Farmers, The Committee, And Tinkerbells

Jeff Foust reports on Mark Albrecht’s diagnosis of NASA’s ills. And in comments over there, Mark Whittington once again demonstrates himself to be a tinkerbell.

[Update late evening]

Hilarious. Tinkerbell has showed up in comments here, whining about being aptly named, and cluelessly clapping her little hands to keep the useless SLS/Orion alive.

[Monday morning update]

Jeez, Mark is so bereft of the ability to understand Albrecht’s metaphor that he imagines I’m actually calling him a fairy.

23 thoughts on “Farmers, The Committee, And Tinkerbells”

  1. When I was in grad school in the late 1970’s, one faction in the grad dorm favored watching The Muppet Show whereas all the rest would leave the living room to go to someone’s room with a TV because they couldn’t stand The Muppet Show.

    The Muppet Show had a recurrent sketch for Miss Piggy, really just a vehicle for one-liner jokes traded between Jim Henson and Frank Oz, called “Pigs in Spaaaaccccceee!” (the a heavy use of radio announcer-style reverb to make it seem dramatic).

    I have made this remark before, but NASA is Amtrak in spaaaacccceee!

    Really. Now NASA is getting, what, 17 billion/year and Amtrak is getting maybe one tenth that at best, and the pro passenger train people resent my making the analogy (that Amtrak is NASA with trains?). I mean 17 billion is a big chunk of money — 170 billion over 10 years, north of half a trillion over the time of history we have been in space.

    But really, NASA is indeed Amtrak in space, that is, having the gummint in a kind of transportation business when transportation, whether it is launching freight and passengers into LEO or giving someone a quick ride, a comfortable seat, and WiFi to go from Philly to Wilmington, Delaware, should be out sourced or sub contracted or left to private businesses.

    Another reason I draw the comparison is that Amtrak has its Tinkerbells, people saying that if people were “properly informed” about trains, they would embrace their inherent goodness. Amtrak also has its Mark Whittingtons, whose remark was not so much tinkerbellish but “if we give up X, nothing will take its place.” If we give up the Wisconsin Madison-Milwaukee train/the California High-Speed Train to Nowhere/the tri-weekly (i.e. train runs not even once a day) Sunset Limited, nothing will take its place.

    What I am also saying is that the passenger train advocacy community has this point-of-view with compound interest that you critique in the space advocacy community — a constituency that fights any change tooth and nail — if they take away X, nothing will take its space.

    Amtrak in spaaaaccceeee!

    1. NASA does more than transportation services. AFAIK transportation is subcontracted to ULA or whatever. SLS is an aberration because it is a vehicle designed by the Senate with little support on technological reality. Politicians need to learn to just allocate the budget in a rough way and give mandates or missions rather than specify how the job gets done. That is the work of the engineers and technicians.

      The DoD did it much better with the EELV program where they defined some requirements and then attributed the contract to two companies which managed to create some actual vehicles. Ares was Griffin playing Von Braun, poorly, and now we have the Senate playing Von Braun. Things just do not work that way people.

      NASA still needs to be around but they got to learn to live on the new environment and give the corporations which actually do the job more slack on how they do their activities as long as they produce results. The COTS and CCDev programs are essential in enabling this sort of transition to a system where NASA purchases flights rather than micromanaging everything.

      NASA also needs to stop killing essential projects in order to protect sacred cows like the James Web Space Telescope or SLS. Killing off the exoplanet search projects was terrible. The Centennial Challenges were a good idea that produced results on a low budget and should have been kept. R&D in propulsion and ISRU should have never been curtailed. Those are going to be the major drivers in cost reductions for space activities going forward. Developing a monster rocket based on 1970s technology is not.

      The Augustine report, despite claiming the need for a heavy lift vehicle, said the vehicle would be useless if there wasn’t a budget to develop the payloads that are actually supposed to go to the Moon and whatever. That is what is going to happen anyway if things continue on this course.

  2. That’s very droll and borderline libelous, all things considered.

    Actually I think Albrecht, like a lot of space cadets, has gotten grouchy and cynical. Some, though (not naming names) have gotten downright mean.

    1. This from a guy that routinely lies about so many things you would need Dbase to keep track of them all. Add in the total lack of knowledge about the definition of words and Mark is the complete package for a propaganda writer to supply cover for the cronyism seen with SLS.

      How much do you get paid per word again for shilling for them, I forget?

  3. By the way, Paul is being silly. We already have the alternative to Amtrak. It’s called the Interstate Highway System. People who favor blowing up the current program have not offered any viable alternatives. Therefore, whether they know it or not, they favor ending American space exploration.

    1. People who favor blowing up the current program have not offered any viable alternatives.

      Just because you’re too technically and economically clueless to recognize that the alternatives that have been put forth are much more viable than SLS/Orion doesn’t mean that we haven’t put forth viable alternatives, Tinkerbell.

      1. As usual, an erudite response by the Bill Maher of space advocacy. By the way, cluelessly clapping “her” hands. You seem to be either implying something about my sexual orientation or you don’t know I am of the male gender.

        1. Ignoring the fact that you are apparently immune to sarcasm and mockery from your cluelessness, you don’t understand the difference between sexual orientation and gender, either?

          Someone needs to take the shovel away from you, Mark.

          1. Bill Maher does that so much better. But do keep trying. It is so much easier than making a logical case for your policy ideas.

          2. Ignoring the “libel” of idiotically comparing me to Bill Maher (and no, don’t expect to hear from my lawyers — who cares what Mark Whittington says), do you have any idea how abundant is the entertainment you are providing the readers of this site?

          3. I’m certainly happy to be of service. Certainly this site could use a little entertainment now and again.

    2. By the way, Paul is being silly. We already have the alternative to Amtrak. It’s called the Interstate Highway System. People who favor blowing up the current program have not offered any viable alternatives. Therefore, whether they know it or not, they favor ending American space exploration.

      But SLS is like Amtrak, and the highway system is being built by a dozen companies that aren’t building SLS. If we’d have devoted all our potential highway funding to railroads, which Eisenhower and Congress could’ve decided to do, we wouldn’t have a federal highway system, we’d have an unused rail system and a highway system built on the side by people fed up with empty promises of inexpensive and convenient train service.

      The fear that without SLS there won’t be an American space program is the same fear that got us stuck going around in circles with the Shuttle for 30 years. NASA administrators were worried about post Apollo and desperately needed to come up with something that Congress would fund, as if Congress routinely zeroes out government agencies that don’t have an upcoming giant, mega-expensive cutting-edge project that shamelessly promises to be better and cheaper than anything that has ever existed before.

      So instead of constantly innovating and obsoleting old rocket designs like they were 1940’s and 1950’s jet fighters, we built a launch system that would turn out to be a budgetary blackhole that would trap generations of managers and engineers and suck up the funds from everything else they could have accomplished.

      We can talk at length about the accomplishments of the Shuttle program, but what we can’t see are all the things that didn’t happen (that would have) if we’d have passed it up and moved on to another idea. SLS is already so expensive that it’s eating other NASA programs and spitting out the bones, and we haven’t even built a static test article yet. It doesn’t even have a payload to launch, because it ate that money, too, just in its gestation. What kind of financial monster will it be when it’s actually born?

      1. The Interstate Highway System does not provide for super heavy transports with payloads comparable to a passenger or freight train. I don’t see any buses capable of carrying 200+ passengers or trucks carrying 5,000 tons. Payloads must be divided among thousands of smaller vehicles.

        Clearly, that is not practical. Building one Walmart would require one freight train or hundreds of tractor-tractor loads of building supplies. What happens if one truckload is delayed or does not show up? Resupplying the store will require multiple trucks arriving every day — comparable to the number of vehicles arriving at ISS in a year. And then there are customers! Can you imagine hundreds of privately owned cars arriving every day? The traffic? The scheduling problems? What if there aren’t enough parking spaces? What if there’s a traffic accident?

        And USGS can’t do exploration without trains. Can you imagine if they had to depend on a fleet pickup trucks to transport its geologists around the country, instead of building a rail line to the destination?

        USGS needs to build a railroad and pick a destination. The “flexible path” which would have geologists driving all over the country is a “mission to nowhere.” USGS needs to pick one geological formation and stick to it.

        Then there’s safety. People get killed in auto accidents all the time. Trains have a 100% safety record — there hasn’t been a significant passenger train accident in years. At least, not on a US train. The people who get killed at railroad crossings don’t count, because I say they don’t count.

        There, Mark. Did I do that right?

    3. By the way, Paul is being silly. We already have the alternative to Amtrak. It’s called the Interstate Highway System. People who favor blowing up the current program have not offered any viable alternatives. Therefore, whether they know it or not, they favor ending American space exploration.

      We have the obvious alternative to SLS, commercial launch services. I wouldn’t consider it an analogue to Interstate highways, but it’s cheaper and flying now. They also have a lot more experience designing rockets than NASA does so if NASA really does need a Saturn V-class vehicle at some point, then I’d suggest the people with the better record to do the job.

      Mark, I also see that you have no answer either here or in the main story to the problem that SLS simply costs too much for what it delivers or for the available budget for space exploration and development. We’ve already seen with the Shuttle the consequences of launch vehicles that cost too much. Spending money on SLS (more accurately on SLS development since there’s a huge, expensive gap between now and a working vehicle) is not space exploration.

      Claiming that something isn’t viable or that SLS is the only option doesn’t make it so. I’ll just note in support of my argument that there are three commercial orbital vendors (ULA, SpaceX, and Orbital Sciences) in the US right now and more possible in the near future. NASA can act now rather than in a decade or more. Second, these vendors have more experience developing launch vehicles than NASA has and they have developed vehicles for far less than NASA has. Third, we have the continued failures of NASA’s history to study as well. SLS looks like a poorly thought out Constellation program (at least it doesn’t have Ares I), dictated by political fiat without even the flimsy engineering pretexts of Constellation.

      In summary, we have with SLS a program that flies ten years later or more, costs a factor of ten or more over commercial alternatives, and which will consume the space exploration budget both during development and after it is actively flying. It makes no sense to claim that US space exploration would end with the discontinuation of SLS. Instead, the discontinuation of SLS is a necessary precondition for US space exploration.

  4. So Mark, do you make any distinction between the actions of your government and yourself? Are you proud and patriotic that your tax dollars are being spent on SLS?

  5. Paul Spudis posted a response, and managed to paint himself a Tinkerbell in the last few sentences too.
    Perhaps the real issue is not whether NASA is up to the task but rather, whether we as Americans are blind to the truth, unable to recognize that by having our nation withdraw from this arena, that we are retreating from our position, thereby ceding our prosperity, leadership and greatness to other nations who do have the will and the vision to press forward.

    Oh yes, if they just woke up and saw the light ..

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