There are two problems, and they’re old ones. First is the lack of commercial industry participation. They’ve added former astronaut Bob Crippen who’s now at ATK, but that hardly counts. But the more fundamental issue (and reason for the first problem) is the assumption that NASA’s strategic direction should be established by the National Academies, with its own inherent assumption that it is about science and technology development, and not opening a frontier. This in turn may be another remnant of the agency’s beginning in the depth of the Cold War and the Space Act. But somehow, we can never have a serious national discussion about why we spend billions of dollars on human spaceflight, which will be necessary to get a new direction. And part of that discussion should be NASA’s role in the twenty-first century, and what other entities may be required as well.
Boeing has their design, which is also a capsule-type design, and is trying to work out the same kind of issues that Dragon has. The only difference is that they haven’t flown their stuff yet. But Boeing has 50 years of human spaceflight already. They have all the people who did Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the space shuttle. They have all the trips and falls that have been made over those 50 years.
As I’ve said for years, companies don’t have experience — people do (this is a fallacy that government evaluators subscribe to, because every proposal we put in to NASA or the Air Force always included the past experience of the organization, regardless of whether or not the people who would be actually working it had such experience). Most of the people who actually worked on the development of those programs are retired or dead. At this point, I would say that when it comes to building reliable cost-effective space hardware, SpaceX has the best team in the country, with the most recent experience (though they got help from some key people at NASA, such as John Muratore). That is not to say that the people working CST at Boeing aren’t good, but it’s really meaningless to tout their historical experience as having any relevance to the current team.
And what’s hilariously ironic is that it was green on green:
After encountering criticism from environmental groups, Gov. Jerry Brown signaled Wednesday that he plans to withdraw his controversial proposal to protect the California bullet train project from injunctions sought by environmental lawsuits.
The Left’s project is foundering on its own inherent internal contradictions.
In reading this article about whether or not there’s money to be made on the moon, I came across this link, with an estimate from about three years ago of the cost of a lunar base.
The numbers seem way high to me, but of course, they’re based on Constellation. But I can never get over the cost estimate for Altair. Twelve billion dollars to develop a lander? How can that possibly be? The only way I can think that they came up with that is to look at the LEM costs in the sixties, and scale them up in both size and current-year dollars. Which is a completely useless way to do it.
Between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (not to mention John Edwards), I have to wonder what it is about Democrats that they are so tolerant of liars as their candidates?
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of liars, Jay Carney gets pretty much everything wrong in his press event. Of course, to be fair, he might actually believe what the other liars are telling him. In which case, he’s not a liar, but an idiot (not that the two are mutually exclusive).