John Fund says it’s time for a new director.
I agree. I’d also note that while there is no certainty to dynamic scoring, it’s guaranteed that a static analysis is wrong.
[Update early afternoon]
Peter Suderman discusses the pros and cons of keeping Elmendorf.
Eric Berger has the latest installment of his series on NASA’s drift (which is likely to become a book, I think):
NASA’s rank-and-file believe America wants a space program pushing outward, and upward.
“We don’t think of our jobs here as white-collar welfare,” Kramer said. “We have a real passion for what we do.”
Of course you don’t. You have to motivate yourself to go to work. But that doesn’t make it untrue.
I weep to think what that billion dollars per year could be doing if applied to something useful.
[Update a while later]
I should note that I have worked on many projects that I considered a pointless waste of money, because it was my job assignment. While I’m probably more cynical than most, I did eventually tire of helping Congress waste the taxpayers’ money, which is why I quit the mainstream industry two decades ago.
…by ending their attempt at Marxism.
It’s an old story, but many remain unaware of it. I doubt that it’s taught that way in school. It certainly wasn’t when I was a kid. We got the old false story about how the Indians taught them how to farm and fish, and all was well.
Why you don’t want to let “intellectuals” anywhere near power:
Unfortunately, contemporary Washington is calibrated to defer to experts who defer to politicians, providing an intellectual Praetorian Guard for the constant growth of a leviathan. As Denver University professor David Ciepley noted, “Starting in the First World War, and much more so during the New Deal and World War II, American social scientists became part of the autonomous state themselves, helping staff the mushrooming government agencies.” The closer that intellectuals get to politicians, the more weaselly they usually become.
Playing off Mr. Gruber’s derision of average Americans, one wag suggested a new acronym — L.I.E. — for Low Information Experts. Mr. Gruber and many other professors have gotten rich by pretending that government is far more competent than it actually is. Economist Robert Skidelsky, writing about the history of modern socialism, observed that “the collectivist belief system existed independently of the facts of modern life.” The same is true of the academic cadre who profit by vindicating endless government interventions that breed chaos and dependency.
I’d like to think that people will take a lesson from this (particularly with regard to climate models), but history doesn’t make me hopeful.
They still have no idea what they’re going to do after thye run out of SSMEs.
As I noted on Twitter:
If a Martian looked at this program, it'd say, "Well, sure don't have anything to worry about from these lunatics.: http://t.co/JcChYaQSgG
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) November 21, 2014
[Afternoon update]
Contra Dan Dumbacher's crazytown Huffpo editorial, SLS is not a "highway" to the solar system. It's a dead-end railroad siding.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) November 21, 2014
Google engineers have given up on it:
At the start of RE
Anyone who understands basic math and physics knows that the notion it could replace fossil fuels was always insane.
Here’s the final report from the CAA, for those who have time and interest. There seems to be quite a bit of enthusiasm. Of course, the Brits have been out of the space game, in terms of launch, for decades.
A long but useful essay from Megan McArdle.
We have a similar issue in the space industry. I see all the hype about the upcoming Orion flight, and as an industry analyst (though not quite an insider) I know that it’s nonsense, but it’s hard to get people to realize that NASA officials are often forced to dish nonsense to placate rent-seeking congresspeople; as outsiders, they are still in awe of the government agency that put men on the moon four-and-a-half decades ago.
There is also this:
…when I see journalists saying that Gruber’s revelations don’t matter because he’s just kind of awkwardly saying something that everyone knew, I get a little jittery. I am not “everyone,” and neither are any of those journalists. We’re a tiny group of people with strange preoccupations who get paid to spend our time understanding and explaining this stuff. The fact that we may have mentioned it once to our readers, in the 18th paragraph, does not mean that readers read it and understood what it meant. (In fact, if you actually interact with your readers, you’ll be astonished at how little they remember of what you told them, especially if you didn’t go out of your way to headline it. Their minds are already crammed full of information that they need to, you know, live their lives. So they tend to take away a few big bullet points, not the piddling details.)
I see the same thing when I argue with people on Twitter, or in comments — we often go around in circles because they seem to have forgotten some previous point I’d already made, or read what they wanted to read instead of what I actually wrote. The dismaying thing is that these are often people who love space, but they end up being cheerleaders for things (like SLS/Orion) that are roadblocks rather than enablers.
Francis seems to suffer from a lack of imagination:
Space analysts said planning and executing a manned mission to Mars would take years and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
French wants NASA to head in that direction, and he sees next month’s Orion launch as the inaugural milestone in a long journey.
Still, he’s circumspect.
“Unless we build the rockets and test the spacecraft needed to get into deep space, sending humans to Mars will remain a dream for centuries to come,” French said. “Whether Orion will be the vehicle, and whether it will survive the brutal budgetary cycles of Washington politics for the many years ahead that it will need to be funded, is impossible to say. It’s hard to imagine any other method succeeding.
Space historians often suffer from this malady.
Why yes, yes, it is a good phrase.