We’re going through an interesting sort of revolution in America. One after another, various disciplines are realizing (or, it’s coming out publicly that they have realized) that math is useful for stuff.
Wherever there is data available, a scientific, quantitative approach allows people to do two things. First, they can use existing data to develop a model which fits all the available observations. Next, they can in turn use the model to predict future behavior. And if people can make predictions, they can try to make decisions. Influence outcomes. Optimize certain results.
An obvious place for such an approach is the world of high finance, a discipline which is totally steeped in numbers and data – and completely focused on the very quantitative problem of maximizing a return and minimizing loss – but for a long time apparently ignored statistical modeling. People successfully applied statistical analysis, and ended up doing very well…but there was a backlash. Here’s an interview where a reporter complains that trying to optimize stock market gains somehow mis-values the stock market, at least according to his conception of value.
Geez. Those…those…physicists. They use models based on data of past performance, then try and predict future performance…and worst of all, they keep getting their predictions right!
(I want to note that if someone has a problem with the idea that these “quants” have privatized tremendous gains and socialized tremendous losses, that’s not a problem with their approach. It’s an issue with the goals of their models, and whether those goals are morally justified is a separate question from whether the approach works to satisfy the goals.)
We also have a ton of data available in the world of professional sports. Commentators make it their business to know – and inform viewers – whether or not this is the guy who gets on base with a ground-rule double on an overcast Tuesday more than any other player with an odd jersey number when the pitcher throws a 96-mile-an-hour fastball. In fact, this revolution I’m referring to might even be called the Moneyball effect. After all, that movie brought this idea forward in the popular consciousness.
Most recently – and certainly most dramatically – we have people who build statistical models on political poll data. Despite a constant media barrage insisting that the 2012 election was a dead-heat horse-race fifty-fifty hyphenated-adjective toss-up, these poll wonks stubbornly viewed their data scientifically, constructed careful algorithmic models, and predicted a much more certain, though far less entertaining, outcome. There was quite a backlash against these predictive models, at first, though the backlash seems to have been driven by either ideological preconceptions or a misunderstanding of the statistics: a poll showing two candidates with a 51-49% split doesn’t mean that the likelihood of each candidate winning is 51% or 49%. In true Hari Seldon-like fashion, the models aren’t predicting what single voters do or making decisions for us; but with an aggregate of people, they can make astonishingly good predictions. In many ways, this was the biggest story to come out of the 2012 American elections: scientific thinking and mathematical methods actually work!
This notion seems revolutionary, in each field it has touched so far. That appearance is what I find most surprising! Science has given humanity an entire body of knowledge. We can predict the behavior of quantum particles. We can determine whether there are planets orbiting other stars. We can forecast snowfall to within a few inches of accuracy a week in advance. We can find out what the feathers on a dinosaur look like. We can reconstruct Pangaea in a computer. And all the predictive mathematical models that allow scientists to do those things also give us cell phones, Angry Birds, medications, contact lenses, and all sorts of other goodies. Science isn’t just something that happens in isolated labs – it gets out into the world. And quantitative thinking isn’t magical wizardry – it is a tool that anyone with the will to apply themselves can learn.
I’ve seen some political surveys recently that ask respondents to pick the most important issue to them from a predefined list, and I’ve never had any of these lists include what I think is the most important issue facing our country right now. This is probably because it’s hard to condense my issue into a pithy phrase. Generally, I would go for a choice such as “science and technology policy” or “research, innovation, and education,” but items like those almost never appear in the poll options.
We live in a fast-moving world, and I am concerned about the United States’ ability to keep up. Perennial stories crop up in the news of how US students’ test scores are falling in science and math, how high technology is moving to India and China, how other countries are committing increasing resources to clean energy, space stations, or Moon probes. Companies in the US are much more focused on next-quarter profits than they are on research and development. Congressmembers routinely attack the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Health for wasting taxpayer money by spending it on basic research. In such a climate, I am worried about whether, in the next decade or two, the US will cede global leadership to other countries. The problem isn’t just money, but also the level of public awareness, understanding, and engagement of the work coming out of places like the NSF and NASA.
This is not just an idealistic policy issue – it’s also an education issue, economic issue, and national security issue. Do we want to create high-paying, rewarding jobs? We can do so by investing in high-tech infrastructure. Do we want American companies to innovate? We need to make sure they have incentives for longer-term R&D. Do we want our transportation systems to be safe from terrorist threats? Then we need intensive research on efficient and sensible ways to identify concealed weapons. Do we want true energy security for the long haul? Then we need to pursue technological solutions for renewable or clean energy sources. Do we want our military to remain effective and safe? Then we need to give our soldiers, sailors, and airmen the latest technologies. Do we want our children to be able to compete in the global marketplace when they grow up and start looking for work? We need to equip them with the best tools we can.And do we want our policymakers to make informed and well-considered decisions about all these issues? Then we need to make sure they are well-educated about science and technology, too!
I want candidates for office to advocate enhanced support for the NSF, NIH, Department of Energy, and NASA. I want them to stand for infrastructure investments. I want them to speak highly of science and engineering scholarship or fellowship programs. I want them to care about basic research. I want them to commit federal dollars to programs that clearly enhance our capabilities and quality of life, but corporations won’t pursue because of their myopic short-term goals. I want them to openly consult the smartest people they can find when considering these issues.
That’s what I think is the most important issue in America. Science and technology policy. Science and math education. High-tech infrastructure. Secure energy. The value of intelligence and critical thinking. In short: the future. Continue reading The Most Important Issue→
I’m rooting for the Affordable Care Act – also known as Obamacare (for some reason I don’t understand – since Congress had more to do with it than the President did, and since its intellectual roots could reasonably be called both Romneycare and Gingrichcare).
When I was three years old, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. This is not the kind of diabetes that correlates with lifestyle choices. Its causes are not fully known. And there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it. Now, I need an external source of insulin to survive. I need to monitor my blood glucose religiously to properly tune my insulin dosage. My choice is pretty stark: get insulin and glucose testing supplies, or die.
Well, maybe not die. Not right away. I’d be in for a lot of nasty complications and time at the hospital first.
This is one reason why health-related commerce does not take place in a free market, and why it would be completely inappropriate for it to do so. It’s also why the term “insurance” is a total misnomer in the phrase “health insurance.”
So: I’m a fan of Obamacare. It means that insurance companies cannot drop my coverage because I have this “preexisting condition.” It means they can’t jack up my rates because something random happened when I was 3. It means that I don’t have to worry that if I lose my job (for instance, let’s say our society stops investing in high-technology infrastructure…) that my savings will evaporate and my life will be at risk. I am 27, which means I should have a lot of life ahead of me – which means there’s a long time for things like those to happen. I’d like to prevent them, if possible – but the health insurance industry is set up to obfuscate and avoid paying out. If insurers had their way, they’d drop me in a moment. I think there’s a clear case that we need strong legislation to regulate health insurance providers.
To me, Obamacare means peace of mind. It also means that I don’t have to pay for people who rely on the ER for health care, which means my own costs will go down. I get more and I pay less: sounds like a good deal to me.
I am a member of the “millennial” generation. You know, the stereotypical hipster kids who like some band you’ve probably never heard of and are living with their parents, unemployed. Except…that’s not me.
I graduated from college and immediately went to grad school. In the sciences, math, and engineering, students generally get paid stipends to go to grad school. Oh, sure, it wasn’t a huge stipend, but it was enough not only to pay the bills but also to let me squirrel away some savings. I was in graduate school during the big financial bust of 2008, but I kept working and kept getting that stipend, thanks in part to the fact that my university valued its grad students enough to guarantee our funding, and in part to support my lab received from various organizations, including NASA – an agency of the federal government.
Immediately after I finished my degree, I got a job. In fact, I even had to push my start date back a little bit, because I needed some time to finish up university obligations and organize my final dissertation. My total period of unemployment was about a week, in early 2011, and then I started working. As it happens, the job I took is with a major commercial spacecraft company; the biggest program we are working right now is a batch of satellites that the US Air Force bought to replace older models.
So, here’s one person’s story: I’ve directly benefited from a government and from institutions that value advanced education, basic research, high technology, and infrastructure investments. And the recession didn’t touch me.
I was thinking about NASA’s new launch vehicle plans, and I decided to dig through some of the data in the public record and crunch a few numbers on launch vehicle performance. Specifically, payload mass to orbit.
I am proceeding from my favorite space-system-engineering assumption, which is that we can take more than one launch to build a spacecraft. Thus, the payload mass to orbit on a single launch is not the most important metric for a launch vehicle. I care equally about how frequently the launcher flies. So I crawled through launch dates and came up with numbers for the average (and peak) payload masses various launch systems delivered to low Earth orbit on an annual basis. (For example, between January and November 1985, the Space Shuttle launched a total of nine times, and in no continuous one-year period did the Shuttle launch 10 or more times, so I multiplied the Shuttle’s payload capacity by 9 to get the peak annual payload to orbit figure.)
Here’s what I came up with:
Launch System
Mass to LEO, Single Launch
Mass to LEO, Avg Annual
Mass to LEO, Peak Annual
Saturn V
119,000
258,927
476,000
Space Shuttle
24,000
84,019
219,600
Atlas V
29,420
169,107
205,940
Delta IV Heavy
23,000
15,119
23,000
Titan IV
21,680
47,337
108,400
Ariane V ES/ECA
21,000
47,049
147,000
Space Launch System
170,000
170,000
170,000
All masses are in kilograms, and for the SLS I used the “evolved” 2021 configuration of the vehicle and the projection that it will likely fly once per year. Averages are over the course of the entire available service lifetime for the vehicle.
My points are these:
While the Saturn V is still the behemoth of launch no matter how you slice it, some of the other systems come surprisingly close in certain metrics. Even though SLS will boost more than the venerable Saturn, it’s more of an incremental improvement – and the Saturn launched more frequently in its heyday than SLS is likely to. Cost information on the Saturn V (either total cost per launch or cost per kilogram) is a little tricky to come by; I don’t think there are good estimates, so it’s hard to see how that stacks the deck. I suspect that the Saturn V’s cost per launch would hurt it in this comparison.
Historically, the Space Shuttle has already outperformed the projected mass to LEO of the fully evolved SLS. It didn’t always, but there were a couple year-long periods when I did count 9 STS launches/year. By the peak annual mass to LEO metric, then, SLS is a step back from the Shuttle.
The commercial Atlas V is essentially already as good at putting mass in orbit as the SLS will be, on average. And its peak annual mass to LEO is 35 metric tons higher.
My biggest point, however, still is that if you count cumulative launch capacity over several launches, you can get enough material into orbit to build some really big things. We could have NASA developing self-contained habitats and interplanetary spacecraft without developing any new NASA launch systems.
Today, the group of Senators with a stake in the space program and NASA administrator Gen Charles Bolden had a press conference to announce key decisions related to the design of the Senate Space Launch System, or SLS. To summarize:
The SLS is going to be based on a LH/LOx-fueled core, powered by 5 Space Shuttle Main Engines at the base and some Saturn V-derived engines on the second stage.
The SLS is likely going to have strap-on solid rocket boosters, derivatives of (if not exactly the same production models as) the Space Shuttle’s booster rockets.
The SLS will carry the Orion MPCV capsule.
The first targeted flight of the SLS is supposed to be in the late 2010’s.
NASA is supposed to paint it to look like a Saturn V. Saturn V Saturn V remember those? those were awesome, when you think of the Senate Space Launch System, think of a Saturn V.
Blatant paint job, huh?
I did not have high hopes for this announcement, because I am not a fan of the idea that NASA must have a heavy-lift rocket. I think that the premise the SLS is based on, that a super-heavy-lift rocket is a requirement for deep-space exploration, is flawed. To me, the SLS looks like the kind of rocket I would build if my goal was to send two or three people to an asteroid to plant flags and footprints, and then come home, and then let the space program atrophy away until nobody cares about it any more.
I think that, instead, NASA ought to leverage everything it learned from the Shuttle program about building things in space and construct a fleet of in-space vehicles, out of parts that could be launched on smaller, cheaper vehicles – such as Falcon 9’s or Atlas 5’s. These vehicles would remain in space for their entire lives, so that they don’t ever have to lug a massive heat shield all the way to Mars and back or anything like that. Every time we want to send another crew into deep space, we need only launch a new fuel tank and supplies – instead of a whole new spacecraft!
The SLS hardly represents a bold leap forward for NASA. Heavier and heavier lift is not so much of a challenge in innovation as it was in the ’60’s – and even the SLS is only fractionally more powerful than a Saturn V. It is supposed to use Saturn-V-derived (read: 50-year-old) engines on one stage and Shuttle-derived (read: 40-year-old) engines on the other. NASA artists went to great lengths to evoke the Saturn V in concept art of the SLS – but to me, that’s a bad omen. It demonstrates how much NASA has stagnated at the whims of Congress.
Worse, according to the New York Times, there are internal NASA documents showing that if the NASA budget remains flat, this rocket won’t have any manned flights until 2021 or beyond. And the NASA budget this year – in the very same appropriations process that generated the SLS – went down. I fear that Congress failed to learn the lessons of the Constellation program: that if you don’t fund a project like this, it will gobble up money from all the other science and technology and space research and missions NASA is supposed to be doing; and if all NASA’s eggs end up in one basket like that, then it really just takes that one project going over budget and coming in behind schedule to topple the whole thing.
I was pleasantly surprised by one bit of good news here, at least: the Senate has backed off a bit on over-specifying the SLS design. Allowing NASA to spec out a LH/LOx core rocket and put out the boosters for competitive bids is a Very Good Thing; previously, Congressional rumblings sounded like the rocket had all been awarded to ATK already. I worried about that because ATK has built itself a track record of running very behind schedule and over budget on NASA rockets, and a liquid-fueled design will be much more efficient than a solid rocket could ever achieve.
On the whole, the story wasn’t as bad as I thought is was going to be. However, I’m finding it harder and harder to be optimistic about the future of NASA with a project like SLS present. My prediction: SpaceX is going to come up with a Falcon 9 Heavy that totally outshines the SLS in capability, cost, and speed of delivery – and I can only hope that, before too many resources get sunk into the Big, Dumb Rocket, Congress wises up and says to itself, “hey, why don’t we just buy a bunch of those?”
The sooner Congress does so, though, the better – because that will give NASA more leeway to build the interplanetary spacecraft that I really want!
Okay. It’s 10 September 2011, and I am 9/11’ed out.
Our nation experienced a tremendous tragedy on that day, and it deserves remembrance and reflection, but I am amazed at the extent to which the concept of “9/11” has been inflated and distorted in politics and the media. Our national sense of victimization has been used to justify all sorts of policies and actions, many of which I feel run counter to the ideals this nation stands for. After a decade, I wonder why our leaders and pundits have had such a hard time getting past the “every day is September 12th” mentality.
To me, the day of the attacks on 11 September 2001 demonstrated how we could come together as a nation under one flag, with common goals, common spirits, and common sympathies. Our divisions and distinctions meant very little on that day: instead, we were all Americans. 12 September 2001 was a powerful day in our nation’s history.
Since then, though, our reaction to the attacks has come to represent, to me, a series of national failures.
I look at the people who responded to the 9/11 attacks – people who demonstrated exceptional stoicism and heroism, people whose concern for their fellow countrymen and women overcame fears for their personal safety, people whose faith in their comrade responders gave them the strength to move towards danger rather than away from it. The thought that there were firefighters streaming into those towers and up the stairs until the moment they collapsed is truly astounding. And yet, to this day, our politicians bicker and dither on whether our nation should do some part to help support those who came to our aid in our darkest hour.
The whole nation of America has internalized the notion that we are victims of 9/11. People far from New York City feel that they, too, were directly attacked – a testament to New York City as a lasting icon of America and American ideals. Yet in the years since, I’ve seen neoconservatives in the punditry vilify the families of the people who lost their lives on 9/11, for whatever reason, while they are happy to simultaneously use the specter of 9/11 to justify who-knows-what actions, from torture to spying to invasion.
The United States went to war, twice, with the sentiment of September 12th. We have killed and died in the Middle East, and spent an amount of national treasure that makes the 2009 stimulus look like small change. Yet whether these wars made us more secure from terrorist attacks like those on 9/11 is still an issue for debate – and likely we will not know the answer to that question without the hindsight of history. In the end, it was not an invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq* that brought the true perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks to justice, but a small commando raid nine years after the fact – essentially, an international police action. And in the meantime, al-Qaeda was happy to put out announcements boasting about how much sympathy our invasion of Iraq had garnered for their cause. That it took us so much time, effort, resources, and lives to learn how to properly fight this ill-defined “war on terror” is disheartening to me.
During the time between 11 Sep 01 and the invasion of Iraq, I think that we as a nation began to confuse the concepts of patriotism and jingoism. There was a philosophy in the public sphere suggesting that to question the actions of the American government, and especially to question the justifications for invading another Middle-Eastern country, was not patriotic. Questioning torture was unpatriotic. Questioning whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was unpatriotic. In the words of our President, “You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists.” I believe that attitude damaged us as a nation, and a decade later, its effects on our politics reverberate with us to this day.
Most sickening to me is the backlash we have seen against American Muslims. This nation was founded on ideals of religious freedom – the thirteen original colonies refused to ratify the Constitution until it included protections against religious persecution, which have been enshrined in the First Amendment. America has always stood for the idea that anyone could come here and become anything that they wanted, even if it took us years to accept that that sentiment really did apply to everyone. We have learned: we learned from Irish immigrants and Asian immigrants, we learned from the Civil Rights Movement among African-Americans, we are still learning from the gay rights movement and from Hispanic immigration. The lesson we learn each time, though, is the same: we are all American. To see us take a step backwards by inventing hatreds against a people seemed, in a nutshell, profoundly un-American. It is not “in poor taste” to build a mosque in New York City – it is a triumph of American ideals over the philosophy of al-Qaeda. Let us never forget that, while the hijackers used Islam to justify their actions, Timothy McVeigh used Thomas Jefferson to justify his. Any person, philosophy, or religion can be taken out of context and distorted to justify a wide range of behaviors. So let Americans stop vilifying Islam because of the attacks.
I have to admit that perhaps this view of the legacy of 9/11 comes from my own reactions on the day itself. I felt angry and upset, but the events seemed remote to me and my feelings ended up…displaced. You see, on the morning of 11 September 2001, I was a senior in a Massachusetts high school, and sitting in calculus class when a runner came from the main office to deliver a note to the teacher. She read it and, while the students joked about who had to go to the office now, she mouthed “oh, my God” to herself. The students could all tell how much her mood had shifted, and we asked what happened.
At this point, I feel the need to reiterate that while we were in school, we were the senior class. Some of my classmates were old enough to vote. Some of them were old enough to join the military. We asked the teacher what the note was about and she put it aside, looked at us, and said the words: “This is way too important for you to know about.”
That was my school’s mentality: hide the events of the day from the students. It didn’t work at all. The vice principal pulled one of classmates out of the room to give him a brief sketch of events and tell him that his sister, in New York city, was all right – he promptly shared what little he knew with everyone in the room. Some students were pulled out of school by their parents, and before they left, they explained whatever they had gleaned about why. One of my friends used the cafeteria pay phone (barely anyone had a cell phone at the time!) to call home; someone in his family narrated the TV news to him, and he related it to the cafeteria at large. The net effect was that, at various times throughout the morning, students thought that there had been as many as a few dozen airplanes hijacked, or that maybe there had been a failure of the air traffic control system such that there were ten airline crashes at once in Pennsylvania, or that the White House and Pentagon had been blown up. I, for one, simply could not believe that the World Trade Center towers could have possibly collapsed, and my mind was filled with visions of them toppling sideways and crushing other buildings.
I was pissed off at the school – because at the time, I wasn’t just a nice, responsible, honors student who felt he could have handled this information. I also happened to be the Cadet Commander of the local Civil Air Patrol squadron. I had emergency services qualifications. On 9/11, after air traffic was grounded, the only aircraft in American airspace belonged to the military and to the Civil Air Patrol. Members of my squadron boarded their aircraft to fly blood for transfusions to New York City. One of my squadronmates was actually on the phonewith NORAD to negotiate flight paths for those small Cessnas. Some of the first aerial reconnaissance photos of Ground Zero, giving emergency workers the ability to assess the damage and plan rescue and recovery efforts, came from CAP missions. I was angry at the school, because I could have helped. In some small way, I could have made a difference to the response efforts. In retrospect, I feel guilty that I didn’t just march down to the main office, show them my CAP ID, and demand to call the squadron commander.
I feel that it’s likely that my impotency on that day colored my reactions to the attacks in general, and fueled my frustration as I watch our national policymakers and news organizations struggle to come to grips with the conflicting ideas that America is the most powerful nation in the world and that a dozen bigoted zealots can cause us so much harm. Over time, their struggle has produced the policy failures I alluded to earlier.
But I harbor hope for the future. Slowly, our national debate is evolving, and I am sure that eventually the “9/12 mentality” will become a much smaller part of our discourse. We are starting to pick up the pieces from our wars abroad, and starting to focus on the shape of our policies at home. At some point, we may stop using the September 11th attacks to define what is and is not American. After all, the children who are too young to remember the events of 9/11 are in middle school now.
It is time for us, as a nation, to move on. Let us remember the courage and sacrifice of that day, and let us go forward with the memory of those who lost their lives to make this country a better place for their families.
On that final note, I will leave you with this poignant video:
* Yes, most of the argument for war against Iraq did not explicitly invoke 9/11. However, remember that one of the justifications presented to the American people in the run-up to the Iraq invasion was that the 9/11 hijackers had met with high-level Iraqi officials. Even without that explicit link, I doubt that the invasion authorization would have passed Congress, or passed muster with the American people, without the events of 11 Sep 01.
It worries me when I see public figures, or aspiring public figures, disparaging scientific work because it is not compatible with their personal positions. The public gets to hear phrases like, “that’s only a theory,” or “that scientific theory has holes in it,” or “it’s not proven, we don’t know for sure yet;” all of which are meant to cast doubt on the validity of one scientific conclusion or another. The problem (and this is, of course, a point of subtlety that often causes proponents of science to look like they have a weaker argument in the public’s eyes) is that all those things are true for scientific findings. The good thing, though, is that none of those statements should be disparaging – if only lay people had a better understanding of the scientific process.
Scientific theories are “only” theories, yes…but “theory” is actually one of the highest terms of honor an idea can attain in the world of science. A “theory” is only accepted as such if it has graduated from the world of hypotheses after rigorous testing. A scientific theory represents the best possible idea humans can conceive of how part of the world works. And if a new theory comes along, in order to be better than the old theory, it still has to explain the same phenomena and fit the same data. Old theories often remain as subsets of new ones, rather than being discarded entirely.
Even then, when a theory represents the best understanding we have of the world, to say that it “has holes” or is “not conclusively proven” is not to say anything at all. Science is not a process of logical argument from immutable premises – it is a process of induction from observable data. We observe new data all the time, and our theories must adapt to that data if they cannot account for new observations. The most fundamental scientific theories still leave some phenomena unexplained, but that does not make them totally invalid. The theories of Newtonian or Einsteinian gravity don’t account for quantum behaviors, but knowing that does not mean that the next time I jump in the air I won’t come down to Earth again. Our best theories cannot be “proven” and cannot be “airtight” – but we can look at their track records to figure out how confident we should be in those theories. Every single time I have jumped in the air, I have fallen downward again. While the amount of observations I have are finite, and I cannot prove with 100% certainty that the next time I jump I won’t fly off into space, the best human understanding of the way the universe works says that I will be disappointed. This sort of thing – a “theory” – is what non-scientists often call a “fact.”
What I see from some public figures these days is a campaign of anti-intellectualism that I think could be extremely damaging to our society. Don’t let those scientists or experts tell you what to do; they don’t know what your problems are! Never mind that they dedicate their entire lives to studying and gaining a more complete understanding of highly specific things…so that you don’t have to. If we as a society tried to solve every problem with “common sense” and common sense alone (assume enough people have common sense to attempt that strategy…) then we would never have invented vaccines, or automobiles, or light bulbs, or computers. We would never have been able to navigate ships, cultivate barren lands, deal with chronic illnesses, or travel to the Moon. (The same thing, by the way, is true for religion.) No, to do those things requires an methodical accumulation of knowledge that stretches beyond a single lifetime…and so our society invented experts. Good thing, too!
Hand in hand with their anti-intellectualism, I see some speakers getting top billing on hungry 24-hour news networks by making intellectually dishonest arguments. The difference between a scientist and an ideologue, as I see it, is this: When a scientist sees a data point that he or she cannot explain with the best scientific theories, then the theory has to be changed to account for all the data, both old and new, because the observations happened the way they did. But when an ideologue sees a data point that he or she cannot explain with his or her best worldview, then the worldview remains immutable and the data point is called into question. In their speech, ideologues make data and observations into matters of belief, so that eventually it sounds like the scientific theories those data support are also matters of belief. Thus, individuals can choose to make up their mind to believe, or not, in climate change, or evolution, or medicine, or gravity, or thermodynamics, or electrons. And somehow, we are to suppose that the universe will bend itself to the worldview that we choose to believe in.
By implying that scientific theories are things we can believe in or not, ideologues accomplish two important goals: first, they make the debate about the existence of the theory or even the existence of the supporting data, instead of about how our society should use or respond to the consequences of the theory; second, they turn the theory into something that they can dismiss in a few words: “oh, I don’t believe in X,” or “I’m waiting for scientists to prove Y,” without having to make a rigorous argument. How much scientific work would it take to prove a theory to an ideologue who doesn’t like its implications? Impossibly much, I think. Continue reading The Science is Real→
Representing the entire Orbiter fleet, the Space Shuttle Atlantis is above the Earth for the last time. She comes home on 21 July.
Atlantis floating over the Bahamas
The Space Shuttle is a tremendous vehicle, a real achievement of engineering. It has given us the Hubble Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory; it’s brought astronauts and nations together in a place where they can see the Earth for what it truly is; it has demonstrated and developed our capability for assembling structures and conducting experiments in space. I think the greatest achievement of the Space Shuttle Program has been the construction of the International Space Station, a huge structure where seven or so (sometimes as many as 13) astronauts can stay for half a year or more – a marvel of engineering if there ever was one. The population of the Station compares with some pioneer towns in American history.
This summer, the Shuttle Program ends. Every news outlet, blogger, commentator, and space enthusiast out there seems to agree that the word to describe the STS-135 mission is “bittersweet.” I agree that the Shuttle program has been pretty sweet…but I’m not bitter that it’s coming to an end.
In fact, I think it’s a very good thing.
The Space Shuttle Program has been active for 30 years now – and I find that simple fact quite unsettling. To put that timeframe in perspective: I grew up steeping myself in space, got a college degree in a hard science, completed a Ph.D. in spacecraft technology research, and began a career in the spacecraft industry, and I just turned 27. As long as I have been alive, there has been a Space Shuttle and a Space Shuttle Program. Or, for another view, NASA has conducted six manned space programs: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Space Shuttle, and International Space Station. Not only is the Space Shuttle Program the longest-running of them all, but it ran as long as all the other programs put together. Our nation got to the Moon from zero space-age industrial base and with a supply of engineers who had no idea how rockets worked in just over ten years. My point is this: The Shuttle Program started in the Eighties, and our nation should have been ready for the next space program in the Nineties.
How did NASA get to this point? The simple answer is that NASA was created as a weapon we could use to fight the Cold War. It was a two-pronged weapon: First, its purpose was to respond to the apparent Soviet dominance in rocket and spacecraft technology, and show that America could develop that knowledge, too. Second, it was a careful political weapon – “Look, your space program is entirely militarized. Ours is entirely civilian and peaceful, and based on capitalist contracts, and those purposes are actually superior!” Now, after it became clear that America won any Space Race that existed, NASA is a weapon without a war. It simply cannot command 4.4% of the federal budget like it did in the heyday of Apollo (it’s stuck with a measly 0.5-0.7%.). And NASA does not command the affection of the American people as well as it did in the mid-20th Century. Without those sources of support, it cannot achieve lofty goals.
I think that the Space Shuttle is, in fact, a good symbol for everything that is wrong with the American space program. In a word: Complacency. We’re too used to having a Space Shuttle – so much so, in fact, that the media continues to equate the Space Shuttle Program and the manned space program. Congress, in particular, is way too used to the Space Shuttle Program, and I think members of Congress view NASA more as a source for government sinecure jobs than for bold exploratory endeavors. The American public has become complacent about the Space Shuttle to the extent that one lasting legacy of the Shuttle Program is that the public thinks space travel is boring – NASA public affairs officers have not been able to deal with a generation that thinks iPhone apps are more exciting than human beings blasting off into orbit. And NASA itself has become complacent about the Shuttle, in many ways. NASA contractors lament the tragedy of this program ending after giving them a single, steady job for 30 years. NASA employees wonder what they will do after spending so long on this one program. And fourteen astronauts lost their lives to complacency within the Space Shuttle Program.
So, yes, the Space Shuttle is a sweet piece of hardware, and it has given us many achievements and advances. And I feel the bittersweet mood surrounding the STS-135 mission, the bittersweet mood that has been building for the last few years. But, for me, the “bitter” part doesn’t come from the end of the Space Shuttle Program.
I’m bitter because the plan America has to follow the Shuttle Program sucks.
Congress has decreed that the post-Shuttle American space program will be this: NASA shall build a really big rocket, and it shall stick the Orion capsule on top of this rocket. I am unimpressed: NASA has already figured out the really big rocket, and that capability has been in private hands for decades. Building a bigger rocket is just a question of scaling up the engineering of contemporary technology, it’s not a fundamentally new enterprise. And the Orion capsule is an Apollo-style vehicle with 125% of the personnel capacity of the 40-year-old Apollo. And Congress, while extremely interested in specifying how much stuff NASA should build and in which states NASA should build it, it has no interest whatsoever in giving the space program an objective to use that stuff for. President Obama, at least, has been willing to sketch out an objective, but NASA is going to be struggling to apply these Congressionally enumerated devices to meet exploration goals. There is a fundamental mismatch between the technologies NASA is supposed to develop and the goals it is supposed to achieve, and so our nation will end up with a Senate Space Launch System Program that exactly mirrors the over-budget, behind-schedule, and finally cancelled Ares program. So, I am bitter about the end of the Shuttle Program because it has clearly illuminated to what extent Congress views NASA as a source of pork spending, an agency to provide sinecure jobs in their districts, and not as a vehicle for our nation’s and our world’s loftiest aspirations.
I grew up with the legacy of the Apollo missions. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are heroes to me, but I am also acutely aware that they are now over eighty years old. And only ten other people walked the Moon since they have. I want to see NASA doing big things again, and I don’t think Congress has it on that path.
What do I think NASA should be doing? Simple. I think NASA should be going where no one has gone before.
Where no one has gone before. Not private companies, not other nations’ space programs, and not NASA itself.
Thus: I don’t think NASA should be in the business of building rockets. NASA paved the way in this country, but since the mid-20th Century, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital Sciences, and other companies have successfully privatized and industrialized the process of getting things into space – and that’s just in America. This process has even made its way into the small business market: SpaceX (which started small, but is rapidly growing) promises cost-cutting launches, has successfully sold its services to acquire the largest commercial launch contract ever, and it is planning to launch a heavy-lift rocket by the end of 2012. Just by the dates, before the program even starts, Congress’ SLS is in losing position and is slated for an inadequate finish – and that’s if it can keep to its intended schedule, which I don’t think likely after the Ares program. So I wonder why NASA should be doing so much as looking into the feasibility of such a vehicle. Just buy the ones that exist! The agency even has several options to pick from!
I also don’t think NASA should be in the business of building space capsules! Again, NASA paved the way – but now, Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada are all developing their own passenger-carrying capsules, and again, that’s just in America. These vehicles come under the aegis of NASA’s Commercial Crew program, which seeks companies that can sell taxi service up to the Space Station and back at competitive prices, with NASA oversight for astronaut safety. So I wonder why NASA has to invest in building yet another such vehicle. Just buy the ones that are further along in development! The agency will even have several options to pick from – and SpaceX’s Dragon is practically ready!
I think NASA should skip all these solved problems and get back involved in true exploration. That is not a goal that a space capsule is appropriate for: what is the most massive component of the vehicle? The heat shield. And on the way to an asteroid or moon or planet and back, what is that heat shield doing?Taking up precious mass capacity. Reducing the spacecraft delta-v. Shrinking our horizon. I look at the Apollo program, and I think the star of the show was really the Lunar Module – that spidery thing that looked silly on the ground, but was totally at home in the environment it was built for: airless moons. That is the kind of thing NASA should be building: interplanetary spacecraft for going into deep space. These should be launched on commercial rockets and assembled modularly in space – using techniques NASA has perfected during the Space Shuttle program as it built the Space Station. They could even be constructed while docked to ISS. Then, the astronauts would taxi up in Dragons or Dream Chasers, hop into the interplanetary vehicle, and go to other worlds!
Which other worlds is an important question, and I think it has to be driven by material benefits – not just science and exploration goals, much as I love them. Because, you see, I want a sustainable human space program, not a flags-and-footprints-and-then-Congress-and-the-public-forgets-it program. I think we have to look to destinations where we can use available resources to refuel and build new space vehicles. For that reason, and the fact that an astronaut can throw things at their escape velocities, I want to see these interplanetary ships going to asteroids.
We can practice harvesting space resources and building space vehicles on the surface of the Moon, before we go further afield to deep-space asteroids. We could go to the near-Earth objects or the Asteroid Belt. We can get to Phobos and Deimos, in Mars orbit, and build shuttles to go down to another planet’s surface. We can even learn enough to mount expeditions to Jovian moons. And as we send scientists and engineers to all these places, they will need a support network – and so NASA can contract with private companies to follow them. Y’know: Starbucks on Mars.
See, I want to take everything we learned from Apollo and the Space Shuttle and build a space infrastructure. NASA-built launch vehicles and capsules are not going to help with that.
It may seem silly to be making this argument at this time – while our political landscape is defined by budget and growth concerns – but I think NASA couldn’t be more relevant. First, it’s one of the most successful government programs in terms of its accomplishments, in terms of the technological benefits, in terms of the scientific returns, and in terms of the increased economic growth in response to each federal dollar spent. Second, we as a nation are faced with a growing number of long-term problems: how to provide cost-effective medical care, how to give our populace better nutrition to combat obesity at attractive prices, how to supply our power grid with enough energy for all its customers in a responsible, sustainable way…all of these things are problems that NASA would have to solve in order to keep people living in space indefinitely. We could solve our problems on Earth in the crucible of space. If we want to really push the economy, accelerate the pace of growth and innovation, and pull off a “Manhattan Project” to deal with climate change, I think a self-sustaining human colony in deep space is the way to go.
The whole situation that NASA is in just kills me. On the one hand, without the Space Shuttle Program, it has a tremendous opportunity to re-invent itself as the kind of program that conjures up images of men and women with the Right Stuff, consistently churning out dramatic stories of inspiring successes and garnering public support. But on the other hand, Congress has set NASA against that path by giving it directives that are almost certain to fall short of their objectives, wasting time and money. NASA was once a great agency, and it could be so again…but we in the space community will have to convince a lot of Congresspeople to look outside of their Shuttle-era complacency and into the future if we want to see a space program worthy of a great nation.
While I would love for President Obama to give Twitter the blind eye I think it deserves, today he used the blip medium to take (moderated) questions from the public. One of those questions was about the future of the space program and NASA. Here is the President’s response (courtesy of space.com):
I am so happy to hear Mr. Obama say this! I am totally on board with the idea that NASA should be sticking its neck out doing unproven things and pushing the frontier outwards.
The most unfortunate thing for NASA’s budget and NASA’s role over the past year or two has been how poorly the Administration articulated this vision. They let the media run with headlines about how “Obama killed the manned space program,” instead of making the story one about smart investments in proven methods and accelerated research into new technologies to get our astronauts to really exciting destinations that the Apollo veterans could only imagine. You know…buy Falcons to get to LEO while NASA figures out how to get to Mars.
The President could make an even stronger case – I think that if he wants to advocate a “Manhattan Project” to fight climate change, push the capabilities and cost-effectiveness of medicine, engineering, and agriculture, and provide lots of jobs, industry opportunities, and infrastructure investments, he ought to announce a program to establish a self-sustaining human colony off the Earth. But I think he hit some major points for a sustainable space policy in his answer above. He also made the strongest, most unambiguous statements I’ve seen yet about the purpose of NASA and the destinations the agency should target.
Sadly, Congress is now subjecting NASA to both the Death of a Thousand Little Cuts and the Death of Stupid Over-Specified Directives. If the American manned space program ends, it will be because Senators like Orrin Hatch and Bill Nelson look at NASA more as a jobs program for their districts than as a vehicle for realizing our nation’s highest ambitions. Hatch in particular – the Ares program should have been cancelled and the heavy-lift vehicle mandated by Congress is a bad investment that will take NASA nowhere.
Maybe, just maybe, the Obama Administration is going to do a better job of putting their space policy message out in the coming budget fights. And then maybe, just maybe, we will end up with what the Augustine Commission called “a space program worthy of a great nation.”
