But I’m reminded that Jesus was a preacher. Barabbas was the community organizer. And a freedom fighter, like Bill Ayers. Also like Ayers, he got off on a technicality.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
The Sky Isn’t Falling
So says First Trust, about the current financial problems on the Street. For what it’s worth.
Bureaucratic War?
Is NASA fighting with OMB?
Lots of great comments here, including the fact that Mike Griffin’s fear mongering about China is at odds with administration policy. Including this great comment from “red””
it would be a good idea for Griffin to consider what kind of response by NASA would be useful to the U.S. in countering the real military and economic space threats from China. It seems to me that ESAS doesn’t help counter these real threats at all.
The kinds of capabilities that NASA could encourage, invent, or improve to counter China’s ASATs, launchers, and satellites are things like:
– operationally responsive space
– small satellites
– Earth observation satellites
– telecommunications satellites
– economical commercial launch vehicles
– commercial suborbital rockets
– improved education in space-related fields
– space infrastructure (e.g.: commercial space stations, tugs, refueling)It’s possible that, if NASA were contributing more in areas like these (through incentives to U.S. commercial space, research, demos, etc), it would find the budget battles easier to win.
No kidding. Especially the last. And Apollo On Steroids makes no contributions to any of these things.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of comments, “anonymous.space” has a description of what NASA’s “pat on the back” PDR really means:
This past week, Constellation patted itself on the back for getting Ares I through its first preliminary design review (PDR) but glossed over the fact that Ares I still has to conduct a second PDR next summer to address the unresolved mitigation systems for the first stage thrust oscillation issue, with unknown consequences for the rest of the design. See the asterisk on the pre-board recommendation at the bottom of the last page of this presentation.
The Constellation press release and briefing also made no mention of the recent year-long slip in the Orion PDR to next summer. See NASA Watch, NASA Spaceflight, and Flight Global.
So neither the Ares I nor the Orion preliminary design is complete, and one could argue that the Constellation program has been held back a year more than it’s been allowed to pass to the next grade.
More worrisome than the PDR slips are the grades that Ares I received in this partial PDR. The pre-board used a green, yellow/green, yellow, yellow/red, and red grading scheme, which can also be depicted as the more familiar A (4.0), B (3.0), C (2.0), D (1.0), and F (0.0) grading scheme. The pre-board provided ten grades against ten different success criteria from NASA’s program management handbook. The ten grades had the following distribution:
One “Green” (A, 4.0) grade
Two “Yellow/Green” (B, 3.0) grades
Four “Yellow” (C, 2.0) grades
Three “Yellow/Red” (D, 1.0) grades
No “Red” (F, 0.0) gradesSo seven of Ares I’s ten grades were a C or a D. Ares I is NASA’s planned primary means of crew launch over the next couple of decades and should define technical excellence. But instead, the project earned a grade point average of 2.1, barely a “gentleman’s C” (or a “gentleman’s yellow”). See the pre-board grades on pages 3-7 of this presentation.
And even more worrisome than the PDR slips and grades are the areas in which the project is earning its lowest grades. Among areas in which Ares I earned a yellow/red (or D) grade and the accompanying technical problems were:
The preliminary design meets the requirements at an acceptable level of risk:
– Induced environments are high and cause challenges, including pyro shock to avionics and acoustic environments on reaction and roll control systems.– No formal process for control of models and analysis.
– Areas of known failure still need to be worked, including liftoff clearances.
Definition of the technical interfaces is consistent with the overall level of technical maturity and provides an acceptable level of risk:
– Process for producing and resolving issues between Level 2 and Level 3 interface requirement documents and interface control documents is unclear, including the roles and responsibilities of managers and integrators and the approval process for identifying the baseline and making changes to it.
– Numerous known disconnects and “TBDs” in the interface requirement documents, including an eight inch difference between the first stage and ground system and assumption of extended nozzle performance not incorporated in actual first and ground system designs.
See the pre-board grades on pages 4-5 of this presentation.
So, in addition to the unknowns associated with the unresolved thrust oscillation system for Ares I:
– the vehicle’s electronics can’t survive the shocks induced during stage separation;
– the vehicle’s control systems will be shaken apart and unable to keep the rocket flying straight;
– the vehicle is going to hit the ground support structure on liftoff;
– the project is assuming performance from advanced rocket nozzles that don’t fit within the vehicle’s dimensions;
– the project can’t even get the height of the rocket and its ground support to match; and
– there’s no good modeling, analytical, or requirements control necessary to resolve any of these issues.
And the real kicker from the press conference was the revelation that Constellation manager Jeff Hanley only has 2,000-3,000 pounds of performance reserve left at the program level and that Ares I manager Steve Cook has no margin left to contribute to unresolved future problems like thrust oscillation impacts to Orion. See, again, NASA Watch.
We know from prior presentations that Orion’s mass margin is down to practically zero (286 kilograms or 572 pounds) for ISS missions and is negative (-859 kilograms or -1,718 pounds) for lunar missions. See p. 25, 33, and 37 in this presentation.
When added to Hanley’s margins, that means that the entire Ares I/Orion system is down to ~2,500-3,500 pounds of mass margin for the ISS mission and ~300-1,300 pounds of mass margin for the lunar mission. That’s between seven and less than one percent mass margin against Orion’s 48,000 pound total mass. Typical mass margin at the PDR stage should be on the order of 20-25 percent, about triple the best-case assessment here. Ares I/Orion still has seven years of design and development to go and at best has only one-third of the mass margin it should have at this stage.
Even worse, those Orion mass margins don’t account for the mass threats still to be allocated in next year’s Orion PDR. In the presentation above, the 90th percentile mass threats for the ISS and lunar missions are separately about 900 kilograms or 2,000 pounds. That reduces the total Ares I/Orion mass margin to between -1,700 and 1,500 pounds. That’s a negative (negative!) three percent mass margin on the lunar mission and only a positive three percent mass margin on the ISS mission, at least seven times less margin than what the program needs at this point in time.
Instead of worrying about $60 million Soyuz purchases and extending existing Shuttle jobs, Weldon and his staff need to be worrying about the $20 billion Ares I/Orion program and whether it can ever technically close and replace some of those Shuttle jobs.
Some have attempted to excuse this by saying, “well, every big space program has teething issues.” True. Two responses.
First, many of them die from them (e.g., X-33).
Second, I don’t know of any comparable program that had essentially zero margin at PDR (and I’m not aware of any that required multiple PDRs or “PDR do-overs”) that survived them. Perhaps someone more familiar with history can enlighten me.
Where Is The Pencil Czar?
George Will has more on economic ignorance:
The indignant student, who had first gone to Home Depot for a flashlight, says it “didn’t try to rip us off.” It was, however, out of flashlights. Ruth suggests that the reason Big Box had flashlights was that its prices were high. If prices were left at regular levels, the people who would have got the flashlights would have been those who got to the store first. With the higher prices, “someone who had candles at home decided to do without the flashlight and left it there for you on the shelf.” Neither Home Depot nor the student who was angry at Big Box had benefited from Home Depot’s price restraint.
Capitalism, Ruth reminds him, is a profit and loss system.Corfam–Du Pont’s fake leather that made awful shoes in the 1960s–and the Edsel quickly vanished. But, Ruth notes, “the post office and ethanol subsidies and agricultural price supports and mediocre public schools live forever.” They are insulated from market forces; they are created, in defiance of those forces, by government, which can disregard prices, which means disregarding the rational allocation of resources. To disrupt markets is to tamper with the unseen source of the harmony that is all around us.
The spontaneous emergence of social cooperation–the emergence of a system vastly more complex, responsive and efficient than any government could organize–is not universally acknowledged or appreciated. It discomforts a certain political sensibility, the one that exaggerates the importance of government and the competence of the political class.
Yes, an exaggeration that is reinforced by the propaganda inculcated into people by government schools.
Meet The New Change
…same as the old change.
I’ve been amused, or at least bemused, for many months that Barack Obama has gotten away with pretending that his stale, failed collectivist policies represent something “new.” So has Michael Ledeen:
Once upon a time, Obama’s vision of “change”-which is based on class structure and top-down collective enterprises-was not only contemporary but exciting. It inspired a generation of Americans to create the welfare state. But then the welfare state aged, and now, in the wild-west world of globalization, instant communication, the blogosphere and so forth, it is very old hat. The ideas are still hanging around, however.
Bill Clinton understood that, and since he wasn’t really committed to any particular political agenda aside from his own success, he was able to grab many of his opponents’ ideas and use them. I remember poor Bob Dole complaining that Clinton was stealing his ideas, and he was right.
Obama doesn’t get that, I suspect because he really believes those old, now-failed ideas. He can’t bring himself to say that the collectivist projects of the sort he promoted in Chicago are bad for the poor, although when pressed he ootches toward more sensible positions (as when, in Saddleback, he confessed that he had probably been a bit too negative about welfare reform). We’ve all noticed that Obama keeps moving toward McCain’s positions on many issues, even on the basic one: the war.
If you hold ideas that no longer work (and indeed don’t even explain anything contemporary), it’s hard to conduct an inspirational political campaign, and Obama, like almost all the other Democrats, is stuck with the knowledge that he’s going to lose most of the policy debates. But he still wants to win. And the only way he CAN win is to destroy his opponents, which is the strategy the left is pursuing, ever more frantically.
Of course, I would be more amused if so many people didn’t seem to fall for the schtick. But fortunately, it looks like a sufficient number are on to him that he won’t get to implement his “change.” As Bill Whittle wrote, Sarah took away his glamour, and now John McCain is purloining his “change” mantra, which was never much, but it was all that he had left.
[Update a few minutes later]
It occurs to me that one of the reasons that young people are susceptible to Barack Obama’s “change” hokum is that they have no sense of history. To them, all is new, and only George Bush’s policies are old.
A New Vote For Palin/McCain
You know that Tina Fey has to be hoping for a Republican victory. It’s a guaranteed gig for at least four, and maybe a dozen years.
How Screwed Up Is Milspace?
This screwed up:
After trying unsuccessfully for years to build its own radar satellite, the Pentagon is now turning to its allies for help and has been presented with a plan that would see it buy a clone of Canada’s highly successful Radarsat-2 spacecraft.
The U.S. Defence Department asked for and received information this week from a number of foreign satellite consortiums on how they could help the Pentagon meet its surveillance needs for the future.
Isn’t there anybody here who knows how to play this game?
Turnabout Is Fair Play
Heh. Instant Godwin:
“Hitler was a community organizer, FDR was a governor.” Makes as much sense as the Jeebus/Pilate meme.
What A Mess
I’m looking at reporting from what looks like the Sheraton in Clear Lake, and there are reports of furniture with NASA logos floating in the bay. Gotta think that some of the JSC facilities were flooded.
If space were important, we wouldn’t have mission control in an area susceptible to floods and hurricanes. The Cape has some geographical reasons for its location, but the only reason that JSC is in Houston is because Johnson wanted it there, and the land was free.
[Update in the afternoon]
Here’s more on NASA’s fragile infrastructure. The agency’s ground facilities are just as non-robust as its space transportation system.
Here is how it seems to work: a hurricane threatens JSC – so NASA shuts off email and other services to a large chunk of the agency. Why? Because NASA deliberately set the system up such that other NASA centers – some of which are thousands of miles away and poised to offer assistance and keep the rest of the agency operating – have their email and other services routed out of JSC – and only JSC (or so it would seem). A few critical users have some service, but everyone else is out of luck for at least 48 hours. Would any self-respecting, profitable, commercial communications company do something as silly as this? No. They’d never stay in business. Only NASA would come up with such a flawed and stupid plan.
That’s too harsh. I can imagine the FAA, or DHS doing exactly the same thing.
It’s just more of that wise, foresightful government thing.
[Update about 1:30 PM EDT]
Jeff Masters says that Galveston lucked out:
Although Ike caused heavy damage by flooding Galveston with a 12-foot storm surge, the city escaped destruction thanks to its 15.6-foot sea wall (the wall was built 17 feet high, but has since subsided about 2 feet). The surge was able to flow into Galveston Bay and flood the city from behind, but the wall prevented a head-on battering by the surge from the ocean side. Galveston was fortunate that Ike hit the city head-on, rather than just to the south. Ike’s highest storm surge occurred about 50 miles to the northeast of Galveston, over a lightly-populated stretch of coast. Galveston was also lucky that Ike did not have another 12-24 hours over water. In the 12 hours prior to landfall, Ike’s central pressure dropped 6 mb, and the storm began to rapidly organize and form a new eyewall. If Ike had had another 12-24 hours to complete this process, it would have been a Category 4 hurricane with 135-145 mph winds that likely would have destroyed Galveston. The GFDL model was consistently advertising this possibility, and it wasn’t far off the mark. It was not clear to me until late last night that Ike would not destroy Galveston and kill thousands of people. Other hurricane scientists I conversed with yesterday were of the same opinion.
And of course, the lesson that the people who stayed behind will take is not that they were lucky and foolhardy, but that the weather forecasters overhyped the storm, and they’ll be even less likely to evacuate the next time. And one of these times their luck will run out, as it did for their ancestors a few generations ago, when thousands were killed by a hurricane in Galveston.
[Update mid afternoon]
Sounds like things could have been a lot worse at NASA, too.
NASA had feared that a storm surge from Galveston Bay would flood some
buildings on the 1,600-acre Space Center. Its southeast boundary is near
Clear Lake, which is connected to Galveston Bay. However, the water did
not rise that high.
Apparently the Guppy hangar at Ellington was destroyed, but it was never much of a hangar–more like a big tent.
Economic Ignorami
George Bush’s announcement this morning that the administration was concerned about “gouging” reminded me of why I wish that we’d had better options in the last two elections (and still do). I expect that kind of nonsense from Democrats, but you’d think that someone who was supposedly a businessman would know better. Or perhaps he does, and is just pandering. I’m not sure which is worse.
Every time we have a natural disaster like this, this idiotic topic comes up, and we once again have to explain Econ 101 to the products of our public school system, probably in futility. This time, it’s Rich Hailey’s turn.
Here’s what I wrote about it a three years ago, in the wake of Katrina.
[Update late morning]
Jeez, I thought that David Asman was smarter than that. Now he’s telling Fox viewers to take pictures of stations with high gas prices so that they can be reported to authorities. It’s hard for me to believe that Neal Cavuto would do that.
[Another update a minute or so later]
You know, I think that this is an explanation for socialism and collectivism’s continuing grip on the public mind, despite its long history of unending failure. There’s just something in human psychology to which it naturally appeals, and rationality just can’t break through. It just “feels” unfair for prices to go up in an emergency, regardless of the demonstrably bad consequences of attempting to legislate them.
[Late afternoon update]
Shannon Love explains how the gas station business works:
I’ll say it one more time for those who can’t be bothered to actually ask someone who owns a gas station. Gas stations set prices for the gas they sell today based on the wholesale price of the gas they will have to buy to replace it. Get it? The price you pay for a gallon today is the cost of the gallon the station will have buy to replace the one you just bought.
Gas stations sell gas at or near cost, so if they did not use replacement pricing any sudden spike in gas prices would shut them down and you couldn’t get any gas. I simply do not know why our public and private talking heads cannot understand and communicate this simple fact.
Because either they don’t know it, or they think that people don’t want to hear it. They operate on razor-thin margins, and can’t afford to hand out subsidized gas as charity, even if that wouldn’t screw up the market. And note, for those who say it’s “big oil” that is “maximizing profits” in the face of a national emergency, even if that were true (it’s not) “big oil” isn’t threatened with jail for “gouging.” It’s the gas station owner, who has no control over his wholesale gas costs. So people who demand that we crack down on gougers are essentially demanding that the station operators either operate at a loss, or pay fines, or go to jail. I don’t know why anyone would want to be in that business in the face of so much public ignorance about it.