Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

A Big Sloppy Wet Kiss

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That’s what Jeff Kluger gives to NASA and the Bush administration in this Time piece. The very first graf lays out the hero, and the villain:

Getting into a shouting match with the HR rep is not exactly the best way to land a job. But according to the Orlando Sentinel, that’s just what happened last week between NASA administrator Mike Griffin and Lori Garver, a member of Barack Obama’s transition team who will help decide if Griffin keeps his post once the President-elect takes office. If the contretemps did occur, it could help doom not only the NASA chief’s chances, but the space agency’s ambitious plans to get Americans back to the moon.

The fact that those last few words are a link almost make it seem like an emphasis. “Doom the space agency’s plans to get Americans back to the moon!” <sound=”dissonant organ chord, thunderclap, horses whinnying”></sound>

If you in fact follow the link, it’s to a piece that Kluger wrote about a month ago on those wonderful plans. The piece continues on, lauding the Bush administration’s foresight in coming up with a new plan, and putting the people into place to execute it. There is an implicit assumption that if Dr. Griffin is removed, and his inspiring architecture ended, that we will have to leave returning to the moon to another generation, because it’s the only way to do it.

It’s very clear that he has talked only to NASA officials who agree with the thesis, and to no one else. In fact, the only quotes he has are from Scott Horowitz and Chris Shank. With regard to Horowitz, he writes:

“At the time, the shuttle had flown 290 people, and out of those 14 were dead — nearly one in 20,” says Scott Horowitz, a four-time shuttle veteran who designed the Ares 1, one of the new boosters. “We needed something that was an order of magnitude safer.”

He doesn’t mention that Horowitz has left the agency to “spend more time with his family.” And he has a quote from Shank:

“We’ve been moving in the right direction since the Columbia accident [in 2003],” says Chris Shank, NASA’s chief of strategic communications. “The concern is that we’ll lose that.” Lately, that concern appears well-placed.

There is no argument about why it is “the right direction” — simply a statement as though it’s fact. And what would you expect Mike Griffin’s flack to say? That there are a lot of ways to get there, and they just happened to pick this one? That they now realized as they’ve gotten into it that it wasn’t as “safe, simple and soon” as ATK’s Horowitz sold it to be?

Most notably, is who he didn’t seem to have talked to — he didn’t bother to get the side of anyone on the transition team. Here’s what he has to say about Lori Garver:

The Obama team picked Garver to run the NASA transition, in part because of her deep pedigree and long history at the space agency, which saw her climb to the rank of associate administrator. But Garver started as a PAO — NASA-speak for a public affairs officer — and never got involved in the nuts and bolts of building rockets. She is best known by most people as the person who in 2002 competed with boy-band singer Lance Bass for the chance to fly to the International Space Station aboard a Russian rocket. Neither of them ever left the ground.

Garver’s lack of engineering cred is especially surprising in light of the eggheads with whom Obama has been surrounding himself — most recently, Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Chu, who has reportedly been tapped to be Secretary of Energy. Garver is also not thought to be much of a fan of Griffin — who is an engineer — nor to be sold on the plans for the new moon program. What she and others are said to be considering is to scrap the plans for the Ares 1 — which is designed exclusively to carry humans — and replace it with Atlas V and Delta IV boosters, which are currently used to launch satellites but could be redesigned, or “requalified,” for humans. Griffin hates that idea, and firmly believes the Atlas and Delta are unsafe for people. One well-placed NASA source who asked not to be named reports that as much as Griffin wants to keep his job, he’ll walk away from it if he’s made to put his astronauts on top of those rockets.

NASA is right to be uneasy about just what Obama has planned for the agency since his position on space travel shifted — a lot — during the campaign. A year before the election he touted an $18 billion education program and explicitly targeted the new moon program as one he’d cut to pay for it. In January of 2008, he lined up much closer to the Bush moon plan — perhaps because Republicans were already on board and earning swing-state support as a result. Three months before the election, Obama fully endorsed the 2020 target for putting people on the moon. But that was a candidate talking and now he’s president-elect, and his choice of Garver as his transition adviser may say more than his past campaign rhetoric.

There is an implication here that in addition to the fact that she’s not technical, she has no interest in manned space. Otherwise (since obviously the evil Obama wants to kill this program, despite the fact that his views evolved to support it during the campaign), why put her in place? But to anyone who knows her, like her or not, that is lunacy. Let’s let Al Fansome do the heavy lifting in her support, in comments over at Space Politics in response to one of our favorite clueless space commentators:

WHITTINGTON: Or, cancelling VSE entirely, which is what I suspect she has in mind

Mark,

You like to talk like you know space policy, but you obviously don’t know anything about Lori Garver. You have been around for many years, but sometimes you are just a dunce.

I will prove it.

Lori has been a big supporter of the VSE.

On the day that the VSE was announced Lori was on television promoting the VSE. Check out the Lehrer News Hour on January 14, 2004 where she debate Bob Parks.

Relevant excerpts below.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june04/moon_01-14.html

LORI GARVER: I’m very enthused about the initiative. This is what we should be doing with our space program. The reason Mars is exciting when spirit land on it is because we believe we’re going further. The space program is about so much more than science. I absolutely agree, we’ve been a great space science through the robotic program. But it is because we’re going as a species that I think the public really can relate to this, and ultimately what has caused us a tremendous benefit.

and

LORI GARVER: … But again, it’s that inspiration that calls us to space, and by that it’s not going to be just robots.

and

LORI GARVER: I want my kids to have somebody who is more interesting to them. The first woman who goes to the moon — we’ve never sent any women to the moon — it’s got to be more interesting than whether or not Britney Spears got married this weekend.

and

LORI GARVER: To me, it’s definitely more than magic. I believe as humanity, as a species, we are going into space. We have explored this planet, we will continue to explore this planet and, for our very survival, we must also leave this planet. Ultimately, a lunar base as the president announced today is going to help us build new things, like a solar-powered satellite using lunar materials. That will potentially end our dependence on fossil fuels on this planet.

You, and everybody else who is maligning her intentions, owe Lori an apology.

Now, in fairness to Mark, he may have confused VSE with ESAS/Constellation. He has never been able to understand the difference between the two. But the notion that Lori and Alan Ladwig, and George Whitesides, have an agenda to “cancel VSE” or end plans to return to the moon, is ludicrous.

Anyway, Kluger seems to be similarly unaware of her actual history, instead implying that she is just a soccer mom in space. And if he were really aware of the history, he wouldn’t have let the statement about Mike Griffin thinking EELVs are unsafe go unchallenged, and simply act as a stenographer for Shank (or whoever told him that). In fact, he would have challenged whichever NASA/Griffin defender told him that to explain what had happened in the past few years to change Dr. Griffin’s mind, because in 2003, he had a very different idea:

Griffin has made it clear that he is not opposed to using EELV vehicles effectively unmodified from their current versions to launch crewed vehicles. In a May 2003 hearing by the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee on NASA’s Orbital Space Plane (OSP) program—a short-lived effort to develop a manned spacecraft that was superseded by the CEV—Griffin noted that the term “man rating” dated back to efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to modify ICBMs to carry capsules. “This involved a number of factors such as pogo suppression, structural stiffening, and other details not particularly germane to today’s expendable vehicles. The concept of ‘man rating’ in this sense is, I believe, no longer very relevant.”

He argued that EELVs and other expendable vehicles are already called upon to launch high-value unmanned payloads. “What, precisely, are the precautions that we would take to safeguard a human crew that we would deliberately omit when launching, say, a billion-dollar Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission?” he asked. “The answer is, of course, ‘none’. While we appropriately value human life very highly, the investment we make in most unmanned missions is quite sufficient to capture our full attention.”

The Atlas 5 and Delta 4 EELVs, he noted, have a specified design reliability of 98 percent, in line with experience with the premier expendable vehicles to date. If such a vehicle was used to launch a crewed spacecraft equipped with an escape system of just 90 percent reliability, he noted, the combined system would have a 1-in-500 chance of a fatal accident, “substantially better than for the Shuttle.”

So what happened in the interim to turn them into death traps?

If Kluger really wanted to provide a service to Time/CNN’s readers, he’d get out and do some real reporting, and get some dissenting opinions, instead of simply providing Mike Griffin’s NASA with a widely read forum for its propaganda. He would also come up with a slightly more sophisticated space policy template than “With Constellation, the moon, without Constellation, nothing.”

[Update a few minutes later]

Paul Spudis (who was on the Aldridge Commission) has related thoughts:

Many people have conflated the Vision with NASA’s implementation of it, but they are two very different things. Project Constellation is the architecture that NASA has chosen to implement the VSE. In its essentials, Constellation is a launch system, a spacecraft, and a mission design. NASA chose to develop a new series of launch vehicles, the Ares I and V rockets, the Orion crew “capsule” (formerly called the CEV), and a craft designed to land on the Moon, the Altair lunar lander. The mission design is to launch the crew in the Orion capsule on an Ares I into low Earth orbit, launch the Altair lander and rocket departure stage separately on the Ares V, rendezvous and dock with the lander and depart for Earth orbit to the Moon. The crew would land and explore the Moon from the Altair spacecraft, return to the Orion in lunar orbit, and return to Earth in that vehicle.

Much of the criticism of NASA in recent years is actually criticism of this architectural plan, not necessarily of the goals of the Vision (although some have questioned it). But this architecture is an implementation of the VSE; it is not the VSE itself. The Vision specified long-range goals and objectives, not the means to attain them. To briefly review, we are going to the Moon to learn the skills and develop the technologies needed to live and work productively on other worlds. And there are many ways to skin that cat.

Yes. That’s apparently too complicated a concept for many (including many journalists) to understand.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Is Atlas Shrugging?

8 Comments

“Blame me for the job losses”:

I caused part of this job loss and I know precisely why; the election. The results portend big trouble for small business.

The job destruction process has started. We are about 20% of the way through our ramp down process and on schedule to complete the shut down by spring 2009. Watch the financial news and you will see continued job cuts each month. We are not alone in our strategy. Far from it. Atlas has shrugged all over the country.

Like many business owners, we are no longer willing to take all of the financial and legal risks and put up with all of the aggravation of owning and running a business. Not with the prospects of even higher taxes, more regulation, more litigation and more emboldened bureaucrats on the horizon. Like others we know, we are getting out while the getting is, well, tolerable. Many who aren’t getting out are scaling back.

We learned just this week that getting out of business is harder than we thought. Take Republic Windows & Doors of Chicago, where being out of money and out of paying customers apparently does not give a business the right to shut down. Nor does it give that business’ bank the right to withhold credit. According to the unions, Jesse Jackson and the Governor of Illinois (yes, THAT governor), this company must continue to pay its employees salaries and benefits.

But pay them with WHAT? Liberals seem to be clueless as to where “the money” comes from. They love to tax, regulate and redistribute wealth — all the while decrying the very profit motive that created it — something they do not understand. If they did, they would not naively insist that a business that is out of money, out of customers and out of credit stay open so as to pay employees.

And that is but one example of why the lay-offs of November 2008 – which will be part of George W. Bush’s statistical record – fall in reality on the Obama election. Business owners understand that the election of 2008 just gave a lot more power to people who think like these liberals in Illinois. For crying out loud, an Illinois liberal is now “President elect” and he chose another one for his Chief of Staff. He chose Michigan liberals for his economic team. Illinois and Michigan are broke!

It is no secret that owners circulated endless emails leading up to election day discussing lay off plans were Obama to win. Entrepreneurs instinctively understand the danger posed by larger liberal majorities in power. The risk-reward equation and fierce independence spirit of start up businesses are anathema to the class warfare, equality of outcome and spread the wealth mentality of the left.

I blame the Democrats and big-government Republicans myself. Read the whole thing.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

It’s The Work Rules, Stupid

1 Comment

I was watching the UAW honcho on the telly this morning, and noticed that all of the discussion was about wages and benefits, and there was no discussion whatsoever of the real problem, familiar to anyone who has ever worked in the US auto industry. There would be no problem with the wages being paid if the workers were productive, but the work rules negotiated by the union make them just the opposite. They also make it very hard for supervisors to supervise. I was going to write a long post about this, but I don’t really have time this morning, and it turns out that Mickey beat me to it.

If the new regime was really serious about “change,” they’d repeal the Wagner Act, which is the root cause of the industry’s problems. Instead, they want to implement “card check” (better called the “freedom of thugs to intimidate workers into joining the union” act), to spread the infection throughout the rest of American industry.

Political Commentary, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

“Hitler’s Last Days In The Bunker”

24 Comments

Hey, I think that it’s time (long past time) for Mike Griffin to go, but I think that characterization of his behavior in comments at this story is a little over the top. I mean, I don’t expect him to eat the muzzle after his wife takes poison. Though he does seem determined to burn the entire NASA budget to the ground rather than have it turned to some purpose that would actually open up space for the American people…

That said, the title of Bobby Block’s piece is a little understated. If his reporting is accurate (and we have no reason from past behavior of Dr. Griffin or others described to think not) he is being much more than a “transition problem” for the incoming president. This in itself, I think, speaks volumes about Mike and the NASA culture:

Those who spoke for this article, including a member and staff in Congress, NASA employees, aerospace executives and consultants, spoke only on condition that their names not be used…

…The Bush White House has pledged cooperation, and many agency leaders have told staff to cooperate fully. Griffin himself sent a memo urging employees “to answer questions promptly, openly and accurately.”

At the same time, he made clear he expected NASA employees to stay on message.

For example, transition-team interviews have been monitored by NASA officials “taking copious notes,” according to congressional and space-community sources. Employees who met with the team were told to tell their managers about the interview.

The desperation strong-arm tactics being used here are unsurprising, but are also not in keeping with an agency supposedly responsible to public accountability and the taxpayers. As anyone who has been reading this blog for long knows, I was not (to understate) a huge supporter of Senator Obama as a presidential candidate. But on the issue of space, I was largely agnostic, because I had no reason to believe that Senator McCain would be any improvement, and I was certainly not a supporter of president Bush on the issue, other than the basic concept of the Vision for Space Exploration (and a few bright spots, like White House support for COTS in the face of high-level NASA indifference). In this case, because I personally know some of the people on the space transition team, while I have had some policy differences with them over the years, I think that, relative to the current NASA administration, they are on the side of the angels. So I was gratified to read this:

…this week, Garver told a meeting of aerospace representatives in Washington that “there will be change” to NASA policy and hinted that Obama would name a new administrator soon, according to participants.

At this point, and particularly after reading this, it can’t happen soon enough for me. Here’s the real problem:

The tensions are due to the fact that NASA’s human space flight program is facing its biggest crossroads since the end of the Apollo era in the 1970s. The space shuttle is scheduled to be retired in 2010, and the next-generation Constellation rockets won’t fly before 2015.

Nearly four years ago, President Bush brought in Griffin to implement a plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 as a prelude to going to Mars. Griffin and his team selected Constellation, with its NASA-designed Ares I rocket and Orion capsule, as cheaper and safer than existing rockets. Constellation – especially Ares 1 — is the center of what Griffin sees as his legacy to return humans to the frontiers of space.

He wants to “return humans to the frontiers of space,” but he is perfectly happy to put forth a plan that ensures that it will only be a few humans (government employees) a couple times a year, for many billions per trip. Talk about Apollo on steroids.

It’s the Apollo budget on steroids as well, which is why Apollo was unsustainable financially. This is only one area in which he completely ignored, or even thumbed his nose at, the Aldridge Commission. As I recommended to the transition team, go read the report, and reflect on how much Mike Griffin’s NASA has deviated from its recommendations, and completely blown off the work of the contractors who worked to present options that would have been in keeping with it.

Unfortunately, due to the jobs issue and politics, it’s possible that this disastrous architecture will continue. But if it does, fortunately, it is pretty clear (though little consolation) that it will do so under new “leadership.”

[Thursday morning update]

In another dispatch from Bizarro World, in yet another display of his magnificent superhuman powers in miscomprehension of plain English, Mark Whittington writes that I (as opposed to the commenter at Bobby Block’s site, who I quoted in the post title) am comparing Mike Griffin to Hitler. He also demonstrates that he has no idea what Godwin’s Law is, if he thinks that I “violated” it.

Well, I guess it’s technically true if, by “comparing,” one means pointing out that he is not. I’ll “compare” Mark to Hitler similarly. Unfortunately, I’m less able to “compare” him in the same manner to Bozo the Clown.

[A few minutes later]

A funny (in a sad way) comment over at NASA Watch (I have a couple comments over there as well for Apollo worshipers):

Remembering that Mike Griffin explained his Orion/Ares system as ‘Apollo on Steroids’, and with what we know about steroid use, Mr. Griffin running off the rails like this [2 1/2 year old project two years behind? Don’t you trust what I’m telling you?] can simply be explained as the reaction of his body to heavy steroid use.

Verbally combative, liver damage, shrunken testicles. We’ll get back to you about the latter two effects.

I’ve heard it’s a tough habit to kick.

[Update about lunchtime]

Mark now updates, hilariously and delusionally, to fantasize that “my rage knows no bounds.” Only he would confuse amusement with “rage.”

[Update mid afternoon]

Dr. Griffin claims to be “appalled” at the Orlando Sentinel report. I think that, like people who when they apologize are really only sorry they got caught, he is appalled by the fact that his actions have been reported. I don’t see any denials of the specifics in his protest.

[Evening update (late evening on the east coast — I’m in LA)]

There’s a good discussion in comments on this topic over at Space Politics. “Anonymous.Space” has good commentary as usual, but this is a key point, I think:

…it’s the transition team’s job to ask questions, and Griffin should understand that and know better than to launch unprovoked, petulant attacks on them in a public setting. He, and more importantly NASA, need the transition team on NASA’s side. Griffin should be thankful that the NASA transition team is wholly composed of NASA boosters (most agencies are not so lucky), and work with the team in a transparent manner to develop the best possible set of materials and options for the new Administration. If Griffin is incapable of doing that, whatever the reason, then he should resign immediately. It doesn’t do Constellation, or NASA at large, any favors to have its Administrator engage in such uselessly childish behavior in view of the public eye, the new Administration, and the incoming Congress.

Considering that it was a Democratic administration coming in, this really is the best possible team that he could have expected. In fact, it’s pretty good even in an absolute sense, given their sympathy to both space settlement and NewSpace, which of course could be one of Mike’s problems with them. It’s quite likely that a McCain transition team would be much worse. I never heard any real signs of promise in McCain space policy during the campaign other than that Steidle was one of his advisors. There’s certainly nothing in McCain’s history to indicate that he would do anything interesting in space. It just happens that a lot (though by no means all) of the most devoted space activists are Democrats. Let’s hope they can make more happen this time than they did in the Clinton administration.

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

How To Implement Prop Depots?

6 Comments

With the (at least hoped for) imminent departure of Mike Griffin, there may be opportunities for more sensible approaches to carrying out plans to expand humanity into the solar system. One of the key elements will be propellant depots, and Jon Goff has some policy thoughts on how to (and how not to) make them happen. They echo some thoughts that I presented at Space Access on his panel on the subject in March, but he’s expanded on them quite a bit.

Political Commentary

An Interesting Blogo Discussion

3 Comments

Jim Lindgren has a timeline. Lots of interesting discussion in comments, including this:

What’s missing from most of this analysis is the timing vis-a-vis the context.

The charges of selling the Senate seat, while spectacular, are just a small element of the overall corruption involved here. Going past the headlines, the other charges include some actually more serious corruption, in the usual pay-to-play manner that is so ordinary here in northeastern Illinois that locals hardly raise an eyebrow.

In fact, I am starting to think that Fitzgerald did indeed pull the trigger much earlier than planned or desired. The huge Federal cloud hanging over Blagojevich isn’t new, and it didn’t start on Election Day 2008.

Blagojevich is but one of the Machine’s operatives abroad working for the benefit of the Machine. The fact that he went wrong isn’t even exceptional; recall failed US Senator Carol Moseley Braun, who also was “sent”, in the Chicago Outfit sense, to Washington.

Blagojevich failed as a Machine person and has been an outcast among his peers for a considerable time now. The fact that the Tribune has been very loudly working against him, leading the way for a Constitutional amendment to permit recall, shows how far off the reservation he’s gone.
But the Trib’s opposition, worthy of the description “all-out attack”, is a clue all by itself.

The Tribune is the organization that made it possible for the Machine to install Obama in the Senate and so on, by taking out his opponent back in 2000 with an Axelrod-style oppo campaign.
The tie here is the protection of Obama. Blagojevich was dangerously close to damaging Obama, and taking him out was high on several people’s lists.

This is not to suggest that Fitzgerald would have helped in that regard, but the help he got from within the Machine certainly must have weighed in the decision to go forward with still so much investigating to be done, and so many more Machine people to indict. Arresting Blagojevich so soon must have pained Fitzgerald, but he did it anyway.

A year ago, Chicagoans widely believed that Fitzgerald would be sent packing in January, 2009 if any Democrat won the White House. This does not seem so obvious, now. Still, it is possible to argue that there was exigency in moving against Blagojevich with the possiblity that the Fitzgerald era in Chicago was drawing to a close.

Keep in mind, especially those who don’t follow the Machine so closely, that Fitzgerald has put some seriously heavy Machine people behind bars, and is getting close to even bigger targets. The desperation on the Fifth Floor (at City Hall) is palpable. Even Richard Daley himself has been interviewed.

But Blagojevich was doing far worse things than the charges presented here, and the Feds wanted a lot more than just this one guy and his chief of staff.

There is local speculation that Rezko suddenly decided not to talk to reduce his sentence, an event that coincided with the election of Obama, and that with Rezko going silent on the possiblity of either a pardon or to take one for the President. Some also believe that without the help of Rezko, Fitzgerald found a number of other avenues becoming less inviting and so, went with what he had.

Finally, it’s clear from the tapes that Blagojevich has gotten unstable, saying such things (which are not extraordinary around Chicago in the least) knowing full well the prosecutor’s office was draped all over him like a blanket. I believe Fitzgerald acted early in order to prevent even more eccentric behavior.

I urge anyone looking for background on this to look up columnist John Kass at chicagotribune.com, who not only accurately foresaw the events of yesterday, but many others as well.

You will learn that this is all a large picture of a large organization, and separating the three Daleys, Blagojevich, Obama, and the others just isn’t possible.

The thought that Blagojevich was too corrupt for the Chicago machine beggars the imagination, but anything is possible, I guess. Or perhaps he was just too erratic and unreliable.