The answer is not always obvious during the design phase. Look at some of the great engineering designs of history: the 1911A1 .45 pistol, the C-47 aircraft, the Model T, the Singer sewing machine, and many others. Only time demonstrated how truly remarkable these concepts were, many other seemingly adequate competitors simply didn’t hold up over time, in spite of better performance up front.

These designs do seem to have certain things in common: such as simplicity of construction and use and easy modifiability and adaptability to changing conditions.

But it isn’t always apparent ahead of time if the machine you are designing has those properties, only long use will reveal them.

This is why we pay engineers big bucks. Any jerk can design a machine to do a job efficiently. The trick is to make it so there aren’t any gotchas, or at least not any easily unfixable ones, in the concept.

And then came along the ISS, a different story. There was a huge outcry over the costs and what else could not be done. The decision was a political one made by Reagan, who wanted to outdo Mir. And to give the Shuttle a legitimate mission. NASA and the engineers would do anything for which they had the money, and Reagan got them the money for ISS.

And everyone knew that much would be sacrificed for a dubious benefit. The present situation was not an unforeseen consequence. It was an inevitable result with responsible people protesting all the way.

My point (never clearly stated in my original essay!) was that even the best scientific minds can misjudge the moment, and make compromises and irrevocable decisions they shouldn’t. Technical rigor, even brilliance, is not immune to the judgements of history, and no one can predict future events which might make their best plans come to naught. This is why we need historians, and why even scientists should study history.

In retrospect, both the Carte du Ciel and the US space program produced useful, even magnificent achievements, but both were wasteful and ill-considered–in the eyes of the future historian. Those men did the best they could with what they had available, and what they knew at the time. When your’re working on the frontier, it is to be expected.

It might be interesting to study what effect the psychology of our space pioneers might have played in this history. The US program arose from the obssesion of men like von Braun and Ley, steeped in an adolescent dream of going to space, of Colliers articles and science fiction pulp novels and the British Interplanetary Society. These were the men, in Germany, the US and USSR, the children of Oberth, Goddard and Tsiolkovsky, who conned their governments into building rockets for national prestige and defense. It never was about systematic exploration and practical results, this was a truly visionary quest, boys playing spaceman. I know, I was one of them.

But even though it might be fashionable now to laugh at those wild-eyed dreamers, I don’t think the space capabilty we have now would ever have existed without them. It would all be military, orbital surveillance and Comsats, at best. We all dream of commercial involvement in space, but that would never have gone beyond space tourism and mortuary services. It is not capitalism that will take us to space, it will be capitalists who want to go there. The earth observation platforms, the planetary probes, the space observatories, were fantastic successes, and more than make up for the disappointments of manned space flight. Still, going there is why we are in this business. We can never forget that. There must be a manned component to the space program to keep that dream alive.

The Carte du Ciel may have never fulfilled its promise, but it wasn’t a waste of time. Useful scientific work was done, and it showed science was capable of carrying out an international, long-term effort, long before the IGY. I think the Shuttle and ISS will be even more successful, in the long run, when judged by future historians, even if their implied future of solar system colonization never fully materializes.

Today, the hyper-precise results of our space-born astrometric programs like TYCO and Hipparcos are being compared to the old Carte du Ciel positions and knowledge unobtainable in any other way is being extracted from that union. Those men, and our own mid-twentieth century space groupies, have nothing to be ashamed about.

If we never do conquer space, it will not be their fault. It will be ours.

There never will be another era such as Apollo, Shuttle and ISS. Mars, someday, will be a collaboration of directed economies which will be able to divert the wealth necessary, not the US or at least not the US as a major player.

Kinda like French astronomy.