Category Archives: Space

History, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

Half A Century

15 Comments

Fifty years ago, three astronauts died on the launch pad in a ground test. It occurs to me that, like the Kennedy assassination, this was one more event that, had it not occurred, the moon landings may not have been successful. There were many problems with the program that weren’t seriously dealt with until after that disaster. It reinforces the reality of how unlikely the success of Apollo was, and why it’s foolish to think we can replicate it half a century later.

Meanwhile, Commercial Crew is delayed again. Because it’s more important to not lose an astronaut than to end our dependence on the Russians, even though at this point, we should have no confidence in their systems. While crew flights use Soyuz, not Proton, they both use the third stage that just failed on the Progress mission. And they seem to have systemic problems in their aerospace industry.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a piece from the WaPo.

[Update a while later]

Andrew Chaiken asks, did it have to happen? They were being very sloppy. They hadn’t had any problems with pure O2 in Mercury or Gemini, so they ignored the issue. I’d forgotten the name Marty Cioffoletti; he went on to work on the Shuttle, and I worked with him occasionally in Downey in the 80s.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is a useful bottom line, that I’ve been thinking about this week, in the context of the book:

A month after the fire, NASA’s director of manned spaceflight, George Mueller, said in a Congressional hearing that NASA’s experiences with Mercury and Gemini “had demonstrated that the possibility of a fire in the spacecraft cabin was remote.” Mueller’s words lay bare the false logic that, in the pressure to meet President Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade deadline for a lunar landing, had skewed the thinking of nearly everyone at NASA: It hasn’t bitten us, so we must be okay. This fallacy would strike NASA again, with the O-ring leaks that brought down the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 and the broken-off chunk of foam insulation that doomed its sister ship Columbia in 2003.

It’s nice to think that if we only spend enough money, and take enough time, we can ensure that no one ever dies, but as I write in the book:

No frontier in history has ever been opened without risk and the loss of human life, and the space frontier will be no different, particularly considering the harshness and hazards of it. That we spend untold billions in a futile attempt to prevent such risk is both a barrier to opening it, and a testament to the lack of national importance in doing so.

Those men died because we were in a rush, because what we were doing — beating the Soviets to the moon — was at the time considered important. But now, “safety is the highest priority.”

[Update a while later]

[Mid-morning update]

OK, I had forgotten that the Outer Space Treaty was opened for signature on the same day. It didn’t get as many headlines.

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Greg Autry

6 Comments

…is one of the first political appointees to NASA. That’s good news, I think. He knows what a programmatic disaster SLS is.

[Monday-morning update]

Thoughts from Bob Zimmerman, who agrees that it’s potentially bad news for SLS/Orion (i.e., good news for people who want to actually accomplish things in space with NASA funding).

As he notes, it’s probably also bad news for Gavin Schmidt and GISS.

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

The Department Of Energy

4 Comments

Rick Perry now regrets wanting to say he’d abolish it:

“My past statements made over five years ago about abolishing the Department of Energy do not reflect my current thinking,” Perry said at his confirmation hearing Thursday to be secretary of Energy.

“In fact, after being briefed on so many of the vital functions of the Department of Energy, I regret recommending its elimination.”

Here’s the thing: Just because an entity does a lot of things doesn’t mean that it needs to be a department, with a cabinet secretary. All of the nuclear stuff was happening before the department was created in the Carter administration. The renewable R&D (if we should be doing it with federal money at all) could just as easily be done at (e.g.) Commerce. Or it would be an independent agency, like NASA. If you want to trim government, it starts by eliminating departments.

[Update a while later]

I hope this is true:

The departments of Commerce and Energy would see major reductions in funding, with programs under their jurisdiction either being eliminated or transferred to other agencies. The departments of Transportation, Justice and State would see significant cuts and program eliminations.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely.

Overall, the blueprint being used by Trump’s team would reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over 10 years.

The screams of the stuck pigs will be deafening.

[Update a few minutes later]

Ignore the fake news about Rick Perry:

None of this is to make a positive case about Perry, who lost my vote (such as it is) when he walked back his bold and eminently sensible plan to get rid of one more usless cabinet-level department and reassign its core functions. But the treatment of Perry by the legacy press—Twitter lit up like a Christmas tree yesterday with journalists and other media types hyping and amplifying the Times’ story—is an object lesson in the urgent need for media literacy during the Trump presidency.

Simply put: Don’t believe everything you read, especially if you basically agree with the outfit reporting it and want to believe whatever moral lesson is being imparted (this goes for Reason loyalists, too, of course). I write this not as a Trump supporter or even as a Trump apologist. I would rather that he not be president of the United States. But he is and much of the media despises him while a solid chunk will also explain all of his bullshit moves. In either case, caveat lector, friends: Let the reader beware. We are entering one of the least-expected and weirdest episodes in American history and I remain optimistic that what we are witnessing are the death throes of a post-war Leviathan that is ideogically exhausted, financially unsustainable, and wildly unpopular.

I hope so.