Space: Final Frontier, or Giant Money Pit?

 

 

Last time we talked about science and technology in the household. Today we are going to talk about a topic that puts the "Big" into "Big Science"--space exploration.

 

I.                    People dreamed of both air and space flight for years before it was possible. Sometimes it was intended literally, while at other times it served as a "safe" form of social criticism.

II.                 Rockets have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, though mainly as small munitions and/or fireworks. The Chinese were especially adept at these, building gunpowder-based rockets, though Europeans used them is early as the 1200's. We see them in use in 1814 in the lyrics of "The Star-Spangled Banner" ("the rockets' red glare, bombs bursting in air").

III.               During the 1920's, people actually started researching and building rockets for research purposes. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian school teacher, did the best early theoretical work. In the U.S., Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926. However,  amateurs in Germany produced some of the best early rockets. By the early 1930's they were launching small rockets that could travel up to a mile high. Wernher Von Braun was active in this group. (Remember him…he's important!)

IV.              When Hitler rose to power of Germany in the years before World War II, he inherited a desperate country with a lot of problems and few weapons.

a.      Early on, he really couldn't do much about the lack of weapons because the treaty ending World War I banned most of the useful ones. However, rockets were not included in the treaty. Hitler thus rounded up the German amateur rocketeers and put them to work on building weapons.

b.      Their major breakthrough was von Braun's V-2 rocket, probably the first decent ballistic missile ever built. It was a stunning technical triumph: the rocket was 46 feet long, weighed 13 tons at launch, carried 1600 lbs. of explosives, had a speed of 3300 mph, and could travel about 200 miles.

c.      However, as a weapon it wasn't so hot. While it looked really cool and was a technological marvel, it was expensive to produce, hard to aim (it was accurate only to about 5 miles of a target!). It landed at three times the speed of sound, causing to explode down (digging a hole) instead of out.

d.      At one point von Braun was arrested briefly, because the Nazis thought he was more interested in building rockets for space exploration than in designing weapons! (This was, in fact, probably true.)

 

V.                 After the war, the German rocket program was (very grudgingly!) divided between the Americans and the Soviets. America got a bunch of V2's and--best of all--most of the chief rocket designers. The USSR got the technicians and much of the tooling to produce the rockets. Fortunately for the Soviets, they had their own rocket genius: S. Korolev--von Braun's counterpart in the USSR.

VI.              America's first decent rockets were thus rather similar to the old V2--they were designed by the same person (von Braun). The Redstone, the Jupiter, and the Juno rockets were all quite similar to each other, and the Atlas rocket was basically a two-stage version of the same.

VII.            However, there is far more to space than just equipment. There was also politics. Some people had wanted the U.S. to orbit a satellite, but President Eisenhower would not let them. The exact reasons for this are not clear; it may have been that he wanted the Navy to do it, with its lightweight--and thus militarily non-threatening--Vanguard program. (Von Braun's Army-based rockets were basically heavy ICBMs, and would have viewed as more of a threat by the USSR.) However, Vanguards tended to blow up on the pad.

VIII.         Things came to a head in 1957, when the USSR launched Sputnik I. It weighed about 184 lbs. and basically beeped and measured temperature. And they used a heavy lifter designed to launch atomic bombs to do it! About a month later they orbited a heavy capsule (over 1 ton) carrying a live dog.

IX.              The U.S. finally let von Braun loose, who orbited Explorer I in 1958. The first American satellite, weighing about 30 lbs, did make one major contribution: it discovered radiation belts surrounding the earth, something the Soviets missed due to equipment failures.

X.                 Eisenhower then reorganized the American missile program, creating NASA. This was probably a wise move, because it allowed a civilian agency (NASA) to use military rockets for supposedly peaceful purposes.

XI.              It also kicked off the "Space Race." Space was a good arena for a variety of overlapping reasons.

a.      It was cool and made a great photo and P.R. opportunity.

b.      It was hard and expensive; only elite nations could engage in it. You have to achieve a speed of about 7 miles per second to escape the earth's pull!

c.      There was real science and real adventure, allowing some justification to tax-payers not as impressed by the P.R. angle.

d.      It allowed each side to demonstrate rockets (and make veiled threats) in an urban way--anybody who could accurately launch a heavy satellite could also accurately launch an ICBM!.

XII.            The U.S. had allowed itself to be totally smoked by its Communist competitor, the USSR, and was itching for a rematch.  Both sides more or less agreed that the next goal would be the moon.

XIII.         The USSR took an early lead racking up a number of impressive firsts. They being the first to (intentionally) crash a satellite on the moon, and the first to photograph the back side of the moon. They also placed the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space in 1961, and the first woman in 1963. America trailed, not orbiting a man (John Glenn) until 1963. The first eight U.S. lunar probes either missed the moon or failed to reach orbit.

XIV.         President John F. Kennedy, faced with an embarrassing situation, did something curious--in 1961 he raised the stakes by declaring the American intention to land humans on the moon! Huge amounts of money and effort were spent on the new program, in part as a memorial to the assassinated President Kennedy.

XV.           NASA began launching new unmanned lunar probes, the Ranger series. The first six failed, but finally, in 1964 one worked correctly--it televised pictures back to earth up to the time of its (planned) crash into the moon. This was a turnaround point. After several more successful Ranger hard landing probes, the U.S. began its generally successful Survey soft-landing probe series. This was followed by the tremendously successful Lunar Orbiter series, which mapped 99% of the lunar surface.

XVI.         Finally, in 1969 Apollo 11 succeeded in landing Neil Armstrong and "Buzz" Aldrin. They spent about 2 hours there, setting up instruments and collecting samples. Later missions included a car, the Lunar Rover, which allowed astronauts to drive around during landings that lasted up to 18 hours. Apollo 17 was the final mission.

XVII.      The vehicle that got them there was the Saturn V, which was probably von Braun's crowning achievement. It was over 360 feet tall, about twice as tall as the Space Shuttle. It weighed over 6 million pounds (3,200 tons), and lifted off with 7.6 million pounds of thrust!

XVIII.    But what happened to the Soviets, who had started out with such a significant lead--especially in rocket technology?

XIX.         The answer is that they, too, had tried to land people on the moon. Their moon rocket was the N-1, a remarkable five-stage rocket that stood some 345 feet tall and weighed 2750 tons. It included a lunar lander, probably containing a single seat. The rocket system was also expected to allow the USSR to build a moon base.

a.      Unfortunately this program was plagued by political infighting, especially after Korolev died in 1966.

b.      It was underfunded, because money was also going to an expensive Soviet ICBM program.

c.      Some claim that the rocket could not have worked because of design flaws. A better explanation was that foolish cost-cutting measures and a rush to attempt to beat Apollo led to inadequate testing of the parts prior to launch attempts.

d.      There were four test launches (1969, 1969, 1971, and 1972). All exploded in a spectacular manner, though most believed that the last one had almost worked correctly.

e.      However, with the moon race lost, the program was cancelled. While U.S. intelligence knew of most of the program, the Soviet government denied the existence of the program until 1989!

XX.           This is not to say that the USSR did nothing. It did manage to land several  impressive five-ton remote-controlled moon rovers, and had several robotic lunar sample returns. However, these were not nearly as spectacular as the manned Apollo missions that took place right before them.

XXI.         America thus managed to beat the Soviets to the moon. The trick was: what next? A moon base? Mars? A space station? The answer was not obvious:

a.      We had "beaten the Russians." However, some at home began to wonder if it was worth all the money. (The moon program cost about $25 billion in 1968 dollars, perhaps $100 billion today.) In fact, the final 3 Apollo missions were scrapped.

b.      Many knew that the space program yielded benefits (Teflon, medical research, etc.) but to this day nobody really can put a dollar figure on it.

c.      Things like civil rights, the War on Poverty, and the Vietnam War were attracting lots of attention.

 

XXII.      Von Braun pretty much "wanted it all"--he wanted to build a permanent space station and a reusable space shuttle, both built at the same time, with an eye towards a moon base and eventually a manned Mars expedition. What he got was Skylab, a fairly small interim station in the mid-1970's, and budget cuts. Eventually he gave up and retired, dying of cancer in 1977, not living to see Skylab fall (1978) or the shuttle launched.

XXIII.    Interestingly, neither the Soviet (now Russian) space program or the American space programs have thrived since the deaths of their masterminds, Korolev and von Braun. The exact cause for the is unclear, though there are lots of small reasons.

a.      Without a Cold War, the U.S. and the Russian governments don't feel the need to spend lots of money trying to impress each other. The current International Space Station is developing more slowly than expected as a result.

b.      Neither the U.S. nor Russia have one "buck stops here" person with the brains or moral authority to integrate a program into a unitary vision.

c.      This is especially true for launchers. For space flight, both manned and unmanned, Russians use a decades-old design based on old ICBMs. America also does this with unmanned designs. The manned shuttle, designed in the 1970's, is now grounded--perhaps permanently. (The only way to get human to the International Space Station now is on a Russian rocket.)

d.      One should not underestimate the power of a focused guiding vision. The Space Shuttle was envisioned as being a temporary design could be launched 60 times per year, then be replaced with a totally reusable design. None of this has happened. Worse, the Shuttle has cost much more to operate than was previously expected, draining funds away from other NASA projects. All Space Shuttle successor programs have met with failure:

 

·        The X-30 (AKA the "National Aerospace Plane") proposed by the Regan administration, was cancelled after the projected cost for a pair of vehicles exceeded $10 billion.

·        The X-33 (AKA "Venture Star"), initiated in 1996, was cancelled in 2001 because the advanced composite fuel tanks could not be built.

·        The X-34 (also begun in 1996) was also cancelled in 2001, officially because it would cost too much to deploy. Some reports state that incorrect specifications were given to the contractor, Orbital Sciences, rendering the ship impossible to build.

·         In 2002 a decision was made to push back design of a shuttle replacement until 2008, with the shuttles being flown until between 2013 and 2020--forty years of use for each space craft! This "clever" plan ended with the loss of the loss of the SS Columbia; NASA and Congress have not yet come up with a better plan yet.

XXIV.   Part of the problem is need, or lack thereof. People have found that they can accomplish most commercial and military goals that they need to on earth.

a.      NOBODY wants nuclear weapons in space.

b.      Other space-based weapons are very vulnerable to being shot down.

c.      Current communications and weather satellites are adequate, and cell phones are working better using towers than people expected.

d.      Launches are so expensive that it generally costs less to replace a satellite than it would to fly up and fix one.

XXV.      The manned space situation has become so dismal that some private citizens are attempting to take matters into their own hands. From time to time, groups attempt to set up private space ventures, many of which have gone bankrupt.

a.       One that is particularly interesting, however, is the X-Prize, designed to promote "space tourism," low-cost satellite launching, and express intercontinental passenger and package service. (See http://www.xprize.org). The goal here is to launch 3 people (or a pilot and two sand bags!) at least 62 miles high, then launch the same vehicle again within two weeks. The winner takes home $10,000,000.

b.      Currently there are about 20 competing teams. While some (most?) are probably never going to launch anything, some (such as Scaled Composites) are having test flights.