I Admire NASA but, Should it be Disbanded?

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

I do not hate NASA, it is and was a shining example of many things I dreamed about as a kid. And I hate to say this, but if we are serious about space it should should be shuttered, and its staff released to find other jobs.

Then we need to create a vision of where we want to be in the long term, and not in small terms…we need sweeping strokes that paint a backdrop for us to see our childrens children against and be excited.

And no I don’t want to kill all space science, it has at times kept me from losing hope in the human race but there has to be more tha wonderous pictures of far stars and Marscapes

So after NASA is good and defunct, maybe 2 years, maybe 5 a number of smaller and more focused organizations need to be set up to support the commercial development of space as well as the advance of technology:

National Aviation Science Bureau (aviation technology) {small and lean probably supporting the airforce and army as well as Boeing, et al with things like wind tunnels and basic research into manned aircraft.}
National Earth Observation and Services Bureau (terrestrial observation/science, terrestrial Navigation, terrestrial emergency/disaster nets, etc
National Space Service (Space Craft Operations (like the ISS,) crewing deep space exploration, oversight of commercial crew training )
Space Science Board to support the above with scientist based at universities and programs funding basic science and instruments (Future, Hubble, Voyager, Sojourner vehicles would be funded by them but not run by them)

Why not just move to this from NASA? Because I have worked in several large-scale (read Gov’t and Mil Industry) organizations through huge upheavals in ownership and management structure and seen how incredibly resilient the ‘cultural habits’ of such organizations are.

[Bureaucratic / hierarchical structures are an offshoot of early industrial age military organizations and the fundamental requirement of an organization in attrition warfare is the ability to keep driving forward after massive losses.]

Don’t break the organizations cultural links with the past and you will not change how it operates in any meaningful way.

{Don’t worry too much about ‘corporate knowledge’ its mostly bad habits and paperwork given a gloss by few knowledgable curmudgeons who get crap done. Those folks will resurface if you give them half a chance, they love the potential and the work.}

I would throw out all this stuff about going to Mars first or the Moon first. The long-term objective is expansion of the human meme space and resource base. Of course the Moon, of course Mars, eventually Venus and I believe that free flying Habs (Habitats) may eventually contain the majority of the human race….in a few hundred or a thousand years. But that is vision not a practical plan.

In the short-term keep the goals limited and real with an eye towards long-term objectives. Grab every chance you get to make a buck, but also incentivize people to stay lean and dream. Every ‘commercial’ space endeavor out there has more fundamental thought in it than has been put into NASA and the ‘Space Program’ since Von Braun. He understood you needed to dream big but work the small near term stuff hard, fast and clean.

Get rid of the idea that there is any advantage to keeping space technology ‘secret’ or that we can try and keep it as a US bastion. This thinking and the resulting ITAR (International Trade in Arms Regulations) categorization has done a lot of damage to our space industry by providing opportunities to our competitors. That’s over and above the damage that having the US Gov’t as the only real customer has done to the commercial viability of our industry.

Space access needs to be the province of the commercial sector. We need variety and flexibility, not just SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, we also want Virgin Galactic/LM Scaled Composite, Blue Origin, Boeing, EADS, probably Long March, Kawasaki and others.

The commercial lifters (and Habs) need to be regulated for safety but reasonably and lightly. A combination of teaming and adversarial oversight is needed, the FAA wobbles between these two methods and neither is healthy. The space access regulator should have a dual model, with two separate organizations, one, the principle one provides oversight via teaming support. The other unit is made up of a few hard-nosed smart auditor teams who check on the partnerships, relatively infrequently.

Bigelow is right, space Habs (space stations) should largely be inflatable structures. They should also be designed for flexibility and for tourists, not professionals. Tourists, who may be astrophysicists, teachers, bio engineers, nano material specialist, or (rich) entertainer. The ISS should become the center of a commercially driven space complex. Its served its original purpose of learning how to build things in space, now we need to treat it as an operational asset, plan to have multiple commercial craft able to access it and use it. Commercialize it, let our commercial innovators as well as those in Europe and Asia use it as a stepping off points for their space plans.

Last: my mid near term goal would be the Lagrange points, the development of a sustainable space based science network and operational habits for humans out of immediate range of Earth.

Are We Nuts to think about launching the Webb telescope to the Lagrange point with no way to repair it?
The L points are great vantage point s for many things
Set up a Bigelow Bungalow at the L point, big enough to live in for a few months at a time. Send cargo vessels to it when you need to occupy in then a space taxi with the crew.
Need to set up a new telescope? Send a crew : Need to repair an observatory? Send a crew : Have a couple of billionaires who want to show their mistresses an out of this world experience? Send up the wait staff.
There are small rocks around the Lagrange points
(don’t treat them as cultural relics, melt them down and experiment with using them to make stuff in space so we can worry about getting humans out of the gravity well not all their gear)
They offer access to near earth asteroids….stir and repeat

Learn how to operate in deep space, learn how to make things (not just assemble them) get used to putting assets in place so they can support long term plans. The only way we will start making significant progress is by establishing an infrastructure and working knowledge base that give us the keys to our future.

Above all else get over the concept that space is the province of rocket scientists and big brains in general and know that expanding the human envelope has always been dangerous, people will die, we’ll regret their passing but they will have been where they wanted to be, on the leading edge, we should see them as the practical heroines and heroes of our future.

Pirates…..AARGH….but it’s no Joke

Posted on August 27, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

Somali Pirates in the Indian Ocean

Until recently most people in the west, particularly the US have thought of Piracy as anomaly of the distant past and rather romantic, (in the persona’s of Errol Flynn, Kirk Douglas, Johnny Depp, etc.) However piracy has existed (in one form or another) ever since people took to the Sea, and it has taken place in every place where you have craft carrying any form of wealth. There are many places where it has been rare or almost unknown, but there are other places it has been the norm and not the exception. The Horn of Africa is one of those hotbeds. Today you hear most news of Pirates coming out of that part of the world but in reality Piracy of various sorts is common in many places.

This article on TheStrategyPage is one of the best ones I’ve read dealing with the ‘Somali’ piracy from an economic strategic standing. If you change some of the words and places you could turn that article into one written by Spanish author talking about the Caribbean, or a Roman author discussing the Saxon Shore.

Piracy in general is very hard to stamp out unless the ‘host’ country controls its coastline and wants to suppress piracy. In fact it may have been easier to suppress it in times past because the tools of the trade were costly and conspicuous (fast ships and big crews and/or heavy weapons.) Also piracy on any scale is not a lone wolf occupation, you have to be able to convert your booty into ready cash and that takes a pretty sophisticated network.

Another sad throwback that you should note in the article is the rather cold-blooded off-hand comment about the pirates butchering the crews of the smaller African or Arabian vessels they capture. This was the norm in most times and places, and accounts for the harsh justice dealt out to captured pirates. it was assumed that the pirates had murdered a lot of people before they were captured, or would have if they had gone uncaught.

Piracy has been with us for such a long time because it is not one phenomenon. At the small-scale end a pirate can be a starving fishermen who has bad catch and reacts violently to a rivals good luck; at the other end of the scale they can be rich nobles or merchants given carte blanche to attack the enemies of their sovereign in undeclared war. Piracy around the Horn of Africa today (as is typical of most objectionable human activities) is fomented/supported by a mix of elements, with poverty and geopolitics key among them.

One comment I’ve received in writing sci-fi is the frequent reference to space piracy. Some have found it unlikely that piracy will emerge in space, that the technology is too expensive and the environment too dangerous to make it worthwhile, etc. But we all forget how vast and dangerous the sea was to our ancestors, and that ships, even craft we would call boats, were once the epitome of technology. Unfortunately (at the personal level at least) when we establish a complex civilization in space there will be pirates and they will be as bloody handed as they have ever been.

Yes I am a pessimist in that I do not think that humans or human societies can be perfected in the way that some have dreamed of. You can perhaps program piracy out of future-sapien and its Utopia but I would argue that the people would not be human as we are human, and that the Utopia would not be a society/civilization as we have today. And I would expect such a Utopia to be fragile and/or more utterly ruthless than the most bloody handed pirate.

Piracy is a human activity and as long as there are creatures that are human there will be pirates.

Pirates AARGH!!!

Consumption vs Production

Posted on August 20, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

I am frustrated with the silliness that passes for wisdom these days. To much of what is said is based on simplistic assumptions and understandings, with solutions crafted for sound bites not reality. One recent example is the call for more Consumption. The argument is that we are a consumer economy and that more consuming will by itself drive the economy forward and up. This seems to be based on a simplistic interpretation of the meaning of what a consumer based economy is all about.

In the beginning the early mass production auto manufacturers had it right. They paid their workers enough to buy the product that they were building. The rationale was that they could buy the cars(or other products) which required labor and materials: sheet steel, wood frames, rubber tires, copper wire, iron castings, etc, all of which required labor and materials from a lower level supplier. Each time the money passed through it was 1) applied in as effective way as possible, 2) stimulated value added labor, 3) Brought more people 4) got people to think of ways to do the job more efficiently so they could capture more profit. This was the Consumption based economy, an engine of progress.

But if you think about it the productive effect of a dollar spent on different consumption has vastly different leverage, spend it in Defense to buy a new jet or missile and you get a huge leverage (mostly US parts, mostly special equipment and special designs, high value add.) Spend it on a Twinkie and its smallish, a few low paid workers and raw materials. Spend it on a hamburger and its even smaller, spend it on consumer electronics and most of the value goes to Asia..

The problem I see with today’s version of the consumer economy is that any consumption is good. In an economy at full steam that may be true, an extra dollar would go into buying a car, RV or adding value to your home. But in a down economy most of that next dollar goes to base consumption such as food or buying a DVD or video game only a small fraction of that money goes to drive some version of the cycle above, most of it vanishes into profits and raw materials with very little processing / value add.

Something I said the two paragraphs above is a key reason I think that our economy has not done worse than it has during the great recession (if that’s what it really is.) Huge amounts of money have gone into buying military equipment over the last five years. Ninety percent of this equipment has come from US producers and money has leveraged out through the economy. Now war isn’t a very popular stimulus method but in my opinion it has buffered us from something that could have been vastly worse and has ensured that the money was spent reasonably effectively.

But with the war economy ramping down what comes next. More Twinkies are not going to get us out of a recession. We have to find something that has the excitement, mass and leverage to get the wheels of the economy back in line. I have not seen it yet, but I see a lot of opportunities, which I will talk about in another post.

I wish that it were some grand adventure like a drive into space, low-cost space access exploration for resources among the near Earth asteroids and the moon, the generation of power in orbit, missions to mars and beyond. But I can see that as yet the ‘value proposition’ (value / costs) of space is too low to pull a big effort out of government / society which has lost its appetite for (or maybe its ability to sell) risks and long-term pay backs at least for now.