24 thoughts on “Here We Go Again”

1. Excellent news. One hopes he can now be confirmed expeditiously, but there will likely be forces in DC looking to drag that process out or even scupper it entirely.

   Assuming confirmation, I would like to see his first few acts as NASA Admin be:

   1. Making Artemis 2 an uncrewed test mission of the ECLSS and heat shield.

   2. Executing a formal unfunded Space Act Agreement with SpaceX for a Starship-based SLS-Orion substitute for delivery at the same time as HLS Starship.

   3. Announce that, per Polaris 3 plans, he will command the first crew to test this item in LEO.

   4. Reassign the Artemis 2 crew to Artemis 3 and let them pick their own ride to cis-lunar space.

   Note that, if the Starship-based SLS-Orion replacement is chosen, all four crew, including the Canuck, can walk on the Moon.

2. The Dems are feeling their oats after this election cycle. They are in no mood now to do the Trump administration any favors. That includes NASA Administrators. BTW is anyone at NASA getting paid these days?

   1. The Dems continue to win in their Blue fastnesses because all of these are bleeding population with the sensible and productive being the ones who leave. That leaves a more and more left-crazy electorate increasingly inclined to vote for grifters and psychopaths as long as they have that ‘D’ after their names. At some point, all that will be left in places like NYC will be the homeless, criminals, welfare cases and government employees. Cannibalism will ensue.

      Is anyone at NASA getting paid? Yes, some are. Is everyone at NASA getting paid? I don’t think so.

      1. Soon they’ll re-release “The Warriors” from 1979 and kids in New York won’t realize it’s a 45-year-old movie.

         1. ‘Tomorrow the world will watch in horror as its greatest city destroys itself. The movement back to harmony will be unstoppable this time.’ – Ra’s al Ghul, twenty years ago

         2. Or “Escape From New York”

            1. Indeed. Where’s Snake Plissken when you really need him?

         3. Maybe a double-bill with ‘The Wanderers’ from the same year.

            But kids in NYC will certainly know both movies are period pieces. It’s been quite awhile since there were any white street gangs in NYC. And mixed-race gangs don’t ever seem to have been a thing.

      2. The Curley effect writ large.

         https://grokipedia.com/page/James_Michael_Curley

         1. Pretty much.

            And the usual election “irregularities” of course.

            The Voting Rights Act of 1965, if I recall, authorized the sending of federal election observers – liberals from the Northeast mainly – to several states to stop-punch election chicanery in the Deep South for an extended period. We now need to recruit a cadre of conservatives from the West to do the same thing in Blue states, and especially in Blue cities.

   2. With the exception of retaking Virginia; I don’t think Dems did much more than win areas they already have major control (and embedded cheating, which includes Virginia). Confirmation is in the Senate, where Republicans are still poised to retain by at least 51 seats.

      That said, I’m more worried about the Senators in Alabama, Texas and Florida still trying to protect their pork.

      1. Yeah those were heavily Dem area that Trump did not win in 2024. BUT as usual the Dems treat this as a Blue Wave and unfortunately it has given them extra energy to resist voting for the clean CR. I’m concerned that the CR blame might now shift onto the Republicans. The SNAP and FAA impacts are starting to be felt.

         Though the SNAP issue might go away since a judge ordered Trump to pay for SNAP. Trump may just do that and that eliminates pressure on the GOP.

         1. And it turns out that the big wins of a few days ago had zero impact on the pressure the Dems were feeling.

   3. Isaacman is capable of winning over Democrats and a lot of the prosciency party already like him.

3. He’s going to push as hard for reform as is politically possible.

   Having read his full post; I agree with your statement, Rand. I think more reform is needed, but I think what Isaacman is offering goes along with “politically possible”. I’m also not surprised with his support of Duffy, because Isaacman has other ventures that need DoT approval.

   1. Isaacman’s rhetorical restraint reflects a strategic thinker picking his fights and not simply clapping back by reflex at every attack.

      We shall see what we shall see, but I’m fairly optimistic Isaacman can produce a slimmed-down NASA, stripped of its now-pervasive Not Invented Here syndrome, that can collaborate with private industry to do good science and stay entirely out of areas where private industry now, or soon will, dominate – space launch being foremost among those.

      1. Dick,
         How to you think about how Issacman’s goals for NASA align with your more specific ones?

         1. I support Isaacman’s proposal to put most of NASA’s aeronautics activity at one site. He’s been a bit cagey about what this might mean in terms of closing centers, but I think it’s fairly clear that Langley would be on the chopping block – as it should be.

            I also support his notions about flattening the NASA bureaucracy. IMHO, any job title that includes both of the words “deputy” and “assistant” should be stricken from the NASA table of organization.

            Expanding NASA efforts beyond the token-ish in terms of lunar and Mars settlement infrastructure development – especially power systems – would be a solid plus.

            Isaacman’s preference for nuclear-electric propulsion development – as opposed to nuclear-thermal – is also defensible – especially for use with unmanned outer Solar System probes. I’m less sanguine it would find much use for moving people around in space, but I’m willing to support repurposing Gateway elements as part of some Nautilus X-type thingy as a development experiment, though my support for such falls well short of wild enthusiasm. And such support is contingent upon ending the idea of anything Gateway-ish in lunar orbit, particularly NRHO.

            NASA has some role to play in the Commercial LEO transition, but that role is not to be in charge in any substantive way as is the case now with ISS. The idea of cutting NASA’s financial involvement in manned LEO activity to perhaps one billion dollars per year, instead of the current three billion, seems about right. But NASA cannot reasonably continue to exercise just as much control as at present when its contribution is cut by 2/3. Isaacman seems well-suited to supervise this transition – especially keeping the old ISS hands from overstepping.

            The idea of tapping universities as substantial funding sources for a new, expanded, but less expensive program of unmanned probe endeavors is a very good one. But one should also acknowledge that doing such a thing will diminish the role of JPL, APL and Goddard in unmanned space probes. If universities are footing much of the bill, they will want the principal investigators to be their own people and not NASA staffers.

            I’m a good bit more dubious of Isaacman’s apparent calls for eventual spacecraft certification by NASA. Advances in space launch technology, manned and otherwise, has been the exclusive province of the private sector for more than two decades. NASA’s lack-of-talent situation anent certification is not, perhaps, quite so severe as that of the FAA anent aircraft, but we should acknowledge that all of the best knowledge of manned spacecraft construction and operation now resides in the private sector and will continue to do so going forward.

            Another dubious proposition is the “Starfleet Academy” idea. In future, most people who go into space will be employees of private sector organizations. NASA may have a handful of astronauts doing research on commercial LEO stations and at the notional Moon Base Alpha or on Mars, but the vast majority of the people in both places will likely have SpaceX, Blue Origin or other space company patches on their coveralls, not NASA ones. Any “Starfleet Academy” designed to feed such demand would be better ginned up as a private sector effort. The aeronautical model, I suppose, would be Embry-Riddle University.

            1. NASA has overseen the construction of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and Orion, and had at least some role in Crew Dragon and Starliner. Not many are still at NASA from the first four development projects, and Orion is not really something to emulate.

               That sparse example set does not compare favorably to the vast aircraft construction dataset available to the FAA, founded in 1958, or the prior Civil Aeronautics Board (1934), and the Aeronautical Branch of the Commerce Department, from 1926, which could look at the history of thousands of different aircraft types.

               And the average commercial aircraft will have two or more prototypes fly 2,000 to 5,000 hours prior to certification. There’s just no way to do that with a spacecraft, especially if orbital time doesn’t count because it’s just floating around doing nothing. Basically, no spacecraft has ever flown enough missions to remotely meet aircraft certification requirements.

            2. I entirely agree that there is no way any government agency can usefully “certify” manned spacecraft. And no need to do so either.

               In fact it’s problematic how much good the current elaborate FAA certification process does for civil aircraft anyway. “Certified” civil aircraft still crash. About half of such crashes are due to pilot error – something manned spacecraft are not subject to as they are autonomous in operation.

               Pilot error accounts for an even larger fraction of general aviation crashes, but it will likely be the next century or beyond before there are any space-going equivalents of general aviation aircraft, never mind home-builts.

               The other half of civil air crashes are caused by many other things with inadequate or damaging maintenance practices or derelictions constituting a fairly large fraction of the total. So long as spacecraft are operated and maintained by their builders, that shouldn’t be a problem.

               Many of the remaining crashes are caused by things like adverse weather, bird strikes, volcanic ash ingestion and other terrestrial environmental hazards that have no analogs in spaceflight.

               There is a small residuum of air crashes that turn out to be due to design issues not caught by certification processes. These generally are caught – after the fact – by NTSB investigators. It is this and not certification, that has driven the long-term decline in aviation accidents.

               The government simply has no way of magically knowing what is safe and what is not anent spacecraft. And a lot of what it does think about such matters is based on tradition and something fairly close to superstition. The best example of this would be the all the cows birthed by old-school aerospace pearl-clutchers when SpaceX wanted to put crews into Dragon 2 before propellant loading commenced. Horrors!

               Government needs to acknowledge its fundamental inability to do certain things and resist the temptation to get too far out over its skis.

            3. About all I could see is some general engineering guidelines, such as require double or triple redundancies for X, Y, or Z, some particular margin on ablative heat shields, or an ability to withstand a certain amount of tile loss, and probably some kind of reserves for power and life support. And of course some common sense engineering approaches to aspects like hatches and latches and windows.

               Plus perhaps a way to ensure nobody is doing a repeat of OceanGate’s submersible by avoiding accepted standards and sound engineering practice.

            4. That all sounds at least provisionally reasonable. As always with government diktats, the devil would be in the details. But, yes, starting with a general admonition not to be stupid and/or obtuse would certainly not go amiss. Had Boeing done so, for example, it could have saved itself much subsequent travail anent MCAS and the 737 MAX.

               OceanGate is a reasonable example also, though it being substantially a one-man show and a start-up makes the eventual denouement less surprising. And at least the principal author of said tragedy was also among the victims.

               But Boeing was responsible for a much higher body count and was an organization with decades of prior directly relevant experience. In short, it should very much have known better than to do what it did.

4. If they really want to test the new AVCOAT formula but can’t afford the time/cost of an SLS/Orion, why not take a cargo Dragon, make a shield from the same formula and have a FH fling it on a elliptical orbit. Use the upper stage to burn hard on the way back and simulate lunar return velocity.

   You won’t need risk people, can’t likely get away for a short time without long range comms and deep space hardened electronics since it’s only going out a few thousand miles.

   It’s not the same but should be similar enough to get whether the new formula is gong to behave.

   1. I suggested pretty much the same thing over at Behind the Black – in addition to making Artemis 2 an unmanned test of the current Avcoat and the new EDL profile. I also suggested that a contingency heat shield of the current formula be built for the Artemis 3 Orion in case the Artemis 2 test proves satisfactory but the test of the new formula, for whatever reason, does not.

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