Chaos Program

In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein’s masterpiece about freedom, revolution and the humor of artificial intelligence, there’s a bit where the lunar colonists throw rocks at the Earth. Big rocks. Gravity makes them into incredibly destructive weapons. The people of Earth can’t do much about it because even getting to the moon is a huge effort. This is a military principle we’ll call the high ground effect, as in when you have the high ground, you have a huge advantage over the other guy. That’s why fighter planes attack from above, why artillery is placed on mountains and why countless battles have been fought over hills (Pork Chop Hill. Bunker hill. etc. etc)

Remember this effect. It will matter soon.

The big news this week is that that misbegotten ground hog has condemned us to another month and a half of global non-warming. Of slightly less import but possibly still newsworthy is that this budget cuts funding for NASA’s shuttle replacement program and for the planned return to the Moon (see here, here , here and here). One obvious point about this: In a budget with a deficit of $1.6+ trillion, the changes being made to NASA are not about the cost-benefit analysis. A budget with such an astronomical deficit is not one where there has been any effort to make the hard budgeting decisions. Just forget that idea. This leads to exactly one conclusion: The cuts to NASA and the narrowing of its mission is an ideological decision. read more »

Remember the old days, when America had a space program? Me too. Forty years ago tomorrow, on July 20, 1969, my mother woke me up (I was young then and went to bed earlier than I do now) so I could watch Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon on small black and white TV set sitting on top of the piano in the living room.

I wasn’t as excited as I could have been, partly because I was half asleep but mostly because I was a huge science fiction fan. To me, walking on the Moon didn’t seem historic. It seemed inevitable. Neil Armstrong’s “One giant leap” didn’t seem like a giant leap. It was just a minor stepping stone in the grand adventure of exploring the universe.

The shortsighted stupidity of politicians and self-absorbed inertia of massive bureaucracies were unknown to me at the time.

Since the end of the Apollo missions, the official American space program has been marching in place, like a bored zombie. There are no colonies on the Moon or even a space station at L5 or some other adequate location. In two years or so, the U.S. won’t even have its own capability to send humans into space. After billions of dollars and a couple of decades of research into a follow on to the space shuttle, NASA apparently lost interest in the project. The agency that put a man on the Moon in less than 10 years, found keeping people in space was just too hard.

There are grounds for hope for real human space exploration as private companies begin to take up the slack that NASA has dropped. Companies like Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites and SpaceX develop their own technologies for reaching and dealing with space. It took a long time for people to figure out that NASA wasn’t in the game anymore and they would need to do it themselves but that leap seems to have finally been made. Even individual states are getting in on the act, as witness the announcement in January that Virgin Galactic has leased land for a space port in New Mexico.

So on this 40th anniversary of a truly historic achievement, I’m going to be wearing a black armband, in mourning for a once great agency that has become just another (albeit funny shaped) pyramid.