Category Archives: Space

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space

The Shuttle’s Ignominious Conclusion

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Thoughts from Ed Driscoll, over at PJM. As he notes, Lileks has some reflections as well:

NASA is keen to tell you there’s a still a future for sending Americans into space, but there’s a general cultural anomie that seems content to watch movies about people in space, but indifferent to any plans to put them there. This makes me grind my teeth down to the roots, but I suppose that’s a standard reaction when the rest of your fellow citizenry doesn’t share the precise and exact parameters of your interests and concerns. That’s the problem when you grow up with magazines telling you where we’re going after the moon, with grade-school notebooks that had pictures of the space stations to come, when the push to Mars was regarded as an inevitable next step.

Just got hung up on the “why?” part, it seems. Also the “how” and the “how much” and other details. I can see the reason for taking our time – develop new engines, perfect technology, gather the money and the will. It’s not like anything’s going anywhere. But it’s not like we’re going anywhere if we’re not going anywhere, either – when nations, cultures stop exploring, it’s a bad sign. You’re ceding the future. If you have a long view that regards nation-states as quaint relics of a time in human history when maps had lines – really, you can’t see them from space! We’re all one, you know – then it doesn’t matter whether China or the US puts a flag on Mars. It’s possible a Chinese Mars expedition would commemorate the first boot on red soil with a statement that spoke for everyone on the planet, not a particular culture or nation. It’s possible. But history would remember that they chose to go, and we chose not to.

No signs that anyone is serious about choosing to go to Mars, other than Elon Musk. For the record, I think that it’s important that we carry Anglospheric and western values into the cosmos, and I’m pretty confident we will. I am equally confident that we won’t do it if we persist in thinking (like the Chinese) that it will be done with a Twenty-Year Plan.

I’m wondering what the thirty-somethings are thinking today. They don’t really remember a time when there wasn’t a Space Shuttle, either under development, or flying. And for most of them, Apollo is just a history that their parents lived through and told them about (as the Depression and WW II are for me). But I suspect that they, and the generation behind, will get pretty used to the idea of a real American space industry taking people into orbit, sans a government mission-control room with lots of desks. I hope that, for them, space will finally become a place instead of a program.

[Update later morning]

More lunacy and inability to read for comprehension or discern human emotions, from Mark Whittington, who fantasizes that I am “dancing on the Shuttle’s grave.”

Political Commentary, Space

What Will They Find?

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POGO has filed a FOIA on NASA’s heavy-lift program.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a story on the SLS by NPR. I found this comment by Bill Nelson interesting:

Congress recently told NASA to build that system by 2016, and to use existing industry contracts as much as possible. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who flew on space shuttle Columbia, thinks building the big new rocket is what NASA needs to do, no matter where it’s going next.

“Maybe it’s going to be an asteroid, as the president suggested, for 2025,” Nelson says. “It’s possible we may go back to the moon. There may be other destinations. All of these are going to develop as we develop technology. But the first thing we have to have is a big rocket that can get all of these different components and refueling up into Earth orbit.”

So, my question is, Senator, if we’re going to be refueling in earth orbit, why do we need the big rocket? Fuel can go up on small rockets.

Space

A Bleg To AIAA Members Who May Be Readers

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I haven’t been a member in many years (I don’t know when I dropped, but it was probably in the late eighties) because for a long time I’ve viewed them as either part of the problem, or irrelevant (for instance, Aerospace America just seemed to be a font of conventional industry wisdom). But they continue to bug me to reup, and I’m thinking that it might actually be useful for me to do so, but if so, at this point in my career, I would only do so as a fairly senior type, for which one has to have sponsorship (according to my understanding). Is there anyone out there that would like to take this on?

History, Social Commentary, Space, Space History

Forty-Two Years Ago

Hard to believe it’s been that long (doesn’t seem that long ago that I attended a celebration in Hollywood thrown by Ron Howard for the quarter-century anniversary), but today is the anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11. Wednesday is Evoloterra, so it’s a good time to plan a get together with family and friends to celebrate. Bill Simon and I, the principal authors of the ceremony, will be discussing it on The Space Show on Monday afternoon.

Business, Education, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

On The Chopping Block

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(My CEI colleague) Iain Murray says that part of a budget deal should be to eliminate the Department of Commerce.

It’s not actually the first one I’d go after (I’d get rid of e.g., Education, Labor and Energy first), but I understand the potential appeal. But it does serve many necessary functions that would have to be redistributed elsewhere. For instance, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) wouldn’t find a comfortable home in the State Department, nor would NOAA or the weather service. Granted, the latter is kind of a mess right now, in terms of not getting needed new satellites up (particularly now that we’re headed into the heart of hurricane season), though it’s not clear whether that’s NOAA’s fault, or NASA’s, which actually manages the development of the satellites. Also, giving over the commercial export list to the State Department could make ITAR even more of a disaster than it already is. It would also raise the issue of finding a new home for the Coast Guard (and the Space Guard, if we ever get one).

There is a reason that Commerce has been around a lot longer than the three agencies I mention above as better targets — if it didn’t exist, we’d probably have to invent it in some form. And unlike education, energy, or labor, we actually do have a Commerce Clause in the Constitution (flawed and overstretched though its interpretation has become).