O, ye who raise your eyes to the skies and dream of flights beyond the horizon to other worlds, you stand upon the shoulders of giants, and it is of the wisdom of one of those giants, the prophet Nevil Shute, of whom I would tell in such poor plain words as I may.
Of his many achievements the tale is told elsewhere, but here we are concerned with the Tale of the Two Airships.
In the long gone days of the 1920’s when flight was a new and uncertain thing and the sun never set on the British Empire, there arose a debate among the mighty of Whitehall as to whether airships should be built to bind together the far-flung Imperial possessions, and if so who should build them. The Committee being undecided, an experiment was decreed, a comparison as to the merits of private enterprise against a government Establishment.
With scrupulous fairness, therefore, the Committee laid down that Cardington, the famous Government Establishment, should have the freedom to build an airship as they chose with all the Treasury at their call. The humble commercial concern of Vickers would build an airship bound by a fixed price contract with strict requirements, lest a penny of the taxpayer’s money be wasted.
Thus, the Committee set forth to discover the truth. So they did. Vickers set themselves to the labour, and long and arduous it was. The prophet rose to primacy in the years of the project in succession to his mentor, the great Barnes Wallis. The fruit of their labour, airship R.100, met the contract requirement and flew to Canada, returning safely to Britain. Little profit they had of it, but they were paid their fee.
Cardington’s great work, airship R.101, was decreed to depart for India, bearing among many others the very Cabinet Minister who had commanded the competition. Great was the bustle to prepare for this auspicious flight, and the Cabinet Minister brooked no delay.
R.101 set forth into the teeth of a storm, and she crashed and burned with the loss of 48 lives, including the Cabinet Minister who had commanded the great experiment and six senior officials bearing responsibility for the design and construction of R.101.
Thus was the truth discovered to all. In the aftermath of the disaster, an inquiry found many faults and errors through the whole project, all combining to make the disaster inevitable.
Many years later, in the fullness of his age and wisdom, the prophet wrote an account of the long drama, and turning his face to the future he spoke thus:
“The one thing that has been proved abundantly is that government officials are totally ineffective in engineering development. If the security of new weapons demands that only government officials shall be charged with developing them, then the weapons will be bad weapons, and this goes for atom bombs, guided missiles, radar and everything else.”
Then did the prophet command that many copies of his writing be made and sent abroad, even unto the furthest reaches of the Empire. The great House of Heineman hastened to obey, and others in after years took up the duty, so that even today in the great mart of trade which is Amazon one may find his words available for a modest fee.
When we come to the present day, yet another such experiment is underway, and the words of the prophet ring as true as when he set pen to paper.
For many years since the great days of Project Apollo, NASA’S contractors worked under its paternal control, which did produce results, but at a glacial pace and a money cost only bearable by the largest economy in the world.
The idea of reusing rocket boosters, and/or making them cheap and rugged, was proposed many times by many voices over the years. All of them went unheeded by NASA and the aerospace companies in its orbit. Such daring innovation could not survive in the dense thickets of regulation and decision by committee.
Then burst upon the scene the brash newcomer SpaceX, for whom daring innovation was a day at the office and an exploded rocket was a teachable moment. What had been considered impossible, the retrieval and reuse of a rocket booster, quickly became routine.
At this writing, two large rocket launch systems are in development for heavy lift into Earth orbit and beyond.
The Space Launch System (SLS) has been built and developed in the old style, with frequent infusions of money from the US Treasury and considerable tolerance for many schedule delays and problems. It has recently completed its first (unmanned) test flight around the Moon. A considerable factor in its per-launch cost of $4.5 billion is that it is entirely expendable.
The prophet would recognize it in a moment as another R.101, beset with all the same failings.
SpaceX’s Starship is a completely reuseable rocket booster, completely reuseable and intended to support a cadence of as many as three launches per day, at a cost aimed to eventually go as low as $1 million per launch.
Starship is, at this writing, preparing for the next orbital flight test of its Starship booster after the explosive conclusion of its first test. More boosters reside in SpaceX’s hangars, ready for more attempts until success is achieved.
Once more the wisdom of the prophet is vindicated in action.
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