I should say, “Everything bad about the Shuttle was entirely predictable, even by people who later turned out to be not very smart.” Which I know, because it was, by Gregg Easterbrook of all people. Easterbrook is well-known to science bloggers as the ESPN football columnist with a special knack for inserting his opinions about science into his columns, and getting it wildly wrong every single time. It’s an intimidating resume of wrongness, on a wide swath of topics: global warming, anti-hydrogen, extra dimensions, evolution, cosmology, atheism, and consciousness. But at least he tends to recycle the same claptrap in multiple venues, thus saving us from different varieties of his craziness.
Which leaves me honestly astonished at stumbling across this 1980 Washington Monthly story on the space shuttle program. The shuttle program had been running at NASA since the early Seventies, when the agency was looking to take the next step after the Apollo missions. They explored an ambitious list of possibilities, before budgets and technology forced them to narrow it down to a partly-renewable shuttle vehicle and (to give it something to do) a modular space station. The burden imposed by these bad decisions is crippling NASA’s science program to this day. The first shuttle launch wasn’t until 1981, and in 1980 almost everyone was in cheerleader mode — this was going to be a momentous step in humanity’s move into space, a cheap and reliable way to bring low-Earth orbit to the masses.
It didn’t quite work out that way, but very few people bothered to poke around in what was going on to read the tea leaves effectively. But this 1980 article did — and it was written by none other than Gregg Easterbrook! Or somebody with his name, anyway. It’s an extraordinary piece, extremely well-researched and detailed, and it lays out with unblinking specificity everything that will proceed to go wrong with the shuttle program in the years to come. The shuttle can’t reach past low-Earth orbit, so conventional rockets will still need to be used. It’s vastly more expensive and complicated than would be necessary to make frequent flights feasible. It was bloated in size in response to Defense Department demands. It will be subject to continual delays. It didn’t have anything specifically to do that couldn’t be done better by other means. It was rickety and fragile and would undoubtedly blow up or crash. Easterbrook examines individual problematic issues in detail, from the infamous refractory tiles to the engineering challenges of building engines that have to operate in unprecedented extremes of heat and cold, pressure and vacuum — and then be used again.
In retrospect, parts of the article are tragically prescient:
Some suspect the tile mounting is the least of Columbia’s difficulties. “I don’t think anybody appreciates the depths of the problems,” Kapryan says. The tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as “safe life.” That means there is no back-up for them. If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry. If enough fall off, the shuttle may become unstable during landing, and thus un-pilotable. The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space. (Verdict: Can’t be done. You can hardly do it on the ground.)
And this was in 1980! By Gregg Easterbrook! Did something happen to him in the interim?
I get all my best technology news from football blogs.
That article is the whole reason he’s still asked to write about science by outlets like Slate. I think it made his career. Unfortunately it was a total anomaly. He’s like a 3rd-rate scientist who happens to write one great paper and coasts on it for the rest of his life.
Wow, thanks for the link. Fantastic article.
I think my favorite work by Easterbrook, though, is still this column you mentioned a couple years ago, in which he suggests that gamma-ray bursts are “the emission lines of horrific weapons being used by civilizations that have acquired fantastic knowledge compared to us, but no additional wisdom.” Which, you know, seems reasonable.
A fellow grad student and I once considered the possibility that gamma-ray bursts were in fact caused by exploding Death Stars in galaxies far, far away. We realized in the end that an exploding Death Star would likely produce a lot of thermal emission of the sort that isn’t seen in typical GRBs. Another beautiful hypothesis meets its end at the hands of cold, cruel data.
You guys are losers. Easterbrook is fun and is never pretending to be a real scientist. He likes to make fun of us because of we say things like “we don’t know where 80% of the universe is.” Why not laugh along? I think you are the only group of people who took the gamma-ray bursts “hypothesis” as an actual hypothesis instead of what it really is – a dopey sci-fi explanation to make the reader think about the possibility of the existence of other civilizations.
Easterbrook’s ESPN articles are primarily about football, and he does good football analysis. So he likes sci-fi, too, so what? So he is tired of Richard Dawkins? Who isn’t? Doesn’t understand cosmology? Who cares? It’s all just good fun, people. I would never have stopped to think about anything as silly as the origin of gamma-rays if he hadn’t brought it up.
Scientists are increasingly coming off as smug, and y’all aren’t helping.
Well, first thing to understand is that Easterbrook really is in a class by himself when it comes to football columns. He is far and away the most insightful one there is, with no one running a close second.
I am split when it comes to the non-football items he mixes in, though. The cheerleader stuff is very tedious. Pointing out logical holes in TV SF series plotting is just shooting fish in a barrel – plotting always comes before rigor in TV SF, and in most books as well. If the plot requires the fleet navigate through the nebula and not around it, they do so, regardless of whether that’s consistent with previously outlines technical capabilities of said fleet. If you want hard SF with rigorously logical, hermetically consistent extrapolation, read Larry Niven’s Gil the Arm stories and turn the frakkin’ TV off.
The “science criticism” he does is just plain silly, and I do find it quite annoying. Since, in his own milieu, he does know his stuff, his readers might assume he knows what he’s talking about in this area as well. Obviously he doesn’t. Hell, I don’t even know what I’m talking about in this area, and I catch him in ludicrous errors quite often! That’s the science equivalent of being run down from behind in the open field by a lineman.
See what I did there? nice, eh? …no? *sigh*
I scoff at his science, and I find his politics ludicrous and indefensible. But when it comes to both the technical aspects of football (current column on underutilization of the tight end position) or the politics around it (recent columns on the NFL coverup of the Patriots’ cheating scandal, or his yearly diatribe against the monopolistic catastrophe that is the NFL Sunday Ticket program) he’s the best there is.
So I take what I need, and leave the rest.
Jefe, I’m with ya on Dawkins – I don’t necessarily disagree with him for the most part, but he’s a dick, and he’s not helping. When you’re on the record as being an asshole to Freeman Dyson, you’ve lost your grip. “Schoolboy error” my @$$. What a tool that guy is.
This has the makings of the best thread ever. Even better than the ones where you make fun of economists.
There was a ton of people who were really irate with the space shuttle, going back to its inception.
Its always been the great debate in engineering circles, namely why abandon the Apollo program (which was a marvel of ingenuity) for something as cludgy as the space shuttle.
Unfortunately it became very much of a political battle and we all know the result.
Back in the 1980s Congress was being asked to fork over billions for both the Superconducting Supercollider and for the International Space Station. So they decided to pick one.
Sigh.
However, these things are not zero sum exercises. Money saved in canceling the ISS would be unlikely to have transferred into the SSC.
No One:
“A fellow grad student and I once considered the possibility that gamma-ray bursts were in fact caused by exploding Death Stars in galaxies far, far away. We realized in the end that an exploding Death Star would likely produce a lot of thermal emission of the sort that isn’t seen in typical GRBs. Another beautiful hypothesis meets its end at the hands of cold, cruel data.”
A few years ago, as a grad student, I discussed a solution of the cosmological constant problem with a friend (who was a post-doc at the time). My friend had suggested that actually the field theory estimate for Lambda is correct. However, an ancient alien civilization figured out how to drain the vacuum energy and use it to make weapons. Lambda is so small today because they drained so much of it. Fortunately, they killed themselves off before they drained it down to Lambda
I remember watching the first launch of Columbia on TV in Holland like it was yesterday (as a 10-year old I even wrote a letter to NASA in some perverse Dutch-English hybrid language and got a response!). Now I don’t know this Easterbrook guy, but everyone was going on about the tiles at the time. In fact, Columbia even lost a few on the tail. So was he really that prescient?
I was writing for Discover in 1980-81, and did a sidebar about the tiles for its Shuttle cover story. The editor, steeped in the gee-whiz traditions of space race coverage, couldn’t get enough impressive numbers about the 25,000+ precisely machined, painstakingly installed, minutely inspected tiles. When I suggested that maybe this was Not a Good Thing for what was billed as a workaday space truck, he didn’t understand what I was driving at: this was an amazing technological achievement, and by god we were going to celebrate it! Since then I’ve come to realize that almost everybody — NASA, Congress, space fans, citizens — was operating in that same reality distortion field.
The Shuttle’s problems were rooted in the hubris of thinking we could get from everything we’d done in space before — the performance-at-any-cost, one-time-use engineering (and economics) of expendable launch vehicles — to a routine, robust, reusable system within a decade, in a single step. We were exploring a whole new engineering and economic trade space — but Version 1.0 was going to be an operational, cost-effective system right out of the gate, replacing ELVs for all purposes.
Maybe that was inevitable in the afterglow of Apollo’s success. (‘Hey, we got to the moon, how hard can it be to make getting just 200 miles up routine?’) But it was starkly impossible — as if the Wright brothers had determined to build a DC-3 by 1910. Cheap access to space was (and still is) a qualitatively different and much harder challenge than Apollo, demanding multiple non-operational “X” programs to tackle one problem at a time (e.g. sturdy, low-maintenance thermal protection, which still isn’t nearly solved)… and a lot of flight experience feeding back into new design iterations in small, incremental steps. That was true in 1972 and remains true today, despite the New Space hype about how private enterprise will do everything 10x faster and 10x cheaper.
Space is hard, people. Orbital rocketry pushes near the physical limits of chemical propellants and workable materials, with a very high cost of entry (two bicycle mechanics won’t cut it), serving a market that’s tiny — a few hundred tons a year to orbit worldwide — compared to any other form of transport. It’s going to take a long, slow, expensive bootstrapping process to get costs down and demand up enough to start a self-financing virtuous circle. Real progress will begin when we acknowledge that — and stop analyzing the Shuttle as if it were a lemon, trying to pin the blame on someone. In fact, the Shuttle wasn’t half bad for a v. 1.0. The problem was our unrealistic “breakthrough” expectations.
Monte, that’s one of the most insightful blog comments I’ve read in ages. Thank you.
I was just going to say that Easterbrook’s astronomy tidbit in this week’s ESPN column wasn’t that bad (although it is misinformed about the proprietary periods for data) until I got to “a group of mainly British astronomers studying a specific patch of the heavens broke this guild arrangement” by putting the AEGIS data on Google Sky. Not only is the stuff about “guild arrangement” a gross exaggeration, but AEGIS, which I worked on, is not mainly British. The website is at Lick Observatory in California, for heavens’ sake. Argh.
However, bitching about Easterbrook’s astronomy inaccuracy is beside the point. (His ill founded environmental skepticism is probably worse.) At least he CARES. How many other popular columnists are repeatedly advertising for science?
I’m sorry, Sean, but what exactly is your point? You are surprised that Easterbrook called out the Shuttle the failure it was destined to be? Why?
It was freaking obvious even then that this was a waste of time and money.
Maybe this was not obvious to the “man belongs in space” crowd who have spent rather too much time watching Star Trek, but it was obvious to those of us in the reality based community. And, you know what, it wasn’t a difficult. Heck, I’ll go even better. Allow me to predict that NASA’s next great human launch vehicle, whatever the heck it is, will also be a disappointment. Why? Because putting people in space is a stupid, pointless activity that will inevitably end in tears. It is too freaking expensive, and space is too freaking hostile for things to be any different. Best case scenario — Americans actually get to Mars sometime in the next twenty years without any deaths along the way. The end result will still be vastly less science than could have been done by robot for the same amount of money, will have buggerall useful spinoffs (honestly accounted), and will do precious little in terms of furthering any larger goal of getting humans off Earth.
The fact that the US is currently spending like a drunken sailor, that this is going to end soon, and that this ending is going to hurt everything the federal government does, including NASA, makes the way this will playout even sadder, but is not essential to the storyline. It will probably, however, mean some pretty damn angry grumbling on the part of a sizable number of US tax payers.
I am not saying it will always be this way. A thousand years from now, who knows what we’ll be doing in terms of materials, manipulation of the human body, and other rocketry-related sciences. What I am saying is that right now, it is just too hard a problem for current science.
Compared to the national budget, Maynard, the cost of sending people into space is a pittance.
However, I’m not sure that we should be worried about that at the moment, as rockets are never going to be a cost-effective method for sending anything into space (let alone people). The only way we’re ever going to be capable of sending things into space cheaply will be if we manage to construct a ground-based launch platform, something to the tune of a space elevator. If we can build such a vehicle that will get us to the moon in one shot (with a relatively small amount of propellant to stop us when we get there), then it should be relatively inexpensive to build a much larger platform on the moon, due to the low gravity and lack of atmosphere, and use that platform to launch ourselves to wherever in the solar system we desire.
…rockets are never going to be a cost-effective method for sending anything into space (let alone people).
I’d qualify that to say that at some scale, with enough economies of scale, chemical-fueled rockets could be cost-effective — but that starting from where we are, it’s hard to see a cost-effective path to that scale of activity. The rocket equation, the earth’s gravity well, and the energetics of chemical propellants tell you that in the best possible case (zero structural weight) you need roughly 8x the payload mass in propellant to get to orbit; real rockets, of course, don’t do nearly that well.
Propellant is cheap, so that ugly ratio isn’t the killer in itself. But it does drive you into an economic corner in which you need lots and lots of payload to amortize the up-front costs: either (1) reusable launchers with a high flight rate, (2) huge numbers of cheap mass-produced expendables, or (3) lesser numbers of extremely large expendables — and even those would have to be manufactured more cheaply per kg than anything we’ve ever done in aerospace.
So you get a chicken-and-egg impasse: only very large payload volume is likely to drive down launch costs per kg dramatically, but nobody can afford that kind of volume starting from current cost levels. Which is why space fans have long yearned for the Big Project, something with extra-economic incentives like solar power satellites or space-based missile defense, to get “over the hump” from a few hundred tons of payload a year to tens or hundreds of thousands of tons.
You may well be right that some other technology will become feasible before chemical rocketry can bootstrap its way up that steep curve. All I meant to say in the Easterbrook context was that we’ve spent decades second-guessing the Shuttle as if it were a lemon, but [implicit premise] some other design for a version 1.0 reusable could have been the breakthrough to cheap and cheerful spaceflight. I think that premise is wrong: that the underlying engineering and economic constraints are so tough as to require a long road, with many successive versions needed, for any design approach.
The only problem is the atmosphere. Once we have bases on the Moon, space stations orbiting Mars etc., we can travel without any fuel costs. There is no friction in space, so if we just accelerate objects using a rail gun, energy can be recovered when the object arrives at its destination with high velocity. You just extract energy by letting it fly though a coil and extract energy from using induction.
One can actually generate a net amount of energy this way using the gravitatonal slingshot effect.
I remember looking at design drawings of the space shuttle twenty-eight years ago. The plans struck me then as preposterous, and as signifying a depressing degeneration in engineering
since ancient times when magnificent structures like the wall of Jericho or the lighthouse of Alexandria actually worked and could even stand for hundreds of years.
But the space shuttle has since acquired a broader meaning. This piece is short enough to copy her in full, from Counterpunch:
February 1, 2003
Jung and the Space Shuttle
Symbol and Synchronicity with the Columbia Disaster
by JERRY KROTH
The loss of the Columbia space shuttle is suffused with symbols begging for attention. Columbia is named, in part, after Christopher Columbus and symbolically points to the very discovery of the American nation. Strangely, on the threshold of America’s preemptive invasion of Iraq to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction, the shuttle’s hold contained the first Israeli astronaut who in 1981 himself participated in a preemptive attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor to eliminate its capacity for developing weapons of mass destruction. An uncanny echo, but certainly not the only one.
As we are on the precipice of a war with Iraq, the whole Arab world screams that it is not Iraq but America’s relationship with Israel and the Palestinian crisis that is the root cause of all Arab anti-American sentiment and certainly all terrorism. Suddenly the Columbia crashes with an Israeli astronaut over George Bush’s home state as debris rains down on “Palestine, Texas.” One cannot help but hear these mysterious reverberations.
Similarly, just as the very essence of Israel is intimately connected to the holocaust as a place of refuge against the worst evil ever perpetrated by man against man, so we cannot help but notice another coincidence: Israel’s astronaut was the son of a holocaust survivor.
These synchronicities drape themselves over the landscape of our sadness, almost overshadowing the advent of the America’s next major war. But perhaps the word is not overshadow but foreshadow, and the meaning of the Columbia disaster—if we are to hazard a guess about these coincidences—is that it is the American relationship with Israel that is leading toward disaster. Certainly many in the Islamic world will see this as a preternatural sign that America’s connection to Israel will result in its annihilation.
On the other hand, if our focus is on Israel, then the meaning might be that it is Israel’s relationship with America which is leading it toward disaster, not the other way round, and here we have a more immediate meaning since an invasion of Iraq will more likely result in retaliation upon Israel than upon the U.S. mainland.
Psychiatrist Carl Jung’s teachings about synchronicities-as-oracles might echo similar sentiments. The fact that all this happened on the first day of the Chinese New Year—a terrible omen in ancient China—adds another element of foreboding. Let us hope such things are egregious speculations and that there is no symbolic significance here, merely meaningless coincidences, a few loose tiles, a painful accident, and the loss of very dear people whose parent’s grief galvanizes a nation’s remorse.
Jerry Kroth, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology at Santa Clara University. He can be reached at: anya@znet.com