NASA probably will blame the commercial space industry (and its advocates) if COTS fails. NASA will probably do everything it can to avoid accepting responsibility, and use this as a reason to kill off similar initiatives to use commercial approaches. Whether they get away with it depends on who the next NASA Administrator is (and who is in the White House).

BTW, one of the market-based solutions, which is used by professional investors to manage risk, is to create a portfolio of investments. This usually means spreading the investments from a single fund to 10 or more separate investments.

Contrast this with COTS. NASA is probably going to give COTS funds to two (2) companies.

The solution?

Add another couple billion dollars to COTS, which would create a half-dozen or more COTS winners. RESULT: We would have a real diversified portfolio to manage risk. It would become highly likely that at least one of them will succeed, and succeed in a spectacular fashion.

Where would NASA get the money?

Guess how much money NASA plans to spend to send the CEV to space station by 2014?

There is enough funding available if we make the decision *now* that the CEV will NOT go to the ISS. This will 1) allow us to simplify the CEV, and 2) allow us to delay both CEV and CLV to a schedule that is more in line with CaLV, since it is no longer urgent that CEV/CLV fly ASAP.

All we need to do is to make the decision *now* that COTS (and free enterprise) is the best (and right) way for the United States (the world’s economic powerhouse because of capitalism) to minimize the gap in U.S. government human spaceflight,

– Al

{we’ve for the most part graduated on to “Why can’t NASA distinguish between good risks and bad risks, and how can this situation be improved?”}

I have to agree with Nemo that this is the REAL question.

Free enterprise capitalism has some real answers, which may or may not apply to the decisions that NASA needs to make.

Anybody here who thinks that venture capitalists (or professional angel investors) “like risk” does not understand them.

They hate taking irrational and unnecessary risk, which they avoid like the plague. Meanwhile they have figured out how to manage the risks they are willing to take, which can look quite substantical to the novice who does not understand their business. However, good investors generally have a proven method (measured by ROI) to reducing to the risks to the “good risks”.

IMO, NASA still has not figured out how to manage or assess risk. By the way that Nemo made his statment, I am guessing he agrees.

Neither the VSE (or one subpart of that, COTS) changes my opinion. (Do you really believe a government bureaucracy knows how assess which COTS competitors are more or less risky from a business perspective? Do you really believe NASA knows how to assess the business or investment risk among the competitors?

If so, I have a bridge to sell you.

In the meantime, I really hope COTS succeeds. The future of national space policy (and our future in space) depends on its success.

But the signals are that NASA will pick the most risky companies to give contracts to, increasing the odds that they will fail. While we might think this is acceptable, and say so when it happens, look for the NASA bureaucracy to say “You commercial guys had your chance, and you failed. Don’t let the door hit you in the *ss.”

Remember what happened on X-33.

This community put in a huge amount of effort to sell x-vehicles, and helped fund a $900M program for NASA. NASA then picked the MOST technically risky approach of the 3 alternatives. It failed.

NASA then said the lesson that NASA learned was that we did not have good enough technology yet. The real lesson is that the NASA culture designed the X-33 program poorly, and then chose the highest risk solution company, substantially increasing the likelihood of failure.

I think Nemo’s point is right on.

– COTSadvocate

The first hit from a Google search on “Apollo 8 environmental movement”

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/eh/9.3/maher.html

The third hit,

http://history.acusd.edu/gen/nature/environ5.html

From no less an authority than the EPA,

http://www.epa.gov/superfund/action/20years/ch1pg1.htm

And so on. While none of these, of course, prove that I am right, they do prove that I am not isolated in my opinion. I would respectfully suggest that you closely examine the values you are an apologist for.

— Donald

Well, I lived through that time, and I do not remember that photo playing any significant role. My direct experience of the pollution of the time, however, is still a strong memory.

The laws that were passed, from the early 1960s (well before Apollo 8) and onwards focused on local pollution, not global issues. This is true to this day in the US — we strictly control NOx, SOx, hydrocarbons, CO, but have no laws limited CO2 emissions. Judging by the results, that ‘Earth as a Whole’ picture seems to not caused actions compatible with its ostensible message. This leads one to doubt that it had much effect at all.

If it is so all-fired important, you could surely point to web pages on the history of the environmental movement (or better, books) that document the importance of this photo. I do not see any such documentation. Indeed, the only place I have seen this photo mentioned is in the writings of space program apologists. Sorry, that’s not my flavor of Kool Aid.

Even in the unlikely event that you are entirely correct, the wider point is still valid. The Apollo-16 astronauts were aware the instant they looked out their windows that there was something wrong with what the scientists expected for their site based on remote observation. It took them a while, but they figured out what what it was, correctly, on site before returning to Earth. There are repeated references in the Apollo record to how beautiful the astronauts found their sites. These people came back and shared their experience with the wider society. (I recall that, when I was a child, just about every one of my friends had that wall paper with the astronauts against the lunar mountains on their walls.)

Do you hike in the wilderness, or only watch it on Television? If your answer to the first question is yes, than why? It costs far more. There is no measurable benefit. Most people don’t bother. But, many, many people expend vast resources doing just that. Why? This experience causes some of them to fight tooth and nail for the retention of those natural places. Why?

The answers to those questions are why you need human spaceflight, and why you need it at all times when it is possible, not only when it is cheap-and-easy.

I find it incredible that a seemingly intelligent person like yourself can actually make yourself believe that watching the lunar or Martian surface on television can possibly have even a tiny fraction of the value of sending someone there to look at it themselves and report back. That large numbers of supposed “scientists” have bought into this absurdity is one of the great intellectual failings of our age.

— Donald

Of course we don’t have ‘infinite’ time. On the other hand, there’s no obvious reason why we don’t have lots of time.

More significantly, you ignore the side benefits of human spaceflight. The famous “Earthrise” photo taken by the Apollo-8 astronauts is often credited with creating the environmental movement.

It’s incredible that a seemingly intelligent person like yourself can actually make yourself believe that. It’s self-serving delusional bullshit.

Environmentalism came about because of perceived damage to the local environment. Dead rivers, air that damaged the lungs, thousands dead in smogs in Britain, etc. It started well before the ‘Earthrise’ picture. I am sure you will find no documentation that this picture served any significant role in the founding or propagation of the environmental movement.

I’m sure that you will argue that this photo, and the others, could have been taken by a robot. Some of it could — indeed, one of the Lunar Orbiters took a similar photo, and certainly, I expect the lovely photos from Saturn to have an impact. Nonetheless, it remains true that the singular photo that has had the greatest impact on our culture was taken by a very human man who hadn’t shaved in a week with a handheld camera out of a porthole window.

I believe that is no accident. Personal experience counts in a way no amount of watching Mars over what amounts to television can ever duplicate.

— Donald

Please insert tongue in cheek now.

I mean, if the alien Proxmires/Parks/(insert demonized critic here) are dominant in all alien societies, at all points in their histories, it can only be becasue they’re right.

Well, it means they’re really really persuasive. The dominance or popularity of a particular set of beliefs doesn’t necessarily make it right.

(The idea that the dominant society could ban colonization, without itself colonizing, using self-reproducing machines if not people, is rather silly.)

Robotic weapons would satisfy the robots-only space policy and enforce the ban on colonization. And they’ll look cool.

Moreover, imagining that humans would be so exceptional that they would be able to buck this univeral trend would be the height of shoddy SF storytelling (unless you like highly implausible humans-uber-alles stories.)

Humans are doing a good job being exceptional here on Earth. Maybe we’ll be exceptional in space too. And look cool.

More troublingly, this point of view misrepresents Parks’ position. I am sure Park is not claiming that in, say, 1000 years, human space travel will not make sense. He is claiming it doesn’t make sense now, so don’t spend money on it now. This is a context-dependent assessment, and there’s no reason to caricature it as a blind, unthinking, perpetual bias.

I don’t know. I don’t think context-dependent assessment is Bob Park’s strong suit.

But if you could give Bob a statement like “Human spaceflight is bad in the past and the present, but it’ll be good in the future”, and get him to sign it… that’ll be… really… cool.

Thanks for the heads-up, Dwayne. I wasn’t aware of the Proxmire effect.

The same topic is also covered by the book If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens… Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi’s Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life by Stephen Webb. “Solution 14: They Stay at Home…” says:

One of the most thrilling events of my childhood happened on 20 July 1969. My father woke me to watch Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the Moon. I guess most people of my age felt the same awe when they saw Apollo 11 touch down. More than thirty years later, we lack the ready capability — and motivation — to repeat the venture. Since Gene Cernan shook the lunar dust from his boots in 1972, no one has set foot on the Moon, and there are no definite plans for anyone to do so. Some space enthusiasts continue to do valuable work on establishing the factors needed for a manned trip to Mars, but such a trip is unlikely to happen soon. An assumption shared by many, including myself, is that intelligent species like ours will inevitably expand into space — so why are we not out there? Perhaps the assumption is wrong. Perhaps an unfortunate mixture of apathy and economics means ETCs stay at home; maybe that is the sad solution to the Fermi paradox.

It’s an interesting book, with a controversial conclusion (Solution 50). I won’t spoil it here!

A nonsense argument. This would mean that any government program, however ill-conceived, is by definition ‘practical’.

A more important question is, if you don’t try to sail the seas in dugout logs, will you ever learn to construct a supertanker?

The implication here is that this linear step has to be taken now. But this is also nonsense. Progress can be made in other areas that will ‘spin on’ to space, even if human spaceflight is otherwise abandoned for now. We didn’t start flying rockets because of a space program stretching back to the dawn of history; we did it after capabilities were developed for non-space applications that made building rockets possible. The most obvious change in the future will be the general improvement in the efficiency of manufacturing and engineering with increasing automation. This will continue to occur even if NASA is axed tomorrow.