Category Archives: Political Commentary

Too Late, I Think

Apparently, Barack and Michelle Obama are going to quit their church, which has provided him so much spiritual nourishment over the years, and provided so much needed guidance to their young children in “black liberation theology.” Apparently, they only just discovered that people have been saying…ummmmmmmm…controversial, yes, that’s the word…controversial things from the pulpit there, to the cheers of the parishioners.

Must be that new politics we’ve heard so much about.

Externships

Jon Goff has some thoughts about outsourcing NASA employees to private industry.

It’s an interesting concept, and not to discourage him from out-of-the-box thinking, but it has several flaws, more than one of which is almost certainly fatal.

Where would they work? Senator Shelby is not going to countenance a program that ships a Huntsville employee off to Mojave (and there are a lot of NASA employees who don’t want to move to Mojave). It’s not just the jobs that are important, but where they are. So it may necessitate moving the company to places like Huntsville to take advantage of it, even though it may be a terrible location from most other standpoints (e.g., flight test). In addition, a lot of the jobs that Congress wants to save aren’t just NASA civil servants–more, probably many more of them are contractors. How does that work? Does Boeing send you an extern and get reimbursed by NASA? How do you work out proprietary issues (among others)? How do you ensure that they send you the best employees, and not the ones they were going to lay off?

Also, there will be a huge discontinuity with skill matches. The current Shuttle work force, for the most part, knows very little about vehicle development, and what they know about vehicle operations, from the standpoint of a low-cost launch provider, is mostly wrong. Also, while a lot of people work for NASA because they’re excited about space, many there do so because they like the civil service protections and pensions. They don’t necessarily want to work the long hours often demanded of a startup, and they come from an employment culture that may be quite incompatible with the fixed-price private sector. I won’t say any more than that, but this is one of the reasons that the Aldridge Commission’s recommendation to convert the NASA centers to FFRDCs went over like a lead blimp.

And how would one qualify to get these “government resources” and how many would you get? As many as you ask for? After all, if the product is free (and contra the paragraph above, desirable) surely demand will exceed supply. How will you allocate the supply. It won’t happen on price, obviously, so some other solution will have to be developed. Would a company “bid” for an extern (and would they be able to bid on a specific person, or would they have to take pot luck?) by putting some kind of proposal to demonstrate how worthy their cause and their use of her will be? Who will be the equivalent of a source selection board for such a process? Can the current acquisition regulations even accommodate something like this? I know that this currently occurs for a few individuals, where it is mutually agreed, but I’m not sure that it would work for an entire work force.

Just a few thoughts, off the top of my head.

John Adams Must Be Smiling

This post, linked by Glenn from the ISDC, reminds me of this post I wrote when this blog was only four months old. It’s not that long, so I’ll repeat. It was titled (as shown over in the left sidebar) “Why This Blog Bores People With Space Stuff”:

As a follow up to today’s rant over our “allies” in Europe, over at USS Clueless, Steven den Beste has an excellent disquisition on the fundamental differences between Europe and the U.S. They don’t, and cannot, understand that the U.S. exists and thrives because it is the UnEurope, that it was built by people who left Europe (and other places) because they wanted freedom.

I say this not to offer simply a pale imitation of Steven’s disquisition (which is the best I could do, at least tonight), but to explain why I spend so much time talking about space policy here. It’s not (just) because I’m a space nut, or because I used to do it for a living, and so have some knowledge to disseminate. It’s because it’s important to me, and it should be important to everyone who is concerned about dynamism and liberty.

And the reason that it’s important is because there may be a time in the future, perhaps not even the distant future, when the U.S. will no longer be a haven for those who seek sanctuary from oppressive government. The trends over the past several decades are not always encouraging, and as at least a social insurance policy, we may need a new frontier into which freedom can expand.

Half a millenium ago, Europe discovered a New World. Unfortunately for its inhabitants (who had discovered it previously), the Europeans had superior technology and social structures that allowed them to conquer it.

Now, in the last couple hundred years, we have discovered how vast our universe is, and in the last couple decades, we have discovered how rich in resources it is, given will and technology. As did the eastern seaboard of the present U.S. in the late eighteenth century, it offers mankind a fertile petri dish for new societal arrangements and experiments, and ultimately, an isolated frontier from which we will be able to escape from possible future terrestrial disasters, whether of natural or human origin.

If, as many unfortunately in this country seem to wish, freedom is constricted in the U.S., the last earthly abode of true libertarian principles, it may offer an ultimate safety valve for those of us who wish to continue the dream of the founders of this nation, sans slavery or native Americans–we can found it without the flawed circumstances of 1787.

That is why space, and particularly free-enterprise space, is important.

China In Space

Glenn Reynolds has filed his first report from the ISDC, on the status of the Chinese space program. Or to be more accurate, the status of our knowledge of the Chinese space program.

I’m long on record as being concerned about the Chinese in space, when it comes to the military, and sanguine when it comes to them going to the moon. I remain that way. As Glenn notes, when it comes to manned space, they’re simply recapitulating what we did in the sixties, except much more slowly.

The Candidates And Space

This sounds like an interesting session. I hope that Glenn is taking good notes. I’d expect Jeff Foust to post something on Space Politics as well (in addition to an article in The Space Review on Monday).

It may be the first time that representatives from all three campaigns have been on a single dais for this subject. We’ll see it they can pin the Obama guy down on how expects to fund education with the space program without throwing a wrench in the works with a delay (and how he addresses the dreaded “Gap”). And why he wants to wait until after the election to have a national dialogue on space.

I know Lori, but I’ve never heard of the other two.

[Update on Saturday at noon]

Here is Jeff Foust’s report, with more to come on Monday. As I would have guessed, the only people up on the issues were the moderator and Lori. I think that it says something about Obama and his campaign that he doesn’t have an adviser for this subject (or perhaps science and technology at all).

Constellation Panel

Clark Lindsey doesn’t usually editorialize, but he does in this report:

Cooke:

– Powerpoint graphics showing Ares I/V, Orion, Altair

– Factors in selecting architecture include performance end-to-end, risk, development cost, life-cycle cost, schedule, lunar surface systems architecture.

– Implementation according to NASA institutional health and transition from Shuttle, competition in contracts, civil service contractor rules.

– Discusses the studies that justify the Constellation architecture that Griffin had decided on long before he came to NASA as director and long before the studies were done.

– Will get problems like thrust oscillation solved.

– NASA proposes to stay on course through a change in administrations. Surprise, surprise…

Emphasis mine. Are they actually openly admitting that Mike ignored all of the CE&R studies, and just did what he planned to do before he was administrator?

This was amusing:

The Coalition for Space Exploration shows a brand new NASA space exploration promotion video. Gawd. After the last panel I felt like killing myself. No problem. I can watch this video again and die of boredom…

He has some other pretty tart comments as well.

[Early afternoon update]

As Clark notes in comments, that reference to Griffin’s plans were his words, not Steve Cooke’s.

One Final Word

Well, that was certainly interesting, if not very enlightening or uplifting, when it comes to on-line discussion.

I see that some blogs are continuing to mischaracterize my post as saying that Buchenwald was “not as bad” as Auschwitz. First, I didn’t say that. My point was never about whether one camp was “better” or “worse” than another. They obviously were all horrific, in different ways, and there’s no sensible or universal way to make such an assessment. As some commenters have pointed out, it’s perhaps better to be gassed immediately than worked to death (on the other hand, in Buchenwald, you had a much better chance of survival).

My point was, and remains, despite all the idiotic straw men (like the above) and insults, that Auschwitz was more notorious, to the point that it almost came to be an icon of the Holocaust. While Buchenwald was certainly one of the more well-known camps, I’d be willing to bet that many more people know the word Auschwitz and what it represents than they do Buchenwald. And among those people is, apparently, Barack Obama. Auschwitz is like Holocaust 101, which it would appear to be as far as Senator Obama ever got in his education on the subject.

What Doesn’t?

Apparently, the phrase “War on Terror” offends Muslims. Words fail.

Well, OK, not completely. Somehow, this reminds me of the (feigned?) outrage that the Democrats exhibited when President Bush talked about appeasers in his speech to the Knesset, but didn’t name names. You know what? If the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it. It doesn’t really serve your cause when, in response to criticism of someone unnamed, you jump up and shout, “Hey, he’s talkin’ ’bout me!”

Similarly, how can Muslims be offended by a “war on terror”? Do they think that terror and Islam are inevitably and appropriately identified with each other, and inseparable? Well, if so, stupidity like this just fuels that perception.

[Update in the evening]

Robert Spencer has further thoughts on fantasy-based policy making.

What Doesn’t?

Apparently, the phrase “War on Terror” offends Muslims. Words fail.

Well, OK, not completely. Somehow, this reminds me of the (feigned?) outrage that the Democrats exhibited when President Bush talked about appeasers in his speech to the Knesset, but didn’t name names. You know what? If the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it. It doesn’t really serve your cause when, in response to criticism of someone unnamed, you jump up and shout, “Hey, he’s talkin’ ’bout me!”

Similarly, how can Muslims be offended by a “war on terror”? Do they think that terror and Islam are inevitably and appropriately identified with each other, and inseparable? Well, if so, stupidity like this just fuels that perception.

[Update in the evening]

Robert Spencer has further thoughts on fantasy-based policy making.