Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, Space

Why Should We Care?

5 Comments

Are you sitting down? Prepare for a real shocker. A bunch of astronauts, many of whom have the program as their current meal ticket, support continuation of the fiasco. And the joint statement was put out by ATK. Yeah, they don’t have a dog in this fight…

I found this particularly annoying:

In the joint statement, provided by Alliant, the former astronauts say: “Our top concern…is to ensure the safest possible system is utilised. This requires a proven track record, building on important lessons learned…NASA’s Constellation programme is exactly that type of effort – infused with generational lessons learned.”

Well, of course that’s your top concern. But as a taxpayer, and space enthusiast, my top concern is having a system that’s affordable, and actually contributes to opening up space, things at which Constellation will be an epic fail even if it meets its stated program objectives. If the system isn’t safe enough for them, I know where we can find a lot of other people to fly it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Need For Actual Human Rights Advocates

…at Human Rights Watch:

From now on, every HRW report on Israel is going to be greeted with “you mean the Saudi-funded HRW,” or “you mean the report written by the woman [HRW Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson] who is a great admirer of Norman Finkelstein and lobbied Kofi Annan against Israel in the middle of the Second Intifada” or “you mean the report written by the guy [Stork] who supports the anti-Israel boycott movement and has been venting his hostility to Israel for almost forty years” or “you mean HRW, the organization that fails to take down from its website anti-Israel reports even when it has admitted they are inaccurate,” and so on.

A housecleaning is needed. Transfer Stork, Whitson, and the rest of the current crew to an area in which they don’t have strong ideological priors, and bring in some real human rights advocates to replace the anti-Israel propagandists. Or just preach to the leftist, anti-Israel choir, but don’t expect anyone else to pay attention.

Unfortunately, too many will continue to do so.

Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Matthew Yglesias

9 Comments

…meets Public Choice 101. I think that, more than anything, this demonstrates the potential for utter worthlessness of a Harvard degree. As Joe Katzman notes:

That’s what happens when you take classes in theoretics where critical thinking is actively expunged, and pay $100k+ for the privilege. It’s an extremely common way to be uneducated these days.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I went over and read Joe’s link on theoretics (by Orson Scott Card), and it turned out to be a lot more than that. It’s a piece about groupthink, and how it has poisoned the theoretical physics community with string theory. It actually reminded me a lot of the conventional wisdom of space policy and launch costs.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Ignorance On Space Power

8 Comments

I found the comments in this piece more interesting than the article itself. Power from space may or may not make economic sense, and there are valid arguments against it, but the opposition to it displayed here is typical, and ignorant, and one of the reasons that proponents persist. From what I can see, what was being proposed was simply to revive the small-scale test using power from the ISS that was cancelled this year. But instead, we get things like this:

Why does the proposer think that it would be more efficient to beam energy from the international space station when sun beams are directly bombarding the surface of the earth already? He needs to be able to explain the physics and the economics and he apparently failed. The money needs to go to proposals that can realize fruition in 10-20 years, not some pie in the sky experiments that makes no economic sense.

…The experimental packages carried by Apollo astronauts took years to develop at great expense to meet NASA’s high standards of light weight, reliability and safety in the harsh conditions of space. You don’t just hand NASA a laser and solar cell you bought off the shelf and assembled into a crude prototype and tell them to aim it at a village in Africa during the 5 minutes a day that ISS might be overhead, assuming it’s not cloudy, assuming the villagers all wear safety laser goggles not to go blind, and so forth.

The benefits of beaming from space (though not the ISS) have been explained many times, and yet people persist in asking such foolish questions.

And then we have this:

there is NO way that any non-telecom based orbital outerspace project will be PRIVATE- COMMERCIALLY viable and self sustaining (creating a net economic surplus sufficient enough to pay down the costs of financing the project over time) until the cost of putting payload in orbit comes below 1000$ a pound. This isn’t even a discussion. Do your homework.

First off, there are already non-telecom-based projects that are viable and self sustaining (e.g., remote sensing) at current launch costs. But beyond that, the implication here is that $1000/lb is some sort of unachievable holy grail, but it’s pretty clear to anyone who understands the economics and technology that if one were in the business of launching powersats into orbit, the sheer economies of scale would drive it far below that. Not that this means that it will be economically viable, of course, but any argument against SPS that involves current high launch costs is fundamentally flawed. Then, along those lines, we get this:

Last time I looked into it, even if launch costs are assumed to be $0 space-based solar power isn’t economical.

Again, that would depend entirely on the assumptions in the analysis. And then we get this from someone claiming to be a physics professor:

Energy from space has been discussed since the 1970’s. It is a thoroughly crazy idea. The cost of putting anything (Solar cells in this case) in space is “astronomical”. The resulting microwave beam at the ground would exceed radiation standards over the wide area needed to collect it, and a buffer zone outside. If the beam ever went astray, large numbers of people would be exposed to forbidden levels of microwaves, without their knowing (until later, too late to do anything about it) they were being irradiated.

“…astronomical…” Sigh…

And the beam can’t “go astray.” This professor of physics is apparently unfamiliar with the concept of phased arrays. And who knows what a “forbidden” level is?

The saddest thing, though, is the degree to which NASA has screwed up public perceptions about this kind of thing, as demonstrated by this comment:

As cool as it would be to get solar stations up in space, NASA can barely focus itself enough to get us to the Moon, a feat we accomplished forty years ago. What chance do we even have of this working at all, regardless of the technological barriers?

Note the twin assumptions, commonly held: that NASA would do it, and that NASA can’t do it any more.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

Their Long National Nightmare Is Over

I would just note that the media has to be very happy that they no longer have to cover the presidential vacation in Crawford, Texas, and that they’re back at the Cape (note for regular readers of this blog: “the Cape” means something different to space enthusiasts than it does to media elites). At least one thing is like the glory days of Clinton (who generally poll tested his vacation venues…).

Political Commentary, Space

The New Policy Starts To Take Shape

29 Comments

Clark Lindsey has a summary of the direction that the new space policy seems to be taking, based on Space News reporting:

/– NASA not likely to get the boost in budget of $3B that the Augustine panel recommends
/– Looking for ways to save money and a Deep Space Option sort of approach with no early landings on the Moon or Mars. Instead, asteroid visits and flybys.
/– ISS will be extended to 2020
/– A commercial crew competition program would get $2.5B as the panel recommends.
[/– Deep space exploration projects would get $1B starting in 2012-2013 time frame.]
/– Will also try to save money by using fixed-price contracts rather than cost-plus.
/– Looking at the possibility of a private contractor operating the ISS
/– R&D will get ~$800M rather that the $1.5B recommended by the panel.
/– Ares 1 will probably be axed. Orion could survive as a backup to a commercial capsule.
/– An amended NASA budget will be submitted to Congress in mid-Sept.

It seems much more promising, and budgetarily plausible, than Constellation ever was. I wonder how, and where, they plan to implement the fixed-price procurements? There’s no mention of robotics, but it would be nice to see some ISRU demos on the lunar surface. If successful, they would provide a lot of leverage for lunar landings. This might be a good prize program — land something on the surface that can generate TBD lbs/hour of LOX (and possibly LH2 as well).

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s an NBC news report, with complaints about job losses. And Andy Pasztor has a story at the Journal:

A presidentially appointed commission on the future of U.S. manned space efforts is wrapping up a study urging the White House to rely on commercial transportation of both cargo and crew to the space station. The commission, which presented its initial findings to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and senior White House science aides earlier this month, wants President Barack Obama to revitalize NASA by getting it out of the routine business of shuttle operations: launching to and returning from low-Earth orbit.

Instead, the commission recommends NASA rely on a combination of commercial and government-developed technologies to explore deeper into space. The study group, for example, wants NASA to start working on ways to combat the rigors of cosmic radiation, lengthy travel times and other challenges presented by possible manned missions to nearby planets and outside the solar system.

In the shorter term, companies expected to benefit from the heightened commercial focus include Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Orbital Sciences Corp., both already working on cargo-delivery systems for NASA. Proponents of the new approach are betting that more competition will emerge as companies see more focus on outsourcing certain missions.

Proponents of the commercial approach also say it would save the government money because companies would use their own funds to develop innovative new technologies and recoup their investments over a longer period by providing services. Such programs also are intended to be faster, more nimble and less bureaucratic than traditional NASA acquisition procedures.

With less than $10 billion annually earmarked for manned space exploration, commission members concluded NASA can’t afford to embark on sweeping new initiatives at the same time it is pursuing plans to return astronauts to the moon, most likely after 2025. One of the biggest decisions facing the White House is whether it is willing to shelve those moon ambitions, at least temporarily, even if that results in industry disruptions and job losses. That would entail ending development of an expensive new crew capsule, dubbed Orion, along with work on certain rocket and lunar-lander projects.

And of course, there is no mention of propellant depots or refueling. I’ll be curious to see what the final report has to say about them. Has there been no discussion of them, or do the reporters not understand their significance?

Also, Keith Cowing seems to have corroboration of Rocketman’s report that Bolden questions the value of the Ares-1X “mission.” And Keith displays the sunk-cost fallacy:

Given that the hardware is in place, and the money has more or less been spent, it would seem to be a total waste to not finish things up and then fly the mission.

What is the value of flying a test of a system that isn’t particularly relevant to the actual hardware when the program itself is going to be cancelled? The money has been spent, and it’s dollars over the dam, but there is still some risk involved in the flight, and I haven’t heard that the Range-Safety Office at the Cape has given the go-ahead yet. Yes, it is a waste of money, but it was always a waste of money. Let’s finally stop wasting the money.