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.