Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Do Both?

53 Comments

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.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Horror

13 Comments

Here’s an interesting tidbit in a story about Blumenthal’s fabrication of his Vietnam experience. Some people apparently think that this is equivalent:

“It’s appalling that the Attorney General of the state of Connecticut – a highly-educated and trained lawyer – would misspeak about such a significant issue,” Simmons told POLITICO this morning. “Clearly he knows he never was in Vietnam, and yet he’s on record saying he was in Vietnam – obviously to appeal to an audience, and that’s a very troubling disclosure.

“But it’s matched in some respects by Mrs. McMahon who brought the charge — when just a few montnhs ago it was disclosed that she did not tell the truth about her college education and her degree — which is again something everybody should realy know,” Simmons said, referring to a Hartford Courant report that McMahon claimed on documents filed with her appointment to the State Board of Education that she had a degree in education, when her degree was in French.

“I got a degree in English Literature,” Simmons said. “It’s hard to make a mistake about something like this.”

What I find hilarious about this is that both Simmons and McMahon apparently believe that an education degree is of more merit than one in French. I disagree. At least the French major has some knowledge to impart to her students, if they want to learn French. I’ve never noticed that a degree in education teaches doesn’t provide much knowlege of positive value, and much of negative value. I would think that if you were going to upgrade your degree, you’d pick something worthwhile to substitute for French, like business, or even poli sci, not the degree that has the lowest entrance scores of all majors.

As I’ve said before, I’d abolish schools of education if I were dictator. Or at least eliminate government-backed loans for them (though actually, I’d eliminate government-backed educational loans, period).

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

A Big Thumb On The Scale

28 Comments

It’s three on one at a House hearing today:

Witnesses:

* Mr. Charles F. Bolden, Jr., Administrator, NASA
* Mr. Neil A. Armstrong, Commander, Apollo 11
* Capt. Eugene A. Cernan, United States Navy (Ret.), Commander, Apollo 17
* Mr. A. Thomas Young, Executive Vice President (Ret.), Lockheed Martin Corporation

I don’t expect Bolden to acquit himself well. I wish I were testifying instead. It’s a shame that Gordon couldn’t get Sally Ride, or Leroy Chiao, or some other astronaut who actually understand the problem for balance (not to mention Augustine versus Young, who has no manned space experience). As Clark notes, it’s too bad that the media doesn’t point out how stacked the deck often is in these show hearings. It does reduce confidence (never high to begin with) in the honesty and integrity of congressional deliberations in general.

Political Commentary, Space

Another Apollo Astronaut Weighs In

22 Comments

Rusty Schweikart steps up to the plate in support of the new policy. I don’t agree with all of it — I think he misses the point in some cases, but I like this:

Are we, in fact, on a dead end road? In answering this critical question you should not overvalue either my opinion or the opinions of my fellow astronauts, but rather focus on the considered and thoughtful, and even hard-nosed, analysis of the panel of experts who dealt explicitly with this, the Augustine Committee on our Human Spaceflight Program. Norm and his panel are very experienced and highly qualified academics, business leaders, astronauts, and space program executives. I have immense respect for them and their considered judgment. They performed a thorough, open and difficult review and analysis of where we are. Their conclusions were not reached lightly nor did they shy away from calling it as they saw it. I take their work and their conclusions very seriously and I believe you should as well.

Note that he’s not asking Senator Nelson (as others have) to take his word for it because he’s an astronaut — he’s citing someone who has actually studied the current problem (as opposed to a different problem that we had to solve half a century ago).

But I disagree with some of his arguments. First:

Technical arguments can and have been made to support this intermediate step, and they are not without justification and support. Nevertheless, in my opinion, the arguments for necessity are fundamentally weak, and in any event are overwhelmed by the widely held and devastating question “been there; done that… tell us why you’re doing that again?” Why, after 60 years, should we be devoting incredible resources and effort to going back to the Moon instead of to a challenging, pioneering new goal? As Norm Augustine stated in your 12 May hearing, the long term space program has to be supported on a continuing basis by the public, and the public simply will not maintain support to reliably sustain a monumental and expensive effort to do again what we did 60 years before. This is especially true of young people, who are hardly inspired by a goal of repeating their grandparent’s achievements.

The problem here is that he is confusing the goal of going to the moon, as established by the VSE, with the means (Constellation) chosen to achieve it. Yes, we don’t want to do Apollo again (and that was what Mike Griffin proposed, explicitly declaring it “Apollo on Steroids”). But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t, or don’t want to go back to the moon, if it can be done in an affordable, sustainable, and useful (which is a key attribute of sustainability) way. This problem will pop up again a little later in his letter. But he thinks that the problem is one of destination, and (surprise, surprise) he likes the asteroid mission.

As I’ve repeatedly said, destinations are beside the point, other than that they be beyond LEO. There is basic infrastructure needed to do so on a cost-effective basis, and once that’s in place, where we go is a relatively minor detail, which can be addressed by small additions to the infrastructure (a lunar lander for the moon, a long-duration ship with radiation protection for deep-space missions). But until we get that basic infrastructure in place, which won’t occur for years, even if we start now, arguing about the specifics of what we’re going to do with it is a dissipation of valuable political energy that would be better served to make sure that we get it, so we later have something to argue about (or more likely and preferably, options to do whatever we want).

He follow up with another confusion between VSE and Constellation, in “explaining” the Gap:

The sad state of our current space program, and the gap in particular, is a given. An unfortunate, but unavoidable given. We are here because of the complete mismatch between the program announced by President George W Bush in early 2004 and the inadequate funding which was subsequently sought and allocated since that time. As Norm Augustine testified before your committee on May 12, in the 4 years between the announcement of those ambitious goals and the time when his Committee conducted its comprehensive review of human space flight, the Ares launch vehicle development slipped between 3 and 5 years. This slip, combined with the planned termination of Space Shuttle operations in 2010 created and ultimately extended the “gap” in our nation’s ability to launch astronauts into orbit to 7 years or more. This gap, during which time we will be dependent on the Russians to launch our American astronauts to the ISS, was created during the prior space program. It is a given and it cannot be eliminated.

Emphasis mine.

Note that he (like many Constellation defenders) claims that there was a “mismatch” between Bush’s program and the funding. But this simply is not true. The mismatch was between the funding planned for the VSE and the program that Mike Griffin later chose to implement it. George Bush never said anything about developing an Ares I and Ares V, and it was the decision to go that route that cratered the budget, and created the sinkhole into which funding for all other aspects of the VSE disappeared. It continues to be frustrating that people commenting on this, who should know better, continue to misstate history, as I pointed out this weekend.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

How Much Does Safety Cost?

26 Comments

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.