It is really unfortunate that Aldrin and Armstrong seem so critical of efforts like SpaceX. Both of these men are very intelligent and highly accomplished. That said, every transition in thinking and technology has always found opposition from those deeply invested in what is about to fade away. I would hope that, in this case at least, things start to change as further proof of the merits of private enterprise is produced.
Elon, if you are reading this, know that you have something pulling for you that Aldrin and Armstrong will never have: The next generation. My kids want to be like their mother and father (who are scientists) and we make it a point to highlight people such as yourself as role models. They want to be just like you. And so will countless others.
After seeing that clip, I wondered how Cernan and Armstrong could have said the things they said and, eventually, how they could even feel qualified to comment. I think the answer to both questions is related.
Armstrong and Cernan are just the Spam in the can. They're glorified pilots. As such, they are extensions of the PR arm of NASA and the entrenched aerospace industries. I've phrased that a little harshly, but not by much. Certainly, as trained monkeys go, they are marvelously trained. And not just any monkey could be trained to perform as they did in their, and I emphasize, highly specialized and limited roles within the space program. But, when we see a well-trained dog, the credit goes to the master.
If Armstrong and Cernan were rocket designers, if they had captained a startup that created a new launch vehicle, then I could take their statements seriously. If they were systems integrators, if they were manufacturing engineers, if they were anything other than good pilots, then they might have something useful to add to the discussion on a national level. Until then, all I want to hear from them is how beautiful the Earth looks from space, how fun it is to play golf on the Moon, and various other fun facts about events that took place 40+ years ago.
I feel awful trying to cut these men down, trying to knock them back into place. However, the truly shameful thing is that they've used their legacy to usurp beyond their areas of expertise. I console myself that the bounds over which they've stepped are generous bounds, the bounds of heroes, and it takes a truly cataclysmic level of folly to behave as they have done. It would take nothing less than the legendary ego of a pilot.
Cernan and Armstrong, rest on your laurels, and get out of the way of people who are doing.
This is very wrong. As pioneer astronauts Armstrong and Cernan had an important say in the Gemini and Apollo program especially in regard to safety procedures and 'human' friendliness (both are trained engineers by the way). At my work place we do some intense parallel computing on clusters and are occasionally consulted by the likes of intel when they're designing new hardware (and I'm sure this happens more frequently with other groups) because of our experience running their hardware to the max. Very few people have the knowledge and experience (both technical and practical) of what it's like on the user end to safely and reliably put a man in space and you shouldn't dismiss their views as coming from 'glorified pilots'
None of his early literature mentioned private space exploration, but considering he fell out with NASA over the bureaucracy and spent the last years of his career in private industry, he would have been all for it.
One can cheer on Musk and everything he's doing, yet still see the complete short-sightedness of ending the Shuttle program. Nothing contradictory about that.
We could take a clip without context, or we could read what Armstrong and Cernan actually said:
Their main thesis seems to be that it's unwise to take a program that's currently functioning, took an enormous amount of time to get to where it is, and shutter it before its replacement is viable. To say nothing of the fact that NASA is laying off perhaps the world's best bucket of space-related institutional knowledge. Sure, many are finding employment at private space firms, but many aren't.
Yes, Cernan has been outspokenly pessimistic on the chances of private industry to get there in time, sure, but he's a guy who knows first hand what it takes to get a man into space when starting from scratch. And it's not an unreasonable perspective to say that we are gambling a known-quantity for an unknown, which, given the time it takes to get there, is unwise. Yes, let them develop, and let's help them all we can. But until they have the demonstrated capabilities that we're giving up, why don't we keep what we've got until we know what the transition will look like?
He's been quoted as saying:
"It has been the commercial space industry, under NASA’s leadership and guidance, that has allowed us to get to the moon and build a shuttle and everything that has happened in the last 50 years. To entirely turn it over without any oversight to the commercial sector, which is a word I question anyway, is going to take a long time. Some of these guys are highly qualified, but some are young entrepreneurs with a lot of money, and for them it’s kind of like a hobby. Not all of them. But some of them are making claims to get into space in five years for $10 billion, and even the Russians say it’s going to take twice as long if we put our eggs into that basket. I don’t have a lot of confidence in that end of the commercial space spectrum getting us back into orbit any time soon. I’d like to hear all these folks who call themselves commercial space tell me who their investors are. Tell me where their marketplace is. A commercial venture is supposed to use private money. And who are their users? Suppose we, NASA, have no need for their services. There’s no other marketplace for them. So is it really a commercial venture, or is it not? Is it a group of guys who have stars in their eyes and want to be a big space developer? I don’t know."
Those are not unfair questions.
"I don’t think they’ll come anywhere near accomplishing what they’ve said they can do. I said before Congress, and it’s still true today, they don’t yet know what they don’t know. We, if you’ll allow me to include myself with NASA, have been doing this for half a century. We have made mistakes. We’ve lost colleagues. Don’t you think we’ve learned from some of those mistakes? You bet your life we have. They have yet to learn from those mistakes."
Armstrong, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any problem with it. In fact, he actually supported the idea of giving serious consideration to the commercial proposals NASA received to keep the Shuttle running.
If we considered any other system of infrastructure--roads, water, the grid--and said, "let's shut it down before the private industry creates its replacement," we'd be laughed off the stage.
I'm all for doing things the most efficient way possible, but given the relatively low cost (remember that the Shuttle program costs the same as the UK bank bailout) of maintaining the Shuttle program for another 5-10 years while other options came online, I don't see how this rush to privatize is viewed with anything but complete skepticism of the current administration's strategy. They know full well they'll be out of office before any of these issues come up, and, like the one before it, seem content to kick the can far enough down the road to defer current issues to future administrations.
We've got a space station orbiting that we can continue to use for at least another 8 years, if we can get there. Our ability to do so is entirely dependent on a re-emerging power with interests contrary to ours. Or, some very brilliant, ambitious guys who are still a ways off from launching people.
The fact that their most recent launch mishap allegedly almost ended the program should be a massive wake-up call to anyone who thinks Cernan's completely wrong. What will happen when a mistake kills a few of our (dwindling) astronaut cadre?
Again -- I hope Musk knocks this one out of the park and goes down in history for it. But that's no reason to end a well-functioning program to score some political points and free up money to pour into voting blocs and bailouts.
You have to keep in mind that for all they've done these guys are still company men, effectively. All of their glories and all of their accomplishments have taken place within the bosom of the government. From their armed forces service, to being military test pilots, to being astronauts, it has all been done within that structure. And for 5 decades that is also the way that manned spaceflight has been done, period.
They cannot conceive of a way to do it otherwise. And they are comparatively blind to the problems of government run spaceflight and the potential advantages of commercial spaceflight. But perhaps after some of those advantages are more readily apparent and after a bit of history has been laid down establishing another way to do it that really is a perfectly fine way o do it then maybe even they will come around.
> All of their glories and all of their accomplishments have taken place within the bosom of the government.
I can only agree. I haven't had the opportunity to socialize with a lot of folks who've lived their entire adult lives under the umbrella of government jobs or highly unionized jobs.
As things have it, I recently did have that chance. I had dinner with a married couple, both of whom have worked government jobs since, well, forever.
I have to say that it was a real jolting experience. It was truly like talking with people from another country, if not another planet.
My take was that the framework (union and/or government) creates such a layer of isolation from what I'll call real life that it creates a highly distorted view of reality (in my opinion) for those within it.
A recent example I heard about was that of a librarian that, after working for some 15 or 20 years earning $100K to $120K per annum (with insane benefits) will retire at a very young age with a pension paying her nearly $250K per year for the rest of her life (and retain such bennies as amazing health-care coverage). This is due to a rule in the contract of many unions that causes pension pay to be calculated on a salary that can be "spiked", as they put it, during the last couple of years by taking courses and doing things that, again, by union rules, count towards the salary calculation.
You can fully expect someone like that to have a completely skewed view of reality. Few private citizens, entrepreneurs and small business people have the opportunity to earn $250K a year with such good benefits, much less retain that for the rest of their lives while doing no work whatsoever. And, for good reason: In the real world that is almost always mathematically not sustainable. There are very few circumstances that allow a business to provide 90% pay --forever-- to retiring employees while having to hire a replacement. It's a case of simply arithmetic.
I firmly believe that this kind of thing, this kind of sub-culture, if you will, is really bad for this country (and any country that supports it). I don't know the internals of Greece, yet from outside it seems that it may very well be an extreme example of this effect. This is a case where millions of people live in a state that is so incomprehensibly shielded from reality that it, effectively, causes a devolving of potentially valuable human capital. In some cases this effect crosses generational gaps ("union towns" or "government towns"). By "devolving" I mean that the removal of the need to fight for survival devolves a human being into an automaton of sorts that will spend decades working within a system that does not compensate or require excellence. Mere participation is all that is needed and the rest of your life is covered. One has to wonder what some of these folks may have been capable of had they been challenged to be better than that. Hence my use of the term "devolve".
I didn't want to inject politics into the SpaceX discussion, but I think Aldrin, et al. have done this themselves. As highly accomplished and intelligent as they are (I don't see them as "trained monkeys" as someone said earlier) it is true that they lived their entire lives within this altered-reality that government and union frameworks can and do create. That, I've concluded, perhaps unfairly, isn't good for the human condition.
Aldrin and Armstrong are NASA astronauts. They spent the best years of their lives wholly bought into the centrally-funded prime-contractor system. They were at the absolute apex of that system, and they and a very small handful of astronauts reaped the fame and opportunity that enormous Apollo (400k people according to wikipedia) program.
SpaceX is doing orbital missions with around 1000 people. This means cheaper flights which means more flights. It's going to lead to the same democratization of access that the computing and network revolutions brought, pulling these technologies out of enormous institutions and dramatically dropping costs.
After hearing their testimony, I actually wondered if it was politically motivated. For example, whenever I hear the term "this administration has <x>", it's almost always uttered by a partisan.
Agreed 100%. You can tell Elon meant it when he said that they are some of his heros, and that he's truly hurt by them lambasting a mission that he felt would make them proud.
It goes to show you that even our heros don't know everything, and even if they let us down we have to follow our own path. Elon Musk is a hero of mine, and I'm sure to many others. Not to mention he was Robert Downey Jr's inspiration for Tony Stark.
Elon, if you are reading this, know that you have something pulling for you that Aldrin and Armstrong will never have: The next generation. My kids want to be like their mother and father (who are scientists) and we make it a point to highlight people such as yourself as role models. They want to be just like you. And so will countless others.