OK, one more space policy post, then I have to get back to paying work.

The Economist is one of the best magazines (excuse me, newspapers, as they call it Across The Pond) in the world (which unfortunately is kind of like saying they’re the smartest animal in the barnyard), but I’ve noticed that they’ve been going downhill lately, particularly in space policy matters. This week’s issue has a leader on NASA, entitled “Too Farsighted.” (Subscribers only, so I don’t bother with the link.) It seemed utterly schizophrenic to me, though it came out all right in the end.

Lucky Transterrestrial readers will get to read it anyway, even if they’re not subscribers, because I’ll stretch fair use to transcribe it here, and for lagniappe, add an additional slight fisking, but only as needed.

The Dangers Of Too Much Vision

Earlier this year, Tom Delay, a Republican congressman from Texas, accused NASA, America’s space agency, of having a “lack of vision.” He is not the first person to make this criticism and he certainly won’t be the last. But what such critics actually mean is not that the agency has no vision–but that they happen to disagree with the one that it has. In the case of Mr. Delay, his expressed dismay at the “anaemic” financing available for human spaceflight was more of a call of “Houston, we have a funding problem.”

So far, so good. No disagreement.

For what it’s worth, Mr. Delay, who is not only a “Texas congressman,” but a congressman who has many constituents who work for Johnson Space Center, just outside of Houston, is also the new Majority Leader of the House of Representatives.

Such accusations should not sting NASA, because they could not be more wrong. For one thing the agency already spends the lion’s share of its $15B annual budget on human space-flight.

Here is where they start to go off the track. How does spending billions of dollars on “human space-flight” equate to “vision”? To me, all it means is that they are spending billions of dollars in Representative Delay’s (and others’) congressional districts. There’s nothing particularly “visionary” about it per se.

For another, if there is one thing that sums up what NASA has suffered from over the past three decades, it is too much vision, not too little.

Too much vision? TOO MUCH VISION?

What have the Economist’s editors been smoking?

Let’s see what they think is evidence of “too much vision.”

And the symptoms of this are most visible in the bloated, late, over-budget and largely useless human space-flight projects that it has been pursuing since the Apollo programme.

So, their contention is that bloated bureaucracy is evidence of an overabundance of vision? On what planet?

Next, they attempt to buttress their bizarre thesis, but instead continue to undermine it.

Vision Express

After men landed on the moon, NASA needed to find something else to do, so it decided to try to put men on Mars. But Nixon turned down this grand vision.

Let me get this straight.

NASA needed something to do, so it decided to try to put men on Mars.

This is what the Economist calls a “grand vision”?

Hint: “Grand visions” have much loftier goals than satisfying the “need for something to do.” The fact that NASA chose Mars had nothing to do with vision. It had everything to do with the fact that it was a space agency, so it had to put forth something plausibly related to that portfolio.

Had NASA instead been the Department of Agriculture, its “grand vision” would have been to put inspectors in every stockyard to look for foot and mouth disease being promulgated by terrorists.

Just as a little primer for the Economist editorialists, here are some “grand visions.”

• Reduce the cost of access to space so that even people who write leaders for the Economist can go.
• Open up the Universe to the expansion of life and consciousness, bringing its potential to full flower, and enabling it to come to know Itself.
• Usher in a new era of extraterrestrial resources that will bring unlimited, environmentally-friendly prosperity to the entire planet, and to those living beyond it.

Those are “grand visions.”

When’s the last time you heard anyone from NASA proposing anything like that?

[Boy, those crickets are loud.]

After a brief respite, to allow a slight reduction in blood pressure at the cluelessness (at least so far) of this leader, let us go on.

When we last left our intrepid but dumbfounded editorialists, they had just related that the evil Nixon had just nixed NASA’s “grand vision.”

And so, according to Roger Pielke, director of the Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the agency simply broke the mission into three more easily sellable parts: the shuttle, the space station, and then mars. It was then left in the impossible position of having to justify each step on its own merits alone. This led to both the overselling of the shuttle and to the thin veneer of “science” that has been arranged around the space station program.

As I said, the piece is schizo. This part is actually correct, and the source of much of NASA’s problem. They have indeed been focused on Men to Mars for decades, though in a closet way, and not sufficiently so to satisfy those whose focus is, prematurely, on the Red Planet. My dispute with this thesis is that it was a fault of “vision.”

I believe that it is due instead to an appalling lack of it, a thesis in which (to the degree that I understand his complaint) I am in concurrence with Mr. Delay.

It is true that science can be done in the space station. but science can also be done dressed in a clown suit atop a large Ferris wheel. The argument ought to be over where is the best place for it.

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!

The argument ought to be about whether or not science is the, or even a, justification for space activities. It’s always assumed that it is, for no good reason, and this unthinking and unexamined assumption is one of the things that allows NASA to get away with so much of its nonsense. The Economist fell into exactly the same trap.

They go on to expand on this theme of what kind of science can be done, and isn’t necessarily done, on a space station, in a few sentences, but I see no sense in repeating it, since it’s not really relevant to the real point or my interests, and if I avoid retyping the entire thing, I might not get sued by them.

Let’s just skip to the next graf.

The only good reason for NASA to be involved in human space-flight is to lay the ground for opening up space for everybody. It takes a vast leap of imagination to detect this reason in NASA’s present strategy.

[Thrusting fist up into the air, vigourously (note British spelling in honor of the authors, or at least the publishers…)]

YESSS!

The first sensible thing they’ve said in the entire piece, which is one of the things that makes it so disjointed and incoherent.

Let’s see where they go with this.

Fleeting visits to the moon (or, one day, to Mars) would turn the agency into little more than an elite travel agent. But for decades there has been a huge pent-up demand for flights into space. Although the private sector is finally making some progress toward this, NASA should have been there years ago. What is still needed is research and development on an economical and safe space transport for the public at large. Space, like the Wild West, can be truly opened up only by the private sector. NASA’s central goal in human space flight should be to make that possible.

Amazing. They actually get it, despite all that nonsense at the beginning about “too much vision.” You’d almost think they’d been reading my blog…

It reminds me of one of my former .sigs on Usenet.

“NASA’s mission is not to land a man on Mars. NASA’s mission is to make it possible for the National Geographic Society to land a man on Mars.”

The final paragraph is a good one, except for the part about a “science-based approach.” Guy’s, it ain’t “rocket science” any more.

All it takes is rocket engineering. But good rocket engineering.

Until NASA swaps its destination-driven thinking for a science-based approach focused on such objectives, the post-1960 generation that has grown up hoping to travel or even live in space will continue to feel betrayed. Several years ago, an organisation called the Space Frontier Foundation observed bitterly: “Thirty-six years after sending John Glenn into orbit, NASA has finally achieved the capability to send John Glenn into orbit.” NASA must find a more practical reason for the human space-flight programme. Sending people to eat all those soya beans cannot be it.

Bravo.