The Folly of Our Age. The space shuttle.

National Review Online ^ | today | John Derbyshire

[Rodney King]

Like the monster in some ghastly horror movie rising from the dead for the umpteenth time, the space shuttle is back on the launch pad. This grotesque, lethal white elephant — 14 deaths in 113 flights — is the grandest, grossest technological folly of our age. If the shuttle has any reason for existing, it is as an exceptionally clear symbol of our corrupt, sentimental, and dysfunctional political system. Its flights accomplish nothing and cost half a billion per. That, at least, is what a flight costs when the vehicle survives. If a shuttle blows up — which, depending on whether or not you think that 35 human lives (five original launchworthy Shuttles at seven astronauts each) would be too high a price to pay for ridding the nation of an embarrassing and expensive monstrosity, is either too often or not often enough** — then the cost, what with lost inventory, insurance payouts, and the endless subsequent investigations, is seven or eight times that.

There is no longer much pretense that shuttle flights in particular, or manned space flight in general, has any practical value. You will still occasionally hear people repeating the old NASA lines about the joys of microgravity manufacturing and insights into osteoporesis, but if you repeat these tales to a materials scientist or a physiologist, you will get peals of laughter in return. To seek a cure for osteoporesis by spending $500 million to put seven persons and 2,000 tons of equipment into earth orbit is a bit like… well, it is so extravagantly preposterous that any simile you can come up with falls flat. It is like nothing else in the annals of human folly.

Having no practical justification for squirting so much of the nation’s wealth up into the stratosphere, our politicians — those (let us charitably assume there are some) with no financial or electoral interest in the big contractor corporations who feed off the shuttle — fall back on romantic appeals to Mankind’s Destiny. Thus President Bush, addressing the nation after the Columbia tragedy two years ago:

These men and women assumed great risk in this service to all humanity. In an age when space flight has come to seem almost routine, it is easy to overlook the dangers of travel by rocket and the difficulties of navigating the fierce outer atmosphere of the earth.

These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly, knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life. Because of their courage and daring and idealism, we will miss them all the more.

The cause in which they died will continue. Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on.

Anyone who finds it “easy to overlook the dangers of travel by rocket” just hasn’t been following the shuttle program very attentively. One astronaut death per eight flights!

The rest of the president’s address on that occasion was, to be blunt about it, insulting to the memories of the astronauts who died, and still more insulting to their grieving spouses, children, parents, and friends. If these astronauts believed that “they had a high and noble purpose in life,” they were mistaken, and someone should have set them straight on the point.

Please note that “if.” The motivation of shuttle astronauts would, I suspect, make a very interesting study for some skillful psychologist. Here is Ken Bowersox, one of the astronauts who was actually on board the International Space Station (steady now, Derb, husband your wrath) when Columbia blew up. He is writing in the June 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics, putting the “pro” case in a debate on the continuation of the Shuttle program, versus former NASA historian Alex Roland arguing the “con.” Bowersox:

I’ve wanted to be in space from the time I was listening to the radio and heard about John Glenn circling the earth. Columbia was the klind of blow that could have made me walk away from it. As astronauts, though, we wouldn’t have been on the space station if we didn’t believe in the program. Even after losing our friends and our ride home, we still believed that exploration was important.

Far be it from me to pull rank on Astronaut Bowersox, but I’ve wanted to be in space for somewhat longer than that — since seeing those wonderful pictures by Chesley Bonestell in The Conquest of Space, circa 1952, or possibly after being taken to the movie Destination Moon at around the same time. The imaginative appeal of space travel is irresistible. I don’t think I could resist it, anyway. Even with two young kids who need me, and a wife who (I feel fairly sure) would miss me, I would still, if given the opportunity to go into space tomorrow, be on the next flight to Cape Canaveral. As Prof. Roland says in that Popular Mechanics exchange: “The real reason behind sending astronauts to Mars is that it’s thrilling and exciting.” Absolutely correct. The danger? Heck, we all have to go sometime. As President Bush said, I am sure quite truly: “These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly…” It’s the president’s next clause I have trouble with: “…knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life.”

Did they really know that? My experience of pointless make-work, which is much more extensive than I would have wished when starting out in life, is that people engaged in it know they are engaged in it. Whether they mind or not depends on the rewards. For a thousand bucks an hour, I’d do make-work all day long — aye, and all night too! Astronaut salaries don’t rise to anything like that level, of course; but there are rewards other than the merely financial. I hope no one will take it amiss — I am very sorry for the astronauts who have died in the shuttle program, and for their loved ones — if I quietly speculate on whether, being engaged in such a supremely thrilling and glamorous style of make-work, one might not easily be able to convince oneself to, as Astronaut Bowersox says, “believe in the program.”

None of which is any reason why the rest of us should believe in it, let alone pay for it. There is nothing — nothing, no thing, not one darned cotton-picking thing you can name — of either military, or commercial, or scientific, or national importance to be done in space, that could not be done twenty times better and at one thousandth the cost, by machines rather than human beings. Mining the asteroids? Isaac Asimov famously claimed that the isotope Astatine-215 (I think it was) is so rare that if you were to sift through the entire crust of the earth, you would only find a trillion atoms of it. We could extract every one of that trillion, and make a brooch out of them, for one-tenth the cost of mining an asteroid.

The gross glutted wealth of the federal government; the venality and stupidity of our representatives; the lobbying power of big rent-seeking corporations; the romantic enthusiasms of millions of citizens; these are the things that 14 astronauts died for. To abandon all euphemism and pretense, they died for pork, for votes, for share prices, and for thrills (immediate in their own case, vicarious in ours). I mean no insult to their memories, and I doubt they would take offense. I am certain that I myself would not — certain, in fact, that, given the opportunity, I would gleefully do what they did, with all the dangers, and count the death, if it came, as anyway no worse than moldering away in some hospital bed at age ninety, watching a TV game show, with a tube in my arm and a diaper round my rear end. I should be embarrassed to ask the rest of you to pay for the adventure, though.

** There are actually reasons to think we may have been lucky so far. News item: “Steve Poulos, manager of the Orbiter Projects Office at Johnson Space Center in Houston, acknowledges there is ‘a debate’ inside the agency about the threat posed by space debris. One school of thought is that a fatal debris strike is ‘probable,’ Poulos said. But he said others think such an event is likely to be ‘infrequent’." Uh-huh.

[from occupied ga]

remnant of mankind can escape to when it becomes clear that this earth of ours is sufficiently doomed or uninhabitable. I kid you not.

Well there are a number of people who believe that health care is a right, gun control prevents crime, and that the role of government is to take care of their every want, so I guess finding a group wiht the shared delusion that humanity can find another place to live isn't so surprising.

[Rodney King]

I won't give him Velcro. So NASA invented it. His assumption is that it or something never would have been invented otherwise. That is a ridiculous assumption.

The very idea that one should set an R&D goal based on spending a whole lot of money on something and hope that it accidentally throws off some useful technologies is an extremely inefficient compared to just researching needed techonologies.

[from occupied ga]

Dupont did next to nothing with teflon, until Nasa engineers started to use it on parts for the space program.

Nonsense. Stick with Tang and velcro - easily worth the billions squandered on NASA < /sarcasm>

[from occupied ga]

His assumption is that it or something never would have been invented otherwise. That is a ridiculous assumption.

Oh I agree - I was just being generous and lazy in not wanting to explain something economic to a space head. Just look at the difference in cost between what the government spends to develop something and what private industry spends. All of that money represents lost opportunity cost for spending on something. Bastiat in That which is seen and that which is not seen shows this much more succinctly and clearly than I could. He and the other space heads ought to read it.

[NCC-1701]

The thing that has always gotten me ruffled is the argument that the money spent on spaceflight could be better spent on social programs and problems here on Earth. This is my retort to that argument. Our involvement in the Vietnam war and the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs were running parallel to each other. The war cost four to five times the amount than the cost of the space race. What did we get out of the war? 58,000 dead, distrust for politicians, a very cynical attitude, and a host of other negatives. By contrast, the space program provided countless benefits from medicine to computers to metallurgy to etc.. And the "problems here on Earth" still remain. And they have gotten worse.
The space program is one of the very few things this country has done right and has succeeded in. Up to Apollo 11, the entire Race to the Moon amounted to a huge high stakes poker game with two mounds of chips pushed to the center of the table and the first one to blink lost. Guess who that was. The shuttle program was a great thing when it started, but became a victim of an out of control, bloated NASA bureaucracy. It succeeds only by the ones who are charged with the assembly, checkout, and flying the thing. But they have to work under "The System". Will there be another tragedy before the shuttle is permanently grounded? Who knows. I pray that we can get through the remaining 18 to 20 flights without incident. Then, maybe the mantle of being "the Last Man on the Moon" can be lifted from Gene Cernan's shoulders. He has always said he'd gladly relinquish that title.

[1Old Pro]

This article is magical. I'm sure the government is pelased that it doesn't focus at all on one of the big attractions for national security the shuttle provides.

Namely, what other vehicle can be put into space and can systematically find important sateliites and destroy them in a time of war?

Imagine a war were your opponent cannot fly without their GPS satellites working? Cannot communicate without their communication satellites? Cannot see where the enemy is without their spy sateliites?

[bvw]

** There are actually reasons to think we may have been lucky so far. News item: “Steve Poulos, manager of the Orbiter Projects Office at Johnson Space Center in Houston, acknowledges there is ‘a debate’ inside the agency about the threat posed by space debris. One school of thought is that a fatal debris strike is ‘probable,’ Poulos said. But he said others think such an event is likely to be ‘infrequent’." Uh-huh.

Gee golly, that may be. But it also misses the risk of dred happenstance upon the ground below. A main engine crashing into an elementary school, a crew cabin into a hospital or mall. We just missed a few such during the most recent break up and crashing over SW USA.

[bvw]

Nice logistics side-discussion.

[bvw]

Velcro? I thought that was a Swiss inventor's invention.

[from occupied ga]

I didn't know for sure, so I let that one go.

[null and void]

Columbus did not find the riches, spices, nor the faster route to the Far East upon which the Spanish rulers had banked. He found hot chili peppers.

And. infinitely more important, the new world had CHOCOLATE!

[NCC-1701]

A small correction. Velcro WASN'T a NASA invention. It was used in World War 2. It was invented by someone, who's name escapes me, that went walking through a field of cockleburrs. He noticed how strongly they adhered themselves to his clothing. That was late '30's or early '40's.

[lasisra]

"One of the underlying realities of space travel is that every place human beings try to go -- at least for the foreseeable future -- will be inherently incapable of supporting human life on its own."

That's certainly true of most places in our solar system, but if Mars has large, *accessible* water supplies, a self-sustaining Mars colony is not all that hard to envision: nuclear reactors + solar energy for power, water and oxygen (via electrolysis) from the local water supply, and food from plants (and possibly animals) grown in artificially heated and lighted environments.

The colony would have to be a lot more efficient than any agricultural operation currently on Earth, but the concepts are not unknown. For example, animal waste is already recycled as plant fertilizer; both plant and animal material not used for human consumption is already ground up for animal feed. In a Mars colony, human waste would also have to be recycled. Most likely, the plants used for food would be algae rather than wheat, and the animal protein would come from grubs and bugs rather than cows.

It would require a huge investment in infrastructure to provide abundant, reliable power to sustain these operations, as well as to power mining and manufacturing operations to use locally available materials to make the supplies needed for the colony.

So, a very large colony would necessary. But it's most likely that the colony would be small (and dependent on regular resupply missions from Earth) for many years at first. Initially, the "colony" might only only be an unmanned facility with robots extracting raw materials and manufacturing basic supplies for the subsequent human colonists. Only gradually would the colony grow in size and capabilities and develop self-sufficiency.

But whether this is feasible at all depends on the availability of large quantities of water. When (and whether) it's logical to make the necessary investment is another debate entirely.

[NautiNurse]

infinitely more important, the new world had CHOCOLATE!

As I nestle into middle age, there are times I wish we didn't have chocolate...sigh...

;o)

[bvw]

NASA wasn't around in 1948, Velcro was:

For thousands of years, man has walked through fields of weeds and arrived home with burrs stuck to his clothing. It’s amazing no one took advantage of the problem until 1948. George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, returned from a walk one day in 1948 and found some cockleburs clinging to his cloth jacket. When de Mestral loosened them, he examined one under his microscope. The principle was simple. The cocklebur is a maze of thin strands with burrs (or hooks) on the ends that cling to fabrics or animal fur. By the accident of the cockleburs sticking to his jacket, George de Mestral recognized the potential for a practical new fastener. It took eight years to experiment, develop, and perfect the invention, which consists of two strips of nylon fabric. One strip contains thousands of small hooks. The other strip contains small loops. When the two strips are pressed together, they form a strong bond. VELCRO, the name de Mestral gave his product, is the brand most people in the United States know. It is strong, easily separated, lightweight, durable, and washable, comes in a variety of colors, and won’t jam.

(source: The Great Idea Finder web site.)

[bvw]

See post above.

[Rodney King]

Namely, what other vehicle can be put into space and can systematically find important sateliites and destroy them in a time of war?

Except of course we are not at all prepared to do that. I am all for space exploration for the benefit of our national interest. That would include space weapons capability, and claiming territory that is valuable. However, we don't seem to be doing that.

[Alberta's Child]

One thing you're overlooking is the compatibility of the human body with a hostile environment like that. One major problem is that the human body is "engineered" to live in a very specific environment, with very little variation in the chemical composition of the air we breathe and the food and water we consume. An even bigger concern is gravity -- since the human body is built for a terrestrial environment with a gravitational pull of 32.2 ft./s² and doesn't function properly when it spends too much time outside those parameters.

When you take into account the enormous cost of creating and maintaining an artificial environment on another terrestrial body in outer space, I can't imagine how it could possibly pay off in the long run -- even if we were to establish colonies on the moon or planets to raise alien creatures that sh!t gold coins and urinate gasoline.

[from occupied ga]

Well now I know :-)

[new cruelty]

I am just relaying the story, so please don't throw your ham radios, comic books, and D&D regalia at me. Live long and prosper.

ROTFLOL. Man, that's just mean.