Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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What’s Really Wrong with our Space Policy
October 13th, 2010
There are issues about private industry vs. government, moon vs. Mars, each country for itself or in collaboration, etc., but these, I feel, pale in comparison with the real issue.
This week President Obama signed the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, a 3 year plan for NASA’s spending that also clarifies NASA priorities for the future. Here’s some additional information. The International Space Station is good through 2020, and there are plans for working with commercial interests to get to orbit. For deep space, NASA is going for asteroids and eventually Mars. Forget Constellation and the Moon.
New York Times science reporter Kenneth Chang is here in Wyoming a couple of days and spoke about it on campus. I got the chance to chat with him, but mostly talked about other things. I’m going to hit him up a bit more on his thoughts over dinner with a group of us from the department, but here’s something that has bugged me for years.
Space missions take years to come to frution, even decades. Political and economic cycles are shorter term, generally speaking, rarely if ever a decade.
Obama may be making the right move, but we’re close to 20 years since the elder President Bush pointed us back at the Moon, without us getting there, and now we are making a new plan.
To properly explore space, we need to make a plan we believe in, that really reflects our long-term goals, and stick to it, somehow maintaining the vision and budget over that span. I’m not against changing plans if showstoppers come up, or better opportunities arise, but we haven’t done this since the 1960s and Apollo.
Maybe commercial efforts and economics will wind up driving things. Tourism and space hotels get our foot established in orbit, with cheaper prices. Once in orbit, you’re most of the way to most attractive places to visit in the solar system. Maybe that’s ok. But as long as NASA is our main vehicle for space exploration and it’s government driven, I think we need a plan that we can stick to. I don’t know how to implement it. The American people seem more and more apathetic about space, and more and more politically crabby.
What do you think?
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I don’t care about the Moon. I care about what can be learned from it, but I don’t really care about sending people there again unless someone can give me a compelling reason to do so (no, the “we need to build a moon base so we can take over space” argument doesn’t work, since we’re so far away from actually doing anything really significant in space to begin with; let’s worry about infrastructure *after* we actually have a reasonable means of traveling about the Solar System).
If we’re going to do manned missions, they should be to Mars or another planet. That’s it. I’m not interested in spending millions or billions on more moon missions. I want to sit on the edge of my seat with my future children waiting the 3 to 19 minutes (roughly) for the transmission from astronauts on the red planet to hit my TV (or brain-V, if that’s where we are at that point). I didn’t get to have anything close to that when I was a kid, because I was born in 1983 (although I remember watching a shuttle launch, which made me want to be an astronaut for the longest time until I realized that I wouldn’t ever be one because of my asthma…stupid biology).
So, that’s what I think. Put people on Mars. Every President should be supporting such a venture, whether purely American or as an international effort (I’d love to see a joint Mars mission between all the minor and major space programs of the world, but I’m not holding my breath…getting along is hard enough). Otherwise, just put robots up there and save the money.
Interesting point, Mike! It reminds me of a large software project at a dysfunctional company that keeps assigning a new project manager, and each new manager in succession changes the idea of what the project is, so it never gets finished.
SMD: I didn’t think Mike’s point was that we should send a man to the moon again specifically, but rather that WHATEVER plan is made (Mar/Moon, humans/robots, etc) should actually be committed to and followed through on, instead of changed again after a few years.
Yes, Russ, that’s pretty much my point. I don’t mind a lot of the diverse science-oriented projects, but there should be one big profile item driving the manned program and it should be important and we should drive to it without changing it every administration or two.
I think from the viewpoint of Congressfolk and Presidents and most other policy makers, the present manned space program is pretty damned satisfactory. It doesn’t do a whole lot, true, but doesn’t cost a whole lot either, and anyhow no one really expects much of it. It’s big enough to be noticed, and that’s really all anyone wants.
Think of the Marine Corp Band, for example, strking up “Hail to the Chief” whenever a President gets within eyeshot. A splendid symbol certainly! Part of our cultural heritage for over a century! Only a raving lunatic would expect that the MCB might be better utilized in –God forbid! — fighting wars. Think of the Smithsonian Institute and all those wonderful statues and decorative memorial buildings in downtown Washington. Absolutely essential for the modern nation, aren’t they?
Think of NASA in the same light. It’s there to impress schoolkids and gullible foreigners; it’s a source of sentiment and endless self-congratulation for Americans. It’s perfect just as it is.
Actually trying to do something with it — colonizing Mars, mining the Moon, building O’Neil colonies — would just ruin things. There’d be cost and schedule problems. It’d attract terrorists. It’d annoy grumpy people around the world who didn’t have space programs. It’d annoy very vocal scientists who’d rather have unmanned projects; it’d annoy budget-conscious conservatives and all those cause-mesmerized liberals who keep saving “If we can put a man on the moon, we can …” Really, committing to a big maned space program would probably make the whole country ungovernable!
The whole DAMNED country.
lets first find a way to cheaply access space. Then we worry about manned missions. They will come naturally as long as it doesnt take $60 million to put a single astronaut in LEO
My short term hopes are on SpaceX and on Reaction Engine ´s Skylon concept.
@ Mike Shupp: Think of NASA in the same light. It’s there to impress schoolkids and gullible foreigners; it’s a source of sentiment and endless self-congratulation for Americans. It’s perfect just as it is.
Which is precisely the wrong attitude for Americans to take. This attitude might be OK for now, when other space-faring countries are not able to make much (visible) progress, but it is this type of “style over substance” thinking that will catch America napping, much as what happened in the late 50s with Sputnik. “Endless self-congratulation” is an art Americans have perfected, which the rest of the world (especially Asian countries, where I live) avoids like the plague.
Do we think we will actually learn something important by sending people to the moon again, or to Mars, or to anywhere else in the solar system, that we don’t already know or that couldn’t be learned more efficiently using unmanned probes? If not, it it really about science or just about the old Cold War values of proving American might?
Meanwhile, we know with near certainty that we can find new, interesting, potentially useful, and potentially disappearing creatures and substances at the bottom of the ocean, or in the heart of the Amazon basin, or twenty kilometers underground. To maximize the payoff of exploration, why don’t we stick to this planet? I have nothing against space exploration per se, but as long as there is a limit to science funding by the federal government, why should NASA’s budget be larger than the entire NSF, CDC, NOAA, and USGS combined?
Nice idea .. but…….. We need to be aware of certain “truths”. Maybe “rules” are a better word?
In the end it comes down to this. As in business, populations , our bodies themselves. “IF YOU ARE NOT GETTING BIGGER, YOU ARE GETTING SMALLER”.
Find out how big the sand box is.. before you start studying the sand…
As well .. since when did we become a “one idea” “one direction” world? Perhaps there is room for both… Just sayin
I think we need to commit to expanded manned space flight, or just forget about it. Dicking around in LEO doesn’t cut it. Robots have proved to be fantastic explorers of the solar system and if people want to stick with them and forget manned missions, I’m okay with that. But if we’re going to support manned missions, I think the Moon is the right target. We’re not ready for Mars. Mars is not practical until we get faster rockets. The Moon provides endless opportunities. Planting flag missions are rather pointless, don’t you think. I’d say work on the Moon for fifty years and then talk about Mars. If we can’t send men and women to live on the Moon for one or two years, why expect to send them on a three year Mars mission.
But I don’t know what the public wants. I do wish that politics would not screw with NASA. Pick a 20 year mission and let NASA stick to it.