The National Review
John Derbyshire

June 16, 2005, 7:49 a.m.
The Folly of Our Age
The space shuttle.

Like the monster in some ghastly horror movie rising from the dead for the
umpteenth time, the space shuttle is back on the launch pad. This
grotesque, lethal white elephant - 14 deaths in 113 flights - is the
grandest, grossest technological folly of our age. If the shuttle has any
reason for existing, it is as an exceptionally clear symbol of our corrupt,
sentimental, and dysfunctional political system. Its flights accomplish
nothing and cost half a billion per. That, at least, is what a flight costs
when the vehicle survives. If a shuttle blows up - which, depending on
whether or not you think that 35 human lives (five original launchworthy
Shuttles at seven astronauts each) would be too high a price to pay for
ridding the nation of an embarrassing and expensive monstrosity, is either
too often or not often enough** - then the cost, what with lost inventory,
insurance payouts, and the endless subsequent investigations, is seven or
eight times that.

There is no longer much pretense that shuttle flights in particular, or
manned space flight in general, has any practical value. You will still
occasionally hear people repeating the old NASA lines about the joys of
microgravity manufacturing and insights into osteoporesis, but if you
repeat these tales to a materials scientist or a physiologist, you will get
peals of laughter in return. To seek a cure for osteoporesis by spending
$500 million to put seven persons and 2,000 tons of equipment into earth
orbit is a bit like well, it is so extravagantly preposterous that any
simile you can come up with falls flat. It is like nothing else in the
annals of human folly.

Having no practical justification for squirting so much of the nation's
wealth up into the stratosphere, our politicians - those (let us charitably
assume there are some) with no financial or electoral interest in the big
contractor corporations who feed off the shuttle - fall back on romantic
appeals to Mankind's Destiny. Thus President Bush, addressing the nation
after the Columbia tragedy two years ago:

These men and women assumed great risk in this service to all humanity. In
an age when space flight has come to seem almost routine, it is easy to
overlook the dangers of travel by rocket and the difficulties of navigating
the fierce outer atmosphere of the earth.

These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly, knowing
they had a high and noble purpose in life. Because of their courage and
daring and idealism, we will miss them all the more.

The cause in which they died will continue. Mankind is led into the
darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing
to understand. Our journey into space will go on.

Anyone who finds it "easy to overlook the dangers of travel by rocket" just
hasn't been following the shuttle program very attentively. One astronaut
death per eight flights!

The rest of the president's address on that occasion was, to be blunt about
it, insulting to the memories of the astronauts who died, and still more
insulting to their grieving spouses, children, parents, and friends. If
these astronauts believed that "they had a high and noble purpose in life,"
they were mistaken, and someone should have set them straight on the point.

Please note that "if." The motivation of shuttle astronauts would, I
suspect, make a very interesting study for some skillful psychologist. Here
is Ken Bowersox, one of the astronauts who was actually on board the
International Space Station (steady now, Derb, husband your wrath) when
Columbia blew up. He is writing in the June 2005 issue of Popular
Mechanics, putting the "pro" case in a debate on the continuation of the
Shuttle program, versus former NASA historian Alex Roland arguing the
"con." Bowersox:

I've wanted to be in space from the time I was listening to the radio and
heard about John Glenn circling the earth. Columbia was the klind of blow
that could have made me walk away from it. As astronauts, though, we
wouldn't have been on the space station if we didn't believe in the
program. Even after losing our friends and our ride home, we still believed
that exploration was important.

Far be it from me to pull rank on Astronaut Bowersox, but I've wanted to be
in space for somewhat longer than that - since seeing those wonderful
pictures by Chesley Bonestell in The Conquest of Space, circa 1952, or
possibly after being taken to the movie Destination Moon at around the same
time. The imaginative appeal of space travel is irresistible. I don't think
I could resist it, anyway. Even with two young kids who need me, and a wife
who (I feel fairly sure) would miss me, I would still, if given the
opportunity to go into space tomorrow, be on the next flight to Cape
Canaveral. As Prof. Roland says in that Popular Mechanics exchange: "The
real reason behind sending astronauts to Mars is that it's thrilling and
exciting." Absolutely correct. The danger? Heck, we all have to go
sometime. As President Bush said, I am sure quite truly: "These astronauts
knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly" It's the president's next
clause I have trouble with: "knowing they had a high and noble purpose in
life."

Did they really know that? My experience of pointless make-work, which is
much more extensive than I would have wished when starting out in life, is
that people engaged in it know they are engaged in it. Whether they mind or
not depends on the rewards. For a thousand bucks an hour, I'd do make-work
all day long - aye, and all night too! Astronaut salaries don't rise to
anything like that level, of course; but there are rewards other than the
merely financial. I hope no one will take it amiss - I am very sorry for
the astronauts who have died in the shuttle program, and for their loved
ones - if I quietly speculate on whether, being engaged in such a supremely
thrilling and glamorous style of make-work, one might not easily be able to
convince oneself to, as Astronaut Bowersox says, "believe in the program."

None of which is any reason why the rest of us should believe in it, let
alone pay for it. There is nothing - nothing, no thing, not one darned
cotton-picking thing you can name - of either military, or commercial, or
scientific, or national importance to be done in space, that could not be
done twenty times better and at one thousandth the cost, by machines rather
than human beings. Mining the asteroids? Isaac Asimov famously claimed that
the isotope Astatine-215 (I think it was) is so rare that if you were to
sift through the entire crust of the earth, you would only find a trillion
atoms of it. We could extract every one of that trillion, and make a brooch
out of them, for one-tenth the cost of mining an asteroid.

The gross glutted wealth of the federal government; the venality and
stupidity of our representatives; the lobbying power of big rent-seeking
corporations; the romantic enthusiasms of millions of citizens; these are
the things that 14 astronauts died for. To abandon all euphemism and
pretense, they died for pork, for votes, for share prices, and for thrills
(immediate in their own case, vicarious in ours). I mean no insult to their
memories, and I doubt they would take offense. I am certain that I myself
would not - certain, in fact, that, given the opportunity, I would
gleefully do what they did, with all the dangers, and count the death, if
it came, as anyway no worse than moldering away in some hospital bed at age
ninety, watching a TV game show, with a tube in my arm and a diaper round
my rear end. I should be embarrassed to ask the rest of you to pay for the
adventure, though.

** There are actually reasons to think we may have been lucky so far. News
item: "Steve Poulos, manager of the Orbiter Projects Office at Johnson
Space Center in Houston, acknowledges there is 'a debate' inside the agency
about the threat posed by space debris. One school of thought is that a
fatal debris strike is 'probable,' Poulos said. But he said others think
such an event is likely to be 'infrequent'." Uh-huh.

--
R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

This article while taking a potshot at the space shuttle, also questions the
necessity of humans becoming space faring. While the first may be justified,
criticizing the second is shortsighted.

Before humans made their presence felt on this planet, there was already a
science, a living system, an order (call it what you will), more complex
than anything that our science is capable of visualizing. Hence, our science
has in no way improved the original planet.

Yet, being an intelligent species, and not ready to give up our scientific
curiosity, and our desire to meddle with things around us, we need a safety
valve. Clearly our planet is not the place to release this pent up energy,
because we have inherited something which it will be advisable for us to
preserve in its original state.

Hence we can only welcome the enormous opportunities thrown up by space, to
extend our science and our spirit of adventure without limit and
constraints.

Selvaraj.

On 29/07/07, R.A. Hettinga wrote:

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "R.A. Hettinga" wrote:
>
>ref=/derbyshire/derbyshire200506160749.asp>
>
> The National Review
> John Derbyshire
>
> June 16, 2005, 7:49 a.m.
> The Folly of Our Age
> The space shuttle.
>
> Like the monster in some ghastly horror movie rising from the dead
for the umpteenth time, the space shuttle is back on the launch pad.
This grotesque, lethal white elephant - 14 deaths in 113 flights - is
the grandest, grossest technological folly of our age...

To R.A. Hettinga, respectfully,
In the nineteenth century there was another exceedingly expensive
and totally unjustified expenditure of national funds which the
popular press dubbed "Seward's Folly". Today that piece of government
extravagance is the great state of Alaska.
There are those who believe that the future of mankind lies in
becomming a spacefaring species. There are those who think this idea
is folly. Since entire books have been written arguing each side of
this issue, I will only say here that I believe in the former.

Chris

At 7:01 AM +0000 7/30/07, Chris Smyth wrote:
> Today that piece of government
>extravagance is the great state of Alaska.

...and it's still, on the balance, stealing taxpayer's money.

:-)

Someone joked that if they ever made a bronze statue of the modern Alaskan
it would be a guy in dirty insulated Carhartts and a backwards gimmie hat,
looking at you with his hand out.

The solution, of course, is to sell all that "public" land and let people
get on with developing the place, but that'll never happen.

Which is why I like asteroids. :-) Let's seem 'em call *that* an "ecosystem".

Cheers,
RAH
Former Alaskan, still a Republican, and who notes that *both* Alaskan
senators *and* it's only congressman are currently under investigation for
"earmark"-based bribery of various sorts.
--
R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

At 11:34 AM +0530 7/30/07, sraj wrote:
>This article while taking a potshot at the space shuttle, also questions the
>necessity of humans becoming space faring.

Whether or not Derbyshire got a little too much stodge in his breakfast
Wheaties that morning, he has a point. The Space Shuttle is, in fact, the
very model of a modern government boondoggle.

My personal opinion is that people should go to space for, for lack of a
better word, *sport*. If you call doing something dangerous for the slight
prospect of enormous wealth a sport, that is. Gambling can be considered
sport, I suppose, and gambling with one's life certainly qualifies.

Even more outrageously, :-), I think that government shouldn't even
"sponsor" science, except directly in the case of engineering and applied
science for defense (what part of the words "force monopoly" does one not
understand?).

It certainly shouldn't sponsor sports, like who touches what flying rock
first, any more than it should subsidize stadia in the bombed-out shell of
its now-legislated-to-death inner cities.

Which is, again, why I like asteroids. :-).

Of course, the modern nation state has developed such an extreme capability
to confiscate wealth at tax time that Caligula's bread and circuses don't
even begin to approach the, yes, boondoggles, even enlightened
bandit-princes like Uncle Sam can pay for with *your* stolen money.

Cheers,
RAH

--
R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

On 7/30/07, R.A. Hettinga wrote:
(...)
> My personal opinion is that people should go to space for, for lack of a
> better word, *sport*. If you call doing something dangerous for the slight
> prospect of enormous wealth a sport, that is. Gambling can be considered
> sport, I suppose, and gambling with one's life certainly qualifies.
>
> Even more outrageously, :-), I think that government shouldn't even
> "sponsor" science, except directly in the case of engineering and applied
> science for defense (what part of the words "force monopoly" does one not
> understand?).
(...)

Hettinga,

I don't think at all that you are being outrageous. It's much like my
own point of view. For the reasons above, I think that nowadays space
tourism (the "sport" of going to space) is by far the best "seed" for
people finally getting off-Earth in the long term...