Rocketforge

After the Columbia incident there was a great deal of discussion over just what our role in space should be. As the Columbia investigation rolled on the discussion died down to a low murmur, often punctuated by mainstream media
debates over humans vs robots. But with the release of the CAIB report the
discussion has begun again in earnest:

• A Time For Everything
• What Should A Space Agency Do?
• Stuck In The Sixties
• Sorry, Bob (a nice review of multiple other articles)

As part of the first round of these discussions, I decided to test out
RocketForge’s polling software by running a Why Do We Want To Go To Space?
poll based on Why We Fly (John Carter McKnight). After
running for almost 6 months, the poll’s results are an interesting way to frame the discussion:

The thing that strikes me the most about these numbers is the fact that
even space activists who should know better seem to have been seduced by
NASA’s “Exploration” rhetoric. I know I sound like a broken record
on this, but “exploration” is not a reason. Its an action that you take
in response to a reason. Lewis and Clark explored the west looking for
the northwest passage which would enable a more direct trade with the Orient
and thus break open the wealth of North America. Columbus was trying to become
rich by trading directly with China. Sure, those men probably had a personal
bent towards concepts of “glory and honor” but those that funded the
exploration were always motivated by wealth or power. Only when the
cost of the exploration was so low that anyone could do it for purely personal
reasons (i.e. building a boat and simply floating down the river) did
‘exploration’ truly become a reason in its own right. And even then, if you
dug deep enough there were deeper motivations: curiosity, the need to
get away from the mediocrity of the masses, gold, a better life for your
children, attempts at utopian communities, etc.

But I was glad to see that the 2nd runner up was “Settlement”. And once
you combine the votes for “Settlement” and “Emigration” (46 votes) you
get a sense that, yes, most do indeed “get it”. So at this point I’m not
going to continue my usual rant about a national dialog on what our
purpose is in space since I’ve made a personal discovery over the past
few years: a large majority of
the human population just doesn’t think about things at meta-levels. Most
find the statement “get the question right first” as simply annoying and
immaterial. So I’m going to simply gloss over it by making a statement
that the average human can understand (he may not agree, but
he can at least understand the statement):

Forget exploration, science and spinoffs. The fundamental
reason that the US should be involved in space is that
Americans want to go there. Now. They want to go there
to build wealth, to live, and to form empires that dwarf
anything humans have ever conceived of.

It is the same reason people built an airline industry. No one flies in
a 747 to explore the air. They simply want to get from Point A to Point B
very quickly. Space isn’t about exploration or any other feel good,
politically correct, Mr. Rogers notion of a “noble cause to understand our
universe.” Its about that sweaty, churning mass of love, hate, fear, greed,
opportunity and universe changing potential that makes humanity what it is.

And we want that now. Not 200 years from now. We don’t want to keep pushing
our Star Trek vision into some future that’s always in the future. That
is something we can get behind. That is something that we will pay for. Hell, as much as it rankles the libertarian in me, its even something
I might be willing to pay taxes for!

But I am NOT willing to support this patently un-American notion of
Soviet-style government bureaucracy dedicated to kingdom building and
preservation of ivory tower science.

One of my favorite comments in all of the threads I mentioned at the top of
this article is this one by “enloop” (found in Frustrating):

Asking today “Do Humans belong in space?” is a bit like asking “Do humans belong in Iowa?” Or, a bit like someone 70,000 years ago sitting in Eastern Africa asking “Do humans belong in that other valley over there?”

Humans “belong” anyplace they choose.

The question is really just a euphemism for “Shouldn’t we just give up and be small?”

I’ll be damned if I’m going to just “give up and be small” because everyone elseseems to have been seduced into thinking that spending billions to send
a few government bureaucrat into orbit somehow qualifies as the “noble
pursuit of space exploration”.

That is what I think our reason for being in space should be…

C. Blake Powers, former Director of Outreach for the NASA Space Product Development Program and regular blogger over at Laughing Wolf, is calling for the abolition of NASA:

I have come to the conclusion that NASA needs to be abolished. It is the only way to make the substantive changes needed. In talking with others about this, I think that many of the services done by NASA can be given to more appropriate agencies, while a completely new organization can be started to take on the true core functions of NASA.

He suggests that the Bush Administration has had draconian plans to reform NASA for some time but that Columbia but the breaks on that effort.

He’s right. Go read the the entire thing. And call your congressman about it!

August 20, 2003 – The Amateur Rocketry Society of America published today on their web site the first in a series of reports to tell the truth on the lies and propaganda being spread by the Department of Justice and ATFE on the dangers of rocketry in America. The first report deals with the feasibility of using amateur or high power rockets to shoot down military or civilian aircraft. The analysis clearly shows that amateur and high power rockets would miss their intended targets even if fired at planes on final approach to an airport.

The first report is available here

This thread is yet another “what should we do next” discussion (its got the whole Mars vs Moon thing to so you could probably recreate the whole thread from scratch). But some of the links are interesting. I’m just still disapointed at how narrow minded some of the Mars folks are. For most of them its either Mars or nothing….

Things have been quiet mainly because I had to sleep on the streets of Manhattan last night. I was caught in the blackout but was able to find a taxi around 4:00 am that could get me to Newark airport. I must say that the New Yorkers behaved themselves amazingly well, I saw a few impromptu street parties and what looked to be roaming bands of problem solvers. It seemed that the citizen based support system (block captains, building captains, etc) immediately fell back to their 9/11 originated rolls. No crime that I saw. Just that the ’street person’ population of NYC increased to a couple of million last night. People just stopped walking and curled up on the sidewalk and went to sleep: business men, mothers and street people all sleeping side by side.

Sure, it was a minor inconvenience for my travel schedule, but the opportunity to see New Yorkers at their best was something I’m glad I didn’t miss.

Taking a cue from several other Open Source projects, RocketForge has setup a wiki space for anyone who needs a space in which to collaberate on a rocket project. A ‘wiki’ is a set of web pages in which anyone can edit anything. Essentially it is a whiteboard where everyone has both a marker and an eraser.

This particular wiki engine does have authentication but this is simply for tracking of who said what. All changes are also archived so even if someone accidentally changes something important, it can be recovered. Links in a wiki take the form of a WikiWords which are simply capitalized words stuck together LikeThis. The wiki engine recognizes those and creates links automatically.

To get a feel for it go directly to the ArocketWiki and add something!