ESAS dogfight

ESAS dogfight

NASA released the Exploration Systems Architecture Study on September 19th. At the time, I actually had some good things to say about it (which is kind of surprising considering what I normally have to say about NASA).

The other day Dan Schrimpsher of Space Pragmatism weighed in with his comments on ESAS:

"Well for the executive summary, I am okay with it. Unlike many of my private space industry brothers, I don't think it is doomed to failure already. I think they could get to space, and with the right leadership (and I mean in the White House not in Griffin's seat) they could build colonies and launch Americans to Mars.

So why am I not jumping for joy and waving my arms. The problem is, it doesn't get me and my wife to space."

Jonathan Goff of Selenian Boondocks concurred:

"It's kind of amusing hearing people defend the ESAS project saying that it will get America back on the moon. No, it won't get America back on the moon. It'll get a few employees of the US government back to the moon, but most Americans have never gone to the moon a first time, let alone talk about "going back" to the moon.

And that's the real problem with this architecture. It really does nothing to help hasten the day when Dan, or his wife, or I, or any other normal Joe for that matter, will have a chance to visit or live on the moon. If commercial lunar access becomes a reality, it will become so in spite of ESAS, not becuase of it."

And Mark Whittington of Curmudgeons Corner disagreed:

"The fact of the matter is, no matter what scenario one can imagine, most people alive on this planet will not travel into space, no more than most people in Europe in the 17th and 18th Century traveled to the Americas. Put that fantasy out of your mind."

Mark is correct that most people alive today will not go into space; most people alive today will not come to America either. He goes a little overboard with this critique of Goff though:

"Let's leave aside the insults against those of us who have not drunk the alt.space koolaid. Those really demonstrate the poverty of the libertarian anarchist argument."

Pot, meet kettle.

In response to Dan's complaint that the new NASA vision implementation wouldn't get him and his wife into space, Mark says:

"I'm not sure why that is the case, as I'll explain later."

Mark does not however explain later on in his post how ESAS will get Dan and his wife into space, only vague assurances that in 50 years some people who are alive today will get to go. The crux of Mark's argument is:

"The purpose of the space program is not to get me and mine a trip to Club Moon but to spread human civilization beyond the Earth. If I get to go, fine. If not, sad for me but it doesn't matter in the large scale scheme of things."

The ESAS will not accomplish Mark's goal of spreading humanity to space. In the very best case scenario, it will send a handful of people to the moon, and will bring them back to earth.

Spreading human civilization is all very noble, but it simply is not going to happen as a result of sending a couple people up to the moon every few years and then returning them to earth a few days later. It will happen as a result of dozens, hundreds, thousands of people going up into space and not coming back.

What that means is not tiny capsules that can only bring four people at a time. That means the equivalent of ocean liners that transport hundreds or thousands of people at a time. In order for the VSE to mean anything in the long run, people other than NASA-vetted übermenchen will have to go. In other words, in order to meet Mark's goal of spreading human civilization, we have to get away from the space-is-expensive-and-only-governments-can-afford-it-and-only-a-select-few-can-go meme.

North America wasn't settled by those few rowboats carrying four people at a time, returning them to Europe after they had spent a week in North America. It was settled by hundreds of ships powered by steam or diesel fuel driving screw propellors, with hundreds of families huddled in the hold on every trip. And those people were not joyriding and expecting to return; often it required the entire life savings of those families to make a one-way trip.

It means a paradigm shift away from the Apollo-on-steroids version of space travel. Instead of tiny capsules perched atop massive rockets, boosting a handful of people into space at a time, supported by an army of tens of thousands of technicians and engineers, we have to find a way to send a large number of people using a much smaller team of enabling personnel on the ground. A new technology needs to be implemented to make space colonization a reality - and that new technology is a space elevator.

I can already hear the cries of "unobtainium!" True, the carbon nanotube ribbon required to build a space elevator is not available yet. However, carbon nanotube fiber has been following a version of Moore's Law of its own, increasing in length and strength by a factor of ten every year since the first millimeter-long brittle strand was produced five years ago. At the present rate of advancement in nanotube ribbon production, we will have the necessary material strength and necessary length to make a space elevator in about five to six years.

For the cost of developing the heavy lifter to be used in the VSE, a space elevator could be built instead, and be deployed by the time the first crewed CEV launches.

This is my main beef with the ESAS; it is not that Apollo-on-steroids won't work (I think it is a far better design than the space shuttle, for instance) - instead, the problem is that NASA didn't take the opportunity to do something truly revolutionary. They could have developed a system that would drop the cost to orbit (or to the moon) by four orders of magnitude. Instead, they have gone back to something that they already tried 40 years ago. NASA is planning on doing the equivalent of a 40-year-old man moving back into his mom's basement.

Update: Dan responds to Mark:

"And while I congratulate you on your altruism, I simply don't share it. You don't care if I get into space, you care if Americans in mass get into space. I would love that (if I was one of them). But you know what, I want to go to space. I am passionate about it. It is my greatest dream. And quite frankly I think you cheapen dreams in general to say my dream should be for western civilization and not personal. Real dreams only happen at the personal level. I bet all our space nut forefathers wanted, personally, to go to space. That is why they worked so hard to make it happen and why we are where we are today.

Okay that was a little bit of venting, but I believe the core of America is personal dreams, not the greater good. The greater good piggy-backs off of personal dreams. So no one should feel bad or selfish for their personal visions of anything, especially space flight."

Update 2: Jon Goff responds to Mark Whittington:

"Human civilization by any reasonable definition of the term is not going to be spread beyond earth by this program. At most a few dozen civil servants are going to go camp out on the moon for a few months at a time...NASA isn't around to give us all a vacation in space. It isn't here for our entertainment. What it should be here for (if it should be here at all) is to help promote the commercial development of space. That is the only way that "Western Civilization" is going to spread beyond the Earth. It isn't going to happen on ultra-expensive, low-flight-rate, government run and operated vehicles. It will only happen when commercial companies are routinely traveling about inside cislunar space, and some companies are making money doing things on the lunar surface, in orbit, and beyond."

Update 3: Rand Simberg weighs in here. Mark Whittington fires back at Jon Goff.

Update 4: The editors of The New Atlantis call for the shuttle program to be shut down even earlier than 2010, perhaps by the end of 2007. This would allow development of the heavy lift launcher to be begun earlier, and the heavy lifter could then launch the remaining components of the space station. This would serve three purposes: it would shorten the timetable for getting Americans back to the moon by three years, it would save the costs of maintaining the shuttle fleet for those three years, and finally it would lock NASA in to the Moon, Mars and Beyond program before President Bush leaves office (meaning that the next president would not have the option of extending the shuttle program, which would have ended a year before the next president takes office).

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