Clark Lindsey explains the facts of launch life to Doc Horowitz, in response to a labored defense of Ares V.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Continuing To Take Sides
I admire Neil Armstrong greatly. He’s a great man, and a great engineer. I was privileged to see him a few years ago at a rare public appearance — a commencement address, which was appropriately humble, and focused on not himself but on the graduates, as a good commencement address should be.
That said, I don’t necessarily take anything he says about modern space policy seriously. This is because a) he and I don’t necessarily share the same goals for our policy and b) it’s not at all obvious that he’s been closely following what’s going on with the agency. After his flight, almost four decades ago, he became almost a recluse, returning to Ohio to teach engineering, and offering little in the way of interviews. In any event, he decided (unwisely, in my opinion) to weigh in on the current NASA transition controversy:
Your article indicated that President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team “faces a tough early choice between extending the life of the aging space shuttle and accelerating its replacement.”
I certainly hope that isn’t accurate, in that the transition team should play no part in such decisions. While these men and women are experienced and enthusiastic space program veterans, they are neither aerospace engineers nor former program managers and cannot be sufficiently knowledgeable to make choices in the technical arena.
The transition team does have the responsibility to collect information to assist President-elect Obama in understanding the issues and decisions he will be facing. The making of decisions of such import, however, is the responsibility of the president and should be guided by the best advice from the most able and skilled experts on the subject.
I think that Professor Armstrong has the wrong take on this. No, the transition team won’t, and shouldn’t make such a decision (if for no other reason than it lacks the statutory or constitutional power to do so — its membership has no official government role, nor is it compensated). However, as he notes, they are collecting information to assist the incoming president in making such a decision, and that includes gathering “the best advice from the most able and skilled experts on the subject.” I’m curious as to why he thinks that they are not doing so. Does he think that this team will go through one exercise now, to no useful purpose, and then the president will later take the time to repeat it, this time “gathering the best advice” as opposed to whatever it is he thinks that they are currently doing? Clearly, they are gathering information, integrating it, and preparing a set of recommendations for the new president. As they should be.
But the next part shows that he has not been closely following what’s going on with NASA lately:
He should have no difficulty receiving high-quality information from NASA. Engineers are painfully honest and insist on presenting any assumptions used in their decision process. Therefore a conclusion can only be challenged when an erroneous assumption can be identified. Because this approach is somewhat unfamiliar in business and politics, its importance is often overlooked.
This is a nice, ivory-tower view of engineering and engineers, and I have no doubt that this is exactly what Professor Armstrong would do were he asked. But it is not what NASA has been doing. We have yet to see a full accounting of the sixty-day study that resulted in ESAS (including assumptions), so apparently NASA management either aren’t engineers, or they are not conforming with the good professor’s idealized notion of how they should behave.
A great deal of thought and analysis has gone into NASA’s program to return to space exploration as the principal focus of the agency. The breadth of NASA’s creative thinking was limited by the funding constraints, and compromises had to be made. Even so, the agency has fashioned a challenging but credible program to return to the moon and go on toward Mars.
How does he know this? Seriously?
Does he have access to the reports and analyses that have been denied to the rest of us? How does he know that the “compromises made” were a result of funding constraints, as opposed to political ones, and personal prejudices (or worse, conflicts of interest among the principals involved)? Is he just assuming that it’s the case, because he doesn’t want to believe otherwise about the agency that allowed him to be the first man to walk on the moon four decades ago?
And what does he mean by “credible program”? That if you put enough time and money into it, you can get it to fly? Sure. But that’s not the criterion. The criteria were supposed to be “affordable and sustainable” (not to mention supporting national security and commercial activity) and he hasn’t made the case for that (of course, he hasn’t made the case for the “credible” part, either, other than assertion).
I’d like to believe with him that NASA has the talented leadership, and has done the analyses, and has offered them up freely, with assumptions, to the transition team. But I’ve seen little evidence of it. This letter reads less like serious policy analysis (since he provides no specifics as to why he finds the program “credible”) than motherhood and wishful thinking in the service of the agency for which he worked so long and well, and with which he achieved so much.
Of course, NASA management wasted no time in making sure that everyone at the agency was aware of Professor Armstrong’s statement of support. And by sheer coincidence, the administrator has come out with a new book on his own laudatory leadership in space.
What we have here is an unseemly, pull-out-all-the-stops campaign to politically influence the incoming administration via public pressure (including pressure on agency employees via emails from the administrator’s wife). Mike Griffin should say something immediately to denounce and shut down this activity. If he does not, that in itself would be sufficient reason to replace him, were I the incoming president.
[Update a while later]
Keith Cowing is reporting that the letter was written for Armstrong by NASA. That wouldn’t be hard to believe (at least based on the wording). I think that it’s a little sad, though, that Professor Armstrong would allow his name to be used in such a way.
Dave Barry
Is not making this up this time.
Mike’s Dream Home
OK, I pledged to be nice to the NASA administrator until after Christmas. Now that it’s two days after, first let us consider his mighty fan club, including (shockingly) his adoring wife. Who would have thought?
When the petition originally went up, I wish that I’d captured a screen shot of the signatures, because some of them were a hoot. I particularly liked the second one from Marsha Ivins, that said something to the effect of “I have to suck up to keep my job.” Unfortunately, the more entertaining ones have disappeared down the memory hole, because Dr. Horowitz decided that they weren’t entirely in keeping with the intent of the exercise, once again demonstrating the fabled openness to criticism always and proudly displayed by this NASA management team.
Imagine, as an anonymous commenter over at R&S (perhaps Rocketman himself) posted in comments, the (hopefully) outgoing administrator as a housing contractor and architect:
First, take all the plans you’ve paid competing architects to devise to meet your stated needs and shred them, and decree that they will build a 6-bedroom Greek-revival mansion on a 1000sqft lot in a marshy brownfield area that you just happen to have gotten a sweetheart deal on.
Then, after decreeing the size and shape of the shell of the house and choosing a builder, mandate on said builder that the home contain all manner of luxuries, amenities, and frivolities, all of which are to come with multiply-redundant safety features and backups. Then comes the punchline: these features can’t take up any of the limited living space, can’t use any power, and can’t add to the home’s purchase or maintenance costs.
Then let your extended family members have their say. Give pushy and dramatic Cousin Marsha a kitchen and bath for every room, lest your guests die for the lack of them. Let scatterbrained Cousin Glenn redesign the basement and utilities services again and again to suit his whims, because it gives him something to do. Put Cousin Ken in charge of redesigning the entire house around the garage door and opener he already has and wants to unload on you. And put Cousin John in charge of building himself the pretty but extravagant Corinthian columns on the front and continually reimagining the interior decor.
Ignore all the while your soil geologist’s anxious whispers that the swampy lot you’ve committed to using can’t support the weight of the house you’ve decreed. There’s no foundation problem a few extra tons of concrete and rerod can’t fix, after all. Tell the county inspector that everything is hunky-dory, and call the home builder and tell him to reduce the weight of the house by deleting the smoke detectors and fire sprinklers.
To silence the critics of your DIY architectural talent, build a “demonstration” house by reusing the foundation of an abandoned tenement that only cosmetically resembles your dream palace. Use it to show off the fire escape design you’ve long since changed, and that the abandoned foundation of a different structure can support the weight of a completely different home than what you’re actually building. Dismiss criticism that the test is being staged for political reasons and to wow the mortgage lenders, and poo-poo as ignorant and uninformed any concerns that it will do nothing to allay fears about the earthquake survivability of the real thing.
Then, after blowing most of your budget on supporting the cousins in their accustomed style and paying the contractors to make unending whim-driven changes, cut the contractors’ budgets. When they complain that there is too much work and too little resources, mandate a bunch of new major changes. That’ll shut ’em up.
Continue to make fundamental changes even as the walls go up. Why not? It’s not like you have to pay for them, since everything you do is “in scope,” by definition.
And then finally, when move-in day comes in spite of your brilliant multi-degreed architectural leadership, you and your cousins can watch from the cookie-cutter ranch houses across the street as the new owners, financed up to their eyeballs and left without alternate accommodations for five years, carry in all their worldly possessions only to have the castle crumble around them and sink into the mire.
Of course by then you’ve moved on to other concerns, like being the HOA president, so you neatly avoid blame for the tragedy and expense.
Must be a descendant of Don Miguel de Grifo.
Anyway, is such a petition by a former AA in favor of his former boss proper? Well, as Frank Sietzen points out, it’s no more improper than anything else Doc Horowitz has done:
Why hasn’t anyone questioned how “Doc” got his ESMD job in the first place? Gee, let’s see, he was a senior corporate official of the company promoting a shuttle booster solution for the CLV and “presto”! Griffin chooses said design, awards a multi-billion-dollar no-bid contract to the same firm and then HIRES the same “Doc” who was promoting the idea to run that part of the agency that contracts with industry (his former employer) to build the vehicle. Had this sorry record been FEMA there would have been dueling Congressional investigations in both the House and the Senate. And now poor old “Doc” — awarded for a time a NASA consulting contract after he left NASA — has organized a web site to urge that Obama reappoint the one man in all of the federal system that has publically questioned his transition team?
“Doc” should be grateful Santa didn’t bring him a summons to testify before a federal grand jury.
I have to say that I’ve always been a little astounded at the media’s (including the space media’s) seeming lack of curiosity about what seems clearly to be a conflict of interest in the Horowitz revolving door. I guess they’re only interested in astronauts in diapers.
In response, scrooge Ferris Valyn didn’t wait until after Christmas to start a counterpetition: Ditch Mike. Unfortunately, it is tainted by the fact that the first signature on it is that of Tommy Lee Elifritz. I have to say that I’m personally unwilling to sully my name, or viewpoint, by associating it with his, despite the old saying about a stopped clock being right twice a day. And as the second anonymous signer points out, it’s unlikely that very many current (or even retired, if they’re still consulting) NASA employees or contractors are likely to sign on to it, regardless of their personal views, just as few were willing to speak ill of George Abbey publicly, even after the end was near at the beginning of the Bush administration, because the stake was not yet through the heart.
And of course, on the Horowitz petition, it’s hard to sift out the sincere but misguided supporters from the suckups, so there’s very little value to either one, other than as a demonstration of the depths to which some of those most benefiting from this programmatic disaster in the making will descend to keep the zombie plodding forward.
[Sunday morning update]
Here is another petition: Remove Mike Griffin Now. I don’t think that this part is quite right, though:
VSE Goal: Develop a new spacecraft, the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), that will start testing by 2008 and will conduct its first manned mission no later than 2014.
Griffin: Griffin cancelled the CEV and replaced it with the Orion crew capsule, which will not start flight tests until at least 2014, and will not fly operationally until at least 2015 (and there is only a 65% probability of meeting that schedule).
CEV wasn’t canceled. Orion is the new name for CEV. What was cancelled were Steidle’s original plans to provide multiple contracts and have a “fly-off” among prototype concepts (by 2006, if I recall correctly). Instead, Mike reverted to a traditional competition of cost-plus study contracts which culminated in a phase C/D award to Lockheed Martin, at which point the name was changed from CEV to “Orion.” And of course, since then, the requirements have been in continuous flux, partially driven by performance issues on the new unneeded launch system.
Carol Browner
I Am So Relieved
…to hear that the Obama transition team has cleared itself of any impropriety:
Greg Craig, the incoming White House Counsel, conducted his inquiry by taking questions to each transition staff member’s lawyer. The lawyers then went to the staff members and collected the answers. The lawyers then gave the answers to Craig.
In some cases — team Obama won’t say how many — Craig would go back to either the staff member’s attorney or the staff member directly for clarification. But it appears Craig’s direct questioning of staff was very limited.
Additionally, there was no independent effort to verify any of the information provided by the staff member or the staff member’s attorney. If, for example, a staff member’s attorney said there was no e-mail or text messaging with Blagojevich or his staff, Craig took that at face value. No one knows if there was any e-mailing or texting, by the way.
Also, the lawyers’ own words mattered to Craig. He told reporters on Tuesday’s conference call that Valerie Jarrett described Blagojevich’s suggestion he might be appointed secretary of health and human services as “ridiculous” when that subject was broached by the Illinois head of the Service Employees International Union.
How does Craig know Jarrett said the word “ridiculous”? He knows that because that’s what Jarrett’s lawyer told him. Jarrett didn’t say it to Craig. Her attorney did.
This reminds me of when Bill Clinton was fending off Juanita Broaddrick’s accusations of rape. He never denied it, but directed people to his attorney, who claimed that it never happened. Even though he had no first-hand knowledge of it. And of course, the press accepted it as a denial.
The Pelosi GTxi Commercial
Some enterprising 527 (or the RNC) needs to buy some ad time for this. Perhaps during the next Congressional hearings on bailing out the auto industry.
Smarter Now?
John Tierney wonders if Dr. Holdren learned anything from his misguided bet with Julian Simon:
Dr. Simon’s victory was not (as some Lab readers suggested) a fluke based on exceptionally lucky timing, as you can see from this Wikipedia graph showing the inflation-adjusted prices for the five metals in the bet from 1950 to 2002. (Since 2002, metal prices rose sharply for several years but have since plummeted back to familiar levels.) Prices do sometimes shoot up for natural resources, but people react by finding new sources and substitutes, and prices come back down. If you look back over the past several centuries, as Dr. Simon demonstrated in his book, “The Ultimate Resource,” you’ll see that the trend was downward long before 1950, too.
What lessons Dr. Holdren learn from that bet? The only one I’m aware of is: Don’t test your theories by betting on them. After Dr. Simon collected his winnings in 1990, he offered to make another bet not just on natural resources but also on any measure of human welfare, like life expectancy or food per capita. Once again, Dr. Simon predicted that humans would adapt to new problems (like global warming) and end up better off in the future — by any measure at any future date that Dr. Holdren or Dr. Ehrlich cared to name. They refused his offer. They did, however, go on making more gloomy predictions and calculations about the problems of sustainability, as in this 1995 essay discussing how to avert future shortages of resources.
I find this particular appointment disquieting. As one of my commenters said earlier, I’d much prefer a “science advisor” who sees technology as a solution, rather than a problem. And, again, I have no idea what the implications of this pick are for space policy.
A Good Time For A Joint?
Could a President Obama decriminalize Mary Jane? It would be a nice offset to the other damage that he’s going to do (though I wouldn’t use it even if it was legal — I had more than enough in college). And it’s not like he doesn’t (or at least didn’t at one time) have a personal interest in the issue.
But I doubt that he would want to expend the political capital on a fight with Congress over it, so I suspect that this insane war on (some) drugs will continue unabated.
Doing The Right Thing Wrong
Mike Thomas has a misguided rant over at the Orlando Sentinel, bashing NASA and its supposed desire to go to Mars (something that is hard for me to discern, based on what it’s actually doing).
There are, broadly, two classes of NASA critics: those who think that it’s doing the wrong thing, and those who think that it’s doing the thing wrong. I fall into the latter camp, but Mr. Thomas is clearly one of the former. But his position seems to be incoherent. He thinks that NASA is supposed to be doing science (as indicated by his final words), and if so, he’s correct that manned spaceflight, as currently performed, contributes very little to it. But he doesn’t seem to think that it should be engaged in space science. He (like too many) thinks that NASA’s job is to heal the planet. My biggest fear of an Obama administration (at least in terms of space policy) is that they will agree, and divert it from its original role as an agency that looks outward, to one that looks instead inward.
Whether one believes that we should be doing more about climate change or not, Mike Griffin is correct that it is not within NASA’s charter to do the heavy (or even any) lifting in that regard. It was a heartburn that I always had with things like the Ride Report, and “Mission To Planet Earth.” If these are important things to do, then set up an agency to do them, but don’t defocus and distract NASA with them. In fact, it is much more a job for NOAA. The problem is that NOAA has no history of developing satellites, and has traditionally relied on NASA to do it for them. Perhaps that ought to change.
If NASA improperly gets assigned the task of healing the planet, it is inevitable that it will make it even harder for it to properly explore and develop space, which is what it was established to do. Now frankly, given how wrongly NASA has been doing the right thing, I’m not sure that it would be all that much of a tragedy if we were to end its manned spaceflight program. But unlike Mr. Thomas, I’d rather see it starting to do it right.