He’s At It Again

Fresh from his previous escapade into unreality, Loren Thompson has another ignorant (or perhaps he’s just lying — not sure which is worse) post at Forbes about space:

The federal government is planning to spend $19 billion on NASA’s civil space program next year, and yet the agency’s signature mission — human exploration of space — seems to be in its death throes. The Obama Administration has canceled plans it inherited to send astronauts back to the Moon, the Space Shuttle is about to retire, and the only near-term human space flight initiative on the books is a handout to rich California businessmen to update old technology. You’d think that with the nation in the midst of an identity crisis, the White House could have come up with something a little more inspiring.

Congress has stepped in to stop the administration from destroying the human space flight industrial base, but it doesn’t really have a vision of what NASA should be aiming to achieve. So here’s a vision: send humans to Mars by the early 2030s, and do it without spending any more money than NASA was planning to spend anyway. Mars is the only other earth-like planet in the known universe. It has water, it may contain life, and it could eventually sustain a human colony. By organizing the human spaceflight program with Mars in mind, NASA can develop a near-term investment and exploration agenda that gets us somewhere interesting without any additional commitment of funding. And in the process, maybe it can help America get its sense of purpose back.

Emphasis mine.

Let’s ignore the silliness about Apollo to Mars. What in the world is he talking about? Who has gotten a “handout”? If he’s referring to Elon Musk, he has been delivering specified milestones on a fixed price, at a very low cost to the taxpayer relative to most other NASA human spaceflight activities. Why is that a “handout” but billions of dollars in cost-plus payments to Lockheed Martin (among others), who fund his Lexington Institute (among others) is not? And if he is referring to Elon, who are the others (note he used the plural)? How about Boeing and CST, out of Houston? Is that a “rich California businessman”?

And what does he mean by “updating old technology”? Does mean like building rockets and capsules based on Apollo designs, and thirty-year-old Shuttle hardware, and then planning to use the horrifically expensive results for the next half century, as Mike Griffin planned with Constellation? Is he completely bereft of a sense of irony and hypocrisy?

Why does anyone take people like him seriously?

15 thoughts on “He’s At It Again”

  1. Why is that a “handout” but billions of dollars in cost-plus payments to Lockheed Martin (among others), who fund his Lexington Institute (among others) is not?

    Because like so many others he knows which side his bread is buttered on…

  2. Why does anyone…

    Because few take the time to go beyond the veneer. Because information has ‘trusted’ gatekeepers. Because people are willing to believe anybody the crowd goes along with. Because it’s easier than actual thought. Because the list goes on and on and apathy is popular for reasons I can not decipher.

  3. @Rand:

    Why does anyone take people like him seriously?

    They don’t. Thompson writes on general matters facing the country. His job isn’t to dive deeply into technical background of a particular issue, but to get people talking about whatever subject his pen happens to touch. Where he leads his audience, there are hopefully experts of some sort or another to guide them further and correct them wherever need be.

  4. @Ken:

    Because it’s easier than actual thought.

    No need to be that dismissive. The realm of knowledge is so vast it’s too much to expect anyone to be thoroughly familiar with a subject that interests them. Isn’t that why we have “gatekeepers” in the first place?

  5. “Isn’t that why we have “gatekeepers” in the first place?”

    Still one expects better from someone pontificating from a public podium

  6. So here’s a vision: send humans to Mars by the early 2030s, and do it without spending any more money than NASA was planning to spend anyway.

    A mite fanciful, but it’s a vision, dammit!

  7. You’d think that with the nation in the midst of an identity crisis, the White House could have come up with something a little more inspiring.

    Because it’s all about National Pride, not actually opening up space to economic activity and colonization.

  8. Industry. When the present decade began, the biggest rare earth mine in the world was operating in California. Rare earths are exotic materials used in everything from BlackBerrys to radars to hybrid vehicles. Today, the mine is closed and America imports all of its rare earths from China, which controls 97 percent of the global market. The U.S. has major reserves of the vital minerals, but a combination of tough environmental rules and lowball Chinese pricing drove the main domestic producer out of business.

    This could only happen in a country with no coherent strategy for maintaining a healthy industrial base. China’s government decided 25 years ago to become a key producer of rare earths, and now actively leverages its monopoly to influence the behavior of other industrial powers like Japan. As Boeing chairman W. James McNerney argued in a speech earlier this month, Washington doesn’t need to be in the business of picking winners and losers, but it can’t simply leave outcomes to the marketplace when so many other countries are actively promoting their own interests. Developing a national strategy to preserve basic industries like steel (where China now out-produces us seven-to-one), chemicals and electronics is crucial to jobs and to maintaining America as the “arsenal of democracy.”

    The same result could be obtained by lowering taxes, cutting red tape, and reining in the excesses of the eco-wackos, rather than implementing a fascist “industrial policy”.

    This article is chock full of rich fisky goodness.

  9. Inspiring? From the Obama White House? How can you be apologetic and inspiring at the same time? Well, I guess it’s inspiring to our enemies when he apologizes.

    And it seems to me, space, space exploration, NASA planning, or just science in general, are taking more of a beating under Obama than they did under Bush. With the exception of Climate Change and Social Engineering. And I forgot, there was a push for Oyster Safety and Beaver Management in the Obamnibus Spending Bill that got killed off.

    Here’s to Hoping D.C. can Change.

  10. What bothers me is that his solutions to all these problems are to return to the Republican brand of pork. The problem is the porkmindness of both parties. We have lost a lot of Free Marketeers since Regan. No one from either party’s hierarchy seems to get it yet. I hope to see enlightenment in the next two years.

  11. “…handout to rich California businessmen…”

    I stop reading whenever I hit a purely emotive argument like that. Surprised to see its kind in Forbes.

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