The Old Guard & The New Space Age
The Old Guard & The New Space Age
Contents
Sanity Checks
The Role Of Oversight
Fortifying Our Teams
A New Era
What Needs To Happen?
Estimation Of Effort
Our Space Future
Civilizing The New Wild West
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One of our strengths as humans is the ability to evaluate the future and make plans. It’s how we have civilizations, train schedules, tiered prizes for ugly sweater contests, elections …
You get the idea.
We look ahead. We estimate what will be needed. We prepare.
Not always perfectly, of course, sometimes quite horribly, but the fact that an Empire State Building exists in New York City – or that a New York City exists at all – would seem to speak to the notion that, mostly, we’re pretty damn good at figuring out how to do stuff.
When it comes to space a storm is brewing. One we may not be planning well enough for. A wave we need to get ahead of.
Many are aware of it. Many are pushing for action.
It’s time to give it the full focus of our attention it deserves. It’s time to apply some of that planning savvy that makes us humans so successful.
Sanity Checks
We’re talking oversight. Successful regulation, one of the ways we’ve managed to come forward as a species, includes sanity checks, on both small and large scales.
Pausing to check that the lid’s on the blender before turning it on. The doctor asking you your name, which kidney he’s working on today (like he doesn’t know), then marking you where he’s going to perform the surgery. All the way up to regulatory bodies deciding whether a rocket can or cannot be launched.
These oversights are vital.
Where they do harm is when they fail to keep pace with demand.
The Role Of Oversight
Whether getting that kidney stone removed, enjoying your tasty protein smoothie, or getting our next great heavy-lift prospect off the ground so we can evaluate performance and keep improving, we should never be waiting.
Speed, especially in the conquest of a new frontier, is of the essence. Else progress falters.
This isn’t to say regulation must be downgraded. Quite the contrary. Our regulatory efforts should be upgraded. Safety first.
That safety, however, should never come at the cost of speed.
If we need more people and systems in order to maintain that speed then, well, that’s exactly what we should assign.
Fortifying Our Teams
When it comes to the accelerating launch cadence we’ve both seen and need, the systems we have in place are in danger of slowing things down. A disconnect exists between regulatory speed and launch demand that may be getting worse if we don’t get out in front of it.
The time to fortify these systems is now.
We need to make it so regulators are on hand in abundance, standing by to execute instantly on the needs of the industry. Maximum effort to get rockets quickly and safely off the ground with absolute, yet studied, urgency.
The tempo we see now is nothing compared to what’s coming.
Our space future depends on the ability to get payloads into orbit with the same speed and efficiency we send cargo around the world by other means (sea, land, air), with just as much safety and efficiency.
To do that we need an equal rate of expansion occurring in our regulatory bodies as is occurring in the space industry itself.
The two must grow in parallel.
Regulation must keep pace with (or exceed the needs of) commercial expansion.
A New Era
Gone are the methodical delay-filled processes of the last space age. That pacing will no longer work.
As both commercial and nation-state launch demands increase, with launch rates literally skyrocketing, wait-times for approval processes and other factors that put the brakes on “getting it done” must be eliminated or, at a minimum, streamlined in order to keep up.
Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, noted:
“The pace of American regulation must match the pace of American innovation.”
Considering the tectonic rate of historically-typical bureaucratic change, if such a “pace-matching” is going to take place, we should’ve been aggressively planning for it yesterday.
As it is, with yesterday already unfortunately behind us, we must take the next best course of action.
We must roll up our sleeves and solve this now.
What Needs To Happen?
As noted, we’re not talking going faster at the expense of thoroughness. In fact, as part of the beefing-up process we should work to become more thorough, more comprehensive, and yet to do so on a much tighter timeline.
How?
By building the machine necessary to make that happen. Allocate the resources we know we’ll need. Increased quality, only done ten times faster. Twenty. How much do we need to ramp up our regulatory capacity?
Your authors don’t know that. Someone important should. Someone should be planning for it.
Our legislators must move quickly to:
Modernize our laws to allow us to achieve greatly accelerated objectives and timetables safely and rapidly.
Establish certification processes for high volumes of new and ongoing activities in space.
Provide certainty for our expanding commercial space sector; a process our space industry can embrace and can rely on.
Coordinate international cooperation. Space is a worldwide goal, after all.
Enhance space situational awareness, control and regulation of orbital debris and other factors.
That’s where it starts. That’s the key.
We must:
See the future.
Estimate the correct effort.
Make a plan.
Execute.
Progress should not have to wait on sanity checks.
Estimation Of Effort
Referring back to an earlier blog, where we discussed how much mass will need to be lifted into orbit as we accelerate our presence in space (remember; the blog where we talked about launching tanks into orbit?), in order to meet those requirements we’ll need not just the technology to get it done, but the approval and safety processes as well.
Those regulations must be in place and well thought out before we need them.
We can’t afford to trip-up the rapid expanse of our commercial industry by waiting for boxes to be ticked. Red tape, bureaucratic slowdowns … those things have the potential to utterly kill meaningful progress.
Especially when so much needs to be done, most of it bleeding edge.
These systems must work in harmony, they must advance in parallel, as one. Regulators must share the same mindset, the same urgency of those pushing our reach into space.
Our Space Future
It’s up to us, this generation, to make sure space is moving fast and widely open for the generations getting started now and those to come.
Slow things down, over-regulate, drag our feet too much and this precarious threshold we’ve reached, the point at which the moon, Mars and the stars are next, could risk collapse.
It’s all too easy for such fantastic enterprise to fade or even slip.
Safety. Speed.
Zero delays.
To quote a fictional hero, “We have no time for time.”
No one, at any level, should ever be waiting.
Not for the removal of your painful kidney stone. Not for your protein shake. Not for your space-launch needs.
Check it. Fix it. Check it. Launch it.
Things have to move, and move fast.
Civilizing The New Wild West
This oversight should extend in all directions. Space debris and junk, management and coordination of orbital assets – there are many things to oversee, and we’ll need robust, capable, official bodies to do so.
Once upon a time the Wild West needed to become civilized. It did, and that’s how we grew. Space, while still a bit of a Wild West in certain regards, is ready to organize. It must do so fast, and without impeding innovation or progress.
It must encourage and support wild ideas and crazy expansion, all while keeping things regulated and safe.
No small task.
Which means we need to be throwing real planning resources into the next-gen regulations and systems without delay. The new better-faster systems that will guide our expansion into, and conquest of, the final frontier.
The future is now.
It should be both safe and exciting.
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