Few things are more irritating than the naysaying pontifications of non-experts after an accident, and as an aerospace engineer I am particularly disgusted by some of the opinion pieces that have hit the Internet in the days since the loss of the SpaceShipTwo VSS Enterprise.
Jason Perlow's bio at ZDNet describes him as "a technologist with over two decades of experience with integrating large heterogeneous multi-vendor computing environments in Fortune 500 companies." Meanwhile, Adam Rogers (@jetjocko on Twitter, if you please!) "edits feature stories, primarily on science but also on geek pop culture, and is the edit lead for WIRED’s video programming." God knows I have nothing against computer geeks -- I cut my teeth on an IBM 360 Model 30 using punchcards -- but where does it say that either Perlow or Rogers is an aerospace expert?
In contrast, I learned a few things about flight from going supersonic, being in zero-G and having my breakfast go from stomach to bag, pulling enough Gs to make the blood pool in my calves like a couple of water balloons, and coming within seconds of punching out of a fighter jet to avoid a close encounter with the Gulf of Mexico. I have taken those "walks in the park." Death comes without fear up there; it happens too quickly, and in the last seconds of life one is nothing other than the sum of ones training, the brain of the machine, analyzing the anomaly with the objective of correcting it. I think I have a fair idea of where Michael Alsbury's head was in that final moment.
The reservations I have expressed in the past regarding space tourism as a viable business model should not be confused with these latest cubicle geek tirades. It should be understood that the technical jump from suborbital flight to orbital flight is two orders of magnitude in terms of shear energy. At the peak altitude of about 110 kilometers, Burt Rutan's designs need have only enough velocity for the control surfaces to keep the vehicle properly oriented. Let's be generous and say that's on the order of 1,800 km/hr. A velocity of 29,000 km/hr is necessary to maintain orbit. That's 16 times faster (a nice hexadecimal number for the computer geeks). However, kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity, and 16 * 16 = 256. So the issue I have with suborbital space tourism is its scaleability to orbital flight. It doesn't surprise me that Virgin Galactic downscoped the SpaceShipThree project from an orbital system to a suborbital system that would go from Point A to Point B several thousands of kilometers distant; this would nevertheless be a technical advancement over SpaceShipTwo, which is intended to go from Point A back to Point A.
Assuming the same level of technology more or less, going into orbit ought to cost a couple of hundred times more than the $250,000 price of a SpaceShipTwo ticket, which makes the $50 million cost of a seat on the Russian Soyuz a reasonable price for all of you comparison shoppers who are rich enough for that market. The challenge is to routinize spaceflight operations and to bring costs down as much as the immutable physics of the problem and the foreseeable state of the art will allow. This where the Virgin Galactic venture has value. It is developing a path toward routinizing operations, something which the Space Shuttle attempted and failed at. The lessons learned from Virgin Galactic may be applicable to orbital flight even if its specific design and its business model turn out to be an evolutionary dead end. Even so, my concern is that the cost per mass to orbit is not likely to be sliced significantly any time soon, certainly not by a factor of 256. There is no Moore's Law for aerospace technology. I'll go out on a limb and say that orbital space tourism may come within the price range of the middle class several generations from now; I take this on faith alone, with absolutely no engineering analysis to support this.
But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to point out Perlow's poor knowledge of history. He says that "the driving force for the space race itself became irrelevant after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992." Although aerospace historians' opinions differ to some extent, most place the end of the "space race" in 1969 with the Apollo 11 landing or in 1975 with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. I don't know of any who place it in 1992; for one thing, the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991.
Perlow says that "private companies… are building and testing commercial launch platforms and spacecraft to send America's astronauts into space without Russia's assistance — because over 20 years after the conclusion of the Cold War we again find ourselves at odds with them." More bad history. I am one who maintains that a Second Cold War began with the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea earlier this year, but this geopolitical event has nothing at all to do with the development of commercial manned spacecraft; this effort began in earnest in the early years of the Obama administration in parallel with its 2010 decision to cancel the Constellation program, which, begun under the Bush administration in 2003, was itself aimed at providing an American capability to launch astronauts into orbit following the planned retirement of the Space Shuttle.
In his own way, Rogers gets it every bit as wrong as Perlow. He questions the motivation behind exploration: "The Apollo program was the most technologically sophisticated propaganda front of the Cold War, a battle among superpowers for scientific bragging rights…. It doesn’t mean that the engineers weren’t geniuses or the astronauts weren’t brave or skilled. But it does make problematic, at least a little, the idea that those astronauts were explorers opening up a new frontier." Surely we all understand that exploration nearly always has some sort of self-interest behind it. Columbus sailed west in search of China and India for political-economic reasons: to cut the Ottoman Empire out of the silk and spice trade. Other political-economic motives followed: the Spanish wanted to outdo the Portuguese, the English wanted to outdo the Dutch and the French, and before long these powers carved up most of the world among them. Scott raced Amundsen to the South Pole out of nationalism. So what? In his expounding on the obvious, where does Rogers take us but into a quagmire of confused thinking. Citing Elon Musk and SpaceX, he proclaims, "Going to space is wondrous, difficult, and a testament to the human spirit. It’s also utterly, cynically practical. That’s being a pioneer." So, according to Rogers' lights, being utterly, cynically practical is being a pioneer. Columbus, da Gama, Cortez, Joliet, Hudson, and indeed any dispossessors of indigenous peoples: pioneers. Scott, Amundsen, Gagarin, Armstrong: stooges of nationalism. Musk behind his desk in Hawthorne, California: pioneer. Alsbury dying in SpaceShipTwo: damned fool, I guess.
A space tourism fatality was inevitable, and I said so a number of times privately; however, my nightmare scenario was of a half-dozen of the rich and famous crashing and burning, the perfect storm of celebrity death media circus, burying space tourism as the Hindenburg did airship travel. As callous as this may seem to Alsbury's family, perhaps it is better for space tourism that this accident happened sooner rather than later. We won't remember his death as much as the death of Michael Jackson or even of Anna Nicole Smith. We will, however, honor his life by moving forward.
But Perlow rants, "the SpaceShipTwo should never fly again, and Virgin Galactic should shut its doors, permanently…. Space travel is not a plaything…. There's absolutely no compelling reason why people that haven't gone through years of training should put their lives at risk, for the sole purpose of having an ultra-privileged thrill ride." By the same logic, Mount Everest and a thousand other peaks should be cordoned off, as there's absolutely no compelling reason why people should climb them. Scuba diving should be banned as a sport, as there's absolutely no compelling reason why people should risk drowning when they can see the wonders of the deep in a safe, comfortable aquarium. All private pilot's licenses should be revoked, as there's absolutely no compelling reason why people shouldn't board an airliner to get to wherever they want to go. And, it goes without saying that the human race shouldn't do anything for fun except play with Fisher Price toys.
Except for Sir Edmund Hillary's famous explanation, "Because it is there." There is something uniquely human about wanting to experience what "is there" for oneself, in the flesh, rather than on a plasma monitor, or on a movie screen, or on the Universal Studios Tour. And being a uniquely human yearning, no one should ever assume the mantle of authority to deny a human being the freedom to decide for oneself what is or is not too dangerous to undertake. A human being has the fundamental right to risk ones own life for whatever reason, in search of God or the meaning of existence, to push the outside of the envelope of knowledge, to defend the innocent, to liberate the oppressed, or just for the plain hell of it, whether to die valiantly at bottom of the world or foolishly at the bottom of a gully.
Either SpaceShipTwo will fly again, or a competitor will fly. People will accept the risk. Technology will improve. Spaceflight will become safer. Everyone who flies high performance aircraft, or surfs, or explores caves, or bungie jumps, or does any of hundreds of inherently dangerous things, lives with the conviction that it's always some other guy who buys the farm. An hour or so after the SpaceShipTwo accident, someone tweeted, "Any bets on whether Branson is still chomping at the bit to take a flight?"
I responded without hesitation, "I'll take that bet... and the seat next to his."
Rogers calls SpaceShipTwo "genius engineering, but it isn’t about exploring anything." We already knew this. The same was also true of RMS Titanic a century ago. Does that mean that it was a commercial boondoggle that should never have been allowed to be built? How many other misfortunes shall we condemn post factum?
There are icebergs in the North Atlantic, "there's a demon that lives in the air." John Jacob Astor IV met one, Michael Alsbury met the other. And the further out we venture, the more invisible monsters will catch us unprepared. Let's go. Some will stay behind and philosophize about our reasons and question our rationality, but that won't matter because we will be "there" and they will still be "here." That in itself is reason enough to go.
SpaceShipTwo: Enterprise Still Flies
5 comments:
Great article. Very insightful.
I would disagree with your history. Ronald Reagan proposed Space Station Freedom in 1984 at the start of his re-election bid. That was a particularly low point in the Cold War, with rhetoric flowing on both sides.
Freedom was our answer to the Soviet space station, Mir. And, of course, it morphed into ISS in the early 1990's after the Soviet Union collapsed. We brought in our old Cold War enemy, the Russians.
I don't see that you disagree at all with my account of history. You haven't refuted a single point I raised in my article; moreover, I certainly don't disagree with your historical rendering.
I am in Albuquerque and have spent most of my life working on the spaceport. I physically felt the crash before I knew about it...there is a spirit between true believers that informs us of events good and bad.
I and other stakeholders of Spaceport America have been talking about the crash and are continuing to believe in the future we all have paid for.
The bitter truth that I have heard other NewSPace executives say is that a failure teaches more than a success. In this case we lost a test pilot to the demon of spaceflight and gained insight into the systems of Spaceship2. The data will improve the design and future generations.
I understand what you and your colleagues have experienced. You were fortunate to be with each other. There was a world of difference between how I experienced the Challenger accident and how I experienced the Columbia accident. When Challenger blew up I worked at Lockheed/Sunnyvale. People ran out of meetings to go to their cars and turn on their radios. All of us were shocked. When Columbia disintegrated I worked in downtown San Francisco. People just shrugged and went on with their day, and in a crowed city I felt alone. Marilyn experienced the same thing at Sonoma State University; she got on the phone and "sat shiva" with a Jewish friend at NASA/Ames, while her fellow professors, many of whom were Jews, could not have cared any less. It is so important for us in the aerospace community to be in touch with each other at times like these. Outsider just don't experience it the way we do.
Thank you for your words and thank you for your work.
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