The man-god who was deposed by a Communist regime says that “Still I am a Marxist.”
“(Marxism has) moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits,” the Dalai Lama, 74, said.
How insipid. You would have expected something more resembling wisdom. I’d call it sophomoric, but it would be an insult to actual sophomores.
No wonder Richard Gere likes him.
A report on the Spanish green energy debacle:
As predicted was inevitable, today the Spanish newspaper La Gaceta runs with a full-page article fessing up to the truth about Spain’s “green jobs” boondoggle, which happens to be the one naively cited by President Obama no less than eight times as his model for the United States. It is now out there as a bust, a costly disaster that has come undone in Spain to the point that even the Socialists admit it, with the media now in full pursuit.
Breaking the Spanish government’s admission here at Pajamas Media probably didn’t hurt their interest in finally reporting on the leaked admission. Obama’s obvious hope of rushing into place his “fundamental transformation” of America into something more like Europe’s social democracies — where even the most basic freedoms have been moved from individuals and families to the state — before the house of cards collapsed has suffered what we can only hope proves to be its fatal blow. At least on this front.
La Gaceta boldly exposes the failure of the Spanish renewable policy and how Obama has been following it. The headline screams: “Spain admits that the green economy as sold to Obama is a disaster.”
It has lots of company with other administration policies in that regard.
Bolden is finally speaking truth to foolishness:
“I can’t pay for an Ares I today. It’s too expensive,” said Bolden, speaking after a meeting of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee.
“That’s an easy decision for me because it wipes out everything. My friend Sen. Nelson, and he is my friend to be quite honest, we respectfully agree to disagree on this. It is incredibly costly for me to go off and try a series of Ares I tests to support a heavy-lift at the present cost of solid rocket motors. Now, there is an answer. Get the cost down. And ATK (prime contractor for the Ares I) says they can do that. But we’re not there right now.”
Right before that statement, Bolden elaborated: “Ares I is not important to the continued development of heavy-lift unless the nation decides that it needs to preserve the capability to develop large segmented solid rocket motors. And that decision still has to be made. Right now, we’re leaning toward liquids. And if you’re leaning toward liquids, why would you spend a lot of time using Ares I as a development vehicle if that’s not going to part of the mix?”
I would have gone farther and pointed out that the only reason to do this is pork for KSC, but then, that’s why I’m not a high government official. And they are friends.
This should be a major theme for the Republicans in the fall.
Sorry, but we can’t afford to do both. I disagree with this OC Register Op-Ed by Peter Navarro, Stu Witt, and Greg Autry:
At least to date, the private space sector has demonstrated very limited capability to move either cargo or crews into orbit or to dock with anything. Moreover, none is human-rated for orbital space flight while there are very difficult challenges requiring large infrastructure and access to larger investment.
Really? Atlas and Delta have “very limited capability to move cargo into orbit”? I think that the military satellite community will be wondering where all those satellite went, if not into orbit. As for docking, SpaceX plans to demonstrate that this year. It’s not like it’s just a twinkle in their eye. Crew will be along shortly after that, with the development of launch abort systems, and long before Ares I is projected to be complete.
We believe all these limitations can be overcome if the private space industry is encouraged along the lines of Mr. Obama’s plan. However, pressing matters of national security also call for a continued U.S. government presence in space. That’s why we believe Mr. Obama was dead wrong in cancelling the Constellation program, the successor to the shuttle program developed after the shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003.
While we have been winding down our space program, other countries – China, in particular – have been working on (and, with China, even testing) capabilities to weaponize space and seize a strategic position on the moon. To prevent this, we must present a credible deterrent with ongoing robust and responsive manned and unmanned space programs. That’s why Constellation remains important, both as a concrete program now and as a bridge to a cooperative public-private space partnership.
Obviously, there are national security implications for a US government presence in space. But not for a manned presence. There have been no national security implications for that in forty years. And if it’s a national security issue to put humans in space, then the Pentagon should be responsible for and paying for it, not NASA, which is a civilian program. And how having a launcher that costs a couple billion per flight and can only fly a few times a year contributes to national security remains unexplained, even if one really believes that the Chinese are “working on seizing a strategic position on the moon” (what does that mean?).
They go on with the standard flawed and failed spinoff argument. And then this:
What we do not need is what President Obama is leaving us with: Showing up at the doors of countries like Russia and China, begging for a lift up to our space station. To paraphrase President Ronald Reagan: “Weakness invites aggression.”
Hey, I’m not a big fan of relying on the Russians either, but you know when the time was to complain about that? First, six years ago, when Bush baked it into the policy cake for at least three years, and then four years ago, when Mike Griffin increased the gap with his disastrous decision to build a whole new horrifically expensive and unnecessary launch system, instead of finishing Steidle’s plan for a CEV flyoff that would have resulted in something (and possibly two somethings) that could have flown on existing vehicles. The one person whose fault it isn’t is Barack Obama’s, and going back to the Program of Record doesn’t fix that problem.
I’m disappointed.
There’s a lot of discussion about this over at Space Politics, where I found the link.
…though the dark cloud of financial “reform”:
The Senate passed an amendment to the financial reform bill Monday night that keeps requirements for angel investors much as they are now, eliminating changes opposed by venture and technology lobbying organizations.
So at least that’s a few less million real jobs that will be prevented from creation by Washington.
[Via Clark Lindsey]
And how much should it cost? Over at my Pajamas Media piece this weekend, frequent TTM commenter “bbbeard” comments:
SpaceX has a launch record of 3 complete failures and two successes. What is disturbing about the SpaceX failures is that they hinged on relatively major oversights. Take the Demo2 flight, for example. SpaceX’s post-flight analysis showed that incorrect propellant utilization parameters were uploaded into the engine computer, a textbook case of sloppy configuration control. There was a recontact during staging, which initiated a slosh event — that was not mitigated because the LOX tank had no baffles. These are the kind of rookie mistakes that get you labeled as a “hobbyist”. It will take more than two successful flights to show that Elon Musk’s company has outgrown its hobbyist mentality and is ready to tackle human spaceflight.
Safety is the elephant in the foyer that you have not addressed. STS has suffered two launch failures in 132 missions (counting Columbia’s foam strike as a launch failure) — and what no one in NewSpace seems able to admit is that that loss rate is unacceptable. You can deny all you want that NASA is up to the job of designing a vehicle significantly safer than STS, but it is a fact that Ares is being designed to tough and unprecedented requirements for loss of crew rates — and Atlas and Delta never were. You claim Atlas has an “unbroken string of many dozens of successful flights” but by my count only 20 of the 21 flights of Atlas V have been successful — and that is an unacceptable loss rate. Only 2 out 3 Delta IV-Heavy flights have been successful — and that is an unacceptable loss rate.
Unlike SpaceX, the engineers at Boeing and Lockheed are the best in the business. But they were never directed to make Atlas and Delta reliable enough for human spaceflight. Using those platforms as human launch vehicles would be a step backward from STS safety levels, which are already unacceptably high.
What your argument boils down to is that you, Rand Simberg, think that the extra reliability that Ares aspires to is not worth the price tag. You may be right, you may be wrong. But why won’t you explain that that is your argument, instead of simplistically blaming NASA for poor cost control?
Man, there’s a lot to unpack there. I don’t know if I have time to deal with it right now, but let me at least lay out the issues. One is what an “acceptable” level of safety is (particularly relative to the reliability required to deliver a satellite worth a billion dollars). Another is how it is achieved. A third is how much it should cost to do so. A fourth is how much someone who had pretty much the same experience as other “professionals” in developing rockets for the first time can be said to be a “hobbyist.” (I would note as an aside that I don’t intrinsically accept “hobbyist” and “amateur” as pejoratives vis a vis “professionals” — many amateurs and hobbyists can be better than professionals — they just don’t choose to do it for a living. Space historian Henry Spencer comes to mind. I don’t think that there is anyone on the planet who is more familiar with both space history and space technology than Henry, but it’s not his day job.)
Anyway, I’m trying to figure out how to earn a living myself, so have at it in comments for now. I may weigh in later.
Remember a few weeks ago, when the Ares huggers were seizing on comments by Gary Payton that cancelling Ares would double costs for the Pentagon’s solid motors? It never made any economic sense, but it was used as cudgel, however dull, in the battle over the new policy. Well now he’s saying that not only will the effect be trivial, but that it actually benefits the DoD to have more users of the EELVs:
Q. What does the cancellation of Constellation mean for the Air Force?
A. If there are increases to the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) annual launch rate, that’s a good sign. Right now, we have a plan for United Launch Alliance to do eight launches a year, notionally five for the Air Force, two for the National Reconnaissance Office and one for NASA. So if we can increase that one for NASA up to two or three per year, that would be great for everybody, because we would be buying more rocket engines per year and flying more rockets per year, and that helps with the proficiency of the launch crews…
Q. Are you concerned about the Constellation decision’s impact on the solid-rocket motor industrial base?
A. We’ve come to find out that it has a trivial impact on space launch because we don’t use the big 3½-meter segmented solids on our EELVs; we use solids that are about 1½ meters in diameter.
Well, pardon me, but DUH.
I could never understand why the Pentagon went along with Constellation in the first place.
[Via Parabolic Arc]
Some depressing thoughts on our unavoidable economic future. I hope he’s wrong about the political will, and that we’re not quite past the point of no return.
…gains momentum. Some thoughts on our justified loss of faith in technocrats, from Walter Russell Mead. One point I would add is that much of the green movement was and is driven by the watermelon socialists, who leaped on to it with the collapse of the Soviet Union and (temporary, unfortunately) corresponding collapse in the credibility of socialism. I’d like to think that the current mess, including the collapse of Eurosocialism, will be the final stake through its heart, but I’m afraid that we’ll have to wage this ideological battle over and over, because every generation or two, we forget what a disaster it is everywhere it’s tried, and the basic tenets are a siren’s song to human nature.