Not sad (the blog post)

 A while back, I mentioned on Facebook that I wasn’t sad to see the Shuttle end. Noel said he was sad that I wasn’t sad. That made me, in turn, a little sad. And the cure for sadness, as we all know, is to write a blog post.

Now: I was going to write a post about how (1) manned spaceflight was sort of a dubious idea to begin with, and (2) it wasn’t going away, since lots of other countries are doing it, and the US will get back into the business by and by, and (3) the Shuttle really did kinda suck; it was a bad design that was way too expensive and that killed many other, better projects. But that post — or, more likely, posts — would have been cranky. And who wants to read someone else being cranky on the internet?

So here’s a different post. Let’s start with a question: how has spending on space worldwide changed since, ohh, let’s say the end of the Apollo program — 1975? Gone up, gone down, about the same?

Answer below the fold:

Global space budget in 1975 (constant 2007 dollars, billions)

NASA ~11
USSR   ~5

1975 total: about $16 billion

Global space budget in 2011 (constant 2007 dollars, billions)

NASA    ~19
E.U.       ~4.5
Russia    ~3.9
China     ~2.0
India      ~1.0
Japan     ~0.4
Brazil     ~0.3
Others (Iran, Pakistan, Israel, Korea, Indonesia) ~0.6
2011 total: about $31.7 billion

These are rough numbers, but the trend is clear: over the last 35 years, global spending on space exploration has roughly doubled.

We’re living in a golden age of space exploration. We’re bombing the Moon for water, mapping methane lakes on Titan, and watching solar flares in realtime in 3-D. We’re getting ready to fly by Pluto and drop an SUV on Mars. We’re mapping the inner solar system down to a few meters of resolution and doing sample returns from comets. We’ve got the International Space Station (ISS), now into its second decade of operation and approved at least a decade more. In terms of technology, we’ve got fully functional ion drives, a working prototype solar sail, and the ISS solar panel systems producing enough electricity to light up a small subdivision.

We’ve put landers on Titan and the polar regions of Mars. We’ve watched geysers erupt on Enceladus, lightning strikes on Venus, and found a frickin’ hexagon on the north pole of Saturn.

So: the global space budget has grown steadily for nearly two generations now, roughly doubling over 35 years, with the number of active countries rising from two to around a dozen. As a result, we are currently in a glorious Magellanic age of space discovery.

And it’s a global age. Here’s a thing you’ll notice, if you hang around space enthusiasts for long: there’ll be a conversation about “space exploration”, and after a bit you realize that half the people in the room are taking that to mean MANNED space exploration BY AMERICANS, with any other sort being at best a bit disreputable and at worst vaguely threatening, and the “failure” of manned US space travel seen as some sort of failure of will. This is incredibly annoying for multiple reasons.

One, the US space exploration budget is still about 60% higher, in real dollar terms, than it was in 1975. If our national will is flagging, you can’t see it from the numbers. Yes, we no longer have a manned space program. But we do have a “find a thousand extrasolar planets” program, and a “let’s have a close look at Pluto, shall we?” program, and a “zip around the asteroid belt with an ion drive” program, and a “land a robot tank on Mars to blast rocks into plasma with its laser cannon” program. I think those count for something.

Two, the fact that the rest of the world is going into space is, and that its no longer a simple binary US/USSR competition… well, how is this a bad thing? India, China and Brazil are becoming rich enough to afford serious space programs, and they are choosing to spend some of their new wealth in space: why is this not a cause for celebration? (Incidentally, China is planning to build its own manned space station over the next few years. If you think that’s a bad thing, you need to explain why Americans in space are a victory for the future of humanity, while Chinese in space are kinda creepy somehow. Please do. I’ll watch with interest.)

To imagine a future where Americans continue to dominate space exploration, you have to imagine a future where the rest of the world stays poor. Wouldn’t that be kind of a crappy future?

Three, modern space exploration involves a worldwide community of scientists and space supporters. When Chandrasekhar discovered water on the Moon, were we supposed to sulk because it was a dirty Indian probe that did it? When the Japanese brought Hayabusa home, should we not have joined in that astonishing triumph of scientists and engineers over adversity? Should the 90+% of the world that’s not American ignore the glorious images from Cassini — and the accompanying avalanche of scientific information! — because Cassini is run by the imperialists of NASA?

Space exploration is science, you know? And science knows no borders.

So, putting aside the whole Space Shuttle thing, when I look at the current state of space exploration? I’m filled with awe and curiosity and delight. And I’m not sad at all.

Comments

[Will Baird]

The funny part is that the end of the Shuttle could be the beginning of a real flowering in American manned spaceflight.

The Orion is (still) being developed, despite its faux cancellation and its intended to be for more than just LEO.

SpaceX's Dragon is going to be a manned capsule, gov money or not. It'll just take a bit longer without the government money. SpaceX is also building the Falcon Heavy...if that gets going for reals and Elon has a good track record, I'd say, then...

Boeing is working on its CST-100; Sierra Nevada is working on the DreamChaser; and Blue Origin is working on their own capsule work.

As I pointed out in email back in Feb about the CCDEV2, you could get all the cargo of the shuttle flights, three different systems, and 72 passenger berths for the price of 30 on the shuttle.

You've more than double the number of people going into orbit.

You have triple US redundancy for space access systems.

You keep the same cargo to orbit.

If Orion continues to be developed and the Dragon can be enhanced for past LEO flights, then we have redundancy in past LEO.

It sounds like a really big win to me.

And it sounds like the beginning of a new era. A good one. Though I hesitate to call it a golden one.

[David Allen]

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute.

So, nationalist rivalry is out of place in space exploration. What, then, is a good (safe) place for it?

[Will Baird]

??? Better rephrase that, David. I missed a step somewhere.

[David Allen]

Okay. Doug said:

"And it’s a global age. Here’s a thing you’ll notice, if you hang around space enthusiasts for long: there’ll be a conversation about “space exploration”, and after a bit you realize that half the people in the room are taking that to mean MANNED space exploration BY AMERICANS, with any other sort being at best a bit disreputable and at worst vaguely threatening, and the “failure” of manned US space travel seen as some sort of failure of will. This is incredibly annoying for multiple reasons."

I understand Doug as saying that the Cold War Space Race mentality is about a quarter century past its last sell date and should be tossed onto the compost heap of history. Mostly I agree with him.

However, while the Space Race mentality may have hurt the science and led to some bad engineering decisions that got people killed, it also provided a way for the US and the USSR to compete that didn't involve guns. And there's plenty of international rivalry out there now. Which would be a better competition for the US and the PRC, space exploration or building aircraft carriers?

[Will Baird]

Wow. David, I think we have radically different views on a number of things.

Competition, IMNSHO, is a great source of innovation. Whether its nationalist or otherwise. Fortunately or unfortunately, the nationalism is about the only source of competition large enough to drive space exploration relatively sustainably.

There are some exceptions to that, like the GLXP which - full disclosure - I am a team lead for. Competition seems to work better, imo, than collaboration, /but/ they are not mutually exclusive either.

We're starting to work with other GLXP teams even as we are directly competing with them.

[Anonymous]

I understand Doug as saying that the Cold War Space Race mentality is about a quarter century past its last sell date and should be tossed onto the compost heap of history. Mostly I agree with him.