Re: Charlie Stross vs. Interstellar Colonization

On Jun 24, 12:25 pm, Monte Davis <monte.da...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"dwight.thi...@xxxxxxxxx" <dwight.thi...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I can mightily sympathize with those who just don't want to see
this. I just can't agree with them.

I'd be more comfortable with a "let them have their illusions" stance
if the widespread desire for a Great Leap Forward weren't so often
*counterproductive* by (1) fostering a boom-bust cycle of
expectations, and (2) directing funds to over-ambitious (and later
canceled) G.L.F. projects instead of much smaller, incremental steps
that would add up over time.

Take the TPS on the Shuttle -- nobody's happy about the extreme
maintenance time/cost of the tiles, or the brittleness of the RCC, or
(last week) the flappability of the blanket. How many screeds have you
read about how we didn't get a titanium-molybdenum-handwavium hot
structure because OMB/Congress/NASA cheaped out way back when? And how
many X-30-something/40-something Great Leap Forward plans have
incorporated that (or equally swell active/passive cooling schemes or
the like)?

Well, we didn't know how to do it at *any* price on the STS timeline.
And if you look closely, every plan for heat loads in all the great
new STS successors proposed since then has had a large component of
"and then all the beyond-state-of-the-art unknowns will break our way
in two years flat." Anyone who tells you we *know* how to do much
better than the Shuttle TPS today, ready to incorporate in STS 2.0,
slam-dunk if you'll just fund it, is ignorant or lying.

What frustrates me is that I'm sure some of those ideas *would* work
-- but we aren't much closer to finding out twhich ones than we were
when the STS designers looked at them and said (quite rightly) "no
way, no how on our schedule." We could have eliminated the losers and
advanced the winners much more than we have, in a patient series of
fabrication tests and sample tests and component tests and even "drop
a 1/8-scale instrumented shape from LEO" tests that *not* tied to any
operational vehicle or even an X-craft.

But since NACA became NASA, patient test programs with no roll-out in
sight have almost never been glamorous enough -- either to hold their
own against immediate Apollo/STS/ISS/ESAS needs, or to build a
constituency in competition with sexier X-something plans. The same
thing can be seen in half a dozen other core technologies.

So we keep quoting Tsiolkovsky and Goddard and JFK to each other about
how important the Big Dreams are for progress in space -- and swinging
for the fences, and hitting fouls and pop flies, because singles and
doubles just wouldn't be thrilling enough.

Surely there's room for a little dreaming. What do you forsee as the
best way for NASA to utilize their resources? Could they do something
sexy, like work on extensible solar sails? Or maybe closed-loop, or
nearly closed-loop life support?


.

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: Charlie Stross vs. Interstellar Colonization
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