From: Monte Davis 

"Geo."  wrote:

>I can answer that one with a word, leadership.

That doesn't cut it -- "leadership" in the abstract is too vague
and cloudy. What *reason* does the leader advance to sell the program? I
may have misgivings about Kennedy's "We'll get men to the Moon first
to show the world we can do big hard technology better than the USSR [and
erase the embarrassments of Sputnik->Gagarin]," but it was clear
and compelling at the time.

Another problem is that after Apollo, the "step size" grows
dramatically. Either a permanent moon base or a flags & footprints
jaunt to Mars would cost a LOT more than Apollo. In fact, so would the
alternative we chose -- a shuttle to lower $/lb to space dramatically
-- although we (1) refused to admit that  and tried to do it quick &
cheap, then (2) pretended we'd succeeded and committed to a space station,
then (3) bitched about how incompetent NASA had become.

>If you take what we spent on NASA plus what we spent on defense, its vastly
>more than the 6%GNP that is what is usually assumed to be the cost of the
>space program during the 60's.

Factual nitpick: Apollo peaked at ~5% of the Federal budget, NOT of GNP,
and averaged closer to 2% over the period 1961-1972. (For comparison, NASA
today is .7% of the budget.)

>A deep space program that requires lots of long term
>energy sources like nuclear or solar, high efficiency and reuse, and high
>output storage of energy might fit very nicely with energy research here on
>earth.

Tempting, but beware of the intellectual dishonesty of the
"spinoff" sales tactic. Space hardware, because it has to be as
light as possible  and survive launch stresses, is remarkably specialized.
If you want better nuclear reactors or solar cells or batteries or
recycling technologies for use here, put your money into designing and
testing them here.

That said, I *could* get behind space solar power as a goal if it were sold
*honestly* -- on a realistic time scale of 25+ years, and with the clear
understanding that while it can't possibly compete with terrestrial
alternatives at today's launch costs,

(1) it's as clean as energy can be and almost indefinitely scalable

(2) our criteria will be shifting in those directions anyway over 25+ years

(3) launch costs will come down *in the course of doing it* (because the
single biggest factor in high launch costs is that we do so little
launching)


Monte Davis
http://montedavis.livejournal.com

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