Category Archives: Space

Political Commentary, Space

Lori’s Speech At NewSpace

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She raised a lot of eyebrows in the audience a week and a half ago when she called some on the Hill “porkers” in public. It occurs to me this morning that now we know why. She was FIGMO.

[Update a few minutes later]

Over at Space Politics, DBN points out the real failure of the administration on space policy:

I’m no fan of the NASA workforce, but if you’re right and Tip O’Neill’s maxim that “all politics is local” is what’s driving the repeated failures of the Administration’s civil space initiatives, then the Administration is to blame for never making the local argument about how their initiatives would maintain NASA employment by shifting workers from Program A to Programs X, Y, and Z. We never saw that kind of argument, commitment, or the workforce numbers to back it up when the Administration rolled out its Constellation replacement programs, and we never saw it earlier this year when ARM was proposed.

I don’t lay this failure at Garver’s doorstep because we don’t know who did what in the Administration and White House before these initiatives were rolled out. That decision process is embargoed, and for all we know, Garver was pounding her fists for a sane workforce transition plan instead of the vacuum that ensued. And maybe the hyperpartisan environment on the Hill would have rendered even Tip O’Neill’s maxim useless. But the fact that the Administration never got to square one on the politics 101 topic of workforce redistribution is not Congress’s fault. As venal and stupid as Congress is, at some level their rejection of the Administration’s civil space initiatives is just them doing their job under the Constitution and protecting their constituents’ local interests. In the absence of any workforce argument, commitment, or plan from the Administration, it’s hard to see how the key members in Congress could have reacted differently. Even a workforce commitment and detailed plan might not have been enough to get the Administration’s civil space initiatives off the ground, but the Administration also didn’t even bother to try.

That’s because space policy wasn’t important to them. That was good, in terms of their willingness to leave it more to the commercial sector, but bad in that they made no effort to implement their good policy on the Hill. Of course, they’ve been pretty incompetent at dealing with Congress in general.

Philosophy, Space, Technology and Society

Randall Munroe’s Time Comic

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The back story.

This is something that used to concern space activists even in the seventies:

“In my comic, our civilization is long gone. Every civilization with written records has existed for less than 5,000 years; it seems optimistic to hope that the current one will last for 10,000 more,” Munroe told WIRED. “And as astronomer Fred Hoyle has pointed out, since we’ve stripped away the easily-accessed fossil fuels, whatever civilization comes along next won’t be able to jump-start an industrial revolution the way we did.”

You could think of fossil fuels as the yolk of an egg. If we eat it up, but fail to hatch and get into space, then this planet won’t reproduce.

Business, Political Commentary, Space

Lori Garver

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I’m a little surprised, but not shocked, that she’s leaving NASA. I’m sure it’s been a very frustrating situation for her. What shocks me is this (via an email from her, though many got one):

I will be resigning from my position as NASA Deputy Administrator, effective September 6 and have accepted a new position in the private sector outside the space industry.

My emphasis.

She gave no hint when I talked to her in San Jose a week and a half ago, but that’s no surprise, either. If I had any brains, I’d probably do the same thing. I’ve been beating my head against this wall, and damaging my finances in the process, for over a third of a century now.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

If You’re Going To Take Mars…

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Take Mars.

First, I don’t have any particular itch to go to, or send people to Mars. I think it can wait. I also see the potential to repeat the error of Apollo if we follow Dr. Thronson’s advice:

A useful tautology: humanity’s second—or third or fourth—mission to Mars will never happen unless there is a first one. Vastly more resources have been expended on concept design and technologies that appear to be necessary for sustained Martian exploration, with comparatively fewer specifically on the most essential mission, the first one. Just as with all programs of human exploration, the first Mars expedition will be very—very!—different from every one that follows. It will have to be more limited, more focused, and necessarily affordable from the start. More will be learned on a first mission, no matter how limited it is some respects, than on any subsequent one. However, in the current, uncritical, and comfortable environment for proliferating concepts for human exploration beyond LEO, there seems to be only modest interest in the difficult process of in-depth, critically reviewed engineering designs for the first Mars mission.

I disagree that “all programs of human exploration” had a first mission that was “very-very! different” from those that followed. The Vikings did nothing different on their succeeding journeys than they did on their previous ones. Neither did the Polynesians. There was little difference between Columbus’s first voyage, and his subsequent ones, or those of others. They all used the same basic technology. There were no significant differences until the technology evolved — more efficient sails, canned food, ship-board clocks for navigation, steel hulls, steam engines. Similarly, most exploration of the North American continent were very similar, from the initial ones by the early French explorers to Lewis and Clark, through Walker and Fremont. Not until the development of first the Conestoga, and then the railroad was there any significant improvement. In fact, as I write in the book:

Once Columbus showed the way, fortune seekers and settlers didn’t wait for shipboard clocks, or steam engines, or steel hulls. They set sail for the New World with what they had. A century or so ago, Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benét wrote a poem about the days of sail, whose first stanza was:

There was a time before our time,
It will not come again,
When the best ships still were wooden ships
But the men were iron men.

Even with Apollo, the subsequent missions weren’t that different from the first, in terms of how they were carried out, except they got better at navigation and precision in landing sites, and took more equipment, such as rovers, to expand the science. So I don’t accept his premise that the first Mars landing will be significantly different than the second one. But the next series of lunar missions will doubtless be much different from Apollo, because Apollo was done in an economically unsustainable way, because there was a national imperative to do it. We have to avoid that with Mars.

I also think that there are some elements of straw man here. No, we don’t need to go to the moon to get to Mars. But we do need to develop some infrastructure if we are going to do it in anything resembling an affordable way, and no, a government-developed heavy lifter is not part of that infrastructure. But I don’t see any societal will to compel the government to do a manned Mars mission in the foreseeable future. If it happens, it will happen privately.

Business, Space

And Then There Was One

39 Comments

With the (at least temporary) departure of Armadillo from the stage, the only VTVL passenger flight vehicles in development appears to be Blue Origin, with no stated schedule for first flight. In the horizontal world, we still have the Virgin versus XCOR race. At this point, given that Virgin said they’d have another powered flight in June, and it’s now August, my money, if not the smart money, would be on XCOR.

Can’t anyone play this game? It’s just suborbital, folks.