Space Stasis (Neal Stephenson)

This is a pretty thought provoking article. I've always really enjoyed Neal Stephenson's odd perspective on things -- in fact, I always want to smack people who complain about his stories' content and ending situations, and tell them "That's not the point, read the descriptions of things dammit.". The thing I really enjoyed was the bit about "the catch is it has to be the size and shape of a hydrogen bomb".<p>Anyway that aside, it really brings up the old infrastructure problem -- Large investment in infrastructure is a two-edged sword, bringing both benefit and lock in, and when it comes time to change there is lots of debate. I think Neal either misses or avoids a big part of the argument here -- infrastructure is turned into the bad-guy and the good guy. People don't see the benefits it has brought for a myriad of reasons - they have internalized it, they are not in the class of society that directly gets money for it (and the general improved life isn't apparent because their neighbors are in the same boat), they are afraid of tax increases (or lack of tax cuts), they don't understand the current tech, and figure that "it has problems so anything else we do won't fix it either", it has broken society in the following ways...<p>Really all of this though is just setup. The way I see it, large scale tech and infrastructure projects are hard to get at and harder to revamp because they are just too easy to target with populist attacks from all sides. The issue is usually complex, but easy to attack with a simple disingenuous quip. Doubly so when the alternative is something that sort-of works, because then the quip doesn't even need the effort of disingenuety, just a mean spirited "they are trying to change the perfectly good stuff we have just to take it away from us, and ignoring everything else to fix"<p>I have no idea of the solutions we could offer to these types of scenarios, but I do think that somehow we need to find a way to look at these piles of infrastructure we have an find ways to make them better. To do that we need to get around the "infrastructure problem".

I am sure many people are wondering about the alternative to giant explosive tin cans:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch</a>

This article reflects a constant theme in American innovation. Capitalism by itself does not demand innovation, but its militant thirst for resources does. What Stephenson calls lock-in is a product of a system that demands maximal efficiency of resources within an organization, but huge waste across the culture. Think of the empty flatbeds driven across Iraq to inflate cost plus contracts, drug companies competing to produce chemical analog drugs, or three drug stores selling identical products on a single corner.<p>The modern Capitalist attitude among modern business schools is that research and development is a cost center which must be minimized. This was a major element of Carly Fiorina's plan to cut HP to profitability. However, tremendous resources are thrown into marginal technologies in order to redundantly market and protect them.<p>Most great innovations in American culture seemed to occur due to a great existential need by our military. The Internet was designed as a communications network to survive nuclear attack. Rockets, as Stephenson pointed out, were improved for ICBMs. Most alternative fuel research is funded by the DoD to provide alternatives for tanks and jets in case our nation gets cut-off from its oil supply.<p>As someone who has run for office twice, I deeply understand that lobbyists exist largely to make money flow regardless of the suitability of a given contractor or product. I doubt our current military-industrial-congressional complex is independent enough to provide groundbreaking developments when incremental improvements suffice. Military lobbyists have become too powerful and too monetarily influential to the candidate that wins.

I'm surprised Stephenson didn't touch on SpaceX's potential as a game changer. The biggest "next" step to increased space access, is a vastly cheaper, more efficient, and potentially more reliable orbital rocket. And, SpaceX is doing exactly that!<p>As Musk is so fond of saying, the existing options are the Lamborghini's of launch vehicles, whereas he's trying to build the Honda. Safe, reliable, and cheap!<p>I have a lot of hope that we will have a new Space Renaissance in our lifetimes and I think the work that SpaceX, and other companies is doing will be instrumental in getting us to Mars and beyond.

It's not mentioned in the article, but in addition to his work as a writer, Neal Stephenson once worked as an advisor to Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by Jeff Bezos.<p>Blue Origin is focused on suborbital space flight using rockets. But I remember Stephenson making some vague statements about his work there (at a reading of <i>Quicksilver</i> at the University of Washington) that included research into space elevators and other less-proven technologies.

If you enjoyed this piece, be sure to read "Mother Earth Mother Board", written by Stephenson and published in Wired in December 1996. It's a long and fascinating look at the world of undersea cabling, and it's chock-full of super-interesting facts.<p>Full giant extremely-long and interesting article here: <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html</a>

Ha: "[After all,] <i>the modern petroleum industry is a direct outgrowth of the practice of going out in wooden, wind-driven ships to hunt sperm whales with hand-hurled spears and then boiling their heads to make lamp fuel.</i>"<p>God, that guy has a way with words.

&#62;<i>The above circumstances provide a remarkable example of path dependency. Had these contingencies not obtained, rockets with orbital capability would not have been developed so soon, and when modern societies became interested in launching things into space they might have looked for completely different ways of doing so.</i><p>&#62;<i>Before dismissing the above story as an aberration, consider that the modern petroleum industry is a direct outgrowth of the practice of going out in wooden, wind-driven ships to hunt sperm whales with hand-hurled spears and then boiling their heads to make lamp fuel.</i><p>Is he seriously citing the adoption of petroleum fuels as an example of path dependency?

TL;DR version (though you should just read it): The space industry is a great example of path dependency and lock-in in innovation. The reasons why we use rockets to launch satellites are historical dating back to the days of Hitler and the H-Bomb. After trillions spent on developing ICBMs capable of crossing the world, our governments are 'locked-in' to using rockets to get things into space. Using rockets for this purpose is not nearly as efficient as other methods, but we have perfected that practice to the point of perfection. In order to increase space accessibility we need to "cross-the-valley" to another technology, but since it has taken so much money (path-dependent) we are locked-in, and it will be very hard to innovate in this space.

Reading this article raises a question that I ask as devil's advocate (mostly): why do we need to get into space?<p>I can think of three reasons: 1) We need to put up comsats. 2) Military superiority 3) Because we can and it's cool.<p>To the first, as the article stated the sky's already getting a bit full as there are only so many comsat "slots"<p>To the second, SDI never really worked and that threat doesn't exist anymore.<p>To the third, well...is it worth the brajillions? I personally think it is because we don't know what's out there, but that's a really poor sales pitch. :)<p>Perhaps it's my limited imagination and understanding, but I'm unable to conjure the reward that offsets the risks/costs.

&#62;But we are not making any serious effort as a society to cross those valleys. It is not clear why.<p>Because what we have works well enough for the task at hand. The problem, which Stephenson alludes do earlier in the article, is space just isn't proving to be as useful as we had anticipated. We're already doing pretty much everything that you can justify from an economic perspective. Activities like asteroid mining and space solar power aren't going to make sense for centuries even if we dramatically cut the cost of $/kg to orbit.<p>So sure, we could do the same things more cheaply after a huge investment in, say, tethers. But so what? How does it make sense to spend trillions on a new launch technology when you could use that money to buy all the conventional rockets you'll need for the next 50 years.

His points translate more or less directly to nuclear fission - Uranium-fueled light water reactors are the result of another "hill-climbing process" and other reactor designs (HTGR, LFTR, etc.) receive almost no commercial attention, in large part due to the regulatory, accounting, and insurance burden of proof that any new design has to meet.

It's worth noting that the article that always gets cited every time the Dvorak keyboard gets mentioned, ("Fable of the Keys", claiming that it's a myth that it is more efficient than Qwerty) is based on the near religious belief amongst certain groups of economists that path-dependency of this sort doesn't exist.<p>They believe we use rockets/Qwerty/Windows because they are the best and the all seeing market has chosen wisely, not because of a series of effectively random decisions and coincidences that occured in the past.

Great article but the modern oil industry did not grow out of whale hunting. In fact it bankrupted whale hunters because it provided cheaper oil.<p>Also we would only end up as "the Ottoman empire of the 21st century" if someone else creates a radically superior technology which we spectacularly fail to copy, reproduce, or simply license form them.<p>I think the sad truth is, there just isn't much to do in space if all you have is a cheap and easy way to escape earth's gravity.<p>Sure space tourism would be fun for a while. But at some point we need to either terraform something or decide to live in city sized spaceships, THEN you'd have a real incentive to innovate launch vehicles.