OK, I was gentle with Easterbrook. But Bruce Moomaw is totally out to lunch with this piece. Everything he knows is wrong, other than the title.

The Space Age Born Of The Cold War Is Over

Today’s appalling Shuttle tragedy proves — once again — that manned spaceflight, at this point in history, is not remotely worth either its cost or its risk of lives. I say “once again” because virtually any scientist worth his salt has been pointing out that fact routinely for decades.

Any skeptic is invited to take a look at what the professional science journals regularly say on this subject.

He says this as though scientists in general have anything interesting or useful to say about the space program. This is an assumption with no foundation. Just as one example, recall UK Astronomer Royal Richard Woolley’s comments, a year before Sputnik, about space travel being “utter bilge.”

Tell me, Bruce, why should we care what scientists think? What does space have to do with science?

Continue reading Bruce Moomaw Gets It Not At All →

The Israeli embassy has set up a condolence page for Columbia.

Finally, indisputable proof that Saddam is linked to Al Qaeda. The headline says it all.

A number of pundits and bloggers have been citing Easterbrook’s piece, so I decided to finally take the time and go through it to separate fact from fancy, so they’ll have a better idea whether or not to agree with him, and on which points. It’s not a true fisking, because I actually agree with most of it, but I do want to note a few places where he goes off the rails as a result of (as always) invalid assumptions.

Continue reading An Easterbrook Critique →

Anglospherian (and former space entrepreneur) Jim Bennett has a column in NRO today on the need for NASA to get the Shuttle/ISS monkey off its back.

Aziz Poonawala has a theory about what happened to Columbia. He thinks that the left gear door opened in flight.

I’ve no opinion on that, and it may be true, but it then begs the question…why? How would such a thing happen, on this of all flights? It still doesn’t really solve the mystery.

But I’m really posting this to make this point. To me, it doesn’t matter that much what the proximate cause of the accident was. As I’ve said in various venues, what surprised me was not that it happened, but that it took so long to happen, and that NASA was lucky for so long.

The Shuttle, as a program, is now, and always has been, a failure, in terms of the original goals set out for it. Now, it is a dead program walking. It may fly for a few years now, but I suspect that at the end of the day there will be a consensus that we have to have different means (and I mean this word in the plural sense) of getting people to and from orbit. Different in the sense that it is safe, affordable, often, routine, and varied. No more monocultures.

My focus is not on the technical details of exactly what went wrong (I am a recovering engineer, after all) but on what we’re going to do to fix it, in a broad policy sense (not a Space Shuttle program sense).

I see this as a rare opportunity to actually change the tenor of the debate about space, and our future in it, and I’m going to emphasize issues relating to that, which I consider much more important. If you want blow-by-blow descriptions and theories of the forensics of the investigation, there will be many places to do so. This will not be one of them. I’m simply not that interested, which means that I won’t want to take the time to discuss it, and my opinion won’t count for much, because I’m not going to be paying much attention to it, except at the highest level, where there may be policy implications.

That is all.

For people who want to have the best technical facts available, here’s a continually-updated FAQ, maintained by experts, both amateur and professionals, many of whom are regular posters in the sci.space.* newsgroups.

I particularly recommend it to journalists who don’t want to say really dumb things, and ask really stupid questions. Many of them will be answered here before you embarrass yourself.

For any readers in the Richmond, Virginia area, I’m going to be interviewed about space policy on WRVA sometime between 4 and 4:30 EST.

[Evening update]

It might be worthwhile to mention how the interview went. Not well, in retrospect.

I think that, based on my NRO column, he was disappointed, because I believe that he expected me to agree with Gregg Easterbrook and bash Shuttle. Instead, I told him that Shuttle was the most reliable launch vehicle we have (which took him aback quite a bit). I perhaps could have softened the blow by telling him that this was damning it with faint praise.

I then confused him by telling him that Soyuz was the safest manned vehicle, which of course required explaining the difference between safety (ability to survive launch mishaps and not lose crew) and reliability (probability of having a successful flight). I could almost hear the crackling of his eyes glazing over three thousand miles away. I was cut off shortly thereafter, though to be fair, it was only supposed to be a ten-minute interview, and that’s about how long it lasted. But the ending seemed somewhat abrupt and, to me, unexpected.

Anyway, I report, you decide…

Some idiot talk-show host posted an ignorant article blaming the Columbia disaster on Bill Clinton, and most Freepers are appropriately ridiculing it.

That’s what this story in the New York Daily News says, and I think that’s right.

But what interested me was a quote from Ari Fleischer:

“The President is dedicated to the mission of science and the marvels of space exploration,” spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

Ari, it’s about much more than science and exploration. Didn’t you get the memo?