When it all went wrong

[james_davis_nicoll]

From a previous comment on my LJ:

I thought there was a significant contingent of politicians who feel most of the developments since [The development of agriculture/the Industrial Revolution/The Great Depression/Women's Lib/Etc (Pick one)] have been mistakes and that if only we could set the clock back, everything would be fine.

Or at least better than it is.

A Canadian example of a When It All Went Wrong (WIAWW) moment is the Avro Arrow, something that many Canadians are still bitching about (Mind you, Canada is a nation with a province whose motto is "Je me souviens," but none with the motto "No Use Crying Over Spilled Milk"). In fact, my father used to complain bitterly about the cancellation of the Arrow and not only was he not Canadian (until just before he died) but I don't think he was in Canada when the decision was made and he didn't work in aerospace. Complaining about the Arrow decision unites Canadians in one great mopey If Only.

Ken MacLeod chooses Sputnik as a moment when everything went wrong.

Is there any chance someone could offer up some links for Ken to use in his alt-history of space development that don't require him to cite a James P. Hogan essay? Yes, I saw the disclaimer in MacLeod's essay.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

What's the Martian equivalent of groundnuts?

And does his argument of "Creationists are only a problem because we riled them up with actual science in the schoolbooks" remind you of D'Souza's "Islamic terrorists are only a problem because we riled them up with our degenerate ways?" (I know, MacLeod isn't anti-science the way D'Souza is anti-modernity, but there's a similar assumption that the way to deal with religious bigots is to preemtively surrender and avoid teaching our children anything that might offend Cotton Mather).

Bruce

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was WTF'ing when I read that part of the essay.

I know I've seen others write about how America lost the plot by getting into a space race instead of sticking with the incremental space plane development. Maybe Greg Easterbrook, who is less daft than Hogan, and pretty good when he sticks to writing on American Football.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I especially liked the add-on that Darwinian theory was so pervasive that there was no need to teach it in school; kids would just learn it on the street.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

From protection racketeers, yes.

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

The incremental-spaceplane argument often conflates two ideas. One is that you can learn more, at lower cost, by gradually expanding the performance envelope with reusable craft than with expendables, for which in a sense every launch is the first. There's considerable merit to that.

The other is that pursuing that route would somehow "carry along" the economics of airbreathing aviation, much more congenial than those of the rocket equation. That part I've never been able to swallow: the X-15 was already a rocket carrying its own oxidizer, already required a B-52 for air launch. So it was already far from aviation's operating and economic models. As far as I can see that simply gets uglier as speed increases toward orbit, and/or range increases toward a 45-minute trans-Pacific clipper.

The heart of the problem isn't really reusability vs expendables. It's that whether heading for LEO or Beijing, the greater the top speed you want, the more you're dealing with the physics and math not of "cruise" but of acceleration -- and the rocket equation's rude, logarithmic insistence that you have to accelerate the propellant you're carrying now in order to burn it at now + N.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Somehow I knew you'd pipe up here.

I remember hearing somebody pushing a similar idea on some Usenet group (but I don't remember which one): that the X-20 DynaSoar was in some way an incremental step beyond the X-15 that would somehow lead to us just flying really fast airplanes into space, much more efficiently than a big Roman candle could do it. I had to burst his bubble by telling him the X-20 was supposed to be shot into space on top of a Titan. He took it pretty well.

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

People go through some remarkable contortions to avoid accepting that we're in a deep gravity well and chemicals only offer so much energy. Most of the contortions assert in one way or another that access to space ought to be more like aviation... which would carry more weight if aviation itself hadn't hit a plateau in speed, for all practical purposes, not long after the space age began.

[jamiam.livejournal.com]

That PART of the essay!

[avram]

Who's children?

[dewline.livejournal.com]

"Surrender to the bullies pre-emptively and maybe we won't get the crap beaten out of us. It's never worked, but it's got to start working sooner or later."

This is what get kids who fight back sent to principals' offices to this day.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I also do not believe that Westerners were more functionally numerate prior to the New Math; it sounds like an argument out of a cartoon from 1971. If anything, all indications I've seen are that we got much more proficient in the hard sciences and mathematics at the expense of English composition and rhetoric. Anyway, most of the business with set theory, alternate number bases, etc. had shrunk to isolated remnants (treated as an occasional pleasant break from arithmetic drill) by the time I was in grade school in the mid- to late Seventies.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It's another in the great list of Upsetting Things We Supposedly Did To Provoke The Religious Right Movement. The usual folk theory is that it was Roe v. Wade. Personally my favored theory is that it was more Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

[tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com]

Loving vs. Virginia?