Over at the Speculist.
I know I’ve been dissing barsoomheads lately, but go read Phil’s interview with Bob Zubrin, to celebrate the opposition of the Red Planet.
All posts by Rand Simberg
Brain-Dead Media
I’ve heard three references today (from NPR this morning, from Greta on Fox, and from Cici Connally on Brit Hume’s show) that today is a “milestone,” because the number of US military casualties since President Bush declared major hostilities over is now equal to casualties in Iraq during the war itself.
Can someone explain to me why this is a significant number?
Two points.
First, to make such an equation is to engage in an exercise of irrational numerology. I can’t imagine why the number, or the ratio of the two numbers, is of any significance.
Second, it seems to me that, like Warren Buffet’s comparison of California with Nebraska property taxes, this makes exactly the opposite point from that intended. To wit, rather than implying that California’s taxes are too low, it really implies that Nebraska’s are too high. Similarly, for those who complain about the “high” number of deaths since the end of major combat ops (less than the murder rate of any major city in the US), it simply points out how low our casualties in the war itself were.
But leave it to the liberal…errrmm…excuse me, “progressive” media to attempt to make good news seem like bad…
Idle Thought
Taking a break from space blogging (and balancing checkbook, and doing various chores around the house) I was watching a movie.
Proposition: Austin Powers (ignoring the bad teeth) is the prototypical metrosexual.
Discuss.
Cancel The Shuttle
That’s what the Space Frontier Foundation says (via NASA Watch/Spaceref, and Keith has a lot of good links on the subject, but unfortunately, he hasn’t upgraded his software yet to support permalinks…)
Maybe Admiral Gehman Gets It
I haven’t read the whole report yet, so maybe this is in there somewhere, but in this piece from the Gray Lady, it’s clear that the admiral was willing to go further than William Rogers did after Challenger:
“We are challenging the government of the United States” to make up its mind, Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., the commission’s chairman, said yesterday, alluding to the ease with which politicians hail the shuttle program while cutting its budget by 40 percent.
“We need to decide as a nation what we want to do,” Admiral Gehman, who is retired, warned. The solution, he said, was not just a modernized shuttle. “We shouldn’t start by designing the next vehicle,” he said. “That is a trap that we’ve fallen into several times.”
The challenge places President Bush in essentially the same place President Ronald Reagan was after the Challenger explosion. Confronting a $480 billion budget deficit this year and many more years of deficits to follow, does Mr. Bush want to commit to expending the money and energy needed to remake the nation’s space program, the step the commission said was critical to averting a third disaster? Or do problems on earth, like bringing order and democracy to Iraq, battling terrorism or rebuilding another aging technological behemoth ? the electric power grid ? rank higher?
Look, folks. It’s not about money. We’re spending about one percent of the federal budget on space. We’re spending much more on agricultural supports that are starving millions in the Third World. The issue is not how much to spend, but how to spend it.
Do we want a space program that is a jobs program for politically correct engineers, or do we want a space program that actually accomplishes something in space? If so, what are we trying to accomplish?
It’s time to write your congressman and senators, and say, not I want to send astronauts to Mars, or I want to send astronauts to the Moon, but I want my children to be able to go into space, and I want to see a payoff from space, in new resources, and energy, and political freedom. And I want to go into space myself, and it’s none of your damned business why I want to go, any more than one had to fill out a form in the seventeenth century to explain why one wanted to go to America from Europe. I want a debate on the purposes of why we’re spending money on NASA, and I’m tired of the space program being used as an excuse for jobs in the right congressional districts, or foreign aid to countries that don’t act like allies, with no attention being paid to any actual accomplishments in space.
I don’t know if it will do any good, but if it doesn’t now, it never will.
The Gehman Report
I’m reading it, and I’ll probably post on it as I go, in a series of posts. I’m also working on an related column for NRO. My initial impression, having read the summary and just started to get into the first section–it’s a great, free book for anyone who wants to understand the history of the manned space program, and the Shuttle, and how we got into the mess we’re in. The fact that John Logsdon was on the panel helps ensure that the history is accurate. I often disagree with John about the future, but he can be counted on to get his past correct (even if he occasionally misinterprets it).
A lot of it I’m just skimming, because little is new to me. I just want to comment on this bit for now:
Rockets, by their very nature, are complex and unforgiving vehicles. They must be as light as possible, yet attain out-standing performance to get to orbit. Mankind is, however, getting better at building them. In the early days as often as not the vehicle exploded on or near the launch pad; that seldom happens any longer. It was not that different from early airplanes, which tended to crash about as often as they flew. Aircraft seldom crash these days, but rockets still fail between two-and-five percent of the time. This is true of just about any launch vehicle ? Atlas, Delta, Soyuz, Shuttle ? regardless of what nation builds it or what basic configuration is used; they all fail about the same amount of the time. Building and launching rockets is still a very dangerous business, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future while we gain experience at it. It is unlikely that launching a space vehicle will ever be as routine an undertaking as commercial air travel ? certainly not in the lifetime of anybody who reads this. The scientists and engineers continually work on better ways, but if we want to continue going into outer space, we must continue to accept the risks.
As regular readers are aware, I disagree that it is “…unlikely that launching a space vehicle will ever be as routine an undertaking as commercial air travel.”
It may not achieve the level of safety and reliability of aircraft, but I do think that it will become routine, in the sense of regular schedules, and something that millions of people will be able to afford to do, and will be safe enough for them to do, in my lifetime, and certainly in the lifetime of young adults. This conventional wisdom is based on 1) an underestimate of how long lifetimes of those living today may be and 2) a misunderstanding of the reasons that it isn’t routine.
And of course, most of the “basic configurations used” are variations on a flawed theme–one-shot systems, built at low rates, which makes it difficult to get good statistical quality control. It’s not really a physics or an energy problem–it’s more a consequence of the path that we’ve followed in launch system design for the past forty years. Fortunately, we’re starting to break out of that with a return to developing suborbital vehicles, and doing it right.
[Update at 5 PM PDT]
Page 24: “The per-mission cost was more than $140 million…”
What does that mean?
One of the frustrating things about discussing launch costs is that people don’t use the vocabulary consistently. I suspect that’s the marginal cost (that is, the cost of flying the next flight, given that the system is already operating). It’s not the average cost (the total number of flights per year divided by the annual budget)–that’s much higher.
Shoddy Reporting
And lazy reporting, at Fox News, in a story about the Gehman Report, as pointed out by Matt Bille over at sci.space.policy today.
“There has been a subtle change at NASA,” physics professor Robert Park of the University of Maryland told Fox News, referring to the amount of outsourcing the agency has done in recent years.
Park said he’d been told that in the control room at the time of the accident “there were no NASA employees. It was all contractors.”
Three points.
First, why does anyone care what a physics professor at the University of Maryland says or thinks? Why automatically go to your rolodex of bombastic kneejerk opponents of the manned space program (which Professor Parks is)?
Second, “he’d been told” is not exactly great sourcing. As Matt says, why take the word of someone known to be antagonistic to NASA, rather than simply calling NASA and verifying whether or not there were NASA employees in the control room. As it reads, there is an implication that it’s true. There’s another implication, which brings us to item three.
Even if true, why is this a bad thing? Why should we assume that civil servants are more competent or responsible than contractor employees? There seems to be an implication here (entirely unjustified) that government employees are noble and have only the interests of safety and the program at heart, but they were replaced by black-hearted greedy knaves with no interest other than crashing space shuttles while fleecing the taxpayer. If that caricature is not what we’re supposed to infer, then just what is his point?
[Update at 8 PM PDT]
Jorge Frank over at sci.space.policy has an interesting URL disputing Professor Park (warning, it’s a big file–over two megs). As he says:
This is the group photo for the STS-107 Ascent/Entry team. For reference, NASA badges have a blue NASA logo on a yellow background to the left of the photo, while contractor badges have black barberpoles on both sides of the photo.
NASA’s Culture Of Denial
There’s been a lot of talk, with today’s release of the Gehman Report, about NASA’s “culture.” Jim Oberg (who should certainly know) has a pretty good description of it.
I haven’t read the report yet, but I’ve heard nothing about it in the various news accounts that I found surprising. I had a pretty good idea what it was going to say within a week of the event, to a very high confidence level. They examined every possibility, but the prime suspect was always the foam debris hitting the leading edge, and I predicted that it would be a broken leading edge on the day it happened. But this was an interesting comment from Admiral Gehman:
…when asked at a press conference how much of his final report could have been written BEFORE the disaster, Gehman thought momentarily and replied, ?Probably most of it.?
Yup.
But this is the key point:
Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the ?NASA culture? is that its managers act as if they are proverbial ?rocket scientists.?
In late 1999, following the loss of a fleet of unmanned Mars probes, a NASA official was asked at a press conference about what the repercussions might be. Would anyone lose their jobs over such performance, a reporter asked?
There would be no such consequences, the official replied. ?After all,? he explained, ?who would we replace them with? We already have the smartest people in the country working for us.?
There’s an old saying about pride and falls…
NASA’s Culture Of Denial
There’s been a lot of talk, with today’s release of the Gehman Report, about NASA’s “culture.” Jim Oberg (who should certainly know) has a pretty good description of it.
I haven’t read the report yet, but I’ve heard nothing about it in the various news accounts that I found surprising. I had a pretty good idea what it was going to say within a week of the event, to a very high confidence level. They examined every possibility, but the prime suspect was always the foam debris hitting the leading edge, and I predicted that it would be a broken leading edge on the day it happened. But this was an interesting comment from Admiral Gehman:
…when asked at a press conference how much of his final report could have been written BEFORE the disaster, Gehman thought momentarily and replied, ?Probably most of it.?
Yup.
But this is the key point:
Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the ?NASA culture? is that its managers act as if they are proverbial ?rocket scientists.?
In late 1999, following the loss of a fleet of unmanned Mars probes, a NASA official was asked at a press conference about what the repercussions might be. Would anyone lose their jobs over such performance, a reporter asked?
There would be no such consequences, the official replied. ?After all,? he explained, ?who would we replace them with? We already have the smartest people in the country working for us.?
There’s an old saying about pride and falls…
NASA’s Culture Of Denial
There’s been a lot of talk, with today’s release of the Gehman Report, about NASA’s “culture.” Jim Oberg (who should certainly know) has a pretty good description of it.
I haven’t read the report yet, but I’ve heard nothing about it in the various news accounts that I found surprising. I had a pretty good idea what it was going to say within a week of the event, to a very high confidence level. They examined every possibility, but the prime suspect was always the foam debris hitting the leading edge, and I predicted that it would be a broken leading edge on the day it happened. But this was an interesting comment from Admiral Gehman:
…when asked at a press conference how much of his final report could have been written BEFORE the disaster, Gehman thought momentarily and replied, ?Probably most of it.?
Yup.
But this is the key point:
Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the ?NASA culture? is that its managers act as if they are proverbial ?rocket scientists.?
In late 1999, following the loss of a fleet of unmanned Mars probes, a NASA official was asked at a press conference about what the repercussions might be. Would anyone lose their jobs over such performance, a reporter asked?
There would be no such consequences, the official replied. ?After all,? he explained, ?who would we replace them with? We already have the smartest people in the country working for us.?
There’s an old saying about pride and falls…