The moon intrigues 21st-Century businesses the way the American West lured 19th-Century entrepreneurs.


The Right $tuff


Last spring SpaceX launched a satellite into orbit using a retrieved rocket (“flight proven” in company parlance) and in the process shook an aerospace industry that has cautiously watched private companies become leaders in the field. SpaceX (officially Space Exploration Technologies Corp.) also added a new category to the space business—discounts.


As mentioned before in this column (Dispatch 103), NASA’s plan to pair the science legacy of Wernher von Braun with the business principles of Adam Smith might redefine the question: What’s The Right $tuff?


SpaceX founder Elon Musk estimates that the main rocket booster represents 70 percent of the cost of launching, which is around $62 million. By using a pre-flown rocket, Musk could sharply discount the next flight and presumably still make a profit. (Also consider: The March 30 rocket was also recovered, so the next launch would be its third.)


Musk’s next goal is to turn around the used booster in 24 hours, more like an airliner than a vehicle headed for outer space. “He has become the disruptive voice this industry needed,” Dale Ketchum, a veteran space authority who works with Space Florida, told the Orlando Sentinel. “He’ has proven us wrong.”


Launches by private companies from the Cape have risen steadily, according to spaceline.org. In 2010, it was 2 out of 15 total launches; in 2011, there were none. In 2012, the number was 2 out 16; in 2013, 2 out of 13. It was up to 6 out of 17 in 2014; in 2015, 7 of 17; and in 2016, 7 of 18.


The New Robber Barons?


Musk and Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos, who started the budding space company Blue Origin, have been compared to leaders of an earlier time, when barons in the 19th Century benefited from the big transportation system of their day—railroads.


In a way, how the transcontinental railroad came to connect America’s East and West is not so far removed from private companies venturing into space. Federal government dollars (then and now) played a big part, especially in the start-up stages. And as one scholar noted, “To most Americans the West (in the 1860s) was as remote as the moon, its terrain as alien and forbidding.”


In brief: Two major railroad companies were involved: the Union Pacific (UP), which would build 1,086 miles of track, started construction in the east around Omaha and headed west; and the Central Pacific Co (CP), tackling tougher terrain, laid 690 miles, beginning in Sacramento, crossing the Sierra Nevadas, and tying in with the UP in Utah.


Congress passed two bills—one in 1862, another in 1864—to help both companies. From a distance the terms appeared extremely generous. Besides granting a cost-free right-of-way, the government gave the railroads alternating sections of land along the tracks. A section is one square mile, or 640 acres. The government kept alternate sections, leaving the private/public interests divided like the reds and blacks on a checkerboard.


There’s more: the companies received $16,000 in government bonds per mile, payable when stretches were completed. The first payouts were for 40-miles, but soon changed to 20-miles to help cash flow. Also, if the grades were steeper, the payment increased accordingly to $32,000 and up to $48,000 per mile.


With federal funding, President Abraham Lincoln’s strong backing, and the obvious national benefits from such an ambitious project (the historian Steven Ambrose titled a book about the railroad Nothing Like It in The World), the iron link uniting the nation looked destined for greatness.


It was, instead, a money-draining slog from beginning to end and was built mainly because the bull-headed entrepreneurs of that day wouldn’t quit and continually poured in their own dollars. Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Oakley Ames (who had a side job as a congressman), Thomas “Doc” Durant.


It was pretty obvious what the immediate problem was: When the Central Pacific finished a section of rail from Sacramento to the California border, what would the traffic be, other than a few passengers or some freight dropped off for haulers? There was virtually no commerce at the border, and as the rail ascended the mountains, the destinations became more remote—next stop, Donner Pass.


These businessmen found a way to profit, but it wasn’t through ownership of stock in the railroad companies. Because the government paid per mile, there was money available upon completion to finance the construction. So to take advantage of the guaranteed income, the owners of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific formed construction units (basically business fronts), one called Credit Mobilier and the other the Contract and Finance Co. It allowed them to pay themselves to build the tracks. There was an obviously inherent conflict: the railroad company wanted bottom dollar for the construction, while the construction side wanted to charge as much as possible. It took until the 1870s for Congress to figure out the scheme and conduct an investigation, which essentially went nowhere.


The completed project (finished in 1869 and before the construction deadline, btw) cost an estimated $70-$90 million or $1.18-$1.52 billion in today’s dollars.


By comparison, NASA is WAY ahead with its private sector ventures. Bezos at Blue Origin is selling about $1 billion a year in Amazon stock to finance his company, and has landed contracts with businesses such as OneWeb for satellite placement and Eutelstat, a satellite television provider. SpaceX has a $1.6-billion government contract to deliver supplies to the space station, but Musk also has a waiting list of private sector companies eager to put satellites in space.


Also, NASA is keeping its ties with the legacy space companies, such as United Launch Alliance (the longtime partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing) that have worked with the space agency for decades.


Overall, it’s a transition strategy that seems to be, well, A-OK.




Vulcan Believers:

The 2017 Solar Eclipse Is Your Big Chance 


Remember the planet Vulcan? Probably not, because it never existed (except as the fictional home of Mr. Spock on Star Trek). That it was thought by many to be orbiting around the Sun, inside Mercury’s orbit, became a point of contention 19th-century scientists argued about for 50 years.


The Hunt for Vulcan…And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe, by Thomas Levenson, (Random House. 2015, 229 pages) chronicles in its first half the tug of war between the sides who believed they saw a new planet (or maybe an asteroid or a group of them), and those who said they were looking in the same places in the Solar System, and it wasn't there.


It’s the classic scientific showdown, and then as now, the snipes at credibility and reputations became the sport of the day. (Similar to craters on Earth caused by volcanoes vs. asteroid/comet strikes; or what killed the dinosaurs—Luis and Walter Alvarez vs. rest of the scientific world.)

    

Actually, the discovery of Neptune (1846) played a key role in the controversy. Following Newton’s laws, a French scientist predicted where this new planet might be found, his theory based on the orbit of Uranus (discovered in 1781), which didn’t quite fit the mathematical model. With Neptune accounted for, all was right with the Solar System, courtesy of Mr. Newton.


Except for Mercury. Author Thomas Levenson, a very good science writer, describes the planet’s behavior as pesky, “a sneaky little sibling” in the family of planets.


Mercury’s orbit should be predictable, just like the other planets. But the scientists of that day discovered it wasn’t obeying Newton’s laws. It was “off” by 38 arc-seconds (later revised to 43) every century. (A full circular orbit—or an elliptical one like Mercury’s—has 360 degrees; each degree has 60 minutes [‘] and each minute contains 60 seconds [“].)

Mercury was not showing up exactly where it was supposed to, thus after scientists figured the effect of other variables, calculations indicated Mercury must be influenced by the gravity of a planet or asteroids between Mercury and the Sun. The science world began a quest for Vulcan, just as it sought out Neptune.


The best time to spot this new planet so near the Sun would occur during a solar eclipse. Amateur astronomers, professionals, asteroid buffs, and other scientists over the course of decades set up their telescopes in prime viewing places, some remote, such as the Crimea or the Wyoming territory. Among the curious scientists gathering in Rawlins, Wyoming, was Thomas Edison. (There’s a solar eclipse in 2017, and North America will be the perfect viewing place, so Vulcan die-hards, the game is on.)


Remarkably, trained stargazers over the years claimed they had seen the elusive planet as it made its transit across the darkened sun. The New York Times in 1876 declared, “…there is an end of all discussion. Vulcan exists….” All was right with the universe, again.


Enter Albert Einstein, young German patent clerk/physicist who ventured that he knew why people believed Vulcan was there, but it really wasn’t. He solved the riddle, but it was a little difficult to explain in 1913: relativity.


It became a test of his own theories, as compared to Newton’s, to explain Mercury’s orbit. And he struggled. Levenson notes a little-known letter exchange between Einstein and a close friend as he labored with the math to support his ideas about movement through the curve of space/time.


By 1915, Einstein was ready to put a fork in Vulcan. After years of working and reworking, he had a calculation that pinned down Mercury to 43 arc-seconds per century. As he told the Prussian Academy, “this theory therefore agrees completely with the observations.” It wasn’t another planet influencing Mercury. “Like all objects navigating space/time,” as Levenson writes, “Mercury’s motion follows that warping, four-dimensional curve….”


Levenson obviously enjoys research and doesn’t like to throw stuff away, which makes his footnotes fun. In one he offers this view of Newton’s laws of motion: “These laws are simple in the sense the physicist Richard Feynman meant when he described solving a problem in Newton’s Principia: ‘Elementary’ does not mean easy to understand. ‘Elementary’ means very little is required to know ahead of time in order to understand it, except to have an infinite amount of intelligence.”


A nit or two: From an Einstein quote, “Now that the mathematicians have seized on relativity theory, I know longer understand it myself.” Einstein was punning on the word know? Also, the first edition has it wrong in Einstein’s address to the Prussian Academy; it’s arc-seconds, not minutes. This was corrected on Google Books. It happens.


This is a book so fact-filled and enjoyable, read it twice. It’s well worth the time, Newton’s version or Einstein’s.

                                                                                                           --John Craddock


John Craddock is a former staff writer for Florida Trend magazine, editor of Arizona Trend magazine, and reporter for The St. Petersburg Times. He is the author of First Shot: The Untold Story of the Japanese Minisubs That Attacked Pearl Harbor (McGraw-Hill). His latest book is Credible Threats: Asteroids, Comets, Impacts on Earth, and What’s Next…It is available on Amazon Kindle.