Nobody Born After 1935 Has Walked On The Moon

Submitted by M Aurelius on Sun, 08/26/2012 - 10:55pm

Science and Tech

Yes kids, that means nobody born since the nineteen thirties.

With that in mind, consider the string of space exploration events that have happened (and that nobody has bothered to diary about), in the past few weeks:

Neil Armstrong is dead at 82.
The rover Curiosity has landed on Mars successfully and is now roving.
Elon Musk's Space X reached the ISS. The Falcon 9 rocket that boosted the Dragon capsule into orbit can put 29,000 pounds into low Earth orbit (LEO) for $54 million a pop,

Armstrong's death is significant because it underlines the abject failure of our space program, from the Nixon administration forward, to effectively pursue a human space exploration program.

We've been screwing around in LEO for 40 years and NASA has no concrete plans to go any further, except by building a costly heavy booster that will require $3 billion a year of investment to get to a first launch with no crew, maybe in 2017. For those of you keeping track at home, this means $12 billion for the first pop of this particular firecracker. The Mars Society performed a highly detailed one-minute analysis by Robert Zubrin, and concluded it will eventually be canceled. Mr. Zubrin has been right before, for example predicting the demise of the SSTO program.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who is a perfect replacement for Steve Jobs when you need a guy to dish out a whooping to a lazy existing industry, is promising the Falcon Heavy for $128 million a launch. Space X plans to launch the first one before the end of this year.

To be sure, NASA's initial SLS variant will be a 70 metric ton to LEO rocket, while Falcon Heavy will initially lift "only" 53 metric tons. So SLS is 32% more capable. Still, the cost differential is so fantastic it seems that somebody ought to be going to jail. Let me repeat, this is $12 billion for a booster that will launch in 2017 with just 32% more payload than a a $128 million rocket available in a few months.

If conclusive proof was needed that NASA's contracting system is broken and determined by political expediency rather than technical or economic merit, Mr. Musk has done the job. That is is not yet totally obvious to the point of scandal is a function of the fact that the first Falcon Heavy has not yet launched. When the first successful Falcon Heavy launch does come, and hopefully it will be the very first try, NASA is going to need to do some explaining.

But I digress. The point of this diary is not a discussion about costs, though costs are hugely relevant, but about goals. The clear and obvious manned objective is Mars. Specifically a series of Mars missions sending crews of four to six astronauts every two years (every Mars launch opportunity) to explore the red planet and slowly build up assets on the surface to allow gradually increasing support, in the forms of food and fuel, for activities there and an eventual permanent base.

Right now, the best bet is that we get there thanks to Space X. Musk built the company specifically to go to Mars, and he is figuring on the early 2020's. I don't think he cares what NASA wants, but is happy to sell launch services to NASA for revenue and prestige. I don't see NASA, the Obama administration, or the GOP being capable of doing anything better than they have so far. I do credit Obama for giving private operators, and in particular Space X, contracts to help them gain relevance. But on the "traditional model" side of NASA, the situation is as dismal as it ever has been.

I don't know how this ends. I am having a hard time seeing Boeing, ATK and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne (United Technologies) just rolling over and letting their bloated cost business model be wiped out by some South African upstart who does cameos on Iron Man. They sure don't seem to have any above-board options though...

Can you directly compare

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Submitted by eeyn524 on Sun, 08/26/2012 - 11:12pm.

$12B development cost vs $128 million per unit cost? I assume the second SLS built wouldn't cost anywhere near $12B, and that Musk is spending more than $128M to develop the first Falcon Heavy and planning to recover the money selling a bunch of them.

Even so the difference in price does seem hard to believe.

The SLS numbers are not yet clear.

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Submitted by M Aurelius on Sun, 08/26/2012 - 11:23pm.

You need to realize that the SLS numbers are mere estimates at this point. Booster design is not finalized and first launch is five years out.

But you could launch 93 Falcon Heavies with $12 billion.

And, it gets much worse, if Wikipedia is to be believed:

During the joint Senate-NASA presentation in September 2011, it was stated that the SLS program has a projected development cost of $18 billion through 2017, with $10B for the SLS rocket, $6B for the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle and $2B for upgrades to the launch pad and other facilities at Kennedy Space Center.^[22] These costs and schedule are considered optimistic by Booz Allen Hamilton, which conducted an independent cost assessment for NASA.^[23] An unofficial NASA document estimated the cost of the program through 2025 to total at least $41B for four 70 metric ton launches (1 unmanned in 2017, 3 manned starting in 2021),^[24] with the 130 metric ton version ready no earlier than 2030.^[25] HEFT estimate Block 0 unit cost at $1.6 billion.^[26]

Four launches for $41 billion. Block 0 (basic core stage alone) unit cost of $1.6 billion. Not even that mountain of cocaine on Tony Montana's desk would be enough to get somebody to the point of delusion needed to justify this.

I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.

Hey, it's stimulus

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Submitted by eeyn524 on Sun, 08/26/2012 - 11:59pm.

and in a swing state too.

I'm sure you've run the numbers...what fraction of the total energy requirements for going to Mars and back are getting to LEO? 53 metric tons doesn't seem like enough to lift a Mars vehicle with its fuel, and I Zubrin's idea about making the return fuel when you get there seems real damn risky.

The beauty of Zubins idea

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Submitted by HankP on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 12:13am.

is that you can wait for the fuel to start getting produced, or send additional fuel plants, before the manned mission even takes off.

I blame it all on the Internet

For The Record...

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Submitted by M Aurelius on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 12:18am.

The Obama admin dragged its feet on SLS for around a year or so. It's really a creature of the relevant Senators and congressional districts (Texas, Florida, Alabama, Lousiana). The article I linked to notes the following:

At that press conference, held in a spartanly furnished committee hearing room on the ground floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building (media and other in attendance had to stand for the half-hour event as there were no chairs in the room) Bolden was flanked by two key senators, Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee and ranking member of the full committee, respectively; the two were the key authors of last year’s authorization bill and Hutchison in particular had been critical of NASA’s delays in announcing a design for the SLS.

Zubrin's idea of producing fuel on Mars has no risk at all because the fuel is produced before the crew launches to mars. You launch the empty habitat and fuel production assets on one launch opportunity and the crew on the next one, two years later. So if fuel production fails, you know already, and you can fix the issue and launch a revised system.

Not to mention, the chemistry involved is really simple. Zubrin did a demo while in Martin Marietta and he's not even a chemical engineer.

Falcon Heavy is not big enough for Mars Direct. They know that. Space X is working on a super heavy for that. That's why they are thinking in terms of the early 2020's. But Falcon heavy is a huge step towards that goal. Recall that Falcon 1 was first successfully launched only in 2008, with a payload capacity of around 400 pounds. They then scaled to Falcon 9 with 13 metric tons.

I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.

In Fairness. . .

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Submitted by M Scott Eiland on Sun, 08/26/2012 - 11:24pm.

. . .there were several open diary comments about Mr. Armstrong, including a YouTube of the Armstrong/Aldrin landing, and a rather amusing anecdote about Armstrong getting stuck out on a dry lake bed with Chuck Yeager. The man did intentionally live a very quiet life after the moon landings, meaning there wasn't much in the way of recent stories about him to pass on (unlike, say, Buzz Aldrin cold-cocking some moon landing denier for shouting in his face).

The universe may well have been created without a point--that doesn't imply that we can't give it one.

Yeah, well...

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Submitted by M Aurelius on Sun, 08/26/2012 - 11:31pm.

...this isn't a diary about Mr. Armstrong's personal anecdotes, as compelling as those may or may not be.

He was a pilot, a really good one, and he loved his craft. I get that. As a private pilot myself I feel I could have had a quiet beer with the guy in the bar at some remote airfield shooting the bull about some rough landing war story or how to deal with asymmetrical stalls.

But the need for a human space exploration program far exceeds the desire for aerospace accomplishment for its own sake.

I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.

Not bad for a 72 year old

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Submitted by eeyn524 on Sun, 08/26/2012 - 11:36pm.

The punch. If I make it to 72 the nurses will have to do the fighting for me.

I admire Collins, the guy up in the orbiting module. That's about the loneliest job I can think of.

Yeah

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Submitted by M Scott Eiland on Sun, 08/26/2012 - 11:41pm.

Particularly since that was the guy whose job it would be to deal with the aftermath if the lunar module crashed and he had to come home to a grieving nation as the mission's only survivor. James Michener's Space included that dire scenario, and reading it disturbed me greatly at the time.

The universe may well have been created without a point--that doesn't imply that we can't give it one.

It's like everything else for the past 30 years

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Submitted by HankP on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 12:11am.

Americans want it but don't want to pay for it. When a major party that wins ~50% of all elections thinks that government should be drowned in a bathtub, why are you surprised at how things have worked out?

I blame it all on the Internet

Yes, there is no Supprise Here....War Cost Savings Alone Would

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Submitted by Traveller on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 12:36am.

...fund a very robust Space Exploration Program.

This is not to say that wars may not be necessary...Quick, Bloody, Terrible and without Apology.

But there are better ways to spend our money than wars of choice.

Best Wishes, Traveller

What an understatement

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Submitted by HankP on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 12:51am.

war savings alone over the past 10 years would fund somewhere between 20 and 100 times what we spend on space exploration over the same period. Plus, of course, tens of thousands fewer dead people.

I blame it all on the Internet

I guess

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Submitted by nyoos junkey on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 4:15am.

when they got up there they found there wasn't much about except some rocks and dust. I blame the moon. If it was a little cooler then we'd be sending coachloads of Japanese tourists up there by now.

Sadly Mars is looking like a similar let-down. Dust. Rocks. Yawn.

Why...

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Submitted by Wagster on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 7:40am.

In what might well be known as the robotics century, do we want a manned flight to Mars? I'd be interested in your take.

"I don't want us to descend into a nation of bloggers." - Steve Jobs

Because it's there.

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Submitted by eeyn524 on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 8:05am.

Really, why should we send robots, either? It's just idle curiosity. Even if they somehow unlocked knowledge about the origin of the universe, it's still knowledge of no practical value.

I see it as part of a long term (maybe centuries) project to have human colonies off this planet. Even if Mars isn't the place to colonize, manned travel over long distances is a capability that would have to be developed and Mars is a good next step.

Many Reasons

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Submitted by M Aurelius on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 9:02am.

The basic one is to establish a colony. There are a number of good reasons to do that. It's the first step towards making the entire Solar System our home and our resource base.

The second reason is that the scientific capability of robotic rovers is a couple of orders of magnitude lower than humans, even today. Imagine dropping Curiosity in the middle of the Grand Canyon. It would take years for it to explore what humans could check out in days. Absent true AI, this will remain true for the foreseeable future.

I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.

Spending for big new programs just won't happen

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Submitted by Bird Dog on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 7:48am.

Not the way our country's finances are structured. Reminds me of this piece:

If you go back and look at the federal budgets during the mid-20th century, you see that they spent money on the future — on programs like NASA, infrastructure projects, child welfare, research and technology. Today, we spend most of our money on the present — on tax loopholes and health care for people over 65.

A study by Jessica Perez and others at the group Third Way lays out the basic facts. In 1962, 14 cents of every federal dollar not going to interest payments were spent on entitlement programs. Today, 47 percent of every dollar is spent on entitlements. By 2030, 61 cents of every noninterest dollar will be spent on entitlements.

Entitlement spending is crowding out spending on investments in our children and on infrastructure.

Government is merely a servant – merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

But the GOP

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Submitted by Spartacvs on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 9:25am.

Your party, isn't proposing to refocus government spending on children & infrastructure. Far from it. Or is it your position that government spending is crowding out private sector spending on children & infrastructure?

"Something I think most liberals don't understand is exactly how stupid many conservative leaders are." - Matt Yglesias

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

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Submitted by notyou on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 8:44am.

Not really about flying cars.

You didn't mention the competition angle.

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Submitted by mmghosh on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 8:40pm.

The Russians were credible competitors - after all, they had a lot of space firsts. And apart from Sputnik and Gagarin, their designs were probably a lot cheaper.

When the main enemy is al-Qaeda (why I still have no idea after 11 years), your issues tend to be women's rights, rather than space exploration rights.

literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it

Yup

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Submitted by HankP on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 8:51pm.

if, somehow, the USSR had collapsed prior to May 1961 we'd all be wondering why there had never been a US manned space program - or at most, why we had never progressed past orbital flights.

I blame it all on the Internet

Or It Would Have Stayed With The Military. . .

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Submitted by M Scott Eiland on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 8:59pm.

. . .and evolved more naturally with the continuation of the X-15 program and the funding of the X-20 program. We'd already dumped a lot of money into high performance supersonic aircraft before Sputnik--without the space race to push us in the direction of "spam in a can"* we certainly would have kept exploring that avenue.

*--no offense intended to NASA--what they accomplished was magnificent. It was also in many ways a dead end, in ways we are still feeling the effects of to this day.

The universe may well have been created without a point--that doesn't imply that we can't give it one.

Maybe

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Submitted by HankP on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 9:13pm.

but I'm pretty sure about 99% of the impetus for all aerospace work in the 50s and 60s was driven by the cold war. Absent the USSR, I don't think the Chinese would have been scary enough to justify that kind of investment.

I blame it all on the Internet

Depends what you mean by impetus.

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Submitted by M Aurelius on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 10:35pm.

Von Braun and all the other rocket pioneers, including in Russia, really were there because they believed in space exploration. This had been their explicit goal since the early 20th century.

They built missiles as a deal with the devil. It funded the development of the technology they needed to go to the moon. Ponder this photo of Robert Goddard taken in 1924:

Likewise Von Braun was talking about travel to the Moon in the early 1930's. He considered himself a follower of Hermann Oberth, who self-published a book called "By Rocket into Planetary Space", in 1923.

There are others. The granddaddy of them all was the Russian, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

My point here is that by the 1950's the engineers had an agenda for space travel going back 50 years and used World War II and the Cold War to enable it. Their objective, however, was difficult to put forth in polite company, much less fund. Serious people dismissed all these guys as crackpots or dreamers. So most politicians were tone-deaf to this agenda, but not Kennedy, and that's how we got to the Moon.

So while 99% of the political impetus may have been for the Cold War, the thousands of man years made up of long days and nights of engineering sweat, and even blood, (this work was not free from risk) were driven by the quest for space.

I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.

That's nice

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Submitted by HankP on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 11:40pm.

but without funding, there is no manned space program. You and I both grew up then, do you really think absent the USSR we'd spend the money "just because"? I don't.

I blame it all on the Internet

I do agree...

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Submitted by M Aurelius on Tue, 08/28/2012 - 12:20am.

But when one looks at human achievements, it's better, more accurate, to look at the whole of the factors that propel them. If all we measure is funding, then we come to the conclusion that the world is made by politicians and money men.

They certainly see themselves that way. Yet note that if it was up to them, we'd still be in the neolithic. They have the advantage of being able to move large quantities of human labor. But they have vanishingly few ideas and lack insight into the natural world.

I don't care for reinforcing a narrative which puts these people at the head of human achievement.

I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.

Recognizing reality is not reinforcing a narrative

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Submitted by HankP on Tue, 08/28/2012 - 12:27am.

I vote against the idiots you describe all the time, but that doesn't mean that I don't recognize that they exist. They have the much easier task of not pushing people to do something new, but just to do everything the way it's always been done (unless there's a way to make more money, then watch out). The first step in changing things is recognizing how they actually are.

I blame it all on the Internet

It's only a part of reality.

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Submitted by M Aurelius on Tue, 08/28/2012 - 12:33am.

Without the scientists and engineers who dreamed it up and made it happen, all the money men, politicians, and dictators of the world put together could not have set off a firecracker, or even have conceived that men could travel in space.

We should never forget this. That's reality too.

I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.

Sure

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Submitted by HankP on Tue, 08/28/2012 - 1:09am.

but without money, nothing gets done. That's our culture, that's our reality. And for the kind of money involved here, we're talking government or a hundred or so billionaires.

I blame it all on the Internet

Dead End? Why?

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Submitted by M Aurelius on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 10:10pm.

NASA was doing great till Apollo was axed. The technology was good, the development paid for. The Saturn V could have been used for 20 years. It was an exceptionally good rocket. Under Mars Direct, two Saturn V launches could have gotten a crew to Mars for an 18 month stay, and return.

The Shuttle was the big mistake, made under lack of political direction. Nixon did nothing for NASA except cut it. Ford was no better. Carter the same. Reagan cared about the political aspect of space and came up with the Space Station as US-led international competitor to the Mir. At that point there were always Russians in orbit, but not Americans.

Bush father was the first to request a NASA plan for Mars, and got back the pork-barreled "90 day report", an awful plan that put the price tag on Mars at 500 billion 1991 dollars. Like STS today, it revealed a broken procurement system at NASA. The project was killed before it started.

Clinton, like Reagan saw space for the political value. ISS now became a way to keep the Russians closer. Not a bad idea. A lot of Russian rocket scientists remained gainfully employed in a civilian program instead of drifting towards Iraq or elsewhere. Still, that's no way to further space exploration.

Late in his term, with his presidency heading down the sewer, Bush II requested a new approach to Mars and got back the overpriced but not insane Constellation program and Ares booster designs. Though overpriced, this was a program worth continuing, but bush started far too late and the program had no momentum, so Obama was able to cut it. Obama has shown no interest in space at all and would just as soon throw the whole thing over to the private sector.

I should mention that Johnson didn't care about the Moon program either. His main "achievement" was moving Mission Control from Florida to Houston, for no good reason. This simply made the logistics more expensive for NASA.

So, at the end of the day, in the entire history of the space program only one president was truly committed to it, Kennedy. Bearing in mind it has been such a political orphan, it has been a reasonable success.

I am not a pessimist. I am an incompetent optimist.

In fact the Soviets landed unmanned probes in Mars in 1971,

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Submitted by mmghosh on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 9:04pm.

it is interesting to speculate what Russian scientists would have achieved if they had been properly funded, rather than wasting resources in Afghanistan.

literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it

Heck, They Dropped Probes On Venus

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Submitted by M Scott Eiland on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 9:44pm.

Both in real life and on The Six Million Dollar Man:

Gotta give them credit where credit was due.

The universe may well have been created without a point--that doesn't imply that we can't give it one.

San Francisco Airport...1:03am

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Submitted by Traveller on Sat, 09/01/2012 - 3:34am.

One could say that it is a nightmare, but there is in a nightmare always some vague sense that things are wrong and you might wake up or...something.

Me, me I`m just stuck. There was a ground hold against flying to SFO for four full hours...250 people deplane trying to make different reservations, different arrangements for their lives....they re board us and other people have much greater troubles. A gently 23 year old female needs to get to Reno for her father's wedding to a stepmother and he is not being understanding. There are no seats out of SF to Reno tomorrow...at all, it is labor day weekend...she is only twenty-three and even if she can get to San Francisco they will not rent her a car to drive to Reno....

She weeps in the seat next to me and they make us deplane again...I book quickly by phone the last seat SFO to Salt Lake City on the first flight in the morning at 7:36am because I know there is only forward, there is no waking up from this. My friends in SLC think this will get better...not a chance, parents are trying to talk a babysitter into staying all night because they will not be making SF before midnight and the BART stops running.

We replane at 9:15 and sit on the tarmac until 11:20pm, I have been at this airport more than 7 hours for a 52 minute flight, that hasn't even left yet.....the people on board are approaching desperation...finally we leave.

I'm sleeping on the floor in front of my gate. Everything is shut down, no food, no water, just harsh florescent light.

When you're you are out and about, there is only forward...you can't turn back...travel is derivative of the word travail from the dangers of highwaymen and travel in the middle ages. I will make Salt Lake City, Yellowstone and Jackson Hole Wyoming.

Not much different now from Medieval times. We sleep where we find ourselves.

Blessed dreams to everyone.

Traveller

Yikes

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Submitted by HankP on Sat, 09/01/2012 - 3:41am.

is it fog, or mechanical problems or what?

I got stuck in SLC for 8 long hours once, I'm feeling your pain. Hope you get there soon.

I blame it all on the Internet

WX isn't that bad

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Submitted by Spartacvs on Sat, 09/01/2012 - 8:18am.

http://www.fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/usmap.jsp

I recommend avoiding the hubs if at all possible in even marginal Wx. The airlines over schedule them to the point that anything less than clear blue & 22 means there will inevitably be delays.

"Something I think most liberals don't understand is exactly how stupid many conservative leaders are." - Matt Yglesias

A Brutal Night...

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Submitted by Traveller on Sat, 09/01/2012 - 9:08am.

...it isn't that it's cold, though the air conditioning in the deserted United terminal seems stuck on freezing, you can cover up for that, but it is the constant barrage of Public Service Announcements that keep you from falling even into a fitful sleep.

The over large PA Voice ricochets around the hollow hall, "USO Club open to all service members..." well good, but every 5 minutes there is..."smoking prohibited, outside of main entrances you must always be twenty feet away..." and the favorite..."report suspicious bags though any airport phone, dial 911...."

On disturbing thing this morning, large grayhound drug dogs are aggressively walking the airport this AM

Must Run

Traveller

Yuck!

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Submitted by Spartacvs on Sat, 09/01/2012 - 9:59am.

I hate traveling on the airlines, even when everything goes relatively smoothly. Yes I have been spoiled, without a doubt.

But why are you in SFO? connecting?

Delta has a direct SLC from Orange County for $175 or SW goes SLC direct from LAX.

http://www.hipmunk.com for all your airline travel needs and avoid hub to hub flights like the plague.

"Something I think most liberals don't understand is exactly how stupid many conservative leaders are." - Matt Yglesias

I got stuck overnight just recently,

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Submitted by Jordan on Sat, 09/01/2012 - 11:58am.

due to bad weather/air traffic delays and missing a connection. I got a hotel to overnight in, screw spending the night in the airport. Course the airline didn't pay for it, the sons of ignorant bastards.

M Aurelius was probably right.

You should fly American

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Submitted by eeyn524 on Sat, 09/01/2012 - 12:57pm.

when my flight was delayed 24 hours those wonderful people gave me a $10 off coupon good at a hotel of their choice, and a free kit containing a 12 cent disposable razor, one of those wet napkins in a foil pouch, a comb, and a 2.5" long toothbrush. Hard to see how they can make a profit on $1400 air fare with that kind of generosity.