…is looking for input on his upcoming Congressional testimony. Here’s my suggestion: Tell them that they worry too much about mission safety, and too little about actually opening up and developing space.
Category Archives: Space
Lost In Space
Lileks has a review of the sixties series (scroll down).
I never liked it, myself. Thought it was stupid.
An Early Space Visionary
ISS Problem
They’ve spotted an ammonia leak in one of the coolant loops. I wonder if they have a capability to do a repair via EVA?
From Second On The Moon
…to the back of the plane:
Aldrin said tonight in front of a packed house in a National Geographic auditorium in Washington D.C. that he presumed he might have a chance to speak with the President about options for space during the flight to Kennedy.
But it didn’t happen. President Obama had nothing to say to the moonwalker and didn’t seem to want to hear anything from Aldrin on the long flight to Florida. So Aldrin sat in the back of Air Force One and never saw Obama – until it landed.
When it landed, Aldrin said he was summoned to the front of the plane. But he found out it was not to talk about space policy. Instead, President Obama wanted Aldrin to emerge from Air Force One next to Obama for a photo op. The moonwalker was to be a mere prop.
I’m shocked, shocked.
Actually, despite the myth, the president has always struck me as a very intellectually incurious man. And this puts the lie, I think, to his comments about how he supports the space program because he remembers the astronauts coming back as a kid in Hawaii. He doesn’t give a damn about space, which is a good thing, because if he did, he’d screw it up like everything else he’s passionate about.
[Update a few minutes later]
Stand by for one of the usual sycophants of The One to stop by and call Buzz a liar in 3…2…1…
[Update late afternoon]
Anyone who wants to buy Buzz’s (and Leonard’s) new book can help me out as well by buying it through this link
Oh, and that story about Buzz punching out Bart Sibrel a decade or so ago? It’s a hoax.
[Late-night update]
My spam filter just caught this comment, from an anonymous someone with a probably made-up gmail address: “Yeah, Rand, f**k you and f**k your affiliate link.”
Note: I added the asterisks, in case anyone was wondering.
I’m not sure to make of that. Why would my trying to make a little money off my website by selling products that my readers might find interesting make someone so angry?
“Like Touching Infinity”
Life aboard an Antarctic research ship.
I suspect that astronauts aboard the ISS have similar perspectives, and more spectacular views.
NASA’s Latest Ambitious Plans
To send a man where many men (and women) have gone before:
The complex and dangerous three-day mission, dubbed “Chariot I,” is expected to pass through six states and include two brief transfers in Atlanta and Louisville in both directions, at a reported total cost of $360 dollars plus taxes and fees.
“For almost as long as our nation has existed, man has gazed upon a map of the eastern United States and dreamed of traveling to Cleveland, the largest metropolitan area in Ohio,” NASA administrator Charles F. Bolden, Jr. said at a press conference announcing the agency’s first major initiative since the discontinuation of the space shuttle program. “Until now, the immense physical and psychological risks involved in any manned mission had put that dream sadly out of reach.”
They’d never be able to do it that cheaply, unless they use Greyhound. As Clark Lindsey notes:
Of course, this mission cannot be carried out with a commercial bus but only with NASA’s $20B SBS (Senate Bus System). NASA has many studies to confirm this.
Though somehow, we never actually see their results.
Organs And Tissues
From a 3-D printer. Also, printed meat, though that’s actually harder, surprisingly. Could be handy on a space ship, though.
Faster, please.
AmericaSpace
In case anyone wondered why I haven’t commented (much) over there previously, and am probably not going to in the future, this thread is canonical. I can take the abuse, but that’s an hour or two of my life I won’t get back.
[Friday morning update]
Well, apparently I don’t have to worry about spending any more time over there — I seem to have been banned. I tried to respond to Jim’s latest nonsense, which was:
A orbital crewed rocket operating from US territory will have to meet all of NASA’s commercial crew guidelines or it won’t be allowed to launch. If SpaceX wants to launch from some other site, it can’t be stopped. It also will see its funding vaporize.
Also, don’t forget that, were there an accident on a non-NASA commercial crew rated launch, the launcher will be facing far more than civil fines, as will its leadership.
…and the comment didn’t show up. Fortunately, it wasn’t very long.
My response was something along the lines of “Jim, with all respect, you don’t know what you’re talking about. NASA has no authority to prevent a launch if it doesn’t affect NASA, and it has no “commercial guidelines.” Only the FAA determines whether or not a company gets a launch license, crewed or otherwise.”
This kind of ongoing and apparently irremediable ignorance is why I can’t take anything that Hillhouse writes seriously. He’s a perfect example of the old dictum about the problem not being what people don’t know, but what they know for damn sure, that is wrong.
[Mid-morning update]
Heh. Someone calling himself “Wolfgang Pauli” commented in response to Hillhouse’s nonsense: “Not even wrong.”
I doubt that either Jason or Jim will get the joke, though.
Over A Barrel
I’m as shocked as the rest of you to learn that the Russians are jacking up the price for ISS support again:
That’s $70.6 million per seat — well above the previous price tag of about $65 million.
Just your standard inflation, I’m sure. Bolden is right:
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said if Congress had approved the space agency’s request for more funding for its commercial space effort, the latest contract would have been unnecessary. He is urging full funding of the Obama administration’s 2014 budget request of $821 million for the commercial crew program.
“Because the funding for the President’s plan has been significantly reduced, we now won’t be able to support American launches until 2017,” Bolden, a former shuttle commander, wrote in a NASA blog.
It could take longer if Congress does not fully support the 2014 request, he said.
“Further delays in our Commercial Crew Program and its impact on our human spaceflight program are unacceptable,” Bolden said.
But they’ll keep wasting money on SLS.
Here’s what I write in the book:
What is nuclear non-proliferation worth to us? This shouldn’t be an issue of civil space policy, but it is. There is a U.S. law called the Iran/North-Korea/Syria Non-Proliferation Act (INKSNA), which states that we will not trade with any nation that supports any of those countries in the development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Russia has been doing both for years, and in order for us to continue to utilize their services for ISS access and lifeboats, Congress has to continually waive the law, essentially rendering it toothless with respect to one of the most significant violators of it (in early January of 2013, they did so out to 2020). If (as earlier discussed) we were to start using Falcon-9/Dragon sooner, even without its abort system, we could stop depending on the Russians, and stop shipping money to a nation that is indifferent to our security, if not outright hostile to it. Why don’t we? Because we don’t want to risk the lives of an astronaut crew, even though the Falcon-9/Dragon is probably as, or more, reliable at this point than anything we flew in the 1960s. Same thing applies for the Atlas and the Boeing CST capsule.
I think that it’s “safe enough” right now to end our dependence on the Russians. Despite their stated desire for three nines of safety, I’d bet that most people in the astronaut office would agree, and if there are some who don’t, no one held a gun to their heads to be an astronaut. In our unwillingness to do this, we are saying that the life of an astronaut crew is more valuable than preventing Iran from getting nukes, or to be more precise, we don’t think that non-proliferation is worth risking their lives. I don’t think that’s the case, and I’d guess that few astronauts do, either, but in its continuing hyperconcern about safety, that is exactly the message that we are getting from Congress. Now obviously, we see many men and women willing to risk their lives for national security every day, in Afghanistan (and now in other places in the Middle East). If I were an astronaut, I’d be insulted that Congresspeople don’t think that I’d be willing to. But if it’s true, then maybe we need some new astronauts, because the current ones, if they’re demanding three nines, don’t have the Right Stuff.
But space isn’t important.