I am writing this on a weekend. We are currently engaged in a partial shutdown of the Federal Government. As I start writing this post this particular shutdown is now officially the longest on record. And no one knows how or when it is going to end. We weren't supposed to get here. But here we are.
The basic motivation for starting this blog was to provide a counter narrative when I thought a large percentage of what was being said about something was nonsense or ill informed. This morning it occurred to me that "the shutdown" definitely qualifies. I have seen a lot of noise and hot air and little intelligent analysis on the subject. So here's what I have to say.
Consider the unthinkable. Some event, either in its basic nature or in its consequences, is so horrendous that any reasonable person will feel compelled to do whatever is necessary to make sure it does not come to pass.
In political parlance, we used to have the "must pass" bill. Not passing the bill was unthinkable. So, if compromises must be made then they must be made. So a long standing trick employed by smart legislators was to attach a "rider" to a must pass bill. (A rider is a small addition that may or may not have anything to do with the main bill.) But the point is that if you succeeded in getting the rider attached, you were pretty much guaranteed it would become law. The "must pass" bill must pass, so it will.
Warren G. Magnuson, a long time Senator from my state (he died in 1981) was famous for doing this. And, as long as it was used sparingly, people grumbled but that was about it. And someone like Magnuson was accorded grudging respect for being a canny legislator. And the tactic worked in Magnuson's day because "must pass" legislation passed. Why? Because it was unthinkable to not pass a "must pass" bill. So people grumbled and complained. But in the end the bill passed.
But this was an abuse of power. It was just a traditional abuse of power that over time got accepted as one of those things that everybody just had to learn to live with. And Magnuson was careful to only occasionally resort to this tactic. And he only did it on relatively small and relatively noncontroversial issues. A bridge in Seattle got wrecked unexpectedly. Magnuson snuck funding in a rider to a "must pass" bill that put the Federal Government on the hook for paying most of the cost of the replacement.
So, other than resorting to the underhanded trick of slipping a rider into a "must pass" bill, it was standard issue pork barrel politics. The amount of money was in line with other pork barrel projects being pushed by other legislators. And that's the way things used to work.
But then some smart people asked themselves just how far this sort of thing could be pushed. How about asking for something that would otherwise have been completely unreasonable? The responsible people would end up sucking it up and voting for the bill even though it now included some horrible component because it was "must pass". (If you want an example, liberals think the "Hyde Amendment" is horrible. Conservatives can site examples of things they find equally horrible.) For a long time this worked. "Must pass" was must pass, until it wasn't.
For a long time funding the government by passing "appropriations" bills on time every year was considered "must pass". It was unimaginable to leave the government unfunded, wasn't it? But over time the brinksmanship kept getting ratchetted up. Before continuing, let's take a moment to understand how the process is supposed to work.
The Fiscal Year for the Federal Government runs from October 1 of one year through September 30 of the next. The appropriations process starts with the President submitting a detailed budget request in late January or early February. This is turned into a Budget Resolution by the House Ways and Means committee and the Senate Finance committee. The Budget resolution is strictly internal to Congress and provides guidance to the various appropriations committees as to how much money they have to spend.
At the same time the budget is broken up into about a dozen "appropriations" bills, roughly one for each cabinet department. These department level budgets are processed by the various congressional committees that have oversight responsibility for the department in question. They hold hearings and go through a "markup" process (making technical - and frequently not so technical - changes) to the budget bill that covers their area of responsibility.
So the Department of Defense gets its budget bill. The State Department gets its budget bill. And so on. When the Budget Resolution is finished and agreed to by the House and the Senate each appropriations bill is expected to conform to the guidance contained in the Budget Resolution.
Generally speaking, work on the Budget Resolution will wrap up in June. Each appropriations bill goes through the House first (the Constitution requires this) and then moves along to the Senate. The Senate can, and usually does, make changes. A "reconciliation" committee consisting of members from both the House and the Senate is now formed to iron out the differences and produce a single bill. This final version goes back to each body for "final passage". If that goes according to form it goes to the President for signature.
The President usually signs it but can veto it. If the bill is vetoed then supermajorities of both the House and the Senate can override the veto. Or Congress can rework the bill and pass the updated version back to the White House for signature. Typically appropriations start becoming law in August. All of them are wrapped up by the end of September. When that happens all is well and the entirety of the government is funded for one more fiscal year. Of course, the whole thing starts over a few months later.
It's a complicated process. And the farther along you get the more rigid it gets. The House and Senate appropriations bills can be amended right up until the moment they pass. But whatever comes out of the reconciliation process is carved in stone. Congress can also make no modification to a bill that has been vetoed if they want to override the veto. What this means is that one of the best points to insert a rider is in the reconciliation process. If you can get it by your fellow committee members you are pretty much home free.
I think you can see why the whole process starts many months before the due date of October 1. And the closer October 1 comes the less practical flexibility there is. So inserting (or deleting) your change as close to the last minute as you can manage is the best way to make sure it survives the process. And this late stage leverage, if you have it, means that lots of people find it advantageous to delay things until the absolute last minute.
Power players have long known this. The result is that the orderly process I have outlined above has been breaking down more and more often. More and more appropriations bills are passed out of Congress late in September. And the process can break down even further. What if an appropriations bill is literally not ready. Enter the Continuing Resolution (CR).
A CR is a super simple bill that just says "keep funding everything at the old levels with no change". That is a "clean CR. It is also possible to add riders. It is only practical to add a few. But they represent too good of an opportunity to pass up. So a CR is a great place to insert a rider. Especially since a CR is even more "must pass" than a regular appropriations bill.
But what if the unthinkable is actually thinkable. The thinking went for a long time that if anyone sabotaged a "must pass" bill the wrath of God would descend upon them. Their reputation would be shot. Their career would go down the tubes. And that would be that. But you know that at some point someone would try it. And the unthinkable happened for the first time in 1976.
President Ford vetoed the funding bill for what were then the departments of Labor, Health, Education, and Welfare. That didn't cause a shutdown because Congress overrode the veto. But the resulting distraction gummed things up enough that the regular appropriations bills got hung up. So the government shut down for 11 days. And the world did not end. Sure, Ford lost his bid for re-election. But the general consensus was that the cause was not bad behavior of anyone's part. It's just that the general chaos got out of hand. And with that, the unthinkable became thinkable.
By one count, if you include the current one, we have now had a total of twenty shutdowns. There is now a whole process in place to make the whole thing routine. And the concept of a "must pass" bill has been consigned to the dusty bin of history. And, oh by the way, the CR has also become routine. The idea that we should have a thoughtful, disciplined, and responsible budgeting process has also gone the way of the dinosaur. Now it's all gamesmanship. The idea of thoughtfully and deliberately going through a process for determining what the Federal Government should and should not spend its money on can now only be described as quaint.
So we now are where we are. Ostensibly, we are fighting over whether a few billions of dollars should be spent on a wall. This is out of a budget that totals a couple of trillion dollars. But that is now our reality. And the actions (or inactions) that put us here this time around are all attributable solely to the Republicans.
Back when the current budget was supposed to be getting assembled Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House. And they managed to pass and get signed into law appropriations bills covering about three quarters of the Federal Government. Why didn't they complete the job? Ask the Republicans. Why didn't they include funding for the wall at whatever level they thought appropriate? Ask the Republicans.
Democrats were in a position to slow the process down somewhat. But they were not in a position to stop anything. And this was true right up to January 3, 2019. That's when the politicians who were up for election in 2018 and won, got seated. And, of course, Democrats picked up 40 (and perhaps 41) seats in the House. So from that day forward they controlled the levers of power in the House.
But let's backspace to December when Republicans controlled everything. The election was over but the new members have not yet been seated. This is called a "lame duck" session for reasons that are unknown to me. Anyhow, during that session a deal was struck. A CR including funding for all of the remaining departments through February 8, 2019 had been agreed to.
House Democrats and Republicans had signed off on it. Senate Democrats and Republicans had signed off on it. The White House had signed off on it. All that was left was to step through the process necessary to turn the deal into law. That process should have taken only two days.
And the Senate immediately did what it was supposed to do. Any single Senator can force a "recorded" vote. That's where the Senate staff polls each and every Senator on the Senate floor. When everybody has been heard from the tally is formally recorded showing how each specific Senator has voted. But this is a time consuming process.
If no one objects there is a quick and dirty alternative. Whoever is presiding over the Senate calls the question. Senators shout out "Aye" or "Nay" and the presiding officer says "in the opinion of the chair the Ayes have it" or "in the opinion of the chair the Nays have it". If no one objects that's it and the whole thing takes less than a minute.
And that's what happened. The Senate approved the CR bill on a voice vote. And the only time you have a voice vote is when all the Senators are in agreement and they all also think the vote is totally noncontroversial. But then before the House had a chance to vote several rabble rousers on Fox got on TV and started calling Trump a coward. And Trump told the House he had changed his mind.
The CR contained $1.3 billion for general border security but nothing specific for the wall. Trump now said he would veto anything that didn't have $5.7 billion for his wall. So the House, then still under the control of the Republicans, amended the bill the Senate had passed and sent it back to the Senate. The Senate was unable to pass this modified version (and we were back to doing recorded votes). And the old CR ran out and a quarter of the government got shut down.
And since then the Democrats have taken control of the House. And they are not going to fund the wall at any level. And Trump says "no wall - no funding". So we are at an impasse. So how does the impasse get broken? That's where most of what the talking heads have to say is either pure hot air or nonsense.
Shutdowns end in one of two ways. It might have been caused by some kind of small technical problem. Everybody gets together and fixes the problem. There is good will on all sides so this doesn't take long. The fix is passed into law and everybody goes back about their business. So that's one way a shutdown ends. The other way is a lot more ugly.
A number of shutdowns have been the result of an actual difference of opinion. One side says "red". The other side says "blue". Until everybody can settle on a color we are all stuck. That's the kind of shutdown we now have. These kinds take a lot longer to resolve and that's why we are in record setting territory when it comes to the duration of the shutdown.
These kinds of shutdowns generally devolve into a blame game. Who is responsible for the shutdown? Whoever gets the blame sees their popularity decrease. Once the losing side has been clearly determined then that side gives ground and a resolution close to the position of the other side ends up being agreed to. From there, things progress along a path similar to the "technical problem" case.
So who's winning and who's losing in the popularity contest that surrounds the current shutdown? The Democrats are winning and the Republicans are losing. But things have gotten a lot more complicated than they were the last time we had a contested shutdown. There have been structural changes so the old formulas no longer work.
Trump is widely blamed for the shutdown. This is because he is the one who reneged on his promise to support the CR. He also publicly accepted responsibility for the shutdown before it even began. That should mean that his popularity is sinking like a rock and he will soon be forced to change his behavior. But we now live in an "alternate facts" world.
His support has not declined. His supporters either don't believe it's his fault or they think it is okay to shutdown the government in order to secure funding for the wall. He has long since given up on getting support from any group other than his hard core base. The fact that whatever popularity he had among other groups is shrinking is not important to him. So he sees no reason to change his behavior.
The same is not true of other Republicans. Many of them depend to some extent on support from groups who are not part of Trump's hard core base. Nobody among these groups is happy about the shutdown. They do blame Democrats but only to a modest extent. Mostly they blame Republicans in general and Trump in particular. The problem for Republicans is that they depend critically on Trump's hard core base. Those people demand loyalty to Trump. If Republicans get on the bad side of Trump loyalists they are in big trouble.
Now let us turn to the Democrats. They just won big in 2018. Voters in general preferred Democrats to Republicans by a wide margin. Gerrymandering and other issues meant that this did not translate to an improved situation for Democrats in the Senate. But it did in the House. Democrats believe rightly that their base expects them to oppose the wall. The Democratic base blames Republicans and Trump for the shutdown by lopsided margins. So from a political perspective there is no reason for Democrats to change their position.
But wait. There's more. History tells Democrats that if they concede on the wall Republicans will move the goalposts and ask for more and more and more. Trying to compromise with Republicans has not resulted in good outcomes from the Democratic perspective. After 9/11, for instance, Democrats went along with the Bush agenda out of a sense of patriotism and solidarity. It didn't get them anything from Republicans. Instead Republicans just dug in harder and demanded more. So from a tactics perspective, backing down looks like a bad idea to Democrats.
The situation in the Senate is interesting. Democrats are holding firm. Some Republicans depend on moderates to win elections. Moderates have said loud and clear they don't want a wall. But moderates are the smaller group. Trump supporters make up the bulk of the people who vote GOP. Still several Republicans have started talking publicly about reopening the government. But talk is cheap.
The key player in all this is Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell. I don't like him but I respect him. He is a wily old fox. He doesn't mind some members of his caucus mouthing off as long as they behave the way he wants them to when push comes to shove. For instance, Jeff Flake has made a lot of anti-Trump noises over the last few months. But he mostly voted the way Mitch wanted him to vote. And he didn't even say a thing until last Spring when he lost in the GOP Primary in Arizona. That meant he had to go home for good in January of this year.
McConnell is wise enough to give his members a little wiggle room over thing that don't matter as long as they go along with his plans when it does matter. The GOP has a three seat cushion in the Senate. If three people defect McConnel can still win because Vice President Pence gets a vote if there is a tie. By my count there are five GOP senators who, on paper, have defected. So McConnell is in trouble, right? Right now he is not in trouble.
That's because what he has been doing so far is making sure no bill gets to the Senate floor for a vote. As long as nothing happens that stops him from being able to hold up votes he is fine. But theoretically, there is a way a vote could be forced. It is called a "discharge petition".
If a majority of Senators sign such a petition then the bill, whatever bill they signed the petition to discharge, must be brought to the floor and voted on. Certainly all the Democrats (I am counting the two Independents as Democrats for the purposes of this discussion) would sign such a petition. So all it would take is four Republicans to sign on too. As far as I know no Republican has signaled they would sign such a petition. That's why we are at the "talk is cheap" stage when it comes to Senate Republicans.
And McConnell's behavior is interesting. He is Missing in Action (MIA) and has been for several weeks. Why is this? The answer is simple. He currently has no good options. For better or worse, he is currently stuck with Trump. That's because he and fellow Republicans all need the Trump base. The Trump base goes where Trump tells them to go. So McConnell can't afford to annoy Trump enough to cause him to bad mouth McConnell.
And McConnell has to be very unhappy with Trump right now. Power in Washington comes from the ability to make or stop deals. To be effective your word must be your bond. If you say you will do (or not do) something you must follow through 100% of the time. McConnell has been wielding power in Washington for a long time. His word is his bond once he signs on. But that is not true with Trump.
And this is a behavior pattern of Trump's that goes back decades. Trump sees welching on deals as a standard business tactic. Normally a businessman can't get away with that behavior. But a number of circumstances have allowed Trump to.
Originally his dad, whose word was his bond, bailed him out. Then Trump screwed over a number of New York banks after his dad could no longer bail him out. He was able to put off the inevitable for a while by switching banks. But eventually that stopped working. So he moved on to international banks. When that stopped working he started to deal with oligarchs and corrupt governments.
That was still working but then he made the mistake of transitioning from the business world to the world of Washington D.C. The problem for him is that there is now no other group to move on to. But he hasn't figured that out yet. But he is also not going to change his behavior at this late date and become someone who can be counted on to keep promises.
McConnell is inextricable bound to Trump at this point. But he knows that Trump is and will always be an unreliable partner. And that means McConnell literally can't make a deal that involves Trump because he can't count on delivering Trump. So how does he make a deal in these circumstances? He can't. So he has gone to ground.
He is hoping something will change and give him an opening. At that point he can jump in and get credit for saving the day. But currently there is literally nothing he can do until something changes. He is the key man but he is radio silent.
And the press is letting him get away with it. They are content to blame Trump, talk to lots of Democrats and Republicans and ask inane questions predicated on ridiculous assumptions. And while all this is going on they are giving McConnell a free pass.
There is a theoretical way out. McConnell could secretly tell his members that he is okay with them signing a discharge petition as long as he is kept out of it. Then when the discharge petition surfaces he would say "I had no idea this was happening and now Senate rules require me to bring the bill to the floor." In other words, "it's not my fault".
From there we would see what happened. Trump could sign the bill or he could veto it. If he signed it that would be the end of that but he would get raked over the coals by the same rabble rousers that made him change his mind in the first place. So most likely he would veto it.
That would put Republicans in both the House and the Senate in a pickle. Do they want to make a meaningful vote? (Republicans in that House voting against various Democratic initiatives designed to get the government back open are not making a meaningful vote. Everyone expects these bills to die in the Senate. As long as that holds the votes are symbolic.)
A number of Republican votes in both the House and the Senate would be required to override the veto. But these votes would not be symbolic and everyone would be watching. So I expect that if a bill made it to the floor a large number of Republicans would be forced to vote for it. Remember, what we are talking about is legislation that passed the Republican controlled Senate on a voice vote and had the public support of the Republican House leadership.
The discharge petition idea works for McConnell if he can escape blame. But I calculate that he calculates that he would not escape blame. And I think his calculation is correct. As long as that is so McConnell is not going to okay members of his caucus signing a discharge petition.
Right now, there is not enough pressure coming from the general public to break things loose. As long as that remains true the stalemate will continue and that part of the government that is shut down will stay shut down. Well, actually more of the government will shut down.
Various tricks have been used to keep parts of the affected agencies and departments at least partly open. But many of those tricks only work for a while. More and more of those tricks no longer work and more and more of the government is shutting down.
At some point something is going to give. When? I don't know. It's the "what" that may be more interesting. The Republican party has been skating on thin ice for a long time. For eight years they got away with being "the party of no". Whatever Obama was for, even if it was something with broad Republican support, they were against.
But recently they controlled all the branches of government for two years straight. Mostly what they got done during that period was putting through a giant tax cut for the rich that started out unpopular and has only gotten more unpopular since.
They promised to kill Obamacare. They failed at that. Trump promised to build a wall and force Mexico to pay for it. They had two years to come through on that promise but they failed there too. There are a number on internal contradictions that they were able to paper over during the Obama years by blaming everything on Obama. Trump has proven to be terrible at deal making. I could go on.
But how does this current shutdown redound to the benefit of Republicans? Well, if the Democrats collapse and completely give in, that would be a big win. But I am betting that won't happen. Republicans could pull something off in the legislature (Discharge petition or something else) that would get the government funded but not the wall. That would likely be very unpopular with a large segment of their base.
They could throw Trump under the bus, a perfectly sensible thing to do from my point of view. But that too would be very unpopular with a large segment of their base. Losing a big chunk of their base, even if it just turned them apathetic rather than driving them into the arms of the Democrats, would be a disaster for Republicans.
For a long time I have believed that sooner or later Democrats would have to come straight at Republicans. Over the years I have seen Democrats forgo opportunity after opportunity to do that on issues that I thought Democrats could win on. Maybe we have finally come to that point. Certainly a lot of newly elected Democrats are spoiling for a fight. If Democrats go straight at Republicans and win that might destroy the Republican party, at least in the short run.
Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night.
Saturday, January 12, 2019
Friday, January 11, 2019
Man in Space
And yes, I know there have been some women in space. The second person is space, for instance, was a woman. But I derived my title from a book called "A Man on the Moon" by Andrew Chaikin. And all the Apollo astronauts, the subject of his book, were men. And the focus of this piece is a contrast between crewed space missions and uncrewed space missions. So the focus is not on any particular attribute of any particular astronaut (or Cosmonaut, if the follow the Russian usage), but on what crewed space missions achieved and what they did not.
And, before I continue, I note that 2019, the year I am writing this post in, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, the first time a person set foot on the moon. And here's an interesting thing that happened in a now long ago time. I was watching Jeopardy! one day and the Final Jeopardy answer was "The Headline on the front page of the New York Times on July 20, 1969". It took me ten or fifteen seconds to come up with the correct response. None of the contestants on the show even came close. That was the date of the Apollo 11 landing. To work . . .
I am going to start my history of putting people in space with the Manhattan Project, the effort to build the first Atomic Bomb. The key number is something called "mean free path". If the nucleus of a Uranium atom Fissions (breaks into pieces), on average, it ejects about two Neutrons (subatomic particles). We are told (and it's true) that an atom is mostly empty space. But a very small part of an atom is the nucleus. If one of these neutrons happens to hit a nucleus then it will blast it apart and the "chain reaction" will continue.
The mean free path is the distance a neutron travels before it hits another nucleus. If your lump of Uranium is too small then the neutron will fly away before hitting another Uranium nucleus and your bomb will fizzle out. But if your lump is big enough and you get some neutrons flying around then each neutron will hit another Uranium nucleus and break it apart sending more neutrons flying. If you can pull this off then you get a nice big boom. If not you get a fizzle.
It turns out that one of the deep dark secrets of the atom bomb business is this simple fact. But there are tricks. One trick is to use explosives to compress the Uranium. This reduces the mean free path. If you get it right then the amount of Uranium you need is decreased. Another trick, and this one didn't get out for a long time, is Beryllium. If you enclose the Uranium in a Beryllium shell the shell will bounce the neutrons back into your lump, thus effectively extending your mean free path. And that means you need less Uranium.
The Manhattan program needed to figure out the Beryllium trick in order to make even the first bomb work. They just didn't have enough Uranium otherwise. So why is all this germane to the subject at hand? Because the Russians (then called the Soviets) stole the first US design, which required a pretty big chunk of Uranium to work. But after that US scientists figured out a bunch of other tricks for making atomic bombs physically small and light.
US scientists got so good at shrinking atomic bombs that they made one that fit inside a standard artillery gun. This was a monumental achievement. Remember, the first atomic bomb was so big that if filled up an entire B-29 bomber all by itself. But for a long time the Soviets only know how to make big and heavy bombs. (They later caught up and could also make very small atomic bombs.)
It was obvious to anyone interested in using atomic bombs in war that using rockets to shoot atomic bombs to the other side of the earth was a good idea. Since the US knew how to build small atomic bombs they didn't bother trying to figure out how to make big rockets. The Soviets (see note above) were initially not so good at shrinking atomic bombs so they set out to make big rockets from the get go.
Fast forward to 1957. The Soviets launched the first artificial satellite into orbit. A big reason they were first was because the US had all these great bomber-type airplanes like the B-36 and the B-47, so they felt little urgency to build rockets capable of carrying atomic bombs. Being behind in the "bomber race", the Soviets put a lot more focus and emphasis on rockets, big rockets.
That first satellite ("Sputnik") was pretty small. But because the Soviet big rocket program had been pushed harder they were able to scale up from there very quickly. So they put a dog, "Laika", into orbit. (It died a few days later because the Soviets had no way to get it back down.) Only a few years later (April 12, 1961) they were able to put Yuri Gagarin into orbit and safely get him back to earth. They were able to follow it up with the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963.
This quick progress was possible due to the fact that the Soviets had started putting a lot of effort into developing rockets long before the US did. This was because they didn't have good bomber-type airplanes. And they had put an early emphasis on big rockets because for a long time they didn't know how to build small and light atomic bombs.
Anyhow, for a long time after 1957 the US was fumbling along in the wake of the Soviets. There initially didn't seem to be a pressing need to spend the bales of money necessary to catch up. So the US didn't. But the Cold War was going on. And the Soviets were touting their space program and it's impressive list of firsts as proof positive of the superiority of the Communist system.
Politics being what it is, eventually the US government, both the administration and the Congress, decided this was unacceptable. And eventually the level of embarrassment got so great that the money spigot was opened wide and cash flowed.
At the time this was going on I knew nothing of the "why" of it. I was a science and technology guy so I just thought spending a ton of money building cool space stuff was a great idea. I still believe that. But people who think like I do have always been and continue to be a small minority.
Most people don't understand that the government spending a lot of money on leading edge technology eventually results in benefits to everyone. This is one of the few places where "trickle down" actually works. What they do understand is "the bad guys are doing something bad and we must do what it takes to beat them". In this case the bad guys were the Soviets and the place we needed to beat them was in what became known as the "space race".
So the US started out well behind the Soviets in terms of our ability to build rockets, particularly big rockets. Once the money spigot opened that started to change. But it took several years for progress to become readily apparent. In those early years the Soviets continued to score first after first. The good news was that this caused the money spigot to be opened very wide. And that made a lot of things possible.
The US was losing the propaganda battle badly in May of '61 when Kennedy made his famous "before this decade is out, to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely" commitment. So why the moon? In 1961 the US was still way behind and it was going to take several years of substantial effort to gain the lead. In that time the Soviets would score some more firsts (see above).
For Kennedy's announcement to work as a propaganda tool the US needed to pick a goal that was hard enough that it would take several years to achieve. And they needed a goal that was spectacular enough and understandable enough that, if the US succeeded, the average person would say "the US is definitely ahead now". Pretty much nothing short of "man on the moon" fit the bill.
Kennedy spent some time understanding the issues. And he eventually came to believe whole heartedly in a muscular US space program, just on its own merits. So did Lynden Johnson. I don't know the origins of this but Johnson was a true believer in the space program pretty much from the start. That meant that when Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson became President, he was a strong supporter of the space program.
The US in 1961 had a cobbled together a program called "Mercury" whose entire objective was to just get a US astronaut into space. Thinking ahead, engineers had come up with an obvious extension. After the one man Mercury missions, we would move on to two man "Gemini" missions. But in the early days there was no good answer to the "why" question with respect to Gemini. Why put two people into the capsule instead of just one? Neither Mercury nor Gemini ("the twins") had any obvious goal other than just the doing of the thing.
When Kennedy said "we're gong to the moon" a third program, Apollo, was grafted on the end like it made sense and it had always been planned to be that way. Apollo would feature three astronauts in a space ship that was designed to go to the moon and back. As a result of the need to build up to Apollo, Mercury and Gemini finally had a "why".
The book I referenced above was originally published in 1994. It was updated and reissued in 2007. I found out about it because I watched a very interesting "Nova" episode about the Apollo 8 mission. The problem is that pretty much everybody agrees that Apollo was the high point of the whole "put people in space" thing. Why is that?
Well, I have alluded to it above. The whole "moon shot" was primarily a propaganda effort. It was designed to demonstrate that US space capability was better than everybody else's. And, most importantly, it was better than the "Communist" system the Soviets used. It succeeded. In fact, it was too successful. The moon shot convinced the Soviets they couldn't be competitive in a space race against the US so they moved on. And that left nothing catchy for the US space program to do.
In theory there was lots it could do. But there wasn't sufficient support for any of those other things. So, the money spigot closed back up. For instance, Nixon the man that succeeded Johnson as President, had little or no interest in space. So he whittled NASA back as much as he could and as quickly as he could.
His approach was to do as little as possible. He had to pretend interest to keep the "space lobby" (people like me) happy. But he really didn't care so his approach was "what's the cheapest thing I can do that will get these people off my back?" He ended up with the Space Shuttle, a poorly designed vehicle whose development was chronically underfunded. If you are doing something because it will save money then you should be able to do it cheaply, right?
But let's leave those kinds of considerations aside, and look at what crewed space exploration has achieved. In the early days, not much was achieved. Various stunts proved that people could be put into space and gotten back safely. That's very hard to do so in the early days there was little left after that for anything else. But, as the doing of it problem got solved there came a time when there was room for other things.
And the "other things" fall into two general categories: scientific and commercial. None of either was done in those early missions except for the taking of pictures. But by this time spy satellites were taking more and better pictures. It's just that the only people who got to see the spy pictures were the military and the intelligence communities. And these missions were so fantastically expensive that no commercial endeavor was possible.
Gradually the science component of these missions increased. Before Apollo, only a dib here and a dab there of science was done. That continued to be true through Apollo 11, the first moon landing. Some science was done on Apollo 12. If you don't know how Apollo 13 went, watch the movie. But the later missions, Apollo 14-17, did a lot of science. This science haul is one of the reasons Apollo was a high point. No other crewed missions ever did science that was nearly as impactful as these missions.
They collected a lot of rocks and brought them back. These were subsequently analyzed, a process that continues to this day, and tons of great science was done with them. Our understanding of the moon, where it came from, what it is made of, and much else, stems primarily from Apollo. And the moon rocks were the most important contributor. But the astronauts also made a lot of important observations, took a lot of valuable pictures, and set up a number of valuable experiments.
One gadget they set up was a reflector that allowed a laser to be used to determine the exact distance to the moon. Both the distance and the way the distance varies with time tell scientists a lot. Another important instrument is the seismometer. The study of earthquakes (moonquakes, in this case, but the science is the same) allows scientists to determine a lot about what the inside of the moon looks like.
Both of these measurements not only tell us a lot about the moon, they tell us a lot about the earth. Tides on earth, for instance, affect the distance between the earth and the moon. So by studying the moon, specifically how far away it is, we can learn a lot about how tides on earth work and what effects they have.
After Apollo various short lived projects like Skylab were implemented. But the big project has been what eventually became the ISS, the International Space Station. The total cost of the ISS exceeds $100 billion. It has turned out to be so expensive that it had to be internationalized. It has now been in place in one form or another for twenty years. And the US designed and built the Space Shuttle specifically as a vehicle for the building and maintenance of what eventually became the ISS.
But what's it all about? A consistent answer over the decades has been "so we can go exploring". Okay. There has been "Explorer's" clubs around in one form or another (the National Geographic Society is an example of one that is still in business) for a couple of hundred years now. But they have mostly been a plaything for rich people.
Regular people like the idea of exploration. They just don't see the need to make more than a token contribution to the cost of exploring. In the past almost all expeditions were financed by rich people. Now they are mostly financed by governments. Voters are willing to allocate tax dollars to exploration as long as the sums involved are very modest. Beyond that, it's mostly rich guys trying to score bragging points off their friends, enemies, and associates.
The Second answer is actually a variation on the "exploration" theme. It's scientific research. There is a larger constituency for this sort of thing. I get jazzed when I think about all the things we found out as a result of Apollo. Geologists are over the moon about the same subject. The same is true generally of scientists in many fields, lots of which have no obvious connection to space. Electronics and Computer Science benefitted greatly from the Space Program.
Then, of course, there's Tang. You all know what Tang is? And that's my point. The people who know about Tang are laughing right now. The people who don't are justifiably mystified. (Spoiler alert: it's powdered artificial Orange Juice.) Most people just don't see any kind of direct connection between their lives and people exploring space. As such, they tend to be pretty unhappy when the Federal Government puts a lot of money into the subject.
We saw this with Apollo. The scientifically important flights, 11-17, all took place in a four year period extending from 1969 through 1972. But public interest in and support of Apollo peaked with 11 and declined through the remaining missions. And this is in spite of the fact that the scientific and exploratory benefits started at a very low point with 11 and grew substantially as mission followed mission. It really was just a public relations stunt, as far as the interest of the general public was concerned. Once we had landed on the moon there was no reason to stay involved.
I subscribe to a number of scientific journals that cover scientific advances across a broad range of subjects. These journals regularly cover important scientific advances derived from space missions. But I can't think of anything significant that has come out of the crewed missions in the post-Apollo era. Instead, it has all come out of what we now call robotic missions. Why is this?
In the early days of space exploration computers had little capability. And all the more capable machines were large, heavy, and consumed substantial amounts of power. In short, you couldn't put them on a space ship. People were the only option when you needed smart. And it took a lot of smart to pull off an Apollo mission. The Apollo capsules had a "computer" aboard. But we would laugh at it now. I think my garage door opener has more processing power than that device had. But it was bleeding edge at the time.
People had to do most of the work. But it is a mistake to believe that it was the people in the space ship. They were very important. But it was the thousands of people on the ground that did the most critical work. Not one of the Apollo missions could have succeeded without ground support. The astronauts couldn't navigate for themselves. They couldn't figure out what to do if some modification to the original plan became necessary. It was not a couple of guys onboard that figured out what to do next but a team of hundreds of people on the ground working feverously that did almost all of the work.
All space missions are crewed. That crew always includes a big crew of people on the ground. Sometimes it also includes a few people onboard the space ship. Nowadays, it usually it doesn't. The indispensable part of the crew is the ground part not the onboard part. And that's the part that advocates of putting people aboard spaceships get wrong. They think the distinction is between "manned" and "unmanned". All space missions are "manned" by a large group of people on the ground. (And the ground crew has always included women.) The difference is that is some cases a few members of the very large crew are local, they are on the vessel.
The "Afterward" in "A Man on the Moon" is instructive. He notes of the ISS "even now [in 2007], after so much money, so much time and effort, so much wasted opportunity, no one was sure what the station would be good for". And that's the fundamental problem with crewed space ships. To put it bluntly, what's the "value add"?
When it comes to the ISS promises have been made about manufacturing advances due to zero gee (more accurately called microgravity - stuff does get bounced around to some extent). Some tests and pilot projects have been run. But the results so far have been a bust. There doesn't seem to be anything that can be made on the ISS that can't be made far more easily "down the gravity well" on earth. Similarly, no one has succeeded in making anything on the ISS that can't also be made on earth.
Now, compare that with the situation that pertains to uncrewed space based machines. There are lots of "Comsats", satellites in geosynchronous orbits (orbits at that cause the satellite to appear stationary in the sky). These are used to relay TV signals from one part of earth to another. This is a thriving and successful business. It is now common for a local TV station to buy "satellite time" so they can broadcast a sporting event that takes place thousands of miles away. This business is so popular that slots in geosynchronous orbit are hard to come by. Pretty much all of them are in use.
Weather satellites are very valuable. They have revolutionized forecasting by being able to provide vast quantities of accurate detailed information for the entire earth, not just the places that are easy to get to. And, of course, they provide the "satellite pictures" that are a staple of every TV weather broadcast. Since this has historically been the province of governments, all of these are government owned and operated. But taxpayers see this as one of the best uses of their tax dollars. So government spending in this area is very popular.
Another business that more than pays for itself is the intelligence business. Spy satellites are ubiquitous. Intelligence agencies depend heavily on them and, as a result, spend heavily on them. This too is a government expenditure, but it too is a popular one.
Sandwiched into a "neither fish nor foul" category is GPS satellites. We all depend on them. Originally there was only one set. And it is operated by the US Airforce. But other countries decided they wanted their own. So the Russians, the Europeans, and others, have put up satellites that serve the same purpose. Again, although the cost of GPS satellites is borne by governments, taxpayers strongly support this kind of expenditure.
Another similar category is "earth resource" satellites. There is a lot of data that can be collected by satellites. And it is very valuable to farmers and other land management types. But various groups have managed to politicize this. The data they gather has, for instance, been used to make a strong case for Global Warming and to show that it is caused by humans.
There are groups (the fossil fuel industry, for instance) that are heavily invested in denialism (arguing that there is some conspiracy afoot to cook the books on the science). So controversy is manufactured where there is really none (the books, at least the scientific ones, are not being cooked). But as a result of the "controversy", funding, again by the government, for this work is fought over vigorously.
In all these cases, even the controversial ones, there is no difficulty answering the "value add" question. In each case there is a large group that thinks the results produced are very valuable and implement a specific, well defined, purpose. Some people may argue that doing something is a bad thing but everybody knows what the objective is. And everybody knows that the particular piece of space hardware advances the objective.
This is most obvious in the field of scientific exploration. Until recently (from a historical perspective) if you wanted to do some exploration your only option was to send people out. Now, at least when it comes to space exploration, the option exists to send a robot, an uncrewed machine, to do the exploration. And again there is no ambiguity about why the mission is being flown. It is being flown to go to a specific place and collect specific kinds of data. And at least some people think that data is very valuable.
The "why are we doing this?" question applies to all crewed missions in the post-Apollo era. It applies to no uncrewed missions in the same period. But the argument is continuously made that we should send people to these various places. The argument boils down to a single word: flexibility.
People with the mobility of their bipedal form of location, and with the dexterity with which they can pick things up and manipulate them, are more flexible. That, at least, is the argument. It is made with respect to various activities on the Apollo missions. This astronaut noticed this thing and was able to respond appropriately on the spot and immediately. Several pieces of equipment were repaired and several samples were collected (or photographed) because an astronaut was on site, saw an interesting rock and collected it, for instance. And this argument is true as far as it goes.
But there is also the fact that people are extremely inflexible. As Chaikin is going through each Apollo mission there is point after point after point where an opportunity must be forgone. It will take too long. It is too far away. Whatever.
The duration and number of space walks was severely constrained. Only a few could be made. And each could only last a set number of hours. A particular space walk had to end by a specific and extremely inflexible time. Even basics, like how many days the astronauts would spend on the surface of the moon was set in stone and could not be changed for any reason.
Contrast this with the uncrewed situation. Chaikin talks about Voyager 2 in his afterward. Had Voyager 2 been a crewed mission it would only been able to visit Jupiter and Saturn. Keeping the astronauts alive and getting them back to earth would have eliminated the possibility of extending the mission.
The actual mission was extended in two different ways. First, Neptune and Uranus were added. And this was done after the mission launched and the space craft was millions of miles from earth. After Voyager 2 passed Uranus the question was asked: why turn it off? The answer turned out to be that there was no reason to do so.
So the craft is still flying years later. And it has now voyaged into entirely uncharted space. And it is still collecting valuable data and sending it back to earth. During this "extended" (actually twice extended) mission it found the point where the sun's influence wains and the galaxy's influence waxes.
He also mentions "Spirit" and "Opportunity". These were two small vehicles that landed on Mars. They too demonstrated extreme flexibility. They were certified to last 90 days. Spirit lasted 2208 days. Opportunity lasted even longer, 5317 days. Everything that these rovers were able to do after the first 90 days was bonus time that would not have been possible if these were crewed missions.
We just saw another example of this recently with New Horizons. This is a spacecraft that was able to do the impossible, impossible for a crewed mission, that is. It flew by Pluto. First of all, it took almost ten years to get there. We couldn't have built a spacecraft big enough to keep people alive that long.
Second, it was a one way mission. It's not coming back. Crewed missions MUST return to earth with the crew alive and reasonably healthy. Sending New Horizons to Pluto was only possible because the machine weighed a thousand pounds at launch. We have a rocket big enough to shoot a thousand pound machine into space at the speed necessary to get to Pluto. We don't have a rocket that is big enough to do the same with a machine weighing a hundred times as much. And a hundred thousand pound or heavier machine would have been necessary to keep its crew alive for a decade or more.
But wait, there's more. After New Horizon passed Pluto, scientists asked "is there anything else we can do with it?" And there was. On New Year's day it flew by a Kuiper Belt Object officially called 2014 MU69. Unofficially, it is called Ultima Thule. Again, this was not even in the plan until after New Horizons flew past Pluto. What Voyager and Spirit and Opportunity and New Horizons (and many more robot space probes) demonstrate is that uncrewed missions are extremely flexible. They are, in fact, far more flexible than crewed missions.
And there is a good reason for this. All these "uncrewed" missions actually have a large crew of people. It's just that they are on the ground and not in the vehicle. So the "benefit" of crewed vehicles is actually the opposite. Adding a crew substantially diminishes net flexibility.
What is different is the speed with which this flexibility demonstrates itself. Crewed vehicles are flexible on time frame of seconds to minutes and inflexible on longer time frames. Uncrewed vehicles are flexible on a time frame of hours to years and inflexible on shorter time frames. A lot of experience has repeatedly demonstrated that long term flexibility is far more valuable than short term flexibility.
But we are going through the argument yet again. The ISS is still up in space. But the US stopped flying the Space Shuttle many years ago. Uncrewed rockets have been delivering supplies to it and returning with trash. Manned rockets have been swapping crew.
Currently the only way to get the crew back and forth is on a Russian rocket. Supposedly the Russians are doing a bad thing by charging $80 million per person to provide this service. But that's about what the same service actually cost when the US was flying the Space Shuttle.
Later this year, if everything goes well, Elon Musk's SpaceX company will be able to take over from the Russians. At that point it will theoretically be back to "full speed ahead" when it comes to crewed missions. But we are still asking the "what's the point" question. There is talk of sending people back to the moon. Why? There is no good answer. There is talk of sending people to Mars. Why? Again, there is no good answer.
Spirit and Opportunity are not the only successful uncrewed missions to Mars. About every two years NASA sends another uncrewed mission to Mars. They have been remarkably successful at doing valuable scientific work.
And China just landed a machine on the far side of the moon. This is the first time anyone has landed anything on the far side of the moon. Their machine even includes a small rover roughly similar to Spirit and Opportunity. And that's not the only uncrewed mission to the moon. And these missions have also generally been successful.
Remember that sending some people to the moon to visit for a couple of days will be fantastically expensive. A permanent base would be perhaps a thousand times more expensive. There is only a little science people can do in a couple of days and they can't get around any distance so they would only get a look at a couple of square miles of the moon. A permanent base could do more exploration but only perhaps ten or twenty times as much.
A mission to Mars would involve a few people spending perhaps six weeks on Mars at an almost incalculable cost. Again, you can only do a very little in that time. And again, a permanent base on Mars would cost perhaps a thousand times as much as a one-shot out-and-back crewed mission. And the opportunities for exploration would only be expanded by a little. And, given the ISS experience, there is no way any kind of commercial project could turn a profit.
For the cost of a manned mission to the moon a series of robot missions including rovers could traverse thousands of miles on the moon. For the cost of a moon base the same thing could be done on Mars. Push a single pin into a standard wall map. That's about the extent of the exploration we have done so far on either the moon or Mars. Crewed missions will keep it that way. They are just too expensive. The future of space exploration belongs to the robots.
And, before I continue, I note that 2019, the year I am writing this post in, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, the first time a person set foot on the moon. And here's an interesting thing that happened in a now long ago time. I was watching Jeopardy! one day and the Final Jeopardy answer was "The Headline on the front page of the New York Times on July 20, 1969". It took me ten or fifteen seconds to come up with the correct response. None of the contestants on the show even came close. That was the date of the Apollo 11 landing. To work . . .
I am going to start my history of putting people in space with the Manhattan Project, the effort to build the first Atomic Bomb. The key number is something called "mean free path". If the nucleus of a Uranium atom Fissions (breaks into pieces), on average, it ejects about two Neutrons (subatomic particles). We are told (and it's true) that an atom is mostly empty space. But a very small part of an atom is the nucleus. If one of these neutrons happens to hit a nucleus then it will blast it apart and the "chain reaction" will continue.
The mean free path is the distance a neutron travels before it hits another nucleus. If your lump of Uranium is too small then the neutron will fly away before hitting another Uranium nucleus and your bomb will fizzle out. But if your lump is big enough and you get some neutrons flying around then each neutron will hit another Uranium nucleus and break it apart sending more neutrons flying. If you can pull this off then you get a nice big boom. If not you get a fizzle.
It turns out that one of the deep dark secrets of the atom bomb business is this simple fact. But there are tricks. One trick is to use explosives to compress the Uranium. This reduces the mean free path. If you get it right then the amount of Uranium you need is decreased. Another trick, and this one didn't get out for a long time, is Beryllium. If you enclose the Uranium in a Beryllium shell the shell will bounce the neutrons back into your lump, thus effectively extending your mean free path. And that means you need less Uranium.
The Manhattan program needed to figure out the Beryllium trick in order to make even the first bomb work. They just didn't have enough Uranium otherwise. So why is all this germane to the subject at hand? Because the Russians (then called the Soviets) stole the first US design, which required a pretty big chunk of Uranium to work. But after that US scientists figured out a bunch of other tricks for making atomic bombs physically small and light.
US scientists got so good at shrinking atomic bombs that they made one that fit inside a standard artillery gun. This was a monumental achievement. Remember, the first atomic bomb was so big that if filled up an entire B-29 bomber all by itself. But for a long time the Soviets only know how to make big and heavy bombs. (They later caught up and could also make very small atomic bombs.)
It was obvious to anyone interested in using atomic bombs in war that using rockets to shoot atomic bombs to the other side of the earth was a good idea. Since the US knew how to build small atomic bombs they didn't bother trying to figure out how to make big rockets. The Soviets (see note above) were initially not so good at shrinking atomic bombs so they set out to make big rockets from the get go.
Fast forward to 1957. The Soviets launched the first artificial satellite into orbit. A big reason they were first was because the US had all these great bomber-type airplanes like the B-36 and the B-47, so they felt little urgency to build rockets capable of carrying atomic bombs. Being behind in the "bomber race", the Soviets put a lot more focus and emphasis on rockets, big rockets.
That first satellite ("Sputnik") was pretty small. But because the Soviet big rocket program had been pushed harder they were able to scale up from there very quickly. So they put a dog, "Laika", into orbit. (It died a few days later because the Soviets had no way to get it back down.) Only a few years later (April 12, 1961) they were able to put Yuri Gagarin into orbit and safely get him back to earth. They were able to follow it up with the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963.
This quick progress was possible due to the fact that the Soviets had started putting a lot of effort into developing rockets long before the US did. This was because they didn't have good bomber-type airplanes. And they had put an early emphasis on big rockets because for a long time they didn't know how to build small and light atomic bombs.
Anyhow, for a long time after 1957 the US was fumbling along in the wake of the Soviets. There initially didn't seem to be a pressing need to spend the bales of money necessary to catch up. So the US didn't. But the Cold War was going on. And the Soviets were touting their space program and it's impressive list of firsts as proof positive of the superiority of the Communist system.
Politics being what it is, eventually the US government, both the administration and the Congress, decided this was unacceptable. And eventually the level of embarrassment got so great that the money spigot was opened wide and cash flowed.
At the time this was going on I knew nothing of the "why" of it. I was a science and technology guy so I just thought spending a ton of money building cool space stuff was a great idea. I still believe that. But people who think like I do have always been and continue to be a small minority.
Most people don't understand that the government spending a lot of money on leading edge technology eventually results in benefits to everyone. This is one of the few places where "trickle down" actually works. What they do understand is "the bad guys are doing something bad and we must do what it takes to beat them". In this case the bad guys were the Soviets and the place we needed to beat them was in what became known as the "space race".
So the US started out well behind the Soviets in terms of our ability to build rockets, particularly big rockets. Once the money spigot opened that started to change. But it took several years for progress to become readily apparent. In those early years the Soviets continued to score first after first. The good news was that this caused the money spigot to be opened very wide. And that made a lot of things possible.
The US was losing the propaganda battle badly in May of '61 when Kennedy made his famous "before this decade is out, to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely" commitment. So why the moon? In 1961 the US was still way behind and it was going to take several years of substantial effort to gain the lead. In that time the Soviets would score some more firsts (see above).
For Kennedy's announcement to work as a propaganda tool the US needed to pick a goal that was hard enough that it would take several years to achieve. And they needed a goal that was spectacular enough and understandable enough that, if the US succeeded, the average person would say "the US is definitely ahead now". Pretty much nothing short of "man on the moon" fit the bill.
Kennedy spent some time understanding the issues. And he eventually came to believe whole heartedly in a muscular US space program, just on its own merits. So did Lynden Johnson. I don't know the origins of this but Johnson was a true believer in the space program pretty much from the start. That meant that when Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson became President, he was a strong supporter of the space program.
The US in 1961 had a cobbled together a program called "Mercury" whose entire objective was to just get a US astronaut into space. Thinking ahead, engineers had come up with an obvious extension. After the one man Mercury missions, we would move on to two man "Gemini" missions. But in the early days there was no good answer to the "why" question with respect to Gemini. Why put two people into the capsule instead of just one? Neither Mercury nor Gemini ("the twins") had any obvious goal other than just the doing of the thing.
When Kennedy said "we're gong to the moon" a third program, Apollo, was grafted on the end like it made sense and it had always been planned to be that way. Apollo would feature three astronauts in a space ship that was designed to go to the moon and back. As a result of the need to build up to Apollo, Mercury and Gemini finally had a "why".
The book I referenced above was originally published in 1994. It was updated and reissued in 2007. I found out about it because I watched a very interesting "Nova" episode about the Apollo 8 mission. The problem is that pretty much everybody agrees that Apollo was the high point of the whole "put people in space" thing. Why is that?
Well, I have alluded to it above. The whole "moon shot" was primarily a propaganda effort. It was designed to demonstrate that US space capability was better than everybody else's. And, most importantly, it was better than the "Communist" system the Soviets used. It succeeded. In fact, it was too successful. The moon shot convinced the Soviets they couldn't be competitive in a space race against the US so they moved on. And that left nothing catchy for the US space program to do.
In theory there was lots it could do. But there wasn't sufficient support for any of those other things. So, the money spigot closed back up. For instance, Nixon the man that succeeded Johnson as President, had little or no interest in space. So he whittled NASA back as much as he could and as quickly as he could.
His approach was to do as little as possible. He had to pretend interest to keep the "space lobby" (people like me) happy. But he really didn't care so his approach was "what's the cheapest thing I can do that will get these people off my back?" He ended up with the Space Shuttle, a poorly designed vehicle whose development was chronically underfunded. If you are doing something because it will save money then you should be able to do it cheaply, right?
But let's leave those kinds of considerations aside, and look at what crewed space exploration has achieved. In the early days, not much was achieved. Various stunts proved that people could be put into space and gotten back safely. That's very hard to do so in the early days there was little left after that for anything else. But, as the doing of it problem got solved there came a time when there was room for other things.
And the "other things" fall into two general categories: scientific and commercial. None of either was done in those early missions except for the taking of pictures. But by this time spy satellites were taking more and better pictures. It's just that the only people who got to see the spy pictures were the military and the intelligence communities. And these missions were so fantastically expensive that no commercial endeavor was possible.
Gradually the science component of these missions increased. Before Apollo, only a dib here and a dab there of science was done. That continued to be true through Apollo 11, the first moon landing. Some science was done on Apollo 12. If you don't know how Apollo 13 went, watch the movie. But the later missions, Apollo 14-17, did a lot of science. This science haul is one of the reasons Apollo was a high point. No other crewed missions ever did science that was nearly as impactful as these missions.
They collected a lot of rocks and brought them back. These were subsequently analyzed, a process that continues to this day, and tons of great science was done with them. Our understanding of the moon, where it came from, what it is made of, and much else, stems primarily from Apollo. And the moon rocks were the most important contributor. But the astronauts also made a lot of important observations, took a lot of valuable pictures, and set up a number of valuable experiments.
One gadget they set up was a reflector that allowed a laser to be used to determine the exact distance to the moon. Both the distance and the way the distance varies with time tell scientists a lot. Another important instrument is the seismometer. The study of earthquakes (moonquakes, in this case, but the science is the same) allows scientists to determine a lot about what the inside of the moon looks like.
Both of these measurements not only tell us a lot about the moon, they tell us a lot about the earth. Tides on earth, for instance, affect the distance between the earth and the moon. So by studying the moon, specifically how far away it is, we can learn a lot about how tides on earth work and what effects they have.
After Apollo various short lived projects like Skylab were implemented. But the big project has been what eventually became the ISS, the International Space Station. The total cost of the ISS exceeds $100 billion. It has turned out to be so expensive that it had to be internationalized. It has now been in place in one form or another for twenty years. And the US designed and built the Space Shuttle specifically as a vehicle for the building and maintenance of what eventually became the ISS.
But what's it all about? A consistent answer over the decades has been "so we can go exploring". Okay. There has been "Explorer's" clubs around in one form or another (the National Geographic Society is an example of one that is still in business) for a couple of hundred years now. But they have mostly been a plaything for rich people.
Regular people like the idea of exploration. They just don't see the need to make more than a token contribution to the cost of exploring. In the past almost all expeditions were financed by rich people. Now they are mostly financed by governments. Voters are willing to allocate tax dollars to exploration as long as the sums involved are very modest. Beyond that, it's mostly rich guys trying to score bragging points off their friends, enemies, and associates.
The Second answer is actually a variation on the "exploration" theme. It's scientific research. There is a larger constituency for this sort of thing. I get jazzed when I think about all the things we found out as a result of Apollo. Geologists are over the moon about the same subject. The same is true generally of scientists in many fields, lots of which have no obvious connection to space. Electronics and Computer Science benefitted greatly from the Space Program.
Then, of course, there's Tang. You all know what Tang is? And that's my point. The people who know about Tang are laughing right now. The people who don't are justifiably mystified. (Spoiler alert: it's powdered artificial Orange Juice.) Most people just don't see any kind of direct connection between their lives and people exploring space. As such, they tend to be pretty unhappy when the Federal Government puts a lot of money into the subject.
We saw this with Apollo. The scientifically important flights, 11-17, all took place in a four year period extending from 1969 through 1972. But public interest in and support of Apollo peaked with 11 and declined through the remaining missions. And this is in spite of the fact that the scientific and exploratory benefits started at a very low point with 11 and grew substantially as mission followed mission. It really was just a public relations stunt, as far as the interest of the general public was concerned. Once we had landed on the moon there was no reason to stay involved.
I subscribe to a number of scientific journals that cover scientific advances across a broad range of subjects. These journals regularly cover important scientific advances derived from space missions. But I can't think of anything significant that has come out of the crewed missions in the post-Apollo era. Instead, it has all come out of what we now call robotic missions. Why is this?
In the early days of space exploration computers had little capability. And all the more capable machines were large, heavy, and consumed substantial amounts of power. In short, you couldn't put them on a space ship. People were the only option when you needed smart. And it took a lot of smart to pull off an Apollo mission. The Apollo capsules had a "computer" aboard. But we would laugh at it now. I think my garage door opener has more processing power than that device had. But it was bleeding edge at the time.
People had to do most of the work. But it is a mistake to believe that it was the people in the space ship. They were very important. But it was the thousands of people on the ground that did the most critical work. Not one of the Apollo missions could have succeeded without ground support. The astronauts couldn't navigate for themselves. They couldn't figure out what to do if some modification to the original plan became necessary. It was not a couple of guys onboard that figured out what to do next but a team of hundreds of people on the ground working feverously that did almost all of the work.
All space missions are crewed. That crew always includes a big crew of people on the ground. Sometimes it also includes a few people onboard the space ship. Nowadays, it usually it doesn't. The indispensable part of the crew is the ground part not the onboard part. And that's the part that advocates of putting people aboard spaceships get wrong. They think the distinction is between "manned" and "unmanned". All space missions are "manned" by a large group of people on the ground. (And the ground crew has always included women.) The difference is that is some cases a few members of the very large crew are local, they are on the vessel.
The "Afterward" in "A Man on the Moon" is instructive. He notes of the ISS "even now [in 2007], after so much money, so much time and effort, so much wasted opportunity, no one was sure what the station would be good for". And that's the fundamental problem with crewed space ships. To put it bluntly, what's the "value add"?
When it comes to the ISS promises have been made about manufacturing advances due to zero gee (more accurately called microgravity - stuff does get bounced around to some extent). Some tests and pilot projects have been run. But the results so far have been a bust. There doesn't seem to be anything that can be made on the ISS that can't be made far more easily "down the gravity well" on earth. Similarly, no one has succeeded in making anything on the ISS that can't also be made on earth.
Now, compare that with the situation that pertains to uncrewed space based machines. There are lots of "Comsats", satellites in geosynchronous orbits (orbits at that cause the satellite to appear stationary in the sky). These are used to relay TV signals from one part of earth to another. This is a thriving and successful business. It is now common for a local TV station to buy "satellite time" so they can broadcast a sporting event that takes place thousands of miles away. This business is so popular that slots in geosynchronous orbit are hard to come by. Pretty much all of them are in use.
Weather satellites are very valuable. They have revolutionized forecasting by being able to provide vast quantities of accurate detailed information for the entire earth, not just the places that are easy to get to. And, of course, they provide the "satellite pictures" that are a staple of every TV weather broadcast. Since this has historically been the province of governments, all of these are government owned and operated. But taxpayers see this as one of the best uses of their tax dollars. So government spending in this area is very popular.
Another business that more than pays for itself is the intelligence business. Spy satellites are ubiquitous. Intelligence agencies depend heavily on them and, as a result, spend heavily on them. This too is a government expenditure, but it too is a popular one.
Sandwiched into a "neither fish nor foul" category is GPS satellites. We all depend on them. Originally there was only one set. And it is operated by the US Airforce. But other countries decided they wanted their own. So the Russians, the Europeans, and others, have put up satellites that serve the same purpose. Again, although the cost of GPS satellites is borne by governments, taxpayers strongly support this kind of expenditure.
Another similar category is "earth resource" satellites. There is a lot of data that can be collected by satellites. And it is very valuable to farmers and other land management types. But various groups have managed to politicize this. The data they gather has, for instance, been used to make a strong case for Global Warming and to show that it is caused by humans.
There are groups (the fossil fuel industry, for instance) that are heavily invested in denialism (arguing that there is some conspiracy afoot to cook the books on the science). So controversy is manufactured where there is really none (the books, at least the scientific ones, are not being cooked). But as a result of the "controversy", funding, again by the government, for this work is fought over vigorously.
In all these cases, even the controversial ones, there is no difficulty answering the "value add" question. In each case there is a large group that thinks the results produced are very valuable and implement a specific, well defined, purpose. Some people may argue that doing something is a bad thing but everybody knows what the objective is. And everybody knows that the particular piece of space hardware advances the objective.
This is most obvious in the field of scientific exploration. Until recently (from a historical perspective) if you wanted to do some exploration your only option was to send people out. Now, at least when it comes to space exploration, the option exists to send a robot, an uncrewed machine, to do the exploration. And again there is no ambiguity about why the mission is being flown. It is being flown to go to a specific place and collect specific kinds of data. And at least some people think that data is very valuable.
The "why are we doing this?" question applies to all crewed missions in the post-Apollo era. It applies to no uncrewed missions in the same period. But the argument is continuously made that we should send people to these various places. The argument boils down to a single word: flexibility.
People with the mobility of their bipedal form of location, and with the dexterity with which they can pick things up and manipulate them, are more flexible. That, at least, is the argument. It is made with respect to various activities on the Apollo missions. This astronaut noticed this thing and was able to respond appropriately on the spot and immediately. Several pieces of equipment were repaired and several samples were collected (or photographed) because an astronaut was on site, saw an interesting rock and collected it, for instance. And this argument is true as far as it goes.
But there is also the fact that people are extremely inflexible. As Chaikin is going through each Apollo mission there is point after point after point where an opportunity must be forgone. It will take too long. It is too far away. Whatever.
The duration and number of space walks was severely constrained. Only a few could be made. And each could only last a set number of hours. A particular space walk had to end by a specific and extremely inflexible time. Even basics, like how many days the astronauts would spend on the surface of the moon was set in stone and could not be changed for any reason.
Contrast this with the uncrewed situation. Chaikin talks about Voyager 2 in his afterward. Had Voyager 2 been a crewed mission it would only been able to visit Jupiter and Saturn. Keeping the astronauts alive and getting them back to earth would have eliminated the possibility of extending the mission.
The actual mission was extended in two different ways. First, Neptune and Uranus were added. And this was done after the mission launched and the space craft was millions of miles from earth. After Voyager 2 passed Uranus the question was asked: why turn it off? The answer turned out to be that there was no reason to do so.
So the craft is still flying years later. And it has now voyaged into entirely uncharted space. And it is still collecting valuable data and sending it back to earth. During this "extended" (actually twice extended) mission it found the point where the sun's influence wains and the galaxy's influence waxes.
He also mentions "Spirit" and "Opportunity". These were two small vehicles that landed on Mars. They too demonstrated extreme flexibility. They were certified to last 90 days. Spirit lasted 2208 days. Opportunity lasted even longer, 5317 days. Everything that these rovers were able to do after the first 90 days was bonus time that would not have been possible if these were crewed missions.
We just saw another example of this recently with New Horizons. This is a spacecraft that was able to do the impossible, impossible for a crewed mission, that is. It flew by Pluto. First of all, it took almost ten years to get there. We couldn't have built a spacecraft big enough to keep people alive that long.
Second, it was a one way mission. It's not coming back. Crewed missions MUST return to earth with the crew alive and reasonably healthy. Sending New Horizons to Pluto was only possible because the machine weighed a thousand pounds at launch. We have a rocket big enough to shoot a thousand pound machine into space at the speed necessary to get to Pluto. We don't have a rocket that is big enough to do the same with a machine weighing a hundred times as much. And a hundred thousand pound or heavier machine would have been necessary to keep its crew alive for a decade or more.
But wait, there's more. After New Horizon passed Pluto, scientists asked "is there anything else we can do with it?" And there was. On New Year's day it flew by a Kuiper Belt Object officially called 2014 MU69. Unofficially, it is called Ultima Thule. Again, this was not even in the plan until after New Horizons flew past Pluto. What Voyager and Spirit and Opportunity and New Horizons (and many more robot space probes) demonstrate is that uncrewed missions are extremely flexible. They are, in fact, far more flexible than crewed missions.
And there is a good reason for this. All these "uncrewed" missions actually have a large crew of people. It's just that they are on the ground and not in the vehicle. So the "benefit" of crewed vehicles is actually the opposite. Adding a crew substantially diminishes net flexibility.
What is different is the speed with which this flexibility demonstrates itself. Crewed vehicles are flexible on time frame of seconds to minutes and inflexible on longer time frames. Uncrewed vehicles are flexible on a time frame of hours to years and inflexible on shorter time frames. A lot of experience has repeatedly demonstrated that long term flexibility is far more valuable than short term flexibility.
But we are going through the argument yet again. The ISS is still up in space. But the US stopped flying the Space Shuttle many years ago. Uncrewed rockets have been delivering supplies to it and returning with trash. Manned rockets have been swapping crew.
Currently the only way to get the crew back and forth is on a Russian rocket. Supposedly the Russians are doing a bad thing by charging $80 million per person to provide this service. But that's about what the same service actually cost when the US was flying the Space Shuttle.
Later this year, if everything goes well, Elon Musk's SpaceX company will be able to take over from the Russians. At that point it will theoretically be back to "full speed ahead" when it comes to crewed missions. But we are still asking the "what's the point" question. There is talk of sending people back to the moon. Why? There is no good answer. There is talk of sending people to Mars. Why? Again, there is no good answer.
Spirit and Opportunity are not the only successful uncrewed missions to Mars. About every two years NASA sends another uncrewed mission to Mars. They have been remarkably successful at doing valuable scientific work.
And China just landed a machine on the far side of the moon. This is the first time anyone has landed anything on the far side of the moon. Their machine even includes a small rover roughly similar to Spirit and Opportunity. And that's not the only uncrewed mission to the moon. And these missions have also generally been successful.
Remember that sending some people to the moon to visit for a couple of days will be fantastically expensive. A permanent base would be perhaps a thousand times more expensive. There is only a little science people can do in a couple of days and they can't get around any distance so they would only get a look at a couple of square miles of the moon. A permanent base could do more exploration but only perhaps ten or twenty times as much.
A mission to Mars would involve a few people spending perhaps six weeks on Mars at an almost incalculable cost. Again, you can only do a very little in that time. And again, a permanent base on Mars would cost perhaps a thousand times as much as a one-shot out-and-back crewed mission. And the opportunities for exploration would only be expanded by a little. And, given the ISS experience, there is no way any kind of commercial project could turn a profit.
For the cost of a manned mission to the moon a series of robot missions including rovers could traverse thousands of miles on the moon. For the cost of a moon base the same thing could be done on Mars. Push a single pin into a standard wall map. That's about the extent of the exploration we have done so far on either the moon or Mars. Crewed missions will keep it that way. They are just too expensive. The future of space exploration belongs to the robots.
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