Andrew, that piece really is worse than you say.

The trouble is that the space program's purposes are inseparable from its Cold War-era context.

No, the trouble is not that they are inseparable--it's that we've never made a serious policy attempt to achieve such a separation.

He gets the NASA budget wrong (it's closer to twenty billion than fifteen). That doesn't change his point (in fact it strengthens it, to the degree that it's valid), but it's sloppy. It's also not clear that the plan will require a significant increase. That was one of the selling points of it--that by putting down the Shuttle program, we can shift funds to the new activities.

Along the way, the space commission he appointed has offered up a smorgasbord of absurd side benefits, such as possible improvements in our (so far non-existent) ability to deflect threatening incoming asteroids, of the sort that may have severely disrupted life on Earth as recently as 35 million years ago.

I guess his point is that it doesn't happen very often, so it's not a benefit. He's probably unaware that if the Tonguska event had occurred on the eastern seaboard of the US, instead of in Siberia, we could have lost millions of lives only a century ago.

It really is a typical "why pour all that money into space when we have so many problems on earth?" rant. Nothing new here.

[Update in the afternoon]

Jeez, I'm almost starting to feel sorry for the schmuck. Dwayne Day really goes after a gnat with a howitzer in the comments section.

I'd say that he's been pretty thoroughly discredited. Unfortunately, most of the PI's readers probably don't read this blog.

I guess I'm just a "the glass is 1/8 full" kind of guy :-)

It's worse than that. The screed decries a lot of technology (and as a side note, I wonder if he knows how many people in the third world have died of maleria and other ailments because we don't use DDT) and then suggests that "all that money" be used to fund science and math teachers whose purpose I suppose would be to teach people to develop technology.

Roth's arguments are the same "NASA is part of the Cold War and we still spend too much money on space" junk we've been hearing from the left for years now. And he's a lawyer to boot. What he has to say about the space program (private and government) ain't worth a bucket of piss.

This really is a poorly-argued article. It's a case of a writer stepping into a subject, spraying around with a machine-gun and occasionally hitting the target, but mostly shooting a lot of holes in the wall.

For starters, although he does not make it clear, he is referring to _human_ spaceflight. "Space exploration" can also refer to robotic probes. Does he really think they are all about the "Cold War"? When he says that the "space program's purposes are inseparable from its Cold War-era context," he neglects the fact that significant portions of the space program are scientific, and they have little to do with the Cold War. Yes, the program was created out of the Cold War, but we send robots to Saturn and Mars not because of that, but because of an interest in gathering knowledge.

There's other intellectual and literary sloppiness in his article as well. For instance, the Bush "plan" was not released just before the SS1 flight, it was released in January and the Aldridge Commission was a review of implementation aspects.

Then there's this:
"The very concept of a "space station," for example, is a 1952 brainchild of Nazi rocket scientist-turned-American-Cold Warrior Wernher von Braun, who was later caricatured as "Dr. Strangelove" in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 Cold War satire film."

There's a couple of whopping inaccuracies there. The "very concept" of a space station was not proposed by von Braun. At the very least, we can trace detailed discussions back about five decades earlier to Tsiolkovsky. Or we can go back to 1869 and the publication of the fictional story "The Brick Moon." And it wasn't von Braun who was caricatured in Dr. Strangelove. It has been widely speculated that Kubrick was caricaturing either Herman Kahn or Henry Kissinger.

And then this: "The Cold War era ideology spawned not only space travel, but also dozens of instances of technological overreaching here on Earth." And then as examples of this he cites Buckminster Fuller and DDT?

Well, first, technological overreaching can be traced back at least to the ancient Babylonians, who wanted to build a really tall tower and managed to get themselves in some trouble. But if we want to point fingers in the United States, I would blame the editors of pulp science fiction magazines in the 1930s. It's 2004, where the $*%@ is my flying car?!!

And DDT as an example of Cold War ideology? The guy needed to do a little basic research:

http://www.vaccines.plus.com/proDDT-history.html

Turns out it was invented in the 1800s, identified as an insecticide in the 1930s, and first widely used by the US Army in World War II. And as somebody has pointed out in one of these posts, it may have important utility today, because too many people in Africa are currently dying from malaria when DDT--properly used--could save them.

(And since I'm working myself up into a rant here, how can he support his case by citing examples of things that were never even _tried_ in the first place? The New York City Fullerdome was never built. Neither was the Panatomic Canal.)

And note to Mr. Roth: Kennedy's goal was set in 1961, not 1962.

But he does occasionally hit the target. His critique of the math and science justification is not illegitimate. If your goal really is to inspire kids to go into math and science, then there may be better ways to do this. But it turns out that there's not really a shortage of math and science students, they just happen to be foreign-born. So fix the visa system and let them all go to MIT. That's how we got our Einstein, right? And come to think of it, that's how we got Wernher von Braun too...

Re: Strangelove: I always thought it was Teller?

I think it was a composite character...

Dwayne: Nice rant. You go, girl! Sic 'em! Any chance the Post-Intelligencer (nice phrase, probably unintentional) will respond to you?

Rand, when one has a big gun and is being nibbled to death by ducks, USE THE GUN. If nothing else the splattered remains might deter (or even [gasp] educate!) other quackers bent on the same stupidity. Such drivel should be buried under a mound of facts as quickly and forcefully as possible (cue Tasmanian devil stomping Daffy Duck into the ground).

Please don't get me started on the old "Rachel Carlson/Silent Scream" dogma on DDT

DDT is not toxic to humans or the food chain when sparingly applied. It, IMHO (I help enforce the Clean Water Act) is a great invention.

The problem was back in the old days, they sprayed DDT like it was going out of style and overapplied it a hundredfold. Instead of trying to find a concentration that was not bioacumlative (DDT was found in higher concentrations as you went up the food chain. Top preadators like raptors the most famous example.) they simply, in deference to luddism, threw the baby out with all thousand gallons of dirty bathwater.

Mr. Young wrote:
"Re: Strangelove: I always thought it was Teller?"

No. I just checked "Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze," by Thomas Allen Nelson. No answer there other than that he was "the archetypal mad scientist." But I know that most of the speculation was that it was either Kahn or Kissinger, both of whom had written prominent books on nuclear strategy in the late 50s/early 1960s.

Aleta wrote:
"Any chance the Post-Intelligencer (nice phrase, probably unintentional) will respond to you?"

No. Why should they respond to an obscure comment on an obscure blog in the remote, unfashionable western arm of the Internet?

I could write a reply, but why bother? The guy's a doofus and unlikely to have any real influence over anybody.

Back around February I did write an op-ed for Florida Today responding to another op-ed by Alex Roland. But that's because Roland is frequently billed as a "NASA historian." The truth is, Roland was last a NASA historian about two decades ago (he has primarily done aviation and military history since then) and to the best of my knowledge the last scholarly piece he wrote about space was about 12 years ago. But it's not so much that he's a poseur (unlike him, I actually have been writing space history for at least the past decade), it's more the fact that he is so incredibly sloppy with his criticism and his facts. One rule of history is that you can be more accurate if you are somewhat vague. But Roland makes all kinds of specific, inaccurate claims that he could easily look up--or at least the kinds of things that he would know if he actually was current in the space policy/history field. Someone who use to work as a NASA historian should know better than say, for instance, that NASA destroyed the Saturn V plans. So in that case, I just got tired of seeing him be so sloppy.

If Roth becomes a repeat offender, then somebody will have to correct him.

Should have wrote "Silent Spring" instead of scream.

I am tired and going to bed now.

With any luck, before too long there will be many people going on "unnecessary, extravagant extraterrestrial daredevil stunt[s]" ... That would be the best answer of all to this luddite nonsense.

We need to make sure the name "Alex Roth" gets put on the "Does not fly at any price" alt.spacer blackball list so he doesn't inadvertantly change his mind and try one of those: "unnecessary, extravagant extraterrestrial daredevil stunts".

Some people should be left behind in spite of their ability to pay just because some genes shouldn't leave the planet. Just imagine if all the idiots were left behind in the old world.

Oh, I have a "not at any price on _my_ ship" list. I'm a greedy capitalist, but there are some things capitalists won't do. :-)

Good for you Aleta. I like people with standards! There are some people whom I will not associate at any price. Peroid!

As the Bard sayeth: "To thine own self be true."