23 thoughts on “Commercial Crew”

  1. I never understood why congresscritters couldn’t comprehend that by growing the pie, the more companies for them to take money from. Don’t they want more money?

    1. They want more power!

      Money is a nice to have for a pol.

      Power is life and breath!

      For that, they need employed voters in their districts that know their jobs are dependent on the incumbent Congress members they vote for.

      More companies that *do*not* depend on their district’s incumbent members do the incumbent no good at grasping for power!

      For life and breath!

  2. So, it’s a classic Washington memoir. Lots of score settling. I can hardly wait.

  3. Lori is one of the only things about the Obama Administration I can think approvingly of.

  4. Is this really what we space advocates want?

    “A spending shift toward Earth science would have strong public support, Garver predicted. On a giant screen next to the stage, she displayed a 2018 survey from the Pew Research Center. Sixty-three percent of the respondents said NASA’s top priority should be monitoring “key parts of the Earth’s climate system.” Keeping watch for dangerous asteroids came in a close second. Sending astronauts to the moon or Mars scored at the bottom.

    “We have our priorities flipped, in my view,” Garver said. “We spend less than 10% of the NASA budget on the top two [priorities] and more than 60% on the bottom two.”

    https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/former-nasa-deputy-makes-case-for-climate-focus/

    1. No, but in the future, politically, it is probably all NASA will be enabled to do. Remember NASA was founded by the politically paranoid. No politics, no NASA. Rightfully, NASA could just be folded into the geo-observation division of NOAA and the youth outreach division of the Dept. Of Education. And that would be that. Exo-Earth to be handled by private industry and research-based NGOs. The most useful part of NASA, the NTRS document data-base, to be folded into the Library of Congress.

    2. It should be noted that screed, which was also the subject of a piece in the Washington Post, came before the Biden administration adopted Artemis as it’s own, thus making deep space exploration bipartisan. Garver was attempting to put herself forward as a NASA Administrator under a Democratic president whom she assumed would deep six space exploration and turn NASA into a climate change agency. It was the latest of her political miscalculations.

        1. Read the Washington Post oped. She advocated turning NASA into a climate change agency and ending efforts, even those using the commercial sector, to explore beyond LEO. Then she denied writing what she clearly wrote after the inevitable backlash. I’m sorry, I find the woman singularly unimpressive.

          1. Yeah, that WaPo op-ed was a deal-breaker for me too. She did good work on Obama’s watch, but she’s no one you’d want to rest very much weight on going forward.

        2. Answers the question on why my High School PE teacher and coach was obsessed with push ups. I guess I should be thanking him now.

  5. You should read that Scientific America piece where Garver accused NASA of being patriarchal and parochial because Biden picked Nelson and not her as administrator. It’s a hoot.

    1. I stopped reading SciAm decades ago when they started pushing global warming nonsense. Who reads them these days?

      1. Well you can always subscribe to what I read: “Settled Science”. The on-going battle: whether to adopt this newfangled form of mechanics being promoted by some long dead judge from the United Kingdom with a penchant for executing forgers. F=mA indeed, we shall see. Lots of geometry in those scholias of his.

  6. I liked Lori when I knew her, but that was a long time ago. When she was editor of Ad Astra, in 1989, I sold her an article called “Harvesting the Near Earthers,” which is probably when the seed of the ARM mission was planted.

      1. I will certainly trust your memory better than what’s left of mine. “Harvesting the Near Earthers” was in the Nov 1989 Ad Astra. I was in the process of rebuilding my life and writing career in those long gone days. All of my artifacts are now entering their 14th year of storage, so I can’t rummage anything out, but I found a checklist of the seventy or so bylined publications for which I owned the copyright. The list shows I also had a piece in Final Frontier, maybe July 1989. I do recall FF paid 8x per word compared to AA, and I guess I thought Leondard David was editor there. Maybe not? Tony something? I don’t remember.

        I do remember Lori called me at my dayjob to talk about the article. I was IT manager for a nonprofit called Health Sciences Consortium in those days. I ran into her a few years later at some space development conference in DC, where she enthused over the idea again. I was wandering around with Don Kingbury for some reason, and remember we tried to have a chat with Alexei Leonov. The other thing I’d like to recover from that era is how I came to know Aleta Jackson. I was in L5 before the merger, but nothing seems to emerge from the fog of memory.

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