Breaking Windows

Some of the greatest words ever written are by Carl Sagan in his Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The picture that inspired the poetry was taken by Voyager 1 some four billion miles away.

I open this post because I want everyone to know I am not passionless about understanding space or our place in the universe. Indeed, I find exploration to be one of humanity's greatest enduring tasks. On that note, I want to draw attention to a comment I heard during my the Public Choice Society meeting I just got back from. The comment, which was made in response to my paper presentation on NASA, is one I've sadly heard often: "If NASA didn't exist, then the private sector wouldn't have the technology they created."

This is a bit like saying that its a good thing you own the clothes you're wearing otherwise you'll be naked. Just because the world emerges in one way does not mean it can't emerge in a similar way through a different method. If I didn't own these clothes, I'd be wearing something else. If NASA didn't make a technology, it's quite likely some other institution would have.

The other problem is the statement is a broken window fallacy (in that it ignores what is not seen) because it implies that this outcome is the best possible outcome. For if NASA did not exist and we never had the Mercury missions, Apollo, all that technology or the picture of that "pale blue dot," then society would have something else. Would it be better? Hard to say. It could be little more than a few dozen art museums. Or it could have been a cure for a deadly disease. Hard to tell, but they all stir the soul.

Flight of the Falcon

Yesterday afternoon on Omelek Island, private company SpaceX launched Falcon 1. The rocket traveled 200 miles into and above our atmosphere before spinning out of control. Video feed then terminated.

Falcon 1 was a success and a failure. The vast majority of the new technology worked and only that last bit-5%-wasn't quite get up to snuff. Still, this is another notable step into making space travel more available to the common people.

SpaceX was created by Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal, with the expressed intent on making rocket launches cheaper. One of Musk's strategies to accomplish this is the scaling down of the firm's bureaucracy. Using only about 200 employees, Musk is taking quite a different approach than the bureaucracy heavy organizations of Lockheed Martin, Boeing and NASA. I doubt they'll learn anything when SpaceX is finally successful but hopefully other entreprenuers will and the space industry will transform as much as the computer industry has over the past fifty years.

Billy Bob in Space

In about a month, I'll be travelling to Amsterdam to present my paper, One Giant Leap for Bureaucracy. The piece is about how NASA is more concerned with maintain its authorative position in space travel than allowing private citizens to enter space. NASA's just like any other bureaucracy, more concerned with its public image than bringing humanity into space.

Enter The Astronaut Farmer, a movie about Charlie Farmer (Billy Bob Thorton) building a rocket on his Texas ranch. When he tries to buy rocket fuel for his launch, FBI and a smattering of other government agencies find out and try to shut him down, notably NASA and the FAA. The overarching sentiment on why they don't want him to launch: they don't want to be embarassed.

It was a pretty good movie, though sometimes overdone and scientifically shaky. But the theme is disturbingly accurate.

Rolling the Loaded Dice

While taking a break from the sudden list of eighty-three things I've had piling up, I watched a bit of a Star Trek: Enterprise episode, of which the Sci-Fi Channel has been rerunning. In the episode, the Captain decides to give the ship a major weapons overhaul instead of returning to Earth's solar system so they can better defend themselves against a virtually invincible foe.

Later, the Captain regrets a decision to rush this new ship out of space dock, before these weapon enhancements were complete. His chief engineer reminds him that he had to accept that risk because the reason it was rushed out was to complete an important mission. He finishes his little lecture by noting that other pioneers of space (notably the ones of our era) sat on millions of liters of rocket fuel--they took on great risks too. That's what it means to do amazing things.

He was clearly talking about NASA, which I found strange. There is no doubt that the astronauts are brave, but the risks they take are not the seat-of-your-pants, on the fly, kind of risks. Those are best left for true revolutionaries, like when the Enterprise left space dock incomplete. The risks NASA astronauts take are calculated risks. Extremely calculated. NASA astronauts are not some "space cowboys," living by their wits alone, bravely the blackness of space like a rugged invididual. They are arms of a bureaucracy. Risk takers? Yes. Legendary heroes? Not quite.

Not About Science Anymore

Tim Swanson today posted a nice article on the Mises Institute about NASA, noting that the opinion of the agency is over-rated. Some of its more popular invention credentials are urban myth, its PR celebrates what should be routine and, of course, there is always the lingering question of lost opportunity (see my recent post on the subject).

NASA is a strange animal when it comes to political agencies. Yes, it is subject to all the shameless politics and waste any government organization is prone to but it is also a brand. When a company produces something based on NASA technology, they proudly proclaim it, knowing it raises the profile of the product. Eagle Eye sunglasses cites the government origin of their technology on their website. Better yet, in the Temper-Pedic commericals (where that dorky-looking guy jumps up and down next to the wine glass on the mattress to show motion is not transferred) the NASA logo leaps on the screen.

People have a lot of faith in NASA and this makes it easier on the agency to get big budgets and political support. They can fail utterly and not be punished for it, sometimes not even politically. By trumping every event as a success, they maintain a high public opinion and thus only have to produce a trivial amount of expensive and minor accomplishments.

The space shuttle was supposed to be a reuseable space craft that could land like an airplane and, now over thirty years old, the design is still celebrated every time it doesn't crash. That cameras still gather to report the launch and landing of the shuttle demonstrates that the vehicle is a failure and exposes the agency not as a scientific haven but a typical bureaucracy with atypical public relations.

Hat tip to Jeremy Horpedahl for sending me the Mises article.

Every Invention Has Its Costs

While visiting home this Christmas, I mentioned to a family friend my research for my dissertation. It consists of demonstrating that competitive structures like the Ansari X Prize (a $10 million prize to the first privately funded team that could get into space twice in two weeks) is preferred to a centralized structure (such as NASA) for the purposes of discovering new technology.

In this brief discussion, my brother seemed it necessary to point out that contestants used NASA-made technology to accomplish the task. He is correct, but I fail to understand the relevance. He is probably suggesting that the base technology everyone used could have only come from a state agency, in this case NASA. This sort of argument is common in the economics of science and it is foolish, just as it would be foolish to claim that because the free market invented the Apple computer, a state agency never could. The question is not of possiblity--given enough time, money, or people any organization can invent anything that is scientifically possible--but of relative cost.

For some reason, people groan when I talk about costs. I'm told that they are not everything and that's true: otherwise gum would always be preferred over a car because it's always cheaper. The benefits must also be weighed. Yet it is those that claim I think costs are everything that then turn around and claim benefits are everything. NASA created an invention, they might say, and thus we must be better off. I hope you can see why this logic, which refuses to ask what society gave up to achieve this marvelous invention, is flawed.

To insist technology should be created merely because the result might prove useful to the private sector is the same as scouring the streets for hours on end in hopes of finding money left on the sidewalk. There are cheaper ways to improve quality of life.

The Lunar Connection

Yesterday morning I heard Howard McCurdy on the radio discussing NASA's endeavors to go to the moon. At first, I was very excited: McCurdy penned a book--Faster, Better, Cheaper--which pointed out the flaws in NASA's attempts to reduce the cost of its over-the-top budget and I've often used in my research. Naturally, I expected him to blast NASA's plans and expose the obvious fact that a base on the moon was going to be very, very, very expensive. I was wrong.

Though he acknowledged the costs would be high, McCurdy defended the bureaucracy and the mission on the basis that sometimes, to advance technology, people need to explore brave new challenges.

There is no doubt that radically new endeavors expand our understanding of the world, and thus our technological base. But the scientific community is not so creatively drained that a multi-billion-dollar mission is needed to inspire others. Nanotechnology, genetic engineering, quantum computers, fusion--these are all areas which are far from reaching their apex and also promise to fundamentally change the way we understand and manipulate the world around us.

There is little doubt that going to the moon (again) will expand science, but we are at a point where more "mere" lab work will do the same. Perhaps McCurdy really meant that space will provide a literal different view--as in one from space. But if that is truly what he wants into to shake up the thought patterns of scientists, I suggest instead a much cheaper option to inquirers the world over: go stand on your head.

Prize Watch

Given my research interests of prizes for technological invention, I've decided to start a list of such prizes in order to keep better track of them. This is an ongoing list and if you discover any technology prizes, please let me know via comments or e-mail.

-The Grand Challenge, a DARPA prize. Robotic vehicles traversing an urban or desert course.
-The Lander Challenges, X-Prize and NASA prizes. Landing on and breaking the Moon's gravity.
-The Auto X PRIZE, an X-Prize contest. Creating a new order of magnitude of fuel efficiency.
-The Genome X PRIZE, an X-Prize challenge. Speeding up the ability to sequence the human genome.
-Centennial Challenges, NASA, et al. prizes. A plethora of space-related prizes intended to ease humanity's jounery into the final frontier.
-The M Prize, a Methuselah Foundation contest. Extending human life starting with mice.
-The NetFlix Prize, improving the accuracy of predictions of who loves which movies.

Notable for the list is the X Prize Cup, an annual exposition where some of these competitions are held.

Shafting the Space Elevator

Colleague and friend Brian Hollar commented yesterday concerning the possibility of a space elevator: a robotic machine that runs up and down a teather with one end anchored on earth and the other anchored to an object in orbit.

Brian thinks the idea is very promising, quoting Business 2.0's comparison of the idea: "The space elevator is where the PC was in the 1960s: The theory is solid, the materials exist, and people in garages are starting to tinker with the next step."

But the biggest hurdle to the space elevator is that NASA has latched on to it. The elevator is destined to be expensive (estimates start at about five billion USD) adding to the already high likelihood that it'll make a lot of headlines. This is more of a weakness than a boon. When NASA projects make headlines before they are complete, the project becomes a political pawn. The focus changes, the budget fluctuates, projects are added on and taken off, rivalries and infighting overcome the goals and, if you're lucky enough to finish what you started, it'll be a shadow of what it was supposed to be. The ISS is the first example that comes to mind.

Don't get me wrong; there are some things NASA's starting to do right. Following the X-Prize lead, it's offering annual prizes for those that solve certain technology obstacles the elevator faces. But the prize money is tiny ($50,000 for each of the two elevator-related prizes) and while one has thus far received an impressive following (19 teams this year for the tether prize), the other is proceeding lacklusterly (4 teams last year, only two so far this year).

NASA's core problem with its approach on this strategy is that it's missing the whole point of the prize system. The idea is to encourage novel solutions of achieving goals, not to simply outsource your R&D department. By stating how NASA would like to get into space (the elevator), that strategy is embodied in the rules and hampers engineers from using their own ideas. For example, the tether prize states all tethers must form a closed loop, weigh a maximum of 2 grams, have an inner circumference of 2m long, +/- 1cm, and can be no wider than 200mm.

The goal isn't to get into space with an elevator; the goal is to get into space cheaply.

NASA Wises Up...Sort Of

Twenty years after the Challenger explosion, NASA finally announced the space shuttle will be scraped and they will undertake a new generation of design.

The shuttle has never worked the way it was supposed to, and by that I mean be cheaper to operate than a rocket and capasule. Thus, NASA will design a new rocket and capsule.

It took two disasters, five space-worthy (relative term) shuttles and a good four decades of development to finally admit what was demonstrated with every launch; it's just not worth it.

But the most puzzling thing is the use of old capsule design for the new phase of NASA space exploration in an age when the Ansari X-Prize generated 26 teams, each with their own method of getting to space. The most notable example being the winner of the Prize: SpaceShipOne. Hell, the craft's hanging in the National Air and Space Museum. It's not like NASA officials have to go far to see it. Perhaps they don't just want to admit the private sector has a leading role in their domain.

General Theory of Discovery

There are lots of things people acknowledge government shouldn't fund. Successful companies. Hitler monuments. Gigli II. Uh....

Ok so that's about where it stops.

But of all things one group or another demands we drop, pure research is something that's hard to defend cutting because it's benefits are so uncertain. Thus the NPR report I heard today that criticized Mr. Bush's recent budget cuts on NASA and the National Science Foundation.

The report opened with how pure theory of Einstein's general theory of relativity is used to make GPS work. The theory tells us that as stuff goes faster, time for that thing goes slower. Since GPS satellites orbit so quickly, they are equipped with special clocks that literaly use a different unit of time to keep in accordance with its terrestial customers. We never know how science will help us, the report concluded (and that is true), thus government has to fund science (here I have a problem).

Let us set aside the fact that Einstein didn't develop his theory at NASA or the NSF. Hell, he didn't even create it in America. The lecture was given in 1915, after he worked at the University of Zurich and the University of Prague. He didn't move to the US until the 1930s. (Even if we assume these are goverment-funded institutions (Zurich is; I'm not sure about Prague), many other universities of equal or greater prestige are not. Indeed, since private schools offer greater freedom, most universities prefer to go private, assuming they could get the funds.)

Government funded science simply isn't neccessary for a well functioning economy. Private firm innovation, X-Prize style contests and academic research easily fill the gap. And even if some great idea for some ungodly reason isn't realized because of a lack of government funding, that doesn't mean we won't benefit from it eventually.

Suppose Einstein really needed public money to develop the theory (maybe money becomes enchanted with some brain-enhancing invisible wave if it's taken as tax dollars). Decades later, the first GPS satellites go in orbit and the firms realize something is very strange. The times between here and space aren't in sink. After intense research and theorizing, they come upon Einstein's conclusion anyway. No public money spent. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Would it have taken longer? Sure would, but we wouldn't have had to fund all those projects that concluded really intersting stuff though wouldn't have a practical value for decades to come. And we could have used that money to make our world better today.

It's like when people say the $118 billion (2000 dollars) that NASA spent on the Apollo program was worth it until I point out that money probably could have been used to make huge leaps in fighting cancer.

A Prize No More

We libertarians love to complain. Government’s in the way over here, not enough free market over there; it’s mostly just a bundle of direct attacks and vauge answers. Mike told me the other day that he’d like to see real solutions put forth and if he was here, he’d do something about it.

(Silence.)

But he’s not here and I am. Just as well, because this is about something that’s near and dear to my heart: the Ansari X Prize.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Ansari X Prize is a $10 million prize to the first private team that can send a manned ship into space, return him and repeat the process two weeks later.

Or should I say, was a prize.

Yesterday, SpaceShipOne completed the daunting task, winning the prize, and already we are reaping the benefits. Virgin Atlantic Airlines founder Richard Branson announced the creation of Virgin Galactic Airways which will offer suborbital flights at $200,000 a seat. The company already ordered five SpaceShipOnes to be built. Next year, the makers of 7-Up will offer one of these six-figure seats as part of a contest.

This is only the beginning. The Ansari X Prize will sponsor annual space races, pushing the technological envelope even farther. And a new contest has surfaced: $50 million for the first team to make a ship capable of going even farther into space (100 miles instead of 62) and dock with an orbital station. NASA will also be offering its own prizes.

This is an answer. Right here. Technology is humanity’s greatest friend. It raises standards, saves lives, connects people and makes dreams reality. At the cornerstone of creating a better world is creating a world that favors novelty, innovation and invention. There is no reason why we cannot stretch our arms a bit wider—prizes for the cure of cancer, for new energy sources, for improved anti-terrorism technologies. The list goes on forever.

(I’m updating a paper I wrote a few months ago about this precise subject. Hopefully, in a few weeks, I’ll publish it here on the blog. I’ll appreciate any input our readers could offer.)

Never Underestimate the Power of the Market

Yesterday I posted an article questioning NASA’s role as a government entity as NASA recently released pictures it took of Saturn’s rings. I implied that NASA’s return on an investment of billions of dollars wasn’t worth it. My criticism of the Space Agency was met with a few comments, two of which challenged my conclusion, both of which were Anonymous.

The second Anonymous not only had the longer and more involving argument, s/he also built off the previous comment which was “the billions of dollars we spent on pure scientific endeavour probably would have gone to bloated defense programs, or something else you libertarian-types would have found equally objectionable.” It’s true that “us libertarian-types” do find a great deal of government spending objectionable for a very basic reason: governments have a hard time assessing value. I can illustrate why by exploring what really would happen if NASA was disbanded.

Let’s suppose that there’s a paradigm shift in the minds of the people and/or our congressional leaders. It’s decided that NASA just isn’t worth the money and is dicountinued, freeing up billions of dollars in the federal budget every year. Like what happened when the government ran a surplus four years ago, everyone has a different take on what they should spend the money on. Some groups will want tax cuts, some will want to pay back the deficit, some will want more public lands, some for education, some for health care, some for things we couldn’t possibly imagine and, yes, some for defense. Most likely the billions will be split between all these interest groups based on what is politically feasible. And that’s the point. Politicans make their descions based on politics, not economics. While the vast majority of them are good intentioned, they are ultimately misguided because the lack the knowledge, rationality, power and incentive to make decisions that help the most people. (I know, dear reader, that you might have a problem with me claiming what’s economic is also best for society as a whole but trust me, it’s true. Explaining why is a whole other article.) My favorite examples of politics over economics are farm subsidies, tariffs, immigration laws and, of course, NASA. All of these concentrate benefits to handful of citizens while punishing the rest of society.

The second Anonymous continues his/her argument with the three following assumptions: space has zero profit potential, pure knowledge has zero profit potential but is more valuable than knowledge for an applied purpose and private firms cannot do a better job at space exploration than governments. Let me address these one at a time.

According to Anonymous, “[i]t isn't the lack of relevance or lack of technology that keeps the private sector out of space science, it's the complete lack of revenue.” That’s flatly untrue. It really is the lack of technology that keeps the private sector out of space (until recently). The widespread interest in the X Prize and the attempt by former pop singer Lance Bass to travel into space demonstrates that traveling to space could be very profitable. True, right now regular travel to space is economically unfeasible but its feasiblity may be just around the corner. Traveling to space is a really cool idea and people will pay for it, as they pay to travel to the most isolated places on earth. Just as the Wright Brothers thought widespread airtravel was a fool’s fancy and IBM’s top brass thought no private person would want a computer (let alone be able to afford one), declaring that privatized space travel is impossible merely sets one up to be embarassed in twenty or thirty years. Even if we set aside tourism, there’s still several different possiblities for profitablity, most of which we can’t envision because we lack the knowledge and incentive to really sit down and be creative enough to think of them. But if you want an inkling, two possiblities are low-gravity manufacturing and asteriod mining (something environmentalists should be happy about).

Anonymous’s implication that pursuing knowledge for its own sake is somehow better than researching for profit lacks cohesion. Discovery is a wonderful, powerful thing and it doesn’t become less so if the scientist/explorer/engineer learns something that’s profitable. Those people aren’t worth less, either. Drawing the line between knowledge for knowledge’s sake and knowledge for profit’s sake is harder than one may think. Anonymous asks, “how would you plan to profit from uncovering the origins of the solar system?” S/he is not the only person that finds “unappliable” knowledge interesting. Millions of people visit musuems ranging from the Air and Space Museum to dinosaur parks to arecehological sites every year and they are willing to drop donations and/or pay for it, too. The success of the History and Discovery channels, as well as TLC turn so called knowledge for knowledge sake into profitable applications. Pure knowledge is really interesting, especially when we are discussing something as powerful and romantic as the origins of the universe.

Anonymous claims “a probe from a private company wouldn’t be able to get there any faster,” suggesting that government-funded space travel is the best people can do. But if there are incentives, like the incentives I suggest above, competeing firms can do amazing things. Individuals and private companies disproved the pessimitic claims of the Wright Brothers and IBM, giants in their respective fields. X Prize contenders created new, more powerful rocket fuels, self-learning software and a new rocket engine, as well as other creations. Because there are many autnomous groups pursuing the same goal, the full range of possiblities can be explored at the same time with no coersive costs to the average person.

While Anonymous was correct when s/he said that knowledge, not pictures, was the most important part of craft, assuming that knowledge is worth “billions and billions” illustrates my point. I think the knowledge is worth significantly less than that. Some one else might think it’s worth more. Who’s right? No one knows because value is determined through the collective action of millions of people, not by interest groups or governments. Only by setting the process to a market environment can society discover how much the data is worth. And when it comes to discovery, I’m sure everyone, especially Anonymous, can appreciate the process.