If you're in early middle age like me, you can probably remember NASA and the government making a huge deal over abandoning "Wasteful" rockets like the Saturn V in favor of a more "Economical" system they called "The Space Shuttle." Development started in 1973, and it was expected to go into service in 1978, but as *NO ONE* could manage to do anything right in the '70s, and as Jimmy Carter had some kind of pathological hatred of the space program, it got postponed to 1981.
That's eight years during which NASA's PR department was in overdrive, hyping the hell out of the Shuttle in a way that wouldn't be seen again until the year "Attack of the Clones" was released. And we totally bought it. I mean, what could go wrong? This was NASA, after all! They put man on the moon, even if they had to use leftover Nazis to do it. They gave us Skylab, and the Viking Probes. What could go wrong?
Everyone was very excited. My dad and I drove all the way to Florida for the first launch, and camped out on the Bananna River. He slept in the car, and I wandered around all night, talking to the other space campers, looking through their telescopes, listening to Queen*, and watching the all-night-long Science Fiction Movie Marathons on all the local channels (I remember watching "First Men In The Moon" and "Saga Of A Star World," but there were others. There was singing and dancing and campfires, the kind of things hippies like, but unlike the filthy stinking hippies, all of us knew how to bathe, and we were all pretty smart and pro-science. I remember all manner of amazingly involved scientific conversations with total strangers, I remember playing frisbee with some kids in the river at three in the morning, I remember everything. And then this happened:
I saw it with my own eyes. I was there, less than three miles away. It was a big as my pinkey as it lifted into the sky. We were elated. The whoops and roars and rebel yells (Florida after all) and applause was deafening. Some women were kneeling, praying that it would go off without a hitch. It was glorious. It felt like it was the dawn of a new age.
And it was, though of course we couldn't know how crappy that new age was at the time. We bought a bill of goods, like a bunch of suckers, and 29 years later, we're still paying for it.
Why? Because the Shuttle *isn't* economical: It costs twice as much per launch as the "Wasteful" Saturn V did, and its cargo capacity is so low that it costs six times as much per pound to put cargo in orbit than it did in Saturn days. But the PR had gone on for so long, and with such intensity, our feelings were so golden, that it took us a long time to realize the truth didn't match up to the hype. Five or six launches a year when they promised us fifty? Tooling around in orbit testing the effects of weightlessness on the manufacture of perfume when they promised us real research? Not even a crappy space station when they promised us colonization? Some of us had already begun to doubt when this happened:
And the dream was over. But sometimes you can't wake up, and it just keeps getting more and more nightmarish
And now, finally, they promise us that it's over, that it's waking up, but I'll believe it when I see it. The shuttle program has been NASA's equivalent of the Vietnam War, it just kept going and going and going, eating up more resources, with no clear goal in sight. It killed fourteen people, it's eaten up hundreds of billions of dollars, just on launch costs alone. Development and servicing are even more expensive. And like all demons, it refused to go down without a flight. It was intended to be replaced with a better system after ten or twelve years, yet here we are a generation later, still running that murderous slovenly profligate beast, and there are people in congress talking about extending the retirement date even as I type this. I'll believe it's dead when I see it in a museum alongside the fossils of other dinosaurs who were too big and stupid to live.
Make no mistake about it: The Space Shuttle *KILLED* space exploration.
*- The soundtrack to "Fash Gordon," over and over and over again. I don't know why.
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| Republibot 3.0 but he has no other genre credits." It seemed like a cool idea to me. 4 days ago |
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Comments
27 June 2009
25 sec
One of the things that killed space exploration and colonization is that we are a democracy. In a democracy the petty wants and desires of people become part of national policy. If Leif Ericson or Christopher Columbus had to get money from congress the Native Americans would have been a lot happier than they are now.
By the time of Columbus educated Europeans knew the world was round and that there was something where North and South America turned out to be Ericson proved it 300 years before. The European monarchies had no interest in exploration for exploration sake they were all preoccupied with internal and external politics and warfare.
Both Columbus and Ericson before him were private explorers looking to make fame and fortune away from Europe The fact that Columbus received part of his financing from the Spanish Queen does not change the private enterprise nature of his expedition. It was about money Columbus wanted to find a way to Asia before the Portuguese explorers did and cut out the Islamic monopoly of the trade with Asia.
Fast forward to the mid 20th century and we find a somewhat similar dynamic at work. After the Second World War both the USA and the USSR had the technology to orbit a satellite thanks to captured Nazi rockets and scientists. Both governments had other things on there mind, Europe and Asia needed to be rebuilt and both were wrestling for the future of the world. Space was for dreamers, the USA even placed missile development on the slow track to build a large bomber fleet that both would threaten the USSR and help employ all the millions of GI’s coming home from the war.
The space race was both an after thought and an accident. The USSR wanted to bluff the Americans with their impractical first generation ICBM and beat the USA into space for the propaganda splash it would cause. The only interest the American government had in space was a secrete program to get a spy satellite into orbit by 1960. Eisenhower even gave orders that no American missile test should place anything into orbit, Von Braun’s Army missile team could have orbited a satellite as early as 1955 if he was given a go ahead.
Governments never have an interest in opening new lands; it’s too dangerous to the status quo. It is only after the adventures and traders have proved there is profits to be made does government want to control what someone else has found. Like exploring the New World space is a wild card that scares governments and the average Joe on the street does not know what it can bring for him so they are either hostile to the idea or do not care.
If we truly want to explore and colonize space we need to hope and pray that the private sector can find a way to make it profitable. Then the fight to control it will begin because once people prove something is worthwhile governments will want their cut and control.
27 December 2008
1 min 42 sec
Hey, welcome back, Neo! We missed you!
You're right, of course. Fear. Though that's the bottom line, it's a little too broad to work with for our purposes, so we need to whittle it down to different kinds of fear. For instance, the Left fears space because their entire ideology is based around one world, one environment, one race, one government, one economy, ein bludt, ein volk, ein reich. It'd be impossible for their potential utopia to control space effectively, it's too damn big, and if they can't control all of it, they don't want it.
The Right fears space - to a lesser extent - because it basically takes the lid off the pot and lets it boil over. Space colonies and economies and whatnot are game changers, and every politician in the world is very invested in the status quo. They don't like game changers.
The average joe on the street opposes space becuase he doesn't realize how important it is, and it'd force them to re-evaluate a lot of basic assumptions.
27 June 2009
25 sec
It’s not just the left, it’s the right and the middle as well that hates space. The hate it for different reasons but they hate it just the same.
Most of the reasons do not make sense but that is because they are straw man the real reason some people hate the idea of space is fear. Fear that some people will become greater than they dare to, fear of the unknown and lastly fear of lost of control over other peoples lives.
27 December 2008
1 min 42 sec
Amen to that. I can't tell you how many times in my life I've heard some well-meaning dope say things like "Space will have to wait until we've solved all the problems here on earth."
What? You mean I have to wait for economic equity, and end to racism, a cure for AIDS and little Jimmy McGeneric's acne to clear up before we can start colonizing? What the hell kind of sense does that make? Added to which the resources in space could solve at least some of those problems.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard people decry the 'commercialization' of outer space, and cite the Moon Treaty (Which EVERY spacefaring country refused to sign) as an example of us 'being on the right path', despite it being unenforcable sour-grapes diplomacy from third world countries trying to prevent other countries from doing the things they can't.
I can't tell you how many times I've...well, you get the idea.
24 July 2009
16 hours 21 min
The Democrats' attitude toward space exploration is much like a tyrannical parent's trying to settle things between their kids in the most confrontational manner possible. "You get back in here and GET YOUR F_CKING ASS BACK ON THE COUCH! We've got a lot of problems to hammer out, and NOBODY, I repeat, NOBODY is leaving this planet -- I mean this room until we're done!" The leftist mindset thinks we're not allowed to go into space until we've fixed all the major problems we've got down here, or otherwise we'll just carry these nonsensical ideas about freedom of choice and distrust of the government into space with us -- and then the whole mess will start all over again.