The president has rebranded the Iraq war. As Jonah says, making it sound like a new dish detergent sounds better than “Operation Defend Biden’s Gaffe.” Besides, you don’t want to establish a precedent like that, otherwise you’d be renaming things a couple times a day.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
The Conference Begins
Alan Stern: Last summer they said we couldn’t get fifty people together for a meeting like this — it was for tourists, not teachers and researchers. But look around the room to see all of the latter. Thanking Lori Garver, George Nield of the FAA, conference organizers (USRA, Southwest Research Institute, Commercial Spaceflight Federation). Thanking corporate sponsors, and speakers and staff.
On the verge of a revolution in spaceflight. Will open up access and reduce cost; comparing it to PC revolution. Wants to have a marriage of research and education, and the suborbital industry. Welcome to 21st-Century spaceflight.
Mark Sirangelo coming up now.
Space industry one of the ultimate team-organizing activities. Industry going through amazing changes. Thanking the people at NASA HQ taking on major challenges of making needed change at NASA. Talking about CSF. Conclusion of remarks.
Lori up now.
Glad to be back in Colorado (she went to Colorado College in Colorado Springs). Privileged to talk about the very exciting time at NASA, one of the few agencies that got a budget increase in the request. Also very risky, and change is hard (not everyone at NASA as excited as people in this room). We’re the figure skaters — doing wonderful, beautiful things on very thin ice.
Six billion dollars will fund climate change, space research, and green aviation. Extending space station to 2020 (Obama spoke to astronauts on ISS yesterday). Said “We want to let you know that the amazing work is a testament to the extensive ingenuity, skill and courage and demonstrates why his commitment to NASA is unwavering. Need to think about new ways of the role of government and industry in opening up space. Want to allow more companies, markets, jobs to be developed, and NASA should be a big part of the future of opening up space. Quoting Bolden, who dreams of the day that any American can go into space and see the wonders that he did. The new NASA wants to make space something that Americans can do more than just marvel from afar. Thanking some of the folks in the room who tutored her back in the eighties (e.g., Gary Hudson) on these issues. Need resources and will that all of us can muster, and competition of the marketplace. This conference is about suborbital, Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research Program (CRuSR) gets several million dollars in 2010, with more in the future. Fifteen million dollars requested for 2011 (misspeaks and says billion instead of million, but corrects to laughter). Anticipates that over time, will allow many students and researchers to fly. Extension of parabolic aircraft program that has been very successful at Purdue. Reading emails from students. “Life changing experience, and easily most valuable course taken at\ Purdue.” “One of the highlights of my experience, even after work in industry.” Noting her own interest in commerical spaceflight, including her training for a ride on a Soyuz. Wanted to provide inspiration for her own kids. President challenged NASA to bring back inspiration, and encourage kids to enter STEM fields. Want to continue to keep America a beacon to the rest of the world. NASA will continue to do that, where a child overseas thinks that she wants to be a part of that. Think about emerging companies — opportunity to make that leap, not just for this generation but the next. Notes that many founders have already made their millions in the past, and now see space as the next big thing to do. Recognizes that this is risky, but NASA learns to manage risk. Anything in life, and particularly the great thing, involve risk. NASA is going to treat these spacecraft the same way they have high-speed research in the past, which is why they’re assigning oversight to Dryden. On the cusp of an exciting time. Going to open space to the American people. Risks are there, but they’re worth taking. Glad to be here, and sees it as the starting ground (though a lot of us have been in the basement for a long time). Can’t wait to take next steps together. Ad astra.
Pete Worden up now.
Good opportunity to get into trouble with your boss speaking just ahead of you. Talking about NASA Ames (his center) the second original NACA facility. Talking about the history. Thinks that NASA is, and should be, returning to its NACA roots. Showing slides of the airships developed at Ames in the early twentieth century. Airships were a new exciting wave of transportation in the twenties and thirties. Macon was based there (airborne aircraft carrier). Brief history of aviation from first flight to first transcontinental flight (1911), first airliner. Talking about how it was driven by entrepreneurs, but government played a key role with airmail subsidy, which led to a robust airline industry in the 1930s. Led to a rise of people taking risks with their wealth. Another key element was the barnstormers, in which people took risks. Talking about safety while showing a picture of a wing walker. First rule of wing walking: never let go of what you have your hand on until you have the other hand on something else. From twenties to forties, NACA assisted industry by doing basic research and providing facilities, and developing new technologies that enabled industry be more profitable and grow. In the fifties it led to early space capabilities, which led to NASA. Sees current NASA as reliving those golden days to support a new entrepreneurial industry, this time in space transportation. Showing a chart, from airmail, to COTS, to CRuSR. Talking about near space (too high for aircraft, too low for satellites, previously known as “ignorosphere”). Upper-atmospheric research, four minutes of microgravity (compared to half a minute in aircraft). Key elements in place: science, players in the private sector, will lead to robust orbital capabilities. Showing the companies involved in the industry, and members of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. Issues: safety, funding, users, legal and bureaucratic. Will have to go through congress, and we need to describe to them the benefits of the new approach.
George Nield up now.
Talking about last week’s FAA commercial space transportation conference. Recent events: Masten’s win of the LLC, rollout of SpaceShipTwo, Congressional renewal of indemnification. Very exciting times for commercial human spaceflight. However, a little troubled by another brand of reaction that is less enthusiastic and very intense. Has been seeing too much disappointment, disdain, and even ridicule of commercial space transportation. Critics small in number, but vehement. Treating commercial launch like a kid who just got his license, and proposes to drive grandparents across the country. Pointing out that commercial flight has a couple decades of success. Not a rookie in the business. Commercial Space Launch Act approved in 1984, and amendments approved in 2004. Yes, crew is relatively new, but much of it will be based on success of cargo experience. Change makes people uneasy, and it’s legitimate to raise question, but not to raise fears of an industry that has served America well, and will continue to do so in the future. Safety is biggest question, of course. Much as he wishes it were, safety is not an absolute. Safety is a mindset, a professional tension where everyone involved is always on alert and determined to get it right. Even then, it cannot ever immunize anyone against harm. Rockets are dangerous, the FAA knows it, industry knows it, and the people involved are doing everything possible to make spaceflight as safe as it can be. Giving history of X-planes between 1946 and 1965. A couple thousand flights, twenty-seven accidents, and four fatalities. Century series (F-101, F-102, F104, F-105, etc.) flown extensively. F-100 had a hundred, F-104 had several hundred. German Luftwaffe killed over a hundred pilots in Starfighters. These suborbital vehicles will not be pushing the envelope like those aircraft did, but they’ll be more like them than commercial transports. Space Launch Amendments act anticipated this, with the goal of continual improvement. Pointing out the statistics for one year (thousands of auto accidents, hundreds of general aviation). No form of transportation is perfectly safe. Not trying to fend off criticism by pointing out in advance that there will be bad days, but rather that they are doing everything they can to minimize them. Space transportation has been risky, and will continue to be. Congress knew that, and directed FAA to develop regs for commercial human spaceflight, and they’ve done so. Risk is with us, and means to overcome it will continue. Questions should be asked, and issues, raised, but should be done constructively, with best tools we have. Believes that American’s space program is recreating its past greatness, and wants to get on with it.
Next speaker Alan Stern (prime instigator of this conference).
The fifteen million that Lori talked about is only a proposal. We will have to be the foot soldiers to get Congress to pass it. Risk is not new to scientists and educators (bottom of oceans, tops of mountains). Talking about educators and scientists killed in space. People in this room familiar with risk (notes Dan Durda flew F-18s for research purposes). We accept risks knowing that they’re real, but small, for great gain, and the risk is worth the reward. Talking about Research and Education missions (REM). Hopes that people here will be even more turned on at the end of the meeting than at the beginning. Five different companies building suborbital vehicles, a unique time in history. Tourist prices $200,000, but that’s inexpensive for government and industry research programs. 190 nations on earth — virtually all can afford space research/education at these prices. Research programs buy dozens to hundreds of flight, and come back for more. Estimated REM market over five years is thousands of seats. This is big market for now, and will help drive prices down to expand tourist market. Lori’s seventy-five million over five years will buy a lot of tickets. Possibilities of new vehicles “blows his mind” as a researcher. Ten times the zero-gee time of aircraft, and a hundred times cleaner. Direct access to the “ignorosphere” every day, watching seasons and weather change. Repeat flights on one-day turnarounds, unlike a grad student who will spend entire career on one experiment, if lucky. Worldwide launch basing, ability to launch at specific times, rapid access to samples, test subjects, etc. No longer just a few astronauts, but hundreds or thousands of researchers and tourists, provide much larger data base for space adaptation. Experiments will have fast turnaround, with less paperwork and cheaper payloads, and allow people to fly with their experiments (making it more like other types of science). Robots don’t do this kind of space science best. No other field is automating their labs — NASA has done it only of necessity. Listing sciences: atmospheric, life, earth, oceanography, space physics, astronomy and solar physics, instrument test and demo, microgee, public outreach. After WW II, we captured a lot of V2s that were launched out of New Mexico, and few initially knew what to do with them. Whole fields were born from that experience. People in this room are early adopters, like Van Allen was in the fifties. We are at the very dawn of an opportunity to fly things on a routine low-cost basis. Ask yourself what next-generation suborbital can do for you. Go out and evangelize with your research community.
[Update a while later]
I think that the conference is being streamed here.
Lunacy
Congresswoman Giffords doesn’t want to put all her launch eggs in a “single” basket:
The chair of that committee’s space subcommittee, meanwhile, makes it clear she does not approve of elements of that new plan, particularly its scrapping of Constellation in favor or developing commercial systems to reach low Earth orbit. “I don’t like putting all our pace eggs into a commercial basket,” Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) told the Sierra Vista Herald. She said it’s “not a good idea” to rely on the private sector, telling the newspaper that she’s worried “the country’s national security could be harmed if private companies are given the opportunity to send missions into space”, without elaborating.
So, putting our launch eggs into a “commercial” basket, that has multiple launch providers — bad. Putting them into a NASA basket with a single monstrously expensive rocket that is years from development — good. Gotcha.
And NASA rockets — good for “national security.” Commercial rockets — bad for “national security.”
I can see why she didn’t attempt to elaborate.
These are the morons in charge of our space policy.
A Brief History
Of the VSE, and the disastrous NASA architecture choice, from Clark Lindsey. As he and Mark Wade note, what is old is new again.
[Update a few minutes later]
I hadn’t noticed the post title, which I love: “Apollo mistake on steroids.”
The Problem With First-Dollar Coverage
Thoughts from Megan McArdle. One of the big problems with health care is that people have come to see every-day costs as an entitlement that someone else should pay, instead of the old days (and not that old — within my lifetime) when you paid for doctor’s visits (and they would even make house calls) out of pocket, with insurance reserved for catastrophe. We’ll take our car to the shop, our pet to the vet, but the current mess has accustomed many of us to thinking that we somehow shouldn’t have to pay for a doctor visit. As Megan notes, when you’re not spending your own money, you’re going to use the service a lot more, and you won’t care about the price. This is the key point of how screwed up the market is as a result of employer-provided insurance:
With all the layers in between consumers and the providers in the ordinary market, the natural battle between consumers seeking better value and producers seeking higher prices is terribly distorted in ways that don’t make us healthier.
That market disconnect is what we need to fix, rather than finding some other peoples’ money to keep doing the same crazy things. And the way to fix it is to end the preferential tax treatment of employer-provided insurance versus personally purchased policies, and to allow purchase across state lines for real competition. If I hear one more moron saying that the way to provide competition for private insurers is with a government option, I’m going to plotz. Just make them compete with each other.
From Blue
…to Red:
…some of the same unlikely states that Obama put in his party’s column 15 months ago feature Senate, House and governor’s races with Democratic candidates in grave danger of losing in what is quickly shaping up to be a toxic election cycle.
While off-year and down-ballot elections are inherently different than presidential contests, the rapid reversal in Democratic fortunes in the very places where Obama’s success brought so much attention suggests that predictions of a lasting realignment were premature.
And it’s raising the question of whether the president’s 2008 win was the result of a unique set of circumstances that will be difficult for him to replicate again and perhaps downright impossible for other Democrats on the ballot to reprise.
This is called hubris, and overreach. They really believed that we wanted this statism crammed down our throats. They’ll pay the piper for their brief dance, in November, and the bill will be appropriately high.
NASA Strikes Back
A response to Charles Krauthammer, from the science advisor and NASA administrator. As Jim Oberg notes in email, they don’t say that his op-ed is off base– they say that he is (i.e., a slightly more personal attack). This is highly unusual. Are they going to go after Tom Jones, too?
The Green Genocide
Thoughts on the consequences of radical environmentalism, intended and unintended:
The motivation behind Silent Spring, the suppression of nuclear power, the global-warming scam, and other outbreaks of environmentalist lunacy is the worship of centralized power and authority. The author, Rachel Carson, didn’t set out to kill sixty million people – she was a fanatical believer in the newly formed religion of radical environmentalism, whose body count comes from callousness, rather than blood thirst. The core belief of the environmental religion is the fundamental uncleanliness of human beings. All forms of human activity are bad for the environment… most especially including the activity of large private corporations. Deaths in faraway Africa barely registered on the radar screen of the growing Green movement, especially when measured against the exhilarating triumph of getting a sinful pesticide banned, at substantial cost to an evil corporation.
Those who were initiated into the higher mysteries of environmentalism saw the reduction of the human population as a benefit, although they’re generally more circumspect about saying so in public these days. As quoted by Walter Williams, the founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, Alexander King, wrote in 1990: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guayana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” Another charming quote comes from Dr. Charles Wurster, a leading opponent of DDT, who said of malaria deaths: “People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.”
Like the high priests of global warming, Rachel Carson knew what she was doing. She claimed DDT would actually destroy all life on Earth if its use continued – the “silent spring” of the title is a literal description of the epocalypse she forecast. She misused a quote from Albert Schweitzer about atomic warfare, implying the late doctor agreed with her crusade against pesticide by dedicating her book to him… when, in fact, Schweitzer viewed DDT as a “ray of hope” against disease-carrying insects. Some of the scientists attempting to debunk her hysteria went so far as to eat chunks of DDT to prove it was harmless, but she and her allies simply ignored them, making these skeptics the forerunners of today’s “global warming deniers” – absolutely correct and utterly vilified. William Ruckleshaus disregarded nine thousand pages of testimony when he imposed the DDT ban. Then as now, the science was settled… beneath a mass of politics and ideology.
These people are the greatest mass murderers in history. Why do we continue to give them so much power, both political and cultural?
[Update a few minutes later]
Apparently NASA is as scientifically corrupt as the CRU:
The emails show the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and suspect data management and integrity of NASA, wildly spinning in defense of their enterprise. The emails show NASA making off with enormous sums of taxpayer funding doing precisely what they claim only a “skeptic” would do. The emails show NASA attempting to scrub their website of their own documents, and indeed they quietly pulled down numerous press releases grounded in the proven-wrong data. The emails show NASA claiming that their own temperature errors (which they have been caught making and in uncorrected form aggressively promoting) are merely trivial, after years of hysterically trumpeting much smaller warming anomalies.
As you examine the email excerpts below, as well as those which I will discuss in the upcoming three parts of this series, bear in mind that the contents of these emails were intended to prop up the argument for the biggest regulatory intervention in history: the restricting of carbon emissions from all human activity. NASA’s activist scientists leave no doubt in their emails that this was indeed their objective. Also, please note that these documents were responsive to a specific FOIA request from two years ago. Recent developments — combined with admissions contained in these documents — beg further requests, which have both been already filed and with more forthcoming.
Read the whole thing. As DocZero says, we need to dramatically change the risk/reward ratio for this kind of fraudulent behavior, particularly when it’s used as a basis for public policy.
[Update a few minutes later]
Recently, the president of the U.N. Foundation and former Sen. Tim Wirth said the manipulated evidence uncovered by the Climategate e-mail scandal was a mere “opening” to attack science that “has to be defended just like evolution has to be defended.”
Get it? Those unreasonable people who deny evolution — despite the overwhelming evidence — are the same brand of illiterate hoi polloi who won’t hand over their gas-powered lawn mowers on the word of an oracle weather model and haphazardly placed weather station.
In some ways, I’m even more infuriated by being lumped in with creationists than I am with being compared to a Holocaust denier. These people are intellectually bankrupt.
Inside Space-Activist Baseball
Terry Savage, a long-time space activist (and friend of three decades) is running to renew his term on the National Space Society board of directors. Here is his campaign statement, at his blog.
I link it because I find a strange cognitive dissonance within it:
Like any entity, NSS has limited resources, and the rules of “opportunity cost” apply. Any resources we invest in one activity, are not available for other activities. From my personal perspective, there is only one mission for the society that really matters: minimizing the time from this moment to the creation of thriving human communities in space. Space settlement. Space industrialization is essential to that result, as are many other supporting activities, but at the end of the day, space settlement is the bottom line. All activities should be tested against how well they support that core objective.
The problem isn’t primarily technological. Humanity is capable, right now, of creating self-sustaining human settlements in space. We simply choose not to do so.
On this note, I’ll say explicitly that the Obama proposal for NASA is a barely mitigated disaster. It has some good elements, like the emphasis on private sector development, but it has no clear focus of ANY KIND for the American manned space program. As a practical matter, Obama is proposing to kill the American manned space program. I think that’s wrong for the country, and I don’t like it.
There is a contrast between grafs one and three. Graf one is great — it matches up with the Space Frontier Foundation’s “Frontier Enabling Test,” (which, ironically, is not part of the NSS, but rather, part of the Space Frontier Foundation, which arose from the ashes of the L-5 Society/NSI merger, after the L-5ers realized that they’d been absorbed into the NASA-lobbying borg).
But the new policy meets that test much better than the previous one. There was little or no hope that Constellation would have opened up the frontier, even if fully funded. This is something that NSS generally, and Terry specifically, have never really understood. There is no plausible path from NASA’s “NASA uber alles” policy, in which billions are spent to send a few astronauts to a planet for some vague purpose, and space settlement. But NSS continually (despite occasional refreshing support for private activities) supports whatever NASA wants to do.
Well, until now, anyway. Which is doubly surprising and ironic, given that the people who came up with the new policy are former heads of NSS, including the Deputy Administrator, who said just last week:
Defending NASA’s new plans on both charges was deputy administrator Lori Garver. “We plan to transform our relationship with the private sector as part of our nation’s new strategy with the ultimate goal of expanding human presence across the solar system,” she said in a luncheon speech at the conference Thursday. “So don’t be fooled by those who say we have no goal. That is the goal.”
Turning to the private sector to launch both cargo and crews to LEO, she continued, actually lowered the risk to the agency in the long run by keeping it from relying on a single system for human access to orbit. “We will diversify our risk by funding a portfolio of highly-qualified competitors instead of a high-risk approach in which we fund only one system,” she said. “We’re going to see the most exciting space race that NASA’s seen in a long time, and there’s likely to be more than one winner.”
Does this sound like a policy to “kill the American manned space program”?
If so, I think that Terry owes an explanation of why, to NSS members he expects to vote for him, other than a belief in the Apollo Cargo Cult.
It’s The Economic Uncertainty
…Stupid:
He…proceeded to relay a conversation he had with a local chemical company regarding their 2010 capital expenditure budget. When asked what the company intended to invest in 2010, the response was ‘nothing,’ not due to a paucity of good opportunities, but because it was impossible for the company to calculate a rate of return given all the uncertainty over cost of labor, energy prices, regulatory mandates and the like.
These people are completely clueless about how an economy works.