” ..’ve got a fire in the cockpit…. a bad fire… get out…”
The last 17 seconds of voice recordings of the astronauts in the Apollo 1 Fire, January 27, 1967
Sun Tzu says attack from a direction that is least expected. The corollary is that one must be vigilant in defense of areas where attack is unexpected to prevent or blunt such attack. Disaster does not always occur where risk is highest. And do not mistake known risk for all risk.
In today’s The Space Review, Stephen Fawkes notes that the space community needs to address carbon pollution. I want to applaud the use of hydrogen in the space shuttle–using about 400,000 gallons or 1/2 of one hundredth of one percent of all hydrogen used in the US each time it launches (one part in 20,000).
I also want to applaud Al Gore and Richard Branson for taking the lead on getting this problem solved for the whole world, not just the space and airline industries.
The gas coming out of a coal furnace is mostly carbon dioxide. Sequestration schemes need not look to capture and concentrate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere until power plant exhaust sources are exhausted. One way to sequester the CO2 is to send it into the ground via the same kind of pipeline and into the same kind of well they find methane in. Al, Richard, buy defibrillators with the $25 million if you end up awarding your greenhouse prize for this idea.
The problem of 143 tons of kerosene is no big deal. Following a carbon neutral strategy would add about $2,000 to the price of an orbital ticket that is priced in the millions at today’s European carbon abatement price per ton.
Carbon is an opportunity, not a material liability. It is time for the suborbital and orbital space companies to declare that they will be carbon neutral and buy carbon offsets for their customers. Join Space Shot and Virgin and help eclipse Earthbound dangers as we develop space.
I’m going to go line by line to analyze Monday’s article, “Just how full of opportunity is the Moon?” by Donald A. Beattie.
The Wall Street Journal has a front page story on the X Prize tiff between Benson and Rutan. This was pretty heady in 2004 on October 3 when Discover aired its special and Rutan’s team poised to win the $10 million suborbital prize. It’s probably pretty rare in NASCAR for the engine maker and the team to make dueling announcements on the nights before the race. I got to talk to Benson the night before the X Prize during the commercials while he was watching the Discover special. He had the restaurant at the Mariah Country Inn & Suites decked out with a big-screen TV. Benson’s group was already touting its Dreamchaser vehicle which was designed as an orbital vehicle, but was also being offered as a suborbital vehicle in direct competition with Space Ship Two. Benson was moved by the visuals in the Discover special. This was the culmination of his victory over eAc to win the engine contract.
Alas, Space Ship One did not enter passenger service. Perhaps because of the shudder or the cost of the hybrid motor, Paul Allen decided it was wiser to sell it to the Smithsonian.
WSJ’s lateness is forgivable. The story has never really gotten wide circulation. And Rutan, Benson and others still have not tested their passenger spaceships. On the other hand, mistakenly calling the suborbital fight an orbital fight is 25 times as bad.
New players ziggy and space traveler are working their way up the Free Space Shot tournament and are a couple of wins away from the lead. That makes the free site about 10 times as popular as the pay site was.
Bill Richardson’s actions to attract aerospace jobs to New Mexico and to incubate the personal spaceflight industry put his state in the lead of US states promoting personal spaceflight. The only government that has done more to promote personal spaceflight is Russia’s. We would not make his choices about how to allocate those state dollars, but wise spending can come later after New Mexico reaps the benefits of being one of the leading states if not the leading state in personal spaceflight.
Our endorsement is provisional because we are looking for a national space commercialization and settlement policy from each candidate (and other policies to the extent they affect space commercialization and settlement) before we make a final endorsement. We’ll let you know who is leading throughout 2007 and 2008.
Free Space Shot.com is attracting a lot of press. Takeup of our press release is about 900 media folks (I’m told the average is about 250). We have over 60,000 folks who have downloaded our press release. We’re on track to get 5 times as many page views as Hobbyspace.com this month.
We have also attracted some skeptics. Part of our marketing effort was to find out that there is a deep cognitive dissonance afflicting people over 13 in this country. Not only are they dissatisfied with NASA’s efforts to produce a space age, but they are bitter and resentful. They have not satisfactorily mourned the loss of their childhood and adolescent fantasies of being an astronaut. Not only are they jaded about spaceflight, but they are hostile to anyone who puts forward a legitimate prospect of success. That’s why we are targeting students 9-13. They are pre-sold on space.
Hence, Free Space Shot’s target market is not people over 13; they are not only not pre-sold on space, but had those hopes dashed. They may say they want to see spaceflight, but that is frequently just a license to gripe about NASA. Or private industry. Or the government of their choice in one of the real or potential space powers in the last 60 years. When it comes to lifting a finger to actually fly into space themselves or help others do so, they don’t.
The most severe form of this affliction is outright hostility to personal spaceflight such as that exhibited by Rep. Jim Oberstar.
The skepticism gets louder when people are onto something. For example, I’ve had two folks pick on Free Space Shot as impossible and sinister. Sinister?! Lucas wasn’t pilloried for making millions on Star Wars. Science Fiction books? No, perfectly safe psychologically. Is it that I am hawking non-fiction hope? Let’s look at comparative track records for other non-fiction hopes:
Hope for world peace: not doing so good
Hope for peace in the middle east: not doing so good
Hope for end to religious strife: not doing so good except in Ireland
Hope for carbon abatement: not doing so good (although I am bullish)
Hope for energy independence: not doing so good
Hope for nuclear disarmament: not doing so good
Hope for winning the lottery: Illinois thinks it’s peaked and is selling
Hope for winning a poker tournament after paying by credit card: Against the law
Hope for NASA settling the Moon and Mars: about 15 years away and holding.
So I am putting hope for personal spaceflight for the middle class out there. Am I being held to the standard of a hope? No, I am being held to the standard of a juvenile ideal. Businesses sometimes fail, but I am considered a swindler if mine does. I am pilloried a cheat if I promise less than I should. So perfection drives out the good. Kudos to an I-think-I-can small business? No, pilloried for not having terms and conditions that make it cost $1 million for Virgin or Microsoft to give away a $250,000 space flight.
Teachers and parents take note. Your schoolchildren will be told that the dream they follow is impossible. The evidence? Just that improbable is close to impossible. I offer license to hope. Am I offering a good or a bad if I fail? If Google can raise $10 billion in ad revenue and NBC $2 billion a year, why not Free Space Shot $100 million? It can. If enough believe it and play, it will. 200,000 kids is only 1% of kids 9-13. That’s all we need to have our own private economy where the skeptics will just shake their heads and say that fools being led by fools have done the impossible and start harping on the next “impossible” dream that comes along.
I wouldn’t be attracting the criticism if I wasn’t starting to sound eerily plausible; too good to be true. What if it is true? What if it really is this easy? Go back to sleep while the kids and I prove it out. Join the fun in a few years when even your subconscious is convinced.
As they say in Little Miss Sunshine, “You can’t fail if you don’t quit.” We’re not quitting. The Moon or Bust.
check out freespaceshot.com
Should be an interview at Out of the Cradle and the essay at The Space Review is up.
Nader Elhefnawy gets half of the trend when he says that “The 1970s was a period of intense concern about natural resource shortages…. [but] commodity prices started dropping…. Julian Simon … [bet] that the prices of copper, chrome, tin, nickel, and tungsten would drop by 1990. Simon won the bet handily. Even more dramatically, the price of oil, which hit $40 a barrel by 1981, fell to $10 a barrel by 1998.”
In Simon’s The Ultimate Resource 2, he shows how ingenuity has always led prices to fall. Including the price of agricultural land.
Elhefnawy goes on to say:
Over the long term the energy, raw materials, and space of the solar system and beyond will need to be tapped if humanity is to go on expanding. Simple math dictates this. A two percent annual growth rate in energy production means a roughly eightfold increase in a century’s time, century after century, and current levels of energy production are already taxing the Earth’s ecosystem beyond its limits. (emphasis his)
No, actually not.
Jeff Foust over at the Space Review reports that NASA has its work cut out for it to convince kids that it is relevant. My prescription is simple. Become like the Park Service and open up the Moon for visits.