Thoughts from Eric Berger. NASA is going to remain a mess until actual accomplishments in space become more important than targeted job preservation. And I don’t expect that to happen any time soon, at least with the current political leadership (and I think that Santorum is likely to be a very bad president when it comes to space policy, as will Mitt).
Category Archives: Space
Good News Bad News For Space Regulation
This won’t be news at all to people who’ve been reading blogs like Space Politics, but I have a piece up at Open Market about the recent (shortened) extension of the moratorium on FAA regulation of space passenger safety.
The Backlash Against The Moon Colony Backlash
Jeff Lord is disappointed with both Romney and Santorum’s lack of space vision, though more so with Santorum:
Instead of Bain bashing, Santorum is attacking Gingrich over the ex-Speaker’s vow to return America to space exploration with a vengeance — in the form of a moon colony. An obvious intent to carry forward with the Reagan space legacy made all the more potent by the Obama administration’s deliberate halt to the very idea of a serious 21st century American presence in space. Appallingly, if predictably, Gingrich’s decision to carry forward with Reagan’s vision has already been mocked by the Obama-lite Romney. But Rick Santorum? The would-be “Authentic Conservative”? Bashing Ronald Reagan’s vision?
Emphasis mine.
As is often the case, he doesn’t seem to understand the new policy, because this is a gross mischaracterization of it. If anything, it was the first serious policy for American presence in space, in that the goal was to finally make it affordable to do so, which the Congress not-so-promptly undid with its insistence on a NASA-developed heavy lifter that will not in any way advance the goal while underfunding or eliminating funding for the things that will. I wonder if he is aware that Gingrich was actually supportive of the Obama policy?
The Space Speech
…that Newt needs to give. My advice to him, over at PJMedia.
Elon’s Reusable Rocket
My latest piece, based on a conversation with the proprietor of SpaceX, is up.
Taking Moon Mining Seriously
…over at the WaPo. Moon Express gets a prominent mention.
A Stunning Space Station Video Of Earth
…and a new paper on urban heat islands/a>:
The debate over whether urbanization and related socioeconomic developments affect large-scale surface climate trends is stalemated with incommensurable arguments. Each side can appeal to supporting statistical evidence based on data sets that do not overlap, yielding inferences that merely conflict with but do not refute one another. I argue that such debates can only be resolved in an encompassing framework, in which both types of results can be demonstrated on the same data set, in such a way that apparent support for one conclusion occurs as a restricted case of a more general specification that supports the other, and where the restrictions can be tested. The issues under debate make such data sets challenging to construct, but I give two illustrative examples. First, insignificant differences in warming trends in urban temperature data between windy and calm conditions are shown in a restricted model whose general form shows temperature data to be strongly affected by local population growth. Second, an apparent equivalence between trends in a data set stratified by a static measure of urbanization is shown to be a restricted finding in a model whose general form indicates significant influence of local socioeconomic development on temperatures.
You don’t say.
I should add that every time I see a video of earth from space like this, I just shake my head in amazement at the people who think that there’s no market for people to go into space.
The Commercial Crew Forum
Clark Lindsey is taking notes.
They are looking at different certification regime options.
– One option is to develop certification that works in parallel with the SAAs.
…
– Safety requirements have been posted (are “on the street”).
– So any participant will know what requirements they need to meet.
– Safety goals: What would firms do to feel comfortable flying their own people on the vehicles?
We need to have a metadiscussion about appropriate levels of safety. We can’t allow NASA’s irrational approach to contaminate the entire industry, or allow their “certification” to become a standard. Different people are going to have different risk/reward thresholds. I’m working on an Issue Analysis on this topic for CEI right now.
[BTW, the entire February space issue of Reason, from which that linked Zubrin piece on NASA’s irrational approach to safety comes, is now on line.]
The Importance Of Space Exploration
Eric Anderson says that it’s a good time to kick off a national discussion.
Two points. Can we please, please, stop using the word “exploration”? Because every time we do, we provide ammunition to the robot lovers, because one does not need to send humans into space to “explore.” Toward the end, he finally talks about settlement, but we need to make the point over and over that exploration is just a means to an end, not the goal.
The other point is that the argument that it’s good to spend money on space because “it’s spent right here on earth” is both economically spurious and weak. As I wrote years ago:
Sadly, it’s a fallacy to which space enthusiasts (and particularly NASA enthusiasts) are prone as well. Often, when touting some proposed space project, they talk about how many “jobs” will be created in Houston or Huntsville or Florida, or in the district of some California contractor. And when someone says that “money is wasted by sending it into space,” they assume that the critic is stupid, or confused, and respond, “Not a single dime is sent into space. We don’t fill up the rockets with bushels of money and send it off to Mars. Every dollar is spent right here, on good old Mother Earth.” And even more amazingly, they say it as though it’s an effective rejoinder.
But of course, they’re attacking a strawman argument, because no serious critic of the space program literally believes that we are shipping currency to the heavens.
Yes, of course paying NASA astronauts, managers, engineers and support people, and their counterparts at the contractors creates jobs for them, just as it would if we took the same amount of money and employed people to dig holes. The issue, of course, is not whether they have “jobs” and receive taxpayer dollars, and recirculate it in the economy–it’s what they create, or don’t, and whether or not their creation is as valuable as some other use of the money that it took to create it.
What were the opportunity costs of building the current International Space Station? Could that money have been spent in some way that would have made us a wealthier nation? Indeed, could it have been spent in a way that would have advanced us much further in space? Well, at least, we have a space station, finally. But could those many billions of taxpayer dollars and almost two decades (yes, time has opportunity costs as well) have provided more than a crippled facility, barely capable of supporting a half dozen people at continuing costs of billions per year?
There’s no way to know. It is, in Bastiat’s words, one of the things that “are not seen.”
If we want the taxpayers’ money, we have to make the case for how spending it in that way, rather than some other, will actually improve their lives. Simply saying that it will be spent here doesn’t cut it, any more than did the arguments for the failed “stimulus.” We simply have to hone our arguments better, and stop indulging in fallacies.
[Update a few minutes later]
Jay Barbree indulges in the same old tired, ineffective arguments and fallacies:
The late, great TV news anchor Walter Cronkite used to say, “There’s not a single McDonald’s on the moon or on Mars. Every space dollar stays in the pockets of those needing to eat on Earth.”
We see the benefits of the space program all around us in lives saved, in early detection of cancers, in NASA’s discovery of the dangers of cholesterol coupled with stress, in early detection of most diseases, in improved surgery techniques needed for repairing failing hearts, in making a child’s small body whole, and in filling our stomachs with safe foods.
We see spaceflight dollars when weather satellites warn of hurricanes, when radar systems tell us that tornadoes are approaching, when satellites log critical environmental changes, when an ATM hands us our cash, when we pay our bills and communicate through satellites. Most importantly, we see space dollars at work when doctors perform surgery robotically through eyes in space, when firefighters walk into flames breathing safely through equipment developed for NASA, when … Well, there’s simply no end to the benefits gained by science.
A repeat of the broken windows fallacy (and citing its use by Cronkite makes it no less fallacious), and very few of those benefits resulted from human spaceflight.
Sigh…
SpaceX’s Ultimate Vision
…is Mars colonization.
No one tell Mitt Romney.