As an aerospace engineering professor, your NASA criticisms made uncomfortable reading for me, but they are good and necessary. There are plenty of good reasons to oppose moon or Mars missions, but space solar power makes a Mars mission look sensible by comparison. Even assuming breakthroughs in solar panel efficiency and power beaming efficiency, a space solar platform capable of powering only one small city (i.e. a few megawatts) would require building a structure several times larger than the space station, which cost $100 billion. Getting enough space solar platforms into orbit to make a noticeable dent in United States electricity consumption would require such a breathtakingly expensive commitment to building very large rockets. I teach spacecraft design to college juniors, and in one class, we went through the sizing, cost, design and risk factors for space solar and found it lacking in every category.
Soon, Barack Obama must make a decision on whether to continue funding NASA's daffy plan to build a Motel 6 on the moon. The president will be put on the spot when the final report of a space commission (here is its preliminary report) is delivered. Rumor is that in keeping with the tradition of Washington commissions, the report will contain extremely vague language about sweeping reform; then cite every item on every wish list of every interest group with a finger in this pie; then recommend nothing specific, so as to offend no interest group; then close with a call for higher subsidies. NASA is not one of the core missions of government, and spends only one-half of 1 percent of the federal budget, so space waste is relatively minor in the scheme of things. But if public policy can't get this right, what can it get right?Of course, I completely disagree that space solar power is a good idea...I think it is a terrible, terrible idea. But other than that, I couldn't agree more.
Right now NASA's budget is $18 billion annually, and the quarter or so spent on science -- planetary probes, telescopes that scan the far universe -- is going very well. The rest of NASA is a mess. The agency has just thrown $100 billion of your money down the drain on the space station, which has no scientific achievement and no known purpose other than keeping checks in the mail to favored contractors and congressional districts. The station is such a white elephant the current plan is to "deorbit" the thing in 2016. "Deorbit" is polite for "make it burn up in the atmosphere." So after spending $100 billion to build a space station, we'll destroy it. Your tax dollars at play!
Since 2004, NASA has said its next goal is a manned outpost on the moon, as a stepping-stone to manned travel to Mars. There's nothing a person could do on the airless, lifeless lunar surface that a tele-robot operated from a Houston office building could not do at a fraction of the price and risk. And the moon has nothing to do with Mars. Any Mars-bound mission will leave directly from low-Earth orbit to the Red Planet: stopping at the moon, then blasting off again, would consume the mission's fuel to accomplish nothing. Though NASA has been studying moon-base and Mars-mission proposals for five years, the agency refuses to give a cost estimate -- a sure sign the plans cannot pass a giggle test. Considering the space station price was $100 billion for a limited facility that was not accelerated to the speed necessary to reach the moon -- speed means fuel which means higher price -- even a Spartan moon base easily could cost several hundred billion dollars. For what? Why, for "economic expansion"! Today, no one is interested in economic expansion at Earth's poles, which are far more amenable to life than the moon, have copious resources, and can be reached at one-ten thousandth the cost of reaching the moon.
What about Mars? That planet is fascinating, and people are sure to go there someday. But until there is a fundamental breakthrough in propulsion, Mars travel will be ultra-expensive and extremely impractical. Today's chemical rockets are little different from those of the Apollo era, meaning the great cost of getting weight into orbit and then to escape velocity, coupled with long travel times, remains a high barrier to any Mars mission.
The fastest trajectory available with current propulsion is a 520-day Mars mission, and that only gets you 30 days on Mars -- the rest is transit time. Now think about weight. The Apollo vehicle, which was 45 tons at departure from low-Earth orbit, carried three people on a maximum mission of 13 days. That's 1.1 tons per person per day. A Mars-bound mission would require less fuel per day, but a lot more weight for supplies, interior volume, multiple redundant systems and radiation shielding that was not required for moon flight. Interior volume is essential. The crew was strapped into seats in the Apollo command module; they couldn't even stand up. For a nearly two-year voyage, the crew will need to be able to get up and walk (or float) around to avoid going bonkers. The Russian and European space agencies recently locked volunteers into a spacecraft-like big chamber to see how long they could stand it; they were able to stand it for 105 days, a fifth of the length of the fastest possible Mars mission. (Hilariously, the agencies announced the volunteers "simulated a 105-day Mars mission full of experiments and realistic mission scenarios." This scenario is "realistic" only using warp drive.)
Any Mars craft will need to provide at least some private space for each crew member, and a decent exercise facility, to stave off the muscle loss and bone decay that is triggered by zero-gee. At least one fully equipped surgical theater will be required. Loads of spare parts and loads of equipment to use on the Martian surface will be needed, versus Apollo, which carried no spare parts and no equipment beyond a small, short-range dune buggy. (Most likely a Mars mission would not be a single vehicle -- unmanned cargo craft would go first, and people would not leave until supplies were in place -- but the weight's the same regardless of whether it's a single vehicle or a collection of launches.) Considering these things, the 1.1 tons per person per day of Apollo may prove conservative for a Mars mission.
Anyway, suppose that number is right. Assume a Mars crew of six people -- two astronauts, two scientists and two surgeons -- on a 520-day Mars mission. (Two surgeons are needed in case one of them gets injured.) Based on the Apollo experience, our six-person Mars mission gone 520 days would weigh about 3,400 tons at departure from orbit. That's approximately the displacement of an Oliver Hazard Perry class guided-missile frigate, and we are not launching a frigate to Mars anytime soon.
My weight estimate didn't pop out of the sky. These numbers have been debated by specialists for decades, and have not changed much by recent tech developments -- for example, electronics are a lot lighter now than in the Apollo era, but since electronics compromised less than 1 percent of Apollo's weight, new miniature stuff does not do much for weight. Two-thirds to three-quarters of the mission weight will be fuel, and fuel weight hasn't changed. In the 1950s, Apollo designer Werner von Braun projected that a Mars mission would weigh 3,700 tons. In the 1960s, von Braun supposed the mission could weigh 1,600 tons if nuclear propulsion was developed, but that hasn't yet happened. Discovery One, the imaginary planetary spaceship in the 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," was described as weighing 5,400 tons, which oddly sounds about right. In 2007, a NASA workshop supposed a Mars mission might weigh only 400 tons, an utterly unrealistic budgetary lowball number.
The true numbers are budget busters! Because it costs about $20 million to place a ton of anything into low-Earth orbit, the heavier the Mars craft, the higher the price. Merely placing into orbit the 3,400 tons of a conjectured mission would cost about $70 billion. That's just the launch cost -- construction of the spaceship is extra! If space station total costs are a basic guide, the full price of a 3,400-ton Mars mission would be $1 trillion. Converted to today's dollars, the entire Apollo program -- not one mission, the entire program -- cost about $140 billion.
Now you see why NASA won't estimate prices.
The shame is that while NASA toys with monumental waste of tax dollars on a moon base and speaks of a Mars mission it knows full well is inconceivable using current propulsion, the agency is not even considering two space initiatives that could return tangible benefits to taxpayers: protection against asteroids and space solar power. Sunlight collected in space where its energy value is far higher than on the ground, then beamed to Earth as microwaves, might provide a long-term fossil-free solution to the planet's energy needs. No one knows if space solar power is practical. But NASA won't as much as fund a demonstration project; all money must go to moon base subsidies and Mars plans.
Aware its current course makes no sense, NASA may soon roll out the reddest of red herrings -- we've got to go back to the moon to beat the Chinese and the Indians. During the Cold War, no one questioned NASA spending because national prestige was involved. Why must we "beat" China and India to something we already did 40 years ago? If China or India beats us to space solar power -- now, that would hurt.
The tests, administered by Kansas City-based Dynamic Athletics Research Institute, provided a baseline movement of a healthy athlete and a fatigued athlete. Their proprietary computer program then analyzes the data and provides results about 24-48 hours in most cases. "We take that information and break it down into numbers," says Patrick Moodie, DARI Sport's lead biomechanist. "We can tell you the time and position. We can tell you the velocities. We can tell you all this kinematic and kinetic data that you just can't see."Biomechanical analysis is really the cutting edge of sports fitness now. Diet and exercise patterns have never been more effective, training regimens now allow athletes to "peak" at the right times, such as cyclists peaking right before the Tour de France.
The International Space Station, for instance, built and maintained at a cost that by some estimates approaches $100 billion, houses six astronauts. The commission headed by Lockheed Martin chairman Norm Augustine that has spent much of the past year deliberating on NASA's human spaceflight program has found that the agency's $18 billion annual budget isn't enough to meet its goal of returning to the moon by 2020, or to keep the ISS aloft beyond 2015, even though ending this program would send NASA's international partners into apoplexy. More embarrassing, with NASA's space shuttle due to be mothballed in 2010, and its cheaper replacement, the Orion capsule, not due to fly until 2012, the partners face a two year gap in which they will have to rely on Russia's Soyuz ships to commute to the space station.It sounds like Fred and Eve have been reading my blog!
What NASA needs most is money, lots of it.This is precisely what NASA doesn't need.
"these doomsday scenarios you're so fond of are dramatic but informationally empty so long as you refrain from meaningful comparisons between domains."
With all apologies to regular readers, I must admit I have not been blogging heavily this last week. As many are aware, I am an "amateur blogger," i.e. I don't get any money for this, so I work a day-job (which I happen to enjoy immensely) and write posts during lunch-breaks...when I have them.Gore wasn't the first quack to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and history suggests he will not be the last. Gore spent eight years in the White House, and in that time took no meaningful action regarding greenhouse gases. The Clinton-Gore administration did not raise fuel economy standards for cars and trucks or propose domestic carbon trading. Though Clinton and Gore made a great show of praising the Kyoto Protocol, they refused even to submit the treaty to the Senate for consideration, let alone push for ratification. During his 2000 run for the presidency, Gore said little about climate change or binding global-warming reforms. In the White House and during his presidential campaign, Gore advocated no consequential action regarding greenhouse gases; then, there was a political cost attached. Once Gore was out of power and global-warming proposals no longer carried a political cost -- indeed, could be used for self-promotion -- suddenly Gore discovered his intense desire to demand that other leaders do what he had not! It is a triumph of postmodernism that Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for no specific accomplishment other than making a movie of self-praise. Gore caused no peace nor led any reconciliation of belligerent parties nor performed any service to the dispossessed, the achievements the Peace Prize was created to honor. All Gore did was promote himself from Hollywood, and for this, he gets a Nobel. Very postmodern.He goes on:
An astonishing measure of how out-of-touch the Norwegian Nobel Committiee seems is that it gave a prize to Gore for hectoring others about energy consumption in the same year it was revealed that Gore, at his home, uses 20 times the national power average. Gore's extraordinary power waste equates to about 377,000 pounds of greenhouse gasses annually, or about 20 Hummer Years worth of global warming pollution. (A Hummer Year, TMQ's metric of environmental hypocrisy, is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in a typical year of driving a Hummer.) When his utility bill made the news -- though apparently not in Oslo -- Gore responded by saying he buys carbon offsets. That takes you back to the offset problem: All offsets do is prevent greenhouse gas accumulation from increasing. If you really believe there will be a global calamity unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced 80 percent, as Gore told the Live Earth crowd, you would buy offsets and cut your own energy use. Instead, Gore flies around in fossil-fuel-intensive jet aircraft telling others: Do as I say, not as I do!
The runner's forward progress toward the opponents' goal line is stopped by contact with an opponent, with little chance to be resumed. The exact moment at which the player's forward progress stops is subject to the judgment of the officials.Shouldn't the officials have seen that Peterson's chance of resuming forward progress was essentially nil, given the 900 lbs of Packer defense climbing on his back?
You write so often about NASA's failures and high costs, but you don't ever write about all the good they do for science. How about acknowledging that NASA funds tons of research and spends millions on education programs for youth? How about acknowledging innovations that NASA brought about, like velcro.
JOPLIN, Mo. — Looking back, Paul Dekok wonders what he was thinking that May morning when the urgent call came in. Mr. Dekok, a manager at the Potash Corporation, learned that a 25-ton truckload of the company’s additive for livestock feed had been rejected by a customer as contaminated.Scrambling to protect his company’s credibility with a big customer, he grabbed his cellphone to arrange a new shipment, cradling it between his left ear and shoulder, and with his right hand e-mailed instructions to his staff from his laptop computer — all while driving his rental car in a construction zone on a two-lane highway in North Carolina.
“I thought I was doing a great job because I was being productive,” Mr. Dekok said. “It’s an adrenaline rush. It’s the buzz we all get of trying to do everything you can in business.”
But later, reflecting on the risks he took that spring day in 2007, he saw himself in a different light: “I was Bozo the clown.
Wouldn't his tasks have been so much easier - and safer - if he hadn't been driving his car, but instead had been sitting in a car that drove itself? Talking on the phone while writing an email is multi-tasking most of us can handle easily. That is...easily if not driving a 2-ton machine at 60 mph.
Some families of victims killed in collisions with a multitasking worker have successfully sued the driver’s employer for tens of millions of dollars.TAE estimates the cost to retrofit an existing car with automated driving technology would cost around $3,500 per car. Certainly not tens of millions. Needless to say, the cost of the life lost by the careless driver cannot be valued. But if the car were driving itself, that person would almost certainly have not died, as there wouldn't have been a vehicle collision.
I get tired of talking about this, but it is one of the single most plausible ways Americans could help make their lives safer and easier. I harp on and on about it because I want my readers to go out and harp about it too. I want some Congressperson's young aide to hear about my blog and come here, read the laundry list of posts I have written enumerating not only how ridiculous it is that we don't already have automated cars, not only how many lives could be saved, but how many dollars, Federal and private, that could be saved by getting rid of human drivers.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2004, a driver talking on a cellphone on her way to church hit the Teaters’ car, killing Joe and injuring his mother, who was driving. (After his son’s death, Mr. Teater worked 18 months for a company that is developing technology that can prevent a driver from using a cellphone while the car is in motion, and he still owns shares in the company.)Would that even be Constitutional? Can you really ban cell phone use while driving? I know some cities are doing it, and base the legality of it on the fact that drivers are in "public use" areas, the same way city parks often ban alcohol. But do we really want to put a crutch on American businesses by not allowing their salespeople to have instant access to clients via phone or laptop computer? No one on Earth has ever caused another person's death simply by talking on a cell phone...it is only the talking on cell phones while driving that does it. Why ban cell phone use and hinder people's daily activities, when instead you could ban driving and liberate them to do even more productive activities while commuting?
I think it would be misleading if I didn't openly acknowledge that I love driving. I love being in control of my pickup, occasionally slamming the gas, occasionally getting to put it into 4-wheel-drive and make my own road, being high up and seeing over the tops of cars (a rare treat for someone of my stature), and rolling the window down and "truckin' along while listening to country music. But what I love even more than driving is simply being alive. And having a beautiful wife and daughter that are alive. Losing my "truckin' along" time is a small price to pay if it means they are much, much safer while on the road. Anyone that tells they wouldn't give up the wheel to save lives is being selfish, and reckless.
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