Category Archives: Space History

Philosophy, Social Commentary, Space History

The Burden Of Things

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A post from Lileks with which I can strongly identify:

…what of the objects? You know, the things to which you apply Meaning simply by owning them for a while? That’s another issue. You have to realize that the meaning changes when you no long own them, which is a kind way of saying “it’s wiped clean when you die, mate.” There are some things whose previous meaning I can infer; my Grandma had a little metal container for pins, with 1893 Columbian Exposition engraved on the cover. It was regarded as junk, I guess, but my mom kept it, and then it passed to me. It’s possible my great-grandfather went. He got out of town from time to time. The fact that it sat on her dresser for seven decades was enough to infuse it with meaning, but that’ll be lost after me; daughter didn’t know her, never saw the farm, never saw the sleek 30s Sears bedroom-set dresser on which it sat. Daughter may see a corner of that dresser in an old photo, because I inherited it. But that’s the end of the chain – after that, it’s a series of facts, not a sequence of memories and emotions.

I’m a pack rat. I keep (and don’t organize) too much stuff. Every time we move, the books are a problem. We’ve been back in California over a year, and they’re still not quite unpacked and shelved. And movers charge by weight. I’m not sure what we would have done if the company hadn’t paid for the move. And I know that there’s not enough time in my allotment, sans dramatic life extension, for me to reread them. But I can’t bring myself (so far) to get rid of them. They contain too many remembrances. Accumulated stuff is the external memory of life, and I feel as though they’re a part of me and my sense of self. When I lose old email in a disk crash I feel partly lobotomized and amnesiac. At some point, though, I have to rationalize my possessions.

I had dinner with Leonard David Wednesday night, and we often talk about his collection of tchochkes and media bags that he has collected over the many dozens of space conferences he’s attended over the past few decades. They’re historically significant, and I doubt there are many people with as extensive a collection as his, but where to keep them all? I have the same problem, on a smaller scale. Someone needs to set up an archive to which such things can be contributed, assessed and put into context, but it takes money.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

RIP, Outpost

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And RIP, Apollo mentality:

The Outpost was an icon of the previous generation of NASA – test pilots, rough-and-tumble guys who blazed trails into outer space with their grit and determination. Or so the story went – when you delve deeper into the details, you find out that really it wasn’t their grit at all – the Right Stuff that we all know so much about really had very little to do with humanity reaching space. The world, America, even NASA allowed the myth to continue because it made much better press – some superhuman beings stretched us from the ordinary to the extraordinary. To glamorize the engineers who actually made it happen: how boring!

Unfortunately, that view was allowed to persist long after it was useful. Today’s NASA is hampered by many forces; one of the most detrimental is the crew office. The crew office is the greatest bastion of the Space Ego, where test pilots, sports heroes, and other mythical creatures can take refuge in perceived greatness.

Time to let go of the Cold-War past, and face a bright new free-enterprise future.

[Update Sunday afternoon]

A lot more (depressing) discussion in comments at NASA Watch. What this comes down to (a recurring theme here) is that space isn’t important. If it were, we’d fix things.

[Bumped]

[Update a few minutes later]

I think that this is related. As far as I’m concerned, shrinking the astronaut office is a good thing — they’ve had too many for years. And what they’ve really had too many of (with exceptions, of course) is people with attitudes like this:

Ross personally does not like the idea of turning to commercial providers to fly astronauts to the International Space Station.

“My personal druthers are to keep the program totally within NASA like we’ve done in the past – the vehicle, the launch team, control, everything – because I know, I’ve seen, how difficult it is to do and I’ve seen what happens when you don’t pay attention to details,” he continued. “Even as hard as we’ve tried to pay attention to details, being what I will call a professional flight launch team, and processing team and flight crew team and flight control team, we still miss things.

“We’re going to have some people that are very much novice in what they’re doing, and trying to do things as inexpensively as possible to make a profit and we’re now going to be putting our crewmembers onto those vehicles and trusting them to launch them safely and that concerns me,” he adds. “You can do it. I’m not going to say that you can’t. It all depends on how much insight, oversight, control, leverage that NASA is given in the overall process. That’s the big key to it,” Ross said.

I grow increasingly weary of the oft-repeated (and much too oft-repeated in the last year) canard that private transportation providers will cut corners and be unsafe because they have to make a profit. The other one is that NASA somehow has some magical expertise and insight that private industry doesn’t have into human spaceflight safety, when in fact much of that, to the degree it exists is in private industry at places like USA and Boeing (who is building a commercial capsule).

Last time I checked, Southwest Airlines had a perfect safety record. Last time I checked, it was one of the most, if not the most profitable airline. And they seem to do both without any oversight by the “professional flight launch team” at NASA. Because, you know, those at Boeing and SpaceX and other places (many of whom are NASA veterans), are just “amateurs.” By these peoples’ theory, Southwest should be killing passengers every week or so. Why don’t they?

Gee, could it be because that they know that killing your customers is bad for business, and that if you go out of business, you don’t make any profits? On the other hand, the agency that not only hasn’t had to worry about profits, but had so much vaunted expertise in human spaceflight, and “knew what they didn’t know,” destroyed two multi-billion dollar Shuttle orbiters, and killed fourteen astronauts, while spending untold billions of dollars of other peoples’ money in apparent futility to make them “safe.” And each time that happened, the agency was rewarded with budget increases and new programs, which they then proceeded to screw up.

So you tell me, who has the more useful incentives, in terms of both cost and safety?

Mind, I’m not complaining that they kill people occasionally — this is a new frontier, and people are going to die. What I’m complaining about is that they’re spending so much money (and again, other peoples’ money) to do so, for so few results.

History, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Fifty-Three Years Of Space

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Today is the Sputnik anniversary. Here are my thoughts from the fiftieth, written three years ago, in Orlando, not far from Disneyworld’s Tomorrowland (the California version was built a couple years before Sputnik) with some tomorrows that remain tomorrows over half a century later.

Over at The Space Review, Jeff Foust has his own anniversary thoughts, in the context of last week’s historic House vote. Also, He alsoFrank Stratford discusses the role of Mars in future human exploration.

[Update a while later]

I didn’t read that Mars piece before I linked to it — I just assumed that because the home page said it was by Jeff Foust, that it was worth reading. Actually, it’s by someone down under named Frank Stratford, and it’s got some nonsense in it, with no very clear point.