Responses to: Johathan Coopersmith, HNN articles on Space

Andrew D. Todd

 a_d_todd@rowboats-sd-ca.com 

http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/




Jonathan Coopersmith, Bush's Pie-in-the-Sky Mars Plan, 2004:

 http://hnn.us/articles/3435.html
-
My reply:
(02/10/2004 01:23 PM)

The average American's "information" about space is overwhelmingly derived from movies and  television shows such as Star Trek and Star Wars,  which are incompatible with the known laws of physics. NASA has for many years promoted such  shows, as a form of public relations. A businessman who did the same thing would probably draw a stiff prison sentence for mail fraud or some similar offense,  eg. Wilhelm Reich and the "Orgone Box." The places in space which it is reasonably feasible to get to in a single lifetime have such thoroughly unpleasant climates that they make the Sahara Desert look like a paradise by comparison. NASA has systematically promoted the manned  space program as a kind of confidence game. It is worth reading Cyril Kornbluth's 1941 short science fiction story, "The Rocket of 1955," a lucid, if cynical, explanation of the ultimate cause of two space shuttle crashes.

One of the cleverer ideas adopted by one of the commercial firms engaged in launching communications satellites is to launch from the middle of the Pacific, from a floating platform similar to an oil-drilling rig, thousands of miles from anywhere. This has obvious advantages from the standpoint of safety, but of course NASA would hate it. They want to be seen to be launching spacecraft, so they have to do it from the densely populated Florida coast.  Of course, one fine day, something will go wrong, and one of  their rockets will come down in the middle of Miami...

Space launchers are expensive largely because they are based around the principle of systematically discarding large numbers of expensively crafted parts. The size of the rocket is dictated by the limited chemical energy of the fuel. Reusable components have proved  impossible to make reliable, given the weight limitations. However, all of this is within the paradigm of the chemical rocket. Leaving aside nuclear rockets, and the possibility of a Chernobyl-like accident, the best prospect is probably for a ground-based laser power system. The spacecraft would have a block of graphite strapped to its backside, and a very powerful laser or lasers on the ground would heat this graphite to temperatures far in excess of those generated by mere chemical reactions. To be practical, such a system would have to accelerate the spacecraft very hard and fast, in order to finish  the acceleration while the spacecraft was still within a reasonable distance of the lasers. The system is therefore more suited to unmanned payloads, which can be designed to tolerate 200 Gees or so, than to humans. By artillery standards, this is not a particularly great acceleration, and proximity  fuses, Copperhead shells, etc. survive being shot out of a howitzer.

President Bush was only able to peddle pie-in-the-sky about Mars because pie-in-the-sky is NASA's principal business anyway. He could never have played such a trick on people who were engaged in doing honest science.

                        Andrew D. Todd



Jonathan Coopersmith, Facing Opportunities and Obstacles in Space, 2010:

http://www.hnn.us/articles/125661.html

(No longer available, but archived at).

https://web.archive.org/web/20100505182738/http://www.hnn.us/articles/125661.html

My reply:

(04/26/2010 01:30 PM)

Space: The  False Frontier.

We had a discussion along these lines about six years ago:

[See Above]

Much of what I wrote at the  time does not seem to require any further expansion. Satellites are not the issue. When run efficiently,  by someone other than NASA, communications-satellite-launching is a  profit-making business.  Fifteen percent losses are about right for satellite  launching. That strikes a balance between expenditure for the satellite and expenditure for the rocket  launcher. Employed correctly, a pound of electronics is _really_ a lot of electronics, and a  launching cost of ten thousand dollars per pound is not an urgent concern. Employed correctly, a communications satellite weighing a thousand pounds or less can serve millions of people, and their pro-rata share is correspondingly  modest. The  same applies to other kinds of information-handling satellites, such as navigation and mapping/reconnaissance satellites It is the manned-space program which is the problem, simply  because it  imposes standards of  perfection which are difficult and expensive to attain.

Coopersmith's suggestions about  space-based manufacturing employing large numbers of workers seem highly improbable. The reality is that in high-tech manufacturing down here on  Earth, the path of progress is towards more and more completely robotized manufacturing.  No  human can assemble components which are measured in microns  or nanometers. As for solar power satellites, they are unlikely to produce power as economically as appropriate  household-level systems.

I have always been impressed by the argument Stephen Pyne made in _The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica_ (1986), to the  effect that Antarctica, and by extension, outer space, is an "information sink," a kind of  cognitive dead-end. NASA's dogged  insistence on  the manned space program is an example of the information sink  in operation.

The analogy between the Atlantic and outer space is so thoroughly false that it should not require debunking. The Atlantic is not, and never was, an impregnable  barrier. I  believe it was the great Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson who pointed out that Iceland and Greenland are nearly all the way across the Atlantic. That said, of course, there were sizable European populations in  America before the year  1000, at which  date the  Vikings made the  final crossing described in  the Vinland Saga. One  might add, also, that serious credence has to  be given to the various expeditions of Thor Heyerdahl, who crossed the Atlantic, along the southern route taken by Columbus, not once but twice in reed-boats of Ancient Egyptian design (constructed in the first instance by Buduma tribesmen from  Lake  Chad, and in the second instance by indigenous Peruvians from  Lake Titicaca). The design of European sailing ships, as Bjorn Landstrom has noted, advanced rapidly from 1400 AD to 1500 AD, and then remained  much the same until the advent  of the steamship in the  nineteenth century.

What did happen in American settlement was what  has been described as the establishing of a "beachhead." The Jamestown settlers were exposed to  terrific levels of famine, simply because, once they had antagonized the Indians, there was nowhere they could go for help. Once there were  large towns on the east coast, such as Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston, South Carolina, the risks of immigration decreased. A new group of settlers in the interior might have been ten or twenty  miles from  the  last  established settlement.

In ninth-century England  and France, it took about a hundred years for Viking raids to develop into armies.  This was a reflection of political conditions  in Norway and Denmark. Rebellious chieftains went a-Viking in order not to have to submit to the king.  Consequently, a Viking raid consisted of one or  two shiploads of men, an  outlawed chieftain and his personal following.  It was only at the last stage, when the king was forced to get involved, in order to prevent chieftains from becoming wealthy in ways beyond his control, that Vikings began arriving in armies.  The Viking age ended when the kings of Scandinavia  became powerful enough that they could  channel all  the warriors towards their own objectives, such as expanding their  kingdoms. Lief Erickson in Vinland had the classic  one or two shiploads of men. While they might have been able to raid a monastery, they  didn't  get very far against  savage warriors. Savage  warriors fight somewhat  better than monks  do, and there would be hundreds of warriors within fifty or a hundred miles of the landing site.  The  nearest Viking reinforcements  might be five  hundred miles away.

What was new about Jamestown in 1608 was that, in imitation of  the Iberian colonial ventures, there was a royal-chartered corporation backing  the settlement, feeding in replacement colonists as the old ones were killed or starved. It is estimated that about two thousand people a year were hanged in sixteenth-century England, mostly thieves and robbers. It was a simple matter  for the  corporation  to arrange conditional pardons for as many  men as  it wanted to  fill the gaps in its colonies. It was simply a question of saving money on rope.

Ultimately, the Atlantic crossing worked  because the economy of the  time  was  primarily  agricultural. For farmers, more land equaled more productivity. Even if they couldn't actually cultivate more land, they could at least turn livestock onto it. For a post-industrial economy, more energy does not equal more productivity. Very few people would have their lives transformed by cheaper wholesale  electricity.

[There were a couple of highly antagonistic responses, one blaming NASA for not solving the poverty problem, and the other claiming that the space program was entirely fictitious. I thought there was a serious point lurking in this "trutherism," and set outto address it in a supplement completed too late (04/27/2010 11:29 PM) to be published. It appears here for the first time:]


That kind of myth happens when people find reality too threatening. Granted that there  were a small  number of flat-earthers, who simply wanted to  explain away  anything which did not square with a  flat earth, but the main body of conspiracy theory opinion seems to  have  been people who wanted NASA to have a comprehensible  crook's motive, rather than for  NASA to be a collection  of fools on a grand scale.   This  is  probably applicable  to other kinds of conspiracy  theories, such as 9/11  trutherism.  A certain type of conventional person finds it  intolerable to  believe the  truth, which is  that our glorious leaders are often overgrown nine-year-old boys. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories


Then,  too, you can talk about NASA as a political actor.  Walter  A. McDougall does so in _The Heavens and the Earth, a  Political History of the Space Age_ ( New York, Basic Books, 1985), and makes  that case that NASA under James E. Webb was  a kind of forced draft agent of statist  modernity.

NASA's "big lie" is the idea of Faster-Than-Light space travel. NASA went to some lengths to spread a widespread  belief in  FTL travel, despite the fact that  this was and is completely incompatible with  known physics. Look at Stephen Whitfield and Gene  Roddenberry, _The Making of Star  Trek_ (1968). This is a near-diary of the  business of making a science fiction movie, specifically, the  Star  Trek  "pilot movie." One point  which emerges is that  Roddenberry had his contacts in the space establishment, who were  giving him advice about  "how to make  it  look good." An employee of the [RAND Corporation?], a physicist, actually engaged in "script doctoring."  The fundamental plot  of Star Trek was built around, not to put too fine a point on it, a scientific impossibility. But a lot of effort went into replicating the "look and feel" of NASA Mission Control, to clothe the impossibility  in an aura of factuality.  This sort of business repeated itself, over and over.  At realistic speeds, there is nowhere you can get to in space which does not make the  Sahara  desert look like paradise, by comparison.




Jonathan Coopersmith, Human Spaceflight Began Fifty Years Ago This Month, But Not Much Has Happened Lately, before April 12, 2011:

http://www.hnn.us/articles/138205.html

(No longer available, but archived at).

https://web.archive.org/web/20111205093520/http://www.hnn.us/articles/138205.html

My reply:
(04/12/2011 11:12 AM)

Outer Space as Dead End

The  problem we keep coming back to is that outer space is a dead end. There is nothing there.  The Viking pictures have perhaps given an exaggerated idea of the habitability of Mars, since the light diffraction arises not from a thick atmosphere, but from a kind of perpetual high-altitude dust storm. The atmosphere of Mars is of course  thin enough to  require a space suit, with all the claustrophobia that implies. The rest of  outer space is  worse.

Practically every effective operation  in space is focused around returning to earth, in some sense. The first  space programs were  ballistic missiles, of course. NASA's  first three  man-carrying rockets (Redstone, Atlas, Titan) had originally been built  as  missiles. Satellites, of course, derived their value from their ability to look at the earth or communicate with the  earth. Even the most extravagant programs for power satellites are based around the idea of beaming  microwave power down to earth again. Only O'Neil colonies can  be said to be earth-free, and they are based on the assumption of continually increasing human population. As third-world countries, such as China,  become rich, they adopt the  demographic pattern of the developed countries, and  their populations stabilize.

Industrial operations in space do not  imply human populations  in  space. Industrial  operations on earth are becoming progressively unmanned. Indeed, the case for industrial operations in space is itself very thin, progressively undermined by progress in earth-based microelectronics, molecular genetics, etc. If one needs zero-gravity, one can perform an operation in a free-fall, lasting  a fraction of a second-- and automatically repeat the  process as many times as one needs.

Satellite systems, the one economic success of the space program, are beginning to reach their  point of limitation. As an example, consider Global Positioning System  (GPS). When the accuracy of GPS is not sufficient, it is augmented by a local transmitter which sends out a correction signal. The more advanced GPS receivers consult internal tables to find  the frequencies of corrective transmitters which  ought to be in the rough  area where the  primary GPS signal says the receiver is, and  tune in  the right frequency. Even  this is not sufficient to land an airplane in fully automatic fashion. For  that, the GPS set  looks up a table of purely local, ground, based radio navigation systems, and sets the  appropriate frequency  on  the appropriate receiver. The ultimate resort is a radar altimeter, measuring the actual distance to the ground at a range of perhaps fifty feet. These kinds of ground-based systems are not available everywhere, but then, neither is an airport  runway. Building a runway is expensive enough  that, with the falling cost of electronics, it is not too difficult to fit the runway with sufficient electronics. In a sense, GPS has been partially superseded by a computer system which can navigate systematically, using all available measurements, rather than just  one or a few.

Likewise,  developments in  solar-power aircraft  are leading to very light unmanned vehicles which can fly  in circles over a city  indefinitely,  at an  altitude of, say, 60,000  feet, and which can serve as telecommunications relays. These kinds of airborne relays are vastly superior to space satellites for mobile communications, because the signal  only  has to go, say, thirty  miles, rather than  hundreds or thousands of  miles, and the feedback time is correspondingly less. Geostationary satellites, at an altitude of about 25,000  miles, simply cannot compete with fiber-optic cables under the sea.  Such satellites have  been relegated to television broadcasting.  The trend of progress in  radio is towards small inexpensive transceivers with computers, which carry out  complex and sophisticated programs. One example is mesh wireless,  in which multiple small radios pass messages from hand to  hand over short distances. Communications satellites are "working against  trend," as it were, and they are  mostly  likely to be most valuable in the poorest and most  backward parts of  the world.

Communicating at long range is not a strategy of perfection--  it is merely a last resort  when  more  immediate  means prove impractical.

What applies to space also applies to the stratosphere,  the domain of jet aircraft. In Europe and East  Asia, railroads, as they get faster and faster, are steadily  chasing out the airliner. On selected routes, such as London-Paris, the railroads' market share is already above seventy-five percent, and this can be expected to increase with track improvements. One key technology for  space launches which Coopersmith cites is Maglev. Gerrard O'Neil proposed a kinds of railroad catapult in which payloads  would be accelerated to escape velocity along the surface, and then tossed into the air. O'Neil proposed this  for  the moon-- it is not  clear where he would have found a site  on earth where the  resulting  sonic booms would not have been a problem. More mundanely,  experience shows that railroads compete effectively with airlines whose top speed is about twice as fast. Once a train goes faster than four hundred miles per hour, it becomes effectively unbeatable.  The French have gotten steel-wheel trains up to more than three hundred and fifty miles per hour in  tests, though their in-service speed is still only slightly over two  hundred miles per hour. Developing Maglev trains to, say, five hundred miles per hour, is a much easier  proposition than developing Maglev to escape velocity. Trains of such speed would drive most of the airlines out of business.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ref:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jonathan Coopersmith, "Facing Opportunities and Obstacles in Space, April 26, 2010"
http://www.hnn.us/articles/125661.html

and my response:
http://www.hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=142545&bheaders=1#142545

(no longer available at HNN, but see above.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brett Holman,  "The shadow of the airliner," and my discussion thereof:

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/29798.html
http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/29798.html#comment 

(no longer available at HNN, but see link.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Brett Holman, "The shadow of the airliner,"
Lawrence S. Wittner,  Bush's Maginot Line in the Sky

http://hnn.us/articles/5026.html

HNN, before May 11, 2004

05/11/2004 11:20 AM

Of course Star Wars will not work. That is beside the  point. For that matter, ICBM's were never terribly reliable. It is in the nature of strategic armaments that they cannot be tested realistically. Star Wars will not work. It's not supposed to. It is supposed to pump up industry, provide employment for engineers and hardhats, and generally deliver a keynesian stimulus to the economy. But President Bush left it too late.
    As a professional actor, Ronald Reagan always knew when he was playing soap opera. He cleverly played up things like Star Wars at the expense of actual wars.
    After September 11, an astute president, someone of the same mental caliber as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, would have made an enormous production of fitting every skyscraper with laser cannon straight out of Flash Gordon or Star Trek. Of course the necessary apparatus would have greatly reduced the rentable space, especially in the upper floors, but the owners would not be unhappy as long as the government was paying for it, and an astute president would have read Joel Garreau's Edge City, and would also have realized that there was a dispersal dividend waiting to be collected with the availability of the internet. Similarly, an astute president would have concentrated on ostentatiously fortifying airliner cockpits, rather than searching passengers. An astute president would have said, beyond all possibility of misunderstanding, that September 11 was paid for with oil money, and that it was time to do something about energy independence in the here-and-now, not in the distant and doubtful future.
    By the time all these initiatives had worked themselves out, the idea of invading Afghanistan would have been forgotten, let alone Iraq. The necessary government spending would have driven an economic boom, with lots of good jobs for everyone. " Bush's Maginot Line in the Sky" is not a bad idea. It's just "too little, too late."


[Jonathan Dresner objected that there were surely more socially useful mens of delivering a Keynesian stimulus. I replied that]

Andrew D. Todd - (5/13/2004)

[In principle, he was], correct about investments in useful public goods being preferable. As a matter of practical politics, I don't know. The electorate simply does not have the mentality of a college professor, nor for that matter, the mentality of an engineer. The weight of experience is that military keynesianism is the only politically viable form of keynesianism.

(5/14/2004)

[The Great] Depression is a case in point. The new deal deficit didn't get much above five percent of GNP, about what Bush's projected deficits are running now. To kick a country out of a stagnation depression, you have to rev the deficit up to something like twenty to fifty percent. That is the point where seemingly strong men become irresolute. It took the Second World War to put enough steel in FDR's backbone to make him just floor the economic gas pedal.



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