That’s a topic I try to tack in an article in The Space Review this week. The genesis of this article came from a number of events, from the release of the NASA budget last week to editorials last month (some of which should be familiar to regular readers of this blog) about the relative utility of robotic space science missions versus human spaceflight. Some argue that space science should be paramount, and if so, then it’s hard to make a case for anything other than robotic missions. However, despite a disproportionately large space science budget, NASA’s mission has always been more than science, and as such, human spaceflight does have a role. The challenge facing NASA is developing a compelling rationale for the agency that incorporates a balance of both space science and human exploration, and resonates with the public. As Michael Griffin put it in a speech last Thursday, “We must speak clearly and openly to the American people about the risks and rewards of space exploration and scientific discovery.” That might prove to be one of the biggest challenges of the Vision for Space Exploration.
A commment and a question – I’ll say it again and again – we need to be talking about colonization – in fact, Nasa should be talking about colonization.
Which brings me to a question – Jeff, not that long ago, I saw an article (don’t remember if it was at space review or not) which mentioned that at somepoint in the 90s, in some nasa authroization or budget, langauge was inserted that, if I recalled, specifically talked about the agency having a role in colonization. (it was a 1 or 2 sentence kinda thing in the authorization, and so was just a “Its nasa’s job to encourage and create space colonization”, without any real force beyond it) and I was wondering why you didn’t mention that in your article?
“Disproportionately large” is a loaded phrase. What the article actually argues is that NASA’s science budget is disproportionately large relative to the NSF budget. That’s a fair point, but it is not an argument for moving NASA money from space science to human spaceflight. It could be an argument for moving NASA money to the NSF. After all, in 1997 Congress resolved to double the NSF budget, then in the next few years forgot what it wanted.
The fact is that relative to human spaceflight at NASA, space science funding is disproportionately small. The space and Earth science projects accomplish a lot, maybe not as much as the NSF, but still a substantial amount. The human spaceflight program accomplishes almost nothing, as the article acknowledges. Indeed, most of its advertised achievement is Potemkin science.
Now I know that most people here want to replace the pathetic white-elephant human spaceflight program at NASA with a much better human spaceflight program. Even so, the only logical path is to first cancel the space shuttle and the space station, then decide what to do next. Anything else, certainly the cynical O’Keefe approach of merely pretending to retire the shuttle, is punishing success and rewarding failure.
Ferris: You may be thinking of the Space Settlement Act, which was incorporated into the NASA authorization legislation in 1988. This required NASA to submit a report to Congress every two years on the work it was doing that would lead to the permanent settlement of space. NASA, to the best of my knowledge, never filed any of the reports, and the provision has been effectively forgotten. Steven Wolfe, who as a staffer to the late Rep. George Brown helped write the act, has a summary of the legislation and why it failed:
http://www.arc-space.org/Space%20New%207-03.htm
Prof. Kuperberg’s comment raises a key question: should space science be compared to other space programs or other science programs? You can make the case for either, with vastly different results. I tend to think space science has more in common with other science programs than, say, building and flying manned spacecraft, but since both are in the same agency and thus fighting for the same slice of the overall budget, there is some logic in comparing them against each other.
However, something like the Pareto principle may be applicable here: the vast majority of the scientific objectives of a human mission could be performed for a fraction of the cost by employing robots.
But, as I’ve argued again and again, this is simply not true. Apollo was far more scientifically productive than comparable automated missions of the same era, and this may be true even for unit dollar spent. Yes, automated spaceflight has improved in the intervening decades, but so has human spaceflight. Apollo technology could never have accomplished the kind of routine space operations in use today on the Space Station.
The Space Station may be relatively useless scientifically right now, but it is teaching us how to build, supply, and operate the vessels that will allow true detailed exploration of the Solar System in the future. The first automated missions, too, were of relatively limited utility, but the experience of building them is what led to the Cassinis of today.
Once again, it is wrong to consider Hubble an automated mission. Hubble is part of the human space program, and, were it automated, it would no longer be in operation. In fact, Hubble is one of the best examples of gaining far greater scientific productivity by combining the best attributes of human and automated spaceflight. With the somewhat cheaper human spaceflight infrastructure that Dr. Griffin is trying to build, Hubble and future tended observatories may be expected to become less expensive.
We need both, and we will never understand the Solar System — either scientifically or culturally — without going there ourselves.
— Donald
I thought that was in the 90s
Oh well, but back to my main question, Jeff, why didn’t you mention that in your article?
The Space Station may be relatively useless scientifically right now, but it is teaching us how to build, supply, and operate the vessels that will allow true detailed exploration of the Solar System in the future.
Actually, like the Shuttle, it’s teaching us more about how not to. That’s useful information as well (as the old saying goes, nothing is completely useless–it can always serve as a bad example), but it’s not worth the expense of completing or operating ISS.
We know what the major science results of Apollo were. Most (but arguably not all) of them could have been achieved without landing anyone on the moon, but instead by remote sensing, in situ analysis, and from returned samples.
Major results of this kind: that the moon is differentiated (actually this was established by Surveyor); the composition of the lunar crust; the depletion of volatile elements and siderophiles; that the moon lies on the terrestrial oxygen isotope line; the age of the lunar crust; the europium anomaly. These would have been enough to lead to the current standard model of lunar formation.
Stratigraphy arguably would have been harder, but even there a great deal of it was worked out from Lunar Orbiter pictures.
One can also turn things around and point out the science that was missed because humans instead of robots were used. No Apollo astronauts detected the lunar polar hydrogen, because astronauts couldn’t easily or safely be sent to the poles.
Rand: I disagree. Construction of the Space Station has actually gone quite well; the problems are mostly with launch vehicles. While it is certainly possible to stage, say, a Mars mission from Earth’s surface, with a minimum of construction in Earth orbit — and while the first missions probably will be accomplished that way — any permanent presence in space will require the kind of skills we are now learning. The first polar expeditions were staged from single ships; you would not do things that way today.
Paul: that the moon is differentiated (actually this was established by Surveyor); the composition of the lunar crust; the depletion of volatile elements and siderophiles; that the moon lies on the terrestrial oxygen isotope line; the age of the lunar crust; the europium anomaly. These would have been enough to lead to the current standard model of lunar formation [and could have been determined by automated missions.]
While all of this may be true (I doubt it), how much would it have cost to do all of this entirely with a very large number of automated missions? Would it really have been less than the cost of Apollo? Your last point is meaningless; all missions have technical limitations, whether they are human or automated.
The fact is, nothing like the comprehensive picture that was attained by Apollo astronauts has been done with automated missions. It is very hard (and probably impossible) to duplicate all of the skills of a human being with an automated probe. Even on their first mission to a planetary-like body, the astronauts could drive great distances and intelligently observe the landscape in a short period of time. They intelligently collected a wide variety of carefully-selected samples, and supply the information required to determine absolute dates in many settings. No one has done that on say, Mars, or proposed any automated mission that could to it except for at one point location. As I have argued elsewhere, the Mars sample return probably has a rather low chance of success — we can’t even reliably automate docking operations in Earth orbit (remember DART?) so what makes anyone think we could do it reliably at Mars?
Finally, back when I studied geology (let alone paeleontology) wide-scale stratigraphy was considered rather important. As you come close to conceding, that is an activity for which any foreseeable robot will be singularly inappropriate but astronauts could do casually.
— Donald
>>”we can’t even reliably automate docking operations in Earth orbit”
Well, maybe NASA can’t, but the Russians have been doing it for decades.
While all of this may be true (I doubt it),
What part do you doubt? Of the specific results I mentioned, the only one that might conceivably benefit from much on-site intelligence is dating (to find a sample with different minerals that was clearly created as a unit), but even that, I propose, could be done with a rover. A single sample return mission as primitive as the core-and-go Russian lander would have skimmed many of the major results.
Once you get down to some lesser details, such as the order in which major basin-forming impacts occured, on site stratigraphy would help. But these are, IMO, secondary results, adding detail after the major global geophysical results.
Your last point is meaningless; all missions have technical limitations, whether they are human or automated.
It is hypocritical to condemn unmanned missions because achieving some human-obtained results would be impractical, yet to dismiss the case where the opposite has occured.
I suggest that what NASA could use is a set of what I would call ‘reference goals’.
These are goals that, under appropriate circumstances, would be useful and worthwhile in and of themselves, not as stepping stones to something undefined. They need not be practical, or even possible, now, but they must be clearly attractive to the public if they were so. This rules out goals like ‘colonize Mars’ or ‘become a spacefaring nation’, which don’t offer a manifest benefit to the average person.
Here are some suggestions:
I’ve left off military goals, since they are the domain of DOD, not NASA.
The purpose of this list would be to create a basline for determining if NASA’s shorter term goals are really steps in the ‘right’ direction.
Paul,
All those things require a permanant manned pressence, which means colonization, so why not just embrace colonization straight up? Admitaddly we need to get the rest of the nation/world to embrace it, but thats a seperate point
# Construction of powersats.
# Construction of a sun shading system at the Earth-Sun L1 to counter global wamring.
# Space disposal or space-based reprocessing of nuclear waste.
Many in Congress and in the general public would consider those goals to be very controversial.
Here is an objection to powersats to which I have never heard any adequate reply: what frequency could the powersats use to coninuously transmit megawatts of power back to Earth that would not heat Earth’s atmosphere and thereby contribute to global warming?
All those things require a permanant manned pressence, which means colonization, so why not just embrace colonization straight up?
They don’t necessarily require manned presence (particularly in extended timeframes), and manned presence doesn’t necessarily imply colonization. Does deep water oil drilling imply colonization of the oceans?
DD wrote:
Here is an objection to powersats to which I have never heard any adequate reply: what frequency could the powersats use to coninuously transmit megawatts of power back to Earth that would not heat Earth’s atmosphere and thereby contribute to global warming?
Direct heating (from any energy source) will not be significant in global climate change anytime soon. Projected increases in CO2 will cause a global increase in downward IR of around 4 W/m^2, which is equivalent to something like 2000 terawatts over the globe. This is many times the current total global energy production.
BTW, the heat from the users of the transmitted energy will be more important than the (small) losses in the atmosphere itself. Almost all the energy ends up as heat, after all.
Jeff Foust: Prof. Kuperberg’s comment raises a key question: should space science be compared to other space programs or other science programs?
Both comparisons are completely valid. If NASA science accomplishes much more per dollar than NASA human spaceflight, but much less per dollar than the NSF, then that is two halves of a message to the House and Senate science committees.
It is not just that human spaceflight and space science happen to share the same agency. NASA has never made any plans for astronauts to do anything in space other than stay alive, socialize, and do science experiments. The first two are all well and good, but they make no sense as end goals. Science, which is to say bad science, has been the only end goal so far. Now maybe NASA could make some other plans for its astronauts — maybe they could be lunar homesteaders or who knows — but until and unless it does, it makes sense to compare human spaceflight to robotic space science.
Chris: The Russians are masters of automated docking, but whenever possible they keep astronauts on hand to monitor the work, and they have to take over with depressing regularity. Again, just assuming we can do this at Mars is a very rash assumption.
Paul, your arguments demonstrate an amazing (and, I would guess wilfull, since you are more knowledgeable that that) ignorance of basic geology. The order in which impacts happened is all important. Stratigraphy is all important. Absolute date for each layor is all important.
A single sample return mission as primitive as the core-and-go Russian lander would have skimmed many of the major results.
This is simply silly, but if it were true, why didn’t the Soviets, rather than Western scientists, produce the results? Their mission was almost scientifically meaningless, while Apollo produced the data on which today’s theories are based, and upon which dating throughout the Solar System is based.
Polar human missions are perfectly practical. They just weren’t done by Apollo. Nor have they been done by automated missions. In this, nither has demonstrated an advantage over the other, though for the other reasons you would clearly want to send human scientists.
However, Paul makes one very good point. The problem with solar power satellites is that, if their use became widespread, they represent a net increase in the amount of energy input to Earth’s climate. Over the long term, that probably would not be a good thing.
Greg: It seems to me that staying alive and socializing are outstanding goals. The first is a prerequisite to anything else, including automated science. The second, in the sense of allowing the influence of new experiences to filter throughout our culture, is probably the single most important reason for spaceflight, human or otherwise. Socializing is, after all, something that primates do rather well.
Paul, your arguments demonstrate an amazing (and, I would guess wilfull, since you are more knowledgeable that that) ignorance of basic geology. The order in which impacts happened is all important. Stratigraphy is all important. Absolute date for each layor is all important.
I would claim that they are less important than the question of the origin of the moon itself. And do recall, I did explicitly say that unmanned missions arguably couldn’t have obtained all of the major results. Stratigraphy was what I was thinking of.
Having said that, a lot of stratigraphy was done from orbit, by carefully noticing what was layered over what. This couldn’t give absolute dates, but did provide a lot of information on relative ordering of events. Dating could have been provided by unmanned sample return with rovers, although I grant that this would be considerably easier now than in the late 1960s.
This is simply silly, but if it were true, why didn’t the Soviets, rather than Western scientists, produce the results? Their mission was almost scientifically meaningless, while Apollo produced the data on which today’s theories are based, and upon which dating throughout the Solar System is based.
(1) They did it after Apollo returned its first samples, and (2) they didn’t have the terrestrial infrastructure to fully analyze the samples. So your whine does nothing to refute my point.
Polar human missions are perfectly practical. They just weren’t done by Apollo.
They weren’t done by Apollo because of various practical constraints, for example lighting, higher mission delta-V, and temperature. Dismissing this is just your double standard showing itself again.
Donald: Sure, staying alive and socializing are fine goals. There are much easier and cheaper ways to do it than to imprison yourself in low earth orbit. Cheaper for taxpayers, that is. If it’s on your own dollar, then I don’t care.
Paul, thank you for your cogent response re powersats heating Earth’s atmosphere.
Sure, staying alive and socializing are fine goals.
Greg, you’re smarter than that gibe. The main reason for manned American spaceflight has always been the good derived from performing inspirational heroic stunts and besting foreign competitors, proving both the pusissance of American technology and the character of our astronauts in the process.
The possibility of an American New Frontier in space has always been part of the rhetoric of manned American spaceflight, too. But as a practical matter, space colonies as a reason for space flight are what what salesmen call a hard sell.
Science? Oh, sure, science too. Just don’t forget to plant the American flag on the Moon again the next time we go there.
What is my point here? I predict that Congress won’t fund renewed American space flights to the Moon unless the Rooskies or maybe the Chinese oblige us by re-starting a race to get to the Moon.
Furthermore, Greg, this is the reason why we HAVE TO keep trying to fly the Shuttle to the ISS: because foreigners are still still doing it. Otherwise, things would be just too humiliating.
I am serious.
Construction of the Space Station has actually gone quite well…
I guess so, if by “quite well,” you mean costing many billions of dollars, and way behind schedule. Part of that was due to launch vehicles, but a lot of it was due to NASA’s unwillingness to make the necessary investments that would allow orbital operations and EVA to become routine. If we ever get low-cost access to space, constructing space stations will bear very little resemblance to ISS.
Donald – that may be the case about colonization being a hard sell, but, and this is speaking as a aerospace engineer in training – If we aren’t seriously talking about colonies, and soon, frankly, I’d rather just see the whole damn program shut down.
Paul – admitadly, yes, theoretically, all of those things can be done without people, but putting that stuff up, and building it, would be much easier with people. But it does bring up a point – and that is, is the manned program about colonization or not??
Ferris, you’ve got the wrong person there, I am not opposed to “colonization” as an ultimate goal. (Though I would prefer the word “settlement,” both because it’s more accurate and it doesn’t have as much baggage.)
That said, I think it is way to early to make settlement our immediate goal. One thing that Greg and I agree on is that space is an unremittingly hostile place for human life and that settlement is either “impractical” (Greg) or far more difficult than we care to believe (myself). In earlier posts, I’ve compared spaceflight to humanity’s learning to travel confidently over our world’s oceans — a skill that took us at least 10,000 years and untold lives to master. There is no reason at all to expect things to be easier this time around.
Our goals in space, in our generation, need to be establishing the first initial permanent basis and infrastructure on Earth’s moon, nearby asteroids, and possibly the Martian moons and Mars. Achieving that would give us great scientific knowledge of the terrestrial worlds and allow us to begin resource extraction and practical “living off the land.” Even that will likely take generations and probably will not succeed the first times we try it (we were very lucky with Apollo, and that project could easily have turned out far worse).
None of which means space settlement is an impossible or unworthy goal for our species. It’s not. But it is important that we put our achievements in a realistic perspective. The twin assumptions on which much of our space advocacy and program is based — that space travel will be “easily” mastered in a generation or two and without much loss of life, and that you can successfully understand another world with a few robots without risking any human skin on site — are both dead wrong in my opinion. It is past time to reconsider both, yet, as you can see above, no one wants to look at these issues realistically.
I am in the process of writing an article on this subject. But, for my earlier thoughts on where we should go from here, check this out,
http://www.speakeasy.org/~donaldfr/sfmodel.pdf
— Donald
Paul. 1) They did it after Apollo returned its first samples, and (2) they didn’t have the terrestrial infrastructure to fully analyze the samples. So your whine does nothing to refute my point.
Nonesense. On the scale of scientific results these projects were done at the same time. The Soviets did outstanding physical science in many fields, and lunar science was one of their very highest priorities at the time. It is most likely that the problem was with the single random undocumented sample.
Polar human missions . . . weren’t done by Apollo because of various practical constraints, for example lighting, higher mission delta-V, and temperature. Dismissing this is just your double standard showing itself again.
Your the one with a double standard. Automated lunar polar missions haven’t been attempted for exactly the same reasons, plus the fact that until recently no one was particularly interested in the lunar poles. Now that people are, both automated and human missions are being planned. However, actually sampling the ice — which may well be thinly and deeply scattered through large volumes of regolith — is not an ideal task for a robot. If it were my choice, we’d cut straight to the chase without wasting a lot of money trying to automate exploratory mining operations that are difficult in the extreme to automate, yet can be easily done by the asteronauts we’re planning on sending anyway. . . .
— Donald
Donald – Unfortantly, if we make colonization the “ultimate” goal, it isn’t ever gonna happen. Maybe in other countries, but not by the US. We need to make Colonization happen, not in 2 or 3 generations – we need to make it happen now (for the record, I hate that word, generation – it hasn’t got any real imperical meaning IMHO. We can’t talk about any sort of lofty ideals, and vainly hope that it leads ultimately to colonization. We need to start now, and be seriously talking about colonization. Yes, I know its hard. But to talk about some sort of 30 year goals of exploritory bases on mars- this world wants a return today, tomorrow at the latest.
We have to be talking about colonization, seriously, in 20 years, even if it means losing 50% of a particluar colony
Making colonization our ultimate goal, is like saying world peace is the ultimate goal – It ain’t gonna happen.
Ferris, neither space settlement or world peace are going to happen in the foreseeable future, no matter how much effort and resources are thrown at them. But one can work toward either or both — here and now we can take the first steps toward space settlement on Earth’s moon — and the effort is far from wasted.
— Donald
No, actually, it is – for the very simple reason, there are too many entranched intrests that will only think short term. And there is also the fact that long term, we won’t be here (or at least in any sort of real position to colonize space, or do much of anything). I know everyone loves to think that they are long term planners and what not, espically with people talking about retirement and whatnot, but the fact is most people aren’t.
The discussion about colonization, and difficulties, are somewhat an issue I’d argue of mindset. Its part of the reason that I’d say we’ve already got proto-colonization with the space station (or rather, when its at full capacity).
But the point is, A) we’ve pretty much run out of time for long term steps and B) people don’t think long term.
So again, its gotta happen, in the short term, or not at all.
So again, its gotta happen, in the short term, or not at all.
If those are the alternatives, then it’s not at all.
NASA should strive to emulate some of its NACA roots. Instead of building a vehicle, NASA should help develop the technologies to enable private industry to build a half dozen vehicles. NACA did fundamental research on airfoil shapes and aerodynamics, thereby helping the airplane industry. NASA should have as one of their main goals to do “fundamental” component work, on things like rocket nozzle materials, scramjets as well as more advanced methods of getting to orbit (tethers, laser launch, electromagnetic launchers, etc. etc.).
Dave, Thats not something I am willing to accept
I realized I had overlooked a question from Ferris Valyn:
Oh well, but back to my main question, Jeff, why didn’t you mention that [colonization] in your article?
Neglecting to explicitly mention colonization (or settlement, which doesn’t have the same negative overtones as “colonization”) wasn’t a deliberate oversight. It does raise an interesting question, though: should settlement be an explicit goal of the space agency, with programs specifically tailored to that, or should settlement be instead a commercial initiative that is either an outgrowth of, or even completely independent from, government space efforts?
Neglecting to explicitly mention colonization (or settlement, which doesn’t have the same negative overtones as “colonization”) wasn’t a deliberate oversight. It does raise an interesting question, though: should settlement be an explicit goal of the space agency, with programs specifically tailored to that, or should settlement be instead a commercial initiative that is either an outgrowth of, or even completely independent from, government space efforts?
First here, then off to visit Rand Simberg’s site, who has just linked to this comment:
I am not confident that the modern nation-state is well suited to be the lead actor in permanent settlement. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 for example creates very real issues concerning claims of soveriegnty over celestial locations. But to withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 will require tremendous persuasion of the Washington DC powers that be.
That said, the US Congress can and should help facilitate space settlement by people who hold in their hearts the Enlightenment ideals that were written down in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution of 1787. Mike Griffin, by the way, has expressed similar ideas.
England has plainly benefited from having the US as an ally (shared language and political philosophies) even though Britain asserts no claim of soverignty over US territory. Likewise the US government can and should facilitate the settlement of space by people with American values.
Commercial operations and making money in space will be essential to permanent settlement. Tax revenues will always be woefully insufficient to fund settlement. But making money in space via free enterprise is part of the “how” not the “why” for space settlement.
My own thought is that religious groups might make ideal candidates to sponsor the first permanent settlements and I believe that to the extent such groups reflect core American values, the US government should facilitate such efforts.
A religous sponsored settlement peopled by folks holding American values in their hearts might be an easy route to by-pass the Outer Space Treaty. The US renounces any legal jurisdiction over the colony, confident that the colonists will retain loyalty to the US regardless of the legal technicalities.
Bill, as a non-religious person I have made similar arguments. Religious organizations and political outcasts are often willing to sustain great physical and financial hardship for no measurable gain, and are frequently the first onto a new frontier. While it is still too early for this to happen in space, I would not be surprised if such people become an important element in any human expansion into the Solar System.
However, I would not get my hopes up regarding the long-term survival of “American values” in space. First of all, the United States is a tremendously diverse country, and it is far from clear what common denominator constitutes “American values.” Whatever these values are, they evolved from “British values” (and Spanish and Russian and so on values) in response to the unique environment and conditions required to survive on the American continent beginning in the 1600s. Whatever we end up with in space will start from the values of those nations who expand into space, but they will quickly evolve into something new in response to the requirements of survival in the unique environments found in the Solar System.
In fact, I believe the evolution of new political and social ideas — which is essentially impossible now on Earth, but is probably essential to humanity’s long term survival in a changing universe — is the single most important reason space settlement matters.
— Donald
David: If those are the alternatives, then it’s not at all.
Once again, I find myself agreeing with David. No matter what we do, settling the Solar System is a project that will take centuries or millennia. We can only start the process.
— Donald
However, I would not get my hopes up regarding the long-term survival of “American values” in space. First of all, the United States is a tremendously diverse country, and it is far from clear what common denominator constitutes “American values.” Whatever these values are, they evolved from “British values” (and Spanish and Russian and so on values) in response to the unique environment and conditions required to survive on the American continent beginning in the 1600s. Whatever we end up with in space will start from the values of those nations who expand into space, but they will quickly evolve into something new in response to the requirements of survival in the unique environments found in the Solar System.
Space will change people. I agree.
It’s not about what we will find by going out there, its about what we will become, as a species by undertaking the challenge of settling space.
That said, the motivation can be a desire that one’s own language, or religion, or set of political beiefs has a disproportionate influence on whatever human civilization eventually develops. If humanity sends people to settle who value the Enlightenment, Enlightenment values will inform whatever new civilization comes to be developed.
And tolerance is one Enlightenment value I desire be promulgated across the solar system.
= = =
As for timelines? Who knows?
What was that famous NY Times quote shortly before Kitty Hawk about human flight being impossible?
But, be it 25 years or 225 years, the underlying issues remain the same.
Whatever these values are, they evolved from “British values” (and Spanish and Russian and so on values) in response to the unique environment and conditions required to survive on the American continent beginning in the 1600s.
No, they’re primarily values derived from the English people who first settled the country (based on English common law and concepts of civil society). The US is the leader of the Anglosphere. Jim Bennett, in his book The Anglosphere Challenge, writes about how the Anglosphere is probably best positioned to expand into space in the twenty-first century.
Donald – I am not claiming that it will be done in 20 years – but it must be started. I could easily see the first true colony in space in 20 years. Fully settling/colonizing space will take many many years.
As far as engaging modern nation states, and postmodern nation states, at somepoint, they have to be prepared to at least deal with them at somepoint, and yes, they could encourage it. I’ll post more on that later
Rand: they’re primarily values derived from the English people who first settled the country (based on English common law and concepts of civil society).
I believe this simply re-states what I said. I fully agree that our core values derive from English common law (while being quite different as anyone who visits the countryside in Britain will quickly discover). However, I would not underplay the input from the other cultures that settled what is now the United States, e.g., our intensely commercial character might have started in the prior Dutch colonies in what is now New York City.
My point was that, assuming that the United States plays a major role on the new frontier, whatever evolves out there will only start from “American common law.” It will quickly evolve into something at least as different from what we have as our Constitution and practice is from anything that could exist in Europe.
— Donald
Bill: If humanity sends people to settle who value the Enlightenment, Enlightenment values will inform whatever new civilization comes to be developed.
Believe me, I did not mean any disrespect to the Enlightenment. I, too, hope that those values have a future.
— Donald
I believe this simply re-states what I said.
Your statement implied that our values were based on cultures in addition to the English ones (e.g. Russian). Certainly other cultures have added flavor to the stew, but the basic stock is Anglospherian. And that includes the Englightenment values.
Rand: but the basic stock is Anglospherian. And that includes the Englightenment values
This is getting off topic, but didn’t the Enlightenment get its start in in Italy?
— Donald
My own opinion about the strength of the so-called “Anglosphere” is its ability to recognize and assimilate the best traits of other cultures seizing those traits for itself. Open source civilization as it were.
An ancedotal example from the world of cooking. The Oxford educated Indian economist Amartya Sen has recounted a wonderful quote he once overheard said of a true and proper Englishwoman. “The lady is as English as daffodils and chicken tikka marsala” – although invented in England, that dish requires a classic English spice: curry powder.
This is getting off topic, but didn’t the Enlightenment get its start in in Italy?
Without answering that question (I don’t know off hand) it doesn’t matter. It was fully absorbed into the Anglosphere by the time of the nation’s founding.
Bill: Open source civilization as it were.
What a great line!
— Donald
“The Anglosphere” is a culturally chauvinistic model of American power. The fact is that among the English-speaking nations, only the United States has any significant space industry. In the rest of the world, Russia and France are also important space powers. They now participate only indirectly in human spaceflight, but human spaceflight has been a bust lately. They are both fairly successful in robotic spaceflight.
Indeed, the real basis of American power is neither ketchup nor anything else uniquely English. It’s the basic combination of personal betterment, capitalism, and economy of scale. That means that China can get there too, and eventually it probably will. Some time in the 21st century, China will probably become at least as powerful as the United States and even the whole “Anglosphere”.
Greg: “The Anglosphere” is a culturally chauvinistic model of American power.
Yes, I agree this is a fair reading of “some, not all” Anglosphere advocates. I reject that model and assert that to the extent proponents of the Anglosphere engage in culturally chauvinistic behavior or analysis, they undermine the original source of Anglosphere exceptionalism.
That said, is it chauvinistic to assert that:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
I assert that when Jefferson wrote men he meant human beings. ALL human beings. And if we encounter sentient aliens they’d be covered under this language also.
It appears to me these words are the antithesis of chauvinism.
Greg also writes: Indeed, the real basis of American power is neither ketchup nor anything else uniquely English. It’s the basic combination of personal betterment, capitalism, and economy of scale.
America has also experienced the benefit of settling a rich and fertile land left largely devoid of people due to the ravages of European diseases that literally decimated the native American population.
Going forward, India is a fascinating example of a nation that might well successfully blend “East & West” and might not. China is China. And we have the West.
Who will settle space? What language will predominate the solar system in 500 years? What religion?
Will a real life Malcomb Reynolds curse in Mandarin?
Such are the questions raised by the prospects of permanent settlement.
Yes, Greg is just spouting the usual fashionable academic multi-culti postmodern claptrap. In order to think the Anglosphere “chauvinistic” one has to believe that the Enlightenment itself is, which of course is standard fare on campus. All those DWEMs, you know…
But to address his specific critique, nobody–not the Russians, not the French, not the Chinese, not even the Americans (using that state-socialist enterprise, NASA)–are opening up space right now. But thanks to people like Burt Rutan, and across the pond, Richard Branson (anglospherians both), we’re starting to. We’ll see if China or France develop a free-enterprise individualistic approach to space. Russia might, but they’re still too corrupt to do it properly. In any event, I won’t be holding my breath.
Rabindranath Tagore argued that India can readily seize the best of Western thought without sacrificing its own roots. A quote from Tagore:
An anecdote about Tagore:
Open source civilization will transcend its origins. And that philosophy is what I wish spread out into the solar system.
Ferris: So again, its gotta happen, in the short term, or not at all.
David: If those are the alternatives, then it’s not at all.
Ferris: Dave, Thats not something I am willing to accept
Gentlemen, is it possible that a definition of terms might illuminate the situation? Can each of you define quantitatively what you mean by “colonization” or “settlement”? What would have to happen for you to be able to say that it is “well under way”, to be satisfied with the progress to date?
Here are a few examples:
1. When the first human child is conceived, gestated and delivered entirely off Earth. To me, this implies sufficient and sufficiently permanent infrastructure to comfortably say “we’re under way, we’re getting there, it’s a good enough start” – my personal hope is that we get to that point on or about 2020.
2. When the off-Earth economy achieves positive cash flow as a whole
3. When the off-Earth economy achieves initial ROI. That is it repays in profits to the then active economic participants (not necessarily to the initial investors) their total investment.
4. When the first independent polity arises off Earth, and is recognized by the polity with the largest GNP then on Earth.
Many other criteria make sense, too. IMHO, it is at least possible that while we may not all agree on a common threshold definition, we can come to understand and respect each others’ timeline views with respect to the source criteria.
Bill White: You are absolutely right that some of the figures of English and American history, notably Jefferson and Lincoln, formulated principles of equality that were the opposite of cultural chauvinism. But then, they didn’t write The Anglosphere Challenge. The book was written by a much less important American named James Bennett.
As for the “rich and fertile land” argument, I don’t buy it. The South has more rich and fertile land than New England, but it was New England where the Industrial Revolution started in the United States. You are also hinting at the idea that the Europeans stole all of that rich and fertile land from the Indians. I won’t take that politically correct bait. The European colonists did treat the Indians very badly in many cases, but that is not remotely why the United States is powerful now.
Wow, it’s a regular dork-o-rama!
No wonder space isn’t getting colonized.
Rand Simberg: If you are so totally wrong if you think that I am following any political academic fashion of multiculturalism. The Anglosphere is not chauvinistic, and neither is the Enlightenment. They are what they are. What is chauvinistic, and also simply wrong, is the idea that English-language culture is the special trait that makes the United States powerful. English-language culture is just fine with me, but it isn’t the be-all of world influence.
It reminds me of the anecdote about Bush telling Tony Blair, “You know the problem with the French is that they don’t even have a word for entrepeneur“. It’s probably apocryphal, but it just perfectly captures the arrogance of many fans of “Anglosphere” explanations.
As for Rutan, I have nothing but respect for him as an engineer, or maybe a leader of engineers, but he does not yet measure up to his own braggadocio. Neither does Branson. Individualism is very important at the lower levels of a national economy or a company. It’s much less clear that a cowboy attitude is really a good thing for top management. It works better as public relations than as serious decision-making.
In any case Rutan and Branson aren’t yet a serious part of the space business, whereas various Russian groups certainly are.
It reminds me of the anecdote about Bush telling Tony Blair, “You know the problem with the French is that they don’t even have a word for entrepeneur”. It’s probably apocryphal, but it just perfectly captures the arrogance of many fans of “Anglosphere” explanations.
On this point, I am in Greg’s camp. For the record.
Shakespeare remains the greatest single writer in all of human history, however. And he wrote in English.
Greg: As for the “rich and fertile land” argument, I don’t buy it. The South has more rich and fertile land than New England, but it was New England where the Industrial Revolution started in the United States.
This is something you, Greg, should recall when you argue that the various environments in space are too harsh to be explored and exploited by human beings on site.
Ben, I think all of your examples must be fulfilled for humanity to be considered a spacefaring species. (Though, I would argue that bringing a child to reproductive age be the standard.) I also think it is possible, though probably unlikely, that most of those could be achieved within the lifetimes of people now alive. We already make a great deal of money through comsats, although it is still far less than the global economy spends. As many will gleefully point out, human spaceflight is further behind, although the Russian’s are generating cash at it.
Right now, in my lifetime, I would settle for a few small bases that actively trade some resource generated in space. Most likely, the former would be on the lunar surface, the Martian moons, or somewhere else relatively easy to get to, and the latter would be oxygen or some related compound like water.
From small volumes of trade, really big things can grow.
— Donald
You are absolutely right that some of the figures of English and American history, notably Jefferson and Lincoln, formulated principles of equality that were the opposite of cultural chauvinism. But then, they didn’t write The Anglosphere Challenge. The book was written by a much less important American named James Bennett.
Why do I suspect that Greg hasn’t actually read the book?
And while it’s not clear that James Bennett is as important an American as the Founders, it’s also not clear yet that he’s not. History will judge.
I think ISS is a pretty good indication of how NASA would attempt space settlement. I would expect such direct action by NASA towards space settlement to be if anything, counter productive. The best scenario would be NASA adopting a NACA like commercial support role. I do not see the NASA ego permitting that so I can only hope that they will dinosaur themselves into irrelevance.
Colonization is a bit like the forced adoption of a child country by the mother country. Settlement is more akin to giving birth to a new country, and in which there is a direct biological relationship. The US will not live forever, its future depends on how many varied and viable offspring it can have. Not being willing to invest in a pregnancy for fear that the offspring will not be direct clones of the mother is not usually the best survival strategy. Space settlements will be the children of all countries on Earth, but they will mostly be the children of the parent countries who invest the most in them. It is in the long term best interests of the US that it invest far more in space settlement. Its stake in that future will be in proportion to its investment, and as growth in space is not immediately finite, largely independent of what other countries invest.
Some argue that space settlement is a long way away requiring a very long term program – it does not have to be. LEO is sufficient for the first generation of space settlement without extra terrestrial resources. All that is required is ~$100/kg to LEO and a serious open and commercially competitive R&D presence in LEO – a number of innovative companies with LEO workshops and construction yards. The objective here is to create a space specific high tech industrial revolution. Of course LEO will still exploit cheap imports from Earth, but those products will not be developed there.
At $100/kg to LEO, real-estate costs in LEO can be in the high end range of similar resorts, workshops, etcetera, on Earth. Costs perhaps similar to Manhattan and the like. With rotovators and the like that would quickly arise, I would expect bulk transport costs to soon drop to around $10-20/kg to LEO. This should economically prompt an LEO presence growing into the millions over time. The LEO economy would most likely be based upon tourism, high technology, Earth observation and communication, beyond LEO missions, its own growth, etcetera.
I expect we could design and build a couple of small $100/kg to LEO space transports now for under a billion dollars. Within a decade or so of such operations I would expect costs to be approaching $20/kg to LEO. The initial market for such space transports needs to be low cost orbital assembly, (and assembled), space stations – and tourism. What is needed now is some large investor willing to make a punt on developing such mass produced small low cost space ‘settlement’, (including propellant depot, tugs, rotovator systems, etcetera), modules based on ~$100/kg and say 1000kg payloads. Such a market would drive the low cost space transport development and be far less limited than just shipping propellant. Bigelow is still mostly in the oversized ISS cost mould, unfortunately.
Pete makes excellent points, IMHO.
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But as for costs, let me offer this. Robert Heinlein famously said/wrote that Earth orbit is halfway to anywhere. But as we see with ISS, halfway to anywhere is really nowhere all that interesting, or useful.
Reducing the cost of the Earth-to-LEO segment is vital but not sufficient unless we also reduce the cost of the travel segments going further out to somewhere interesting.
As I recall, only 1/5th of the mass lofted to LEO can be soft landed on the Moon as useful payload. Actually, for cargo it takes less delta V to get to Mars, as Dr. Zubrin perpetually reminds us, due to aerobraking possibilities. At $2000 per kg in LEO that is $10,000 per kg on the Moon. At $500 per kg in LEO that is still $2,500 per kg on the Moon.
But deploy one of these tether systems as described here and the cost of the LEO-to-Luna leg could very well fall dramatically. A kilogram in LEO becomes a kilogram on the Moon.
Drop that 5 to 1 ratio to 2 to 1 for example (to cover the capital costs of building and deploying the tether system) and then getting stuff to the Moon or Mars is very much more affordable even if Earth-to-LEO costs do not fall as far as we might hope for.
A tether system with a 2 to 1 LEO-to-Luna ratio combined with using Proton and Soyuz means payload on the lunar surface at less than $2500 per kilogram, TODAY, which is what it would cost to deliver payload to the Moon using a $500 per kg to LEO alt-space system and chemical propulsion to the moon.
This is equally true for Mars.
Settlement may be closer than it seems since a MXER tether could easily throw food, fuel and plant food to Mars quite cheaply (measured as a multiple of Earth-to-LEO costs, be they whatever).
Tether transport including Mars.
= = =
Halfway to anywhere (LEO) is really nowhere if all you do is go in endless circles
Rand Simberg: Why do I suspect that Greg hasn’t actually read the book?
It’s very simple, Rand: because I haven’t commented on The Anglosphere Challenge as a book. It may be a fine book, but its themes have been exploited by naive American chauvinists. That may or may not be its author’s fault; I won’t pass judgment on Bennett until I read Bennett.
On the other hand, I don’t have to read the book to know that it ain’t the Declaration of Independence.
The germane point is that there are a lot of impressive Russian scientists and engineers in the world, enough that the Anglosphere blah blah blah is rather less than the whole truth. Anglosphere arguments do little to distinguish shaving cream from shinola in the rocket industry in particular.
Bill White: I have to agree that Shakespeare is tops. My kids like Shakespeare too. But how can we know that he is the greatest writer in the world, in all languages?
LEO might be half way to anywhere in energy, but not in time. Transport delays cost, and as the SPS advocates say, energy in space will be cheap.
I used to be very moon focussed, but then I realised that once you get CATS, Earth derived materials quickly become very cheap to the point of economic viability, and more they come pre processed and manufactured with cheap labour. A lunar capable LEO rotovator type system will also enable much cheaper transport from Earth to LEO, as low as $10-20/kg. Lunar materials will be required in HEO, where large quantities of radiation shielding is necessary, but it will not be until after this that lunar materials become competitive in LEO.
LEO has two very big advantages, greatly reduced radiation shielding requirement and very fast and frequent transport to and from Earth. This last is essential for fast responsive development of space based infrastructure, it allows LEO to fit in with Earth based transport systems and time frames. People and parts can move back and forward quickly. Hence I expect LEO to become the first ‘Silicon Valley’ of space. LEO will be where most of the development action is, and so from my perspective at least, will initially be the most interesting of space places.
The solar energy climate in LEO is not as good as HEO, but a 1000 kg of old tether working as flywheel energy storage will provide ~150 kW through the LEO night. The greater issue is the 50% capacity factor of the solar power system, again not particularly prohibitive.
Once there is a significant LEO presence and technological ability, then one of the first beyond LEO projects I would like to see would be an Earth moon tether transport system that served to transport regolith to LEO. The development and operation of space based regolith processing and manufacturing systems is something that I think is greatly underestimated. Hence I think this is something that initially will need to be done in LEO where the resources and engineers are, and also where the infrastructure of Earth will be close at hand. Space settlement is not a one off design and build job, but an industrial revolution scale education and development program. This is all about designing a learning process.
The germane point is that there are a lot of impressive Russian scientists and engineers in the world, enough that the Anglosphere blah blah blah is rather less than the whole truth.
No one ever denied the capability of individual Russian scientists and engineers. It’s the capability of a society to get productive efforts out of them, particularly as applied to space, that’s the issue. So far, on the space front, all nations have largely failed on that score, in terms of cost-effective, large-scale activities. The Anglosphere is the only place, so far, that shows any signs of breaking out of that pattern. There are sound socioeconomic-political reasons for that to be occurring here, and not elsewhere, and it has nothing to do with either chauvinism, or the White Man’s Burden.
Pete: How can we make money if we stay in LEO? Unless we start making money, who will pay to develop these low cost Earth-to-LEO systems? And why?
Greg: Most if not all of the world’s literature has been translated. If there is someone better than Shakespeare, someone would be shouting his or her name already. Might there be an author lying undiscovered? Sure. But this guy has scoured the world of global literature quite thoroughly and if there were someone else of Shakespeare’s stature, in any language he would know about it.
Bloom’s tastes do run English and perhaps he overlooks the ancient Hindu & ancient Chinese writers as being as good as the ancient Greeks & ancient Hebrews but there doesn’t seem to be anyone else who has written with the breadth and depth of Shakespeare. But then again, how do you compare a short brilliant career (Sandy Koufax) with along one (Roger Clemons)?
Bloom vigorously defends the “Western Canon” yet is also very liberal in his politics – perhaps even more liberal than me!
No one ever denied the capability of individual Russian scientists and engineers. It’s the capability of a society to get productive efforts out of them, particularly as applied to space, that’s the issue. So far, on the space front, all nations have largely failed on that score, in terms of cost-effective, large-scale activities. The Anglosphere is the only place, so far, that shows any signs of breaking out of that pattern.
Elon Musk? Won’t the Falcon series still cost more per pound to LEO than comparable Russian carrier rockets?
The Anglosphere-ian thing to do would be for Yankee traders to buy Russian rockets as fast as they can can and employ those rockets to fulfill western business plans.
In a word: arbitrage.
No one ever denied the capability of individual Russian scientists and engineers. It’s the capability of a society to get productive efforts out of them, particularly as applied to space, that’s the issue. So far, on the space front, all nations have largely failed on that score, in terms of cost-effective, large-scale activities. The Anglosphere is the only place, so far, that shows any signs of breaking out of that pattern.
Elon Musk? Won’t the Falcon series still cost more per pound to LEO than comparable Russian carrier rockets?
The Anglosphere-ian thing to do would be for Yankee traders to buy Russian rockets as fast as they can can and employ those rockets to fulfill western business plans.
In a word: arbitrage.
“Pete: How can we make money if we stay in LEO? Unless we start making money, who will pay to develop these low cost Earth-to-LEO systems? And why?”
By thinking about just as more high end real-estate, the market is primarily space settlement.
While at $100/kg LEO will cost a lot to get to, (~$20,000 per person), accommodation in LEO can be of similar cost to accommodation in good locations on Earth. I would expect LEO to initially be a strange mix of high end resort town and high tech research and development base. Of course all the usual markets will help. The satellite industry alone probably has a larger annual turnover than some small countries, and an LEO settlement should be able to get a large piece of this.
Given how much some countries earn from tourism and how much it is likely to cost in LEO, I would expect this to be a big export earner, probably enough to sustain a few million people if need be. LEO settlement would have naturally expanded much farther a field long before such numbers are reached.
For now we need only aim for a low cost presence in LEO. We can naturally expand out from there in due course, after we get the hang of living in space. Going for the moon now is kind of like spending money of $10,000/kg launch vehicles – mostly a waste of money. We are probably better to put the moon off until we have developed the low cost space infrastructure in LEO that can sustain such an expansion.
This sounds like ISS-2 only faster, better, cheaper:
I see things the other way around. Until we start making money out there, the private sector has little incentive to fund the R&D to develop low cost space access. Elon Musk’s famous quote about making a small fortune in the space development business by starting with a large fortune is spot on, IMHO.
LEO tourism? I have no problem with that but I doubt it is a sufficient source of revenue all by itself.
Time to stop talking about settlement and start doing it. Hundreds of American families preceded Lewis and Clark into Louisiana Territory before Jefferson bought it and commissioned an expedition through it.
Bill White- on the issue of LEO tourism, I disagree – the beauty of LEO tourism is inspiration, and I think it has the potential to inspire people, and specifically, to inspire R&D facilities in space. Maybe I am wrong. But at those prices, people will start to take notice of the potential for manned orbital, in a business sense.
Ben Reytblat – You do make an excellent point. All of those would be logical indicators of whether we’ve achieved space colonization. I think the best way to look at space is when we get the first true homesteaders in space.
Pete – minor quibble, but nasa can no more “dinosaur themselves into irrelevance” than the dinosaurs did. Birds are doing quite well (I admit its minor, but I really get annoyed any time I hear someone talk about dinosaurs as being dead/extinct/irrelevent.)
2nd, I have to ask exactly what the difference is between colonization vs settlement, at least in your mind. Most people seem to think that there is a negative conitation with the word colonization (something I don’t agree with). In my mind though, the difference is 2 parts, basically being an issue of scale, colonization we are talking not tens but hundreds or even thousands), and also an issue of scale relative to the average person, whereby the average person can par-take in colonlization – the average person cannot partake in settlement (or at least it much harder). Finally, I agree with your comments on LEO and orbital stations, but I also think at that price, people will start considering such ideas as Martian cyclers and tethers, and so we needn’t limit ourselves to LEO
Hundreds of American families preceded Lewis and Clark into Louisiana Territory before Jefferson bought it and commissioned an expedition through it.
It’s a pity the economic case for a movement into space isn’t at all similar. Families could move into the new territory and be productive at a much lower cost, one that a family could afford.
Won’t the Falcon series still cost more per pound to LEO than comparable Russian carrier rockets?
Only Elon knows what Falcons cost, and I’m not sure that anyone knows what Russian rockets really cost. Don’t confuse cost and price.
In any event, I was referring to general space transports, not SpaceX per se.
LEO tourism? I have no problem with that but I doubt it is a sufficient source of revenue all by itself.
Yes, Bill, we’ve heard your doubts on that score, many times. What we’ve never heard is any valid basis for them.
Rand Simberg: No one ever denied the capability of individual Russian scientists and engineers. It’s the capability of a society to get productive efforts out of them, particularly as applied to space, that’s the issue.
You are confusing society with opportunity. Obviously the “Anglosphere”, which is to say the American economy, is full of business opportunities for Russians. They do not need to immerse themselves in American society in order to produce. That part is a matter of personal preference; some Russians want it and some don’t. RKK Energia is an entire company of productive Russians, in Russia.
It is true that the business structure of the United States can be taken as one side of American culture, obviously a very successful side. But if you really want to compare all sides of culture, then Russian culture also brings something important to the table, namely a strong social appreciation of mathematics and science. It is not a fluke that not only was one of Google’s founders born in Moscow, but also that his father is a mathematician at Maryland and his mother is an engineer at Goddard. And again, not all of these Russians go to America.
Pete: Excellent points re. our “national children,” with which I fully agree.
However, I think it is a very safe bet that exploitation of lunar resources will come before, and probably long before, really cheap access to orbit. The latter is a far harder technical problem than the former. And, the history of trade on Earth makes it very clear that cheap, or even reliable, transportation is not a prerequisite for trade to exist.
For this and other reasons, I strongly disagree with you about staying in LEO. We’ve been doing that for a quarter century and it obviously hasn’t worked. It is time to try “pull” as a way to lower transportation costs — especially since that is the way new frontiers have worked historically. Establish distant, high-cost bases at the edge of your capability, then let the need to supply those bases create a market for better transportation.
Rand: I disagree with you regarding the Russians, and I agree with Greg. At least in human spaceflight and launch vehicles, they have beat the pants off of us, with safe and reliable transport to safe and reliable space stations, both of which cost a small fraction of ours. They lack money, not skill or technical capacity. What they have is pragmatism, which we (NASA) lack. Based on past performance, I suspect that, given equal funding, they would continue to outperform us.
Making money in LEO = observation satellites in the broadest sense (already becoming a viable industry) + tourism + logistics to further destinations.
The Anglosphere-ian thing to do would be for Yankee traders to buy Russian rockets as fast as they can and employ those rockets to fulfill western business plans.
Which we and the Europeans have been doing ever since the end of the Cold War.
— Donald
Bill: Won’t the Falcon series still cost more per pound to LEO than comparable Russian carrier rockets?
Rand:Only Elon knows what Falcons cost, and I’m not sure that anyone knows what Russian rockets really cost. Don’t confuse cost and price. In any event, I was referring to general space transports, not SpaceX per se.
= = =
Fair enough on cost / price. Your correction is noted.
I was being lazy and using “cost” to refer to what it would cost me as a consumer to place X kilograms in LEO via SpaceX launchers, and price is indeed the more accurate word.
SpaceX predicted prices appear higher than Russian prices on a per kilogram basis.
In addition, other than SpaceX, who is remotely close to going orbital?
Remember Bill, that SpaceX can afford to have a bit of a premium over the Russians because dealing with SpaceX means no ITAR headaches to factor into the cost of doing business.
Bill,
The other big name that has hardware actually built, as far as I know, is Kistler, but they are still facing the financial crisis since they had their backer pull out of them.
InterOrbital is saying that they will have an Orbital Rocket by 08, although I have no knowledge beyond what little bit is on their site.
Rutan has of course said he has something that is orbital, and is involved in the CXV, although I’d be surprized if he isn’t working on a personal craft for orbit, and not just relaying on CXV.
Most everyone else has plans, like the Silver Dart and the Dreamchaser, but are of course dependent on money, and many are going after COTS, but face the issue of money
Of the upstarts, SpaceX is the only one with hardware thats built. Others have serious designs, from stuff that’s been put out there like the silver dart, the dreamchaser, and the CXV, but they are the only ones with flight hardware thats orbital capable. Interorbital Systems is saying it will have a 2008 orbital launch as well,
At least in human spaceflight and launch vehicles, they have beat the pants off of us, with safe and reliable transport to safe and reliable space stations, both of which cost a small fraction of ours.
You damn them with faint praise. I already said that nobody was doing it, to first order.
They lack money, not skill or technical capacity.
I didn’t say that they lacked either skill or technical capacity.
Strawmen abound in this thread.
You damn them with faint praise. I already said that nobody was doing it, to first order.
But the Russians and the Ukranians are the market leaders. Your interpretation is like watching Sharapova win Wimbledon and saying, “Nobody is any good at this game, and if anyone were, it would be Americans!”
But the Russians and the Ukranians are the market leaders. Your interpretation is like watching Sharapova win Wimbledon and saying, “Nobody is any good at this game, and if anyone were, it would be Americans!”
No, Greg. I’m talking about a completely different game. And so far, it’s one that only the Anglospherians have started to play (including purchasing services from the Russians, as Space Adventures just announced).
I will repeat my previous point as it is critical to the settlement question, IMHO.
The current “ratio” of kilograms to LEO versus kilograms to the lunar surface or Mars is about 5 to 1, working with “bar napkin” figures. Moon and Mars delivery costs are pretty much the same when doodling on bar napkins.
If that tether idea can reduce that ratio down to 2 to 1 then for lunar purposes thats the same as reducing the cost of getting to LEO by 60%. Do both and the price per kilo to the Moon and/or Mars falls through the floor.
Rand’s Anglosphere-ian space-planes would be a fabulous development BUT at $1200 per kilo to LEO via Proton and $2400 per kilo to Luna via tether (at least for bulk supplies) lunar operations are far more affordable TODAY than I suspect many of us currently believe.
at $1200 per kilo to LEO via Proton
I believe this is far too low. A Proton M can put about 20,000 kg into LEO and is available commercially for around $75 million each (exact prices are not disclosed, but this is in the right ballpark, at least); that works out to about three times the $1,200/kg estimate above.
at $1200 per kilo to LEO via Proton
I believe this is far too low. A Proton M can put about 20,000 kg into LEO and is available commercially for around $75 million each (exact prices are not disclosed, but this is in the right ballpark, at least); that works out to about three times the $1,200/kg estimate above.
= = =
Mea culpa. I suppose I was thinking $1200 per pound which is more consistent with your numbers, Jeff.
21,000 kg = 46,200 pounds and I seem to recall reading that some satellite launches have purchased Proton well below $75 million (closer to $50 million) sort of like how Dennis Tito officially paid $20 million for his Soyuz flight but might actually have paid only $12 million – – subject to his promise to forever insist he paid $20 million.
Ferris: “I have to ask exactly what the difference is between colonization vs settlement, at least in your mind.”
I suppose in my mind colonization is more centralized and exploitation based. Settlement is more distributed and self sufficient, organic if you will. The kibbutz movement in Israel for example was probably more one of settlement rather than colonization under some distant government. The NASA approach is one of colonization, burdening the space expansion with centralized costs it can not sustain and forcing the necessity of highly remunerative extra terrestrial resource exploitation, whether such resources exist or not. Space settlement will be more grass roots and day to day survival focused – more of a life style choice. While space settlement will have lower export earnings, it will also have much lower costs, and hence be far more sustainable.
Paul: “It’s a pity the economic case for a movement into space isn’t at all similar. Families could move into the new territory and be productive at a much lower cost, one that a family could afford.”
The trick as I see it is to make it similar. A ten ton LEO house at $100/kg would cost $1,000,000 and could be really quite large, (thousands of cubic metres), apartment habitats could be much smaller. This seems quite possible with large inflatable habitats which one could tether to a common hub, perhaps purchasing common utilities off a hub provider. Economically speaking this does not seem all that dissimilar to some terrestrial circumstances.
Rand: “LEO tourism? I have no problem with that but I doubt it is a sufficient source of revenue all by itself.”
In New Zealand, (population ~4 million), tourism is somewhere around 15% of GDP, no doubt more comparable places like Monaco are much higher. It seems to me that as a source of revenue in LEO tourism could be quite sufficient, not that it would be the only revenue source. Obviously one of the first tasks in LEO will be to develop a significant domestic economy.
I would expect LEO to attract very wealthy and competent residents, those global nomads intent on getting in at the ground floor and looking for a place to call their own. It might become something of a Zionist like movement, I do think of the Jewish resettlement of Israel as something of a model for space settlement. I would expect LEO to become a major international centre for business and technology, with laws and communications systems developed specifically for that purpose. LEO might become a good place from which to run multinational business empires.
Greg: “However, I think it is a very safe bet that exploitation of lunar resources will come before, and probably long before, really cheap access to orbit.”
I have come to think otherwise. Very high flight rate space transports have a working life of only a year or two, at which point they will be replaced by the next generation. Rotovators can similarly start happening almost straight away and be continuously up graded. As a consequence I would expect that once the CATS threshold has been overcome, launch costs will drop to significantly less than $100/kg to LEO in only a few years. For unprocessed raw lunar materials to compete with this, I expect they will have to come in at significantly less than $10/kg. And even then, only after the space based processing systems have been developed, a development that I expect will take decades, with all the up front investment that implies.
The equipment necessary to mine, transport and process lunar resources will be far more complicated and difficult to develop than Earth to LEO transportation, and there will be far less short term economic incentive to do so. It will come in time, but LEO will develop significantly on Earth resources in the interim.
Rand: “LEO tourism? I have no problem with that but I doubt it is a sufficient source of revenue all by itself.”
Actually, this was me. Rand and I dispute this exact point quite regularly, at various places on the internet.
Hey, if LEO tourism ALL BY ITSELF creates sufficient demand to fund the development of low cost space access, I will eat a crow dinner with a BIG smile. A very big smile. That said, I am not willing to bet the entire pot on that scenario. Therefore I believe we need to look into every potential source of revenue.
Greg: “However, I think it is a very safe bet that exploitation of lunar resources will come before, and probably long before, really cheap access to orbit.”
Speaking of bets . . .
I want lunar tourists to visit the PGM mines as part of the grand tour of the moon. Also, lunar LOX may well be a resource that lowers the cost of lunar access.
Tethers are terrific for cargo but I am less confident they can be easily man-rated. Release the payload at the wrong instant and crew may be stranded in an orbit incapable of being rescued. A few days of whining crying tourists waiting to run out of oxygen would be a huge set back to space tourism.
Therefore, lunar mined LOX shipped to LEO may well be needed to lower the cost of tourists travelling to the moon by conventional chemical rockets. Less chance of accidentally ending up in an unreachable orbit.
Rand: “LEO tourism? I have no problem with that but I doubt it is a sufficient source of revenue all by itself.”
Bill: “Actually, this was me. Rand and I dispute this exact point quite regularly, at various places on the internet. ;-)”
Sorry to you both. To try o make my original point more succinctly, tourism does not have to sustain an entire space settlement economy. Like countries on Earth, tourism specific export earnings may only be a small proportion of the space settlement GDP. Assuming LEO is of interest to tourists, which I expect it will be, then likely LEO costs and the scale of on Earth tourism infer that it will be a substantial LEO industry.
What is probably needed now is an alt.space development focus on space settlements, similar to the one on launch vehicles. The ISS is to space settlement what the Shuttle is to CATS. This needs to change if low cost space transports are to have a market. Low cost space transports and space habitats probably need to be developed concurrently.
Maybe what we need is a ~500 kg inflatable LEO habitat prize, (Perhaps as a propellant depot module?). This might enable something in the ten metre by three metre diameter range – furnishings, consumerables and utilities being separate.
Sorry to you both. To try o make my original point more succinctly, tourism does not have to sustain an entire space settlement economy. Like countries on Earth, tourism specific export earnings may only be a small proportion of the space settlement GDP. Assuming LEO is of interest to tourists, which I expect it will be, then likely LEO costs and the scale of on Earth tourism infer that it will be a substantial LEO industry.
I agree with this 100% – – Tourism absolutely is part of the solution. But only part, IMHO.
What is probably needed now is an alt.space development focus on space settlements, similar to the one on launch vehicles.
Bigelow is doing exactly this.
Getting a genuine space hotel up there sooner rather than later – – even if Soyuz and Shenzou are the only initial rides – – will stimulate alt-space humans to LEO faster than anything else, IMHO. Me? I’d wouldn’t complain at all if Congress agreed to spend $500 million to loft a few Bigelow habs on expensive US rockets just to get the ball rolling.
If we are flying the shuttle stack anyway, why not stick a few Bigelow habs and Russia’s spare FGB-2 where orbiter would otherwise go, wrap in a disposable payload shroud, launch unmanned and voila! – – a space hotel in one launch.
Guests arriving on Soyuz / Shenzou pay a reasonable fee per night of lodging. Guests arriving on US flag alt-space rockets stay free.
Pete: “What is probably needed now is an alt.space development focus on space settlements, similar to the one on launch vehicles.”
Bill: “Bigelow is doing exactly this.”
Unfortunately this is not entirely true. The Bigelow habitats are 20 ton behemoths, they can not be launched on smaller launch vehicles, which the first reusable low cost space transports will surely want to be. And so such habitats will end up being an order of magnitude more expensive than they need to be, a cost that will be passed onto space tourists with the obvious result on market size. They also miss an opportunity to directly add to a low cost reusable space transport market, space transports which will likely be required to serve them anyway, further delaying economic payback.
My major complaint is that they use a rigid core, (a waste of mass), within which many other systems are situated. This is so that they can launch the entire module in one go in a self sufficient fashion – this is NASA thinking. If they adopted an orbital assembly approach then the same module could probably be assembled from 1000 kg payloads with greater flexibility and fewer design compromises. Such orbital assembly could be as simple as putting up a multiple layer tent fly for impact shielding, (less than 1000 kg), inflating a habitat shell inside it, (~1000 kg), and then adding utilities and furnishing it internally, (many 1000 kg payloads).
Like SpaceX, Bigelow is trying to be a mammal in a dinosaur world, instead of designing for a mammalian future. This can be a sensible transition approach, but I doubt it is in this circumstance. Bigelow is having a very positive effect on the market, it is just less than it could be.
Bill: “I wouldn’t complain at all if Congress agreed to spend $500 million to loft a few Bigelow habs on expensive US rockets just to get the ball rolling.”
$500 million in prize money could probably help pay for the development of 2-3 low cost space transports systems and low cost orbital assembly habitat modules to boot. One does not develop low cost space settlements by spending lots of money. That leads to corruption, pork barrel politics and a failure to achieve any results whatsoever. Stupidly high costs have a bad tendency to poison every design they touch, it is much safer to keep one’s distance.
Pete: In New Zealand, (population ~4 million), tourism is somewhere around 15% of GDP, no doubt more comparable places like Monaco are much higher.
I agree. It is my understanding that telecommunications and tourism periodically trade places as the world’s largest industries. The money is there if we can find a way to exploit it.
Pete, I’ll believe $100/kg. LEO transport when I see it. In the mean time, I think it is wisest to assume that’s not going to happen and act accordingly. After all, if you can make a business work at current rates, it’ll take the world by storm at $100/kg. When planning space-based industries, I see every practical and financial reason to assume the worst and hope for the best.
The equipment necessary to mine, transport and process lunar resources will be far more complicated and difficult to develop than Earth to LEO transportation,
While I am not an engineer and will defer to those who are on this, I think this extremely improbable. Anyone else care to comment?
and there will be far less short term economic incentive to do so.
As no less an expert than Wendell Mendell once pointed out, the incentive to develop local resources is directly proportional to the cost of transport. The higher the cost of importing things the higher the incentive to make do locally. If you are correct re. transportation costs, than there will be relatively little incentive to develop lunar oxygen, et al. If I am correct, than the incentive becomes very high.
Some of the issues in the above discussion of the Anglosphere concept are addressed nicely in Peter St. Andre’s recent post at Albion’s Seedlings.
I find it a bit ironic to be dismissed by comparison to the “more important” Mr. Jefferson. (Was it me who claimed to be equally or more important than that gentleman?) Although I do not claim to rival him in importance, I am one of the more conspicuous of those who have pointed out that Jefferson’s long-dismissed historical scholarship, on which his better-known writings rest, has in fact been revindicated by recent historical scholarship. Jefferson himself was not an American exceptionalist — he placed the development of free institutions in American unambiguously in a line of descent from the english representative and constitutional institutions that date back to Anglo-Saxon times and beyond, resting his argument on Montesquieu’s research on medieval and pre-medieval constitutionalism. This research has recently been shown to be largely accurate, and in general the continuity of American culture and institutions from its British Isles predecessors, and the continuity of English institutons to pre-Norman Conquest institutions, has been given renewed emphasis from recent research. The whole idea of the “frontier thesis” and American expectionalism was a 19th century romantic nationalist fiction adopted in American schools for propaganda purposes. Ironically the idea of an “authentic American national voice” distinct from European models is in itself a 19th-century import from German models, which have in turn become discredited due to their role in propogating certain unpleasant events in their country of origin 60 years ago.
But don’t take my word for it — my sources are readily available.
Donald: “Pete, I’ll believe $100/kg. LEO transport when I see it. In the mean time, I think it is wisest to assume that’s not going to happen and act accordingly. After all, if you can make a business work at current rates, it’ll take the world by storm at $100/kg. When planning space-based industries, I see every practical and financial reason to assume the worst and hope for the best.”
One still should be designing for substantially lower cost, as this is possible and maximises the return. This quickly leads to even lower costs.
$200-300 million seems a common figure for the development of a low cost 2000-3000 kg payload space transport. Boot legging a rotovator sees payload gradually increase up to about ten times the original amount. (This is an exponential relationship so increasing the payload fivefold costs very little, like fifty original payloads worth of tether system, increasing tenfold costs a lot more.) So it seems sensible to me to start with the development of a space transport in the 100-500 kg payload range. This should reduce initial development costs and increase initial flight rates significantly.
Fuel costs start off at around $10/kg to LEO, lowering to around $1/kg to LEO with the fully developed rotovator system. A 500 kg payload at $100/kg is $50,000 per flight, $5,000 of which is fuel. With high flight rate, operational and maintenance costs should probably also be in a similar range to fuel costs. Hence the dominant costs are initially development and vehicle costs, these set the cost/kg to LEO.
Assuming an equatorial launch site and LEO destination, and about an hour turnaround at each end, around eight flights are possible a day, say 2500 a year. Obviously one would plan on a lot less initially, like one flight a day.
Assuming $100 million average development and build cost amortised per space transport in the fleet and 1000 flights per space transport before retirement, this would cost about a $100/kg to LEO. At full flight rate, such a space transport would have a life span of less than six months. One should probably assume much lower average development costs, significantly higher fleet numbers, (more than three space transports), over which such costs would be spread and many more flights per space transport. In time development and space transport build costs should be in a similar range to fuel costs.
Assuming $10,000/kg of drymass, a nominal, (without rotovator), 500 kg payload space transport might cost $25 million to build. This should quickly decrease to around $1000/kg of drymass or $2.5 million per space transport. On the above assumptions this cost fraction works out at $50/kg and $5/kg to LEO respectively. With a fully developed rotovator this would go down to around $0.5/kg to LEO.
In this fashion, with a fully developed rotovator system, I would expect total costs to eventually get down to below $10/kg to LEO. Without a rotovator, I would still eventually expect less than $50/kg to LEO. This all assumes a mature industry, much like air or sea travel. With such high flight rates space transports reach retirement age in only a couple of years. This makes for a very short developmental generation, and so I expect industry development to be very fast indeed. The space transport design, build and fly cycle should almost be an incrementally improving production line, completing the next vehicle every few months. Costs per kg to LEO will drop rapidly once such a process is started.
Mr. Bennett writes:
Some of the issues in the above discussion of the Anglosphere concept are addressed nicely in Peter St. Andre’s recent post at Albion’s Seedlings.
Interesting. Based on that post, it would seem I am Quaker-oriented. A world view solildy within the Anglo-sphere without being necessarily supportive of American military hegemony.
Donald Speaks
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As no less an expert than Wendell Mendell once pointed out, the incentive to develop local resources is directly proportional to the cost of transport. The higher the cost of importing things the higher the incentive to make do locally. If you are correct re. transportation costs, than there will be relatively little incentive to develop lunar oxygen, et al. If I am correct, than the incentive becomes very high.
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Hi Don! By the way it has been many years since we met, good to see you are still around.
While low cost transport to LEO is important, so is low cost LEO-LLO-LEO costs (or straight to ground). I don’t really buy mass drivers as the holy grail as it is almost impossible to target them at the right point on the Earth, too many transient variables involved. What is important is a transportation system that can move signficant material to and from Earth orbit to the Moon and back. This is why I applaud the COTS effort and hope that there will be a proposal out there that actually has a chance of working.
ISS or some commercial facility in orbit is far more important to the opening of at least the cis-lunar economy than simple low cost launch to orbit alone. The rational is this:
A heavy lifter, no matter the type, is going to cost at least ten billion dollars to develop, if not more (Gordon Woodcock estimates that the current NASA HLLV is going to cost $20 billion). That is a very high energy of inital cost that, while government may absorb that cost, there is little likelyhood that the operational cost is going to be low. For example of this, the NASA budget assumes a CEV budget of $2.4 billion dollars per year between 2012 and 2016. Since they are only talking about two flights per year, this means that the CEV is going to cost about $1.2 billion per flight. Correct me if I am wrong but this is HIGHER than Shuttle costs when it is launched at least four times per year.
A theoretically low cost launcher such as what Elon proposes could get payloads, including a human occupant, to LEO for considerably less but still not cheap. The Russians today launch crew and cargo for pretty reasonable costs, to ISS. With that low cost, and with the ability to store partially complete vehicles at the station, we don’t need heavy lift. I can guarantee you that five Proton’s or Faclon 9’s will be cheaper than a single heavy lift launch. If we couple that with an electric propulsion system to take cargos to LLO, then we have the potential for a commercial system to carry payloads and people to the Moon completely outside of the ESAS system, while allowing the COTS funded developments to help amortize the cost of commercial systems to station to provide an American solution.
Just some thoughts about first steps.
Dennis
While low cost transport to LEO is important, so is low cost LEO-LLO-LEO costs (or straight to ground)
Dennis, what are your thoughts on momentum exchange tethers?
= = =
On the main point, recall that sci-fi master Robert Heinlein wrote: “Once you get to low Earth orbit, you are halfway to anywhere. . .”
True, but if you then remain stuck in LEO then “halfway to anywhere” is really no where that is either interesting or useful.
Bill
I worked with tethers for almost ten years and am a great fan of them in their proper place. A spinning tether can toss a payload ten times its length but with the penalty that it reduces the orbit of the tether by the ratio of the weights tossed. A tether would work great for dropping payloads from ISS while giving it a boost.
I like electrodynamic tethers that are also used for momentum exchange as this is the way to recover the lost momentum, assuming you have a power supply to pump the energy into the tether. E-tethers don’t work very well above 2000 km.
For a real transportation system between the Earth and the Moon, tethers can be used to optimize some orbital energy but mostly on the outgo from LEO. The timing is so tight that it is not that valuable for a lot of things.
I guess I am of two minds about tethers, I like them more for LEO to the ground and low LEO orbits rather than for grand schemes. The exception to this is the idea of Paul Penzo of JPL to use very long (1000+ km) tethers attached to Phobos and Deimos to provide a way to drop into, and climb out of Mars orbit without much energy being required. Look up the papers on that idea.
Dennis
Pete: Hence the dominant costs are initially development and vehicle costs, these set the cost/kg to LEO.
I don’t disagree with much of your analysis, but your key sentence, and the key problem, is that one. Today, there are a few dozen payloads to orbit. Who is going to spend the money to develop reusable transport to serve that market? Nobody, except the odd idiot spending his personal fortune for ideological reasons derived from Star Trek. You need a bigger market first, to pay for the up-front development costs. That’s why the Space Station and lunar base are so important. Potentially, these are markets for space lift that will dwarf any existing market, and, if they are ever commercialized, they are what will pay for your development costs. We’ve been trying to do it the other way around (up-front development of efficient launch vehicles first, reason for their existence second) ever since Apollo, and it hasn’t worked. I see no reason for it to work now.
Dennis: ISS or some commercial facility in orbit is far more important to the opening of at least the cis-lunar economy than simple low cost launch to orbit alone.
Good to hear from you as well. I fully agree with this, as I argued some years ago here,
http://www.speakeasy.org/~donaldfr/sfmodel.pdf
I am agnostic on launch vehicles for the CEV as long as it does not involve developing a new one. I think we should have used the EELVs to take advantage of economies of scale with the Air Force, but if the Falcon-9 is ready in time, I’d love the see them have a go.
Developing — and maintaining! — a new set of launch vehicles for use solely by NASA is the wrong way to go. However, since the decision has been made — and because fratricide will kill the VSE far faster than the wrong launch vehicle — I’ve thrown my support (such as it is) behind the current plan.
— Donald
Donald: “Today, there are a few dozen payloads to orbit. Who is going to spend the money to develop reusable transport to serve that market?”
I fully agree with this. This is a problem that needs to be approached from both ends simultaneously. The first low cost space transports are going to have small payloads – in the few hundred to few thousand kilogram range. We need to be developing the full range of payloads now to fit these space transports, using orbital assembly as required.