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Subject: SPACE Digest V10 #122

SPACE Digest                                     Volume 10 : Issue 122

Today's Topics:
               Re: Astronaut Selection
              "The Plan" (long)
            Re: More whining about Galileo
               Re: Astronaut Selection
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 5 Oct 89 04:39:48 GMT
From: mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo![e-mail]  (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Astronaut Selection

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (NUTSY FAGEN) writes:
>        I'd like to know how one goes about becoming an astronaut...

This is my standard writeup on the subject.  This isn't *quite* in line
with your specific questions, but I suspect it's of interest nevertheless...

Q. How do I become an astronaut?

A. We will assume you mean a NASA astronaut, since it's probably impossible
    for a Westerner to get into the Soviet program, and the other nations
    have so few astronauts (and fly even fewer) that you're better off
    hoping to win a lottery.  Becoming a shuttle pilot requires lots
    of fast-jet experience, which means a military flying career; forget
    that unless you want to do it anyway.  So you want to become a
    shuttle "mission specialist".

    If you aren't a US citizen, become one; that is a must.  After that,
    the crucial thing to remember is that the demand for such jobs vastly
    exceeds the supply.  NASA's problem is not finding qualified people,
    but thinning the lineup down to manageable length.  It is not enough
    to be qualified; you must avoid being *dis*qualified for any reason,
    many of them in principle quite irrelevant to the job.

    Get a Ph.D.  Specialize in something that involves getting your hands
    dirty with equipment, not just paper and pencil.  Forget computer
    programming entirely; it will be done from the ground for the fore-
    seeable future.  Be in good physical condition, with good eyesight.
    (DO NOT get a radial keratomy in an attempt to improve your vision;
    its long-term effects are poorly understood.  For that matter, avoid
    any other significant medical unknowns.)  Practise public speaking,
    and be conservative and conformist in appearance and actions; you've
    got a tough selling job ahead, trying to convince a cautious,
    conservative selection committee that you are better than hundreds
    of other applicants.  (And, also, that you will be a credit to NASA
    after you are hired:  public relations is a significant part of the
    job, and NASA's image is very prim and proper.)  The image you want
    is squeaky-clean workaholic yuppie.  Remember also that you will
    need a security clearance at some point, and the security people
    consider everybody guilty until proven innocent.  Keep your nose
    clean.  Get a pilot's license and make flying your number one hobby;
    experienced pilots are known to be favored even for non-pilot jobs.
    Work for NASA; of 45 astronauts selected between 1984 and 1988,
    43 were military or NASA employees, and the remaining two were
    a NASA consultant and Mae Jemison (the first black female astronaut).
    Think space:  they want highly motivated people, so lose no chance
    to demonstrate motivation.  Keep trying.  Be lucky.
--
Nature is blind; Man is merely |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
shortsighted (and improving).  | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry [e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 5 Oct 89 02:42:47 GMT
From: ibmpa![e-mail]  (nick szabo)
Subject: "The Plan" (long)

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Henry Spencer) writes:

>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (nick szabo) writes:
>>
>>A plan is something to be _followed_, that we get
>>locked into.  Imagine a PERT chart for 'The Plan', the Space Station/Moon/
>>Mars scenario.  (Ridiculous as this is, I've actually seen one drawn up.)
>>Now imagine changing that PERT chart to fit a discovery that in fact the
>>asteroids are much better places to put our first space settlements.
>>Pretty much have to wipe out the whole thing, don't you?
>
>Why?  The station/Moon/Mars scenario does not include space settlements
>at all; the only "settlement" is a base on the Moon, which is justified
>in terms of the Moon rather than in terms of it being the best place for
>a settlement in general.

Well, yours truly Mr. Truly (groan..) is starting to call the Mars Base
a "settlement", which I agree rather stretches the term.

The proposed costs for these "settlements" are around $150 billion apiece.
This will make the present NASA bureaucracy look like the Lake Wobegon city
counsel.  How do you think this bureaucracy will react to the news that
they are working on a dead-end?  (Clue: how has NASA dealt with Max Faget,
AMROC, etc. in the 80's?  Now scale that up an order of magnitude).

BTW, there is nothing on the Moon that justifies spending even $15 billion,
 much less $150 billion.  What Apollo found in the lunar soil can be
found in any typical backyard on Earth, and I can find oodles of things in
my backyard that you can't find on the Moon.

As for other proposed uses:

"Radio telescope platform": the Earth radio-noise problem can usually be
handled by simple electronics and antenna arrays.  If you really want
a good telescope away from Earth noise, put it in an Earth-Sun trojan point
and we'll get good VLBI to boot.

"Lunar oxygen": No one has ever built a working model of a lunar-oxygen
extractor/purifier. The demand from current space projects is thousands of
times lower than the kilotons/year of production needed to pay back even a
$100 billion investment.  Even if such a demand were to arise, there are
at least two better alternatives: 1) obtain lox from a near-earth asteroid,
or 2) develop better Earth launch technology.

"geological research":  the geology of other planets (including Earth!)
is at least as important as that of the Moon, there is no justification for
spending orders of magnitude more money on Lunar geology than on that of
other solar system bodies.

"learning to live on the Moon":
1) first we need to know whether we _want_ to live there.

2) just about every biological fact we need can be learned from the Soviet
space station studies and by putting a mini-LDEF on the surface of the Moon.


>More generally, any plan which would be fundamentally changed by certain
>quite-plausible discoveries needs to settle those issues *first*.

How?  There is no way to anticipate all possible discoveries that far
into the future.  The Station/Moon/Mars folks aren't anticipating _anything_
other than their pet scenario.

>I assume
>we are talking about competently-drawn plans, mind you.  Project Apollo
>did not *guess* that the surface of the Moon was solid enough for the LM,
>it *confirmed* it, early, with Surveyor unmanned landers.

I wonder how long it would have taken NASA to radically redesign the LM,
if it had turned out the lunar surface was covered by tens of feet of
"quicksand".

The lesson I draw here is that  we should _confirm_ the economic viability
of Mars vs. Moon vs. asteroids vs. Galilean system vs. /etc before we spend
hundreds of billions of dollars on any one of them.

>To update the example, any plan which relies
>heavily on extraterrestrial resources for their own sake (rather than, say,
>lunar resources as a byproduct of lunar exploration) will first have to
>settle where the best source is.  That would mean putting very high priority
>on geochemical mapping of the Moon (notably, resolving the debated issue
>of whether there are frozen volatiles at the lunar poles) and on determining
>the bulk (not just surface) composition and mechanical properties of a good
>sample of near-Earth asteroids (not just one, and not main-belt asteroids).
>This is what planning, as opposed to doing things at random, is all about:
>"to do Y we need X, so we'll have to do X first".

Why only the Moon and near-earth asteroids?  It is too early to confine
our sights to just these.  There is no garantee we will find anything
valuable enough to motivate space settlement, on either the Moon or the
near-earth asteroids.  Perhaps what we need is in a main-belt asteroid or
on Mars or in the Galilean system or in a comet.

The cost of covering all (or almost all) of the possibilities with an
extensive space-exploration program is peanuts compared to the cost of
building a $150 billion dry hole.

Also, you missed another big "X" that is needed for using extraterrestrial
resources: mining technology.

>
>Don't confuse planning with drawing PERT charts.  In real life, they are
>unrelated.

Nope.  "to do Y we need X, so we'll have to do X first" is the beginnings
of a PERT chart.  And as long as you consider the very wide variety of
X's and Y's, and don't build a huge bureaucracy around any one of them
until we know what the payoff is, this kind of "planning" is fine.  I
choose to call these "scenarios", because there are many different
possibilities rather than just one, and we don't commit to just one
scenario, like the Station/Moon/Mars nonsense.

>Planning requires thinking, and consideration of alternatives.

OK, just to get our bearings, Yet More Dictionary Definitions

plan:

1) any detailed scheme, program, or method worked out beforehand for the
accomplishment of an object.

2) a proposed or tentative project or goal

scenario:

(1 & 2 have to do with drama).

3) an outline of a hypothisized chain of events

(American Heritage Dictionary)

IMHO, scenario(3) and plan(2) most closely match our current state
of information.  Any "detailed scheme, program or method" we work out
to reaching our final objective, settling space, is going to turn out
badly wrong and quite inefficient.  There are just too many possibilities
and we have too little information.  The best we can do for "planning"
now is to propose _many_ different scenarios and see what they have in
common.  For example, both a Mars Base and a Galilean moon mining project
require inexpensive transport from Earth.  The latter requires and the former
would benefit from mining technology operable in vacuum and small levels
of gravity.

Our efforts now must focus on _gathering_ information in as
efficient way as possbile.  We need to geochemically map the Moon and
several (not just one) near-earth asteroids.  We also need to thoroughly map
several main belt asteroids and comets, Mars, and the Galilean moons.  We
need to study many different kinds of industrial processes in vacuum/
microgravity environments.

We need to build working models of new technology for launch systems,
space propulsion, extraterrestrial mining, etc.: stuff that is not
specific to only one or a few scenarios.

Doing _all_ the above would cost less than the Space Station, and less than
one-tenth the cost of building bases on only the Moon and Mars.

Playing poker is much easier if you look at all your cards before drawing.


--
--------------------------------------------
Nick Szabo
uunet!ibmsupt!szabonj
These opinions are not related to Big Blue's

------------------------------

Date: 5 Oct 89 05:27:26 GMT
From: rochester![e-mail]  (Brian Yamauchi)
Subject: Re: More whining about Galileo

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Joseph  Brenner) writes:
>My emotional reaction to the news of the Christic institute's
>attack is extreme depression.  I'm once again impressed
>with the extreme stupidity of our society: we don't seem to
>have anything resembling a rational way of resolving debates
>like this.  We don't even have a halfway reasonable way of
>ranking what questions are worth debating.  We seemed to be
>ruled by a tyranny of fear, a collection of unthinking
>reactions to buzzwords and images.

For a while, I was completely mystified as to why the Christic
Institute was trying to kill Galileo.  If they were really worried
about protecting people from plutonium contamination, it would make a
lot more sense (by several orders of magnitude) for them to be
concentrating on DOE weapons-grade plutonium facilities (like the one
in Fernald, Ohio).

On the other hand, if you look at the situation from the perspective
of organizational interests, it makes perfect sense.  If the Christics
were to protest weapons plants, or the Exxon Valdez spill, or the
greenhouse effect, they would be competing for the spotlight with a
dozen other environmentalist organizations, including ones like
Greenpeace which are much larger, much richer, and much more powerful.

Galileo offers the Christic Institute a convenient target of
opportunity.  For a relatively small investment of resources, they get
a lot of publicity (and probably a sizeable increase in contributions
as well).  I seem to remember their last media blitz was another
high-profile, low-rationality lawsuit, something like suing the CIA
for helping the Contras.

>And in a way, focusing on risk analysis misses the real point.
>You wind up dealing with things you can stick numbers on, like
>probabilities of accidents and potential lives lost, and you
>underplay the real value of the mission, which to me at least,
>is close to infinite.  We're talking about a probe into the
>atmosphere of Jupiter! It's not just a fly-by, not more peering
>through telescopes, but a chance to stick our noses right up against
>the face of the unknown.  If this isn't worth risking our lives,
>then what is it we're alive for?
>
>The problem with the Galileo is nothing new, but it really brings
>home to me a number of things I suppose I already knew:
>This is not my world, these people are not my people.  We have
>things in common, but the way I think is not at all the way
>they do, and the things I care about most strike them as trivial
>and tedious.

And vice versa :-).

_______________________________________________________________________________

Brian Yamauchi                University of Rochester
[e-mail]        Computer Science Department
_______________________________________________________________________________

------------------------------

Date: 5 Oct 89 05:48:49 GMT
From: rochester![e-mail]  (Brian Yamauchi)
Subject: Re: Astronaut Selection

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (NUTSY FAGEN) writes:
>>        I'd like to know how one goes about becoming an astronaut...
>

>Q. How do I become an astronaut?

>    Be in good physical condition, with good eyesight.
>    (DO NOT get a radial keratomy in an attempt to improve your vision;
>    its long-term effects are poorly understood.


The following information is second-hand, but I've heard that there is
a new process called laser ablatement cornea sculpting which has
acheived much better results than radial keritonomy.  It's currently
in the evaluation stage, but should be commercially available in
around five years.  And evidently, it results in flawless corrections
to nearsightedness, farsightedness, and some astigmatisms.

Does NASA have any official policy on using eye surgery to meet vision
requirements?

>      For that matter, avoid
>    any other significant medical unknowns.)

Or not :-).  Seems like a matter of individual choice to me.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Brian Yamauchi                University of Rochester
[e-mail]        Computer Science Department
_______________________________________________________________________________

------------------------------

End of SPACE Digest V10 #122
*******************