Should NASA send government employees into space?

by philg

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin ushered in an era of government-operated manned space flight.  In the intervening 42 years we’ve seen the following:



  • several accidents in which NASA flight accidents have killed off government employees who had become public heroes, a popular schoolteacher, etc., causing widespread international grief (plus a bit of euphoria in the Palestinian world after the crash of the Columbia)
  • an inability by NASA to take the risk or massive expense out of manned space flights
  • improvements in technology have led to various private groups (see http://www.xprize.org/) deciding that personal space travel has become practical

Perhaps it is time to ask the question “Why should NASA operate manned space flights?”  I.e., is sending a human into space an inherently governmental function?


In some ways it would appear that the U.S. government must be involved.   No private individual or company can afford to set up a worldwide tracking and communications network.  No private individual or company can afford to invest in fundamental research and development on new kinds of jet and rocket motors.


Yet the same arguments could be made for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).  It makes sense to have the government fund infrastructure that facilitates flight.  The FAA pays weather briefers and air traffic controllers.  The FAA funds airport design, construction, and maintenance.  The FAA researches instrument approaches to airports and publishers procedures that it believes to be safe.  The FAA certifies airplanes, pilots, and airlines.


But the FAA doesn’t buy the planes or have its employees fly them.


When the U.S. government goes flying it is extremely risk-averse.  Army helicopter pilots train in expensive Bell Jet Ranger turbine-powered helicopters ($600/hour).  The Black Hawk helicopters have airbags to lessen injuries to occupants in the event of a crash.  The Feds look at a piston-powered Robinson R22 ($150/hour; the standard private sector trainer) or a homebuilt helicopter with horror.  They’d never want to be responsible for an 18-year-old Army kid going into one of those death machines.  Roughly half of the crashes of homebuilt airplanes supposedly occur on the very first flight.  The FAA is well aware of the dismal statistics but they’re happy to check your work, give you an Experimental certificate for your new kitplane, and wish you good luck.


Conclusion:  there are plenty of activities that the Federal government facilitates but considers too risky to undertake.  They don’t want a Federal employee doing it but if Irving Goldberg, a divorced retired dermatologist, wants to do it they will actually facilitate his risk-taking.


Why not do space travel the same way?  NASA can fund all of the infrastructure, do research, sell rockets cheap, and then shake the hand of any adventurous folks who want to head up beyond the Wild Blue Yonder.  In the small airplane world we have Angel Flight in which private pilots volunteer their time and airplanes to transport medical patients and their families, to the tune of approximately 15,000 missions per year.  Similarly in the private space travel world the government could ask these adventurers “Say, as long as you’re going up into space, would you mind conducting this experiment for us?”


It was a national tragedy when Christa McAuliffe died on the Challenger.  It is only a minor local news event when an adventurous soul crashes his or her small aircraft.

22 thoughts on “Should NASA send government employees into space?”

  1. NASA?  Government employees  I dunno.

    But here are two suggestions for future blog entries:

    =======================================

    Clear to Land, but Dodging East River Flotsam

    By MICHELLE O’DONNELL

    Published: November 18, 2003

    f all the airplane runways in New York City, the longest and most treacherous is the murky vein of the East River.  It does all a river can do to distinguish itself from the asphalt lanes at Newark and La Guardia and Kennedy.

    It coughs up piano casings and the shells of old refrigerators.  It sends back corpses from its depths.  Its currents have currents, its eddies have eddies, and cargo ships and high-speed ferries crisscross it with no apparent regard for an aeronautical grid.

    But to a small and select breed of aviators, the urban bush pilots, the East River and its slapping waves have a special draw.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/nyregion/18SEAP.html

    =======================================

    More Consumers Reach Out to Touch the Screen

    By AMY HARMON

    Published: November 17, 2003

    […]

    A new generation of self-service machines is slipping into the daily lives of many Americans.  Rejected for decades as too complicated, the machines are being embraced by a public whose faith in technology has grown as its satisfaction with more traditional forms of customer service has diminished.  Faced with the alternative — live people — it seems that many consumers now prefer the machines.

    “The main thing is you don’t want to deal with the cashiers and their attitudes,” said Dexter Thomas, 37, bagging his own pizza rolls and Eggos in a self-checkout lane at Pathmark store in downtown Brooklyn this month.  “That’s why people come to this line.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/17/technology/17MACH.html

    =======================================

  2. I completely agree space exploration has moved beyond a government function. What they should do is get the heck out of the way, much like they do with other areas of science.

    There are great private companies like SpaceX and those competing for the X-prize which should be leading the charge. At best the government is competition for them; at worst the regulations get in the way. Going into space should be like skyjumping or diving; you sign a release form, and a private company makes it happen.

    Ole

  3. The questions you raise about the wisdom of continuing manned space flight are routinely discussed by Rand Simberg at his website “Transterrestrial Musings” http://www.interglobal.org/weblog/

    Rand is, I believe, a former NASA engineer, and so his criticism of the notion of continuing manned space-flight has an added pique.

  4. Many people do not realize how far X-prize contestanst are from actual spacefaring. Suborbital flight is cheap. You don’t have to burn inordinate amount of fuel to achieve orbital velocity, or to dissipate inordinate amount of energy on re-entry. One can strap a copy of Gemini capsule onto a decomissioned SCUD-m booster and go suborbital. If tinpot tyrants can buy SCUDs by the hundreds they should be cheap enough. It won’t satisfy reusability requirement of X-prize contest though.

    The current mode of getting to orbit is not suitable for economic spacefaring. There’s no economy of scale, one has to build and then discard an enormous booster to get a teeny bit into orbit, and to get that teeny bit back to Earth it has to consist mainly of heat shield. The chemical rocket engines show no sign of revolutionary improvement since late 50-s too. I do not see how going private would solve these fundamental problems.

  5. I always find it interesting when Ed Hudgins points out that “40 years after the Wright brother’s first flight, probably at least a million people had taken flights in planes. 40 years after the first men traveled into space, fewer than 500 individuals have followed them.”

    If NASA wasn’t were less successfull at protecting their monopoly maybe more people would find it worth while to spend money on solving technical and business problems of spaceflight. Mircorp gets credit for the world’s only privately-funded manned space mission: Soyuz-MirCorp Expedition 28. I believe that when Mircorp was going to buy the Mir spacestation, NASA pressured the RSA to dump it into the ocean.

  6. The principal reason that the U S Government should not be involved in manned space flight is that there is no commercial or scientific benefit commensurate with the enormous cost.

    (Unmanned space flight has, by contrast, yielded much for the money spent.)

    The only benefits from manned space flight that make it worth considering are political. However, now that the Soviet Union is dead, the political benefits for the US are ephemeral.

  8. JCM, you nailed it and here’s how to prove you’re correct: If the US government gets out of the manned space travel game and stays out of the way, then if there’s value, someone will fill the void. If not, no big deal.

  9. I think the government should be involved because in one way or another they will end up paying for the mistakes — specifically in the area of liability.

    Consider the issue of insurance. Columbia had disintegrated on a different flight path or at a different point of entry, we could have had large pieces of debris raining down on Houston or Dallas — and there isn’t an insurance company in the world which will accept that kind of risk. The US government, on the other hand, is self-insuring, due to the large financial resources at their disposal.

    Now if Johnny X-Prize jumps into his rocket and then “lands” in suburbia, wiping out a daycare center, who gets stuck with the bill? What happens if Johnny X-Prize leaves from Florida and “lands” in Toronto? Or Berlin? Or Damascus? Each of those foreign governments will hold the US responsible, and the US will be stuck with that responsibility — because if the Chinese accidentally “land” in Los Angeles, you bet that they will hold Bejing responsible.

    The scope of the problem is different. When a hobbist messes around with his experimental aircraft, he’s only carting around enough energy to wipe out a house or two. When a hobbist messes around with an experimental spacecraft, we are now talking about enough energy to wipe out more than just a block or two, and the potential range of that “accident” is much larger.

  10. Like others have pointed out, orbital flight is a lot harder and expensive than sub-orbital. Other than repairing low earth orbit satelites, however, there isn’t any real use going into space. And unless that satilite is of Hubblesque proportions and cost, going up there to repair them, while probably costing less time, is often more expensive than replacing them.

    One cost effective way I just came up with to get people up there more safely and cost effictive is to let humans piggy-back commercial payload, as opposed to the other way around.

    The Russians have the massive Energia booster, big enough to lift the massive Buran with a full cargo bay into orbit. How about you put the big payload on top of the thing and strap a small craft like the one recomended in the Columbia investigation strapped to the side?

    If they insist on having a platform like the Shuttle to do major repair works in, why not put one permanently up there! The shuttle is much more comfortable than the compact people transporter will be for staying close to the hubble for a few days and doing space walks. But you can build something that big without the need, or ability, to ever return to earth much cheaper and reliable. Just fly it to the ISS in Energia’s cargo hold and when needed, go to the satelite in question, repair it, go home to the ISS.

    Time’s up for all-in-one solution like the Shuttle.

  11. Interesting thoughts. Even more interesting was the genral view by Heinlein. In his future history tales, an indentifying cusp was who first flew to the Moon. Was it a commercial flight or the government?

    I hope the Xprize has the desired effect.

  12. Alas, Energia is no more. On the positive side, technologies developed for Energia are being used in a new family of boosters called Angara. It would be a first major booster rocket designed with economic efficiency in mind. Some proposed solutions are quite interesting, including air-breathing first stage, reusable first and second stages etc. I think Angara is the project to watch in space industry nowadays.

  13. dgm, I read your comment about the issue of insurance and I have to disagree. What you have stated about a rocket landing on a day centre has direct parallels to the risks that are inherent in aircraft travel. Many aviation accidents have happened over the years all over the world that have cost huge numbers of lives and yet air travel still happens and is still insured.

  14. As noted above, the correct answer is that there appears to be little point for humans to be in space, government employees or otherwise. A minor nit on an otherwise fine blog entry: on the point about “oh, by the way, if you’re going into space anyway, would you mind conducting these experiments for us?” — this assumes that these experiments have some value. In fact my impression is that the space shuttle experiments are purely make-work. I would be happy to be persuaded otherwise about this, but my impression is that all of NASA’s scientific successes of any substance have come from unmanned craft of various sorts (e.g. the Voyager satellites; the Mars robots — the ones that didn’t crash; the Hubble telescope).

  15. Just because the Space Shuttle is in a rut with ancient technology sending ant farms into orbit doesn’t mean manned spaceflight has no benefits.

    Some of you who have actually bothered to study history may recognize a little thing called the Apollo Program. While it certainly didn’t help Donald Trump throw up any casinos, it did trigger a wave of scientific and technological development that triggered waves throughout academia and the corporate world, with results we’re still enjoying today.

    Similar developments were done during the early days of JPL’s unmanned probes.

    A NASA that sought actual challenging goals would be able to continue to stimulate science and the economy. Unfortunately, short-sighted individuals (both within NASA and outside) continue to limit their scope to being Shuttle-pushers.

    All of this leaves aside the immense cultural benefits that we wreaked from the Apollo Program, but I won’t bother to get into that because most free-market types believe culture is something only the wealthy are entitled to.

  16. Jim, the model you hint at is quite prevelant. Left to itself, the private sector would not invest the resources to make great scientific advances. I wonder how many advances in computing were funded by military contracts. IBM surely would not have taken on multi-billion dollar risks on their own.

    The same applies to NASA contracts that fund new developments, eventually applied to commercial products by Boeing, etc. Chomsky gives much better examples than I can come up with…

  17. You know, there’s a nearly perfect analogy that throws JCM, Gideon and all the others a curve ball. This is something we have done before.

    I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but the analogy is the opening of the new world. It’s another land with natural resources and most importantly, room to grow. Mars, and all of the bodies in space are other lands with natural resources and room to grow. Yes, there are big differences: there were already people in the Americas, you could breathe in the Americas, food grew here. In all, it’s a lot easier to live here than on Mars.

    That’s true, but that’s not to say that it didn’t require amazing technology, huge risks and lots of money to get to the new world. Many, many people died in creating the countries that exist here now. People need to look at deaths in the space program as tragedies, learning events and unavoidable. They should cause us to look at what we’re doing, fix the problems, then GO ON. Life isn’t safe and the truly valuable things can not be obtained without risk. We take those risks because the end results are so important.

    Those first missions to the new world were sponsored by the governments. They were the only ones with pockets deep enough to take the risks. It wasn’t until their ventures became profitable (at the expense of the Aztecs, etc.) that private industry moved in.

    Extending the analogy, I would consider near-space (orbit) to be roughly the equivalent of fishing grounds off Europe. Governments have shown how to do it, have made it profitable. Now it’s time for them to move into a regulatory structure and to let capitalism do what it does best: maximize profit margins (at the expense of the Aztecs, etc.).

    But, by all means, they need to continue to push the envelope in the areas that need to be developed to the point that corporations (and individuals) are willing to take over. They need to push for Mars. They need to develop the science that will allow humans to go on long duration missions.

    And that comes back to Phil’s original point. NASA must continue a human mission because the principles aren’t understood well enough and the market hasn’t developed enough for the resources to be exploited by society. And those are resources that can’t be questioned: they exist. (You can only really argue about how valuable they are…)

    What they shouldn’t be doing is sitting around in near-earth orbit doing make-work jobs. ISS is a joke and nearly useless in its current incarnation. NASA needs a true mission. Something worthy of spending our cash on. Forget the space station. Sell it to Tito as the first near earth hotel. Buy Mars with the cash.

  18. Rudy, you can’t go to Mars with out having a space station of some sort in orbit around earth. Sorry.

  19. Hey Abner,

    You speak pretty authoratatively though I don’t know what ground you speak on.

    I can see a number of ways that you CAN go to mars without a space station. More importantly so have a lot of people with a lot more credentials than my own. Read The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin. Look the book (and author) up for all sorts of information about him and the idea.

Comments are closed.