Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, Space

Not Rolling Dice

28 Comments

I’ve commented in the past (even recently) that risk estimates of continuing to fly the Shuttle are overblown. There are good arguments to retire the system, but the risk of losing the crew isn’t one of them, both because they aren’t as high as people are saying, and because losing another crew wouldn’t be the end of the world. As I’ve said repeatedly, if we’re not willing to risk human lives on spaceflight, then it’s probably not worth doing. Anyway, Dick Covey, former astronaut and head of USA, apparently agrees with me (at least about the risk numbers):

The often-quoted PRA numbers do not factor in the continuous improvement in the vehicle and operations — of which there have been numerous and significant changes — or the quality and performance of the team that makes it work.

PRA estimates alone should never be used to reach a go/no-go determination on flying one, two or 10 more missions. PRA is intended primarily to provide an analytical yardstick for making sound engineering decisions about the development of a system and whether incremental changes in a system would improve or degrade relative safety.

Applying statistical probability techniques to the space shuttle PRA number to determine the risk of flying multiple missions implies a randomness in safe shuttle operations that does not exist, and belies the real approach to risk identification and management that defines the current space shuttle program.

The shuttle currently operates at the highest level of safety in its history. It is not without risk, but that risk is better understood and mitigated now than at any time in shuttle history.

Absolutely. The Shuttle has never been safer than it is today. Mike Griffin has just been using the PRA numbers to scare Congress into retiring the system so he could free up the funds for the Scotty rocket.

And this nonsense about needing “recertification” (whatever that means — it was never “certified” in the first place) in 2010 is just that. The CAIB never really provided any basis for this date. It’s an arbitrary one that just happened to coincide with the planned completion of ISS, so it seemed like a good marker for the decision as to whether or not to continue to program. We don’t really know if the vehicles need an OMDP, or mini or nano OMDP. We would just have to continue to inspect as we fly.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Good Luck With That

1 Comment

Jim Pinkerton thinks that space development should be at the center of Obama’s stimulus plan.

The problem is that, as “anonymous.space” points out, it isn’t particularly stimulating in the short run:

Unfortunately, departments and agencies with large portions of their budgets dedicated to multi-year development projects — like NASA and DoD — are extremely poor prospects for near-term economic stimulus funding. Congress appropriates the vast majority of NASA’s $17 billion budget as two-year funding, meaning that NASA has two years to get the funding on contract or otherwise awarded. NASA has an even longer period of time to spend the funding — i.e., obtain a receipt from the contractor and pay them. If the White House and Congress want to see federal funding pumped into the economy in early to mid-2009, NASA would be a very poor choice of vehicle for that funding (as much as I wish it were otherwise). Funding appropriated for NASA in 2009 would not really be flowing until 2010-12.

Space projects are about the farthest thing from shovel ready. And there’s a lot of up-front effort that has to go in to how to properly spend the money.

I met Pinkerton at a free-market space symposium sponsored by Cato about a decade ago. He was (and remains) very enthusiastic about space, but very skeptical about private space.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Over in the same comment thread as the one from “anonymous.space,” Charles in Houston has a great stimulus idea:

OK, I can’t help myself!!! I have to at least fire off a controversial and pointlessly realistic posting on the NASA As Stimulus idea!!!

Why not create a few more NASA centers? We have created lots of jobs by opening the Shared Services Center and the Independent Verification center and some other center that I forgot about and maintaining a whole host of overlapping Centers for years. Why not open a few more in Detroit and hire a bunch of auto workers to do something or the other?? You would build parking lots and visitor’s centers and attract tourists – all NASA facilities attract tourists like picnics attract ants.

He might be able to get John Conyers’ support for that one.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s the original version of the Pinkerton piece at Fox News, which is much easier on the eyes to read. The Lifeboat Foundation really needs a site redesign.

Humor, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Satire

Just Arrived In Big Hollywood

3 Comments

Iowahawk:

Cold Humpcrack Creekwater: Two retarded gay cowgirl sisters (Rene Zellweger, Traci Lords) defy a fundamentalist sherriff (Chris Cooper) and discover love in this 1930’s period piece set in the Appalachian outback of Nebraskansaw.

Angel Soft This: In a shocking and sometimes humorous indictment of the toilet paper industry, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock documents the ravages he suffers after 30 straight days of non-stop butt-wiping.

Snow Fuji Mountain: Mothra (Toby Damon) and Gamera (Orlando Law) discover forbidden love while destroying Tokyo in this story of nuclear-triggered sexual awakening.

I would actually pay to see some of these.

Economics, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Economy Is Not A Machine

9 Comments

I don’t understand why people don’t understand this. An ecosystem is a much more accurate (and more useful) analogy. And I’ve always found this amusing/frustrating:

Keynesians on the left are eager to dismiss Intelligent Design (ID) as the creationist afterthought to evolution, but just as eager to embrace its analog in economics. Disciples of Adam Smith know better. Darwin, after all, read Smith. As the late naturalist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “the theory of natural selection is a creative transfer to biology of Adam Smith’s basic argument for a rational economy: the balance and order of nature does not arise from a higher, external (divine) control, or from the existence of laws operating directly upon the whole, but from struggle among individuals for their own benefits.”

It’s particularly ironic (and there must have been some cognitive dissonance) that Gould wrote this, because my understanding was that he was a life-long Marxist. And of course, the opposite applies as well — many free marketeers refuse to believe in biological evolution. They understand that there is a natural emergent order in the marketplace, but can’t believe that life could evolve unguided from above.

I’m one of those weirdos who believes in both free markets, and free nature.

[Update late morning]

Arnold Kling has some thoughts on the myth of the “economic multiplier”:

It is amazing what happens when you assume that you live in a linear world. You say that the multiplier for government spending is 1.57.

Really? Over what range? Think of it this way: at which level of additional government spending would the path of U.S. real GDP be the highest?

(a) $100 billion in spending above the baseline
(b) $1 trillion in spending above the baseline
(c) $100 trillion in spending above the baseline

If you use a constant multiplier of 1.57, the right answer is (c). Yet we know that this is not the right answer. At $100 trillion in additional government spending, the United States would be operating like Zimbabwe, with similar results.

This is similar to the (dumb) argument often made by space advocates that space spending has a high (or higher) “multiplier” effect than other kinds of spending (the study most cited on this is the one done by Chase Econometrics back in the 70s).

Yes, obviously, if you pay engineers to do things, they’ll go out and spend the money on goods and services, and create more jobs for other people. And yes, if you develop technology, some of it is bound to have an economic benefit and improve productivity, or create new products, and grow the economy.

But when one makes these kinds of arguments, it’s all too easy to ignore what you’re spending the primary money on. It really does matter what product the engineers are building with government money. When it comes to space, does anyone think that it makes no difference whether we had continued to employ people building and flying Saturns, or had developed the Shuttle? Or that if we’d developed a better version of the Shuttle (perhaps by starting with smaller prototypes, and continually improving the concept over the past thirty-five years) that it would have made no difference in our prospects for being spacefaring? That it makes no difference whether we spend thirty-billion dollars developing Ares, or instead something that actually reduces the cost of access to space?

To listen to the “multiplier” argument, it doesn’t matter at all. Having the engineers design a machine to bore a hole to the earth’s center has the same economic value as to build a space elevator.

When we are talking about government spending, it isn’t sufficient to talk about how much we’re spending, and whether or not it will “stimulate the economy.” We have to talk about what we’re spending it on, and unfortunately, much of what the Democrats want to spend it on will (relative to letting people decide what to do with their own money) not create wealth, or grow the economy, but rather destroy it. It’s what governments do.