And now for something completely different.  Like most (all?) geeks, I love the idea of human space travel.  I know we have got tons of problems to fix here, but I don’t think that should deter us from pursuing some of our other dreams (after all we wouldn’t have airplanes either had folks waited for everything else to be dandy). 

So I was dismayed to read that NASA’s mandate continues to be to pursue a heavy lift strategy.  It is the space travel equivalent of scaling up instead of scaling out.  As you grow a machine, the waste and the need to cope with it becomes an ever bigger problem (eg cooling a huge CPU).  Similarly, the physics of lifting are such that you have massively declining returns to scale (eg more fuel requires a larger tank which is heavier).  Admission: my knowledge here comes from building model rockets, so this is a bit like “Flight of the Phoenix” and might be off the mark.

Instead, I believe we should be getting folks like SpaceX and others to compete on getting relatively small loads into space ever cheaper and more reliably.  Then we should have a separate effort to figure out how to assemble stuff in space and/or colonize the moon where we would have a low gravity environment for building a larger space ship.  I would love to see us at least attempt to get to Mars with that kind of approach combined with a one-way strategy (not unlike the discovery of America after all), meaning that the mission would have to figure out how to generate enough fuel for a return upon arrival.

It is worth pointing out that there is a spectacular disconnect between our willingness to send thousands of young people to their deaths in questionable wars and our current risk tolerance in the space program.  I am hoping that some day soon we will figure out how to reboot NASA, take big risks and get someone to Mars.

And now for something completely different.  Like most (all?) geeks, I love the idea of human space travel.  I know we have got tons of problems to fix here, but I don’t think that should deter us from pursuing some of our other dreams (after all we wouldn’t have airplanes either had folks waited for everything else to be dandy). 

So I was dismayed to read that NASA’s mandate continues to be to pursue a heavy lift strategy.  It is the space travel equivalent of scaling up instead of scaling out.  As you grow a machine, the waste and the need to cope with it becomes an ever bigger problem (eg cooling a huge CPU).  Similarly, the physics of lifting are such that you have massively declining returns to scale (eg more fuel requires a larger tank which is heavier).  Admission: my knowledge here comes from building model rockets, so this is a bit like “Flight of the Phoenix” and might be off the mark.

Instead, I believe we should be getting folks like SpaceX and others to compete on getting relatively small loads into space ever cheaper and more reliably.  Then we should have a separate effort to figure out how to assemble stuff in space and/or colonize the moon where we would have a low gravity environment for building a larger space ship.  I would love to see us at least attempt to get to Mars with that kind of approach combined with a one-way strategy (not unlike the discovery of America after all), meaning that the mission would have to figure out how to generate enough fuel for a return upon arrival.

It is worth pointing out that there is a spectacular disconnect between our willingness to send thousands of young people to their deaths in questionable wars and our current risk tolerance in the space program.  I am hoping that some day soon we will figure out how to reboot NASA, take big risks and get someone to Mars.