SpaceShipOne

Props to Burt Rutan and his team; SpaceShipOne flew to more or less the height expected on the day they said, and it was apparently a height that qualifies it for its name (just). I don't know much about aircraft/spacecraft design, but SpaceShipOne seemed to me to demonstrate that you can now implement something that does much of what the X-15 programme did -- and some things it didn't do -- using new technologies in a very elegant way. It is an inspiring sight, and a great achievement.

The flight also illustrated something which I often need reminding of; the hold that spaceflight novelties have on the media and on the public imagination. According to Brad Stone of Newsweek, there were nearly 600 journalists at the event, and more than ten thousand enthusiast spectators. Google News was listing over a 1000 stories on it. The last bit of successful human spaceflight that got that sort of attention, I suspect, was the first Hubble servicing mission; I don't think there was ever quite this much fuss about any ISS mission, but I may just not have noticed.

While acknowledging the excitement of the achievement, this fuss seems a trifle overblown. This was a small sub-orbital hop, and I really don't see how it scales up to being the herald of a world-changing paradigm shift, or the beginning of a new era. As Jeff Foust asks, is it not possible that SpaceShipOne is more like Paul MacCready's Gossamer Albatross than the Spirit of St Louis? (That said, while acknowledging that the SoSL was more significant than the Albatross, I'm always a bit puzzled as to why people make such a fuss about the solo flight when Alcock and Brown's earlier transatlantic flight was so much more thrilling -- wing walking in the snow, for God's sake -- as well as looking much more like a precursor of routine transatlantic flight to come, reliant as it is on crews and big planes. Yes, Lindbergh helped with the design as well as doing the flying, but his design innovations -- no view out front, for example -- were pretty precisely tailored to pulling off a stunt, rather than fecund foundations for future progress. Obviously national pride plays a role here, but shouldn't the odious fascist my-friend-Goering-has-the-right-idea stuff rather undercut that?)

Anyway, back to the fuss surrounding SpaceShipOne. The problem is that reaching space in a way that lets you stay there is a lot harder that paying a flying visit. Orbit is a matter of velocity, not altitude; to stay in orbit you need to have reached a speed of Mach 25. That means more fuel and more powerful rockets and a much smaller payload fraction. And the amount of energy a spacecraft needs to get rid of when coming back to the earth is proportional to the square of its velocity in space. The amount of energy per unit mass you have to shed coming back from orbit will be 70 times that needed to come to a stop after flying at Mach three. SpaceShipOne's "re-entry" was pretty impressive in terms of aerodynamic control. However it didn't require anything like the sort of thermal protection that coming back from orbit does.

This is why sceptical voices doubt that SpaceShipOne and its X-prize ilk can really do much to further access to orbit -- the problems are of a different magnitude. There are undoubted advantages to the nimble development programmes aimed at sub-orbital flight for paying customers, as Rutan has shown. They allow new concepts to be tried. They allow test-a-little, redesign-a-little, test-a-little approaches that can be very fruitful. (That's why it's no bad news that things went wrong on SpaceShipOne - the whole idea of testing is to find things to fix.) Developing sub-orbital skills lets you evolve appropriate operational know-how, can provide continuous reassurance that things are working and progress is being made, and makes it easier for a sensible regulatory framework to evolve. It even allows you to generate income (though how well that will work after the first crash remains to be seen). But even so, it's hard to see how all that good stuff lets you bridge the gap between suborbital and orbital.

A while back Clark Lindsey asked various notables about these issues, and compiled their answers into a really excellent discussion (part one here, part two here) on Jeff Foust's Space Review. (There’s a lot of good stuff on the Space Review site, and a very good signal-to-noise ratio.) The key question, I think, was raised by Henry Spencer. Once you've developed a workable aircraft that lets paying customers do more or less what Mike Melvill did in SpaceShipOne on Monday -- thrill of acceleration, amazing view, weightlessness, achievement of space travel in arbitrary altitude terms -- will further improvements in performance pay their way in terms of increasing the revenue you can generate? The costs will probably climb quite steeply as you push that envelope out towards orbital capability. But how much more will people be willing to pay for a system that doubles their time in free fall, or that brings them back down on the far side of an ocean, or lets them launch a slightly larger LEO satellite at apogee?

I find it hard to believe that the revenues from ever more capable vehicles will grow as quickly as their development costs do. I may be wrong. Burt Rutan is not stupid, and does not seem given to idle boasts. Jeff Foust reports him saying that they'll be getting orbital quicker than most of us expect. Maybe he has technological tricks no one else has, or a business plan that generates billions from suborbital applications. Maybe Paul Allen has a skyhook in his skunkworks. But for the time being I remain sceptical.

For many people, though, the question of what SpaceShipOne might lead to is almost overshadowed by the way it was developed: using private, rather than government, money. It seems self-evident to them that something done with private capital is somehow better than something done by a government. Now I have no doubt that there are things that private enterprise does much better than government; the evidence for this is clear. But it seems to me something of a leap to say that private enterprise is intrinsically superior for all purposes, or even, as some seem to hint, morally so.

The idea that something achieved by people working for a billionaire is somehow more human, and easier to identify with, than something achieved by people working for a representative government is not one I find very easy to understand. And it can lead you to silliness, as when Michael Potter and Rick Tumlinson sneer that governments keep space travel the preserve of "a few very well paid government and very well trained employees". I don't know what an astronaut earns, but I don't think many people dependent on government salaries are likely to be paying customers on SpaceShipOne's commercial offspring any time soon.

And there's another thing. I like space exploration, especially when it provides scientific knowledge and cultural perspective, which much of it does. I think it's something people should do. But I don't think it's the most important thing people should do, and I'm aware that the $15 billion a year spent on NASA could save millions of lives if spent on strengthening and widening access to existing programmes on tuberculosis, malaria, maternal health, vaccination and childhood disease in the developing world. And that would be a very good thing; a better thing, in fact, than stimulating my intellect.

When the allocation of resources is a matter for governments, I can take refuge in the knowledge that transferring that money from one set of accounts to another just isn't politically possible. That sort of saves me from having to face the implicit choice between the two, and allows me to enjoy the intellectual stimulation of space travel without too much guilt over the opportunity costs involved. (I wrote a bit on this here when John Brockman asked for science advice to President Bush a few years ago.)

In private philanthropy, the choice is starker. Even if he wanted to, it would be really hard for George Bush to have NASA's budget spent on health issues in developing countries. However it would be quite easy for Paul Allen to spend his wealth that way. Indeed the experience of Allen's former partner, Bill Gates, suggests that it would be possible to do so effectively and on the grandest of scales. Paul Allen is free to do as he likes with his money, and what he is doing is exciting and fun; he also gives a lot more to his own charitable foundations than he has spent on SpaceShipOne. I know in my own life I don't spend as much of my time or my money on development issues and well focused philanthropy as I should; Paul Allen is not only vastly more generous than I in absolute terms but quite possibly in relative terms, too. But when we all get caught up dreaming about what large amounts of private money could be doing for a space-faring few in the future, it's worth keeping in mind what that money could be doing for millions who are suffering in the present.

Comments

[John F.]

Oliver,
You are, of course, quite right about the magnitude of difficulty involved in orbital flight as compared to what Space Ship One accomplished. I do feel that you are unnecessarily pessimistic about the progression of private space flight. Neither Burt Rutan nor Paul Allen are noted for doing things for altruistic reasons. Usually, they make money at what they do. Is it possible that they have a business plan that goes in a direction that nobody else has surmised? Quite possibly! My perspective is that SS1 is more like the Wright Flyer than the SSL in it's place in history. No one expected that to amount to anything either, but 50 years later there were commercial jets in service.

As regards private vs government development, the primary differences are that private developers can choose to take more risks, both technical and business, than governments can, are more programmatically agile and in the long run are more efficient. Large bureaucracies, whether government or commercial, are pathologically risk-averse. It takes great bureaucratic soul searching just to commit to a program, a consensus of many different constituencies to continue to progress at each decision point, and a "cast of thousands" to perform and then second guess each step. High risk is not something that bureaucracies accept unless there is absolutely no choice. You will note that there are no big aerospace companies involved in the X-Prize competition.

Of course, willingness to take risk leads to inevitable failures. Small enterprises will either survive the problems, or not, but usually some do. Frequently, the frontrunners thrive for a while, but then many fall by the wayside, or are bought out. Curtiss-Wright, for example, no longer manufactures aircraft, but the company is named for the true pioneers in the field. The ones that do survive over the long haul have both technical and business vision. It's a Darwinian situation, and "the vision thing" may be the most important element.

I think this situation is a closer parallel to the early days of the Wright Flyer and the Curtiss June Bug. Granted, the current protagonists have the benefit of 40 years of government space development, and the technological knowledge that goes with it, but then the Wrights had Otto Lillienthall, too.

As to why this flight was significant....I guess I need to make a wholly unsupported assertion as to why I think it is important. I really feel that a robust, extensive and efficient space transportation infrastructure is necessary for the long term survival of humanity. We don't really know when the next dinosaur killer will come, or when some other equally drastic threat will surface. I think that only a competitive, capitalistic process will provide that infrastructure in any sort of timely way. How long has it been since the last man walked on the Moon? That's the kind of timliness that governments provide! I assert that focused greed, i.e. the profit motive, has a far better chance of being timely. The flight of SS1 is just the beginning of that process.

As to the problems of the starving millions, don't lose sleep over that. The problem is not the money that is spent (or not spent)on them. It is largely, perhaps exclusively, the result of national mores and cultural impediments that prevent the natural productiveness of private individuals from raising themselves out of poverty. Witness Zimbabwe, for example. Under a more free society, they used to produce more than enough to feed themselves. Under Mugabe, with his government siphoning off what little the new land users can produce, people are starving. The real problem is institutions, not money. Freedom and, yes, capitalism can raise most peoples out of serfdom. I assert that governments and freedom are frequently mutually exclusive. "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

John F.

[Guy Mac]

When they (scaled) call the program 'Tier One', you can bet they have Tiers Two and Three already in mind. And Rutan has admitted as much, they they are looking beyond Earth orbit....

[Del Miller]

Comparing SpaceShipOne to the Wright Flyer and heralding it as a similar great leap toward commercialization is a pretty big assumption.

The rapid advancement of air travel was made possible by, more than anything else, the fact that the oil industry and the aircraft industry developed together. If the airplane had been developed at the time of da Vinci, it would be half a millennium before a cheap, high energy density fuel would be available to make the thing practical.

The amount of energy required to boost a practical mass into earth orbit is so enormous as to be a very high threshold to cross. There would have to be a parallel development in the economics of fuels to make Mach 25 flight anything other than a governmentally sponsored event.

But, barring some terrific new technology for making rocket fuel, we now live on the descending side of the cheap energy curve. The development of commercial space travel will have to proceed in opposition to the economics of energy as opposed to going along with it, as the aircraft industry did.

Perhaps we will someday have dedicated fusion plants churning out Hydrogen and LOX by the Saturn V load and can thus provide an inexpensive fuel for space travel, but that prospect is far enough in the future that it bears little import to the SpaceShipOne way of doing things.

And this is only one difference between the Wright Bothers legacy and the prospects for commercial space travel. There are forbidding materials problems, the issues of re-entry heating, radiation shielding and many others.

I don't want to be a pessimist, but I don't see SpaceShipOne in the direct lineage of tomorrows space industry.

[Charles Schmidt]

This leads one to ask why there is not more serious talk of a space elevator, which would seem a smart investment.

[Bruce Moomaw]

Well, in the first place, we are still absolutely nowhere near the structural technology necessary to buld a space elevator -- indeed the recent discoveries with "buckyballs" are the first hint that such a thing might even be physically possible. If we EVER see it, I don't think we'll see it for at least a century -- and we'll need cheap launches into LEO to build it in the first place.

In the second place, consider the terrorist possibilities in a quite small chemical bomb that severs a 37,000-km tall structure near its top so that the remainder of it falls back to Earth...

[NelC]

It's more than pure politics that keeps money in the space programme; it's what you'd do with all the rocket scientists. Retrain them as barefoot doctors? More likely is that we'd get 100,000 of Michael Douglas' character from "Falling Down", and a half-dozen latter-day Von Brauns, pursuing their interest while also working as grocery clerks.

--Okay, so there'd be other engineering projects they could work on. But I think the point is that a society kind of expresses what it can do by what the individuals in that society want to do. That is, there are a certain number of rocket scientist jobs partly because there are enough people interested in it to pursue it as a career. If there aren't enough teachers, for example, it's partly because there aren't enough people who want to teach. And that's for a bunch of reasons that no-one can cure just by Dear Leader fiat: "Let there be more teachers, barefoot doctors, etc, etc."

And if you could just fix things by moving money around, well, just look at that big pile in the Pentagon. It's much bigger than the space programme's. Surely they wouldn't miss a little bit, just to feed the starving in the Sudan....

[John F.]

Del,
I think you are just a bit too pessimistic. Years ago (about 1970) I had the dubious pleasure of doing the first range safety studies for the space shuttle when launched from the (then) Air Force Eastern Test Range. The configuration under consideration at the time was functionally similar to the SS1/White Knight...a manned flyback booster and a separate orbiter. That configuration was expected to be much more fuel-efficient, since most of the lift was aerodynamic until the vehicle made it out of the atmosphere, but it had more development risk. As I noted above, bureaucracies hate risk, and NASA ultimately chose to go with a configuration that was less fuel-efficient but was something they understood better.

While I grant you that the engineering problems are not small, I can see Rutan, et al, progressing to a hypersonic flyback booster and a true orbiter. I suspect that reentry heating will be the biggest bugabear, but not the only one. On the other hand, Burt is noted for unusual solutions to presumed difficult problems. I wouldn't count him out. Example: SS1 did not use either LOX or liquid hydrogen. I think the glass is half full, not half empty!

[Del Miller]

John F.

Well, I hope you're right, but it's tough fighting both the physics and the economics at the same time. The Apollo program grew in an environment of economic plenty and abundant cheap energy. We have neither now nor in the medium term future.

The future of commercial spaceflight will, I think, be less determined by Burt Rutan and his proven genius than it will by enlightened government policy in areas other than spaceflight.

We all now the old saw about pessimists and realists - I hope I'm the former.

Del

[Bruce Moomaw]

Jeffrey Bell of the U. of Hawaii has just replied to your argument after I approvingly repeated it on some E-mails, and I think has just shown both of us up alarmingly well:

"We are already using the theoretically best practical chemical propellant, LH2/LO2. Every better fuel combination investigated has only
minor improvements in ISP but huge problems with corrosion, toxicity, etc. I highly recommend an amusing book called IGNITION! which is an
inside account of the search for better fuels. That line of improvement was played out by about 1965.

"The fuel cost is a trivial percentage of the total launch costs. The problem is that we build something as complicated and expensive as an airliner and throw it away after one mission. A cheap, reliable booster recovery system which doesn't weigh too much is the key ere."

Touche. (Well, that's what I get for not having a science degree.) The only defense I can make is that -- with fuel cost as with every other aspect of a space flight -- you want to make sure that the economic benefits from the flight exceed the cost, which is often not the case even if you're only talking about its fuel cost alone. Which, I think, is part of what Del was trying to get at: as energy gets scarcer for all human activities, its cost rises and human prosperity in general drops, there will be even less tolerance for relative luxuries like spaceflight (even with relatively low-cost reusable boosters), unless some aspect of space industrialization succeeds well enough conomically that spaceflight (especially manned spaceflight) ISN'T a luxury anymore.

[Del Miller]

Bruce,

Thank you. You clarified what I was trying to say much better than I did. (Well, that's what I get for not having a journalism degree :-)

I think it is important to note that our currencies are, these days, not based upon the gold standard but upon the oil standard. I don't mean to launch into a discussion of macroeconomics here, but the cost of EVERYTHING in our society is now determined by either the availability of low cost energy or by the willingness of foreign governments to buy our securities. This willingness is, in a circular fashion, dependent on their ability to get cheap energy in order to generate the industry necessary to make the money to buy our securities. Whew.

In other words, the commercialisation of space isn't as much a technical problem as it is a matter of affordability in an era that is redefining affordability down. If you want a commercial space industry then you'd better care about deficits, balance of trade, worldwide disparities of income, environmental sustainability and the geo-econo-political aspects of the energy market.

In "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" Douglas Adams made a joke about the earthlings being un-interested in local politics - where "local" means the this part of the Milky Way. Oddly enough, local politics here on earth will determine the future of space exploration.