I believe we could have had robot-driven cars years ago. We need:
A video camera
A computer
Software
It should be obvious that we are missing only the software. What we need is 100s of people working together. There actually are enough computer vision people out there today, but they are not working together! They need codebases they can collaborate in, and big, worthy tasks.
My exciting insight is that instead of immediately hooking up computers to cars, and then spending months writing device drivers, I’ve come to the realization that we should start by hooking a vision engine up to a driving video game. We can cheaply and safely simulate all sorts of sensor inputs, fog, urban scenarios, etc. And anyone around the world can jump in and help out.
Torcs re-engineering w/ Mono
Right now the focus of JC Hoelt and I is taking the best free driving game, Torcs / Torcs-NG[1], improving the codebase to simplify and modernize it, and port it to Mono. Then it will be suitable for new people to improve the simulator and do vision and driving AI experiments. Unbeknownst to even its maintainers, Torcs hampered by its age and C/C++ code. It uses the ancient and primitive PLIB, and so we are making it use .Net wrappers around the modern graphics library Ogre. Its physics sometimes behaves funky, so we are making it use ODE & ODE.Net. In many ways big and small, Torcs is doing things the hard way: it has even written its own XML parser, which we can just throw away. It is no coincidence that the track format for Torcs has not changed in 10 years when the current codebase is such a complicated mess! For the current team, even little tasks like porting to the Mac is a major piece of work.
When we are done, we will have a 10x smaller and cleaner codebase that will serve as a great baseline to add features a lot faster.
We’re looking for people who want to help us out on any coding aspect. There are all kinds of easy and hard programming problems. If you’ve got a few hours a week of time, contact me! It is cool and interesting.
[1] Torcs-NG is a fork of Torcs that is making small changes (automake -> CMake, new artwork, Mac port, etc.) We can keep up with the changes made in both teams.
This man needs my help to transfer 30 million dollars to a US bank account and I get 15%! I had no idea South Africa was such an unstable political environment that the banking system is not reliable, but their loss is my gain.
Note the passport looks a little suspicious to me as his personal details are done in a different font from the country name, and his personal picture looks like it was added on the computer later. I’m trying to get a bigger copy of the passport, a copy of his CV, to get him to send me any sort of inocuous mail from his official business account, and to understand why South Africa is unstable like Zimbabwe and Somalia, but I’m not worried, anyone with glasses like that has to be an honest man. He’s a respected civil servant in the Ministry of Finance of South Africa and that’s all I need to know. I’m going to be able to live like a rock star! I’ll keep this post up to date with the latest news.
Update: I think Khumalo Donald figured me out. Oh well, the dream was fun while it lasted.
I like Ubuntu very much, but I find it annoying how behind the curve you guys are with your releases. Jaunty is the first release of Ubuntu that has Mono debugging support out of the box. Jaunty will ship with Mono 2.0, which was released October 6, 2008, yet Mono 2.4 has just been released! I’m going to have to wait till October to get the Mono bits that were released in March.
In general, new software is better and more reliable than old software. You guys spend lots of time backporting fixes from newer builds that would be solved more efficiently by just taking newer builds! You guys also aren’t helping advance the state of the art by working on old software. Novell could care less about bugs in Mono 2.0.
If you guys ship every 6 months, using software that is 6 months old, did you really ship on day X, or 6 months ago and just sit on it?
I realize you guys have a tradeoff between stability and freshness, but I think your team is not making the right tradeoff, and I see this as a problem that crosses many teams. If there are any problems (that likely affect just a few customers), you can fix them right after release. What is the whole point of having this infrastructure of repos and backports?
Even though I left NASA officially in ’75 (I worked at JSC starting in ’63, thru the Gemini, Apollo, and into early Shuttle era), by ’80 I was re-engaged intimately as a consultant until the late 90′s, and I still remain in close contact with many of the NASA folks that I worked with (many of whom have now risen to higher positions in NASA). I (and they, I might add) have witnessed a steady decline in the organization, the “tips of the ice-berg” of which has been the obvious Challenger and Columbia disasters…..but much other lies below the surface of public cognizance.
What has happened is not the fault of NASA engineers and technicians, but rather a transformation of NASA by ever deeper penetration of political influence, and what I call the “cult of management”.
I saw the top spot at NASA be transformed from a technical-job (ie one being filled by highly qualified technical people of vision) into a “politically appointed puppet-position”; I have watched this political-stance of top management permeate ever lower….to the Center-directorships, then on down to the division chiefs, and even below.
The “Cult of Management” refers to a viewpoint by folks who fancy themselves as possessing (generic) “management skill” which can be applied to any “job of management” whatsoever. They would view this skill as complete, in and of itself, needing no any other subsidiary skills, such as antecedent specialized experience in the development of the product over which they presume to preside. For example, the filling of Apple’s top position once by the “Pepsi Cola president”, John Scully, is a case in point! I rest my case!
The cult of management tends to view with suspicion, all but the folks in accounting, whose “bottom line numbers” they view as the single valid metric of their performance; this type of thinking can lead to such things as the indiscriminate application of “out-sourcing” driven by immediate “bottom line” thinking. Furthermore, this lack of trust of technical people tends to make “cult managers” reject those who would bring bad technical news, regardless of the messenger’s competence. Of course this cost-only fixation can be disguised in tech-talk-garb such as NASA’s once motto “Cheaper, Better, Faster”, but we all know how that went!
I have seen out-sourcing (of just about everything NASA once used to do) progress to the point that in-house technical skills were allowed to erode, leaving few engineers competent to run the “NASA cash-registers” with real insight into whether NASA was being “taken to the cleaners or not” by the many new sub-contractors. In contrast to this, when I was responsible for writing the procurement specification for the real time OS for the computer complex to run the Shuttle mission simulators, the contract was awarded to UniSys. IBM (who had also bid on the contract) protested the award, and I was called to NASA headquarters to defend my specification and evaluation to the Government Accounting Office (GAO)….I had to go toe-to-toe with the IBM proposal-writers, they came out second-best, with GAO sustaining our evaluation and award (it was rumored afterward that IBM fired some of their people over that embarrassing confrontation with NASA)…..the point here being that folks up-and-down the ranks of NASA (by which I mean top management down to technical working levels) were typically quite competent in those early days!
In another example, I had a crew of 10 people who did the entire job of developing boost abort simulations for Gemini and Apollo astronaut training. As the Shuttle program begin, when NASA considered out-sourcing the jobs that our little team had performed reliably, on-schedule, and in budget, a sub-contract bidder proposed a crew of over 30 people to do what we did!!! gross waste and abuse of the government system. Eventually, when I saw the handwriting-on-the-wall, that my days of doing technical work was soon to be over at NASA, I left.
In my opinion, after Apollo, NASA progressively lost vision of how to get the most for their buck and inspire the “man on the street” (just look at the ISS and see what it has yielded for all its cost….constructing an ISS is something that makes more sense to me after a space elevator is in place whereby payloads can be delivered to orbit at a fraction of the current cost). The ISS has mainly inspired “yawns” by the public.
It is not clear that NASA’s current vision is valid; about a year ago, a group of high-level, space visionaries, ex-astronauts, and technologists, independent of NASA, convened a private panel at Stanford to re-evaluate NASA’s current “Space Initiative” and propose new ways to better use resources and re-direct the mission’s vision. It has been conjectured that this was aimed at presenting a new plan for consideration by the next administration. While I am not sure what has become of this, as I recall, their conclusions were notably different to the current vision. There has been significant concerns voiced (from NASA contractors and independent technical observers) about engineering issues with many aspects of the current development.
When I look at what the ISS has cost, and compare that to, say JPL’s budget, and see what JPL has accomplished with its robotic explorations (in terms of actual scientific data-return as well as far-reaching public excitement), it is evident that NASA management is not conducting meaningful cost effective use of their budget.
The currently brewing gap in the US Manned Space Transportation system capability (that will result from the time lapse between the demise of the Shuttle operational capability, and the next operational manned capability) speaks for itself! While one is forced to admit that the Shuttle has turned out to be immensely more expensive than it was originally advertised to be, it is not apparent that the current manned space transportation system may not be heading for its own severely problematic manifestations. These manifestations may well hinge on unrealistic budgetary restrictions that precipitate late implementation and on-going technical issues, all with serious impact on national schedule priorities, operations, and national space logistics security.
I wish I could get this magnitude of publicity about my book ;-). Maybe I need to sing a couple of chapters with SongSmith and sell it in audiobook format.
My book is done, I’ve restored my blog database and theme properly, upgraded to the latest WordPress, and now I’m ready to go! I will use the wiki for certain things and the blog for certain things.
I grabbed a rip of most of the show, though the network died part of the way through. In addition, the right track was quieter than the left track, so I used Audacity to try to fix the levels.
I was honored to present my ideas about Ubuntu & Debian at Debconf 7, with a number of Ubuntu and Debian developers present, including Mark (first time I saw him in person) and DPL Sam Hocevar. There was no slide projector, so I had to read my slides, even though everyone says you shouldn’t do that… :-)
I was very impressed with the quality of the people at Debconf. I met lots of smart geeks, and even several anthropologists who study Debian as a social organization. You do not ship an operating system by accident, just as you don’t build an airplane by accident.
A couple of thoughts from the discussion after the slides:
One of the big pieces of confusion is that Mark believes that publishing patches in multiple / granular formats is helpful to Debian. Lars Risan, who had a beer with Mark after my talk said that Mark strongly disagreed with my analogy of throwing code over the wall and that Ubuntu is doing everything technically possible to make its changes available to Debian. However, a major point in my talk is that throwing patches over the wall is not helpful because the person on the other side needs to get up to speed on the patch. You can’t just hand someone 100s or 1000s of lines of code because that person will have to take time to learn what is going on (to integrate them, fix any problems, etc.) and this takes a lot of time, perhaps as much time as if the Ubuntu patch doesn’t exist. This is why it took Debian many months to integrate modular X even though it had Ubuntu’s patches. Because it takes so much time, Ubuntu’s patches in practical terms are not helpful to Debian. The format, frequency, etc. of the patches doesn’t matter, it is the time to learn something which is the cost. If two people in different teams are each learning the same thing, they are not “standing on the shoulders of giants” but re-inventing and re-learning from scratch, just like the old, dark proprietary software days. I believe that, even though I spent some minutes on this topic, Mark did not understand this concept. Perhaps he would disagree with the scope of the problem, etc., but he would need to understand it first to disagree with it.
One of the points in my talk is that Ubuntu is exploiting a loophole in the GPL. You can of course fork code and do with it what you want, but that the spirit of GPL is to cooperate, work in the same codebase, and to fork only under extreme circumstances. Two examples I cited are the Linux kernel and Wikipedia. Jonathan Riddell has responded that Ubuntu is not exploiting a loophole in the GPL because he disagrees that there is only one Wikipedia and one Linux kernel. However, he doesn’t explain what he means. Perhaps he thinks there are multiple Linux kernels because each distro ships their own. Along these lines, Mark at one point responded to my point that there is only one kernel by asking: “Which one is that, the Red Hat kernel?” Only if Ubuntu had at least considered using the Red Hat kernel would his answer have been a substantive rebuttal. The larger point is that the various distro kernels differ from the mainline kernels mostly because they contain backports of fixes from the mainline kernel and other minor tweaks. These changes are very small in nature compared to the chasm of the separate buglist, greatly divergent code, etc. which exist between Ubuntu and Debian. Maybe I should have said that there is “one Linux kernel and Wikipedia team.” However, I see these statements as largely synonymous.
One of the points I made is that Ubuntu did not show up to Debconf with a list of workitems for Debian: Ubuntu takes whatever they can get from Debian, but any Debian limitations they just fix on their own. Mark responded by saying that the idea that Ubuntu should demand a list of workitems from Debian is a misunderstanding of the way free software works. However, I believe he is nitpicking my choice of the word “workitems.” My point is that much of the design and feature work that happens in Ubuntu is going on in a separate community/world. If the cross-organizational collaboration was healthy, Ubuntu would come to Debconf with a list of things like: “One of Ubuntu’s biggest problems is (x). How can we work together on this problem?” This doesn’t happen because Ubuntu is attacking problems on their own, without the deep and rich consultation if the communities were together. And, another downside of this situation is that the center of gravity on a number of areas is moving away from Debian.
Mark believes that Ubuntu is good for Debian, because so many people use apt-get. This is a bad way of measuring “good.” What about quantifiable metrics? Here is one: I would measure something as good for Debian if it increases the number of DDs. Anthony Towns told me here that the number of DDs has not dramatically increased in the last 3 years, and the number of new maintainers joining every year is even slightly decreasing. Therefore, this is one metric which demonstrates that Ubuntu has not been good for Debian. Mark says that he thinks it would be great if Debian had 10,000 DDs, but if the Debian userbase is not growing, how is it going to get there?!
Mark said that: “Ubuntu could have derived from Red Hat, SuSE, Gentoo…” However, Mark did not do this, and instead forked Debian and hired a number of its best developers. Furthermore, I also disagree with the premise that he needed to derive from any codebase at all. A major theme of my talk is that what makes Debian so great is that it supports many hardware platforms and contains many software packages, built to work together. Why could his improvements not be done directly into Debian, just like HP and many other companies and interests have done? Finally, if Mark thinks he could have had so much success deriving from any other distro, Debian is not the special thing he claims it to be.
A number of Debianites agreed with me on many aspects of these issues, but who have given up trying to convince Mark, etc. Several told me that they were worried about the center of gravity shifting away from Debian, for example. I believe a reasonable compromise to minimize the damage to the community is to let users use Ubuntu, but to encourage all developers to join Debian. I met someone working on MOTU games, and his group by themselves realized that doing their work directly in Debian was a better approach.
A final thought: if Debian took all of Ubuntu’s patches, which Mark would like Debian to do, and shipped on the same day, how would a user decide which distro to install?
Debian is the the quietest big Linux distro. I see hourly posts on Distrowatch, Slashdot and Digg about the latest builds of Ubuntu and SUSE, and even Mark Shuttleworth’s wearing of a KDE t-shirt is considered news. I presume that things are fine inside Debian and that no gnus is good gnus, but also I believe, as Oscar Wilde said: “What’s worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”
I’ve written a number of posts about Ubuntu and Debian on this website in the last few weeks, saying that: in principle I should be running Debian, that Ubuntu is too small a team for the size of their customer base and buglist, questioning the size of the fork Ubuntu has made, questioning whether Debian is stagnant, etc. I decided to see if I could test any of these assumptions, so I grabbed the latest Etch bits from the Debian-testing tree and installed it on a 2-year-old Sony VAIO laptop.
Even though I had grabbed just a daily build, the very nice Debian installer recognized my hardware, it generally installed and ran like a champ. However, my hopes and expectations for Linux in 2006 are greater:
The mouse pointer was very slow; it took 15 swipes to move the mouse across the screen and tweaking the speed of the mouse in the Gnome UI didn’t help. There is a bug in Debian’s database which suggested a workaround and that the problem isn’t specific to Debian, but I haven’t seen this problem on the other distros. I plugged in a USB mouse and kept going.
My ipw 2100 didn’t work. I know there is a firmware freedom issue, but the drivers ship with the kernel, and they work on other distros. I just plugged in an Ethernet cable, which worked right away, and kept going.
Menus: There are simple Ubuntu-style menus, and then a deeply nested set of Debian menus. I’m not sure if this is part a transition, but I do think they should ship with one nice simple default set.
There is a a lot of crufty old apps which get installed by default: mutt, sh, tcsh, xeyes, etc., etc. Given that it is so easy to install software, even if you assume that Debian is for experts, why not ship the prettiest and most popular and perhaps put the old command-line stuff into a meta-package?
I tried to hibernate and received an error message saying that it didn’t appear software support was compiled into the kernel. Neither was any support compiled into the UI for me to choose hibernate from the logout menu.
Sound didn’t work. Totem-gstreamer would crash saying “failed to connect to the d-bus daemon.”
Everything is built against gstreamer .08 even though .10 is in the repositories; I presume this is being worked on.
Apache is 2.0, latest is 2.2
Drupal is 4.5.8, latest is 4.7
GCC 4.0.3, latest is 4.1
OpenOffice 2.0.1, latest is 2.0.2
Tomboy 0.3.3, latest is 0.3.5. No F-Spot or Beagle
No Ekiga
Tried to install the free ATI 3-d drivers (the proprietary ones I wish I had the freedom to install are nowhere to be found) but it couldn’t install because it complained about missing xserver-xorg-core 1:0.99.0-1, which it said wasn’t installable.
I installed the Xfce Window Manager which worked fine, but I didn’t see the application menu for starting any apps, like Xubuntu has.
Lots of little things: the “Add to Panel…” dialog box is lamer than the one that ships with Dapper. Sorry I don’t have a screenshot. The dialog to change the desktop background had repaint issues.
On the good side, Debian ships with a more sane set of fonts than Ubuntu, which has a pile of international fonts, causing my few Western fonts to get lost.
After that I gave up. I know this is an incremental build and I could get more or perhaps even all things working, but I feel like Debian will need to do more than fix the RC bugs to keep up with the other distros and tempt me.
I know some people will read this and say that I don’t understand Debian, or that Debian shouldn’t be easy to use. Whatever. Linux is growing in double digits, but not Debian. And if you aren’t growing, you are shrinking through attrition. (I wonder if Debian is firing on all cylinders–I’d be interested to know how many of Debian’s developers do less than 4 hours a week of work.) I did a subsequent install of OpenSUSE, and was very impressed with both its stability and polish, so it isn’t just Ubuntu which thinks that the last 5% is important. It should be no surprise that Debian is only #7 on the distrowatch list.
I also didn’t see that Debian is benefiting as much from Ubuntu as I thought it would. Power management features, and many new packages and new versions of code in Ubuntu have not made it upstream. Perhaps this is work Debian has signed up to do but hasn’t done, but it does suggest that things might work better if more work was done directly in Debian; code is flowing downstream much better than upstream right now.
I wish Debian was trying a bit harder for my affection. I’ve boasted that I’ll probably be ready to maintain a Debian box in the Etch timeframe, but now I’m not so sure. Ubuntu has lots of bugs, but I don’t think more than a handful are regressions. It appears that Ubuntu has all the advantage of Debian with no new disadvantages.
Finally, while I do see that Debian has given Ubuntu a great base and that Ubuntu could probably be helping Debian more, it seems fair to say that Ubuntu has taken Debian and polished it up quite a bit and they deserve more props for that than I and many others in the Debian community have given them. Of course, when Canonical adds another 24 people, Ubuntu will really rock…
I have been rude and disrespectful to thee, Ubuntu. Will you take me back? [Eyeing the SUSE CD in the corner--I've always had a thingforGermans.]
P.S. Some people are angry that I dare criticize Debian when its not ready, but I want Debian to succeed, this build is the culmination of 12 months of work, with 6 months remaining, and I calls ‘em as I sees ‘em; that’s why you guys pay me the big bucks!
Written May, 2006, updated May, 2007 in preparation for Debconf 7 Update 2: The slideshow and my thoughts on the subsequent discussion are available here.
Ubuntu is a very exciting distro, gaining critical mass, and demonstrating the possibilities for a powerful and simple Linux desktop. I can’t help spending time handicapping the top Linux distros; it is more fun than the Windows, Mac & OS/2 wars of the past, especially as we are participants rather than merely spectators.
I don’t think that there need be just one distro or family of distros which will own the market, and Linux needn’t become a monoculture to succeed on the desktop. I run Gnome, but can run KDE apps as well, so while we can make this situation better, we don’t need to. Today there are 20 million Linux computers and lots of different distros and I don’t know why there can’t be 1 billion Linux computers with lots of different distros. I’m sure Novell would be ecstatic with only 50 million Linux customers.
For those living inside the Debian or Ubuntu worlds, the issue of their relationship is an old topic, but it it will continue to evolve as they learn from their experience. Ubuntu already exists and is a great distro, and I support the friendly competition and energy that it brings. However, a goal should be to figure out how to best harness each’s efforts. I strongly believe that Debian needs to stay the center of gravity; when a feature is done first in Ubuntu, the center of gravity shifts away. Given the fact that Ubuntu has no “list of features” they’d like Debian to implement, you can say they are on course to become the center of gravity.
As background, I believe that Ubuntu’s existence is an exploitation of a loophole in the GPL: you are allowed to take someone’s code, and do anything you want with it, but the presumption is that you should work together on one codebase. As you make improvements, you should immediately put them back into the standard codebase, and take ownership of any issues with that improvement. When someone makes a fix to the Linux kernel, they don’t use that improvement to make a competing Linux kernel!
While Ubuntu forking Debian goes against the spirit of cooperation embodied in the GPL, there are also practical reasons why it is a bad idea.
Ubuntu’s challenges
While Ubuntu has 2 million (now 8 million) customers, it has lots of challenges as well. The biggest is that the maintainers cannot keep up with the incoming bugs. In fact, if the most popular Linux distro has the smallest engineering team and is the least stable, it threatens the perception of the desktop distro market as a whole. Meanwhile, if Debian had so many new customers and 10,000 (now 30,000) new bugs, I’ll bet they could pick up the pace for the increased workload, especially if it came with a few New Maintainer applications. That mild shock to their system might even be healthy. Excitement brings in new people and makes existing people work harder. Ubuntu is sapping excitement, which is killing Debian.
I think there are 3 main reasons why Ubuntu is buried in bugs:
Ubuntu is finding bugs which exist in Debian but that Debian hasn’t fixed or doesn’t even know about. This is very worrisome because Ubuntu has 10,000 (now 30,000) active bugs, with 5,000 (now 15,000 ) still unconfirmed. Not only is it a problem that Ubuntu is shipping with so many bugs, Debian is shipping stable releases with potential “release critical” bugs that it does not know about. It therefore questions the merits of Debian even making stable releases.
Ubuntu is making deep core changes but it doesn’t have the resources to deal with the issues across all the hardware and software because Debian’s expertise is not being fully utilized.
Ubuntu snapshots bits from Debian-unstable which gives them the latest and greatest Debian code, but it is code which hasn’t been debugged yet.
Here’s a question: of the first 75 bugs in Ubuntu, how many exist and are filed in Debian?
Efficiency by doing work directly in Debian
When Ubuntu did modular X, the packages were provided for Debian but it still needed to be adapted and re-debugged and in the end turned out to be only a “starting point,” according to the Debian engineer who did this work. In other words, even though Debian had Ubuntu’s patches, it was still months of work–not that much better than if they didn’t have the changes at all! It sounds helpful to throw code over the wall, or publish patches on a website, but it takes time to ramp up expertise to understand them. If you have to ramp up expertise in 2 organizations, the global community’s time is not being spent efficiently. Hiring Debian developers, even to work full-time on Ubuntu, does not much help, and actually weakens, Debian.
Note that this inefficiency issue doesn’t happen as much going the other way. Ubuntu doesn’t have Apache maintainers, so they just take the code as-is, and probably file any bugs upstream. In the areas where they both have maintainers: the kernel, X, Gnome, KDE, FireFox, OpenOffice, you will find a ton of duplicative efforts and expertise.
Code is infinitely malleable
Ubuntu wanted modular X, and so they forked Debian and added this feature. However, no one has said why this feature couldn’t have been added directly to Debian. Whether Canonical believes that Debian is missing features or shipping too slowly, it can simply hire Debian engineers to directly fix these problems, without needing to create a separate codebase. The codebase they started with was 100% Debian, so clearly it was possible to add their features to the Debian codebase.
Reasons for a divergent fork no longer apply
Debian and Ubuntu have converged a lot in the last year. Ubuntu’s initial changes were big, however, Debian has caught up with Ubuntu and both want to add Xen and Xgl to Etch/Feisty Fawn. Now that the architectural differences are smaller, the reasons to add features outside Debian become smaller. It only makes sense to add features directly to Debian that Debian wants, but from looking at Ubuntu’s spec list, I’ll bet that Debian wants at least 90% and potentially all, of Ubuntu’s improvements. If there are no features that Ubuntu is adding that Debian doesn’t want, what does that say about the wisdom of separate codebases? Even worse, some significant features that Ubuntu has, Debian is no longer even motivated to add: any user of Debian that has wanted better power management for his laptop is now using Ubuntu, and so Debian 4.0′s power management is several releases behind Ubuntu’s and probably not as well tested.
Ubuntu shouldn’t be doing the big stuff first
Some of Ubuntu’s architectural bets: modular X, 2.6 kernel, new GCC, etc. were safe bets to make. However, core decisions are better left for Debian to decide and whatever decision Debian makes will typically be fine with Ubuntu. Just imagine what a mess would be created if Ubuntu adopts Upstart and Debian something else. Lots of arbitrary differences could cause unnecessary divergence over time.
Building on top of Debian Unstable
Another significant decision Ubuntu made is to ship the Unstable branch. This is an interesting idea that made sense during the Sarge era because Sarge had lots of new code in unstable, but the stable code was ancient. While this suggests that even an unstable branch is a pretty solid base, I’m not sure if Ubuntu can ever be confident in the quality of an LTS release if it has known, and untested and therefore unknown, bugs. Either Debian has ‘release critical’ bugs or it does not.
What is Twobuntu, other than a silly name?
I’m suggesting a few changes to the way Ubuntu develops software:
When Ubuntu decides to add a feature, the question needs to be asked if it is a core feature that Debian wants. If so, the Ubuntu developer should either do the work directly inside Debian, or takes ownership for it in Debian after implementing it in Ubuntu.
If Ubuntu adds features in Debian first, it won’t ship with Ubuntu till it hits Debian stable (or unstable) but it will not take much more time to do something in Debian.
If Ubuntu doesn’t make big changes outside of Debian, it could more easily triage: for example, all X and power management bugs would flow directly upstream. By having all the bugs in one place, it makes it easier to hand them out amongst a unified team of developers, and to analyze the state of a component.
I realize that whether to do a feature inside or outside Debian is a hard question. An exercise for the reader: if Ubuntu decides to adopt a Smart Package Manager, should this be done inside Debian or not?
Because code is infinitely malleable, separate codebases create arbitrary boundaries between ideas and people. There are various ways to work better together, and the goals should be to make development maximally efficient, allow Debian to better feel Ubuntu’s investments, help Ubuntu with its pitched battle against bugs, ensure that bugs and code flow freely, and that Ubuntu and Debian’s architecture, user and developer communities be well connected.
Update: this old proposal is somewhat complicated, but it would allow Ubuntu to exist as a separate entity if they believe that there are enough features they want that Debian doesn’t care about. If it turns out that Debian wants all Ubuntu’s features except for the orange, then it makes sense to think big. I would prefer merging, because I don’t like the idea of disparate communities. In general, the goal should be for Ubuntu and Debian to share a source tree, bug list and community, like Wikipedia and the Linux kernel do. Whether they have Technical Committees, or Community Councils, codes of conduct, etc. doesn’t matter nearly as much.
I don’t know if you saw my post “10,000 bugs away from World Domination” which made my day by getting Digged and was even read by one of your engineers Scott James Remnant, but the thesis is that the challenge to widespread use of Linux is not that it doesn’t have wobbly windows and Xen support, though these are exciting features I look forward to in Eft, the problem is that it has bugs.
PC Hardware sucks
Few non-geeks fully realize how building software for PCs is staggeringly complicated. The work involved in getting every driver ready to handle sleep & hibernate is enormous, and that’s just one row in the hardware matrix. Brian Valentine, a Windows VP, once described Windows as a testing organization, and that is one of the reasons why it is so successful and why it ships so slowly. Microsoft software has its faults in addition to being buggy, but it is still pretty thoroughly debugged and they have buildings full of hardware and the electricity bills to prove it. (Think Steve Jobs could stomach buying a WinBook XLi to test their ‘fantastic‘ little platform on? Support for the Intel processor doesn’t get Mac OS X anywhere close to support for the PC platform.)
I think Linux needs some serious love in a couple of usability scenarios such as external monitors and printing, but from researching your bug list and doing anecdotal analysis of installs on 6 different machines I believe the current biggest challenge for humans with Ubuntu is bugs which only show up on certain hardware: install race conditions, power management issues, video card crashes, screen resolutions which can’t be set in the UI, hangs on startup, soundcards and bluetooth devices unrecognized, etc.
Ubuntu might be 10,000 bugs Away From World Domination, but a tremendous milestone is the 5,000 bugs to reach World Installation.
It is possible to work around almost any bug: hack your xorg.conf, disable power management, try the install again, swap hardware, etc. but these problems hurt the perception of Linux, waste even experts’ time, and are structural impediments to its widespread use. Whether Linux has the right set of applications and is ready for phase 3 (profit) of World Domination is mostly irrelevant until the system is up and running.
Ubuntu’s Maturity vs. SUSE & Fedora
Bugfixing is time-consuming and not particularly rewarding. What’s worse, from looking at your incoming workload, I believe that even if Ubuntu had 10x the number of devs, you would all still be running at 110%. (If you did grow that much, you’d then equal the resources of the big dogs SUSE and Redhat.)
Another challenge for Ubuntu is that in addition to its backlog of bugs, it is less mature than Redhat and SUSE. I recently saw an IBM laptop just like mine running SUSE, and hibernation worked with visual status of what was happening. I can only dream of those days on Ubuntu; hibernate has started working literally hours ago, though the flashing brown lines do not fill me with confidence. I know this is just one anecdote, but I have others. :-)
The good news for desktop Linux is that Redhat and SUSE are learning from Ubuntu that they have done a bad job at evangelism, polish, freedom, and frequent releases. They also still have some catching up to some important Debian innovations:
install that works, including wireless
resizing NTFS on install [UPDATE: SUSE does this, but not Redhat]
an excellent package manager, with an easy to use UI (how’d Debian stoop to that?)
a free update service that works and which even supports in-place OS upgrades
a distribution which can scale down to embedded devices
a mature, stable, big, coherent platform
Other good stuff? I barely know what I am talking about here.
Debian’s excellent qualities, and those which Ubuntu bring, make Debian/Ubuntu an excellent platform, but Ubuntu might very well be the OS that shows us the promise of Linux on the desktop, but not necessarily the one that keeps us.
Where to harvest eyeballs?
If I had your cards and credit at a Vegas blackjack table, I’d double-down. :-) Meanwhile, there should be ways to better use Debian’s resources for your common aims. Debian is a team of 1600 maintainers who has provided you a base set of 18,000 packages and while they aren’t necessarily interested in re-coloring their swirl orange, they presumably would like to have the improvements in desktop scenarios and the work on the larger variety of hardware that Ubuntu’s efforts and userbase bring to the table. It would be interesting to know how many Ubuntu bugs exist in Debian or would exist in Debian if they were using the same verson of the upstream code. In other words, if few of your bugs are Ubuntu specific, then we know for certain that their 3200 eyeballs would be helpful.
Perhaps you could consider radical things like aligning every 2nd or 3rd release with Debian, and therefore share compilers, the desktop kernel and more of the workload. I know this was not easy in the past, but both groups have been through a lot of changes in the last 2 years and you are now more closely aligned, sharing GCC 4.0, Kernel 2.6, modular X, etc. I also see Debian plans to ship this year and has done work on Xen and Xgl which aligns it well with Eft. Finally, these would be great releases to provide long-term support.
OSS Rulez
Once the bugs are fixed, it is then a good time to talk about Linux’s structural advantages. One of the biggest is the many packages. The Linux kernel isn’t what people will appreciate, it is the applications on top. When I talk to people about Linux, I am often asked whether there are any apps to run on it!! Behind the “Applications – Add/Remove…” menu item in Ubuntu is a pretty dialog box with a incredibly comprehensive set of applications from a Logo VM for Slashdotters in diapers, to many games equal to the task of multislacking that Windows provided with Solitaire, to all kinds of productivity and multimedia apps in between. To buy all that stuff in Windows would cost a fortune and in Linux it can be installed in just one click with no questions or nagging. (Of course, OSS also has other great communities of software, such as the one surrounding PHP, which has helped make Apache so popular.) Linux apps could all use a coat of polish, but with just a couple of doublings of desktop marketshare, plenty of geek resources and money will become available, and Linux will double 6 more times to reach 1 billion PCs.
Its a fun time to be running Linux on the desktop. It is close to being ready and the pace is incremental, but steady. The best news is that you can see the pace quickening. The 2.6.8 (800KB) kernel had ~550 contributors, while 2.6.14 (2.1MB) had 844, a growth of 50% in a timespan of 14 months. If the OSS dev efforts everywhere were to grow at that pace, life would be very good, and Microsoft’s position will finally be accepted as unsustainable. Now that Scott McNealy is gone, someone should tell the new CEO of Sun that a Linux desktop has more C# apps than Java apps, a stunning failure given Java’s enormous investments in the ostensibly open JCP and a 7-year head start. Let us hope that at least, the J2SE and smaller VMs become OSS. If I could free one chunk of code, it would be that.
Having just come in from the cold, I have great respect for Dapper, Debian, GNU/Linux, and to the free software movement as a whole. As the neocons say about Iran, “Faster, please!”
-Keith
P.S. I wrote an Open Letter to the DPL recently, saying that in theory I should be running Debian rather than Ubuntu, but also that Debian seems stagnant. I do think some of my ideas about backports and proprietary software were wrong, but I still believe that installing new apps post-ship, and proprietary apps and drivers present tough technical and philosophical challenges.
P.P.S. Last October, I did an interview with Bradley C. Edwards, one of world’s experts on the Space Elevator, in which we cover a bunch of topics. Perhaps the next time you go to space will be on a Space Elevator.
I read your post-election comments about your mission as DPL to be increasing the tempo of Debian, and I think that is an excellent theme. This is the 21st century: Google existed only on paper 8 years ago, China and India are just coming online and will eventually contribute to OSS in a manner commensurate with their size, and maybe even in the Middle East and Africa they’ll quit killing each other or dying of pandemics and become productive members of the modern world. In 20 years, Linux will be running on 1 billion devices smaller than a PC and 1 billion PCs and Nicholas Negroponte will be giving us $100 to take one of his laptops. 1 billion PCs running Linux requires 20 years of 22% annual growth starting from ~20 million today. It needn’t happen that steadily and slowly as FireFox made it to 100 million in 1 year.
Linux, and the millions of lines of OSS on top and underneath it, is at an interesting inflection point: without fanfare, steadily making progress in the embedded, server, supercomputer, space, etc. space, but with little desktop marketshare and almost even smaller mindshare in the outside world. The lack of mindshare on the desktop is headwind for the server and embedded market and still allows for doubt of the legitimacy of the OSS development process.
OSS Picking up Steam
My initial experience with Debian was inauspicious. I was running Fedora Core 4, happily at the time, when I randomly bought a Linux magazine bundled with a Sarge (Debian 3.1) DVD, read a nice review of it, saw that it shipped with the 2.4 kernel, and promptly tossed it into the trash. As it turns out, 2.6 is supported in that release so my facts were wrong, but I stand by my sentiment. I have since discovered that 2.4 was only the default for Sarge and that now Debian is even transitioning away from the 2.4 kernel, and that is good. A Debian based on 2.4 might be a good reason for a derivative distribution, assuming there is still enough interest.
For comparison, FireFox is shipping once per year, Gnome is shipping twice per year and the Linux kernel is shipping 4 times per year. The Open Source movement is not only moving quickly but actually gaining momentum. The only constant is not simply change, but an increasing rate of change. This is in contrast to Debian, in which the last release took 3 years and the one before that took 2 years. I believe there is no technical reason why you cannot ship whenever you’d like. The Linux kernel merges in changes whenever they are ready without anything holding up the train. Your codebase is much bigger and your changes are more frequently more intrusive, but I believe there has to be a way to work things out even if it simply requires more resources.
Ubuntu & Debian
My second experience with Debian, running Ubuntu, has lasted much longer, and I am a happy customer and so is my father, who can’t really tell that he’s not running Windows anymore, though he does understand the geopolitical significance of it.
I have nothing against Ubuntu, and I love my operating system very much, but I believe that in principle, I should be running Debian. The Ubuntu guys took the efforts of your decade-old project, now containing 1,600 developers, added 10-30 of their own, threw in some new artwork, and have created a huge amount of excitement. Their success is a testament to their efforts, but to Debian’s even more. Of course, Debian’s success is a testament to many other people and so on, but Debian has built a large organization, focused itself on one big noble, common, goal and has built a superb system upon which there are 130 derivatives–one of which now threatens to dwarf Debian itself.
Everyone agrees that Ubuntu couldn’t exist without Debian, but I also believe that Debian is better setup to take Ubuntu where it needs to go. There are hints that the Ubuntu team feels like they brought a pork chop suit to a lion’s den. Ubuntu’s user base and development team is growing exponentially, but I believe they could get there much faster with more of Debian’s help. Its a simple fact of math that their many new bugs can be more easily divided between 1600 people than 10-30.
I am not a zero-sum person, and while I do believe that every time someone installs Ubuntu, it is good for Debian, I also see a downside. When he files bugs, the knowledge gained by the dev fixing the bug will not necessarily flow upstream to you guys. When someone writes software for Ubuntu, it may not run on a Debian system. I think benefits flow downstream better than upstream and I’m not sure if Canonical’s new tools will fix that.
Ubuntu is a relative and therefore a friend, but they want both desktop and server customers and therefore threaten the center of gravity of Debian and its 130 derivatives. And if Debian developers think the excitement is elsewhere, they might not necessarily move to Ubuntu. I wonder whether it would be better for Ubuntu to send most interested developers upstream to you guys, or whether you could share work on the desktop kernel which still needs a lot of work for laptops.
What can Debian learn from Ubuntu?
I believe an important lesson to learn from Ubuntu is that excitement is generated when you ship fast. Also, it is important to focus on the desktop and ease of use. Developers are users of your software, and users become future developers. We all start out as noobs. Eric S. Raymond wrote a great memo about the difficulty of getting printing working in Linux and if software is too hard for him to use, then it is just not completely ready for the outside world yet. All the code is there: the drivers, the network protocols and the management UI; they just require spit and polish. You can build a powerful system which is also easy to use and apt and Debian-installer are superb examples of that.
Is Debian Stagnant?
While Ubuntu doesn’t have the large, experienced team that you have, they do have excitement and momentum. When I look through the Debian website, I see some worrying metrics:
There are 189 bugs assigned to the x86 kernel, and the average age of those bugs is 1 year
The Debian-apache e-mail alias is deathly quiet, other than spam (some cleverly containing bug numbers in the subject!), and mails wondering about Apache 2.2 go unanswered.
You’ve got churn on your bug database at the rate of 12,000 entries per month or 600 per workday. If half of those are by the dev and a full-time dev can work on 5 bugs per day, then you’ve got the equivalent of 60 full-time devs working on bug fixing, or that your 1,600 devs are doing 1.5 hours of bugfixing per week.
I’m not going to judge anyone else’s volunteer contributions, but it is interesting to have some high-level measurements of the excitement of the team. I’d be curious to know what others think of these swags and how they compare to the time people spend hacking in other projects, maintaining their free blogs, myspace pages or other hobbies.
As Debian matures, your current set of volunteers might graduate from college, become satisfied or bored or otherwise move on.
A lot of what your devs do on a day to day base is hacking–integrating new versions of code, debugging it and keeping the system running. It is important stuff, but it is different from writing code and I believe it needs a constant stream of fresh blood to keep up with this somewhat tedious, labor-intensive task, and to allow your experienced people to solve the harder problems. You should be able to grow the team of contributors proportionally with the userbase if you want that. A lot of people would be excited to work on Debian and you should harness that.
What are the Big Issues?
In addition to a focus on desktop and polish, I think it is important to think big, long-term, and strategically. Things like apt and debian-installer play a big part in the definition of Debian. What future investments should your team be making? You could create a process whereby the community identifies the best big issues and then the DPL would provide the leadership to see that these efforts get off the ground. This can all happen in a meritocratic, volunteer process if there is buy-in. Here are a couple to think about:
Allow users to run new versions of code without upgrading the OS. It is an unsupported scenario on both Ubuntu and Debian to run FireFox 1.5 on your released OSes. Ironically, my mom would be okay with FireFox 1.0 for years on end, but your most passionate customers are not. There are workarounds, but they are time-consuming. The current policy is to only support fixes for security bugs, but FireFox 1.5 contains many security enhancements, some of which must not been backported, and I’ll bet the FireFox team considers FireFox 1.5 to be better in every way, including security. There is a backports mechanism, but it is not a first-class mechanism.
It should even be possible to test pre-releases of FireFox and so be ready to sim-ship with the Mozilla folks–that would be exciting! Likewise, OpenOffice.org is going to start shipping every 3 months. Upgrading apps after install is not only a problem for the big apps, but also the small ones: GtkPod is my latest discovery of an app which requires many steps to install if not using the ‘official bits’. [Update: Backports being 'unsupported' may be a bigger problem in Ubuntu than Debian.]
Are there challenges which would limit your growth? If you had 10x the users, could you scale out your download mirrors and other infrastructure to handle it? I personally think a peer-to-peer APT would be cool and I know such a tool will get written if it makes sense, but developers don’t pay the bandwidth bills.
We can hate closed source, but we cannot wish it away. Closed source video, network, modem and biometric drivers, apps like Flash, Real, Skype and Adobe Reader, codecs, and Sun’s Java 5 VM are examples of closed code that are an important part of a modern computer and need to be supported, grudgingly.
I don’t even know if those are good problems, I’m just proposing that you guys find some and start chipping away at them. There are many challenges Linus will never get to, unless he gets pissed off and creates a ‘Linus Gnu/Linux’ distro.
Debian as Man of The Year
Many people in the outside world still do not get even the basics of why Open Source is viable and actually superior to closed source and your organization needs to continue to make explaining this part of the public message.
I also find it interesting that Debian has very little name recognition compared to MySQL, Redhat and IBM, yet the fact that Debian is such a large effort is newsworthy and should get you at the seat at the table with anyone you’d like. Google made it on the cover of Time, and Debian could win ‘Man of The Year.’
Developer Productivity
By far, the biggest thing which is slowing down both open and closed source software development is the use of old tools. C and C++ are fundamentally 30 year-old programming languages and they don’t have garbage collection, metadata, language support for multi-threading, modern class libraries, do not agree on what a string is or how to allocate memory, are not portable, and the compilers are huge, ugly and slow. Line for line, a Java app might be 20% slower than a C app, but algorithms define the speed of code and as Anders Hejlsberg said of .Net, a VM is the best use of Moore’s to come around in a long time. There are many huge benefits to modern languages but the biggest is that a developer is up to 10x more productive. I won’t argue that kernel mode code should be written in Java–yet–but the kernel is only a small portion of a distro and much of the other code could easily be.
I think Scott McNealy should be fired by Sun’s Board of Directors for his poor stewardship of Java (I run more C# apps than Java apps on Ubuntu!) but in the meanwhile, you should encourage code to be written in any managed language: Perl, Python, PHP, Java, C#, etc. Less VMs is definitely better, but the toothpaste is already out of the tube and multiple VMs aren’t a serious cost.
Fini
Some of this may be silly, obvious or other, but I offer it humbly as food for thought to an organization who has built something big and important, all of which prepares it well for the many exciting developments ahead.
I am an ex-Microsoft programmer of 10 years who hadn’t spent 10 minutes with any Open Source code till I left Microsoft–which is actually very typical for MS employees.
After leaving 1 year ago and spending it with Linux (most of that time with Ubuntu) I’ve gained tremendous respect for the Open Source world as a whole but more than that, had an epiphany that Linux on the desktop is 99.999% ready to go. Linux is lean, stable, polished and extremely rich. All of the pieces needed for world domination on the desktop are there. If every Microsoft employee installed Linux, the attrition rate would double–which would be considered a catastrophe. If Bill Gates were to install Linux, he’d hire someone to smash one of his plasma TVs.
When I first investigated Linux, many of the obvious stuff I thought would be problems were not:
Linux supports a wide variety of PC devices. The driver support in Linux is as least as good as Windows and must represent an enormous effort by a veritable army of programmers.
The modern GUIs have all the nice features you’d expect: a clean, rich, stable, customizable & dynamic shell, consistency and interoperability among applications, and administrative UIs for all essential features.
Linux supports laptops now with sleep & hibernate, power management, Wi-Fi, external monitors, ability to plugin USB keys and cameras, Cleartype (LCD sub-pixel smoothing), etc.
Linux has all the important apps: FireFox, Thunderbird/Evolution, OpenOffice, GAIM, games, accessories and multimedia apps.
Excellent interoperability with Windows: SAMBA file sharing, Office file-format interop, WMA/WMV codecs, dual-boot, NTFS resize on install, MSN IM protocol support, WINE, and probably much more I haven’t discovered yet.
In fact, Linux hasn’t just reached parity with Windows, it has significant functionality that Window doesn’t have:
Linux distributions contain thousands of applications and installing them requires just 1 click. The market for 3rd party apps on Linux is much healthier than the 3rd-party market on Windows today and it is almost all free! Computing has become fun again because I can download all kinds of cool tools and instantly start learning and creating.
I never run into walls with the ability to grep through essential system logs, tweak and re-compile code, google the actual development design discussions, jump into a rich command shell, have lots of choices for tools when one doesn’t meet my needs because of either bugs or missing features, and I can browse excellent support forums. My mom won’t use all those options but they are great to have.
An important point here is that Linux already has all the needed desktop features. What is holding it back is not features anymore, but bugs. Here are a few of the bugs that I see on my one English install: (UPDATE: I could probably file 50 bugs if I had the time and expertise and had a clean room setup to repro them in)
Multimedia often skips or doesn’t display properly in the browser
Sleep and hibernate don’t work on my hardware yet
Gnome will mount NTFS, and create an icon on my desktop, but I can’t browse it because of permission problems
Installing non-free software or drivers requires lots of manual work
Driver bugs, some hangs and crashes
apt-get dist-upgrade hosed my machine (had to do a fresh install)
ogg-vorbis is 5x slower at encoding a CD compared to Windows Media
These things are problems, but most are really just bugs. For example, the kernel and shell UI support hibernation, but it doesn’t yet work on many laptops–each problematic chipset is a bug. Gnome can detect and mount my NTFS partition and it actually understands the complicated NTFS format, but I am forced to jump to the command line to view my files. These problems can usually be worked around by a Linux guru but they shouldn’t exist and in many cases are just tiny bugs breaking a scenario from being easy.
My diagnosis is that the problem with Linux is that it doesn’t have anyone pushing to get the newbie bugs fixed first. At Microsoft, we had Program Managers and one of their responsibilities was to be customer advocates to prioritize the bugs for the devs to fix. In many open source groups, it sometimes appears that bugs get fixed when the dev decides to work on it, not because an important user scenario is broken. The Wi-Fi tool was broken in Gnome for many months, but the bugs just sat there languishing in the database. Microsoft or Apple would not have shipped a Wi-Fi UI that was completely broken in that way.
I believe the Linux development process overall is working just fine, shipping high quality code on a regular basis, so I think the problem is simply an issue of socalization. Many bug databases allow people to vote for bugs, and that might be an interesting democratic way to go about it, but I also think that having more focus and vocal user advocates would be enough.
One of the reasons why I like Ubuntu is that because it is being run on a wide variety hardware by newbies like me, it is building up a knowledgebase of these issues.
How much needs to be done? My estimate is that Ubuntu needs on the order of 10,000 bugs to be fixed to get that last .001%. If you want to make your own number, here one place to start: Ubuntu bugs. How long will that take? If we assume it takes 1 day per bug, then 10,000 bugs is 50 man-years. By Microsoft standards, 50 man-years is tiny: Windows Vista will probably have 5000 man-years of effort beyond Windows XP. In other words 10,000 bugs is 1% of the effort MS will spend on Vista.
The bad news is that while 50 man-years is small, it is still large for an organization like Ubuntu which I estimate has the equivalent of 30 full-time devs. In addition, many of their bugs exist in other codebases manned by volunteers.
How and when those bugs get fixed, or whether another distro will get there first, I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader, but I do feel that the big guys should jump in a bit and help out. IBM claims to be a big supporter of Linux, but their employees all run Windows, which shows you what they think about Linux on the desktop. It is a shame because IBM could lose 50 employees under the cushions of their couch.
Linux on the desktop is very, very close and can happen as soon as we want it to.
Update 2: The 10,000 bugs number is just a back of the envelope calculation. I looked at the Ubuntu bug database, but also at the kernel, Gnome, and OpenOffice bug databases as well. I looked at Debian’s ‘Release-Critical’ bugs, but think I could ship with all of them–there may be wisdom with Ubuntu just snapshotting Debian-unstable to start a new release.
I actually think fixing just the right 1,000 bugs would move it forward a huge amount for me at least, but I still imagine that running Ubuntu on 100 million different desktops around the world would bring out more issues with a much wider variety of hardware, software, .DOC files, other writing scripts, etc.
Another approach: I think I could file 50 Ubuntu bugs, yet I don’t believe that my testing is 1/20th of the Ubuntu codebase but I do imagine that it is at least 1/200th.
When I realized that Ubuntu is just getting going, that many people don’t file bugs, and that 10,000 bugs is a relatively small number, I quit work on estimating. If Ubuntu could fix the right 10,000 bugs, it would be a superb system indeed.
No team won the two prizes for the tether and climber contests in NASA & Spaceward Foundation’s recent Space Elevator contest which is a shame because there have been a lot of news articles about it.
However, this contest seems designed by a marketing person to generate news articles, a grad student version of a soapbox derby, not to advance human understanding in any of the challenges in building a space elevator. For example, the current standard to beat in the tether contest is Spectra Fiber which is a polyethelene plastic; nanotechnology is nowhere to be found.
The Space Elevator guys hope for favorable comparisons to the X-Prize, though in fact the contests are very different. The X-Prize contest had winnings which were 100x greater, was a true contest with no timeline (this contest was announced in March) and completing the contest required man-years of work instead of just a few months by small teams. In short: if grad students in Canada can do well, then the problem is not hard enough. :-)
In both cases, however, it isn’t clear that humanity has learned anything from the contests. Boeing isn’t going to have its top engineers rip SpaceShipOne apart like they would with a flying saucer or some other invention which was a true breakthrough; in fact SpaceShipOne is on its way to the National Air and Space Museum–to excite future generations if not be useful to this one. Perhaps the biggest thing learned from the X-Prize is that you only need an R&D budget of $26 million, not billions of dollars, to build a spaceship, but that is a testament to the sophistication of modern manufacturing techniques, not to the SpaceShipOne itself.
However, even if the X-Prize is mostly an engineering task, it was a significant one. The Space Elevator contest involves tackling only 2 small challenges and by having teams all working on the exact same small problem makes it the equivalent of research pork.
How about instead a contest where teams can attack any problem in building a space elevator and money would go to that which advanced our knowledge most? Different teams would focus on different problems: how lightning affects the tether, research into epoxies, the affects of radiation and high-speed objects, geographic research into the best places to anchor elevators, any aspect of space hotels or space tourism, work on adaptive optics, MPDs, robotics and software, etc., etc. The Space Elevator book is currently the best compedium of solutions to many of the challenges in building a space elevator, but the book exudes future challenges!
The current Space Elevator contest is a 20th-century contest for a 21st-century problem. It becomes harder to judge such a contest, but then lets just get smarter judges! More importantly, it becomes much more likely that people will solve real problems that mankind hasn’t solved before and therefore be worthy of the news it will generate. Unleash our ingenuity!
KC: My jaw dropped when I went to my nearest Starbucks, saw your artwork on the wall, and realized that you lived in Seattle. How long have you been here? It doesn’t exactly seem to be a hotbed for space elevator work…
BE: I did my work for NIAC (NASA Institute For Advanced Concepts) here in 2000, and then moved back in June. I was working with people everywhere; most of the collaboration was virtual, and many folks I didn’t meet until the end. I don’t think I met Eric Westling until after we published our book (The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth-to-Space Transportation System). A few people I’m currently working with I still haven’t met. I don’t work with people just because they’re local, I have to find people I think are the best. It depends on what I’m working on. It’s an effort that can be largely broken up into sections. “Here is the anchor station, go do it.”? Actually, it’s great that I don’t have to have everyone in the same room because it’s just not possible.
I tried to look up your biography on the Internet, and couldn’t track down some of the organizations you’ve worked in. Some of them are probably from the early Internet days…
We’ve been trying to get various projects started. A few were a few false starts, or in some cases just testing the waters. HighLift Systems was a Seattle-based company, and was one of those false starts. I closed it down. I’m not affiliated with LiftPort. I have worked with LiftPort’s founder Michael Laine a bit at HighLift in Seattle before we parted ways. [Not on the best of terms; juicy but unsubstantiated gossip about LiftPort removed, Meow!! --ed]
No, but I know the general gist. It’s not a surprise. In my mind the Space Shuttle and Space Station are not valuable efforts. It’s not what NASA should be doing. NASA is using technology from commercial enterprises, or very old technology from the 70′s to try and do space exploration. If they are going to be a real premier space agency, they need to be pushing it.
They should be doing stuff which looks to us like science fiction…
It shouldn’t be science fiction, but they should be pushing the boundaries and doing work that inspires. That’s what Apollo was. The technology for Apollo existed before the program started; they took that knowledge and pushed it to its limits, and it literally inspired the world.
I wasn’t around then, but it seems like peoplecared what NASA did back then. NASA has their Moon and Mars pictures up on their website, but I don’t know if anyone cares. If you squint as you look, you’d think it was 1970.
It is history; it’s old news. And since then, they’ve done very little.
It seems like there was a long-standing debate between rockets and the Space Shuttle. From where you sit, that’s like choosing between Nicki and Paris Hilton.
Even high up in NASA management, they won’t officially say it – but they have said it directly to me – that nothing substantial in space can be done with rockets. A federal program with lots of money can take some people up there, but it won’t be able to commercialize space. We’ve been going at it for thirty-five years now, and we’ve put up telecommunications systems and GPS. If there’s a buck to be made and a product to be built, it’ll get done. With current technology, I think we’ve developed space commercially as far as we can. We need something dramatically different—a brand new market, a brand new technology.
Economists should get that. How did trains and highways change America?
Private enterprise is starting to get it. NASA hasn’t shown much interest on the space elevator, but there are a number of private entities that have.
But we just laughed at a bunch of them: HighLift, LiftPort. Do any of them have billions of dollars?
There are real people with money and the know-how. To get it going you don’t need ten billion dollars. You’ll need a couple of billion up front, and a lot can be financed. For example, instead of money changing hands, you could approach Hyundai and, ignoring the issues of dealing with a foreign company, offer them 10% of the company. They could then supply the anchor station and the climbers or whatever. Either they as a company would invest, or maybe the government of South Korea would invest. But dealing with South Korea would bring up all kinds of technology transfer export issues which may make it unfeasible – perhaps a company like Exxon might be approachable. Private individuals, financial groups – there are a lot of people who could step up.
In principle, we shouldn’t be waiting for our government to throw big money at it.
No, no. We are getting a few million to develop the last needed parts of the technology, developing the high-strength materials needed, creating a Research and Development center, performing other engineering work, cleaning up some of the loose ends, and doing some promotional work to let people know the concept exists and where we are at with it. Money could be leveraged to get more development done until the risks are reduced; then we can approach the real people with money.
A space elevator seems like a task of the same complexity as the Apollo mission was, and maybe private enterprise could have tackled even that project. Perhaps the 21st century is different, but it seems like a task as big as that would require government’s involvement.
It is similar in size to that, but it’s also similar in size to the Boston Big Dig. It’s small compared to, say, rebuilding New Orleans in money or effort. There’s different technology and risks than the Apollo mission presented, but the full effort and capabilities aren’t that different.
The Apollo program didn’t have a commerical endpoint. It set a goal of putting a man on the moon, which it was an enormous engineering effort. But the space elevator is a commercial effort. The Apollo, the Shuttle, the Space Station were never that.
They certainly sold us on that vision…
They sold us on that vision, but it was never that way, which is unfortunate.
You present a vision in which we don’t need NASA. Perhaps that’s true, but if what NASA‘s doing isn’t useful to us, can they be refocused to help us? Is that a goal for you? Is it possible?
I’m not working toward that. I worked at Los Alamos and I’ve seen how NASA operates. Their primary goal is not the development of space. They are a space agency, but they are very political. It’s a political organization; it’s a federal agency. Even if one of the NASA centers became completely useless, it wouldn’t get closed down because there are thousands of jobs there.
They’re a huge organization and they’re doing lots of things.
Yes, and that means they can’t be focused. They can’t trim off something to go do something else. Their hands are very well tied because of the requirements of the real world and society’s constraints of what they can and cannot do.
I look at NASA as a company doing lots of interesting things. I can’t say whether ramjets and so forth is interesting, but it is research, and it’s their mission. So what part would you cut?
That’s exactly it – what part would be cut. For NASA to go off and do something new and different, they’d have to take people or build a virtual organization from all the different centers and work together, which is very difficult. So they’d have to start a new center because it’s difficult to reorganize or refocus the old stuff. It’s the same with the national labs.
So are you resigned to the fact that Michael Griffin’s successor is going to do another mea-culpa in 20 years? The space elevator will be flying on by, and NASA will be stuck with their tiny little rockets andlunar landers.
Well, NASA will continue to do what they’ve always done, which is to provide employment.
Employment?
That’s their primary goal. They can do research, and the space elevator would open up new areas for them to do cutting-edge research. In some cases they really are; in other cases, they are sort of floundering about trying be something that they aren’t. With a space elevator, NASA could build probes that they weren’t able to do before; they could do new research on different applications of the space elevator and new applications of space, but unfortunately NASA has trouble just doing the main infrastructure and large program pieces.
But they did build the Apollo, and the Space Shuttle is a tremendous achievement.
It is, but NASA is a different organization today. The Shuttle was designed in the 1970s, right after Apollo. Today, you have a very different organization with different capabilities.
But I don’t know if they’ve completely lost ‘the right stuff.’ They can maintain it, and they do understand it. Hasn’t that knowledge and experience been transferred from engineer to engineer? In the software world, there’s code rot because everyone who has worked on the code has since gone elsewhere.
They can maintain it because it’s all built up. They started the Shuttle in the 1970’s when NASA was still new and flexible enough to move into new areas and design a new program such as the Shuttle. Also it wasn’t far enough from Apollo that they could take people from there and go do it. Now, however, the idea of taking a fair chunk of people with very different expertise and focusing them on one mission is very difficult.
Apollo was fantastic. The Shuttle is an amazing machine. I look at the space elevator and think of it as doable, but by the same token I look at the Shuttle and ask myself how it could possibly be built. There are 3 million parts, it’s exremely complex, and it doeswork.
Do you think they have the technical skills anymore?
They have so many people with so many different skills – if you tried to put them all on the space elevator project, there would be a fair fraction of people that wouldn’t find a role.
NASA could just create new teams and move appropriate people over. I jumped from group to group in a software company, each time learning a new skillset…
Yes, but if you had a group of, say, geologists, would you put them on carbon nanotubes??
Okay, then, the space elevator doesn’t have work for them. You would let them continue their research.
But there are geologists and plasma physicists and people who design gamma ray detectors – all of these people have niches, some of which would be helpful, but a lot are simply overkill for what we need. They are studying planets and the moon and Mars and asteroids and such, but the organization is just hard to fit into a whole new entity. It would be like asking NASA to go and build ocean-going ships. You just can’t refocus an entire organization such as NASA.
Going back to rockets is a still big step for NASA. Perhaps you could say that forty years on and all they’re doing is updating the software, but even that is a large engineering effort.
There are real problems with that. If they were to start a new program to build a new launch vehicle (which is what they should be doing), grabbing an F-1 rocket for the new venture is reverting back to 1950′s technology. They are still going to have to redesign it, because that ‘50’s technology is no longer valid today. Why not start from scratch and do the best you can? In the end, NASA is still living with rockets, and it won’t turn into a self-sustaining endeavor. It will end as soon as the government funding is shut off, which it will be eventually. Administrations change and the world changes – eventually something else will happen that preoccupies the Administration, and they’ll say “We are done with this.”?
I think Bush thinks big enough to spend the political capital and billions of dollars, but you never know with future Presidents.
Yes, you’ll never know about the next one, or the next one after that.
I thought I remembered hearing about Mars and the date 2040, but I looked around and couldn’t find anything.
There isn’t a defined timetable beyond 2020, and that’s already four Administrations away.
We’ll still have John Roberts… One thing I’ve thought about is how rockets have made people lose faith in the mission. People look at the moon and say “F*ck it, why should we bother, we just got out of a gravity well.”? Our current technology limits our thinking about what’s possible and reasonable.
The moon is an ambition, but not a valuable end unto itself. If you’re going to go to the moon you need a goal, like setting up a base, or mining the moon, or installing solar power arrays or something.
I think Bush believes that it’s a 384,000 km warmup lap for everything else, and I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that.
Well, then the question is, “Why are you going to Mars?”?
We’ve always known that going to Mars is a good thing! We are just now coming to realize that going to the moon isn’t. We used to think the moon was a good thing.
Going to the Mars is a very complex endeavor, so you need to have a reason.
We’re convincing ourselves that going to the Moon isn’t a good thing, so convincing ourselves not to go to Mars seems to be next. At that point, no one will dream anymore.
If we are going to Mars just because it’s there, that’s not self-sustaining. It’s very likely that it will get killed once we’ve done it; then it will shut back down (just like Apollo) because it’s not self-sustaining. Then you go through the whole cycle again in another thirty years.
Someone from Slashdot made the comment that we’ll do this mission, pop open a brewski, and proclaim, “Yep, still got it.”?
Which brings up the problem that if China, South Korea or Europe plans out how to do it commercially, and for example gets infrastructures set up, then they’ll have a commercially self-sustaining enterprise which will spread out on its own, to the moon or Mars. That’s a real program, not pork.
It’s why countries came to North America. They didn’t come because the land existed, they came because of gold, furs, tobacco, lumber. If they had found barren rock, they would have just returned.
America as “the land of opportunity”? used to mean animals and trees…
And gold. Greed drives things. If we found something of value in space, and if someone thought they could make trillions of dollars from it, they would spend billions to go get it.
Alternative Energy Sources
You talk in your book about heavy Helium being a resource.
That section was primarily written by Eric Westling. It’s another resource in space that would require fusion technology to be developed further. If this technology became available, then we would need Helium-3.
Is this another example where our country is so politically backward with regards to nuclear technology that we just can’t take advantage of this resource yet?
Actually, I’m not sure if there’s been enough money in the right places to develop the technology. There are some efforts, but they may not be focused in the right directions. We should be working on this, because we are going to need it.
I read reports of more oil being discovered all the time, yet everyone believes we are going to run out, and so it’s very expensive.
There have been various studies done; the ones I believe say that in ten to fifteen years we are going to have real issues.
Saudi Arabia just recently doubled the amount of oil they thought they had in their reserves!
They’ve been doing that for years, upping their estimates on what they think they have, but they aren’t finding new oil.
You don’t think the environmental lobby has shut down research and exploitation of oil? It seems we aren’t allowed to drill anywhere or build new refineries, and now we wonder why it’s so expensive.
Most of the planet has been surveyed, and if there’s oil to be found, someone’s found it.
We’ve recently discovered these shale deposits…
Yes, but even beyond the cost of oil, there’s the cost of extraction, and if you have to dig up half of Canada to get to it, you’ll get to the point where it will take more energy to retrieve it than what you’ll get back from it. A colleague of mine spoke with Exxon, and some of their technical people said we have fifteen years.
There are pessimists everywhere. I know a bunch.
But Exxon is an oil company and they should be the optimists. The point in all of this is that we don’t know. It could be ten years, it could be fifty. We don’t have the information that’s needed, and someone needs to be pushing for it.
We will always have doubts until we go into space and realize the resources out there are infinite. There’s tons of solar energy and nuclear energy. Your book talks a lot about energy.
With the space elevator, we can create a huge solar array. We’ll tap into this energy, and it won’t run out. We won’t have to deal with oil glitches and stock market glitches and potential environmental glitches.
I’ve thought about solar arrays, and I’ve wondered whether E=mc2 proves we should be utilizing nuclear power because it’s easier to transport mass than energy.
That’s great, too. We can do nuclear power – if you have the fuel and make it safe so it doesn’t glitch – then you’ll have the energy.
Space And The Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism
It’s a post-9/11 world, and everyone now realizes the threat of terrorism. If our government said that we should build it on land to protect it, is that possible? If we build more than one, why worry so much about where the first one is?
The reason we picked that position, straight down from California, is because there are no hurricanes, no lightning, no winds, and it’s out of the way. Someone flying an airplane will be spotted 400 miles away.
That would require a huge amount of infrastructure. Protecting something in Nevada, we’re set up to do.
You still have people driving the roads through there, hanging around outside Area 51, and so there would be the potential for terrorists to strike with shoulder-fired missiles. The U.S. pretty much controls the oceans – we have a heck of a Navy. Any incoming airplane could be easily shot down way before it became a threat. The middle of the ocean is very secure. With land, you have to secure the roads, clear out the access.
It is inaccessible, therefore making it more expensive to get people there.
Initially it would be cargo that’s needed, and the cheapest way to move something is on a ship – one ship out of Seattle could contain enough climbers to keep the space elevator going for a year.
It would depend on the infrastructure and how many experts and support staff you have on site to keep it running. What if you needed a million square feet?
We aren’t talking about thousands of people. Sea Launch has tens of people.
Tens? What if we needed a thousand people?
If you need a thousand people, then you would need a cruise ship, or more floating platforms, supply ships, etc.
If we are going to build more than one, are they all going to be located in the same place? Asia will get one eventually, if they don’t get one first.
You could put a number of them in the same place, but once we start building and understanding them better, we can put them on land as well as in other locations. You could put one in parts of Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia. After we build the first one and have a better understanding of what’s going on, we’ll have a lot more options with subsequent ones.
Elevator Thrust
MPDs seem like a good idea to power the climbers because they are seventeen times more efficient than chemical rockets.
It’s electric propulsion. They’ve been developed and tested in various labs including at Princeton and some labs in Moscow. They have been developed at pretty much the size we would need, and they can be run for five hundred hours without degradation. The space elevator doesn’t require MPDs; chemical rockets could be used but they’re less efficient. On the other hand, it takes much longer to get from low earth orbit to high earth orbit with MPDs; – rockets are much faster, you just flip the switch and they head on their way. So there are some tradeoffs with each.
Both need fuel.
With MPDs, we talk about beaming them up.
Err, you would need something which shoots out the back, even if it doesn’t combust.
Yes, propellant. They accelerate faster than what you get out of chemical rockets, which is why it’s more efficient.
We’ll Need to Get India Working On a New Kama Sutra
Your book talks about a hotel in 0.1 g space…
Probably the first efforts in tourism will be a climber with glass windows. You could put forty people on and charge them $20,000 – $30,000. They’ll go up a couple of hundred miles, have dinner, spend eight hours, and then come back down. That could be a very good market for the elevator.
Next, you could expand upon the living quarters up in geosynchronous orbit (GEO). The solar power arrays and satellites will be up there, so the infrastructure and crews will be needed to maintain them, and so forth. One of the problems will be the radiation belt between here and there, so the transportation would need to be sped up, or the radiation shields improved. If you are sending up tourists they’ll want to be comfortable, so you either need more shielding or it has to be faster.
Space tourism will be limited by the long trip to GEO.
The space elevator has been planned around current technology in which speed is mostly a function of power. Once the elevator is built, people will be working on improving its speed, and will improve other areas and shrink the transport time from eight days to one; thus radiation becomes less of an issue. You will have to design the climbing system and the treads such that they won’t be damaged at higher speeds. Tourism is viable in the long-term, but these issues have to be dealt with first. It’s not the first market, but it will happen.
Two hundred miles up (about where the Space Station orbits) is a lot closer than 14,000 km up, where your book talks about at which, with the speed of your climbers, is seventy hours of travel.
14,000 km up is right in the middle of the radiation belt, so you don’t want to go there. You could build a hotel hanging on the ribbon. Alternatively, you could just have a car which is self-contained. Forty people, three trips per day, and $20,000 per person would make it viable. A second elevator would cost one-third as much as the first, so it becomes doable.
To do that, you’d need a rocket to catch up, and then use it for coming back down. Then, you’d just have a re-entry probe.
Why not just do the reverse?
A re-entry problem would be easier. There are lots of different options. You wouldn’t need to get out of the elevator though. It would take a few hours to get up there, and it would be enjoyable from the moment you left till you got back. The whole time spent is enjoyable without getting off the elevator.
Lunar Elevator?
Okay, so we have the space elevator. To get to the Moon, we’d build a lunar elevator?
Jerome Pearson has been talking about that idea. I’m not a big fan of the lunar elevator because there are a lot of complications and fewer economic reasons. Asteroids are a lot easier to put elevators on. We can do that with current materials if we have an economic reason to do it. The moon is a little more difficult because of its slow rotation. Asteroids and Mars are easier, but what will drive the project is the economic return. It also depends on what the goal is. If all of our activities are on the moon, then that’s where we go. If we are going to Mars, then we go there next. If we are mining asteroids, then we will be sending elevators to all the asteroids we can get to.
I’m not sure if we need to be mining asteroids yet…
I don’t think it’s a near-term opportunity. I think it’s something which will happen eventually, when we have a lot of other projects going on in space. The first projects will be solar-powered satellites and telecommunications.
Nanotechnology
Everyone focuses on nanotechnology as being the only challenge, but really its only the first. President Bush has increased spending by 83% for it since 2001. It seems like we must be on the cusp of something.
There’s what’s called the National Nanotechnology Initiative. When I was looking into it, the budget was a billion dollars. But when you look closer at it, it is split up between a dozen agencies, and within each agency it’s split again into a dozen different areas – much of it ends up as SBIRs and STTRs and turned into $100,000 grants. We looked into it with regards to carbon nanotube composites, and it appeared that about thirty million dollars was going into high-strength materials – and a lot of that was being spent internally in a lot of the agencies, in the end there’s only a couple of million dollars out of the billion dollar budget going into something that would be useful to us.
It’s pork. It doesn’t have focus.
It doesn’t have focus, and it’s spread out to include everything. You get a little bit of effort in a thousand different places.
You wonder whether the efforts are duplicative…
A lot of the budget is spent on one entity trying to play catch-up with whoever is leading. Instead of funding the leader, they’re funding someone else internally to catch up.
Payload Physics
Talk a bit about bootstrapping payloads to a twenty-ton elevator, and what would be next after that. I worry that starting with twenty tons would be a bottleneck, even though it’s two orders of magnitude greater than what NASA can do today, given the time it would take to build an elevator.
A two hundred ton elevator will become reasonable and commercially viable once we get the costs to where we believe they are going to be. We chose twenty tons, as this is what we know will be the first viable step. Thirteen tons is a good payload on a 20-ton climber, and will prove to be very valuable. What happens after that – well, we can plan all we want. When the first one starts operating, then there’ll be somebody saying, “ two hundred tons is great, but we need three hundred tons, and it has to do this, and this, and this…”?
But each order of magnitude is a milestone in itself, and so we need to start at the right place.
Yes, but the basic physics don’t change, and the operations don’t change. To give some perspective, two hundred tons is like the size of a large commercial aircraft. We can build a climber that size, and a ribbon that will hold it. It’s all things that can be done. Ramping up to that size is a matter of will; there aren’t any physical constraints.
Waiting For Our Overlords To Wake Up
This interview is depressing. We haven’t broken ground and it isn’t clear if NASA could be helpful.
From the inside, we’ve got a lot of things going on, even though we haven’t started construction. That book of mine came out a couple of years ago; before that, space elevators were the stuff of science fiction. We’ve gone from science fiction to this idea showing up in a lot of places – various magazines and in real serious discussions in mainstream forums. It’s showing up in high-level discussions at NASA and European Space Agencies and other places like that. We also have a lot of efforts which aren’t solidified yet, but if if any one of of them comes through, we’ll be on a real good track to make this idea happen.
Living in the 21st century, fifteen years just seems too long. It’s like saying that it’s going to take fifteen years to rebuild the Gulf coast after Katrina.
There are limits on how fast you can do things. But if we got more money, it can go faster. I’m a scientist so it’s my nature to be realistic. The project has a couple of years of development and the assumed hurdles with regulatory committees, as well as going out for bids on contracts.
None of that’s engineering though. If you killed all the lawyers and bureaucrats, how long would it really take?
When we’re finished with the development, we would still have some work on the materials yet to complete. If we really pushed everything, we could get it up and running in five or six years. That’s pretty tight. Our estimates are seven or eight years, but if we really pushed it it could happen sooner. It would take a couple of years to build things, and then a couple more to increase the strength of the elevator. But one could use more launches or bigger launches to get a bigger first ribbon to cut back on things a bit. There are things you can do to tighten up the schedule, but I’m trying to be a realist. If you promise something in five years, then five years later you’d better have something. Large infrastructure and power plants take time to get built.
The money will eventually come. With a space elevator, the day you build it and the first elevator you send up, the value of the company will easily become ten times what was put into it, with just the market that’s available; and that’s assuming you don’t do anything intelligent like build the next one at a much lower cost, or develop new commercial applications, etc.
You’re basically saying that if we could launch ten times more stuff into space than we do today, we would still max out that capacity…
Once you’ve got the elevator, you’re able to transport lots of stuff up there. The company that operates the space elevator could then put up the telecommunications satellite, and become the telecommunications owner for the whole planet. Then they could put up solar-powered satellites and own the power producing capability for the planet. That’s a ridiculous amount of money and power involved. And if they really wanted to go hog-wild they could say “You know what? We are just going to take Mars! We are the only ones who can get there.”? At some point the implications get crazy. So yes, there will be a pretty big return on it once it gets built.
Software Versus Hard Ware
A lot of space elevator supporters are software geeks. Any thoughts for them?
There are a lot of software challenges involved. The system isn’t a whole lot different, but there are new uses being created for robotics and autonomous operations. I think a lot of that is currently being developed for factories. There’s more need for robotics, but I think the software requirements will keep up.
You should be worried about it! The Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers nearly died because of software bugs, and the Denver Airport’s luggage system failed because of software. I suppose God has provided harder physics problems than software problems in the short-term.
We’re always going to have software glitches, therefore we have to plan for them. But the elevator will allow us to send up whatever computers we want. It doesn’t have to be a specific little piece of software for a specific piece of hardware, like what was designed for the Mars mission. A space elevator can use software that has been tested by a million people.
The Trillion Dollar Question
I think you should have your Natan Sharansky moment with President Bush…
There’s been discussions, and hopefully the twenty books you’ve sent him will spur them into giving me a call. A lot of this is just getting into the front door. I’ve briefed all levels of NASA except for the administrator in the past, but I haven’t really tried to recently because we’ve got a lot of activities going on and I don’t know where NASA would play a role.
One challenge we face is that if NASA gets involved, it can tie up the technology development. If government funds it, then government owns it – you may lose control of the technology which could be valuable to private enterprises. We have to be careful how we set everything up to avoid burning bridges.
What I think is going to happen is that someone will develop the first elevator. After that, there’ll be a rush to build five more. You can run off a list of who will be building it: DoD (Department Of Defense) will want one, a couple of private entities will want one, the Europeans will want one. Those five will be built independently of who builds the first one, whether it’s the US, China, private enterprise… Regardless, the next five will be built. After that we lose complete control; they get bigger, they get more of them. We’re only worried about building the first one.
This is an enormous industry which needs to develop. I come from the IT industry, and I think of this as something on that order of magnitude.
It is literally a multi-trillion dollar per year industry. There are real markets that you can run the numbers for, and it’s well over a trillion – that’s just launch revenues. Add on top of that the value of the products that will be launched.
I think this picture summarizes why we shouldn’t follow NASA’s vision. There are a couple of guys, a cute little space ship, and an American flag…
Or, we can have a city up there. I sent a proposal to NASA which cut the cost of the moon-Mars initiative in half, and what it ended up being was a settlement of 100 people on the moon and Mars with all kinds of infrastructure and supply depots and everything else – the money wasn’t being spent on the launches.
It would be great if we could get NASA involved but I don’t know where they would fit, and I don’t feel obligated to get them to fit. If private enterprise comes up and says here’s the money, lets go do it, then we should do it. There’s a whole lot more money in the private side of our economy than the public side. So if a project comes up which has a good business case, then private enterprise will get right on it. In terms of resources that NASA could reallocate, it’s pretty limited. A lot of their resources are tied up, unless they were to shut down one of their centers. The billion dollars a year they’re spending on is all they could scrape together without firing people.
I talked with Michael Griffin many years ago and he’s a very interesting individual. I may go talk to him at some point again, and see where things might fit, but currently I’ve got my hands full with other avenues that look promising. I’ve been briefing NASA on a regular basis for a couple of years, and not much has come out of it. I’ve started talking to private industry and things happen a lot more quickly, so naturally I’ve gone down that route. With NASA, you can fight just to get a $100,000 grant.
I’ve sent a few e-mails to him and he’s written me a couple of notes. He’s very supportive of our ideas. He just wrote a letter to the London Times regarding NASA and space elevators. That’s where he mentions that his fifty-year target has dropped to twenty-five years. He spoke at one of our conferences as well, in which he said it would be ten years, so he’s changed it a few times. He’s been a good supporter. In fact, we have a lot of people who are good supporters. It’s amazing how far things have come in the last five years or so…
I created a poll. Pretty please vote! Update: <5% of readers are voting! I will install spyware on your computer which drinks all your vodka and cuts the whiskers off your cat unless you vote! :-) Thank you.
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 17 – When President Bush greeted Secretary General Kofi Annan on Wednesday, he gestured toward John R. Bolton, the United States ambassador, and asked, “Has the place blown up since he’s been here?”
The internal United Nations television sound boom that picked up the jest did not record any response from the Secretary General, who simply smiled.
I have no idea if people still read my blog after my 15 minutes of fame, but they will again soon–I’ve got an interesting interview with Dr. Bradley Edwards I will put up as soon as I finish transcribing and cleaning it up.
In the meanwhile, I just wanted to write a quick note about how I got a new IBM T-43 laptop as my old Sony was falling apart. I shrunk the Windows XP partition down to as small as possible and installed Ubuntu on it and I’ve now come to love computers again. Here is a screenshot: Isn’t it a polished, modern thing of beauty? Note my screen is messier than normal, but I wanted to give a feel for that apps I use, all of which are standards-oriented, solid, easy to use and have the power whenever I need it. (To give one example of the 1000s I’ve noticed, the sound recorder in Windows only records up to 1 minute.)
Here are the apps I’m using:
FireFox
Thunderbird (I want to try out Evolution, but didn’t get it working with gmail yet)
OpenOffice Writer
Audacity (for manipulating audio files)
Synaptic Package Manager (Apps to do anything I want just one click away)
Art Manager (Custom themes, icons, beautifulbackgroundimages, window decorations, etc. Your desktop a personal computer.)
Totem (with w32codecs extension I can play any Microsoft files I want.)
Bash (way better than cmd.exe)
Gaim (Instant Messenger)
Nvu (For tweaking HTML I’ve composed in OpenOffice)
Gimp (Photoshop)
On my server, I’m using
Apache
Java
PHP
phpBB2
Gallery2
Drupal
WordPress
MySql
The Gnome desktop is beautiful, simple and functional. (I tried KDE and I hate it.) With these few apps I’m only scratching the surface of the tools available, I’ve only been using Linux for a few months.
The best thing about it is any time I run into the problem, Google has the answer. I couldn’t use Linux without Google.
Linux is powerful, robust and I never run into walls. Anything is doable, sometimes it’s just a little bit of work the first time.
Are you a Windows user who has tried Linux recently or thinking about it? Post your thoughts below.
I just spent several enjoyable hours browsing NASA’s website and I am impressed with the breadth and depth of their work. We tend to think of NASA as being mostly about the Space Shuttle, and now the Moon and Mars, but they are doing work in fields such as nanotechnology,personal aircraft,ramjets & scramjets, and lots of other fundamental research–my links are just a small sampling.
I read the transcript of the public rollout of NASA’s new Moon and Mars work, and the new NASA administrator, Michael Griffin made it clear that NASA’s new efforts will not take away any money from NASA’s other scientific research and I think that is wise. The only question I have is whether they are doing everything they can to get those ideas into commercial enterprises. How many billions of dollars of intellectual property are currently locked up in their laboratories?
As for the Moon and Mars plan, from reading what little public data is available, it is clear that their proposal rests on a fundamental underlying assumption, which is the use of Apollo-style rockets as the mechanism of transport. The implications of this assumption spread far and wide; the lunar lander’s design is clearly inextricably intertwined with the rocket which will launch it.
So what happens when that fundamental assumption is replaced? Who knows! It will be interesting to find out. That lander could clearly be launched from a space elevator, but if it wasn’t constrained by the underlying assumption, it might built very differently, much bigger, but what else? Perhaps, it should also be scrapped, as maybe the first logical step to the Moon should be to build a lunar space elevator. Otherwise, at the pace of NASA’s current vision, it will take a long while to fill the Moon up with fun things. I do believe that going to the Moon first is a great place to start, a 384,000 km warmup lap for further explorations.
The best reason to build a space elevator is not just that it is cheaper than NASA’s current plan, but that it will make Space accessible to all of us. NASA’s budget is $16 billion, only 5% of the cost of Katrina cleanup, and yet they still have to fight for this money. I believe people would be willing to spend much greater sums on space (10x NASA’s current budget) if they could see the benefits.
That is why space tourism and other commercial enterprises need to become more important over time and NASA needs to figure out what it’s role is. It isn’t relevant yet with NASA’s current plan because for the next 13 years and more, they will build and deploy everything with little room for independent companies to participate. Once we have a space elevator, it becomes possible for Hilton to put up a hotel, then we will need to answer the question of what NASA’s role should be in designing and certifying it?
The Telegraph has a good article about the space elevator here.
UPDATE: Even better, Arthur C. Clarke, famous for predicting that mankind will start work on it 50 years after everyone has stopped laughing, has just now lowered it down to 25 years! He must read Slashdot or Instapundit!!!
UPDATE 2: Here’s another brand-new article on LiftPort’s recent work.
It is great to see the mainstream media raising the level of knowledge about this–and raising the expectations for our rocket scientists to build us new things.
I believe there will be some major direction shift coming from within NASA, or at the direction of the White House, within 6 months.
You read that crazy prediction here first. Why? NASA’s recent proposals which were circulated around the White House and and Congress recently and were accepted (what else do you say when a rocket scientist tells you his ideas but nod and act like you understand?) but with little excitement about the cost, scope or timeline. I know that lots of people in the White House, Congress, etc. read the Internet and there was a flurry of postings and discussion about it last week, and I know that the books I sent to the White House are not lost, and so now we just have to wait a few months while they do their homework and then decide what the next step is. A commission? Reorganization? Hearings? Will the MSM make it’s usual contribution of demanding that heads roll?
Finally, I don’t know for certain if it is a space elevator, a new propulsion system using nuclear rockets, or something else dramatic, but lets hope NASA focuses on something out of their research labs, not something which should be in mothballs or on display at a museum.
From the outside, it appears that NASA is sniffing glue for staking out such backward-looking yet expensive proposals for the next 13 years of our lives.
To be fair, I think NASA’s proposal to move back to rockets is probably a better plan than using the Space Shuttle. How much better? NASA quotes it as being 10x safer, but I think a better question is whether it is 10x cheaper. The price tag suggests that these rockets aren’t significantly advanced from the 40 year old technology. Every technology has gotten uncountably cheaper in the last 40 years, the computer I write this on is more powerful than the sum total of the computing power of the world in 1960. Why can’t NASA make significant progress as well?
Anyhow, given how expensive NASA’s glue must be, it is more likely that their plan is more of the same because of institutional inertia.
I’m a software person, so as a thought experiment I imagined the response I might get if I walked up to Bill Gates and told him that in preparation for the next 40 years of computing, he should throw away Windows and redesign it from scratch and rewrite in a modern programming language like C#/Java. Bill would look at all the testing tools, the expertise of the Microsoft and its customers in the existing code, the device drivers, the performance enhancements and bugfixes, etc. etc. etc. and think it was a bad idea. I personally don’t think this suggestion is a good idea either, but we can see how hard it must be for big organizations to take seriously a completely transformational technology.
NASA and its contractors understand rocketry better than anyone in the world and have priceless knowledge and expertise in that area, but I believe this may be blinding them from thinking in completely new ways, even though NASA has funded space elevator research! (Likewise, I’m sure there is some researcher at Microsoft who has some ‘brilliant’ ideas on how to change Windows but the ideas are too dramatic to be implemented.)
Large organizations just have so much investment in the current understanding of their particular technologies that it requires leadership from the top to make a big change happen.
I started this process by sending 20 copies of The Space Elevator to the White House. Perhaps we could start a program to mail 10 to every Congressman–or maybe just the Republicans, aren’t they the ones with monopoly power? [What about John McCain? --ed] Or we could send 357 of them, one for every hundred kilometers to geosynchronous orbit, to NASA. (Any other good numbers?) Put a comment in the post if you would donate to that effort and your thoughts.
In any case, while we can all think of many challenges to building a space elevator, I believe NASA owes us all a proof for why they should not completely scrap what they are doing and work on this instead. Going through that exercise would be good for them and force them to put their current thinking on firmer footing and perhaps force them to consider other dramatic ideas as well. I hope and suspect, from my limited understanding of the materials sciences, that the proof for why they shouldn’t build one will turn into a proof for why they should, but whatever happens will help further our understanding of space research.
Glenn Reynold’s latest Tech Central Station article is interesting, but doesn’t go into much detail on the technical details and benefits to get going on it.
I personally think NASA is acting stupid in the way only a big bureaucracy can by suggesting we spend 100 billion dollars and use 40 year-old Apollo-style rockets to get us to the moon and Mars. How can their engineers be motivated to get out of bed in the morning to work on such a small-minded plan which does nothing more than get us 4 men back on the moon in 13 years?!
NASA needs to quit sniffing the glue used to affix the ceramic tiles, ignore the idea that a space elevator sounds like science fiction the way going to the moon sounded like science fiction in 1960, and just start work on it. Scientists have been speculating about how to build such things for 50 years and have understood that with long strings and counterweights it would be much cheaper to put a pound into space than attaching it to a bomb as we do today. The biggest holdup has been in the materials science, but in 1991 carbon nanotubes were invented which allow us to build a string the width of a human hair which is strong enough to lift a car.
With that alone, we have the essential technology which has been holding things up and we can build something which is 10-2000x cheaper per pound than conventional technology.
However, we can build space elevators even more cheaply by taking advantage of other new technologies which are well understood in the laboratory but which needs to be built at largescale by the engineers with the big budgets. We need to build a set of devices which will climb the first string (which will initially be installed by rockets or the space shuttle) and add another string to it, eventually building a ribon. These climbers could be powered by conventional mechanisms, but it is much smarter to leave the the power source on the ground and use laser beams (first demonstrated by Bell Labs way back in 1960) to beam the energy to the climbers. This keeps the climbers lightweight which we will need in the bootstrapping process. NASA would need to build new types of drives to convert the laser energy to work; the best appears to be magneto-plasma-dynamic (MPD) drives which shoot out ions at 40,000 m/s, another technology waiting for an application for productive use.
These are just two of the biggest breakthroughs which will come out of our space elevator research and all of it can be ours for only $6 billion. In addition, there are many more small and interesting problems that building the space elevator will force scientists to undertake. Beyond the nanotechnology, which may get widespread use because of this effort, there is much more materials science work to build ribbons, support structures, housing, etc. to withstand the elements and the oxidation and the radiation from space and other new challenges. It becomes important to build systems to track (and eventually clean up) the junk floating in space which could threaten the ribbon. We will learn very much building and maintaining this big system.
The space elevator will not only make it dramatically cheaper to put a pound into space, it has the potentially to fundamentally change many things. The idea of building big rockets may become obsolete when most of the energy getting from here to there is handled by space elevators on the Earth and Moon and Mars. (Once you build the first one, subsequent ones are much cheaper to build.) Satellites are built in a particular way because they are launched at high Gs and it takes a year and $500 million to fix them. When these dynamics change and they become more disposable, it will improve the diversity and quantity of them. Space tourism and other commercial enterprises will drive most future efforts in space, and the tourism might start with a modest hotel in .1 g 14,000 km out. 3He could be used in the future for nucular reactors and it is available in very large quantities from the moon which has been collecting it from the sun. A kilo of 3He put into a nucular reactor is worth 157,480 barrels of oil. It puts into perspective our silly worries about oil when we have so many energy sources available.
This scratches the surface of the changes to our world which will occur when space becomes affordable: could even Tim Berners-Lee predict how the Internet would change our world in 1990? A great book which discusses in more detail most of what I have written is The Space Elevator by Bradley Edwards & Eric Westling, I encourage you to read it–it is more exciting than sci-fi! I sent 20 copies of this book to the White House 2 weeks ago; hopefully they haven’t gotten lost. It is currently only #86027 on Amazon.com’s list, but it must be more important to humanity’s future then that!!
We should demand our government seriously consider investing $6 billion to build us a 200 ton space elevator in 5 years. If we told ourselves it would take 50 years, we would build it in 51. If we had to build it in 5, we could build it in 5. The rabbit hole is waiting.
– UPDATE: — I have written more about how Institutional Inertia rather than glue could be what has completely blinded NASA to recognizing a transformation technology in a new post above.
– UPDATE 2: — Arthur C. Clarke and I both make recent predictions about when humanity will start work on the space elevator here. Check it out and put your thoughts in!
I tweaked the theme, put in a cool background, and have been working on learning and tweaking the CSS and other stuff. This is an amazingingly nice and polished piece of software.
