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.