Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/pc/text/spacedig/v16_6/v16no689.txt

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Date: Sun,  6 Jun 93 05:10:21
From: Space Digest maintainer <[e-mail]>
Reply-To: [e-mail]
Subject: Space Digest V16 #689
To: Space Digest Readers
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Space Digest                Sun,  6 Jun 93       Volume 16 : Issue 689

Today's Topics:
               1992 NASA Authorization Budget- shuttle
                Calling all chemical engineers (etc.)
            Dr. Paine- Budgeting for space & why (part 3)
               Dr. Thomas Paine on space policy Part 1
         manifest destiny = US getting uppity again (2 msgs)
    Outline of STS Systems (A response to Fraering's misstatement)
                    Tom Paine- Why Space (Part 2)
             Why are SSTO up-front costs rising? (2 msgs)

    Welcome to the Space Digest!!  Please send your messages to
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Date: 5 Jun 93 16:36:40
From: Steinn Sigurdsson <[e-mail]>
Subject: 1992 NASA Authorization Budget- shuttle
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Matthew DeLuca) writes:


   In article <1uq4k5$[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Pat) writes:

   >And as for abandoning a jobs sector
   >to another country, what distinguishes  Aero-space from  Automotives
   >or Energy Production or Textiles.   or Memory or PC board production.

   Nothing at all distinguishes them.  Notice how we regret loss of leadership
   in these fields?  It shows up in our annual trade deficit.  I'd like to
   keep that from happening again in yet another field.

Might I beg to differ here a little and note that aerospace differs
from most of the other fields in one small respect: that is the
country that excels in aerospace can take the other fields back
on a short time scale.
You can kill people, directly, with aerospace, and do it fast enough
that them embargoing your DRAMs is irrelevant. There honestly is more
to this then business and employment.

|  Steinn Sigurdsson    |I saw two shooting stars last night        |
|  Lick Observatory    |I wished on them but they were only satellites    |
| [e-mail] |Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?        |
| "standard disclaimer"    |I wish, I wish, I wish you'd care - B.B. 1983    |

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

Date: 5 Jun 1993 16:45:07 -0700
From: Nick Szabo <[e-mail]>
Subject: Calling all chemical engineers (etc.)
Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.astro,alt.sci.planetary

I'm trying to contact folks who have an interest in
cooking up scenarios for space industrialization or colonization,
and a reasonably strong background in one or more of the following,
or a good general knowledge of most of the following:

chemical engineering
organic chemistry
materials science
planetary science (esp. spectroscopy & chemistry, comets)
biotechnology (esp. agricultural, waste processing, metabolic
    engineering)

I'm looking to start a special-topic list on comet materials
processing, especially in terms of the processing steps needed
to create a wide variety of end products.  If you or someone
you know meets these criteria, I'd love to here from you.

Nick Szabo                [e-mail]
--
Nick Szabo                     [e-mail]

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

Date: 5 Jun 1993 18:14:13 -0700
From: Ken Hayashida <[e-mail]>
Subject: Dr. Paine- Budgeting for space & why (part 3)
Newsgroups: sci.space

In this last of 3 posts, Dr. Paine's views on budgeting and
why we go to space are made clear.

_______________
"
The meeting that was held in Mark Albrecht's Space Council about
last November was for me a remarkable eent.  Jack Kerrebrock and I
were there and toward the end, the Director of the Budget, Richard
Darman, met with us and gave us the following statement which I
thought was remarkable.  I've had a lot of interaction with OMB
Directors and I regard them as the natural enemy of NASA types, and
it was very interesting to hear him give us a very broad
philosophical comment.  He said, as we look at the planning for the
Bush Administration's Space Program and the mark that they would
like to leave in their tenure in office, that we should think very
broadly indeed about what should be done by the United States in
concert with other nations in space, without restricting ourselves--
at least in the initial period, to problems of the budget.

He said that all of the money that we could possibly imagine how to
spend in space was actually available in our wealthy nation.  We
have, of course, a five trillion dollar gross national product which is
exponentially growing.  We have a federal budget in the trillion and a
quarter area, a budget which is undergoing great changes, and he
pointed out that really our problem in deciding what to do in space
will not be decided on the basis of whether we want to spend the
money in the area of space.  Our challenge, he stated, was to put
together a space program that would attract the funds.  The funds
were certainly available, and I think also, if you spend the next
couple days thinking about the future of space, that's the way you
should look at it, too.  The problem is not that in our 5+ trillion
dollar economy we can't afford space.  The question is, how much of
that do we want to spend, and for what, and why?  So these are
things we will be addressing and which are very relevant indeed.

...
I'd like to run through the broad spectrum of reasons why we want to
go out into space and become a multi-planet species.

Number one is economics, the long-term investment in the economic
development of the inner solar system.  This is something that can
occupy us for a century...

The second is access to limitless growth potential, access to virgin
continents that can remove the Malthusian limits to the aspirations
of humanity and can cause us to move beyond a mere zero sum battle
for which people on Earth control our dwindling resources and rather
make it an open end, and opens up a vast new growth potential for
humanity.

The next is national pride in leadership...

I thought the way Richard Darman put it from his budgetary
perspective was very good.  He said, there are three types of things
you spend money for in government.  One of them is paying for the
things you did in the past; he must have been conscious of his
interest payments for all the borrowings -- I think we
owe some 3 trillion dollars now, and that's a fair amount of interest.
But we have Veterans Administration, we have other costs
associated with things we've done in the past, and those bills have
to be settled.  And secondly, he said, there are things that we should
be spending money on today -- all of the Head Start for the young
children; all of the questions of housing; doing a much better job on
our highway sytem, which has come up recently; the war on drugs;
all of the things that we have to do today.  These are always the
most popular with politicians.  So paying for the past, spending
money on the present are the two leading items, and there's a little
bit left over for investing in the future.  That, of course, is where
the space program comes in, and thus national pride in leadership for
investing in the future.

...there are religious, ideological, or humanistic values associated
with a basic desire to preserve life....

...opportunity for a fresh start.

...of course research and exploration

... search for extraterrestial intelligence

... opportunity to create prototype extraterrestial communities in
nearby space

(...paragraphs deleted)

NASA must develop six new challenging technology bases and
program elements:
1  A highway to space, using economical joint NASA/USAF man-rated
heavy-lift launch vehicles to provide regular automated low-cost
access to Earth orbit
2.  Orbital space ports, evolved from International Space Station
Freedom technology, circling Earth, Moon, and Mars to support
remote human operations and the assembly, storage, repair,
refueling, check-out, launch, and recovery of robotic and piloted
spacecraft
3.  A bridge between worlds, to open regular transports to the Moon
and to extend spaceflight to Mars...
4.  Prospecting and resource utilization sytems to map and
characterize the resources on the inner solar system...
5.  Closed ecology biospheres to recycle air and water and provide
food and organic products within Earth-like habitats of other
worlds...
6.  Lunar and Martian bases to furnish advanced life-support,
habitats...

Perhaps, my concluding remark ought to be the one I wrote you in a
letter, a quote from my friend, Arthur Clarke, who said:  " In the
difficult years that lie ahead, we must remember that the snows of
Olympus lie silently beneath the stars, waiting for our
grandchildren."

________
This concludes this 3 part series on the comments of the late- Dr. Thomas
Paine, former NASA Adminstrator and chairman of the National Commission
on Space.

Thank you Dr. Paine for your years of dedication to the concepts of
space exploration.

Ken

Comments?
send them to: [e-mail]
thanks for reading

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

Date: 5 Jun 1993 18:02:40 -0700
From: Ken Hayashida <[e-mail]>
Subject: Dr. Thomas Paine on space policy Part 1
Newsgroups: sci.space

Friends, over the past few weeks we have been seeing alot of
conjecture posted regarding the future of the US space program.
Perhaps, one of the greatest leaders that the civilian space program
has had is Dr. Thomas Paine.

Dr. Paine served as NASA administrator under the Johnson and Nixon
Administrations, led the National Commission on Space appointed
by President Reagan to foresee a future for the US space program, and was
highly involved with the space advocacy community.

During the proceedings of the National Commission on Space Dr.
Paine gave me the opportunity to present some ideas before his
esteemed committee.  Through several years of limited contact I
found Dr. Paine to be cordial, always enthusiastic, and quite an
inspiration.  As an undergraduate student, this ex-
admiral and advisor to Presidents took the time to speak with me on
numerous occasions, answering my phone calls and messages, and
sending me references.  His staff assistant was equally cooperative.

I was profoundly saddened to hear of his passing during the past year
(as I am sure alot of you were), and I believe that we have lost
a tremendous intellect and leader.

Because of my debt of gratitude and my desire that his views
continue to gain attention, I am posting exerpts from a speech which
Dr. Paine made before the 28th Goddard Memorial Symposium, held
March 14-16, 1990, Washington, D.C.

Those of you that wish to read the entire speech can find it in the
following reference:
Leaving the Cradle:  Human Exploration of Space in the 21st Century
28th Goddard Memorial Symposium; edited by Thomas O. Paine;
Volume 78, Science and Technology Series, A Supplement to
Advances in the Astronautical Sciences; copyright 1991, American
Astronautical Society; ISBN 0-87703-336-6 (hard cover),
ISBN 0-87703-337-4 (soft cover), published by Univelt,
Incorporated; P.O. Box 28130, San Diego, CA 92198.

In the text below I have added "..." when I have deleted text.
When paragraphs are deleted, I will so designate.

This entire volume is packed with great presentations and
testimony, including Al Gore, Harrison Schmitt, and others.  I
encourage any interested in space policy and exploration to obtain a
copy.

------------
And now, exerpts from AAS 90-101, titled "Leaving the Cradle:
Human Exploration of Space in the 21st Century,"  by Thomas O. Paine

"Thank you very much, Larry, and welcome.

We're meeting at an extermely interesting time in the history of the
space program and I think in many ways in the history of our
planet...One of the reasons we are meeting here today and examining
many of the precepts underlying the exploration of space is because
these are such critical, pivotal times that all of our new thinking is
going to be required to make sure that we come out in the end with a
successful program.

(paragraph omitted)

We need more of that kind of thinking as we take a look at the Mars
Program and decide, on the basis of what we will want to do in
perhaps the second decade of the next century on Mars to figure out
what we should be doing on the Moon in the first decade, and what
we should be doing in Earth orbit during the decade of the 90's.  So
this afternoon, we're going to look at some of the challenges that
Mars represents.  I think that that can cast a very long shadow
through the 90's.

One of the things that I think we will also have to do some brand
new thinking about is the whole question of the international
participation in space in the next two or three decades...

Back in the 1960's when I was concerned with NASA, we had a rather
simple rule:  If the budget was in trouble, wave the Russian flag.
That's not the way it's going to work in the future.  We think much
more carefully about how this is going to go.

(paragraph omitted)

I guess, what I'm really talking about, therefore, this morning is
opportunity.  We have a magnificent opportunity and a very
challenging opportunity, and as we meet in these very rapidly
changing times, we need more than ever to be thinking
of the fundamentals because if we're going to put together a program
that will take us to Mars sometime in the first, second, third decade
of the next century, it will have to require sustained effort.  We're
going to see Presidents come and go.  Congresses will have many
different concerns.  There will be all sorts of crises, alarms,
excursions, and during all of this period, we will have to have the
exploration of space on such a firm philosophical and technological
basis that it can indeed attract the type of sustained support that
will be required not only in the United States but in the world.  It's a
magnificant challenge and, I think, one that we are ready for...


Please see part 2 for the continuation...

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

Date: Sat, 5 Jun 1993 22:57:32 GMT
From: Henry Spencer <[e-mail]>
Subject: manifest destiny = US getting uppity again
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>>    Alas, coming  from a  neighbor of the US, 'manifest destiny'
>>hasthe implication you folks  are contemplating yet another  unsuccessful
>>invasion.
>
>Just lay back and think of England, bub... We have to do it so the jarhea-,
>er Marines don't embarass themselves again...

And to think we spared their headquarters when we burned Washington DC.
Well, we won't make *that* mistake again...

You see, this time we're planning a preemptive strike, rather than waiting
for you uppity rebels to invade us again.

Early in the morning of July 4, when most everybody down there is preparing
to celebrate the anniversary of your insurrection against lawful authority,
most of the Canadian Armed Forces will move swiftly to seize North Dakota.
They will bypass and contain major population centers, which could offer
lengthy resistance anyway, and stick to seizing strategic assets.

And I do mean strategic.  This one move will make us the world's third
largest nuclear power.  Maybe the second, if Yeltsin's situation continues
to go downhill.

Now, in itself this wouldn't be very useful.  North Dakota otherwise isn't
that interesting a place. :-)  And being a nuclear power, per se, is not
all that helpful, especially when doing so devastates one's foreign trade.
(The US and Canada are each other's largest trading partners, but that's
a much larger proportion of Canada's trade than the US's.)  Oh, it might
deter an invasion, if we could hold our new territory... but we probably
couldn't, not for any length of time.

However, we won't have to.  We plan to participate in a grand old US
tradition:  fireworks on the evening of the 4th.  You see, last time we
burned Washington, our mistake was that we weren't *thorough* enough.
We plan to rectify that this time.  Blasting the entire area within
the Beltway clear down to bedrock ought to do it...

After this, of course, resistance will vanish, and our troops will be
greeted as liberators.  Our biggest problem will be how to cope with
a sudden 1000% growth in Canada's population and wealth.

We're still debating exactly what do with all the new territory.  The
British like the idea of getting the original Thirteen Colonies back,
but they're objecting to having to take New York City as part of the
package, and we may have to throw in Hawaii to sweeten the deal.
Negotiations with Mexico over Texas etc. are underway.  We're keeping
the West Coast, since it has the only decent climate on the continent.
The USSR was interested in buying Alaska back, but recent events there
have scuttled that idea -- Russia can't afford it.  France wouldn't
take Louisiana even at a bargain price, so I suppose we'll have to
keep it.  Stay tuned for more details.

:-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
--
Altruism is a fine motive, but if you   | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
want results, greed works much better.  |  [e-mail]  utzoo!henry

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

Date: Sun, 6 Jun 1993 00:37:08 GMT
From: Eric H Seale <[e-mail]>
Subject: manifest destiny = US getting uppity again
Newsgroups: sci.space

[e-mail] (Henry Spencer) writes:
>...You see, last time we
>burned Washington, our mistake was that we weren't *thorough* enough.
>We plan to rectify that this time.  Blasting the entire area within
>the Beltway clear down to bedrock ought to do it...

Promises, promises, promises..... ;-)

>... and our troops will be
>greeted as liberators.

At this point, they probably would!

Eric Seale
[e-mail]

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

Date: Sat, 5 Jun 1993 23:02:06 GMT
From: Henry Spencer <[e-mail]>
Subject: Outline of STS Systems (A response to Fraering's misstatement)
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <1uk9pb$[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Ken Hayashida) writes:
>1  Press Information- Space Transportation System, January 1984,
>    Rockwell International Corporation
>2  Space Shuttle Operator's Manual...
>
>The first reference is my primary information source.  Because I expect
>that interested readers will have difficulty obtaining the first document,
>I have included the second reference...

Getting the STS News Reference is no problem -- several of the space-
enthusiast groups sell copies.
--
Altruism is a fine motive, but if you   | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
want results, greed works much better.  |  [e-mail]  utzoo!henry

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

Date: 5 Jun 1993 18:08:48 -0700
From: Ken Hayashida <[e-mail]>
Subject: Tom Paine- Why Space (Part 2)
Newsgroups: sci.space

this is a continuation of Dr. Tom Paine's speech before the
28th Goddard Memorial Symposium, published with the AAS in
"Leaving the Cradle".

In this part of the speech, Dr. Paine discusses reasons to advocate space
and the philosophical underpinnings of space exploration.

_________________
"My own rationale for why we are going this is that you can't come up
with any one reason, and if you ever tried, it would very quickly
become obsolete anyway, and that furthermore, space by its very
inherent nature is something so fundamental to the human drive for
exploration that, at any given time in the history of our country
and in the history of the world, we would come up with a different
rationale as the times change, but that the fundamentals
would always be there.  So I think the challenge we have is to try to
understand the exploration of space in terms of these fundamentals.

One example I might give you is that if we were indeed meeting one
hundred years ago to discuss the exploration of space--that would
be in the 1880's -- very likely one of the fundamental rationales
would be colonization, because strength of the ohrld scene was
really related to the number of colonies that any nation controlled.
It would be on a highly commpetitive basis, and we wouldn't want
the British Empire, with all of those parts of the world painted red,
to start painting the Moon or Mars red, would we?  We'd want to take
our colonial holdings in the Phillipines which we were about to
acquire in the next twenty years and we'd want to become a great
colonial power, too.  That was the big deal in the end of the last century.

If we'd moved out a little beyond that another quarter century or so,
it would be in terms of military power.  The great fleets were being
built that would later fight in Jutland.  Submarine were being
developed to deny the British their long domination of the seas.
These were the kinds of concerns nations had, and we'd ask the
question, how our power in space would contribute to this kind of
national power aimed at World War I and, then later, World War II.
Question the Depression, and it would be jobs.  Can we indeed use
this as a WPA Project?  Today, you talk about missile/bomber
builders and fighter plane builders reconverting and doing this as a
kind of a make-work project.

Again, I think all of these are not really good reasons.  There are far
more fundamental reasons....

(2 paragraphs deleted- Dr. Paine talked about upcoming speakers)

...we've been able to get a very broad representation of experts
looking at this from different perspectives.

I think that for everything we do in space we need to get this broad
perspective.  Space is very much like the blind man and the
elephant...(sentence deleted)...this is like the fellow holding the tail
of the elephant, saying, "Hey, it's a long, stringy thing," trying to
talk to the engineer who's trying to build a new launch vehicle
who's got a hold of the ear saying, "No, it's a great big flat thing,"
and somebody else worrying about tusks and trying to convince
people that's what the Space Program is.

(several paragraphs omitted)

...We've had a series of relatively weak Presidents in the grand
sweep of our nation, concerns that were very much with the
problems of yesterday and today and not much left over for the
problems of tomorrow, which is where those of us in this room
pretty much keep our own thoughts and attention.

I was very pleased, therefore, when the Congress created the
National Commission on Space...And I think that that allowed us to
take a breather back in the 1986 period to detach ourselves from the
Space Program as it then existed and take a look twenty, thirty
years out into the future and try to answer the question that
Congress had put to us and that the President had appointed us to
come up with an answer to, what the Space Program should be for
Twenty-First Century America.

I think in many ways, that's the challenge that all of us in this room
have still before us:  What should be the Space Program for the
Twenty-First Century America?  In order to get your mind around it,
I'll warn you right at the beginning that you have to decide what
Twenty-First Century America is.  It certainly is not the America of
1990.  It will be a different country with different concerns, and we
have to think about the fact that it will be an extremely affluent,
very high technology country, but a country which will probably not
be in as leading a position in the world as it has been since World
War II, a country that can lead other nations in a participatory
sense, but only by selling the strength of its good ideas.

So think about Twenty-First Century America as you sit through the
sessions that you'll be listening to for the next couple of days.
Think about the kind of a Space Program that will be appropriate for
Twenty-First Century America as we did on our Commission.  We
thought at the time that we were probably going to be criticized
after our report came out for being too far-out for the first ten
years, and we thought that probably in the second ten years, which
would be '96 to about 2006, it would be considered about right, and
that from 2006 on, it would be considered too pedestrian.  I think we
are about on that track now.

One of the things that you also put your mind to when you think about
the Twenty-First Century America is the fundamental objective that
humanity as a whole will accept during that period as being worthy
of major international projects.  I think in that connection that all
of us in this room and all of the people who think about space are
very conscious of the connection between space and environmental
concerns...

(several paragraphs deleted)

I think that from all of these various factors that come into the
Space Policy question, which our Keynote Speaker has been invited
to address, you can see the complexity of it and you can see the fact
that our program, as broad as it is, probably isn't broad enough.  But
it will give us, I think, considerable breadth.

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

Date: Sun, 6 Jun 1993 00:44:44 GMT
From: "Allen W. Sherzer" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Why are SSTO up-front costs rising?
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Matthew DeLuca) writes:

>This isn't my discussion, but I have to hop in here for just a second.  Just
>yesterday, Allen, you were telling me that since NASA messed up on the
>Shuttle they can't possibly build a cost-effective replacement;

That's not what I said. I said that NASA had nither the money or culture
needed to build SSTO. I base the statements on both the projections for
spending at NASA make by Congress and the problems with almost every
large project undertaken at NASA in the past 15 years. Their own procurement
office says it costs them several times what it should to do things. I also
believe that the existance of serious cultural problems is generally
acknowledged by people up to and including the NASA Adminstrator.

NASA has serious problems executing large programs. I think you would
agree with that statement. SDIO, however, has a long history of using
streamlined procurement, learning from past mistakes, and focusing on
the problem.

Do you see the difference?

   Allen

--
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Lady Astor:   "Sir, if you were my husband I would poison your coffee!"   |
| W. Churchill: "Madam, if you were my wife, I would drink it."             |
+----------------------11 DAYS TO FIRST FLIGHT OF DCX-----------------------+

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

Date: Sun, 6 Jun 1993 01:00:26 GMT
From: "Allen W. Sherzer" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Why are SSTO up-front costs rising?
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Matthew DeLuca) writes:

>Hmmm, I don't think this is true, either; Delta Clipper is being brought to
>you by the same folks doing parts of the space station.

and the C-17. This was a matter of serious concern for me a few years ago.
However, I note the management processes put in place both at SDIO and
MacDac. I also looked at early progress and the results of their Phase I
study and decided that this effort was being run properly and had a good
chance of success. If I concluded otherwise, I would be working just as hard
to kill it as I am to helping it.

I also note the actions of the NASA department who would build a SSTO if
NASA decided to. That organization distinguished itself by working hard
to kill the SDIO effort for no other reason than that it competed with
their effort. That is not the actions of a group wanting to reduce the
cost of access to space.

>Is Delta Clipper
>going to be a success, indicating that organizations can change?

Well so far, I think it looks good. I think the lesson isn't that
organizations are angels or devils but that the deciding factor is the
rules of the game. DC is working because SDIO picked good rules for the
game. Should NASA change the rules, they will have my wholeharted support.
In fact, this is why I have lobbied for Goldin so that can happen.

Why does that bother you?

>mud forever?  Allen likes to assert both sides, depending on whether or not
>it is one of his 'blessed' projects.

You missed it. I 'bless' projects because they work, not the other way
around. I 'bless' results.

  Allen
--
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Lady Astor:   "Sir, if you were my husband I would poison your coffee!"   |
| W. Churchill: "Madam, if you were my wife, I would drink it."             |
+----------------------11 DAYS TO FIRST FLIGHT OF DCX-----------------------+

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


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[e-mail] (Jim Hart) writes:

> Furthermore, most of the mass of processing materials used to make those
> robots are volatiles,...

...assuming a "designed for Tokyo 1992" robot factory, building robots
designed for Earth.

You do not need to use today's factories' techniques on the moon.  The
working environment is different, and makes different techniques possible and
economical, and makes today's techniques uneconomical.  Instead of machining
a gear out of metal using lots of cutting fluid, you can use the
laser-sintering fabrication technique that is now being developed for
"desktop fabrication". Instead of washing parts every few steps in
production, you can take advantage of the moon's clean vacuum.  If hydraulic
fluids are uneconomical for moving arms, use electric motors.

> Do you have fantasies of full recycling of volatiles (include HF-acid :-)
> like the last poster did?
> ....
> No, you have demonstrated an almost infinite capacity for
> self-delusion.   For example:
> ....
> OK you've convinced me!  Beam me up Scotty!  :-)

You've totally blown any credibility you might have had.  Ad hominem attacks
like you've shown merely make you look afraid/unable to deal with the
arguments.

--

[e-mail]

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End of Space Digest Volume 16 : Issue 689
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