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Carl Sagan's Planetary Society is testing out a solar sail next year. A breadloaf-sized satellite will unfurl a mylar sheet that will expand, origami-style, to an eighteen feet square. The pressure of photons (which is to say sunlight) is sufficient to propel the satellite, allowing it to sail the solar winds. It's all being funded by a low-key, anonymous, individual donor.
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I just love these photos of the X-38—the unpowered glider developed as a lifeboat for the space station. Bush foolishly cancelled the project in 2002, after $510M had been spent on it with only another $50M in testing remaining. It's very clever, the idea of using a glider to return from space.
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"If the…minimum wage had risen at the same rate as CEO compensation since 1990, it would now stand at $23.03." A 2006 article, but these series of statistics on income disparity are as eye-opening as ever.
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Last week, Ruby on Rails developer John Lannon went out to get some Chinese food for his wife. Walking out of the restaurant, he was shot in the chest by a pair of robbers. After nearly dying, lung surgery, heart surgery, and six days in the hospital, he's home and blogging about his experience. It's harrowing to read.
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Are you basing the “foolish” remark solely on the Wired article? Seriously?
Classic example of a sunk-cost fallacy (mentioning the amount spent on a project to date to justify its continuation).
It’s only a fallacy if divorced from a consideration of the value of the end product. If the technology were a failure, or the product itself unneeded, then pointing out that $510M had been spent would indeed be irrelevant or, at worse, misleading. But given that the product itself is needed if we’re to continue expand our presence beyond Earth, and given that the technology had proven itself to be a success, spending 91% of the money necessary to turn it into something viable and then stopping strikes me as awfully foolish. In general, if you’re going to cut corners, safety programs aren’t a good place to start.
This is a symptom of why our space program sucks. It took us less than a decade to get to the moon. And then, for over thirty years…nothing. As a kid, studying to be an astronaut (I thought), I looked at all of those old photos of the moon landings and Astrolab and thought wow, that was a long, long time ago. Very little has changed since.
It may strike you as awfully foolish, but you’re foolishly not taking into account other very important factors. I’ll mention just three for simplicity:
1) The mission of the X-38 became overlapped with the Space Plane, which was becoming a much more viable and useful alternative than a one-and-done type of vehicle like the X-38. What would truly be foolish is throwing more money into a project that has little use because its mission is now performed by a better product.
2) It is naive to think that the only costs of a project are its development costs. Hell, that’s just the beginning. Once development is complete, and the vehicle enters into service, that’s when the real money comes in. If NASA commits to the X-38, you’re looking at many years of contracts to buy multiple vehicles, service the existing fleet, train personnel. That would ultimately dwarf the R&D outlay. And for what… for a vehicle that is never used because it’s one and only mission is being performed by a better vehicle. Yeah, that would be brilliant.
3) Perhaps the most foolish assumption is to think that the half billion spent on X-38 R&D is somehow lost or wasted when the project is cancelled. A very large chunk of the knowledge gained in that development has been and will continue to be useful in developing the space plane and other ISS projects.
Re Mother Jones list: And, alas, I think none of those facts bothers the Obama administration.
I.Publius, my understanding the chronology is that the OSP concept came after the X-38 was cancelled—that there was no point at which both programs existed simultaneously. And I wouldn’t argue that the only costs were the development costs, but that the failure to complete the development process is foolish and wasteful, because anything less than 100% functional space plane is not useful. On top of that, the OSP was also cancelled, though I don’t think it was ever done formal-like—I think they just cut off the funding.
So we got 90% of the way through a project, didn’t pay the last 10%, started another project kind of based on the first one, really didn’t get anywhere with it, and then cut that one off, too. Then Bush announced the Crew Exploration Vehicle in 2004, halfway bailed on that, giving way to the Orion/Ares…which is still under development. That all took place in something like a three-year span. And that 90% of an X-38 is now doing absolutely nothing for anybody. It’s sitting in a museum in Houston.
What all of this reminds me of is the bullshittery behind the shuttle program that led to the Challenger disaster. As best I can remember, it all went down like this. NASA, to get congressional funding, spread out the work across the country, in oodles of congressional districts. The contract for the fuel tanks went not to someplace logical—some place on the Gulf Coast, or at least the east coast, but instead inland in Texas or something. Fuel tanks are too big to move by rail or on roads, which meant that rather than building them as a single piece and moving them by boat, they were built in pieces. That’s not real safe, because it gives a point of failure. But, hey, no problem—we’ll just attach them with O rings. Which really didn’t work out, what with the explosion.
NASA needs some balls, like it had in the 1960s. They decided to do something, they got some tough-as-nails test pilots to test out model after model after model of rocket—some of those pilots dying in the process—and then we were on the moon. Now we’re about to retire the shuttles and be left with nothing, dependent on Russia to get to space. That’s embarrassing. The 1968 United States would kick the 2012 United States’ ass for that.
Waldo, everything in your first two paragraphs is incorrect… well, except for the last sentence of the second one.
The space plane project started, officially, in 1999. It was in concept for several years before that. It has most certainly NOT been cancelled. The OTV that is scheduled to be tested in January is the continuation of the X37 that NASA began with Boeing 10 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
The truly foolish course of action would be to continue throwing money into a program that had ZERO usefulness. It’s too bad that we spent as much as we did on it, but I’m sure that NASA engineers learned a great deal during the design and testing phase, and I’m very glad that they stopped throwing good money after bad.
I think the problem here is that we’re talking about two different programs with nearly identical names. The X-38 was (retroactively) part of the Orbital Space Plane program (which I’ll call “OSP,” now, instead of “space plane,” to avoid further confusion), which was one of the three components of the Integrated Space Transportation Plan”: the Shuttle, the OSP, and a yet-to-be-determined next generation launch system. The Shuttle was to get stuff up and down right now, the next launch system was to replace it, and the OSP was to move around within orbit, since there’s no reason to use a whole Shuttle just to go from one part of orbit to another. (Of course, the OSP was also intended to survive reentry.) The X-38 was cancelled, the OSP plan was promptly announced, and then that was killed, etc., as I already wrote.
So, yeah, we’re talking about two different things. The space plane is significantly more advanced than the OSP space plane, more like an airline than a glider.