Why Not Space? [Op-Ed]

[Skgoa]

- The soviets had a moon program, they might even have made it there first, if Apollo 11 had failed. (Though at a rather high chance of killing the soviet astronauts in the process.)

Really?

This is so ridiculous that I don't know what to say. The first test launches of the N-1 rocket occured in January and June 1969, and they both failed miserably. Had Apollo 11 failed, the Russians would still not have a freakin' rocket,and the LK lander was still untested (first unmanned test flight in NOVEMBER 1970). In contrast, all Apollo hardware was fully tested and flight ready, so the only scenario where the Soviets get to the Moon first would possible only if the American public decided to scrap Apollo altogether (for example, if Apollo 11 failed, 12's hardware was taken apart in search of problems, then 12 launched with 13's hardware and blew up in space).

So? Someone claimed there had not been a soviet moon program. That is false. If Apollo 11 had had a catastrophic failure, a delay like they NASA had after Apollo could have given the soviets enough time to get something going.

[Skgoa]

3) The Shuttle's thermal protection system was mostly a constraint of the era- at the time, the options for making the thing able to survive reentry boiled down to "metallic shield" or "tiles." A metallic heat shield would have been a lot heavier and cut into payload, especially given the big wings the Shuttle got saddled with. The ceramic shield they actually used was lighter but much more fragile.

Today, we might be able to do better- but in the 1970s, the Shuttle as designed and any similar reusable spacecraft of similar design was something of a boondoggle.

Still, the reason why they had such an ungodly number of tiles was that they were afraid the tiles would be to brittle and consequently drastically increased the number of tiles over earlier plans. It turned out these fears were unnecessary. (Nobody had thought about foam breaking of the tank, though. Or at least they did not think it would be that much of a problem.)
But more to the point, someone made the claim reusable was a bad idea in general. And that is simply not true at all.

[Simon_Jester]

So? Someone claimed there had not been a soviet moon program. That is false. If Apollo 11 had had a catastrophic failure, a delay like they NASA had after Apollo could have given the soviets enough time to get something going.

You don't seem to get what I'm talking about- there was Soviet moon hardware, but there was no Soviet commitment of funding. The Russians did not give the Baikonur team the money to "choose to go to the moon," it was never an explicit commitment on the Kremlin's part, and the USSR abandoned the project rather than make an Apollo-sized commitment to taking the parts of the system from testing to reliable, series-produced usability.

If the US had the same budget priorities as the USSR did in the overall space program, it is likely we would not have gone to the moon in the 1960s or 1970s, and would instead have spent the money on space stations.

[K. A. Pital]

It's not that I'm opposed to doing it, it's that I, personally, am happier with the idea of large scale human settlement. Which I think would seem understandable, even if it isn't necessarily logical. It's not as if it would be the only logical thing that I find depressing.

I think that if the singularity (be it just a point or a rather protracted event, like a New Tech Revolution in a span of 20-30 years) might change the human body to an unrecognizable extent, in which case your wishes might be easily fulfilled. But as we are now, we're poorly suited for hostile environments and we'd have to work on ourselves.

[Skgoa]

So? Someone claimed there had not been a soviet moon program. That is false. If Apollo 11 had had a catastrophic failure, a delay like they NASA had after Apollo could have given the soviets enough time to get something going.

You don't seem to get what I'm talking about- there was Soviet moon hardware, but there was no Soviet commitment of funding. The Russians did not give the Baikonur team the money to "choose to go to the moon," it was never an explicit commitment on the Kremlin's part, and the USSR abandoned the project rather than make an Apollo-sized commitment to taking the parts of the system from testing to reliable, series-produced usability.

If the US had the same budget priorities as the USSR did in the overall space program, it is likely we would not have gone to the moon in the 1960s or 1970s, and would instead have spent the money on space stations.

And all of that still misses the point. There was a soviet moon program. They would have gone to the moon in the 70ies but once they realized that Kenedy's speech had been more than a load of typical politician's bullshit, they tried to bring it forward. It was only after Apollo 11 that they claimed they never had been in the race at all, in order to save face.

[PeZook]

And all of that still misses the point. There was a soviet moon program. They would have gone to the moon in the 70ies but once they realized that Kenedy's speech had been more than a load of typical politician's bullshit, they tried to bring it forward. It was only after Apollo 11 that they claimed they never had been in the race at all, in order to save face.

Simon's right in as much that it was never an explicit Soviet goal to go to the Moon. The Soviet space program was always very propaganda-oriented and calculated to one-up the Americans in a series of glourious feats of international commienism, while the US had a clear goal and a clear strategy for accomplishing it. However, by 1969, any ambitions of a lunar landing were already abandoned, and resources were diverted into space stations and perfecting the Soyuz. On the contrary, the American space station program was more an afterthought of Apollo, a way to use the already procured hardware after the program has been terminated.

[Simon_Jester]

One cannot understand the Soviet program without understanding the disconnect between the rocket scientists at Baikonur and the politicians in the Politburo.

The Politburo saw the manned space program politically- entirely as a way to prove that Soviet science and industry were equal or superior to anything the Americans could achieve. This goal was best fulfilled by doing whatever the Americans had not yet done, regardless of exactly what they hadn't done or why they hadn't done it. The Americans orbit a series of one-man capsules? Hah! We will stuff three chairs into a modified Vostok and send up THREE cosmonauts at once! The Americans are working on a space suit? Hah! Send Comrade Leonov out in a pressure suit, who cares if he hasn't got any equipment for maneuvering, it's still the first spacewalk, right?

Meanwhile, the rocket scientists were trying to accomplish what we (as a community of science fiction fans) might call "real" progress toward a manned space presence. So they were enthusiastically sketching out plans for a Soviet moon landing, and designed all the basic pieces of hardware they'd need to launch what might be termed "Apolloski:" the N1 rocket, variations on the Soyuz capsule, a lunar lander, and so on.

However, they were doing this on a shoestring budget- because the Kremlin had already decided by 1968 or so that there was no chance of beating the Americans to the Moon, and from their perspective it was not worth channeling a large fraction of the Soviet GDP into being second to put a man on the moon. Therefore, the Soviets never actually got close to a moon landing, even though Soviet scientists and engineers worked out all the details of how a Soviet moon program would have gone and designed the hardware they'd need- because the rocket teams never got the funding and support they would have needed to turn their paper designs into practical, man-rated hardware.

Could the Soviets have decided to go to the moon in the 1970s? Probably, if they'd really wanted to, but they didn't. Which is why I said in the first place that without the lunar commitment, the US space program in the '60s and '70s would probably have looked a lot more like what the Soviet program really did look like. Because the Soviet program is exactly what happens when a major power with a thriving aerospace establishment decides it wants to go to space, but doesn't want to go to the moon.

[K. A. Pital]

The USSR sent jolly old automatons to the Moon and considered that enough. Being "the second humans" sounded crap. So the USSR basically refurbished the plan into a "get a Soviet space colony on the Moon by 1980" (the Zvezda), and ran a series of enclosed biosphere tests, but that was also abandoned later on due to the false idea that the Shuttle was an uberweapon.

[Simon_Jester]

Allowing for the fact that you are describing Soviet intentions as unified where I perceive a split between what the Politburo cared about and what the rocket scientists wanted, I think we're in agreement.

I won't dispute your description of the internal political question.

Hm.

The shuttle could have been a weapon- it just wasn't made so. Many of the specifications were influenced by the Department of Defense's desire for features that would make the shuttle useful to the military.

[K. A. Pital]

Yeah, hence why I said they were fooled into thinking about a more militarized version of the space race (which prompted an improved Shuttle copy, the Buran, and the space laser project). This tied neatly into the idea that the capitalists were relentlessly plotting to [insert something nasty] the USSR.

As for the group of Soviet rocket scientists, I'm not sure if there was a really huge disconnect between them and politicians. The Moon project suffered not least because of their internal fractures. Chelomei and Korolev were competing, Glushko was basically putting rods in the wheels... add a string of disastrous deaths (Korolev, Komarov and Gagarin), and that sort of cooled down some of the hotter heads, even among the space enthusiasts in the Construction Bureaus.

But of course, the political factor came as the primary driver. It was technologically feasible, after all.

[Skgoa]

However, they were doing this on a shoestring budget- because the Kremlin had already decided by 1968 or so that there was no chance of beating the Americans to the Moon, and from their perspective it was not worth channeling a large fraction of the Soviet GDP into being second to put a man on the moon. Therefore, the Soviets never actually got close to a moon landing, even though Soviet scientists and engineers worked out all the details of how a Soviet moon program would have gone and designed the hardware they'd need- because the rocket teams never got the funding and support they would have needed to turn their paper designs into practical, man-rated hardware.

Could the Soviets have decided to go to the moon in the 1970s? Probably, if they'd really wanted to, but they didn't. Which is why I said in the first place that without the lunar commitment, the US space program in the '60s and '70s would probably have looked a lot more like what the Soviet program really did look like. Because the Soviet program is exactly what happens when a major power with a thriving aerospace establishment decides it wants to go to space, but doesn't want to go to the moon.

The problem with your magical insights into the minds of soviet leaders is that we have undeniable evidence of there being a moon program as late as 1970: the Zond flights. And if you are prepared to believe actual soviets, then we know that kosmonauts were still training for a moon landing in October '73 and the N1 program survived till '74. But hey, what do soviet rocket engineers know about the soviet rocket programs, eh?

[HMS Conqueror]

While I generally agree with the conclusions, the arguments are a bit grasping (he completely ignores economics, which is the real reason), and I don't like the "capitalism/progress is failing!!" ideological subtext. We are not incapable of going to the moon. We are more capable than we ever have been. We are capable of catapulting a man out of the solar system if we are just interested in maxing his "throw distance from earth" metric. The question is why? And this isn't that things are getting worse on earth, it's that they're good enough there's nothing out there worth going to get.

Unmanned scientific probes are the big exception, but by space standards they are not expensive.

[PainRack]

One thing I never really understood, how difficult would it be to create a semi-sustainable craft in orbit?

I know that we had failed to create fully sustainable biospheres but an artificial environment that requires miminal supply? Why can't we do that? Plants for vegetables and oxygen. Some form of insect or mushroom based protein. Feed for animals like chickens. Recyclers for water, perhaps a fuel cell for energy and water..

All that would be required is to send up fuel and fertilisers.

[K. A. Pital]

I don't like the "capitalism/progress is failing!!" ideological subtext

You mean the subtext that it already failed? Because the Moon landings were quite a long time ago?

The question is why? And this isn't that things are getting worse on earth, it's that they're good enough there's nothing out there worth going to get.

No, when things are good you go out and explore. When things are bad (see Africa) you can't launch anything into space. Much less out of the Solar system. Poor people don't build skyscrapers, they build mud huts.

I know that we had failed to create fully sustainable biospheres but an artificial environment that requires miminal supply?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS-3
We didn't fail. It is almost closed. With the current tech, I think even 100% recycling rate is possible.

[PeZook]

The ISS does in fact recycle most of its water and oxygen. Read up on its life support system, it's actually very advanced. The only reason why it can't do more is a lack of space (Hello, shuttle!)

[Simon_Jester]

We might have an absolutely amazing space station if we'd had a few more spare Saturns and just launched giant Skylab-style modules on them and bolted the things together. Probably a hell of a lot cheaper than the Shuttle-assembled ISS...

Yeah, hence why I said they were fooled into thinking about a more militarized version of the space race (which prompted an improved Shuttle copy, the Buran, and the space laser project). This tied neatly into the idea that the capitalists were relentlessly plotting to [insert something nasty] the USSR.

As for the group of Soviet rocket scientists, I'm not sure if there was a really huge disconnect between them and politicians. The Moon project suffered not least because of their internal fractures. Chelomei and Korolev were competing, Glushko was basically putting rods in the wheels... add a string of disastrous deaths (Korolev, Komarov and Gagarin), and that sort of cooled down some of the hotter heads, even among the space enthusiasts in the Construction Bureaus.

But of course, the political factor came as the primary driver. It was technologically feasible, after all.

Yeah, you're right, the infighting among the rocket scientists was probably at least as big a factor as the lack of serious political ambition.

The problem with your magical insights into the minds of soviet leaders is that we have undeniable evidence of there being a moon program as late as 1970: the Zond flights. And if you are prepared to believe actual soviets, then we know that kosmonauts were still training for a moon landing in October '73 and the N1 program survived till '74. But hey, what do soviet rocket engineers know about the soviet rocket programs, eh?

You're missing the damn point. The Soviets had preparations for a lunar program. What they did not have was the absolute high priority and massive funding needed to make a lunar landing a reality. The Soviet space program was not given these resources because a moon landing was not an all-consuming ambition of the Soviet leadership, and (Stas is right) the resources available were often used less well than they might have been because of internal rivalries within the Soviet space program and the death of leading lights like Korolev.

Whereas the US spent far more money, designed hardware that worked nearly every time instead of exploding every time (N1) or failing in ways that would be lethal on a manned mission three times out of four (Zond). They had a unified program under von Braun, and they had the public commitment of the American leadership that a moon landing was top priority.

You seem to think I'm saying "The Soviets never designed or tested hardware intended for the moon." They did. But they never took the designs or prototypes and created a mature program, one that actually could have put a cosmonaut on the moon and brought him back without killing him. They never got beyond where the US was in about 1965-66, and they stopped there, rather than continue through the massively expensive final stage of testing, development, and debugging.

[Skgoa]

Funny how you moved the goalposts from "there was no soviet moon program in 1968" to "the soviet moon program in the early 70ies wasn't a REAL program because they didn't spend as much money on it as the US did." Also, congrats on working in how much better 'Murricans are. But really, what I find most astonishing is that the cognitive dissonance, that you get from stating both that there was no development program AND that this development had many failures AT THE SAME TIME, just has to hurt.

[PeZook]

Funny how you moved the goalposts from "there was no soviet moon program in 1968" to "the soviet moon program in the early 70ies wasn't a REAL program because they didn't spend as much money on it as the US did." Also, congrats on working in how much better 'Murricans are. But really, what I find most astonishing is that the cognitive dissonance, that you get from stating both that there was no development program AND that this development had many failures AT THE SAME TIME, just has to hurt.

Funny how Simon never said "there was no soviet moon program",and in fact claimed this from the start:

1) The Soviets had designs for 'moon shot' hardware, but none of it was ever close to a manned flight. They might have gambled on a Zond flight in 1968-70, but based on the performance of the unmanned Zond capsule tests, it would have been hellaciously risky. To actually put a man on the moon, as opposed to just circling around it and coming back a la Zond, they would have had to build and develop a lot of stuff that historically, they never got the budget for. It's not that the Soviets couldn't have gone to the Moon, it's that the Soviet government never committed the huge scale of funds and resources it would take to make it happen, so most of the hardware never got beyond the prototype/blueprints phase and the missions were never planned beyond the 'rough sketch' level.

Simon merely said the Soviets had little hope of landing on the Moon before Americans, not that they didn't have a moon program at all. NOBODY ELSE said there was no Soviet moon program, either. I contested your claim that the Soviets could've landed before Americans did if Apollo 11 failed, because in 1969 their program was incredibly, hopelessly behind and lacking several pieces of critical hardware - and thus could only have succeeded in beating the US if the Americans abandoned Apollo entirely.

[HMS Conqueror]

I don't like the "capitalism/progress is failing!!" ideological subtext

You mean the subtext that it already failed? Because the Moon landings were quite a long time ago?

The question is why? And this isn't that things are getting worse on earth, it's that they're good enough there's nothing out there worth going to get.

No, when things are good you go out and explore. When things are bad (see Africa) you can't launch anything into space. Much less out of the Solar system. Poor people don't build skyscrapers, they build mud huts.

It's a bait-and-switch: there's no inability, just no reason. We make progress by making investments that on balance of probability leave us better off than we were before. There's no such opportunity in space right now, and there wasn't in 1960 either.

atm, the big investments in space are indeed coming from third world countries, like Iran, India and China. This is primarily because they want to build ICBMs, but also because they want to show they are almost as rich and technologically capable as the US was when the Beetles were at Number 1.

[K. A. Pital]

There would have been a reason for a more advanced, united civilization than the one we have now, but certainly for apes who are more concerned with throwing missiles at each other space is just useless. First you have to solve the issues on Earth. "We" (there's no we on a planetary scale) make investments that on balance of probability leave us better off, even if that happens at the expense of someone else on the planet, and so basically we aren't mature enough for space and the visions of ones like Sagan, Bradbury and Lem.

[HMS Conqueror]

The claim was that we have been going backwards.

Do you see that "X(t) < Y(t)" is a very different claim to "dX/dt < 0"? And in fact that these claims have no logical relationship to one another at all?

In fact the real GDP - a good indicator for ability to do any industrial project - has been rising since 1969 in every country except North Korea and Zimbabwe.

[K. A. Pital]

Real GDP is the volume of market transactions in your economy. It says nothing about your ability to complete a specific industrial project, much less "any" industrial project. Except the more general "a lot of money is circulating here". Which does not directly translate into having the necessary industrial machinery, knowledge, personnel to complete a certain advanced project.

For example, having a high GDP does not mean you can build yourself a CERN. Building something like that is a matter of human knowledge and necessary industries, too, not just "GDP" as an overall figure.

[Simon_Jester]

There's also a question of how we define "ability."

The United States of 2012 could do a lot of things that, let us be blunt, aren't going to happen unless the country changes beyond all recognition. "Ability" is not just a measure of crude physical statistics- tons of steel produced per year, or number of arbitrary value-counter-tokens passing through Wall Street's computers per second.

"Ability" reflects the leadership, and whether leaders are willing and prepared to organize an effort. Two thousand men with poor leaders might lack the "ability" to do something that would be very easy for a thousand men with good leaders.

"Ability" reflects what proportion of the society's resources can be devoted to a given process. Two societies of equal real GDP will not have equal "ability" to build infrastructure if one of them is willing to spend 3% of GDP on infrastructure construction and the other is not. If all the money is in the hands of a class with no incentive to invest in infrastructure (or education, or luxuries for the general populace, or anything else), then the theoretical "ability" that money represents will not be anything more than a theory.

Stas has a point with respect to this- while the modern US has more of certain kinds of abstract and real resources than the US of fifty years ago, the increase is not uniform across the board. In other real resources the US has declined (certain types of machinery used to build large things or mass-produce things). And the decline is even sharper in terms of intangibles (ability of the political class to agree on large projects, compatibility between the styles of government favored by different political factions, proportion of society's resources controlled by people who care about how the resources are used). So many things that the US's current real GDP would make you think are possible... aren't possible, not without significant changes to how the society is organized.

Doubling the size of the army doesn't guarantee success if you fire the general, or replace him with a nincompoop.

[HMS Conqueror]

The whole point is to distinguish will (the actual reason) from economic capability (the reason stated in the article).

GDP is by definition a general measure. Even if your economy is currently geared to produce bras and movies, it means you have enough money to retool if you want to.

Impression of US as a purely service economy is false anyway. US produces a huge quantity of large industrial goods. An aircraft carrier is much larger and more complex than a rocket. In fact rockets and other 1950s tech have fallen so far down the ladder that they're being built by aforementioned third world countries.

[K. A. Pital]

Even if your economy is currently geared to produce bras and movies, it means you have enough money to retool if you want to.

Retooling isn't a question of money. If you have zero nuclear engineers, you can't build a nuclear reactor; someone will have to do it for you. Humans are the most valuable commodity which cannot be "retooled" at your whim. It takes more than 20 years to create a skilled spacecraft engineer capable of solving necessary tasks. You need hundreds of them and dozens of very smart guys, and probably a pair of real visionaries, to complete a revolutionary spacecraft.

An aircraft carrier is much larger and more complex than a rocket.

The engineering challenges are very different. One is a weapon; the other a tool of exploration. One is a ship which goes through water, and the likes of which have been built since the early XX century. Another is a craft which moves through air and vacuum with rocket propulsion. You just can't take a shipbuilder and "reassign" him to build rockets, the world isn't a fucking Civilization game.

In fact rockets and other 1950s tech have fallen so far down the ladder that they're being built by aforementioned third world countries.

This is because we're speaking about simple, non-revolutionary designs, the principles for which are widely disseminated and knowledge is spreading to the more ambitious Third World nations.

Could a Third World nation go and complete a project like Space Shuttle or Energia in, say, 5 years? No. Because the knowledge's just not there, the necessary humans are just not there and maybe, worse yet, the necessary materials aren't there either (Chinese metallurgy reaching the "make spacecraft" level only at the break of the century is a prime example).

It is stupid to pretend that you could "reassign" people to make A not B in an instant