Space Advocates Like To Talk To Themselves
How We Go to Mars, op ed, Rick Tumlinson, Space News
“So what do we do? As many of these approaches are viable, we must go back to the Why? to begin culling out the dead ends. Since a notable group of space leaders at the 2015 Pioneering Space Summit agreed settlement is the goal and science is something you get if you do settlement (the reverse does not apply), I will adopt that assertion as my standard in the process of elimination.”
Keith’s note: Yet another word salad op ed about going to Mars – this time from Rick Tumlinson, one of the usual suspects in space advocacy community. The author asks dozens of questions yet does not answer a single one. The last sentence of this rambling piece was all that Tumlinson probably needed to say to get his point across.
Tumlinson and his New World Institute had all the space advocates in Washington all pumped up for his “Pioneering Space National Summit” event in February 2015. No media were allowed in. If one were to believe all of the pre-game hype, discussions were to be had amongst the pillars of the space community, and momentous statements intended to break the deadlock and propel us all into space were to be issued. As I noted in June 2015, 4 months after the event “Checking the website there seems to be little in the way of output – just two documents only a couple of pages long that are mostly semi-edited meeting notes/outlines: Report: Deliberation #1 – Vision (Group A) and Report: Deliberation #2 – Strategy (Group A). Two other documents are apparently being edited. That’s it?” Nothing has changed. Its as if nothing happened.
But wait – there’s more – now the same New Worlds Institute that provided none of the promised space policy goodies from Pioneering Space National Summit is holding New Worlds 2015 in October 2015 an event with the usual suspects which claims to be “the first comprehensive gathering of the people, companies and institutions that will open space to human development and settlement”. I have seen meetings like this every 3 years for the past 40 years. L-5 people used to talk like this in the 1970s.
These events accomplish nothing. Why not just take all the money that goes into running them and just buy cubesat launches and put real space technology in the hands of the next generation instead of enabling this endless stream of pointless blabber from all of us middle-aged tired space advocates?
Choir practice in an echo chamber – that’s all these events are.
– Pioneering Space National Summit: So Far, Nothing But Crickets
– Yet Another Plan For Outer Space, earlier post
– Pioneering Space National Summit Details Emerge, earlier post
– Alliance for Space Development: Yawn – Yet Another Space Group, earlier post
– space Advocates Work Together By Not Working Together, earlier post
– Move Along. This Is Not The Space Policy You’re Looking For., earlier post
Sounds like Buckaroo Banzai: “Where are we going?” “Planet 10!” “When?” “Real Soon!”
Is Tumlinson saying that all of NASA should redirect to this goal-like-thing?
As I noted this whole thing is word salad. Hard to tell.
I just noticed reading ‘NASA’ and ‘redirect’ in the same sentence gives me a tick, oh dear.
Anyways I’d love to see more solid concrete mission goals from NASA instead of; strategies to develop the base, to consider the experience, to possibly devise a goal, sometime in the vicinity of our distant horizon time-frame, on our upcoming flowchart.(That’s how it feels to me a lot of the time.)
NASA can’t establish concrete mission goals all by themselves. The President needs to work them out with NASA and sell them to Congress.
When that doesn’t happen, we get SLS.
There is a bunch of these middle ( or a bit more ) aged advocates around that seem to get more and more incoherent as time goes by.
Keith is 100% correct – launch a cubesat and be useful. Kickstart it if you lack rich friends.
EDIT: also, the hubris. “someday this piece will be archived in a Martian library.” Really ?
From a distant view, the space advocates have made a difference. This is reflected in the op-ed and the comment “put the technology in the hands of the next generation”.
NASA has identified a flexible architecture/paths forward that fit within the budget. To lower costs to LEO requires a consolidation of US LVs/components with a focus on reuse–a real game changer. Propellant storage reduces LV capacity. BEO demand provides stability for the possibility of 2-3 *new* markets. In short, LVs are exchanged for payload/missions and the increased flight rate reduces costs.
Gravity well missions do not fit the budget until the infrastructure is in place, but numerous missions and ISRU resources remain for the next generation. With all the marketing and false policy statements creating incoherence, it took much time and energy to communicate a more logical path forward.
I don’t mind the closed-door summits, since if they ever want any plans to get broader advocacy they’ll have to reveal them anyways – the “closed doors” just lets them discuss frankly.
They’re not that expensive. Plus, space is one of those things where a big part of ensuring it doesn’t dwindle involves keeping people “activated” and part of a pro-space community of advocacy. That’s what the summits are for – they keep people activated. Honestly, we ought to be having broader ones.
Personally, I’m starting to give up. We’re closer to Mars than ever before! #JourneyToMars! But we’re not because Orion was just delayed. Elon Musk and SpaceX are going to start a space colony on Mars because, well, he said they will (Dragon could land on any planetary surface? Really?). Then there’s the question of who would even want to be stuck in a spacecraft for months on end with little to do without going insane. (Oh, but don’t talk about any of that practical stuff, because, The Martian.)
Maybe I’m just incapable of seeing a 20+ year horizon (or maybe today just sucked.) Or maybe we should stop dreaming and do stuff that will actually happen. Honestly, I’ll never understand why we’re in a rush to Mars when the Moon is on our doorstep. There’s so much we could learn about dealing with humans in space that is both realistic and practical. And it’s right there.
BTW, it’s 2015 now, the year we were supposed to be back on the Moon with the original VSE.
#JourneyToMars.
“I’ll never understand why we’re in a rush to Mars when the Moon is on our doorstep. There’s so much we could learn about dealing with humans in space that is both realistic and practical. And it’s right there.”
You’ve just explained the core of the issue. NASA and politicians like the “Humans to Mars” goal because it’s always 20 years in the future. They can do nothing but still claim that they are “going to Mars.” A lunar outpost would require real, measurable accomplishments on an accountable timetable.
So with Mars as the ever-distant, constantly receding goal, we get our current Potemkin Village space program, run by incompetents and supported by the dishonest and the ignorant. Welcome to the future.
“I’ll never understand why we’re in a rush to Mars when the Moon is on our doorstep.”
While I was presenting recently on the Moon and Cislunar Space at the UT Arlington Planetarium for International Observe the Moon Night (InOMN), one young lady commented that our Moon is basically ‘Mars w/training wheels’, which other college-age members of the audience quickly agreed with. A number expressed bafflement at NASA’s OCD preoccupation with Mars when there’s a whole Solar System at hand.
I usually refer to Cislunar Space as our ‘Sandbox Mode’ for the rest of the Solar System. It’s the on-ramp to the Inter-Planetary Superhighways, more of the rest of the Solar System is more like our Moon than either Mars or Earth, there’s good science to be done on the Moon and in Cislunar Space, and commercial and industry opportunity abounds.
I know NASA is going to Mars because Mat Damon told me so.
Looks like on SLS Orion too.
http://www.youtube.com/watc…
Oops Not Matt’s Damon’s NASA commercial, Zubrin’s case for mars instead.
Agreed. This certainly wasn’t the first time and it certainly won’t be the last. Rand Simberg’s Twitter accounts are a comical testament to this trend – a tweet from one of his accounts is retweeted by his other two accounts.
You just replied to a guy who is impatient with seven paragraphs. 🙂
Seriously, that’s some food for thought. Thanks for posting it.
But could we have gotten the Internet Revolution without the role the 1960’s space program had in advancing electronics and computer science?
Well, I AM nodding my head…
Hi Mr. Spencer are you a Space Advocate?
Me too! 🙂
Keith,
I think these conferences would make more sense to you, if you just consider them club reunions. Specifically a reunion where everyone gets to commiserate, on how all the other people in the world ignore them – and where everyone can agree they are smarter about this then everyone else. After that they can then attack one another to decide which of them is the smartest of them all.
None of these get togethers ever even speak the name of any of the main issues (hell even true facts are not welcome visitors), so obviously they have moved on from the “results hang-up”.
Perhaps there’s a good hook up scene at these?
Kelly Starks