Friday, July 8, 2011

Blog

Innovation bypassed U.S. manned space flight

By Rodney H. Brown

In April of 1981, I was living in a hovel (OK it was an apartment, but it was a hovel to me) in South Lawrence, huddling over a 13” Sony Trinitron TV one morning, watching the launch of the very first space shuttle, Columbia, on the first mission, called STS-1.

This was long before the advent of anything like the Internet anywhere except in the minds of science fiction writers. Cable TV was just starting to become a popular way of getting entertainment, and even MTV was a few months away, about to launch in August of 1981 with a video of the song “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles. Yes, shuttle launches predate MTV.

The first cellular network in the United States was still two years away, and a portable phone (the unwieldy bag phones, with a battery/transceiver combo separate from the handset) were still almost a decade away. The home PC revolution was in its infancy. The Commodore Vic 20 had just come out and the Apple II was a scant four years old. The Apple Macintosh was still three years away, waiting to break through your TV screens with an Orwellian launch ad during the Super Bowl.

Fast forward to the launch of the shuttle Atlantis this morning on the last shuttle mission, STS-135. I watched it at work on a 21-inch Apple iMac, viewing it in full HD via an Internet stream though the site UStream, which was taking the HD NASA feed and redistributing it. In 30 years, I have a single device that is my cable box, my Internet access machine, and if I wanted to use Skype or a similar feature – I’m looking at you Google+ and the new Facebook chat – my phone. It could also be a gaming platform, although the corporate bigwigs would frown on that. Better leave that to the Xbox 360s and the like at home.

Speaking of the Xbox 360, Larry Hryb (AKA Major Nelson), the director of programming for XBox Live for Microsoft Corp., tweeted out this interesting factoid today - there is more computing power in an Xbox 360 than in the navigation computers on the elderly space shuttle Atlantis.

Why didn’t NASA keep up a pace of innovation even remotely close to that of general consumer technology? If it had, we wouldn’t be looking at the possible end (or at least a long hiatus) of manned space flight from the U.S. – we would be celebrating the next platform that would take us into space to replace the shuttle. Where is my space plane, my heavy lifting body rocket, my linear accelerator rail launch system or any of the ideas that have been teased over the decades as a way to reduce the cost of getting into orbit?

I know, it is all about the federal budget, and there is no political will to spend even a dime on developing new technologies solely for exploration and science, particularly during and just after a severe recession. But really the groundwork for a shuttle replacement would have needed to start long before the recent economic troubles. The will to fund space exploration petered out more than a decade ago, and the war on terror (don’t get me wrong, I am not an anti-war-on-terror liberal) stripped away any money that could have gone into a new space vehicle program even if there had been the will to develop one.

And clearly the pace of consumer and corporate innovation has been as rapid as it was over the past 30 years because of the market forces driving it. That is the current plan by the Obama administration – make the moving of goods and materials into orbit a commercial play, and the competition to get there first, then to do it better, will speed up innovation in that area. But that doesn’t address the idea of man in space. All U.S. astronauts will only go to the International Space Station from now on to do any research, and all of them will get there on Russian rockets.

Innovation happens when an existing need is met with a new way of doing things. While most of that can be done in the corporate and consumer worlds, some things are just too big, and too important, to be left to market-driven innovation. Manned space flight and the new technologies it should be employing right now, was one of those things. Sadly, as often happens, politics got in the way.

I would like to think that some day my son can watch the launch of a new U.S. manned space vehicle. Since he is 19 now, it won’t be when he is 21, as it was for me. I only pray it is before he is 51 as I am now.