Forty years of earthbound life

kw: musings, history, space policy

No photo, no link, no long historical discursion. The fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing has become an unutterably sad day for me. Our hopes were so high, our excitement that we might soon have a lunar colony so keen. For nearly three years we hung on everything that came out of NASA, but by December 1972 it was clear that an era was about to end. The policy-makers of the human race turned inward, and December 7 of that year marks not just the end of lunar exploration, it was the last space flight with an altitude exceeding 2,000 km.

The first problem was, quite frankly, money. The government's budget then was a much smaller share of the gross domestic product, compared to now. Brought forward to the kind of dollars we spend today (a few months shy of 2010), the moon program cost about $40 billion. Isn't it ironic that the money spent in the past year to attempt to shore up a bunch of crooked bankers would pay for ten Moon programs? And that is only a quarter of what will eventually be spent in "stimulus" of an economy that will probably recover quicker if left alone.

The second problem was, and still is, that no technology so far discovered can produce the huge thrust needed, with a specific impulse greater than about 600 sec. Specific impulse (SI) is the number of seconds a one-gram thrust can be produced while using up one gram of fuel plus reaction mass. Since the masses cancel out, it is expressed as a pure time value. We need to attain SI closer to 5,000 to make the attainment of orbit affordable to the "only moderately rich" among us.

A third problem, seemingly less important at the time, is complexity. The Saturn V rocket was simple compared to the Space Shuttle, yet it had tens of thousands of components. How complex will the proposed Orion craft be? Possibly worse! Hey, NASA folks! Try for no more components than the average Chevrolet!! It'll work better and fail less often. Remember the old concept of Fail Safe? Recent history indicates you have. Design things so they can't cause a tragedy no matter how badly they fail, for starters.

Will we return to the Moon, and then go to Mars? Only after the economy turns around big-time. I say "after" rather than "if" because it will do so, but who knows when?