going he will probably not get NASA’s inflation-adjusted budget back up to where it was at the end of his father’s presidency, before Clinton started cutting it.
Donald, I agree, although I don’t think innovation equates to bringing in commercial fliers, or vice versa. (I don’t consider flights to ISS by anyone to be especially innovative.) Griffin made it clear he wants to buy ISS support flights, but that he won’t give up the government’s capability to do that.
I don’t oppose commercial ventures in space. In fact, i would be ecstatic if people started flying tomorrow. I just don’t expect to see many successful profit-making space exploration activities. The most apt terrestrial counterpart to a spaceship is the submarine, not the airplane. Commercial uses of submarines are very few and far between. In my judgment, commercial space activities will be equally rare so long as we are using rockets as our means of transport. We need a propulsion breakthrough that makes the Moon-and-back a brief daytrip and Mars a week’s journey before we can begin to seek the Eldorado that many think is out there. And, I suspect Eldorado is no more located there than it was in the high plains of the the American southwest. If we are really going to exploit and settle the Solar System, something besides profit will need to motivate us.
Meanwhile, so long as we are stuck using rockers. it would really help if we also found a way to begin and end missions off the planet. If we could put payload in LEO without rockets, the advantages are obvious. If we could bring payload from LEO to the surface slowly enough to eliminate the need for a heatshield, those advantages would be equally impressive.
>> It isn’t fair, but i wouldn’t equate today’s talk radio spin with public opinion.
I would. I work (just started recently in fact) for one of the “Big Three Contractors”. When I talk to friends, family, etc., the first question after I tell them where I work and what I do is “Why? Why do we need to explore Jupiter/Mars/Moon/favorite space locale of the day?” It comes down to will we ever land a person on Jupiter?; Haven’t we already done the Moon thing? What is on Mars that is useful? Doing “Science” doesn’t impress them since there is lots of science that needs to be done here on Earth every day.
>> I don’t want any taxpayer money going to the private sector until they’ve actually demonstrated the capablity to do what they’re being paid to do.
Just rewrite this as “I don’t want any taxpayer money going to NASA until they’ve actually demonstrated the capablity to do what they’re being paid to do.” For reference I point to Shuttle-ABCDE… of the 80’s and 90’s, Space Station, X-ZZ programs of the 90’s, ISTP that lasted for about 1 legislative year, SLI where NASA deemed the commercial launchers just didn’t understand how to make launch vehicles safely/cheaply/reliably and that NASA was here to save the day and kerosene was the fuel of the future and LOX/H2 was just too problematic. Quite frankly, NASA manned space has been a dismal failure since Apollo and the space community is just supposed to trust that they will get it right this time. How many times has the community heard that one?
Your original post asserted talk radio and the public were critical because VSE wasn’t going to proceed fast enough. That implies a great deal of public support for space travel. Now, you assert that the public is not at all interested in space travel.
However, the “Why?” question is the right question, and the space community has failed to answer it. That’s the reason people keep asking the question over and over. We haven’t articulated any compelling reason to support space travel that resonates with the general public.
The government plays by different rules, like it or not. More to the point, NASA has demonstrated, for more than 40 years, the capacity to put people in to space. While I agree that the Shuttle has been a 30-year waste of time, it is a system designed to meet a budget. NASA’s initial post-Apollo plans included lunar bases and Mars missions, not the Shuttle. Politics, not NASA, ended that and gave rise to the Shuttle.
So, no I don’t want taxpayers money going to any commercial company that hasn’t demonstrate the capacity to deliver the goods, whether those are space-related or not.
Meanwhile, NASA doesn’t owe the space community a damn thing, especially including lobbying the President to change their marching orders to please a small band of off-field kibitizers. If the “community’ wants to get in the game, it needs to bring some money and ante up.
More to the point, NASA has demonstrated, for more than 40 years, the capacity to put people in to space.
So how many NASA people-d space flights have there been since Columbia burned up, and how many years will pass until the nrxt Shuttle launch?
His so far unspoken potential ace is this: Rolling back VSE means no American human spaceflight capability after 2010.
Oh, by that time NASA may have an improved External Tank that will allow STS missions to resume.
What, GuessWho, you’re using NASA’s past cost and schedule performance to predict how well they will execute in the future? What are you, some kind of thinking person?
It’s too bad. Griffin could have turned things around and pulled NASA’s fat out of the fire, but he’s not going to. He’s just more of the same. Here is the quote from his news conference that I hope comes back to haunt him: “When we have a hurricane, we don’t cancel the Air Force. We don’t cancel the Navy and we’re not going to cancel NASA.” He is really so arrogant to think NASA is on a par with the Air Force and Navy? Hmm, let’s be analytical here, Mike. They defend our country, and you do what for us again? Spend our money? You’re outta there. The USAF can do what you do, and we actually do need them.
Felllow Space Politickers, you all seem to be neglecting another like item in the ESAS slide show.
That little item is sixteen ( 16) more ISS component delivery flights, plus a Hubble Telescope repair mission.
NASA’s long term default behavior is to keep flying the Shuttle to the ISS, while aborting development of any other manned spacecraft.
This is what will happen. The Shuttle will keep flying on past 2010, when Dr. Micky Mouse Griffin’s Apollo on steroids slide show is as forgotten as the Orbital Space Plane or the X-33 or the [scramjet] National Aerospace Plane.
You bring up another point that really hits a nerve with me. The biggest failure NASA has is the one that’s going to continue to 2010 while everything else is cut to work on this ESAS thing. Space station has no part in ESAS, as expected due to it’s orbital inclination, and it has been a big failure in every possible respect, but it will continue on too. This whole thing is a tribute to the power of the big program, isn’t it? Now NASA has one more big program to suck down all the funds the other two weren’t getting.
>>So how many NASA people-d space flights have there been since Columbia burned up, and how many years will pass until the nrxt Shuttle launch?
How many people has the commeical sector put in space, ever?
Space exploration is not about the number of passengers you haul there. You seem to be interested in making suborbital and orbital travel widely avilable at affordable prices. That’d be nice, but it is not at the rop of my agenda.
Frankly, after the novelty wore off, I don’t think there’d be all that much business. Why? There’s essentially no place to go. Travel is usually about going from one collection of humans to visit another. There are no humans off-Earth and, sad to say, until we find a better, faster way to move in space, there won’t be.
Dfens, the ISS exists beecause the last few presidents want it to exist for reasons that have nothing to do with space exploration. It is blantantly disingenuous to blame NASA for doing something politics compels them to do. (The government is full of agencies spending billions to do things they don’t want to do. Just asked DoD, for example.)
Griffin lacks the authority to cancel ISS or to end the Shuttle now, or to do something at odds with Bush’s VSE. If he has actually suggested those things to the White House, we will never know, because to speak of them publicly would be the last thing he did as NASA administrator.
I’d like to see ISS canceled now. I’d like to see Shuttle cancelled now. But, Bush is the only person who can do that.
Now that Mr. Griffin’s plan is actually out, everyone seems to have caught my depression bug. So, I’m going to change my tune and argue the other side for a second.
Billg: “Frankly, after the novelty wore off, I don’t think there’d be all that much business. Why? There’s essentially no place to go. Travel is usually about going from one collection of humans to visit another.”
That is why the single highest priority of the space program needs to be to create someplace to go. We have a start with the Space Station, and before everyone gets to exciting about cancelling that because it is “useless,” lets keep in mind that if alt.space is going to have a market in the next decade, that is it. If we want alt.space to succeed, we’d better support the Space Station to the hilt, however useless it may or may not be.
This is also why Mr. Bush’s vision, in the wider sense, is the correct road. We’ve got to establish high cost bases now, so that low cost transportation has a reason to exist. I don’t like Mr. Griffin’s choices of rockets — not least because the EELVs would have provided a much easier entry for alt.space upgrades and replacements than the Shuttle-derived components will. But, if he actually makes it to the moon, and manages to place some permanent infrastructure there — and especially if I’m correct about the stengthening political support for human spaceflight — alt.space will have somewhere to go. Then, we can start that beneficial feedback of bases encouraging better transportation which in turn allows bigger bases which require more logistics and better transportation. . . .
It does not have to be profitable. Was colonizing the American continent profitable? Certainly not at first. You only need a reason, and these reasons are more commonly idological than commercial. (Republican support of human spaceflight has little to do with commerce, even in theory, and everything to do with a grander America — Reagan’s “morning in America.”) It does not matter if the Space Station and Lunar Base are “useless,” they are markets.
In the short term, using Shuttle components does have advantages, I suppose. It keeps the pro-Shuttle political crowd in line, and that is probably very important. It may not be a minor part of Mr. Griffin’s thinking.
— Donald
>> … the ISS exists beecause the last few presidents want it to exist for reasons that have nothing to do with space exploration. It is blantantly disingenuous to blame NASA for doing something politics compels them to do.
This is such a motherhood statement it is difficult to respond to. If ISS, and from my viewpoint, by extension the Shuttle are purely political white elephants, then lets examine the motivations behind them. ISS is not for science since it clearly has failed to deliver even a tenth of what was advertised. One possibility is that it was purely a job-works program for select Congressional districts. I would have to say this was successful. Did it foster greater international cooperation (space-related or not)? I don’t think so. Politically, the EU hates us (Britain to some extent excluded) because we are the only superpower and they envy our global influence while France/Germany are has-been powers and their economies are in the toilet. The EU seems more intent on federally backing their industrieas to directly compete with US companies. So we either support our own industrial base (yes, the big contractors too since they are the primary suppliers of aircraft/launch vehicles/etc) with help from the Govt or see all that business go overseas. Did it result in a large number of former Soviet scientists from selling their expertise to undesireable nations? Debatable but I think, with little evidence to back it up at this juncture, that this objective was only marginally successful. Thus ISS/STS, and in my opinion NASA as a whole over the last twenty years, has been nothing but a job works program that can occasionally be justified by highlighting a rare NASA success (usually from the robotic side which is now suffering significant cuts due to ESAS).
GuessWho, I think if you recall the pre-Clinton Congressional testimony regarding the Space Station, it was all about the United States’ “destiny” in space. (I wanted to type “manifest destiny,” but, while I think the motivation was very similar, those words would not have been used.) I mean no defense of Mr. Clinton when I say that he was the first to give the project a “practical” reason to exist, however marginal that practical reason may have been. (I don’t think it was, but I’ll allow that for the sake of argument.)
The Space Station exists because a group in Congress and the Senate believed it was critical to maintain the United States’ human spaceflight skills, and they managed to convince enough of their colligues to win the votes (one by only one vote!). It was all about “America’s place in space,” and had little to do with any practical application.
My response would be, so what? It exists, it’s a market for alt.space, let’s use it.
— Donald
I know why each big program exists, but when you step back and look at the situation as a whole, it is laughable. Recently we were discussing a DoD satellite that was deemed overly complex and technically risky, but if you look at the trend in NASA’s own budget you see that the smaller, more efficient programs are all being squeezed out in favor of the large, wasteful programs with lots of political clout.
As I’ve stated before, this is the trend ever since we went away from the matrix organization. It used to be NASA was about people, now it is about programs. When it was about people, there was accountability. Now that it is about programs, there is no accountability.
In fact, there seems to be inverse accountability. The more a big program screws up, the more money they get to fix what they shouldn’t have screwed up in the first place. Conversely, no matter how much the small programs produce, relatively speaking, they are rewarded by being squashed like bugs because they don’t have the political clout to fend off the big program raids on their budgets.
Donald, I’m interested in seeing people explore and exploit space. Whether that comes about via big, lumbering government or less lumbering private enterprise is pretty much irrelevant to me. I just don’t get animated by the government versus commercial debate. I don’t worry if NASA costs too much and goes too slow. If the commerical sector does it in half the time at half the price, then I’ll be among the first to applaud. It is the going that concerns me, not the cost or the schedule or the motivation.
Five hundred years ago, a lot of Europeans did a lot of exploring and exploiting, and no one today really cares who paid for their expeditions. Looking back from 500 years, the important thing is that it happened. We should adopt a similar perspective when pondering human movement into space. If we do, in fact, have descendants on Mars or in the Alpha Centauri system 500 years from now, they won’t care who paid for 500-year old trips, either.
I can’t disagree with the logic of your assertion that we should build places in space that attract people. But, to refer back to my submarine analogy, I don’t think that’s much more likely than our building places on the bottom of the ocean that attract visitors. Yes, that is technically feasible. Yes, a few people would make the trip. Everyone else would stay where they were.
Space is a lethal environment. Every place in space we’ve scouted is hostile at best and lethal at worst. Yes, we have the technology to protect people in those environments. But, we’ve had the technology to protect people at the South Pole for a century, and no one is building condos there.
I don’t say that to pooh-pooh alt.space or any other kind of space advocacy. I’m one, too, and have been all my life. I say it because I believe the incentives for successful commercial human space activity are very limited, at least given our current and foreseeable technical capabilities. I think there’s money to be made supporting LEO activities, perhaps in actual LEO activity, and in quasi-barnstorming tourism flights. It is within the realm of possibility that, someday, we may mine the Moon to support energy production. Anything else that can happen, should happen. I’d love to see it, but I doubt I will. I think we’re in the present mode until we find a way to get around Einstein so we can scout for real Earth-like planets in other star systems.
Billg: “Five hundred years ago, a lot of Europeans did a lot of exploring and exploiting, and no one today really cares who paid for their expeditions.”
My argument boils down to, they did it and did it successfully, so it behooves us to look at how they did it. The fact is, the European governments generally paid for the initial base, and commercial interests followed. If you haven’t done so, do read my rather out-of-date but still relevant Spaceflight article on this subject here,
http://www.speakeasy.org/~donaldfr/sfmodel.pdf
You are correct about submarines, Antarctica, et al, but maybe that’s because we’re ignoring the lessons of history and going about it the wrong way. There seems to be little ideological interest in ocean floor bases, they haven’t been deployed, so there is no place for submarines to go. For whatever reason, there seems to be intense ideological interest in bases out in the Solar System. Therefore, they are far more likely to happen than oceanic or Antarctic colonies.
As to why space settlement is more interesting to humanity than ocean floor settlement, well, one is a frontier without end, but other than that I haven’t a clue. I know that if someone offered me a ticket to visit apparently dead Mars, and one to visit the deep ocean with all its life and color at the same price, I (and I think most people) would choose Mars in an instant. I don’t pretend to understand it even in myself, but there it is.
— Donald
Donald: Many lessons gained here on Earth can be applied to space exploration, but 15th and 16th century Europeans didn’t need to build and cart along a complete Earth-like ecosystem in miniature. Getting into space is hard; staying there is really hard.
That said, I agree that it is relevant that initial European exploration was state funded. States — monarchies, really — coughed up the cash because they believed it was in their interest to do so. Sometimes they saw a strategic interest, sometimes a personal financial interest; often they saw little distinction between the two motives.
I tend to think we’re in the Prince Henry stage of things, sending out the equivalent of a few caravelles to the Azores and Canaries.
Ideology seems to me a poor substitute for long-term self-interest and self-aggrandizement. The former may spur heated bouts of activity, but the passion usually doesn’t last long enough to sustain the effort. Exploration and exploitation sparked today by ideology will die tomorrow when our children no longer believe. Exploration and exploitation prompted by a realistic chance to make a living and a life will last. As I’ve said, I think opportunities for that are rather slim. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect not.
And, like you, if offered a chance to go to Mars or the deep ocean, I’d opt for Mars without a second’s thought. However, I think most people would take a pass on both destinations. What we need to change that is, first, the ability to get there, in comfort, in a week or two, and, second, a safe environment that promises financial reward for the individual emigrant.
What we need to change that is, first, the ability to get there, in comfort, in a week or two
You won’t get to Mars in a week or two using a Shuttle-derived chemical rocket. Fission propulsion, using liquid H2 as the propellant? Fission seems to be out of Dr. Griffin’s Vision.
and, second, a safe environment that promises financial reward for the individual emigrant.
Not necessarily. The Puritans did not colonize New England in the 17th century because New England was safe, not were the settlements at Plymouth, then Boston, Salem (!), etc., particularly financially rewarding for the individual Puritan settler.
They were settlers, not immigrants, btw.
/////
You know what I’d like to do with Mars? Deport all the Muslims there. Let them have there own Planet, where everyone can be governed according to Muhammed’s immutable laws, Praise Be Unto Him.
Your last sentence may be true for “common” immigrants, but I agree with you that it will be a long, long time before that need concern us. We’re talking about the hearty few that are willing to sustain great hardship. Also, don’t underestimate ideology: who colonized Utah? and I’m only partially joking when I say you might as well colonize the moon. We are at, or a little before, the Lewis and Clark stage on the moon and that is probably the best that we can expect of the VSE at this point in time. Before the kind of colonization you’re talking about in that last sentence can happen, we need the equivalent of the British Navy exploring and mapping the world, and that won’t be complete in the Solar System for many centuries to come.
I agree with you (and Greg) that space is really, really hard. That’s why I usually use as my model learning to travel confidently over the extremely hostile environment of Earth’s oceans, which took us some ten- to twelve-thousand years to master. Spaceflight will be even harder and our tools are no better compared to the job than were the log dugouts floating over ice-flecked, storm tossed waves to get to barely habitable North Sea islands immediately after the ice withdrew — but the fact that we did it once implies we can do it again.
One of the problems we space activists have is that we expect way too much too soon and set wholly unrealistic expectations. Colonizing the Solar System is a project that will last many thousands of years, at best; our part of it at this point in time is to start understanding the lunar environment with scientists on site in human expeditions, and preparing to do the same at Mars. The rest can wait because it must.
— Donald
The thing that will spur exploitation is discovering something to exploit. Think of how the lunar exploration program would be different had one of the rocks the astronauts picked up been a lump of gold. I think it is reasonable that the US government explore nearby planets and moons to discover their resources. I think there is a demonstrated willingness of “we the people” to fund such exploration. Where the whole thing falls apart is in the ability of NASA to do the job.
I think it is ridiculous to look at NASA’s track record and assume because you’ve put a new person in charge suddenly everything is going to change for the better. Have all the other NASA directors since the ’70s been abject idiots? Certainly not! They’ve all been bright people faced with difficult circumstances, which many have been unable to overcome despite heroic efforts.
It is hubris for Mike Griffin to assume that because he is so much smarter he alone is going to right the wrongs of NASA. I don’t care how smart he thinks he is, he isn’t that smart. It would be better if he would be a leader and do what is necessary to enlist and enable those under him to do the best work they are capable of than for him to try to do it all himself. That’s leadership. That’s the quality by which a leader is defined. Not by how smart they are.
One thing I’ve learned from doing design work, is that it is full of contradictions. You have to be a arrogant to believe you can design something better than anyone else can, but you have to balance that with an ability to listen to others with more expertise in any given aspect of your design. You never know who is going to come up with a brilliant idea. If you are focused on the product you will not only be happy to integrate ideas from others, you will do everything possible to foster those ideas. A good designer gets excited about what they are trying to build. That excitement is contagious. They aren’t Spock. They care about building a team, because it’s the product that’s important, not themselves. Ironically it’s the people who care more about the product than their own ego, people like Kelly Johnson, Jack Northrop, Verner Von Braun, who build the truly great monuments.
Mike Griffin might have an impressive list of degrees, but what has he ever designed? Nothing! Now he is supposed to design a manned space program. They should get someone who is qualified for the job.
>>We’re talking about the hearty few that are willing to sustain great hardship.
Donald, to continue with the European model, that would be folks looking to get rich quick, as did the Spanish and the people at Jamestown. A lot of Spaniards and native Americans died while the conquistadores were looking for wealth that wasn’t there. Ditto the Jamestown settlers, although after most of them died during the first winter they slowly changed their tune.
What profit came to those early efforts was due to extractive industry. Gold and silver in the case of the Spaniards, and slavery to support tobacco in the case of the Virginians. Neither, alone, were sufficient to establish a sustainable society.
Whether or not similar extractive opportunities await in space remains to be seen. Wearing my gloomy hat, I’d say the cost and unprofitability of finding out precludes much activity in that arena.
That said, I agree that the timeline for human migration into space needs to be measured in centuries. I don’t doubt that we can pull off the equivalent of inhabiting “barely habitable North Sea islands”. I’m just not sure if anyone will want to.
That said, I agree that the timeline for human migration into space needs to be measured in centuries.
Going this far into the future is very problematic, since you have to consider possibilities like the now-cliched Vingean Singularity. Perhaps the first human on Mars will not land there, but be downloaded there.
I expressed an opinion to Bill Higgins a few years ago that all this space stuff was going to be made irrelevant by the much more rapid advance of info/bio/neuro technologies, and everything I’ve seen since then has reinforced that opinion.
It is true that the technological singularity has been bouncing around the blogosphere lately, but even as a cliche it is actually much older. Many of the early computer scientists thought of the same idea. The specific singularity metaphor (which refers to singular solutions of differential equations) is due not to Vernor Vinge, but to John von Neumann. Vinge, however, is also a science fiction author.
If there is a technological singularity, then afterwards it won’t be very important whether humans go to Mars. After all, neither people nor ants care whether ants make it to Mars. Even if the ants could care, people wouldn’t care.
What profit came to those early efforts was due to extractive industry. Gold and silver in the case of the Spaniards, and slavery to support tobacco in the case of the Virginians.Neither, alone, were sufficient to establish a sustainable society.
Unlike the sustainable society of the New England Puritans, who had neither precious metals nor the climate and cropland to grow tobacco and cotton for cash export.
Nor were the Protestant colonies of New England founded on some bogus notion of the wonderful diversity of its settlers.
Yet New England persisted and prevailed. You, sir, fail to acknowledge the spiritual, moral,and social profits enjoyed by the early New Egnlanders.
And early New England was “world class” in the worldly endeavors of shipbuilding and sailing.
Dave: your comments highlight another important point. The economy is much more integrated now than it was three centuries ago. Then, most people worked to produce for themselves (mostly on farms), perhaps trading a bit of the surplus in the local area. Today, each of us provides (and obtains) good and services in a global economic net.
It was relatively easy to snip off a small part of the economy in the late 1600s and transplant it to a new continent. It is very much harder to do that now.
>>You won’t get to Mars in a week or two using a Shuttle-derived chemical rocket.
No, you won’t. David. But, Griffin’s tasking from the President did not include delaying the Moon and Mars missions until new exotic propulsion technology had been invented and delivered. It’s unfair to criticize Griffin for failing to distort his orders.
I’d love nothing more than a serious effort to create breakthrough propulsion. But, even with that, I think it will be decades, at least, before we see it. I’m sure that space exploration in our lifetimes will be based on chemical rockets. (I don’t count fission rockets as breakthrough propulsion.)
About those Puritans: Yes, they were driven by ideology. No, the Pilgrims were not Puritans. After the pioneer period, surely by 1700, most New England residents lived better lives than their relatives in England. Most white colonists anywhere lived better lives than their British cousins. And, they were immigrants who settled in New England; your comment is pointless.
Your final and totally unrelated blast of bigotry and hatred destroys any credibility you may have been seeking, and insults the other posters here.
I doubt there will be any large scale farming of the Moon. Regardless, we won’t know what its key value for economic exploitation is until we explore it enough to have an idea of what resources it has and how accessable they are.
The thing is, though, we are still in the same predicament today as we were yesterday. We still don’t have a reasonable method of getting to low Earth orbit. All space exploration begins or ends with that capability. NASA seems to be totally incompetent in regard to reducing the cost of anything. There are plenty of decades old concepts that would be cheaper than what we’ve got or what NASA is proposing. Maybe it is time we stopped taking money away from the taxpayers and let the capitalists step up. I don’t see how they could do any worse.
>>You, sir, fail to acknowledge the spiritual, moral,and social profits enjoyed by the early New Egnlanders.
No, David. I don’t. I didn’t mention the New Englanders because they were an exception to the more general get-rich-quick impetus for European conquest of the America. (You will recall, I’m sure, that Spanish conquest of the Americas preceded the Puritans by more than a century.)
The New Englanders prospered economically because they found a few products that British and European merchants found profitable to import. That, in turn, spurred New England shipbuilding, essentially an extractive industry based on mining the forests.
Finally, as to the spiritual and moral nature of the Puritans, suffice it to say that a good deal of their prosperity was dependent on the profits of the slave trade.
So, unless you’re arguing that Mars will be the source of products worth importing to Earth, or that we should revive the slave trade, you might want to rethink your position.
“What profit came to those early efforts was due to extractive industry. Gold and silver in the case of the Spaniards, and slavery to support tobacco in the case of the Virginians.”
Because New England for so long dominated the cultural scene and American self-image, we think of Plymouth Rock more often than Jamestown. But historians know that Virginia dominated in terms of population, profit and prosperity for most of the 150 colonial years.
So I’ve long felt that we should re-tool our school pageants from Pilgrims and Indians to a more representative image of a well-to-do Tidewater family bowing heads as the patriarch intones: “Dear Lord, thank you for an addictive drug and slaves to tend it.”
I can’t imagine why my local school board is so resistant to the idea.
Monte, it also usually forgotten that the Pilgrims were aiming for a landing in Virginia, but weather and bad luck forced them into New England. Their significance in American society is overrated, and owes more to the mythology surrounding them than to their actual impact.
Paul D: “I expressed an opinion to Bill Higgins a few years ago that all this space stuff was going to be made irrelevant by the much more rapid advance of info/bio/neuro technologies, and everything I’ve seen since then has reinforced that opinion.”
Singularities aside, you can see just that movement in Freeman Dyson’s thinking. He, Ted Taylor, and the others involved in Orion were convinced by 1958 that chemical rockets weren’t ever likely to get us into space on an interesting scale.
Since Orion and nuclear-thermal for launch became “roads not taken,” he’s focused on smaller and smarter payloads: combinations of robotics and biotechnology, which benefit from Moore’s Law and the Moore’s-Law-like possibilities of genetic engineering — for example, the “astrochicken” in “Infinite in All Directions.”
It’s an interesting alternative to the Big Tech of “The High Frontier” and “Mining the Sky.” If we can’t send massive infrastructure into space, maybe we can send seeds instead.
I’ll believe this singularity when I see it. So far, I’m unimpressed by efforts to automate simple muscle contraction, let alone anything resembling human intelligence.
While I am not a religious person, at least in the conventional sense, I do not at all underestimate sperituality. At bottom, that is probably the reason most of us are here worrying about how to get into the Solar System. If humanity does colonize any part of the Solar System, that will be the reason; everything else is an after-the-fact excuse for what we wanted to do anyway.
Dfens: “We won’t know what its key value for economic exploitation is until we explore it enough to have an idea of what resources it has and how accessable they are.”
Once again, I agree with Dfens (just his first paragraoh, in this case!). This is key to anything else. It’s why Dr. Griffin’s Lewis-and-Clark class missions are so important. We won’t know until we’re there, and I for one don’t propose to wait for any “singularities” (which sound far more spiritual than scientific to me).
— Donald
And, they were immigrants who settled in New England; your comment is pointless.
Definitions of Immigrant on the Web:
Definitions of Immigrant on the Web:
* A person who migrates to another country, usually for permanent residence.
* This is an alien admitted to the United States as a lawful permanent resident. Permanent residents are also commonly referred to as immigrants; however, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) broadly defines an immigrant as any alien in the United States, except one legally admitted under specific nonimmigrant categories (INA section 101(a)(15)). An illegal alien who entered the United States without inspection, for example, would be strictly defined as an immigrant under the INA but is not a permanent resident alien. Lawful permanent residents are legally accorded the privilege of residing permanently in the United States. …
* One who settles as a permanent resident in another country.
* a person who leaves one country to settle permanently in another
collections.ic.gc.ca/peh/teachers/Glossary.html …
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&hs=LJC&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official_s&oi=defmore&q=define:Immigrant
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Definitions of settler on the Web:
* a person who settles in a new colony or moves into new country
* a negotiator who settles disputes
* a clerk in a betting shop who calculates the winnings
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
* Settlers are people who have travelled of their own choice, from the land of their birth to live in “new” lands or colonies. In modern history, the word “settlers” is synonymous with terms like pioneers, colonists, or (as British people once called them) “colonials”. It has been argued that all peoples are “settlers”, since migration has featured throughout human history and prehistory. However, the word settler is generally used only in relation to modern or early modern history.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settler
* One of the first to settle and develop a new territory.
http://www.google.com/search?hs=oyW&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s&q=define%3A+settler&btnG=Search
http://www.albanyinstitute.org/resources/colonial/colonial.glossary.htm
* One who took up residence on, and cultivated, land that had previously been unused.
jamaicanfamilysearch.com/Samples/Glossary.htm