As one more example of the bizarro world of space politics, I comment on the Tea Party praise of Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, over at the Washington Examiner. Jeff Foust has a post about it as well, where commenter “abreakingwind” continues to make an ass of himself.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Teaching Space Policy History
A question for Apollo veterans Armstrong, Cernan, and Lovell: Can you look at yourself in the mirror and say, without reservation, that the Apollo program, as it unfolded in history, held the key to our future on Earth? To our generation for the most part Apollo was a technical success but a policy failure – if that policy was, as Kennedy stated, that Apollo would be the key to our “future on Earth”.
I stood before many of you as a young student over 20 years ago questioning why we had not made any progress in making space the key to our future on the Earth. Today, after being a part of the unfolding of the failures to make progress since then, the answer is clear. We have not made progress because we have failed to embrace the awful truth that Kennedy saw through a glass darkly, which is that economic development of space is the key to our future on the Earth.
In 1969, the United States was at the height of its economic and political power and we turned away from space; today we are broke and the challenges that face our nation are daunting in the extreme. Without a powerful economic incentive, space is simply not worth the expenditure. It is within our financial and technical power to do this as a nation, but not through the brute force method of an “Apollo on steroids” architecture (as cited by Mike Griffin) and certainly not with further flags and footprints.
The day that Werner von Braun, sitting at his desk in Huntsville, caved to the inevitability of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous method of getting to the Moon. he warned his Huntsville staff that his greatest fear was that Apollo would lead to a “Kilroy Was Here” mentality that would allow our political leaders to kill the program after the first success was had. The ESAS/Constellation architecture of an “Apollo on steroids” program, even if somehow successful, is molded in the same vein, and with our economic difficulties today, would be similarly shut down after the initial goal reached.
There are architectures out there – many of them – that will enable the economic development of the solar system and the harvesting of the resources that are out there, wealth that will transform our world for the better, for the good of all humankind, in keeping with the Kennedy vision and legacy. NASA is making moves in that direction today with a focus on the use of commercial space solutions for cargo and human spaceflight, contracts for fuel depots, and other innovative systems. However, the rump ESAS/Constellation program in the form of the SLS vehicle is not one of them.
Fortunately, it’s not likely to survive more than another year or two at most.
Climate Change–The Republican Position
Some lengthy thoughts and suggestions from Steve Hayward. I particularly liked this:
The climate campaign’s monomania for near-term suppression of greenhouse gas emissions through cap and trade or carbon taxes or similar means is the single largest environmental policy mistake of the last generation. The way to reduce carbon emissions is not to make carbon-based energy more expensive, but rather make low- and non-carbon energy cheaper at a large scale, so the whole world can adopt it, not just rich nations. This is a massive innovation problem, but you can’t promote energy innovation by economically ruinous taxes and regulation. We didn’t get the railroad by making horse-drawn wagons more expensive; we didn’t get the automobile by taxing the railroads; we didn’t get the desktop computer revolution by taxing typewriters, slide-rules, and file cabinets. It is time to stop ending the charade that we can enact shell game policies like cap and trade that will do nothing to actually solve the problem, but only increase the price of energy and slow down our already strangled economy. I support sensible efforts for government to promote energy technology breakthroughs, but am against subsidizing uncompetitive technologies.
Bjorn Lombog’s Cool It is a good source of common sense on this as well.
Higher Than I’d Like
…but it’s encouraging that only a quarter of Americans share Barack Obama’s political views. So why do do many more say they’d vote for him?
Freedom And Locale
Some thoughts. While a lot of people will continue to live in California despite it’s relative lack of economic freedom (like me, for one, for a while), there’s been a lot of outward migration to Texas.
Growing The Energy Supply
It comes from markets, not bureaucrats:
There is a lesson here for public policy generally, including health care. No centralized government expert predicted the vast expansion in energy supply from hydraulic fracking. It was produced by decentralized specialists in firms subject to market competition.
Just as Friedrich Hayek taught, no central planner can know or foresee enough to produce the beneficial results regularly produced by competition in free markets regulated in accordance with the rule of law. And no central planner can accurately predict the course of innovation that can be achieved in decentralized markets. That’s something you might want to keep in mind when someone tells you that Medicare costs can be controlled by 15 members of an unelected board created by Obamacare. Better results and lower costs can be expected with the kind of market competition set up by the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law.
We can’t get rid of these unjustifiably arrogant ignorami soon enough. But it’s less than a year and a half to judgment day.
Brainless Feminist Twits
…and the men they love. They probably swooned over Alan Grayson, too.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Beware of feminist men. And “liberal” “men” who don’t get it.
Congratulations, New Media
Journalism is back:
MSM political leanings and friendships take precedent over news and news coverage — they simply balked at the idea of covering the “Weinergate” scandal. Rather than investigate, they went on the offensive! Surely the story can’t be trusted, since the source was Breitbart. They mocked those who even discussed it.
How many times will they call a story DOA, only to have Breitbart drop one more thing in their lap? How many times will they ignore a story, just to have New Media show how important it is to the future of the republic?
The MSM reacts to New Media in the same manner they have reacted to Sarah Palin’s bus tour. They mock her every step of the way, then have the gall to be infuriated that they — the press! — are not given her itinerary. They complained about being “forced” to relieve themselves on the side of the road, as if Palin forced them to get in their cars and vans and follow her a la The Beatles arriving in America. The MSM believes that they have — and deserve — a monopoly on the stories we read, and when someone doesn’t fall in line with the old guard attitude, they become petulant.
Well, it was a huge vacuum that something had to fill.
The Media Machine-Gun Myth
…continues. You’d think that with Adam Gadahn as a source, they’d want to double check, but I guess the story is too good to check for them.
Fact Checking The President
The strangest thing about this is the source. Even the WaPo says that he’s full of it on the auto bailout
We take no view on whether the administration’s efforts on behalf of the automobile industry were a good or bad thing; that’s a matter for the editorial pages and eventually the historians. But we are interested in the facts the president cited to make his case.
What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.
Of course, if the Times did it, it would mean the End Times.