Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Ares I-X

4 Comments

…isn’t getting much love in comments over at Space Transport News. At least not the kind that its supporters would like to see:

Perhaps NASA should keep the Ares I-X in storage until the 4th of July next year. I imagine the flaming propellant debris cloud would be pretty cool to watch.
Posted by Neil H. at 08/15/09 12:28:55

4th of July is too long to wait. I vote for New Years fireworks spectacular.
Posted by john hare at 08/15/09 13:02:52

How about Labor Day, send Summer out with a bang.
Posted by anonymous at 08/15/09 13:16:56

This “test,” which isn’t testing actual flight hardware, has cost (so far) a third of a billion dollars. That’s about the same as the estimate for the launch escape system for the Dragon. Sometimes it seems that people who advocate more money for NASA seem to have no concept of cost and value.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

The President’s Space Policy Dilemma

12 Comments

A good wrap up over at the Orlando Sentinel:

For NASA allies on Capitol Hill, news that the agency does not have enough money to do what it wants is not so shocking. For years, members of congressional science committees have complained about underfunding.

But in a time of enormous budget deficits, a major boost is seen as unlikely.

“NASA is getting $18 billion a year. That’s more than all the other [space] agencies in the world combined. It’s very difficult to make the argument for more money,” said Vincent Sabathier, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

Sabathier said NASA’s best hope lies in giving a greater role to its international partners to develop key components of an exploration system, such as using a French rocket to launch a U.S. capsule.

One point that people don’t understand, though, is that it isn’t a budget problem per se. It is a budget problem in the context of the politics. As I said over at Space Politics:

It is disheartening — but not surprising — to read that the Augustine Commission doesn’t see any way the current NASA budget can get us back to the Moon or to any of the spectacular alternatives that have been contemplated in anything like a reasonable time frame.

Actually, it’s not that the NASA budget can’t do it — it’s that NASA can’t do it with that budget, given its political constraints. Certainly it could be done for that amount of money, or even a lot less.

A long as we have a political requirement to maintain thousands of jobs at KSC and Marshall and Houston, it’s going to be hard to reduce costs. That’s a point that needs to be made strongly in the panel’s report. If the politicians want to shut down human spaceflight, or dramatically increase the budget, we should at least be clear on why those are the two options — it’s not because it is as intrinsically expensive as NASA always makes it. By the time Dragon is flying with crew, Elon will have spent far less than a billion dollars, a tiny percentage of what NASA plans to spend on Orion and Ares I. And the difference in size doesn’t explain the difference in cost. What does explain it is that he’s spending his own money, and his primary focus is on developing space hardware that closes a business case, not “creating or saving” (to use the administration’s wonderfully nebulous criterion) “jobs.”

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Roundup Of Good Political News

34 Comments

The pace of “stimulus” spending has plummeted. Good time to shut off the spigot entirely, but it probably won’t happen until we at least restore some sanity to the Hill next year.

Meanwhile, cap and trade appears to be dead in the Senate for this year (and let’s hope forever). This is bad news, of course, for the Blue Dogs in the House who Pelosi strong armed into voting for it. They made a politically painful vote against their constituents’ wishes with nothing to show for it. Let’s hope that it turns her from Speaker Pelosi to Minority Leader Pelosi next year (if not dumping her from the leadership altogether).

And another sign that the people are waking from their trance — a clear majority of likely voters now say that no health-care bill is better than anything resembling this bill:

This does not mean that most voters are opposed to health care reform. But it does highlight the level of concern about the specific proposals that Congressional Democrats have approved in a series of Committees. To this point, there has been no Republican support for the legislative effort although the Senate Finance Committee is still attempting to seek a bi-partisan solution.

Not surprisingly, there is a huge partisan divide on this issue. Sixty percent (60%) of Democrats say passing the legislation in Congress would be the best course of action. However, 80% of Republicans take the opposite view. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 23% would like the Congressional reform to pass while 66% would rather the legislators take no action.

Don’t just do something — stand there!

It’s partly because of this:

One reason is skepticism about Congress itself. By a two-to-one margin, voters believe that no matter how bad things are Congress could always make it worse.

Yup. Michael Barone expands on where the Democrats went wrong:

…the Democrats have a problem here. The party’s leadership currently tilts heavily to the liberal side. Barack Obama is from the university community of Hyde Park in Chicago. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is from San Francisco, and important House committee chairmen are from similar “gentry urban” locales — Henry Waxman from the West Side of Los Angeles, Charles Rangel from a district that includes not only Harlem but much of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Barney Frank from Newton, Mass., next door to Boston.

Of the 21 top leadership members and chairmen, five come from districts carried by John McCain, but the average vote in the other 16 districts was 71 percent to 27 percent for Obama.

All these Democratic leaders understand that their home turf tilts far left of the rest of the nation. But a politician’s political base is ultimately his or her reality principle. Moreover, most of these leaders — though Obama obfuscated this in his campaign — have strong, long-held convictions that are well on the left of the American political spectrum.

These are the people — the House leaders more than Obama, surprisingly — who have shaped the Democrats’ stimulus package, cap-and-trade legislation and health-care bills. The rules of the House allow a skillful leader like Pelosi to jam legislation through on the floor, although she’s had more trouble than expected on health care. But their policies have been meeting resistance from the three-quarters of Americans who don’t describe themselves as liberals.

The leftists were deluding themselves when they saw the November election as a mandate for socialism. Most of the independents who voted for Democrats were voting against Republicans, and many of the people who voted for Barack Obama were just voting for generic “change” without paying much attention to what kind of change was being promised. Now that they see what it actually means, they’re in revolt. And coming up with better commercials isn’t going to get the dog to eat the dog food when it tastes like crap.

Finally, a bonus: If Sarah Palin is so stupid, and Barack Obama so brilliant, how did she win the argument?

One can hardly deny that Palin’s reference to “death panels” was inflammatory. But another way of putting that is that it was vivid and attention-getting. Level-headed liberal commentators who favor more government in health care, including Slate’s Mickey Kaus and the Washington Post’s Charles Lane, have argued that the end-of-life provision in the bill is problematic–acknowledging in effect (and, in Kaus’s case, in so many words) that Palin had a point.

If you believe the media, Sarah Palin is a mediocre intellect, if even that, while President Obama is brilliant. So how did she manage to best him in this debate? Part of the explanation is that disdain for Palin reflects intellectual snobbery more than actual intellect. Still, Obama’s critics, in contrast with Palin’s, do not deny the president’s intellectual aptitude. Intelligence, however, does not make one immune from hubris.

It’s also because he doesn’t have good arguments. All that he has is charisma, and people are starting to see through the lies and the fraud. No wonder the markets are cheering.

[All collected via Instapundit]

[Early afternoon update]

The telecoms apparently don’t want to be stimulated:

With today the deadline to apply for $4.7 billion in broadband grants, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast won’t be going for the stimulus money, sources close to the companies said.

Their reasons are varied. All three say they have enough cash to upgrade and expand their broadband networks on their own. Some say the grant money could draw unwanted scrutiny of their business practices and compensation programs, as seen with automakers and banks that got government bailouts.

And privately, some complain about the conditions attached to the money, including a net-neutrality rule they say would prevent them from managing traffic on their networks in the way they want.

“We are concerned that some new mandates seem to go well beyond current laws and FCC rules, and may lead to the kind of continuing uncertainty and delay that is antithetical to the president’s primary goals of economic stimulus and job creation,” said Walter McCormick, president of USTelecom, a trade group that represents companies including AT&T and Verizon.

Emphasis mine. And of course, it’s not at all antithetical to his true goal of giving the government ever more power over the private economy.

[Mid-afternoon update]

Andy McCarthy has related thoughts:

Obama has never been as popular as advertised — not even as personally popular (his policies have always been far less popular than his person). It is worth remembering, as I’ve noted before, that even with a Republican candidate who inspired little enthusiasm among conservatives, almost 60 million Americans voted against Obama. That’s more than voted for every winning presidential candidate in our history except Bush ’04. The president has gotten by to this point on the bipartisan goodwill almost every new president gets and a media that has projected him as wildly popular — appearances being crucial in politics. Given that the president is a fierce partisan extremist and that picture of plenary enthusiasm for him was an illusion, that bubble wasn’t likely to last very long, and now it’s been punctured by an issue about which people care deeply. In those straits, a clever communication strategy is not going to solve the problem. It can’t change the substance of what he’s trying to sell.

Bill Clinton recovered from this problem (after he lost the Congress) by “triangulating” and moving to the center. I don’t think that Barack Obama is capable of doing that, despite his pretense of being a moderate — he’s too much of a knee-jerk statist. And the people are wising up to the fraud (nine months too late).

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A US President

25 Comments

…raised on KGB propaganda:

From his communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis to the unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, Barack Obama has always gravitated towards people holding radical leftist views akin to those of Zelaya. He eagerly promoted leftist ideology as an ACORN activist and later when he taught and developed theories that opposed the American system of individual liberties in favor of unsustainable group entitlements at the expense of producers — theories that advocated placing the people under the controlling “care” of the state.

And since such views are part of the ideological template that vilifies America and lionizes its enemies, Obama’s instinctive reaction was to back Zelaya and throw a lifeline to Ahmadinejad.

Like John Kerry at the Senate hearings, President Obama may be acting in good faith, but his processing of reality is just as impaired by the same “metaphorical deformation.” As a result, the leader of the free world strays across the frontlines and joins the Marxist leaders Hugo Chavez, Raul Castro, Evo Morales, and Daniel Ortega, at least two of whom — Castro and Ortega — were committed Soviet clients.

It explains much.

Political Commentary

You Want Astroturfing?

14 Comments

This is astroturfing.

And hilarious. And more signs of their desperation.

But they won’t be well dressed, so I guess they have that going for them.

[Evening update]

More thoughts on astroturfing, and hypocrisy, from Jesse Walker. This part seems a little unfair, though:

It’s entertaining to watch the same people who spent the Bush years smearing the antiwar movement as “on the other side” suddenly rediscovering the virtues of noisy protest.

I can’t speak for others, but I never called antiwar people, per se, on the other side. I reserved that term for people who wore kaffiyehs, marched with Palestinian flags, said that they supported the troops when they shot their officers, and called people in Iraq killing US troops their version of the Minutemen.

Just sayin’.

[Update a few minutes later]

Megan McArdle has some thoughts, from experience:

Have I mentioned recently that I hate PIRG? Well, I hate PIRG with the kind of blackhearted distilled rage that normally characterizes the breakup of a thirty year marriage. They, and their whole canvassing operation, are a vile beast that subsists on dishonor, greed, and the rapidly disintegrating idealism of impressionable young people.

But the LA Times piece makes it sound like the Obama administration, or some other wing of the Democratic party, is hiring these volunteers. It is, I suppose, possible, but it’s not the most likely supposition. PIRGs love national health care. So do most of the other groups they work with. Given that their canvassing operation is the fundraising arm of half the left-wing groups in this country, they’re the obvious people to hire if you want to take your message to the streets. I’m sure there are loads of perfectly legitimate groups out there with money to spare and a heartfelt desire to push national health care reform for its own sake.

Whether or not the administration is involved, it’s true, unadulterated astroturf. And really, it’s all part of the collectivist hive. The administration doesn’t have to orchestrate it, because it can count on its fellow travelers.

And yes, I know exactly the connotations with which the phrase “fellow travelers” is fraught. They are intended.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Meghan McCain

3 Comments

Slapped down:

Ms. McCain’s ideas are neither new nor exciting. In fact, if you took Nelson Rockefeller’s speech to the GOP in 1964 when Barry Goldwater was nominated, toned down the language so a whiny teenager would understand it, inserted a few pointless digs at other peoples’ appearance/online fan base, one or two lines of bizarre biker fetishization, and peppered it with logical fallacies and non sequiturs, you’d have the makings of a pretty standard Meghan McCain column. In fact, if you took the former self-described “conservative” and two-time Adlai Stevenson supporter Peter Viereck’s thoughts on Joseph McCarthy and replaced the name “McCarthy” with the name of any socially conservative Republican politician/commentator, and replaced the terms “communists” and “reds” with the word “gays” or “bikers,” you’d also have the makings of a pretty standard Meghan McCain column. Both of these people ended up lost on the ash heap of failed Republican political figures, a destiny which Ms. McCain herself is destined for if she keeps on offering unsolicited advice.

What a ditz. But it’s sort of like shooting a whale in a barrel.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

More Augustine Thoughts

13 Comments

…from Clark Lindsey. I have to say that Sally Ride has risen considerably in my esteem in the past couple months. And I’m a little disappointed, but not shocked that Bo Bejmuk (with whom I worked at Rockwell) doesn’t quite seem to get it. Operational costs are key. NASA simply can’t expect to just have money shoved at them.

[Update a few minutes later]

Lindsey versus Coppinger. It’s quite the beat down.

I was going to respond, but haven’t had the time. I read Rob’s stuff, and sometimes I just shake my head. He has an apparently massive capability to delude himself on both the politics and the economics. He’s been whistling past Ares I’s graveyard for months.

Political Commentary

The People Are Waking From Their Trance

16 Comments

Republicans are now trusted more than Democrats on almost all major issues (including health care):

Overall, Republicans lead Democrats in terms of voter trust on eight out of 10 key issues for the second consecutive month, and the two are tied on one issue.

Republican candidates continue to hold a modest lead over Democrats for the seventh straight week in the Generic Congressional Ballot.

The GOP now holds a six-point lead on the top issue of the economy, an advantage that has changed little over the past four months.

Health care is not the only issue which the Republicans are enjoying a first-time lead. Voters now trust the GOP more than Democrats on the issue of education, 41% to 38%. This is also the first time in over two years the Republicans have held an advantage on that issue. Democrats led Republicans on education by three points in July and seven points in June.

Republicans lead Democrats on Social Security for the second straight month, this time by a 43% to 39% margin. Social Security is another issue where Democrats have enjoyed consistent leads in recent years.

The GOP maintains a strong 51% to 35% lead on taxes, after holding the same lead in July. Republicans have been trusted more by voters on the issue of taxes in every poll conducted since February.

Apparently, the fastest (and only) way to convince voters that the Democrats are terrible on the major issues is to put them in charge. Fortunately, it works. Let’s just try to minimize the damage until we can rectify the situation next November.

[Afternoon update]

Here’s another sign that the American people are coming to their senses:

With improvements in the economy and only a fraction of the stimulus money having been spent so far, most Americans — 72 percent — say returning the unused portion of the $787 billion dollar stimulus to taxpayers would do more to boost the economy than having the government spend it. Majorities of Democrats (59 percent), Republicans (87 percent) and independents (70 percent) think the money should be returned to taxpayers.

I have to say that I’m surprised that even the Democrats agree. I don’t think that the worst is over yet, but the “stimulus” is anything but, and will just contribute to the problem as long as it goes on.

Political Commentary

Stop Lying About Us

4 Comments

The American College of Surgeons slap down the president. I guess TOTUS must have taken August off.

[Update a few minutes later]

Heh:

…feeling it was my patriotic duty to do so, I have copied the statement from the American College of Surgeons and posted it to the whitehouse.gov website, asking them to look into this ‘fishy disinformation’.

Fishy indeed.

[Late afternoon update]

Obama’s rhetoric versus reality.

Political Commentary, Space

A Defense Of DIRECT

46 Comments

Stephen Metschan emails, per my recent piece in The New Atlantis:

I agreed with much of what you wrote especially with the lead up to how we got to where we are today. In fact even key elements of what you wrote as solutions to going further are actually part of the DIRECT plan which goes far far beyond the Jupiter Launch System which is just a one component of that plan. One day I wish you would at least publicly acknowledge this. In fact the CE&R were very informative in help us come up with a good compromise between the two extremes of Ares or an exclusive existing EELV approach. Also for the record we are no longer anonymous to the Commission as I promised them. In fact Leroy’s question of who are we was a call to arms. To suffice to say what they found will result in some significant changes shortly to NASA middle management.

You continue to have three key blind spots in three very different areas of physics, politics and experience.

Starting with physics. Whether we like it or not the rocket equation governs our current reality. In addition, RLV will always have higher mass fraction than ELV. As Carl Sagan once said “The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition”. Changing who the government writes the checks to won’t change physics or the golden rule. Further the dynamics of how young, efficient yet inexperienced organizations turn into old, inefficient yet experienced organizations, given enough time and money, won’t change either. While the last one is not strictly physics its durability across human organizational history is almost an axiom of the human condition which in turn mirrors the life cycle of individuals only on longer time scale.

Politics, you almost got it with the statement of the Iron Triangle but you failed to weave that into a broader understanding of solution that works. Politics is the art of the possible. As long as the space services customer base is dominate by government, elected representatives of the taxpayers who ultimately foot the bill will have a dominate influence. Until something ‘like’ Lunar He3 comes along (ie this particular idea may never be possible) the space industry will be dominated by government, the market niche of joy rides for millionaires not withstanding. For now telling the likes of Senator Shelby that your plan is to shut down MSFC is like taking grocery bag to a tank fight. In addition, the Jupiter launch system is not just slightly better than Ares but is less than half the cost (development, operational and fixed). The fact that our plan saves so much money has actually been the problem with the Senator from Alabama. Any guess on how well a plan that destroys NASA as we know it would be received? In addition our fixed cost (ie no launches) is less than 20% of the Human Space Flight budget, well below Ares and an improvement over STS. At launch rates that far exceed our mission budget that percentage number barely moves while the cost per kg to orbit drops below $4,000. The biggest problem we have is that the incremental cost per launch is even lower than this already extremely competitive full amortized cost thereby make any conceivable ELV or RLV approach based on existing physics by any nation or organizational paradigm ‘more’ expensive not less. So your cost argument is completely backwards. In a Jupiter world the government will need to subsidize the ‘commerical’ market not the other way around by paying much more to launch the same payload via multiple smaller launchers than the incrementally cost of what one more Jupiter launch would entail.. Besides their is no absolutely no reason why the Jupiter couldn’t be designed, built and operated by a ‘commercial’ industry consortium or FFRDC for the matter. Again I see little difference between the commercial companies of USA, ULA, SpaceX, Rent-A-RLV, etc. They all are ‘commercial’ companies of one size or another yet the golden rule will still hold sway. Bottomline: lets not throw out the high volume heavy launch infrastructure and workforce out with the NASA management bath water.

Concerning Experience. You also continue to neglect for some reason the fact that launch cost is only 20% of the overall mission cost. As such even if a time machine delivered a device, that for some mysterious reason would only work on Earth, which could place any mass you wanted into Earth Orbit using Duracell battery you would only lower the cost of space exploration and development by 20%. On the other hand we have lots and lots of cost date from real programs that prove that attempting to pack 10kg of spacecraft into a 5kg box increases costs many times that of the actually launch cost think JSWT and MSL. Further even in an EELV paradigm the ISS would still cost more, have less capability and weigh more than Skylab which the Jupiter could put up in one launch. I for one much prefer Skylab over the ISS rabbit warren for trips Beyond LEO.

So in summary I agree with a lot of what you wrote by the ‘close’ on some of your key recommendations only make sense if you ignore physics, politics and experience.

I don’t have time to respond at length, but briefly, there is no correlation between mass fraction and launch costs of which I’m aware. If there is one, it’s certainly second order, relative to flight rate and whether or not you throw hardware away. So I (as always, as I did in a previous piece in The New Atlantis) summarily reject the flawed and false argumentum ab physics.

As for the politics, while closing down MSFC might or might not be a good idea, I do in fact recognize that it is politically unrealistic. I don’t, however, think it politically unrealistic to apply that resource to something useful, that actually advances us beyond LEO, rather than building Yet Another Launch System. For instance, propellant depot development should in theory be in their wheelhouse. Having them do it wouldn’t necessarily be the most effective way to get it done, but it may be the kind of political compromise necessary to at least get the agency to start doing the right thing, if not doing the thing right.

I also recognize that cost of launch is (currently) a small fraction of total mission cost. What I don’t recognize is that this is an iron law of aerospace, rather than an artifact of the way we’ve been doing space for the past five decades. And in fact, for a propellant delivery, the cost of launch dominates, and the vast majority of mass that has to be delivered to LEO (at least until we start to utilize extraterrestrial resources) for extraterrestrial missions is propellant. Also, I share the enthusiasm for Skylab over ISS, in terms of volume, but one can get volume without a heavy-lift vehicle. Just ask Bob Bigelow.

So I plead innocent to all three charges.

[Thursday morning update]

Clark Lindsey has a response to Stephen’s thesis.

[Bumped]