💥 Is America ready for another rocket disaster?
I question our ability to push forward when times get tough
Quote of the Issue
“At some point, everything's gonna go south on you... everything's going to go south and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem... and you solve the next one... and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.” - Mark Watney, The Martian.
The Essay
💥 Is America ready for another rocket disaster?
Just after SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded, so did social media. While there were plenty of genuinely puzzled reactions — “Was that supposed to happen? So the test was a failure, I guess?” — there were also plenty of gleeful reactions from people who simply don’t like Elon Musk. That, because Musk is an uberbillionaire, bought Twitter and then turned it into a more free-wheeling forum, and overall now seems to be an indisputable right-winger who dabbles in hot-button cultural issues. You can decide for yourself what exactly drives comments of the following sort:
Certainly ignorance about the iterative, trial-and-error model of SpaceX is playing a role here. As the great space journalist Eric Berger at Ars Technica writes:
Consider this: NASA spent billions of dollars and the better part of a decade constructing the Space Launch System rocket that had a nearly flawless debut flight—aside from damage to the launch tower—in late 2022. NASA followed a linear design method, complete with extensive and expensive analysis, because a failure of the SLS rocket would have raised serious questions about the agency's competence. Fortunately for SpaceX, the company can afford to "fail." It can do so because it has already built three more Super Heavy rockets that are nearly ready to fly. In fact, SpaceX can build 10 Super Heavy first stages in the time it takes NASA to build a single SLS rocket. If the first five fail but the next five succeed, which is a better outcome? How about in two or three years, when SpaceX is launching and landing a dozen or more Super Heavy rockets while NASA's method allows it a single launch a year? So, yes, SpaceX's rocket exploded on Thursday. The company will learn. And it will fly again, perhaps sometime later this fall or winter. Soon, it probably will be flying frequently.
But I’m not willing to attribute all the negative reaction to ignorance. Look, it’s my hope that we are now experiencing not just a Next Big Thing but a Wave of Next Big Things, a cluster of inventions and applications that will translate into faster productivity growth, faster economic growth, and a faster rise in living standards. But the pace of progress doesn’t depend just on the cleverness of our scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs. It also depends on us. It depends on our societal decisions and preferences.
Consider genetically modified foods, crops engineered to reduce diseases, increase resistance to pests, add nutritional value, and, increasingly, to make them more tolerant of climate change. In the United States, over 90 percent of corn, upland cotton, and soybeans are produced using genetically-engineered varieties. Europe, less so. As Politico noted late last year, “For the moment, the EU has some of the world’s strictest rules when it comes to approving genetically-altered crops, and GMOs remain a divisive topic among governments and citizens alike. As a result, only one GM crop is grown anywhere in the bloc — an insect-resistant variety of corn — and only in Portugal and Spain.” The US has made one choice, Europe — for the moment — a different one.
If Starship were a NASA program, all else equal, I wonder what the reaction would be today after yesterday’s test flight than ended in an explosion.
Back in the early 1970s, America made a choice about how it valued manned space exploration. Then it made a choice about how it valued even getting Americans to orbit on its own. Thankfully, we have a market economy where private companies have considerable scope of action and can raise money in the public markets rather than being utterly reliant on government, even in a sector where government plays a huge role such as space.
If Starship were a NASA program, all else equal, I wonder what the reaction would be today after yesterday’s test flight than ended in an explosion. There might well be hearings and calls for funding cuts from anti-space politicians such as Senator Bernie Sanders. Instead, the engineers at SpaceX will just get back to work on analyzing the data and figuring out what needs to be done to reach the company’s next milestone.
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