False Analogies
As usually happens when I criticize the current NASA exploration approach, Mark Whittington decided to weigh in, accusing me of "half baked thinking". Some of what he said seemed to stem from poor writing on my part, and other comments I just plain disagree with. I'll mention a few here, since Mark doesn't have comments enabled on his blog for some reason.
First off, responding to my comment that "Even if [the ESAS plan] worked flawlessly, and without any cost overruns, it would be way too expensive to actually do anything truly meaningful in the long run", Mark replied:
What I meant by truly meaningful was an exploration program that would actually accomplish a reasonable amount for the amount of money that would be spent on it. Spending $65-100B or more just to get up to the point where you can send two four-man missions per year to the moon is I think a pathetic waste. Now, if that money were to yield a truly robust lunar exploratory program, one that landed dozens of people per year to explore the moon and setup a base, I wouldn't be quite so disgusted. But basically all we're getting is an Apollo remake for the same price, but this time boys and girls with 4 Astronauts per mission instead of two!!! Yawn. Apollo on Steroids? Hardly. Apollo on Geritol maybe.
More to the point, the Lewis and Clark analogy Mark uses (over and over again) is deeply flawed. Later in the article he makes a similar false analogy by saying:
The problem here is that Lewis and Clark also didn't wait until the government had spent ten years designing and building a massive Crew Exploration Wagon before exploring the West either. They for the most part used existing transportation equipment, imperfect as it was, and made do. Which is what we should be doing.
If the only point is to get to the moon, to start exploring, with no thought toward future commercial development, then why even develop Ares I and Ares V? EELVs in their current forms exist, are man-rateable at comparatively low costs for delivering crew capsules to orbit, and could mount an effective lunar exploration program. If the point is to get to the moon as quickly as possible, why wait another ten years while we develop boosters that would be even more useless and cost-prohibitive for truly commercial cislunar transportation than the ones we already have?!? If the goal were to get to the moon as quick as possible, and get an semi-affordable exploration program under way, why wait till 2018? If we're going to go with a capsule, and all sorts of retro Apollo technologies to avoid having to develop new technologies, why are we still embarking on a decade long development program? Boeing and Lockheed could probably have warmed over Apollo-esque capsules, flyable on their vehicles, man-rating and all, before the end of this decade. Lockheed claims (with good evidence to back it) that you could use the basic Centaur upper-stage technology as the transfer stage instead of making a custom "Earth Departure Stage". At that point, you'd only need a lander stage developed. If the point were to get an exploration program going on the moon before them darn Chinese Commies can take over the moon, and block us capitalist running dogs from being able to ever develop it, why wait till 2018? Especially when you can get a better, cheaper, more extensive program to the moon by 2012, and for $10-15B or less? I mean really?
Sure, you can't launch the bloated NASA Continual Employment Vehicle design on an Atlas 401. But if the goal is to get a good exploration program going, you don't put artificial constraints on the capsule like requiring it to fit 4-6 people. If you could save $30B in development by going with a 2-man architecture instead of a 4-man architecture (and if you could shave 6-8 years off of the development schedule), wouldn't it be worth it? With the amount you saved, you could send several times as many people to the moon.
Quite frankly, even with the current EELVs, you could afford to do 50-100 lunar sorties just for the development cost NASA is going to spend building vehicles that they don't need, and that will be obsolete very soon after their introduction.
If Mark Whittington really supported a Lewis and Clark approach to space exploration, he wouldn't be supporting wasting tens of billions of dollars over the next several years, and would instead be advocating using the launchers we currently have, and making due.
Anyway, now that I've ripped on Mark long enough for his false analogy, now it's time to admit my own. In my article I referred to NASA's operating its own space launch program as being an "Amtrak in the sky" or something to that effect. I didn't clearly think through all the connotations of what Amtrak implies (I was merely trying to think of a wasteful government operated terrestrial transportation system), and Mark rightfully called me on it. He said:
To be clear, I never meant to imply that Ares 1 and 5 were bad ideas because "they wouldn't be taking commercial customers to the moon". I never meant to imply that they should. Ares I and V are not even an Amtrak in the Sky.
What I was trying to say was that particularly regarding earth-to-orbit transportation, NASA should not be operating its own transportation system. There are plenty of commercial transportation systems fully capable of delivering stuff to LEO. If NASA should operate any transportation systems at all, it should be in areas where private industry isn't yet operating right now--like outside of LEO. Building their own lander and EDS is still slightly wasteful, but nowhere near as wasteful as also insisting on building the vehicles to get them into orbit in the first place.
The Amtrak analogy was a bad one on my part.
One last point ought to be made. I had been talking at one point in my post about NACA and what they did, contrasting it to NASA. I had said that "The NACA approach, which focused more on industry promotion, developing the technologies and doing the research to enable commercial application, and such things instead of trying to operate their own airlines would've been a lot better than the path NASA has taken since it's foundation. NASA may be lousy at doing commercially effective R&D, but they are far worse when they try acting like an airline."
Mark comletely missed my point and instead responded that:
I wasn't implying at all that NASA is or should be a commercial entity. What I was saying was that it would be good if NASA spent more time trying to do commercially relevant R&D as opposed to operations. NACA for instance did a lot of wind-tunnel research into different airfoil shapes, which it then made publically available with all the data. Some of those designs are still used today for some things. That data greatly aided in the development of commercial aviation. NASA does a little bit of this for commercial space (such as TPS work done at Ames for instance), but unfortunately far too much of their money is focused on doing the one thing NACA never did--trying to design, build, and operate their own vehicles and transportation systems. Unfortunately, due to inevitable cost-overruns trying to develop and operate their own vehicles, many of these more commercially enabling R&D projects are being curtailed. NASA has a huge amount of money, and is in one of the best positions to lay the groundwork for a truly vibrant commercial space industry, but instead it wants to go play with being their own rocket line. Again. In spite of all the examples in the past where their grandiose approach to space ended up being far to expensive, and completely ineffective.
My point (minus the false analogy) deserves repeating. As a research agency, and even with a lot of their exploration, NASA does a pretty good job. But as a transportation operations agency, they have an extremely lousy record. Stop throwing good money after bad. Get NASA out of the Earth-to-LEO transportation market. Say no to Shuttle-Derived-Launch-Vehicles (unless someone can raise the money privately to develop them). If NASA wants to play Lewis and Clark on the moon, let them do so with existing rockets, instead of trying to build yet another Space Transportation System.
First off, responding to my comment that "Even if [the ESAS plan] worked flawlessly, and without any cost overruns, it would be way too expensive to actually do anything truly meaningful in the long run", Mark replied:
What "truly meaningful" means is something that is not clear to me. The architecture is designed to get people back to the Moon. It is not designed to open the Moon to human settlement or economic development, any more than the water craft that Lewis and Clark used was meant to open up the American West.
What I meant by truly meaningful was an exploration program that would actually accomplish a reasonable amount for the amount of money that would be spent on it. Spending $65-100B or more just to get up to the point where you can send two four-man missions per year to the moon is I think a pathetic waste. Now, if that money were to yield a truly robust lunar exploratory program, one that landed dozens of people per year to explore the moon and setup a base, I wouldn't be quite so disgusted. But basically all we're getting is an Apollo remake for the same price, but this time boys and girls with 4 Astronauts per mission instead of two!!! Yawn. Apollo on Steroids? Hardly. Apollo on Geritol maybe.
More to the point, the Lewis and Clark analogy Mark uses (over and over again) is deeply flawed. Later in the article he makes a similar false analogy by saying:
The needs of space exploration are a little different than that of commercial transporation. We did not wait until the transcontinental railroad was built to explore the American West.
The problem here is that Lewis and Clark also didn't wait until the government had spent ten years designing and building a massive Crew Exploration Wagon before exploring the West either. They for the most part used existing transportation equipment, imperfect as it was, and made do. Which is what we should be doing.
If the only point is to get to the moon, to start exploring, with no thought toward future commercial development, then why even develop Ares I and Ares V? EELVs in their current forms exist, are man-rateable at comparatively low costs for delivering crew capsules to orbit, and could mount an effective lunar exploration program. If the point is to get to the moon as quickly as possible, why wait another ten years while we develop boosters that would be even more useless and cost-prohibitive for truly commercial cislunar transportation than the ones we already have?!? If the goal were to get to the moon as quick as possible, and get an semi-affordable exploration program under way, why wait till 2018? If we're going to go with a capsule, and all sorts of retro Apollo technologies to avoid having to develop new technologies, why are we still embarking on a decade long development program? Boeing and Lockheed could probably have warmed over Apollo-esque capsules, flyable on their vehicles, man-rating and all, before the end of this decade. Lockheed claims (with good evidence to back it) that you could use the basic Centaur upper-stage technology as the transfer stage instead of making a custom "Earth Departure Stage". At that point, you'd only need a lander stage developed. If the point were to get an exploration program going on the moon before them darn Chinese Commies can take over the moon, and block us capitalist running dogs from being able to ever develop it, why wait till 2018? Especially when you can get a better, cheaper, more extensive program to the moon by 2012, and for $10-15B or less? I mean really?
Sure, you can't launch the bloated NASA Continual Employment Vehicle design on an Atlas 401. But if the goal is to get a good exploration program going, you don't put artificial constraints on the capsule like requiring it to fit 4-6 people. If you could save $30B in development by going with a 2-man architecture instead of a 4-man architecture (and if you could shave 6-8 years off of the development schedule), wouldn't it be worth it? With the amount you saved, you could send several times as many people to the moon.
Quite frankly, even with the current EELVs, you could afford to do 50-100 lunar sorties just for the development cost NASA is going to spend building vehicles that they don't need, and that will be obsolete very soon after their introduction.
If Mark Whittington really supported a Lewis and Clark approach to space exploration, he wouldn't be supporting wasting tens of billions of dollars over the next several years, and would instead be advocating using the launchers we currently have, and making due.
Anyway, now that I've ripped on Mark long enough for his false analogy, now it's time to admit my own. In my article I referred to NASA's operating its own space launch program as being an "Amtrak in the sky" or something to that effect. I didn't clearly think through all the connotations of what Amtrak implies (I was merely trying to think of a wasteful government operated terrestrial transportation system), and Mark rightfully called me on it. He said:
I had not heard that NASA was going to build the "next Amtrak in the sky." Where has Jon heard the Ares 1 and 5 was going to take commercial customers to the Moon?
To be clear, I never meant to imply that Ares 1 and 5 were bad ideas because "they wouldn't be taking commercial customers to the moon". I never meant to imply that they should. Ares I and V are not even an Amtrak in the Sky.
What I was trying to say was that particularly regarding earth-to-orbit transportation, NASA should not be operating its own transportation system. There are plenty of commercial transportation systems fully capable of delivering stuff to LEO. If NASA should operate any transportation systems at all, it should be in areas where private industry isn't yet operating right now--like outside of LEO. Building their own lander and EDS is still slightly wasteful, but nowhere near as wasteful as also insisting on building the vehicles to get them into orbit in the first place.
The Amtrak analogy was a bad one on my part.
One last point ought to be made. I had been talking at one point in my post about NACA and what they did, contrasting it to NASA. I had said that "The NACA approach, which focused more on industry promotion, developing the technologies and doing the research to enable commercial application, and such things instead of trying to operate their own airlines would've been a lot better than the path NASA has taken since it's foundation. NASA may be lousy at doing commercially effective R&D, but they are far worse when they try acting like an airline."
Mark comletely missed my point and instead responded that:
NASA is not a commercial entity. It cannot be made to be one. Wishing that it were so is sort of like wishing for the Moon without being willing to put out the hard effort to get it.
I wasn't implying at all that NASA is or should be a commercial entity. What I was saying was that it would be good if NASA spent more time trying to do commercially relevant R&D as opposed to operations. NACA for instance did a lot of wind-tunnel research into different airfoil shapes, which it then made publically available with all the data. Some of those designs are still used today for some things. That data greatly aided in the development of commercial aviation. NASA does a little bit of this for commercial space (such as TPS work done at Ames for instance), but unfortunately far too much of their money is focused on doing the one thing NACA never did--trying to design, build, and operate their own vehicles and transportation systems. Unfortunately, due to inevitable cost-overruns trying to develop and operate their own vehicles, many of these more commercially enabling R&D projects are being curtailed. NASA has a huge amount of money, and is in one of the best positions to lay the groundwork for a truly vibrant commercial space industry, but instead it wants to go play with being their own rocket line. Again. In spite of all the examples in the past where their grandiose approach to space ended up being far to expensive, and completely ineffective.
My point (minus the false analogy) deserves repeating. As a research agency, and even with a lot of their exploration, NASA does a pretty good job. But as a transportation operations agency, they have an extremely lousy record. Stop throwing good money after bad. Get NASA out of the Earth-to-LEO transportation market. Say no to Shuttle-Derived-Launch-Vehicles (unless someone can raise the money privately to develop them). If NASA wants to play Lewis and Clark on the moon, let them do so with existing rockets, instead of trying to build yet another Space Transportation System.
posted by Jon Goff at 10:17 PM
5 Comments:
The one that got me was his comment:
"People who arm wave about "commercial solutions" to return to the Moon have no notion of how private capital is raised."
Given that my day job is investment banker I have to strongly disagree. I'm not sure exactly what it is Mark does, maybe he raises private capital, but I am quite familiar with the financial markets, economics, and so on.
That's what Mark does. He purposefully misunderstands, and then proceeds building strawmen as fast as he can.
When Mark gets to the point where he acknowledges that there might be folks who do better understand whatever it is that he's loudly declaiming against, then perhaps I'll start taking him seriously. And until I start seeing that HE understands more than Econ 101, then I'll take him no more seriously about matters financial than any of the other laymen in the space field.
What makes you think that Mark understands Econ 101?
"since Mark doesn't have comments enabled on his blog for some reason."
He also doesn't have a spell-checker enabled either. For a guy who claims to make money from writing, he sure doesn't do it very well.
Don't forget that Lewis and Clark nearly had to turn back because their watercraft failed. If they had not had the advantage of an in-situ expert such as Sacagewa, they would not have succeeded.
I worked on the ESAS study and I can attest to the fact that sustainable access to space is not what we achieved.
Robert,
Thank you. I did remember something about weird watercraft in the Lewis and Clark expedition, and could've sworn I remembered it giving them trouble, but since I wasn't 100% sure, I decided to leave it out of the discussion. You'd think that someone who is an ancestor of the Lewis's would know his family history a little better.
So yeah, the one time that they tried to be clever and make their own form of transportation instead of just using existing commercially available technologies, they had problems. Good thing they at least hadn't wasted 10 years designing and building said inflatable rafts.
As for the ESAS study not being sustainable, I'm glad that at least some of the people involved saw that. Here's to hoping that fate intervenes (in a way that doesn't involve NASA burying seven more astronauts) in a way to steer things back in a more rational direction.
~Jon
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