Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

What Is Constellation?

16 Comments

No one seems to know, even though it’s been pretty well defined by NASA. If we are to believe this web page (and it seems consistent with what I’ve always understood it to be) it is the set of hardware elements that are to get us back to the moon, and eventually to provide the basis for missions “beyond,” whether Mars or other objects in the inner system. These include the Ares I and Ares V launchers, the Orion capsule, and the Altair lunar lander (it also of necessity includes the Earth Departure Stage, though it’s not mentioned at the top level, and remains unnamed, as far as I know).

But apparently people, and people who should know better, don’t read that web page. One of them is Andy Pasztor of the Journal, who I had to correct the other day (I sent him an email — he never responded).

Someone else who should know better is Glenn Smith (who I’ve known for a couple decades, though we haven’t had any interactions since the early nineties), who wrote an editorial last week that implies (well, OK, actually states) that Constellation is a moon base:

It is time to reconsider whether we want to go ahead with the Constellation program to place a base on the moon. Many of us in the space community would be eager to recreate the thrill of Apollo. However, from the public’s standpoint, going back to the moon in 2020 would not invoke the same sense of awe and inspiration it did 51 years earlier when it was a seemingly impossible task.

The Constellation program is not to place a base on the moon. The Constellation program is to develop the capabilities to get humans back to the moon (and perhaps beyond it). To actually build a base would require much more than Constellation, at least as currently defined. There is in fact no funding in the budget plans that I know of for a lunar base (there’s not really enough to even do Constellation in the manner in which NASA has insanely and duplicitously and disingenuously defined it).

At this point, arguing about whether or not we should do a moon base is utterly beside the point, because there are no concrete plans as to what NASA is going to do once it has the trivial capability to get a handful of astronauts to the moon once or twice a year, at a cost of billions per flight, which is all that Constellation in its current incarnation provides.

And notice the last two sentences. They don’t seem to jibe with the first one. “Going back to the moon” is not the same thing as building a moon base. After all, we went to the moon once, and Mike Griffin advertised this plan as doing that “on steroids,” and there may have been a base implied, but there may also not have. Unfortunately, the VSE wasn’t sufficiently specific about what we were supposed to do after we got back to the moon, other than as to use it as a basis for going on to the other places, but there are lots of ways to do that.

Now, I’m not necessarily opposed to lack of specificity, because I don’t believe in socialistic/fascistic five- and ten- and twenty-year plans. I was happy with the president’s general goal that man was going out into the cosmos, and I wasn’t unhappy with the idea that we’d get back to where we were forty years ago and use that as a basis for going beyond.

What I am unhappy with is the cargo-cult mentality on the part of NASA that, because we got to the moon forty years ago on a humungous launch system with a crew capsule and service module and expendable lander, that this is the way to do a reset of history and reestablish a forty-year-old baseline.

In my mind, what Constellation should be is the development of an infrastructure that allows us to go anywhere we want in the inner (if not outer) solar system, and then let the national priorities determine what we’ll do with it once it’s in place.

But it must do so in an affordable and sustainable (and, I would add, scalable) way, which means you can’t throw the hardware away. In repeating Apollo, we are doing exactly the opposite. We have to develop a system that has low marginal costs, which means reusable hardware, which means in-space refueling, and depots from which to do so scattered (at first) in cis-lunar space. Until I see NASA plans to do so, I won’t take their multi-decade plans seriously.

[Tuesday morning update]

Paul Spudis (who was on the Aldridge Commission) says that NASA has managed to subvert the intent of the VSE:

The Vision was never intended to be a repeat of Apollo – the idea was to use the Moon to create new spacefaring capabilities. This is a task that’s never even been attempted in space, let alone accomplished. It is the antithesis of “been there, done that.”

The administration may have thought that the issue was settled after the VSE announcement and the Aldridge Commission, but it wasn’t, and there continue to be warring factions within the agency. It was pretty clear (and one can even recall quotes from Doug Stanley to that effect) that some saw the lunar mission as nothing more than an excuse to develop Mars hardware (a heavy lifter, that just happens to be named “Ares”), which is ironic, because the Ares V will not perform a Mars mission in a single launch, and it’s impractical (short of something like Sea Dragon) to build a launcher that will. And yet they avoid the technologies (in-space assembly and fueling) that are enabling for Mars, though this would make the moon more practical and sustainable as well.

This is quite literally lunacy.

Political Commentary, Space

Break From Blogging Break

15 Comments

Things are still hectic here preparing the house for the party after the communion, but for those who hadn’t seen it, NASA Space Flight has finally acquired the heretofore hidden appendices to the ESAS report that supposedly justify their selection (i.e., the work that I asked Mike to show us). Jon Goff has a sneak preview. Clark Lindsey has more thoughts. More thoughts from me will have to await my return to Florida tomorrow.

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

The Real Cultural War

38 Comments

It’s about free markets versus fascist corporatism.

[Update early afternoon]

Sorry, but yes, it is fascism. Which is not identically equal to Nazism.

[Update a few minutes later]

So much for the rule of law:

As much as anyone, we want to see Chrysler emerge from its current situation as a viable American company, and we are committed to doing what we can to help. Indeed, we have made significant concessions toward this end – although we have been systematically precluded from engaging in direct discussions or negotiations with the government; instead, we have been forced to communicate through an obviously conflicted intermediary: a group of banks that have received billions of TARP funds.

What created this much-publicized impasse? Under long recognized legal and business principles, junior creditors are ordinarily not entitled to anything until senior secured creditors like our investors are repaid in full. Nevertheless, to facilitate Chrysler’s rehabilitation, we offered to take a 40% haircut even though some groups lower down in the legal priority chain in Chrysler debt were being given recoveries of up to 50% or more and being allowed to take out billions of dollars. In contrast, over at General Motors, senior secured lenders are being left unimpaired with 100% recoveries, while even GM’s unsecured bondholders are receiving a far better recovery than we are as Chrysler’s first lien secured lenders.

Our offer has been flatly rejected or ignored. The fact is, in this process and in its earnest effort to ensure the survival of Chrysler and the well being of the company’s employees, the government has risked overturning the rule of law and practices that have governed our world-leading bankruptcy code for decades.

Hey, there are omelettes to make.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

More Candidates For Tea Parties

17 Comments

GM bondholders:

This is what happens when the government picks winners and losers: big unions walk away with GM and small investors get thrown by the wayside. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to return to some kind of normal economic activity, and when that happens we will need investors, large and small, to feel it’s worthwhile getting back into the market. Deals like this one are going to make that awfully difficult.

People are reeling from having their 401ks wiped out in the current market slide. And now those who had for years bought what they thought were “safe” blue-chip corporate bonds are discovering they were only safe until they were told by the government to go fly a kite because government wants to pay off the unions instead. That is deeply unfair to small bondholders, and it’s dreadful economic policy. As a friend of mine put it to me, “Who in their right mind will buy corporate bonds now? And if nobody’s buying bonds, how exactly are our debt markets going to get humming again? What a mess.”

It’s almost like they want to wreck the economy.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Apparently, Ken Lewis, head of B of A, has been fired.

The question is, who did it? The shareholders and board (you know, the old-fashioned way), or was it our new head of the economy continuing to grab more power?

[Update]

Apparently it was the board. And he’s still CEO, just not chairman.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

What He Says

7 Comments

…and what he does:

1. “As President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.”

2. “I will make sure that we renegotiate [NAFTA].”

3. Opposed a Colombian Free Trade Agreement because advocates ignore that “labor leaders have been targeted for assassination on a fairly consistent basis.”

4. “Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.”

There are a lot more broken campaign promises (I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, and not call them lies) where those came from, and probably a lot more to come.

I just don’t understand why anyone believes anything he says. Must be something in the water.

[Update early evening]

Note, unlike many of His flock, I’m not complaining about him breaking campaign promises per se — many of them were awful, and I’m glad he didn’t follow through. I’m just sayin.’

Political Commentary, Space

Assembling The Station

7 Comments

Here’s a nice animation of ISS assembly. One of the most tragic things about the current approach to the Vision for Space Exploration is that it completely ignores all of the experience gained in orbital assembly over the past decade, instead reverting to Apollo on Geritol.

[Update a couple minutes later]

What a coincidence. I just got an email titled “Gee, Scolese Sounds Like A Critic Of ESAS” (I don’t know if the sender wants to be attributed):

I’m watching the Appropriations hearing, and in response to a question from Chairman Mollohan re plans for moon exploration, etc… Scolese talks about ISS as an example of success at assembling complex systems in LEO and that he would like to see NASA come up with an architecture to build things and then go explore.

Gee. What a concept.

You’ll have to get the transcript, but it sounds pretty treasonous…

At this point, just making Scolese the formal administrator is sounding pretty good to me.

[Update early afternoon]

Rob Coppinger is live twittering the hearing (not a permalink). And he has some thoughts on Scolese’ testimony as well:

In an extraordinary exchange between NASA acting adminisrator Christoper Scolese and the US House of Representatives’ committee on appropriations’ subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies chair, Scolese said that the agency was still working on what “return to the Moon” meant and whether that was a outpost, which he went on to describe as expensive, or an extended sortie like Apollo

So much for Apollo on steroids…

Let’s hope.

[Late afternoon update]

Here’s more extensive coverage of the testimony:

“We were looking at an outpost on the moon, as the basis for that [2020] estimate and that one is being revisited,” he said. “It will probably be less than an outpost on the moon, but where it fits between sorties, single trips, to the moon to various parts and an outpost is really going to be dependent on the studies that we’re going to be doing.”

“Recall [that] the Vision [for Space Exploration] was not just to go to the moon as it was in Apollo, it was to utilise space to go on to Mars and to go to other places,” he added. “We’ve demonstrated over the last several years that with multiple flights we can build a very complex system reliably – the space station – involving multiple nations…and we’ll need something like that if we’re going to go to Mars.”

Scolese’s further comments hinted that the agency’s plans might shift to include a greater emphasis on destinations beyond the moon. “So what I would like to see from NASA over time is an architecture that…will give us flexibility for taking humans beyond low-Earth orbit and allowing us to have options for what we can do at the moon as well as other destinations…[like] Mars or an asteroid…so that there are options on what we do in 2020,” he said.

Good news, bad news. The good news is that (as noted up above) he’s more interested in building an in-space infrastructure than Mike Griffin ever was. The bad news is that he’s backing off from the commitment to a lunar outpost. On the other hand, the in-space infrastructure may allow a revisiting of that issue if it can be shown to reduce the costs of lunar operations. And ESAS would never have allowed an affordable lunar outpost in any event. The activity rate would have been far too low.

[Bumped]