In Michigan:
What is it with liberals and gun rights? Liberals simply cannot find an individual right to carry in the U.S. Constitution, even though it is explicitly cited in amendments that specifically address only individual rights, but can find a right to abortion which is somehow invisibly inserted somewhere in the same document.
It’s partly because they’re not really liberals.
This WaPo piece by Joel Achenbach has something missing:
The panel will give the administration a menu of options that includes some that require a boost in funding for human spaceflight, which currently costs a little less than $10 billion a year, including the shuttle, the station and the Constellation program. Those options will include variations of a lunar program — the committee appears to prefer to see astronauts making sorties to various locations on the moon rather than concentrating on a single outpost at the moon’s pole, which is the current plan.
The committee is clearly most animated by what it calls the “Deep Space” option, a strategy that emphasizes getting astronauts far beyond low Earth orbit but not necessarily plunking them down on alien worlds. Instead, the Deep Space strategy would send them to near-Earth asteroids and to gravitationally significant points in space, known as Lagrange points, that are beyond the Earth’s protective magnetosphere.
Astronauts might even go all the way to Phobos, a tiny moon of Mars, where the spaceship wouldn’t land so much as rendezvous, in the same way a spacecraft docks at the International Space Station. That might seem a long way to go without touching down on the planet below. But the Deep Space option steers clear of “gravity wells,” which is to say the surface of any planet or large moon. The energy requirements of going up and down those steep gravity hills are so great that it would take many heavy-lift rocket ships to carry supplies and fuel on a mission to the Martian surface. A human landing on Mars is presently beyond NASA’s reach under any reasonable budgetary scenario, the committee has determined.
Note that there is absolutely no discussion of refueling, though that was a key feature of several of the Augustine options. The piece seems to be entirely focused (as the press tends to do, in its simplistic reporting) on destinations, and their various attributes, desirable or otherwise. This notion of a “long way to go without touching down on the planet below” seems to be an artifact of limited imagination.
First of all, once you’re at Phobos, if you send the right equipment, you might in fact be able manufacture the propellant needed to descend to the surface, manufacture propellant there, and come back up. The additional mass needed to do this would be trivial, compared to the IMLEO (initial mass in low earth orbit) required to do a Mars landing staged from earth. All it would take is a refuelable lander, and the equipment necessary to process the asteroid (which is what Phobos or Deimos are, other than their location).
But beyond that, what’s wrong with Phobos? I think that John Logsdon’s attitude is blinkered as well (not that that would be anything new):
Any strategy going forward must cope with the obvious problem that the United States has already visited the moon, and the solar system offers earthlings few other appealing places to go that are anywhere close at hand. Logsdon said he wasn’t sure that the Deep Space option, with its emphasis on “flybys” rather than landings, would be easy to sell to the public.
“I wonder myself if just flying around and not landing anywhere would be very attractive,” he said.
This from a guy who has never expressed any interest or desire to go himself, but thinks he knows what people want from a space program. First of all, you aren’t “not landing anywhere.” You are landing on frickin’ Phobos. The fact that it’s a lot easier than having to descend into a gravity well doesn’t make it less interesting. Yes, obviously, most people would rather walk on Mars, but (at least in NASA’s plans) most people aren’t going to be able to do any of these things. And on such a huge planet, even if someone lands on Mars, will it be the most interesting part of Mars? Not initially. Armstrong and Aldrin landed in the Sea of Tranquility not for any particular points of interest, but because it was the biggest flattest mare they knew of on the near side. It’s not like the first Mars explorers are going to climb Olympus Mons.
Seeing the earth from ISS, through glass and with their own eyes, unfiltered by electronics, is the most fascinating thing that astronauts there do. Why would we think that looking at Mars from Phobos would be of any less interest?
While I’m not that big on the voyeurism inherent in the NASA human spaceflight program as currently executed, I would think that having humans orbiting the Red Planet, and reporting back their experiences in their own words, would be pretty damned exciting (though I’d hope that given how picky they can be about astronaut selection, one of the criteria they would use was communications ability and articulateness, and even poetic ability — a lot of astronauts are good at this, but many aren’t, and when they are, it seems to be accidental, e.g., Mike Collins). There is no reason that you should have to descend into a deep gravity well to make deep space exploration exciting, and I tire of the notion that there is.
He was on the Newshour last night. You can listen here. It’s nice to hear him making the airmail analogy for providing commercial space markets.
[Update a few minutes later]
I’m listening to the Jeff Hoffman interview, and he’s using the same analogy. It would be nice to get this meme into the main stream.
…isn’t getting much love in comments over at Space Transport News. At least not the kind that its supporters would like to see:
Perhaps NASA should keep the Ares I-X in storage until the 4th of July next year. I imagine the flaming propellant debris cloud would be pretty cool to watch.
Posted by Neil H. at 08/15/09 12:28:554th of July is too long to wait. I vote for New Years fireworks spectacular.
Posted by john hare at 08/15/09 13:02:52How about Labor Day, send Summer out with a bang.
Posted by anonymous at 08/15/09 13:16:56
This “test,” which isn’t testing actual flight hardware, has cost (so far) a third of a billion dollars. That’s about the same as the estimate for the launch escape system for the Dragon. Sometimes it seems that people who advocate more money for NASA seem to have no concept of cost and value.
A good wrap up over at the Orlando Sentinel:
For NASA allies on Capitol Hill, news that the agency does not have enough money to do what it wants is not so shocking. For years, members of congressional science committees have complained about underfunding.
But in a time of enormous budget deficits, a major boost is seen as unlikely.
“NASA is getting $18 billion a year. That’s more than all the other [space] agencies in the world combined. It’s very difficult to make the argument for more money,” said Vincent Sabathier, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Sabathier said NASA’s best hope lies in giving a greater role to its international partners to develop key components of an exploration system, such as using a French rocket to launch a U.S. capsule.
One point that people don’t understand, though, is that it isn’t a budget problem per se. It is a budget problem in the context of the politics. As I said over at Space Politics:
It is disheartening — but not surprising — to read that the Augustine Commission doesn’t see any way the current NASA budget can get us back to the Moon or to any of the spectacular alternatives that have been contemplated in anything like a reasonable time frame.
Actually, it’s not that the NASA budget can’t do it — it’s that NASA can’t do it with that budget, given its political constraints. Certainly it could be done for that amount of money, or even a lot less.
A long as we have a political requirement to maintain thousands of jobs at KSC and Marshall and Houston, it’s going to be hard to reduce costs. That’s a point that needs to be made strongly in the panel’s report. If the politicians want to shut down human spaceflight, or dramatically increase the budget, we should at least be clear on why those are the two options — it’s not because it is as intrinsically expensive as NASA always makes it. By the time Dragon is flying with crew, Elon will have spent far less than a billion dollars, a tiny percentage of what NASA plans to spend on Orion and Ares I. And the difference in size doesn’t explain the difference in cost. What does explain it is that he’s spending his own money, and his primary focus is on developing space hardware that closes a business case, not “creating or saving” (to use the administration’s wonderfully nebulous criterion) “jobs.”
The pace of “stimulus” spending has plummeted. Good time to shut off the spigot entirely, but it probably won’t happen until we at least restore some sanity to the Hill next year.
Meanwhile, cap and trade appears to be dead in the Senate for this year (and let’s hope forever). This is bad news, of course, for the Blue Dogs in the House who Pelosi strong armed into voting for it. They made a politically painful vote against their constituents’ wishes with nothing to show for it. Let’s hope that it turns her from Speaker Pelosi to Minority Leader Pelosi next year (if not dumping her from the leadership altogether).
And another sign that the people are waking from their trance — a clear majority of likely voters now say that no health-care bill is better than anything resembling this bill:
This does not mean that most voters are opposed to health care reform. But it does highlight the level of concern about the specific proposals that Congressional Democrats have approved in a series of Committees. To this point, there has been no Republican support for the legislative effort although the Senate Finance Committee is still attempting to seek a bi-partisan solution.
Not surprisingly, there is a huge partisan divide on this issue. Sixty percent (60%) of Democrats say passing the legislation in Congress would be the best course of action. However, 80% of Republicans take the opposite view. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 23% would like the Congressional reform to pass while 66% would rather the legislators take no action.
Don’t just do something — stand there!
It’s partly because of this:
One reason is skepticism about Congress itself. By a two-to-one margin, voters believe that no matter how bad things are Congress could always make it worse.
Yup. Michael Barone expands on where the Democrats went wrong:
…the Democrats have a problem here. The party’s leadership currently tilts heavily to the liberal side. Barack Obama is from the university community of Hyde Park in Chicago. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is from San Francisco, and important House committee chairmen are from similar “gentry urban” locales — Henry Waxman from the West Side of Los Angeles, Charles Rangel from a district that includes not only Harlem but much of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Barney Frank from Newton, Mass., next door to Boston.
Of the 21 top leadership members and chairmen, five come from districts carried by John McCain, but the average vote in the other 16 districts was 71 percent to 27 percent for Obama.
All these Democratic leaders understand that their home turf tilts far left of the rest of the nation. But a politician’s political base is ultimately his or her reality principle. Moreover, most of these leaders — though Obama obfuscated this in his campaign — have strong, long-held convictions that are well on the left of the American political spectrum.
These are the people — the House leaders more than Obama, surprisingly — who have shaped the Democrats’ stimulus package, cap-and-trade legislation and health-care bills. The rules of the House allow a skillful leader like Pelosi to jam legislation through on the floor, although she’s had more trouble than expected on health care. But their policies have been meeting resistance from the three-quarters of Americans who don’t describe themselves as liberals.
The leftists were deluding themselves when they saw the November election as a mandate for socialism. Most of the independents who voted for Democrats were voting against Republicans, and many of the people who voted for Barack Obama were just voting for generic “change” without paying much attention to what kind of change was being promised. Now that they see what it actually means, they’re in revolt. And coming up with better commercials isn’t going to get the dog to eat the dog food when it tastes like crap.
Finally, a bonus: If Sarah Palin is so stupid, and Barack Obama so brilliant, how did she win the argument?
One can hardly deny that Palin’s reference to “death panels” was inflammatory. But another way of putting that is that it was vivid and attention-getting. Level-headed liberal commentators who favor more government in health care, including Slate’s Mickey Kaus and the Washington Post’s Charles Lane, have argued that the end-of-life provision in the bill is problematic–acknowledging in effect (and, in Kaus’s case, in so many words) that Palin had a point.
If you believe the media, Sarah Palin is a mediocre intellect, if even that, while President Obama is brilliant. So how did she manage to best him in this debate? Part of the explanation is that disdain for Palin reflects intellectual snobbery more than actual intellect. Still, Obama’s critics, in contrast with Palin’s, do not deny the president’s intellectual aptitude. Intelligence, however, does not make one immune from hubris.
It’s also because he doesn’t have good arguments. All that he has is charisma, and people are starting to see through the lies and the fraud. No wonder the markets are cheering.
[All collected via Instapundit]
[Early afternoon update]
The telecoms apparently don’t want to be stimulated:
With today the deadline to apply for $4.7 billion in broadband grants, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast won’t be going for the stimulus money, sources close to the companies said.
Their reasons are varied. All three say they have enough cash to upgrade and expand their broadband networks on their own. Some say the grant money could draw unwanted scrutiny of their business practices and compensation programs, as seen with automakers and banks that got government bailouts.
And privately, some complain about the conditions attached to the money, including a net-neutrality rule they say would prevent them from managing traffic on their networks in the way they want.
“We are concerned that some new mandates seem to go well beyond current laws and FCC rules, and may lead to the kind of continuing uncertainty and delay that is antithetical to the president’s primary goals of economic stimulus and job creation,” said Walter McCormick, president of USTelecom, a trade group that represents companies including AT&T and Verizon.
Emphasis mine. And of course, it’s not at all antithetical to his true goal of giving the government ever more power over the private economy.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Andy McCarthy has related thoughts:
Obama has never been as popular as advertised — not even as personally popular (his policies have always been far less popular than his person). It is worth remembering, as I’ve noted before, that even with a Republican candidate who inspired little enthusiasm among conservatives, almost 60 million Americans voted against Obama. That’s more than voted for every winning presidential candidate in our history except Bush ’04. The president has gotten by to this point on the bipartisan goodwill almost every new president gets and a media that has projected him as wildly popular — appearances being crucial in politics. Given that the president is a fierce partisan extremist and that picture of plenary enthusiasm for him was an illusion, that bubble wasn’t likely to last very long, and now it’s been punctured by an issue about which people care deeply. In those straits, a clever communication strategy is not going to solve the problem. It can’t change the substance of what he’s trying to sell.
Bill Clinton recovered from this problem (after he lost the Congress) by “triangulating” and moving to the center. I don’t think that Barack Obama is capable of doing that, despite his pretense of being a moderate — he’s too much of a knee-jerk statist. And the people are wising up to the fraud (nine months too late).
…raised on KGB propaganda:
From his communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis to the unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, Barack Obama has always gravitated towards people holding radical leftist views akin to those of Zelaya. He eagerly promoted leftist ideology as an ACORN activist and later when he taught and developed theories that opposed the American system of individual liberties in favor of unsustainable group entitlements at the expense of producers — theories that advocated placing the people under the controlling “care” of the state.
And since such views are part of the ideological template that vilifies America and lionizes its enemies, Obama’s instinctive reaction was to back Zelaya and throw a lifeline to Ahmadinejad.
Like John Kerry at the Senate hearings, President Obama may be acting in good faith, but his processing of reality is just as impaired by the same “metaphorical deformation.” As a result, the leader of the free world strays across the frontlines and joins the Marxist leaders Hugo Chavez, Raul Castro, Evo Morales, and Daniel Ortega, at least two of whom — Castro and Ortega — were committed Soviet clients.
It explains much.
This is astroturfing.
And hilarious. And more signs of their desperation.
But they won’t be well dressed, so I guess they have that going for them.
[Evening update]
More thoughts on astroturfing, and hypocrisy, from Jesse Walker. This part seems a little unfair, though:
It’s entertaining to watch the same people who spent the Bush years smearing the antiwar movement as “on the other side” suddenly rediscovering the virtues of noisy protest.
I can’t speak for others, but I never called antiwar people, per se, on the other side. I reserved that term for people who wore kaffiyehs, marched with Palestinian flags, said that they supported the troops when they shot their officers, and called people in Iraq killing US troops their version of the Minutemen.
Just sayin’.
[Update a few minutes later]
Megan McArdle has some thoughts, from experience:
Have I mentioned recently that I hate PIRG? Well, I hate PIRG with the kind of blackhearted distilled rage that normally characterizes the breakup of a thirty year marriage. They, and their whole canvassing operation, are a vile beast that subsists on dishonor, greed, and the rapidly disintegrating idealism of impressionable young people.
But the LA Times piece makes it sound like the Obama administration, or some other wing of the Democratic party, is hiring these volunteers. It is, I suppose, possible, but it’s not the most likely supposition. PIRGs love national health care. So do most of the other groups they work with. Given that their canvassing operation is the fundraising arm of half the left-wing groups in this country, they’re the obvious people to hire if you want to take your message to the streets. I’m sure there are loads of perfectly legitimate groups out there with money to spare and a heartfelt desire to push national health care reform for its own sake.
Whether or not the administration is involved, it’s true, unadulterated astroturf. And really, it’s all part of the collectivist hive. The administration doesn’t have to orchestrate it, because it can count on its fellow travelers.
And yes, I know exactly the connotations with which the phrase “fellow travelers” is fraught. They are intended.
Ms. McCain’s ideas are neither new nor exciting. In fact, if you took Nelson Rockefeller’s speech to the GOP in 1964 when Barry Goldwater was nominated, toned down the language so a whiny teenager would understand it, inserted a few pointless digs at other peoples’ appearance/online fan base, one or two lines of bizarre biker fetishization, and peppered it with logical fallacies and non sequiturs, you’d have the makings of a pretty standard Meghan McCain column. In fact, if you took the former self-described “conservative” and two-time Adlai Stevenson supporter Peter Viereck’s thoughts on Joseph McCarthy and replaced the name “McCarthy” with the name of any socially conservative Republican politician/commentator, and replaced the terms “communists” and “reds” with the word “gays” or “bikers,” you’d also have the makings of a pretty standard Meghan McCain column. Both of these people ended up lost on the ash heap of failed Republican political figures, a destiny which Ms. McCain herself is destined for if she keeps on offering unsolicited advice.
What a ditz. But it’s sort of like shooting a whale in a barrel.
…from Clark Lindsey. I have to say that Sally Ride has risen considerably in my esteem in the past couple months. And I’m a little disappointed, but not shocked that Bo Bejmuk (with whom I worked at Rockwell) doesn’t quite seem to get it. Operational costs are key. NASA simply can’t expect to just have money shoved at them.
[Update a few minutes later]
Lindsey versus Coppinger. It’s quite the beat down.
I was going to respond, but haven’t had the time. I read Rob’s stuff, and sometimes I just shake my head. He has an apparently massive capability to delude himself on both the politics and the economics. He’s been whistling past Ares I’s graveyard for months.