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.