If you happen to have been reading this blog for the last year or so, you may have noticed that I sometimes find myself at odds with Jeffrey Bell, the occasional opinion writer at Space Daily.com. Here’s a link to his latest column, but let me summarize it for you:
“Back in my day, we solved all these darned ‘Centennial Challenges’ but you young’uns are too thick to pay attention.”
Seriously, that’s a pretty accurate representation of what he’s saying. For those not familiar with Jeffrey Bell, his tagline is
Jeffrey F. Bell is a former space scientist and recovering pro-space activist.
That just about sums it all up right there. Nearly every single column he writes attacks the current new space movement from the tired perspective of “been there, done that”. But let me tell you something Mr. Bell, your generation of space activists and engineers did not actually succeed in getting us all into space!
You say that Armadillo Aerospace’s latest designs were fundamentally flawed, and looked like a cheap version of the test-bed lander Northrup Grumman used in the 60’s. Even if that were true, what do you expect? The people that engineered that craft have been retired for years, and their expertise was not passed on to the current generation because of terrible national space policies. The people at Armadillo are actually building something, which seems a whole lot more than the Milspace contractors are capable of these days.
Frankly, I’m a little tired of Mr. Bell’s curmudgeonly attitude and his disdain for this new.space, or alt.space, or Space Race 2.0 thing we are entering into. His dismissal of the recently completed Wirefly X-Prize cup as a replay of old black-and-white newsreels from Germany in the 1920s displays his lack of understanding about the goals of the X-Prize Cup. The Cup and the Rocket Racing League do not exist to advance technology, they exist to reignite the imaginations of the next generations of aerospace engineers whose designs will finally take us into space. The Cup and its participants do far more to get us closer to space than all of the back-of-the-envelope calculations ever done on the feasibility of orbital colonies or any other such topic.
I admit, Armadillo’s Pixel will not orbit a single paying customer, but the folks there are creating the knowledge and expertise to build something that will, and to do it affordably. This is a period of infancy of the new private space companies, and before than can replicate the successes of the past, they must learn those lessons anew. No amount of reading dusty, yellowed technical reports and published accounts can compare to the direct experience of building, trying, and failing.
This isn’t the 1960s and we don’t have the support of the nation as we once did. But this time, unlike then, we’re going to do it right. Companies will make money on sending people into space, and the profit motive will do more for space access than any amount of government funding ever did.
The experience of writers such as Mr. Bell could be valuable for the entire space activist and commercial space community, but he chooses to use his experience to “hoot derisively” at modern efforts. Much of his writing serves little purpose than to pad his ego about the superiority of his generation while completely ignoring the reality forced on us by the events of the intervening decades.
If the new space movement actually succeeds, I think Mr. Bell would be disappointed–or maybe not, after all what will it matter if we send people to the Moon on a privately financed mission? I can see the column now: “Hell, we did that back in the 60s and we brought guys back using only duct tape and a few old spare parts. You guys have computers with all that fancy design software, there’s no excuse not to be exploring the moons of Jupiter!”
Well said, Anthony! Practical space technology has skipped a whole generation of engineers, so we do indeed need to train a bunch of people to start with the basics of space flight engineering, to get their hands dirty climbing the experience curve, hopefully in a way that will provide some inspiration and excitement too.
Four-hundred-something people flew to Earth orbit before Anousheh Ansari did so recently as a “space tourist” - but somehow her personality, her background, and her down-to-earth communication style appealed to many people around the world who never cared about space before. She wrote about washing her hair! She made it all seem real, something for regular people (even though she has more money than most “regular people” - that wasn’t her point or especially important for most who followed her adventure). Probably many of her blog readers have gone back to their TV shows or whatever, but perhaps a few will now see space as something you can really do. There’s a lot that needs to be made real again, even though much of it is is “basic” by Apollo and shuttle standards - but Apollo is in the history books, and the shuttle soon will be.
The thing is, these “basic technology” things may be old at the core, but the details will be new, and they will lead to cheaper, more scalable, and more reliable systems than the old “money is no object, each vehicle is a custom work of art” government space systems. The vehicle system communications on SpaceX rockets are an ordinary local area network that any modern computer systems engineer would understand.
This time rocket science won’t be just for rocket scientists (really rocket engineering, that’s the hard part). It will be integrated into the mainstream of modern technology and life.
I think J.F. Bells point is that it will not get easier if you use Ethernet rather than a “hand designed” com protocol. All this modern art modifications can’t change the basic physical rules. At the end of the day, its risky and expensive to lift a single kilogramm (or lbs if you want) into orbit — not to talk of any trajectory to more distant locations.
True, new technology can improve efficiency and may make things possible that where not in 1960. And it can lower costs. Maybe.
But to prove this, SpaceX has to lift some payload finally. The VirginGalactic (what a megalomaniac name for a company that is going to offer 5 minute hops to the upper atmosphere) SpaceShipXXX must prove its business case works.
Actually, the business concept of VirginGalactic maybe the one that works best, because noone will complain or give disappointed comments about a 5min hop if one had paid big money for that little hop. The traveller would make a fool of himself in that case. Saying that, I start to belive it will work. The “emporers new clothes” business model has proven to work so many times, why not again?
I do not worry about technology, I worry about the business cases. Most of those companies, like SpaceX, are addicted to DoD or other govermantal money. Thats no new business, its old business with new players. I am happy if people will prove I am false.
And I guess Mr. Bell will be, too.
Well thats the thing for me. I’ll agree we need more spacey trips, but private profiteering, probably based in 0% tax havens, i dunno. I think I agree with Volker, but more to the point if the US government, or any government for that matter, got their heads out of stupid wars in Iraq or wherever they might be able to find a spare 50 billion just sitting there saying “conquer space” The realproblem isn’t about state or private advantages, it’s gotta be that privateers focus because they risk their capital whereas governments get caught up in all that other crap. Honestly I think governmental policy can be more effective when concentrated efficiently to harness the power of 300million investors through the tax dollar. Still if Volker is right then maybe government money is in the pipelines anyway
(I’m sure all governments will jump onboard once the iron starts rolling off some asteroid in quadrant 4)