The Wet Wick
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D.M.J. March
As more and more time passes with little advancement along our, once inspired and sensible, outer-space exploration milestones (do we even have milestones anymore?), we should never forget that sometimes the mill that grinds the finest, grinds longest. While the recent time and money being spent on the various Mars initiatives can seems little more than bread and circus', especially when we have restrained ourselves from even serious effort to grapple with so-much-as a Lagrange point [Cornish, 1998] by 2015; those who remain serious and hopeful about our eventual mass-ascension from the Earth would do well to continue investigating things that will yield lasting benefit regardless of our initial or ultimate destinations.
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| Lagrange Points: if we can't get HALF-WAY to our Moon, how are we even talking about Mars... hint, no one authorized it and it's a run-away campaign. Why is the Moon so discounted ? |
Considerations of long-term provision, social and physical well-being, economics, legal frameworks, and technology - necessary to any permanent colonial undertaking - all retain relevance and import, even in these tardy times. While our current peak human achievement, that venerable old "space" station - the ISS, hits almost 1 orbit per every person on the planet; we are yet to allow a single private commercial spaceflight with paying customers go up... even though those customers have already paid and the test flights proved sound as early as 2004 [David 2004]. Although a gush of private money has been allowed to flow into the 'civil space industry' the actual results for regular civilians have not been as rapid or manifest.
It has been the case, for a while now, that the main restrictions upon our space-faring endeavors has not been technological, but legal. While outfits like SpaceX and Bigelow have made strides in recent memory as part of the 'commercial' outgrowth of NASA, this growth has been rapid only in comparison to previous efforts - which amount to zero. It is worth remembering that Bigelow, Virgin and SpaceX have all been at it for more than a decade now. They have been working hard and waiting around for approvals and frameworks far longer than it has taken any of them to actually develop the tech they are employing at this time. It is worth noting that most of these projects utilize decades old ideas from NASA that were discarded along the way for one reason or another.
Bigelow: to quote wikipedia "Bigelow originally licensed the multi-layer, expandable space module technology from NASA after Congress canceled the International Space Station (ISS) TransHab project following delays and budget constraints in the late 1990s
Virgin: Scaled Composites, the company that actually did the bulk of the design/build work on the 2004 Ansari X Prize winning craft borrowed heavily from the Boeing X-20 DynaSoar designs that were produced from 1957-1963 (those being cancelled pretty-much as soon as actual construction on the craft began).
SpaceX: began with the ambitious goal of putting Earth-life on Mars, still keeps this notion alive in projections but has degenerated into refitting old-style ICBMs with old-style capsules and provides the same old-style launch services we've come to expect - but does it "privately" and has also mastered the single-stage reclamation process which, while not without merit is neither an original or unique effort.
Especially in the case of Space-X we see very little intended deviation from the age-old method of reaching space, the 'innovation' being that a private group is handling the work. The main differences are legalistic, not technological.
If the best we can do is re-hash ideas from 50 years ago, finally allow a qualified group of NGO's to handle some of the work (totally discounting the existence of ULA, of course) and finally allow private funding for good ideas that the public system aborted without any reason other than 'budget constraints', then we need to really get our heads around the fact that our main retarding agent here isn't the tech, it is the force of government authority over citizens that is crippling human efforts at off-world colonization [Econ 2013]. When SpaceShipOne proved that you can go to space for less than $100 Million a pop (closer to $1 Million), NASA quickly disbanded the entire shuttle fleet. How could such a behemoth of cash stand any scrutiny in the future as we continued to delay civilian access ? Instead we returned to using the old "capsule and candle" system the Russians still had kicking around.
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| Hey kids, the ISS is a "space station", we're going to Mars and have I told you about this excellent idea for an elevator to space ?? All aboard !! |
It has been the case, for a while now, that the main restrictions upon our space-faring endeavors has not been technological, but legal. While outfits like SpaceX and Bigelow have made strides in recent memory as part of the 'commercial' outgrowth of NASA, this growth has been rapid only in comparison to previous efforts - which amount to zero. It is worth remembering that Bigelow, Virgin and SpaceX have all been at it for more than a decade now. They have been working hard and waiting around for approvals and frameworks far longer than it has taken any of them to actually develop the tech they are employing at this time. It is worth noting that most of these projects utilize decades old ideas from NASA that were discarded along the way for one reason or another.
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| AVRO VZ-9 c.1960 The company that produced this was destroyed by gov't policy, not business or technical failure |
Bigelow: to quote wikipedia "Bigelow originally licensed the multi-layer, expandable space module technology from NASA after Congress canceled the International Space Station (ISS) TransHab project following delays and budget constraints in the late 1990s
Virgin: Scaled Composites, the company that actually did the bulk of the design/build work on the 2004 Ansari X Prize winning craft borrowed heavily from the Boeing X-20 DynaSoar designs that were produced from 1957-1963 (those being cancelled pretty-much as soon as actual construction on the craft began).
SpaceX: began with the ambitious goal of putting Earth-life on Mars, still keeps this notion alive in projections but has degenerated into refitting old-style ICBMs with old-style capsules and provides the same old-style launch services we've come to expect - but does it "privately" and has also mastered the single-stage reclamation process which, while not without merit is neither an original or unique effort.
Especially in the case of Space-X we see very little intended deviation from the age-old method of reaching space, the 'innovation' being that a private group is handling the work. The main differences are legalistic, not technological.
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| A visual summary of NASA's primary mandate for the last 40+ years. |
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REFERENCES throughout
[1] Cornish, Neil J., Document (...) for WMAP, (NASA,1998).
Retrieved Online May 2016 at pdf from site
http://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/media/ContentMedia/lagrange.pdf
http://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/media/ContentMedia/lagrange.pdf
[2] David, Leonard., SpaceShipOne Wins(...) in Historic 2nd Trip to Space, (space.com, 2004).
Retrieved Online May 2016 at site
http://www.space.com/403-spaceshipone-wins-10-million-ansari-prize
-historic-2nd-trip-space.html
[3] Economist Magazine, Tech Quarterly (unattributed author, June 2013)
retrieved online from "Stuck to the Ground by Red Tape" June 2016 from site
http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21578517-space-technology-dozens-firms-want-commercialise-space-various-ways
-historic-2nd-trip-space.html
[3] Economist Magazine, Tech Quarterly (unattributed author, June 2013)
retrieved online from "Stuck to the Ground by Red Tape" June 2016 from site
http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21578517-space-technology-dozens-firms-want-commercialise-space-various-ways
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