Disclaimer 1: These are my personal opinions. I emphatically do NOT
speak for my employer (who probably wishes to remain anonymous--I haven't
asked) or for anyone else, real or ficticious, living or long since dead;
human, cetacean, or space alien; animal, vegetable, mineral or ethereal.
Disclaimer 2: I have had a professional interest in the space
program for my entire 18 year career, but all of my academic training (and
work) has been in engineering. My interests in economics, psychology,
religion, sociology, and political science are strictly amateur.
Where (In Space) Do We Go From Here? or,
Why Do We Have A Manned
Space Program?
Peter A. Taylor
Summer 2000
In a previous essay, "Why are launch costs so high?"
I tried to explain why space launches are so expensive. I expressed my
belief that lack of direction is a major obstacle to solving this problem, but
I said very little about what can be done about it. In this essay I offer
some suggestions. Because I think the problem is largely one of political
will, my aim is to build consensus, and thus my intended audience is not a few
specific decision makers, but the space futurist community as a whole. Anyone
may participate; a voter's registration card is not required. As a side
effect of writing this, I also hope to clarify my own thinking about my
career.
Here are my suggestions for what we space futurists need to do in order to
have a manned space program that's worth cheering for:
- Know what we want.
- Know how badly we want the various pieces of it.
- Have a plan for getting where we want to be.
- Present a unified front.
There are too many possible directions for space efforts to go, and too
little profit or political support, to allow moving in all of these directions
at once. What kind of launch vehicle work should we advocate? A Magnum
(Saturn V class) booster for going to Mars? A small "clean sheet of paper"
Shuttle II? Liquid fly-back boosters (LFBB) for Shuttle evolution? Subsidies
for privately developed launch vehicles? More X-vehicles? Should X-vehicles
focus on technology or operations research?
While this work on launch vehicles is going on, should we support ISS? How
hard should we be pushing ground-based closed ecological life support system
(CELSS) research? What about unmanned space exploration?
It isn't enough to be able to say that a particular project (ie. Mars
Direct) is a good thing. We collectively need to be able to negotiate over
the details. If there isn't enough political support to fund both Mars Direct
and Shuttle II effectively, we need to be able to choose between them wisely.
How much extra are we willing to spend in order to send people to Mars instead
of just robots? How much extra are we willing to spend in order to send
humans to Mars this decade rather than next decade? We need to know this
because a human Mars mission probably competes directly with reusable launch
vehicle development for funding. Which budget trade-offs are good ones and
which aren't?
If I want other space futurists to agree with me, I can't simply state my
position regarding what our objective(s) ought to be. I need to lay out a
reasonable set of possibilities and defend my choice. This means I have to
open The Big Can of Worms:
Why do we have a manned space program?
To put this in perspective, I think back on that night in July of 1969, when
I was nine years old. My father was usually very firm about us kids going to
bed on time, but on the night of the Apollo 11 landing, he made an
exception.
Why did John Taylor let his children stay up late? He was a physics
professor at a local community college, and he was very excited about the moon
landing, as were my brother and I. I have trouble finding words for this
without using religious language. I am reminded of the Promethean allusion in
the title of Apollo 11 Command Module pilot Michael Collins' book, Carrying
the Fire. It was as if some flaming cosmic torch was handed down that
night, and it was important that we all be awake and present to witness it.
Or perhaps I should say, to receive it.
In a parallel development, my brother and I were becoming readers of science
fiction. We learned to especially like the hard core science fiction of
Clarke, Asimov, and Niven, but we also liked the softer stuff, like "classic"
Star Trek. Science fiction was and remains today only vaguely definable,
blurring imperceptibly from hard science into utter fantasy, in a way that
seems to me to echo the muddled sense of purpose of the manned space
program.
Why do we read science fiction? William Hartmann's novel, Mars
Underground, tries to put some excitement into his Mars exploration
scenario by positing an enormous alien artifact (sorry about the spoiler).
What does this have to do with a real-life space program? In classic Star
Trek, Captain Kirk seemed to be interacting with new and interesting space
aliens, the proverbial "priestess of the bronze brassiere," in almost every
episode. If we interpret this in a literal way, that the purpose of the
manned space program is to have interesting face to face conversations with
extraterrestrials, we are forced to my ex-wife's view, that we know enough
about this solar system to know that the priestess doesn't live here: wake me
up when you invent faster than light travel.
A variation of the "wake me up when..." theme was described to me in terms
of the cat that gave Heinlein's novel, The Door into Summer, its name.
The cat meows at a succession of doors during winter, trying to command its
owner to open the right one, the one that leads into summer. The cat doesn't
understand that the time is not right, and it will just have to wait.
Similarly, space colonies and the other important things that space futurists
want to build will just have to wait; the technology is not ready, and sending
humans into space at current launch costs with current life support, power
supply, and manufacturing technology is like the cat scratching at the door to
make it be summer.
Short and Medium Term Tangible Benefits
Several other commonly heard reasons for having a manned space
program have similar problems holding up under close scrutiny. One of the
reasons why the NASA Public Affairs Office (PAO) is so ineffective at
portraying NASA in a favorable light is that it is forever talking about
"spinoffs." As Richard Dawkins put it, "Justifying space exploration because
we get non-stick frying pans is like justifying music because it is good
exercise for the violinist's right arm." By "spinoffs," I mean using
technology that was developed for space in applications that are not directly
space-related; I don't consider asteroid mining or solar power satellites as
"spinoffs."
The "spinoff" argument for manned space flight is unconvincing
for a number of reasons. For one thing, one often hears claims that spending
on the manned space program brings economic benefits that are greater
than the costs by some ratio, be it 7:1, 14:1, or whatever. Lord Chorley
referred to these claims in a "Viewpoint" article in Space Policy, August
1988, "Economics of space and the role of government." He quotes Henry
Hertzfeld, former Chief Economist of NASA, "No economic study should attempt
to put a 'bottom line' ratio or return on space R&D investments." To do such
a study properly would require a universe-jumper, so one could compare the
world that is with a hypothetical world without a manned space
program. Otherwise, the best one can do is guess, based on, in Lord Chorley's
words, "a series of assumptions...which are incapable of being tested and in
some cases are intuitively implausible." One study which estimated this ratio
to be 8.3 was followed up by another that found it to be indistinguishable
from zero. Regarding the latter, Lord Chorley notes, "This result is rarely
quoted." The point is that we do not know what the benefit ratio is, and
anyone who says he does at best is kidding himself. This doesn't mean that
the benefits are zero. We simply don't know what the numbers are.
A second problem with spinoffs as a justification for the manned space
program is that the relationship between the sort of program objectives that
space futurists are interested in and commercially important terrestrial
applications is too tenuous. One sometimes hears claims that the manned space
program is needed as a "framework for technology development," but I've never
heard anyone seriously try to argue that research that is oriented towards
rocket engines is more effective at improving airplane engines than research
that is oriented towards airplane engines directly. As Poul Anderson put it
in a 1984 lecture, Space: Promises and Problems, "The average man is not dumb;
he's perfectly able to see that sending men to the moon is a rather roundabout
and expensive way of producing a teflon frying pan, especially considering
that teflon was already in existence." There are too many worthy research
programs, such as on aircraft icing, that are notoriously underfunded, and too
much of the manned space budget goes for repetitive "operations" that have
little to do with technology development.
Apart from any questions about whether the importance of the manned
space program in promoting commercially important technology has been
greatly exaggerated, Earthly spinoffs are simply not that interesting. They
were certainly not interesting enough to my father to justify letting his
children stay up past our bedtime. This point escapes very few people. The
emphasis that manned space advocates put on spinoffs is at best an
evasion. The main effect of this emphasis on me is to drive home the point
that we lack direction.
One also frequently hears an analogy drawn between the first transatlantic
voyage of Christopher Columbus and the current manned space program.
The unsatisfactory nature of this analogy was driven home rather brutally by
James A. van Allen, of "van Allen belt" fame, in a "Perspective" essay, "Myths
and Realities of Space Flight," in the 30 May 1986 issue of Science (pp.
1075-6):
Fervent advocates of the view that it is mankind's manifest destiny to
populate space inflict a plethora of false analogies on anyone who contests
this belief. At the mere mention of the name of Christopher Columbus they
expect the opposition to wither and slink away. I find it possible to resist
such an expectation. If reference to Columbus is made in an offhand,
thoughtless way, it is merely incompetant; but if made with full knowledge of
the facts, it is deceitful and fraudulent.... [T]he surface of Mars has been
studied comprehensively by a succession of U.S. and Soviet spacecraft.... If
a similar survey of America had been available in the late 15th century, the
mission of Columbus' fleet to the West Indies would have been unequivocally
desirable. But the application of the Columbus analogy to support advocacy of
a manned mission to Mars is massively deceitful. Mars is not terra incognita.
We have already explored it and found it to be far more desolate and sterile
than the heart of the Sahara desert. There, of course, remain many matters of
deep scientific interest on Mars but these matters can be addressed ... by
automated ... missions."
The point of the Columbus analogy seems to be that it is unreasonable to
demand a convincing "business plan" from someone who proposes a low-cost
voyage into terra incognita, land that is genuinely unknown. A cavalier
attitude about a business plan is appropriate under those circumstances. But
as van Allen points out, we know too much about our solar system for this
analogy to hold, and there are cheaper ways of aquiring the information we
don't have. Perhaps 30 years ago we could with integrity have gotten away
with such a cavalier attitude, but not any more. We know too much. We need a
credible business plan.
My father's response to the question, "Why do we have a manned
space program?" was similar to the Columbus analogy. He repeated a retort
that Michael Faraday (quoting Benjamin Franklin, I'm told) had reportedly
given someone who asked what the dynamo, his newly invented electric
generator, was good for: "What good is a newborn baby?" This answer, while
rhetorically satisfying, has the same problem that the Columbus analogy has:
it may have been a reasonable reply at one time, but we know too much about
the environment we're working in, and are spending too much money, for our
lack of direction to be excusable now. We also know too much about babies for
this answer to really be as clever as it sounded in the first place.
Van Allan brought up the phrase, "manifest destiny," which I have also heard
elsewhere in this context, so I will address it directly. Claiming that we
should build space colonies because it is our "manifest destiny" to do so is
an example of the fallacy of "begging the question" (aka petitio principii).
The problem with this class of argument is that the premise is only cogent for
people who already believe the conclusion anyway, like arguing that the Pope
is going to Heaven because he's Catholic, and all Catholics are going to
Heaven. It is possible to take the "door into summer" view, and agree with
van Allen for the forseeable future, but still accept the manifest destiny
claim in the long run. In this case, manifest destiny still doesn't tell us
how much we should be spending on manned space in the forseeable future, or
how we should spend it.
Philosophical Note on Uncertainty
Because of the uncertain nature of the payoffs of the exploration business,
proposals for exploration put us in the realm of what Industrial Engineering
textbooks call either "decision making under risk" or "decision making under
uncertainty," depending on whether we have information about the probabilities
of various outcomes. Uncertainty does not put us on any sort of elevated
philosophical plane where we are exempted from having to say anything
intelligent about expected benefits and costs to the people whom we are
asking for money. Decisions about exploration may involve a lot of guesswork
and judgement, but there are no blank checks here. Ignorance is not
bliss.
If we try to sidestep the guesswork by claiming to be on an elevated
philosophical plane, exempt from criticism by "bean counters," or by saying
that exploration is a Good Thing, and should be funded at some arbitrarily
high level simply because it is a Good Thing, we run into several problems.
First of all, saying X is good doesn't tell me it is better than Y. Second,
the conclusion that I should get a blank check is absurd enough to prevent the
argument from being taken seriously. Third, the argument proves too much. It
can be used to justify almost anything, any of a hundred conflicting uses of
the public's money. The decision makers we hope to influence couldn't use
this as a basis for making a decision even if they wanted to. Finally, as I
suggested with regard to manifest destiny, apart from its ineffectiveness at
swaying decision makers, it also fails us in terms of providing guidance in
setting our own goals and priorities.
Scientific Benefits
Occasionally one hears the claim that humans are better than robots at
exploration because they can respond better to the unexpected. Is that why we
send humans into space? Because it is the most cost-effective way we can
think of to acquire scientific data? My first reaction is that at current
prices, humans can only compete with robots in situations where the schedule
is very tight and money is very loose, and even then it is highly dubious.
It's true that humans are better able to respond to surprises than robots, but
it isn't reasonable to compare one expensive crewed mission to one cheap
robotic mission unless we are in a terrible hurry and there isn't time to send
a followup mission. If we took the amount of money necessary to send humans
to Mars, and put it in the bank, we could send robotic missions every three
years until the end of time. Perhaps there are economies of scale in the
space exploration business such that at some level of activity humans become
competitive with robots, but at current NASA funding levels, this speculation
seems rather academic. I want to send people to Mars in spite of their
scientific cost-effectiveness, not because of it. But I don't want human
tourists on Mars infinitely badly--the price has to be right. As with the
Apollo program, science is part, but only part, of the motivation.
Another claim is that we need humans in space to do certain kinds of
research efficiently, particularly research on humans. This is somewhat
circular logic, because most of the reason for doing research on humans in
space is in order to support the manned space program. As with the Columbus
analogy, we already know too much about humans in space from Skylab and Mir to
be able to plead ignorance about what we hope to accomplish by studying it
further. In addition, the level of funding for research that requires humans
in space is too low in comparison to the cost of the manned space program to
make sense as a justification for it. This is also true of materials
processing experiments, in so far as these benefit from human
presence.
A Belated Organizational Note
Up to this point, I have made little attempt to group the arguments for a
manned space program that I have discussed into orderly categories,
other than that so far they have all been what I consider to be bad ones. One
obvious category is scientific arguments, which I think for the forseeable
future are unable to stand in the face of competition from robots, and about
which I have little else to say. A second class of arguments attempts to
pursue more tangible benefits that are available in the short and medium term.
This includes spinoffs and tourism in the short term, and asteroid mining and
solar power satellites in the medium term. It also includes the Columbus
analogy, which claims medium term benefits are probably there, but we don't
know what they are. By "short term" I mean roughly within my lifetime, and by
"medium term" I mean a few generations. The short and medium term tangibles
include military as well as economic benefits, and for convenience I will lump
political reasons, such as the historical reasons for the Apollo program, in
with military reasons. Like Apollo, which was described by a coworker as "a
technical solution to a political problem," the actual reasons for the current
International Space Station (ISS) are mainly political. What I particularly
want to separate from the other short and medium term reasons are a set of
intangible reasons that for lack of a better word I will describe as
"cultural." These form my third category, and are the hardest to articulate.
Finally, we have arguments involving the long term survival of our species.
For convenience, I will lump defense against small "city-buster" asteroids in
with defense against planet-killers, but mainly in this final category I want
to consider things that threaten species survival. This list of argument
types is not exhaustive. For example, it does not include long term economic
benefits such as might be enjoyed by people a thousand years from now.
However, I do not think these are helpful in justifying a manned
space program in the near term, and in any case I would for convenience lump
them in with shorter term economic benefits.
So far I have focused on commonly heard, bad reasons for supporting a
manned space program. My main emphasis in what follows will be on
cultural and species survival reasons, but I still need to tie up a few loose
ends.
Short and Medium Term Tangible Benefits, Continued
One of these loose ends is space tourism. (See Appendix A.) If I can some day afford to
experience space flight myself, I would want to, but the difference between
people enjoying space tourism and enjoying other luxuries doesn't justify
spending very much of the taxpayers' money. I see little role for the
government here. (I am assuming that the knowledge of how to build cheap,
safe spacecraft is largely a public good, and therefore governments would have
a legitimate reason for going out of their way to support a fledgling space
industry if it were sufficiently beneficial, even if it was producing fairly
pure private goods such as joyrides or commodity metals.)
Another argument is that there are natural resources elsewhere in the solar
system that are likely to be valuable enough to justify the cost of the
manned space program in the near term. One of these is solar power, as
collected by large satellites (SPS) and delivered to Earth by microwave
transmissions. The satellites are usually envisioned as made from lunar
materials. Another candidate is metals mined from asteroids, or possibly a
helium isotope (He3) recovered from lunar soil that might some day be
useful in nuclear fusion reactors on Earth. I take the SPS argument as
potentially serious, but not compelling. If I had to make a decision today
about how to deal with our dependence on fossil fuels, I would choose nuclear
power over SPS. I don't find the He3 argument very helpful because it is too
speculative to justify an interesting manned space program in the
near future. I also see little basis for hope that asteroid mining will be
able to compete with terrestrial mining and recycling with any propulsion
system in the forseeable future. A possible exception would be if
environmental concerns were to some day make terrestrial mining
extremely expensive. This is a better argument than He3, but it is
still too speculative to justify an interesting manned space program
in the near future. This is true of "put polluting industries in space"
arguments in general--scrubbers are almost always cheaper. Some kinds of
biological research could some day be candidates for moving off-Earth, but the
practicality of this is again very speculative. Materials processing on a
commercial basis, taking advantage of vacuum and weightlessness, is similarly
speculative, its economic viability depending strongly on launch costs.
One reason why Europeans immigrated to the Americas was population pressure,
with cheap arable land being available in the New World. The hope that our
off-Earth transportation and life-support capabilities will be great enough in
the forseeable future to provide noticable relief of population pressure for
the Earth is pure fantasy. A different argument is that a New World would
provide a wonderful opportunity for those few who are fortunate enough to get
there, that they would be much better off than those left behind. If
something utterly dreadful happens to the Earth, this may be true, a point to
which I will return. Otherwise, I dismiss this argument with the observation
that no life support capabilities that we will have in the forseeable future
can hope to make life off-Earth nearly as pleasant as the same amount of
wealth could make someone's life on Earth.
One motive for a manned space program that might provide a legitimate role
for government is to separate warring factions. The Mormons moved to Utah to
avoid religious persecution. Criminals from the Old World were often exiled
("transportated") to the New World (Heinlein's novel, The Moon is a Harsh
Mistress, borrows this theme). Poul Anderson's New America
suggests an interstellar colony might be supported in order to get rid of a
troublesome political minority. Quite a bit of science fiction plays on
various people's anti-government sentiments, but if we are asking the
government for money to make our dreams come true, it is a bit awkward to
explain that our dreams involve escaping from the government's evil grasp. I
myself happen to be one of the more vulnerable people to this sort of appeal,
but realistically, if we want to solve political science problems, we should
really be studying political science, not rocket science. I dismiss these
arguments as well as being too speculative to justify serious funding of the
manned space program. If and when our "door into summer" opens, I
will not be surprised if religion plays a major role in motivating many of the
early settlers, but for the forseeable future, the Earth is not likely to be
so terribly homogenized and overpopulated as to make this a compelling reason
to leave the planet.
I have described a number of the above arguments as "speculative." This
doesn't mean that those arguments are completely worthless. What it does mean
is that they have relatively narrow limitations. If we try to push these
arguments too hard, they will break. For example, the argument that we should
pursue solar power satellites (SPS) may be a good reason for doing paper
studies and some ground-based materials processing experiments. It can also
be used, along with several other arguments, to justify playing with a series
of frankly experimental vehicles to try to get launch costs down, because the
feasibility of SPS is sensitive to launch costs. It can't be used to justify
an expensive space station devoted to working out the technical details of a
project to which we are not yet committed.
Cultural Benefits
I next come to a category of arguments I am calling "cultural." I don't
know how to separate culture, spirituality, depth psychology, and religion.
In depth psychology terms, there is something archetypal about space, or "the
heavens." An instructor at the local C. G. Jung Center said that "great
dreams" commonly feature such symbols as God, the Virgin Mary, the ocean, and
space. There is something about space that, for many of us, floats our boats
in ways that are non-rational and very hard to articulate. The phrase, "pure
unadulterated vastness," comes to mind. There is an excellant book by Robert
Bly called A Little Book on the Human Shadow that offers some
suggestion of what might be going on. Bly uses the metaphors of the
projection screen and a long sack that people drag behind them. The sack is
filled with parts of their personalities that they don't recognize in
themselves, but often project onto other people or things, which is what the
projection screen is about. It may be that part of the fascination of science
fiction is that its "other worldly" nature invites us to examine ourselves
with particularly strong light. Certainly "classic" Star Trek often had
obvious psychological themes, and part of what seems so flat for me about Next
Generation is that it seems more interested in taking a utopian technological
advocacy role than in using space travel as a pretext for exploring the human
condition. Is the manned space program to some extent an exercise in
psychodrama? If so, does that provide some basis for a role for the
government, as some sort of public mental health program? I suspect that the
answers are respectively yes and no. I can see some similarity between a
modern manned space program and building cathedrals in medieval
times, as deep expressions of who we are, but I shudder at the thought of
trying to run NASA off of the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts.
I think a reasonable reply to such a suggestion is that there are cheaper ways
of doing psychodrama, and that perhaps we're just not reading enough
Niven.
There are several questions about our culture that I think are relevant
here. Why do we read science fiction? Why do children (and adults) build
plastic models of the Starship Enterprise, or little Estes solid rocket
powered flying models of Saturn Vs? How is this relevant to the government's
role in manned space flight? For that matter, why do governments build
monuments? Part of the answer to why I read science fiction is escapism. I
am reminded of part of a recent sermon by Rev. Robert L. Schaibly about the
movie, American Beauty:
The confusing role fantasy plays in our individual lives is a theme. When we
are unhappy with our lives we try to visualize something else, and the line
between that and fantasy is often indistinguishable. What to be when we grow
up. A high school senior may have a vision about athletic achievement or work
that requires eight more years of education, but in general the same idea in a
65 year old person is a fantasy. Yet where do we get our ideas, but through
daydreams?
Historically, my interest in space travel in science fiction has not been
so much that I thought it would be cool to visit alien worlds as that I
thought it would be cool to leave this one. I tend to get through difficult
times by maintaining a very active fantasy life. As I think about my escapism
and reflect on why people build toy models, I am reminded of David Friedman's
explanation of why people buy lottery tickets. The State of Texas, like
several others, sells lottery tickets with rather bad odds (and makes its
competition illegal). Buying lottery tickets makes very little sense as an
investment, and it's hard to argue that people buy them because they like risk
when the same people also buy insurance. But people like to fantasize about
being rich, and the lottery tickets make the fantasies seem more believable.
Perhaps the manned space program serves a similar function, making people's
futures seem more full of opportunity, even though, for the forseeable future,
many of the the actual claims made for the manned space program seem
rather far-fetched.
Part of my reaction to the Apollo landing was simply one of awe and wonder.
Part of this feeling was because travelling to the moon was so far out of line
with what people were used to thinking of as being possible in any practical
sense. That sort of experience will be very hard to repeat. But there is
also something deeper, a sense of a small child from the city seeing a cow for
the first time and asking his mother, "Why?" I find it hard to describe
without religious language. I remember a coworker who will tell you he's a
Christian if you ask him what religion he is, but if you really want to see
him get excited, you need to get him talking about sending people to Mars. I
am reminded of the last line of John Gillespie McGee's poem, "High Flight," "I
reach out my hand and touch the face of God." The experience of watching
transmissions from robotic space probes is different somehow.
Earlier I suggested that some sort of cosmic torch was handed down during
the Apollo 11 landing, and that my brother and I had to be awake in order to
participate in the ceremony. It seemed as if the entire species was
collectively having its Bar Mitzvah. We were coming of age in the Milky Way.
In Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's language, Earth was the cradle of mankind, and the
baby had just taken its first step. Arthur C. Clarke captured some of this
feeling with the title of his novel, Childhood's End. The closest
thing to an individual coming of age ceremony I had was getting a driver's
license. The Apollo landing felt as if our species had gone to God's version
of the Department of Motor Vehicles, taken the test, and passed. We have the
license now, and it holds the promise that we will some day be able to
accomplish great things, but we're still living with our parents, and will be
for the forseeable future.
I have no intention of trying to equate science and religion, but these two
areas of thought do tend to get in one another's way from time to time. This
is something that I think my father was quite sensitive about, as am I.
Episcopal Bishop John Spong and his wife, Carolyn Spong, have described this
in terms of "premodern" versus "modern" and "late modern" or "postmodern"
thinking. Part of what was going on during the Apollo 11 landing was a
triumph of a modern worldview over a premodern one. A cosmonaut had made a
big point of reporting not having seen any angels in Earth orbit. Frank
Borman had read from the Bible during his Apollo 8 flight around the moon. I
don't know exactly what Borman's point was. Spong's point was to keep
Christianity as a body of spiritual teaching, while discarding the Bible as a
source of literal scientific or historical factual information. Whatever
conclusion one draws about the value of Christianity as spiritual teachings,
it was quite clear that the understanding of orbital mechanics that sent
Borman around the moon came from Copernicus and Newton, not from the Bible.
Since the literal-minded reading and acceptance of the Bible is still very
much of a live issue in the modern US ("scientific" creationism, anyone?), I
welcome opportunities to drive nails into the coffin of "premodern thinking."
I also see value in a manned Mars mission from this standpoint, and while I
would hesitate to ask Congress for money for the purpose of embarassing
religious fundamentalists, I would support a "flags and footprints" mission if
the price were right.
One of the benefits of the space program was the "Spaceship Earth" paradigm
shift, from seeing the Earth as huge and rugged to small and delicate. This
was partly due to photographs that could just as easily have been taken by
robots as humans, but the "spaceship" idea probably would not have caught on
nearly as well if we did not sometimes have people on board our spacecraft.
Perhaps some important new ways of thinking will result from long duration
human space flight or from trying to survive on Mars, however briefly on our
early attempts. That's worth something, and could help partially justify
manned space missions, providing they were reasonably novel. But again, if we
were to ask Congress for money on that basis, we might reasonably be told that
there are cheaper ways to change our thought patterns: perhaps we should take
up meditation, study philosophy, or read more science fiction.
One way of looking at the manned space program is as entertainment. David
Friedman called it "The Greatest Show Off Earth." John Young referred to "the
adventure of human space exploration." From this standpoint, as one of my
coworkers put it, asking why we put humans on spacecraft is like asking why we
have jockeys at horse races. Horses can run without jockeys, but it's not as
much fun to watch.
It is also said that there are psychological advantages of having a
frontier. I could argue either way on this one as far as psychology is
concerned. Also, if I took this argument seriously, I'm not sure what
conclusions I could draw from it about what would be an appropriate funding
level and how the money should be spent. There is a respectable argument
(Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations) that a frontier is
helpful from an economics standpoint, in tending to destabilize cartels and
price-fixing agreements. This argument might be marginally helpful if we were
close to being able to build an economically viable space colony, but it
doesn't seem helpful in the near term.
Another obvious reason for the manned space program is national prestige.
From this standpoint, a nation having a manned space program is like a wealthy
family owning an expensive sports car. This makes the US manned space program
look like the Soviet Union's efforts to do well in the Olympic games.
Prestige or national pride seems to be the main thing keeping the Mir space
station flying. An odd thing about this is that the news articles I've seen
keep quoting Russian officials who insist that the Mir is vital for technical
reasons, and that prestige is merely incidental. It seems to me that much of
the prestige associated with the space program comes from people thinking that
its purpose is far greater and nobler than just showing off. This may not
have been true in the Apollo days, when there was such a huge amount of awe
and shock that such things were possible, but now that manned space flight is
old hat, showing off just to show off isn't cool anymore. The prestige seems
to depend on a belief that prestige is a secondary motive (I call this
Frank's Paradox). As a reason for
the US space program, prestige seems to be a minor issue. (We're not as
screwed up as Russia.)
(Update, 8-25-2007: I've changed my mind about the importance of prestige
to the US manned space program. I now believe it is of central importance.
See the above link regarding Frank's Paradox.
Bryan
Caplan described Sputnik as an "economically insignificant prestige
project," and I'm afraid there's a lot of this going around.)
It may seem odd that I have chosen to lump "political" reasons in with the
"short and medium term tangible" reasons, but "prestige" is in with "cultural"
reasons. This is rather arbitrary, as I am hard pressed to explain the
difference. I think of prestige as a consumer good, something that people
value directly, whereas "political objectives" sound to me more like an
"investment" of sorts, a means to some other end. An example of a fairly
tangible political objective is using the International Space Station to prop
up the Russian aerospace industry so they don't sell missiles to Iran.
Prestige seems too intangible. In the case of the Apollo program, the
distinction is very unclear to me. Did JFK support Apollo because he thought
it was cool, or because he thought other people thought it was cool? Was it
to influence the behavior of other countries by convincing them that the US
was not lagging the USSR in ballistic missile technology, or to comfort US
citizens by providing something akin to the "intangible religious benefits"
that the Internal Revenue Service uses to judge whether contributions to a
church are tax deductable? I'm not sure I can tell the difference, or that it
matters.
Finally among cultural reasons for the manned space program, we come to the
worship of technology. Shortly after the Challenger accident, there were
suggestions in the popular press to scrap the Shuttle and try to build a new,
Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO), fully reusable launch vehicle, something that
would be enormously difficult to do. As a coworker put it, some people have a
strange attitude towards technology--a reusable SSTO would be much harder to
get to work than two-stage, and we can't even get a two-stage to work
properly. As I argue in the companion to this essay, "Why are launch costs so high?" efforts to lower space
launch costs have consistently been much too focused on "advanced"
technology, to the great detriment of these efforts. I think this is related
to the belief some people have that living on Mars would be more attractive
than living on Earth. A future in space requires high tech, and life on Earth
doesn't, so when we think we are comparing living on Mars with living on
Earth, we tend to inadvertently compare high tech with low tech, and so we
make silly comparisons. A popular attitude among space futurists seems to be
that advanced technology is good, and the manned space program is the
One True Path to advanced technology. I object to this not only because I see
other paths, but because I share Sam Keen's concern that technology has been
allowed to grow in undisciplined ways. Our ability to build weapons of mass
destruction and exploit natural resources has outstripped our understanding of
psychology, ecology, political science, and other "soft" sciences. From this
standpoint, a Mars colony is yet another attempt to find a technological
solution to a political problem.
I leave my list of "cultural" reasons for a manned space program now
on a religious note. As Michael Meade put it, the world is being shaken by a
sort of mythological earthquake; the old myths are crumbling, and no one knows
what the new myths will be that will inform our perceptions of the world in
the future. I do think that in some sense, an excessive interest in space
travel is a religion. Specifically, it's my religion, or at least one
of them. It floats my boat. I didn't choose for this to happen--I feel more
as if it chose me. It's non-rational. Like Elaine Pagels, who reflected on
her feelings towards Christianity in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, I find
the symbolism of this religion moving, regardless of what I think of the
theology. Furthermore, my purpose in this essay is similar to Bishop John
Spong's purpose in Why Christianity Must Change or Die. I want to
create a new theology of space travel that I can support without suspending my
critical thinking skills.
Species Survival
I now come to arguments involving the survival of our species. As Apollo
16 astronaut John W. Young wrote, "NASA is not about the 'Adventure of Human
Space Exploration,' we are in the deadly serious business of saving the
species." The cultural reasons may be the main factors affecting the
thinking of space futurists, but arguments involving survival have far
broader appeal and can be used to justify much larger expenditures. If we
think of the space program as a safari, it is a very expensive safari, and
if we're going to justify the cost in terms of the meat we take, we need to
bring back an elephant, not a jackrabbit.
An obvious near term objective is defense against Earth-crossing asteroids
and comets. As Carl Sagen said, the reason dinosaurs are extinct is because
they didn't have a space program. This seems to me to be a compelling reason
for ground-based and perhaps some unmanned space-based sky searches
(Spaceguard). Asteroids are in a different class from comets because they can
be detected relatively easily decades in advance, and once detected, are
relatively easy to reach, and are close enough that unmanned spacecraft near
them need relatively little autonomy. Comets are a much harder problem, and
more likely to directly require humans. Paper studies would certainly seem in
order, and perhaps development of a nuclear thermal or other high performance
propulsion system, which would be very useful for other missions. But the
role that a determined asteroid defense would provide for humans in space in
the near term is very limited.
John Young's essay on "Mitigating Earth Disasters" is oriented more towards
using technology developed for the manned space program in order to cope with
terrestrial natural disasters such as very large ash-producing volcanos and
climate changes due to variations in the sun's output. Excluding comet and
asteroid defense, the argument as he presents it is basically one of spinoffs,
and is vulnerable to the same counterarguments discussed earlier. If my
ultimate purpose is to develop electric power supply, hothouse, and cold
weather survival technology for terrestrial use on a massive scale, why should
I be fooling with rockets, vaccuum systems, and artificial gravity? I
certainly don't mind taking terrestrial technology developed for the medium
term and spinning it off into space applications that can take people to Mars,
but the justification for going to Mars is left to fend for itself, and we are
back to the "door into summer" position of waiting for somebody else's
technology to ripen before we can go out and play. In order to justify space
research and technology as being dual-purpose, it needs to really have
important dual purposes. It would also be a lot easier to justify doing such
dual-use R&D if the catastrophies involved were man-made, which seem more
likely to threaten a significant fraction of the Earth's population than the
purely natural ones. Fortunately, there is at least one area of research
which I think fits the bill: closed ecological life support systems (CELES),
which are necessary for any long term human presence in space, and which
require a sophisticated knowledge of ecological systems which we desperately
need to understand and limit the effects our industrial civilization is having
on the Earth's biosphere. Complex closed ecologies are needed to understand
how ecological systems work so we know how to solve the problems we are
creating and to prove that we understand them so that we can mobilize
the political will to deal with them. Even if the rest of NASA were
abolished, I would still want the CELES work in the Bioplex facility at
Johnson Space Center to continue and to be funded aggressively.
Other species survival arguments involve getting some of our "eggs" out
of this one terrestrial "basket." In the medium term, an alternative
basket might consist of an enclosed colony either in free fall or on another
celestial body. In the longer term, this might involve terraforming Mars. In
the very long term, geological time, the Sun will leave the stellar main
sequence in about 1 billion years, and we will want interstellar travel long
before then. This last deadline is so far beyond any human time scale that
survival considerations of this sort seem to be largely religious again.
Although I shrink from describing it as immortality for our species or its
distant descendants, it would be a life extension of cosmic proportions for
Gaia's children. In any case, a deadline of 1 billion years is too far away
to get worked up about, or to allow rational planning if we did somehow manage
to get worked up about it. The threats I am concerned with are relatively
near term, and are mainly ecological and military, such as biological warfare.
Once again we find the manned space program being advocated as a source of
technical solutions to what are mainly political problems.
If we wait long enough, and are lucky enough to avoid any major disasters,
we will eventually have the technology to build space colonies without
government assistance, just as a side effect of the general progress of
science and technology. The reason for government involvement from a survival
standpoint is because we are concerned that disaster might strike before we
would otherwise be ready. In formal terms, the survival argument for the
manned space program would sound like this: "If we push space technology hard,
with $X, we will be able to build a permanent colony Y years sooner than we
otherwise would, enabling the species to survive a medium-term catastrophe
that has P probability of taking place within that time frame." If the
numbers, X, Y, and P, make sense, this could justify a large program.
The catch is that we have to have a permanent, quasi-independent colony at
the end of the program. "Permanent quasi-independent" means that (1) under
normal circumstances, it has to be economically viable in the face of
competition from Earth and (2) in an unexpected emergency, it has to be
capable of surviving indefinitely, independently of Earth. A colony doesn't
have to pay back any of its "sunk" development or construction costs or pay
any kind of a return on investment in any conventional sense in order to be
"economically viable," but it has to be able to pay its operating costs. It
needs to be attractive enough compared to Earth that sane people will want to
raise their children there, and if this requires luxuries supplied from Earth,
they have to be paid for without being a significant drain on the sponsoring
political unit. (This requires low transportation costs even after the colony
is completed.) If the colony is going to be abandoned the first time the
political winds shift, it should not be thought of as "permanent." It might
become possible to build a colony on Mars that meets the emergency survival
requirement long before it is possible to build one that meets the normal
competition requirement. Making Mars an attractive place for people to live
without continuing subsidies from Earth may require terraforming. My guess is
that either of these requirements by itself implies so much self-sufficiency
that the difference between them is minor, but that this degree of
self-sufficiency will be very hard to acheive, and will require low launch
costs, a huge amount of tools and other material goods, and a large commercial
space infrastructure that will take advantage of economies of scale, make
serendipitious discoveries, and generally push us along the relevant learning
curves.
An Aerobraking Orbit Transfer Vehicle (AOTV) Concept
The payload is depicted in magenta, engines in yellow, oxygen tank in light
green, hydrogen tanks in dark green, heat shield in red, and other structure
in various shades of blue.
If it sounds like I'm grinding an axe, I am: launch costs influence the rate
at which progress is made in
reducing the other costs of space activities. For example, consider an
aerobraking orbit transfer vehicle (AOTV), a reusable upper stage or "space
tug" designed to carry cargo from low Earth orbit (LEO) to geosynchronous
(GEO). It may seem obvious that a reusable AOTV would save money in the long
term, but in fact, this depends on the cost of propellants in LEO. A reusable
has to make a round trip, whereas an expendable's trip is one-way. (See
"Design Study of an Integrated Aerobraking Orbit Transfer Vehicle," NASA
Technical Memorandum 58264, March 1985.) Even with aerobraking on the return
trip, this means more delta-V, 20350 vs. 14050 ft/sec (p. 13), and more
weight. The aerobrake alone was to weigh 1855 lb (p. 16), on an 11094 lb
vehicle (p. 16) sized for a 28000 lb payload (p. 10), the weight of about
three typical GEO satellites. The NASA report assumes a specific impulse of
460 sec. with 1% degradation, and flight performance reserves of 2% of delta-V
(p. 13). Using these numbers and the rocket equation (32.174 ft/s^2 to convert
from lb mass to lb force), I calculate an additional 5794 lb of propellant
attributable to the aerobrake, 1855*(exp(20350*1.02/(460*.99*32.174))-1). Bear
in mind that airplanes typically cost between $150 and $300/lb. (Aircraft
Design: A Conceptual Approach, 1992, Daniel P. Raymer), whereas mass
delivered in LEO costs on the order of $5000/lb. At $5000/lb, that extra
propellant associated with the heat shield is worth about $29 million. If an
expendable upper stage can be built for a few tens of millions of dollars, and
saves several thousand pounds off the gross weight of a reusable AOTV, at
current launch costs, the reusable will not be able to save money.
I don't have any particular ideas on how to estimate the cost and schedule
involved in building space colonies, or the likelihood of disaster striking
the Earth in the mean time, but some of the major technical objectives of such
a development program are obvious. In fact, it may be more helpful to
organize arguments for the manned space program not by their objectives (ie.
cultural vs. economic), but according to the kinds of technological or
economic changes they are sensitive to. For example, a Poul Anderson New
America scenario requires fusion drive and suspended animation. Permanent
colonies require advanced life support or terraforming. All of the arguments
I'm interested in are sensitive to space launch costs, including "cultural"
arguments, which may be able to justify an inexpensive human Mars mission, but
not an expensive one. Nuclear power also seems to be a practical necessity
for lunar and planetary surface operations and trips outside the inner solar
system. The ability to process extraterrestrial materials, In-Situ Resource
Utilization (ISRU), is needed in a wide variety of different forms by all of
the more interesting scenarios. Several of these scenarios also involve a lot
of unmanned space activity. An economically rational space program would have
a much stronger emphasis on teleoperators, long operational lifetimes for
space hardware, and greater spacecraft autonomy. For the more interesting
scenarios there are issues involving international law that have to be worked
out as well.
Building Consensus
My conclusion is that the reason we have a manned space program that is
currently active in flying humans in space is mainly a combination of
political and cultural reasons, some of which are based on misunderstandings.
Species survival and economic benefits are likely to provide compelling
reasons for human spaceflight some time in the future, but they are very hard
to relate to any human space operations of which we are presently
capable.
Which of these objectives make sense? The science that is
done as part of manned spaceflight is worth doing on an opportunistic
basis, but can not justify more than a fraction of the total cost of the
manned space program. Cultural reasons are important. C. S. Lewis expressed
a view in his poem, "Science-Fiction Cradlesong," that "Outer space is a
concept, not a place...There's no way into the sky." In this view, the
cultural reasons are only misunderstandings. I don't think this is
true, any more than I think that the fact that I like chocolate is a
misunderstanding of nutrition. However, I can't reasonably expect everyone
else to share my tastes, and I regard these "cultural" reasons as luxuries,
something that I want to buy in quantities that depend strongly on their
novelty and their price. So even if cultural reasons were the only reasons
for a manned space program, I would still want to invest much of its budget in
bringing costs down.
The economics problems associated with resource
exploitation and with building colonies are too closely related to one another
for me to be able to usefully distinguish between them. Again, species
survival will provide a compelling reason for human spaceflight some day, but
not with our current technology and economic situation. A case could be made
that the needed technology is so far removed from what we have that the "door
into summer" view is correct, and that the best thing we can do is forget
about human space travel until wealth and technology that is not developed for
directly space-related reasons alters our situation dramatically. This would
mean not only the moratorium on manned space flight that James van Allen
recommended, but also a view that it is a waste of money to develop technology
that is not going to be useful within the time horizon within which we can
plan effectively. I don't share this view either. Some of the sort of
technology we will need for economical manned operations in space, such as
cheap boosters, does not appear likely to come about any time soon as a side
effect of non-space development, and the lack of cheap boosters is largely
what determines the limits of our ability to make meaningful plans. I don't
think a serious effort to build cheap boosters needs to be much more expensive
than what would be justified by saving money on unmanned launches. A
moratorium on manned space flight would result in a loss of "corporate
knowledge" that would be hard to regain, and much of the technology that I
hope to see developed soon will require test flights and evaluations by human
operators.
The manned space program I advocate is mainly focused on
development work to enable the economical exploitation of space, with some
occasional manned flights for cultural reasons and development testing. From
this perspective, I see the Shuttle as a necessary evil, an expensive trainer
that we will have to live with until we get something cheaper. Manned Mars
missions and the current International Space Station (ISS) are expensive
diversions. Regardless of whether we envision our long term objectives as
emphasizing cultural, economic, survival, or for that matter, scientific
objectives, our primary short term objective needs to be reducing launch
costs. Our secondary short term objectives should be closed ecological life
support systems, headache-free electric power supplies, and in-situ resource
utilization (ISRU). But work on these secondary objectives may not pay off in
a visible way for a long time.
How much money it is reasonable to
spend on this sort of space program is a judgement call, but one consideration
that should limit how hard governments push economically oriented space
development work is not wanting to get too far "ahead" of commercial practice.
This means a return to a NACA model of the relationship between the public and
private sectors (NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee on
Aeronautics). Work that is too "advanced" risks not only being wasteful
because of the timing being inappropriate, but also risks being permanently
misdirected. But we can not go very far wrong if we succeed in cutting launch
costs. The "cultural" payoff will be immediate, and it will have long
reaching effects in changing the way we think about and execute space
missions.
I return now to my suggestions for what space
futurists should do in order to have a manned space program worth cheering
for:
- Know what we want.
- Know how badly we want the various pieces of it.
- Have a plan for getting where we want to be.
- Present a unified front.
What I want is mainly to see
progress towards permanent space colonies. I would also like to see manned
missions beyond Earth orbit, but unless they are clearly related to a serious
effort at colonization, I regard these as a "lark." My plan for getting there
is mainly to work on cheaper launch vehicles, with additional work on closed
ecological life support, space nuclear power, and in-situ resource
utilization. Specifically, for reasons which I described in the companion launch costs essay, I suggest a series of
reusable X-vehicles oriented towards operations research rather than reducing
weight or improving technical performance. I don't think we're smart enough
to build Shuttle II yet. I have nothing to say about presenting a united
front other than to thank you for reading this essay.
I do, however,
have some more thoughts on having a plan for getting there. One is that we
collectively need to resist getting too excited about the "advanced
technology" side of launch vehicles, lest we end up with more expensive
diversions like the X-33. Since most of us seem to be ardent technophiles, a
corollary of this is that if someone makes a proposal that we really, really
like, we should be very suspicious of it. We also need to be realistic about
the roles of the public and private sectors. The goods that we want to see
produced are a mixture of public and private goods. Delivering specific
products for specific customers is a private good, which we may expect the
private sector to do more efficiently than the public sector, but there is a
considerable amount of public good associated with knowledge, which we should
not expect the private sector to be terribly efficient at producing. Cultural
objectives and species survival are both mainly public goods, as is much of
the operations research information needed by private companies to build cheap
launch vehicles and in many cases to take advantage of them. The market for
the sort of manned space missions which we are interested in developing seems
likely to be a government monopsony (only one major buyer) for a long time.
The government can "outsource" the launch capability it needs, but this is not
the same thing as true privatization. We should not expect a government
monopsony to act like a competitive market.
I have two more
suggestions to offer based on arguments from The New Science of
Economics, by Richard McKenzie and Gordon Tullock regarding competition
and duplication of services within government, and from Infinite In All
Directions by Freeman Dyson. Just as competition enables private sector
customers to get lower prices, McKenzie and Tullock argue that an important
factor in keeping the government's costs down is having several agencies that
can compete with one another for the same public service fiefdom. Such
"duplication of services" is usually the first thing that is condemned by
commissions that investigate government "waste," and so these authors argue
that the first thing to do to make government more efficient is to abolish all
the commissions that purport to be investigating how to do it. My point in
bringing this up is to suggest that the various NASA centers should be
encouraged to compete with one another at such tasks as developing X-vehicles,
rather than trying to "eliminate duplication." I would like to see several
NASA centers playing with reusable sounding rockets similar to the ones that
are intended for the "X-Prize."
My second suggestion is to follow
Dyson's advice, and avoid projects that will take longer than five years or
cost more than $100 million or so. The rationale for this is that large, slow
projects tend to become overly political, are harder to manage efficiently,
and tend to pursue objectives that become outdated before the project is
completed. Much of what went wrong with the X-33 may have been related to the
size of its budget.
Finally, I want to pound my shoe on the table a
little bit more about launch costs. As I suggested earlier, it's as if we
passed God's driver's test three decades ago, but we're still living with our
parents. I grew up in the post-Apollo days, expecting a permanent Lunar
settlement any year now for many years. The reason we don't have one is
primarily because of economics. Technology is certainly a factor, but
technology is important largely because it drives some of the economic
considerations. Even here, economics largely determines the directions in
which technology development takes place, particularly in a market economy
such as the US.
With apologies to pop psychologist Anne Wilson
Schaef, the relationship between economics and technology in the future of
humans in space is analogous to the relationship between egg and sperm
respectively in conceiving a child. When appropriate sperm comes together
with an egg, interesting things happen. If the egg is not present, the
process of releasing sperm may look and feel like the process of conceiving a
child, but nine months later, you don't get a baby. The egg (economics) is
not a means of enabling the sperm (technology) to travel farther and faster
towards its goal. From the sperms' standpoint, the egg is the goal.
Although I am interested in advances in other areas, I
regard launch costs as a "make it or break it" issue, the most salient portion
of the economics problem associated with the conquest of space. Launch costs
are the primary economic "choke point" for the entire spectrum of possible
human activities in space. If we solve the launch cost problem, private
industry will eventually build the rest of the infrastructure we want. If we
don't, no amount of government subsidy will produce permanent self-sufficient
settlements. If we want a manned space program that brings us more
than "intangible religious benefits," we need to get serious about reducing
launch costs.
Suggested reading:
James van Allen, "Myths and Realities of Space Flight," Science, vol. 232, 30
May 1986, pp.1075-6. Read the original.
Freeman J. Dyson, Infinite in all Directions, 1988, Harper and Row, ISBN 0-06-091569-2, Chapter 10,
"Engineer's Dreams," pp. 180-200. Compares the Challenger accident and the
Voyager success, with an analogy to the Scott and Amundsen polar
expeditions.
See pp. 623-5 of Cost-Effective Space Mission Operations, by Daryl G. Boden and Wiley Larson, ed., 1996, McGraw-Hill,
ISBN 0-07-006382-6. This is section 20.1, "Rationale for Human Missions,"
from Chapter 20, "Human Space Flight Operations," by Carolyn Blacknall and
Felix Godwin. They cite another paper that I have in my file and was thinking
of mentioning anyway, so I will:
"Logsdon, John. The Space Shuttle Program: A Policy Failure? Science, May 30 1986, pp. 1099-1105." This is the same issue of Science as the van Allen article.
Richard P. Feynman, "An Outsider's Inside View of the Challenger Inquiry," Physics Today, February
1988, pp. 26-37. Good general background on space program politics.
Lord Chorley, "Economics of Space and the role of government," Space Policy,
August 1988, pp. 180-6. Since manned space flight is pretty much limited to
expensive government programs for the time being, it's hard to talk about the
role of humans in space without talking about the role of government in space.
James Bennett and Phillip Salin, "Privatizing Space Transportation,"
Reason Foundation Issue Paper, 6 March 1987, Reason Foundation, 2716 Ocean
Park Boulevard, Suite 1062, Santa Monica, CA 90405, (213) 392-0443. This is
arguably relevant because of the need, in my opinion, to examine the role of
government and to get costs down in order for manned spaceflight to become
readily affordable.
Appendix A:
Commercial Manned Space Flight
Here's a comment by Jeff Hagen, 5-19-2016:
First, we need to dispense with this ludicrous delusion that commercial human LEO operations are verging on realization. The economics says otherwise. (Note that SpaceX finally published their expected cost savings from first stage reuse just last week. Best case if it works still north of $40m per Falcon launch.) With launch costs still stuck at 10's of millions per person even in the optimistic scenarios and cost per stay on a Bigelow tourist station optimistically hoped to be in the neighborhood of a million per day per person on the low end, considering the several month stay time due to launch costs, logistics, etc., the per person operational costs alone will be on the order of $100m. Pretty much in line with what the Russians have charged. That doesn't begin to cover the amortized construction and launch costs or company overhead over the estimated ten year life of a Bigleow station, let alone amortized development costs and profit margin. The addressable market for 9 figure, one-time entertainment expenses obviously consists of very few individuals. Then consider that between training and flight, said individuals will have to spend a half year or so doing nothing else, they must have the physical condition to survive the intense physical demands and isolation from medical care, and despite being the most pampered class of people in human history, they must be willing to spend several months living in very primitive and confining conditions without assistance, and must be willing to accept a demonstrated level of risk of fatality that is orders of magnitude worse than even the riskiest leisure activities, even bordering on risk levels associated with combat. Obviously the pool of individuals meeting such requirements is vanishingly small, yet a single first generation Bigelow tourist station is intended to operate for a decade with four people rotated every few months, for a total required market size to justify construction of a single station on the order of 160 such people. Obviously, the business case for orbital space tourism is several orders of magnitude away from having a potential for profit at the level of technology in which the private capital market is presently willing to invest. The situation is even worse when considering development costs. After almost two decades of operation, Bigelow remains stuck at around the 100 employee level and appears to be perpetually about 10 years away from human operations. So far, it has been a money losing proposition on which Mr. Bigelow is willing to consume his personal fortune for personal reasons. Even assuming he is willing to step up the burn rate of his personal fortune by the couple orders of magnitude or more necessary to actually commence human operations, consider that he is presently over 70 years old and will be over 80 or more by the time tourist operations can even optimistically start. There is no reason to assume that his heirs or successors will have the same willingness to burn their money on a commercially unviable enterprise.
The bottom line is that there is no viable commercial orbital human space flight market on the horizon with even the most optimistic cost projections. The only commercially viable space flight markets at present, such as communication, navigation, and remote sensing have a proven track record of no need for humans in orbit. The perennially nascent microgravity industry has shown some renewed signs of life, but only if charged the marginal cost of operating on ISS with the development and infrastructure costs fully subsidized.
For the foreseeable future, the practical market for orbital human spaceflight is entirely limited to a handful of national space agencies. Barring an order of magnitude or better cost breakthrough (which at present nobody is willing to invest in even attempting), there simply is no commercial market for orbital human spaceflight. Claims to the contrary are either delusional or disingenuous sleight of hand attempts to assume the mantle of 'commercial' operations in order to gain access to public funding without the hindrance of public oversight or direction.
Comments?