By: doug l

doug l — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 04:45:52 +0000

I stongly support space exploration but we have to get out of the perceptual box we’ve built around the approaches we are using. Our historic use of ballistic missiles originally designed to deliver war heads and designed to be integrated into the NORAD “trident” configuration of defense strategies (air sea and land based system) has lost its relevance to the current capacity, knowledge and needs. We need to lower the costs dramatically and and the best way of doing this will be by going to a much larger scale with the economies of scale that are concomitant upon that expansion which are required. Industry, in contrast to academia and NASA and the DoD, is the best suited (I applaud Obama for working towards this very wise perspective) and will be the agent by which we reach that new plateau.
Imagine NASA attempting to create a transcontinental railroad and you might imagine a lightweight titanium train on a gossamer thread sipping exotic purified fuels and carrying probes that were as expensive and intricate as swiss chronometers, all in the quest to understand the landscape. Nice idea but the tremendous rewards of the continent’s resources, which I admit should have been managed better, were the result of large scale heavy industrial approaches to the problem. The same super abundance of energy and materials await us out there in the oxidation-free vacuum of gravity-free space bathed in the high intensity energy from the sun 24/7/365/endlessly (in practical senses). Interesting to note that if the US hadn’t already had ICBMs functioning as defense weapons we might have had to develope the large scale, reusable, durable and energy efficient launch system designs as proposed by the original early recognized leaders in the field such as Von Braun and Truax. Alas we already had explosive, dangerous and barely efficient (but effective targetting devides) rocket. They could be used to launch people if they were throttled back a bit and after huge amounts of testing to insure they were ‘man rated’…and then the shuttle.. a billion a trip…aye yi yi…suching all the funding out of the room…we need to be looking at appropriately scaled ideas for launching heavy masses that don’t need man-rating now expecially with the current approach of commercial space taxis that is anticipated to eliminate the need for man rated giants.
There are great rewards in both the scientific and industrial realms but we have to un-hook the idea that NASA, long the puppet of DoD through which it, as the NSF, recieve significant funding, should continue to operate as it has and instead realise that we must enter into a new phase now that we have learned how to navigate.
Go large, go to stay. It’s raining soup.

By: Szwagier

Szwagier — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:56:28 +0000

Yes, I support it. No, I’m not American. Ah, well.

Comments on: Do you support Big Space Science?

By: doug l

By: Szwagier