Neal Stephenson On Rockets and Innovation

Dr. Gamera writes "Science-fiction author Neal Stephenson gives us his perspective on the history of the development of rocketry. He uses that history to illustrate the phenomena of path dependence and lock-in."

Odd, unsatisfying conclusion

[smellsofbikes]

It's a neat article, as usual with Neal, but the ending is odd. He says the current state of rocketry is at a local maximum, it's not going to get appreciably better, and there may be other ways of putting stuff in orbit that are better, and then he says he doesn't know why we aren't trying those other better things. This, after spending the previous twenty paragraphs writing about how the US has spent four trillion dollars to get to the top of this local maximum, and the old USSR spent about the same, and in the process we've established a huge military-industrial complex based on the money still flowing into that development path, with lots of political inertia greased by manufacturing and administrative money going into congressional districts... and he wonders why we're not considering spending another trillion dollars on a different, unproven system that would probably involve taking money from the people who are now getting it? He's already answered his own question, and that's surprising because he's a very bright person and does a good job of analyzing the subject.

Re:Odd, unsatisfying conclusion

[rickb928]

Lemme put it this way. He did edify and inform you enough to come to that conclusion.

He's brighter than you thought, maybe?

Re:Why not, indeed?

[sznupi]

There's one key word in that quote - "if". "There is no shortage of proposals for radically innovative space launch schemes that, if they worked..."

When we really seriously look at spaceplanes (say, HOTOL or Skylon studies), it turns out they aren't likely to end up any better (in best case scenario!) than "dumb rocket" using comparable technology, materials science ... on the level which we don't have yet, and which is required to make the spaceplane even borderline doable!

While, perhaps, we haven't utilized yet all the possibilities of dumb & simple approach [wikipedia.org], in some ways we are worse than first effort [fourmilab.ch]

I don't think his premises support his conclusion

[amliebsch]

Suppose you accept his premises that our current state of rocket technology evolved in part due to key improbable events. As a result, we've continued that technology, to "climb to the top of that hill" as he puts it. That doesn't, by itself, automatically mean there must be higher hills to climb. We may have purposefully or accidentally climbed the highest hill we are currently capable of climbing. Perhaps we would have been further along with some other technology if we hadn't climbed this hill, but it might not have been better overall. Right? I mean, it could have turned out like our quest for magnetically confined fusion.

Blind people develop superior hearing to sighted people. I'd still rather have my vision, and I don't think that's entirely due to path dependency.

Same mistake with the combustion engine. Yes, we are getting close to maxing out the technology. But it's not clear that, if we had not developed it in the first place, we would have come up with something more effective in its place. It's not even clear we would have come up with something *as* effective. It's not even clear we even have anything plausible *yet* that would be as effective.

The fundamental mistake in this article seems to be an assumption that the grass is greener in the counterfactual, but he presents no evidence to persuade us that this is actually true.

Re:Odd, unsatisfying conclusion

[red_dragon]

It's a neat article, as usual with Neal, and the ending is odd, also usual with Neal.

Fixed that for you.

Engineering Culture

[BJ_Covert_Action]

I like how one of the things Stephenson blames in his article for the rocket lock-in is, "engineering culture," that is resistant to change. I often find that nontechnical folk (and no, sci-fi writing does not count as a technical pursuit) use terms like, "engineering culture," or "scientific elitism," to describe phenomena brought about by actual technical details. In other words, that engineering culture doesn't develop simply because we engineers are resistant to change. It develops because we engineers crunch the numbers and have to deal with reality.

Anyone who thinks that engineers working in the space launch industry are resistant to change just for the shits is pretty misinformed. When it comes right down to it, we're the ones who would love to find a new Pandora's box technology that could get us into space faster, cheaper, and safer. Hell, we have devoted our lives to pursuing the development of the space industry. If anyone wants to see men and women living on Mars, manufacturing in orbit, and fucking onboard inter-galactic colony ships, it's us. Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury that sci-fi authors have of writing about some great new idea and just assuming it will work. We have to test material strengths. We have to plot thermal loads. We have to damp harmonic oscillations. We have to produce enough energy to overcome gravity. Those aren't trivial tasks. And we don't get to defy the laws of thermodynamics and gravity with some hand-wavy bullshit about, "couldn't this idea totally work in theory?!"

So yeah, there are lots of proposed theories and ideas on how to get to orbit. Great, congratulations Mr. Stephenson, you have an imagination. And, awesome, you can see sunnier hilltops across the valley that reach higher than the one we are standing on now. That's a great fantasy land. I hope you enjoy living in it. But while you draft up clever metaphors based on cherry-picked "facts" and unrealistic assumptions, those of us working in the industry, you know, the ones doing the math, actually have to look at the numbers. And those distant, high hilltops you see, well they might not be as high as you think. And all those, "innovations," on how to get to space, well they might not be as Earth-shatteringly ingenious as you think.

I'm not saying there's not room for improvement, there definitely is. But until someone shows me some numbers that prove a space-elevator, a launch loop, or a space fountain can be built, today, without unobtainium (in the form of some material, or some epic power source), I am going to delegate those ideas strictly to fantasy-land for now. And as for things like space planes, hypersonics, multi-propulsion-type vehicles, and so on, we are trying them, to an extent. And, believe it or not, just like rockets, they are still fucking difficult to get right. That's why it takes a long time to develop them. In the end, chucking something out of our gravity well is no easy task, no matter what method you take. And it is expensive, in both time and energy, no matter what technology you utilize. So stop lamenting about how poor off we are compared to where we could be. We're doing everything we can with what we've got. If that's not good enough for you, vote to give us more money or design a small, portable power-plant that can produce a proper metric fuckton of thrust.

In the end, engineering culture is just a term being used to say, "technical shit that I don't understand well enough so I'lll use it as a scapegoat to justify my preconceived notions"

Re:Stephenson & Rocket?

[Rei]

Yeah, I was really disappointed by this from Neil. It's extremely poorly done.

1) "Without the Nazis, rockets wouldn't have happened" -- the Nazis merely accelerated something that was already ongoing. All major nations were working on rocketry. There were two primary purposes: sounding rockets, and aircraft. This was, you'll recall, before we knew that jet engines would win out over rockets for airplane propulsion, and all sides were working on rocket-propelled craft. Even if rocket-plane propulsion were to stop, sounding rocket development would have continued to advance to V2-scale. WWII just accelerated things.

2) "A-bombs were too expensive and militarily ineffective" --really? Taking out an entire city and its mass production capability isn't worth the cost to purify some uranium? Perhaps if you divide the number of bombs dropped on Japan by how much we spent on the Manhattan project, maybe, but most of that was a sunk cost. The world was terrified of atomic bombings.

3) "Without A-bombs, rocket development would have ceased." -- ignoring the issues in #1, after WWII, rocketry had already captured the public mind. In fact, even during WWII, Von Braun had already been talking up, and getting military interest in, orbital space bombers that would stay in orbit and drop their (conventional) payloads on enemy targets at a moment's notice (plus taking spy photographs, etc, all without risk of being shot down) during WWII.

4) "All payloads are sized to be like A-bombs" -- not in the least. There's a huge range of payload profiles and lift capabilities of modern rockets. Just because the stacks were originally designed for a specific load doesn't mean that all of their descendants are.

Probably the most disappointing line, however, was:

5) "Rockets are as close to perfect as they're ever going to get." Oh really? Scramjets? Nuclear thermal? Strained-bond chemicals? Cryogenic solids and hybrids? The dramatic materials enhancements we're starting ti get (which has a profound effect on rocket performance)? Advanced heat shields? And on and on. Plus, just ignoring radical changes, look at how much of a difference design approaches have toward launch costs -- compare the Space Shuttle to SpaceX, for example. Rockets are nowhere close to being completely optimized.

There's a lot of legacy that could be criticized with the space industry, esp. the government space industry. Nobody would insist on keeping on reusing as many shuttle components as possible for a next-gen stack if it wasn't all the jobs on the line. Even the "radical", ground-up redesigns, such as SpaceX's Falcon, still uses some legacy parts. So there is a lot of legacy stuff to criticize. But Neal only skimmed over these things :P And he skipped the most important part of such an article: proposing alternatives. So you don't like rockets -- fine. Let's talk alternatives. What do you like -- skyhooks, space elevators, launch loops, ballistic launch, what?