Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, Space

More Constellation Problems

27 Comments

No one who has been following the program will be shocked to learn that the major, fundamental design issues continue, and that they aren’t just “teething pains” of a new program. Despite a lot of happy talk from Griffin and Cook and Hanley over the past few months, thrust oscillation remains a serious problem for the Ares I first stage:

According to a NASA blog, the engineers are still looking at putting a series of passive dampers at the bottom of the rocket and a series of spring-like brackets in the middle to soak up the vibrations like shock absorbers.

Originally the brackets, called a dual plane C-spring isolator system, were too heavy to incorporate into the overall design. An updated version uses titanium, which is as strong as steel but lighter.

However, the fixes are not easy and engineers have yet to settle on a solution. According to NASA officials who attended the meeting, the shaking problem is more difficult to combat than originally thought as each solid rocket burns slightly differently.

You don’t say. That means that a passive solution won’t work, unless they can predict prior to flight exactly what the characteristics will be for each SRB (a longer way of saying…it won’t work). They’ll have to have an active approach that can actually measure the vibrations in real time and try to compensate for them. My solution? Bag the solid first stage. Here’s one that will save even more money. Bag Ares I.

And all is not well at the pointy end of the rocket, either:

An Air Force memo obtained by Todd Halvorson of Florida Today indicates that military safety officials are worried that NASA’s Orion capsule and its crew might not survive an emergency escape off an exploding Ares I rocket.

As I understand it, the concern is that the launch abort system is sized to accelerate away from an exploding upper stage, and to outrun an out-of-control first stage, but not from the flack created by the massive explosion of an SRB. Parenthetically (without the parentheses) it should be noted that one of the ways that NASA put its thumb on the scales when it compared Ares to EELV was to assume that the same LAS would be used in both cases, but the latter has a much more benign failure environment, and could get by with a much lighter LAS, so dinging the EELV for lacking the performance to lift an unnecessary weight was stacking the deck against it.

Anyway, how likely is it that the first stage will explode? Well, I find this sadly amusing:

…the article also has Hanley pooh-poohing the Air Force’s concerns, saying that “supercomputer analyses” will prove that the Ares I rocket is a fine vehicle and Orion’s launch abort system will be able to save the crew in the event disaster strikes.

They have top men looking at it. Who?

Top. Men.

Here’s my question. If they know the results of the “supercomputer analyses” before they have performed them, why are they bothering to perform them? Couldn’t they save some money and just skip them?

Florida Today quotes Hanley saying that the statistical probability of an Ares I first-stage failure is remote. He pinpointed it at 1 in 3,000 to 1 in 3,500.

Gotta love that verb, “pinpointed.”

You know, those were the kinds of numbers that they were claiming for Shuttle, right up until around January 27th, 1986. They got some new data the next day, though, that significantly altered the estimates going forward…

So, once again, show us the numbers, Jeff. Show us your work.

It’s hard to know from this brief news story, so I don’t even know what he means by “failure.” Does he mean spontaneously explode without warning? Well, it’s not unheard of for solid rocket motors to do just that, though it has never occurred in the Shuttle program. But I suspect that what the Air Force is concerned about is a different kind of failure — a guidance failure that requires the Range Safety Officer to destroy the vehicle so that it doesn’t hit any uninvolved areas (e.g., Daytona). And considering that an SRB has never had to do guidance without help from a partner on the other side of the tanks and the SSME gimbals, that’s a non-trivial concern. And when the stage is destroyed (by setting off a linear charge along its length) it could create explosive debris that the LAS may not outrun. I assume that’s the Air Force’s (probably supported by an analysis from Aerospace) concern.

Of course, this all raises the question of whether or not we should even have a launch abort system, as I’ve discussed previously, with further thoughts here. Of course, the whole problem goes back to NASA’s “cargo-cult” engineering approach to Constellation, in which they think that if they just go back and do things the way the Apollo gods did, except “on steroids,” they’ll once again have a successful program.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Race Obsession

63 Comments

…of Judge Sotomayor:

A disinterested observer would conclude that Justice Sotomayor is race-obsessed. In her now much quoted 2001 UC Berkeley speech she invoked “Latina/Latino” no less than 38 times, in addition to a variety of other racial-identifying synonyms. When one reads the speech over, the obsession with race become almost overwhelming, and I think the public has legitimate worries (more than the Obama threshold of 5% of cases) over whether a judge so cognizant of race could be race-blind in her decision making.

I would not wish to be a member of what she termed in the speech the “old-boy network” in a case in her chambers pitted against a self-identified “Latina.” Indeed, if one were to substitute the word “white” for “Latina” in the speech, it would be rightly derided as a classical display of racialist chauvinism.

One of the many and enduring lies of the Obama campaign was that it was going to usher in a post-racial America.

[Update a few minutes later]

A relevant passage from the book about this kind of stuff:

You might say it’s outrageous to compare the current liberal program to help minorities with the poisonous ideology of fascism and Nazism. And I would agree if we were talking about things like the Holocaust or even Kristallnacht. But at the philosophical level, we are talking about categorical ways of thinking. To forgive something by saying “it’s a black thing” is philosophically no different from saying “it’s an Aryan thing.” The moral context matters a great deal. But the excuse is identical. Similarly, rejecting the Enlightenment for “good” reasons is still a rejection of the Enlightenment. And any instrumental or pragmatic gains you get from rejecting the Enlightenment still amount to taking a sledgehammer to the soapbox you’re standing on. Without the standards of the Enlightenment, we are in a Nietzschean world where power decides important questions rather than reason. This is exactly how the left appears to want it. One last point about diversity. Because liberals have what Thomas Sowell calls an “unconstrained vision,” they assume everyone sees things through the same categorical prism. So once again, as with the left’s invention of social Darwinism, liberals assume their ideological opposites take the “bad” view to their good. If liberals assume blacks—or women, or gays—are inherently good, conservatives must think these same groups are inherently bad.

This is not to say that there are no racist conservatives. But at the philosophical level, liberalism is battling a straw man. This is why liberals must constantly assert that conservatives use code words— because there’s nothing obviously racist about conservatism per se. Indeed, the constant manipulation of the language to keep conservatives—and other non-liberals—on the defensive is a necessary tactic for liberal politics. The Washington, D.C., bureaucrat who was fired for using the word “niggardly” correctly in a sentence is a case in point. The ground must be constantly shifted to maintain a climate of grievance. Fascists famously ruled by terror. Political correctness isn’t literally terroristic, but it does govern through fear. No serious person can deny that the grievance politics of the American left keeps decent people in a constant state of fright—they are afraid to say the wrong word, utter the wrong thought, offend the wrong constituency. If we maintain our understanding of political conservatism as the heir of classical liberal individualism, it is almost impossible for a fair-minded person to call it racist. And yet, according to liberals, race neutrality is itself racist. It harkens back to the “social Darwinism” of the past, we are told, because it relegates minorities to a savage struggle for the survival of the fittest.

The notion that it is “racist” to oppose quotas is a perfect example of this kind of doublethink.

[Tuesday morning update]

She’s not a racist, she’s a racialist. I agree that she shouldn’t be “borked,” but she has to be soberly questioned on this sort of thing. Republicans probably can’t stop the appointment, but they can make it very unpopular, and something that people will remember in the voting booth a year and a half from now.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

So How’s That “Stimulus” Working Out?

17 Comments

Like this:

…thanks to Barack Obama and democrats, the US Unemployment rate is worse today than if they never would have passed their stimulus package. The Obama Administration predicted the unemployment rate with and without President Obama’s stimulus package, the one that is supposed to “create or save” 3 million jobs.

Unfortunately, the red line shows the actual trend since the Stimulus was passed.

It wasn’t stimulus, it was scamulus. And it’s scandalous. Or it would be if we had a press that was a watchdog, rather than a lapdog, when Democrats are in power.

[Afternoon update]

Andy McCarthy noted Austan Goolsby’s dancing around this issue this morning, with two left feet:

I caught a panel on which Obama economic advisor Austin Goolsbee conceded that the administration had previously predicted unemployment would top out at around 8%, that it was now up to 9.4%, and that double-digit unemployment was a distinct possibility in the near future. Goolsbee didn’t resort to the administrations’s blather about “saving or creating jobs,” but he did repeat its fustian about how last month’s loss of 345,000 jobs (resulting in a half percentage point jump in the jobless rate) is somehow good news because it beat predictions (I don’t recall him saying whose) of even more dire loss numbers. It made me wonder why, if those predictions either existed or were serious, the Obama administration would have previously predicted that unemployment would top out at 8%?

Because they’re economically clueless, and willing to drive the economy deeply into a ditch if it will expand and entrench their political power?

[Monday morning update]

More thoughts from Stephen Green:

Let’s pretend for a moment that, god forbid, you break your arm. And somehow you end up with a team of doctors all trained at Obama University. As you lie there on the table in the ER, one doctor treats your arm by banging on the unbroken one with a ball-peen hammer. The second doctor takes the unusual course of setting your hair on fire. And the third one uses leaches.

Undeterred by your arm’s stubborn refusal to set, soon the doctors start blaming one another. And even though all of them are doing nothing but compounding your injury, none will take any blame. In fact, the louder you scream, the harder they go to work on you.

That, apparently, is what’s going on in the West Wing these days. Our economy is being managed by Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Howard.

It’s Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

[Bumped]

General, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

On Pseudonymity

21 Comments

There’s been a little kerfuffle in the “left-right” blogosphere this weekend over the “outing” of a pseudonymous blogger.

While I sympathize (or is the right word these days “empathize“?) with Ed Whelan’s frustration at being publicly attacked by someone who wants to lead a dual on-line/off-line life (and ignoring the incivil nature of many of the comments over at Obsidian Wings), I think that (former pseudonymous) blogger Jonathan Adler has the better part of the argument.

I would also say that I agree that there is an important distinction between pseudonymous and anonymous blogging. The former establishes an identity and a reputation that must be both established, and upheld. After a while, people will respect, or not, posts or comments from such a person, regardless of whether or not they know the real name/profession/location, etc. An anonymous commenter/blogger, on the other hand, has the potential to be a drive-by arsonist, and many are. In the space Internet world, Tommy Lee Elifritz is perhaps the best example of this, who changes his nom de plume more often than he probably changes his underwear, at places like Space Politics, NASA Watch and Rockets’n’Such. Of course, in his case, the vile style is quite distinctive.

Anyway, from a personal perspective, I’ve always blogged under my real name, for better or worse. In some cases, it’s been for the worse. I won’t name names, but I know for a fact that I have lost consulting work and been blackballed by parts of the industry because of my writing on the net under my own name (the proximate cause was the LA Times debate that I had with Homer Hickam), prominently noted to industry insiders, who might otherwise not have noticed it, by NASA Watch. Thanks, Keith…

Note that this wasn’t over my “right wing” (a phrase that never fails to amuse) politics, but specifically about my space policy blogging. This undoubtedly cost me many thousands of dollars in income since then, and ultimately resulted in a blogging plea for work last summer (one that ultimately resulted in consulting employment that undid at least some of the personal economic damage, so blogging has some value). This isn’t a complaint, but simply a statement of how the world works.

Perhaps, had I been blogging pseudonymously, this wouldn’t have happened. But as others in the most recent discussion have pointed out, one can only maintain pseudonymity for so long, until one is “outed,” because the more one reveals on the blog (and if one is a serious blogger, much is eventually revealed), diligent people can figure it out, and if they think it in their interest, reveal it to others. And of course, had I been a pseudonymous blogger, I wouldn’t have gotten the LA Times gig to begin with. Who wants to read Homer Hickam debating someone who won’t use their own name?

Anyway, when I started this endeavor, my motto was “to thine own self be true.” I’ve always tried to do that on this blog, consequences (apparently) be damned, and I’d like to assure what few readers I have that I’ll continue to do so.

[Monday morning update]

Heh. “I’ve looked at a bunch of the sites that have posted on the Blevins affair, and their anonymous commenters are running heavily against Ed for some reason.”

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Hating Bush

15 Comments

…loving Castro. It’s all good:

He was a courtly State Department intelligence analyst from a prominent family who loved to sail and peruse the London Review of Books. Occasionally, he would voice frustration with U.S. policies, but to his liberal neighbors in Northwest D.C. it was nothing out of the ordinary. “We were all appalled by the Bush years,” one said.

So, who could blame him for spying for a communist dictator?

Political Commentary, Space

Should NASA Get Back Into The Launch R&D Business?

6 Comments

Frank Sietzen has kicked off a discussion over at NASA Watch:

While the present Orion-Ares 1 architecture may well be the “safe, simple, soonest” launch solution promised by ESMD, notice nobody is claiming an Orion-Ares 1 stack will be cheaper than a Shuttle flight. My question to readers: what is the government’s role and responsibility in reducing the cost of access to space? Would you bring back NGLT-or a revamped version of the SLI minus specific vehicle test beds such as the X-33/X-34? How would you revitalize spaceplane research? And would any of you remove funding from existing NASA programs such as exploration to fund research in advanced launch technologies? Or has that ship sailed?

I would certainly remove funding from Ares development for it (because I’d do that on general principles). But NASA wasn’t particularly good at funding launch R&D, as exemplified by the X-33 fiasco. What I would do is get NASA out of the launch development business entirely, and back into the R&T business, and start to view industry as the customer for it, as NACA did. If NASA really wanted to support commercial industry with VSE (as recommended by the Aldridge Commission), it would be doing two fundamental things, neither of which it’s doing much of right now. And no, COTS doesn’t count — it has nothing to do with the VSE.

First, it would be purchasing services, including launch services, from the commercial sector, as it does for unmanned exploration, and stop trying to develop and operate its own dedicated vehicles. Second, it would be canvassing those providers for input as to what high-risk technologies could reduce future costs and increase reliability, and start investing in those. That could include developing X-Vehicles, but they should be true X-Vehicles, each one focused on proving out one or (at most) two key technologies, and not relying on those technologies to be able to fly at all (the grand failing of X-33). They would also be much less risk averse for X programs, and not idiotically shut them down when almost complete out of fear of failure (e.g., X-34). Not to mention demanding that they incorporate some pet NASA project, like a Marshall-developed engine (X-34 again).

There are lots of lessons to be learned from space history, but unfortunately, the space policy establishment seems determined to learn the stupendously wrong ones (e.g., Shuttle proved reusables don’t work, so let’s do Apollo again), and ignore the sensible ones.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

More History Lessons For The President

2 Comments

From Michael Barone and Frank Tipler.

It makes me all the more curious to see his college transcripts. Did he even take a course in history? And what’s really appalling is that it isn’t just him — there are apparently no fact checkers in the White House itself.

And Victor Davis Hanson says that the president reminds him of himself. A much younger, and more naive himself.

[Update a few minutes later]

Obama’s message of weakness:

The speech…impressed many conservatives, including Rich Lowry, my esteemed editor at National Review, “esteemed editor” being the sort of thing one says before booting the boss in the crotch. Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: “Fundamentally, Obama’s goal was to tell the Muslim world, ‘We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don’t hate us and murder us in return.'” But those terms are too narrow. You don’t have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders. And you don’t even have to hate him if you’re too busy despising him. The savvier Muslim potentates have no desire to be sitting in a smelly cave in the Hindu Kush, sharing a latrine with a dozen half-witted goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building. Nevertheless, they share key goals with the cave dwellers – including the wish to expand the boundaries of “the Muslim world” and (as in the anti-blasphemy push at the U.N.) to place Islam, globally, beyond criticism. The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.

Once Obama moved on from the more generalized Islamoschmoozing to the details, the subtext – the absence of American will – became explicit. He used the cover of multilateralism and moral equivalence to communicate, consistently, American weakness: “No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.” Perhaps by “no single nation” he means the “global community” should pick and choose, which means the U.N. Security Council, which means the Big Five, which means that Russia and China will pursue their own murky interests and that, in the absence of American leadership, Britain and France will reach their accommodations with a nuclear Iran, a nuclear North Korea and any other psychostate minded to join them.

This reminds me of the old The Simpsons episode about the right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way. There’s the Reagan way, the Carter way, and the Obama way. The latter is like the Carter way, but way faster. We’re not even half a year into the presidency.

Political Commentary

Fox Derangement Syndrome

7 Comments

…is on full display over at this “Democratic” Underground discussion of a typical leftist who wants to decide what other people should, and should not hear.

I went in to have some blood drawn on Tuesday, and Fox News was playing in the doctor’s office waiting room. It obviously didn’t bother me, but I can’t imagine being as outraged as some of these people are even if it had been MSNBC with Olbermann.