Category Archives: Space

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Uh, Guys?

52 Comments

The supply chain is gone:

To avoid any gap in providing independent repair spacewalks as a safety contingency for the space station, Congress, NASA and the ISS partners should evaluate the option of postponing the launch of STS – 135 until more external fuel tanks and other parts can be built to support additional shuttle flights in 2012.

2012? What are they smoking?

It would be at least two years, probably three, before they could resurrect the tooling and manufacturing needed to do this, and it would cost billions of dollars that NASA does not have, and isn’t going to get. Meanwhile, we’d have thousands of workers sitting around, forgetting how to launch safely. This is just crazy, and disappointing, considering the sources. Do they really so completely lack imagination that they can’t conceive of ways to do EVA and ISS repair and maintenance with what is currently coming on line, and not relying on an unsafe hyperexpensive vehicle? This is the product of emotion, not thought.

[Update early afternoon]

I have a sort-of-related bleg. I’m working on an article about the false lessons learned from the Shuttle, and how they’re continuing to screw up space policy. Suggestions in comments are appreciated. The first and most obvious one is that it proved reusables don’t reduce cost.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Public Support For Space

1 Comment

With the approach of the final Shuttle launch next week, Pew has done a survey of public opinion, that shows continuing support for maintaining our “leadership” in space, whatever that means.

As is often the case with such polls, put together by people who don’t understand space policy themselves, those questioned are presented with a false choice:

Q.17 Thinking about the space program more generally, how much does the U.S. space program contribute to:

a. Scientific advances that all Americans can use

b. This country’s national pride and patriotism

c. Encouraging people’s interest in science and technology

You’d think that if they lacked imagination to come up with anything else on their own, they’d at least provide a d) Other, so they would know to think harder next time. I can think of at least two:

d. Increasing the nation’s wealth and standard of living

e. Increasing the potential for human freedom and opportunity.

I’d like to raise the money to do my own poll, that would actually be useful in guiding policy.

Political Commentary, Space

The Ground Continues To Shift

1 Comment

For years, since its founding in the wake of the Challenger disaster by June Scobee (not June Scobee Rogers), widow of perished commander Dick Scobee, the Challenger Center has been a strong defender of the Shuttle program and traditional NASA human spaceflight. So this press release supporting commercial human spaceflight is sort of a big deal (or as the vice president would say, a BFD), I think. At some point (and particularly if we can get a new president, and people have forgotten that it was Obama who came up with the new direction), the only supporters of the Senate Launch System will be those who benefit from the pork. Most others who are truly interested in actual space accomplishment will see it for what it is.

[Update late morning]

It’s nice to see Bolden standing up for sanity at the National Press Club:

Bolden: ‘When I hear ppl say last shuttle launch marks end of human space flight, I say u must B living on another planet.

We’ve been getting lots of dispatches from other planets over the past year and a half.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Is The Space Age Over?

35 Comments

The Economist seems to think so. More thoughts later.

[Friday morning update]

Clark Lindsey has a good comment over at their web site:

The author uses the cheap-shot pejorative “Space Cadet” to demean those in favor of space travel. So I will use “Earth Child” to characterize the author’s parochial one planet view.

Go read all, as he takes Earth Child to task. A lot of the other comments there are also pretty critical and disdainful.

[Bumped]

[Update a few minutes later]

More comments over at NASA Watch.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

It’s Dead, Jim

33 Comments

I was thinking about responding to Paul Spudis’s bizarre attempt to resurrect the Shuttle, but Clark Lindsey has spared me the trouble. In fact I had this exact thought when I read Paul’s post title:

…neutral would be a big improvement over reverse, which is where NASA has been going for the past decade. Constellation burned up many billions of dollars on a plan to build retro-tech vehicles that would have been just as expensive, if not more so, to operate than the Shuttle. The administration’s plan, of course, is not in neutral but is moving forward on development of cost-effective commercial launch systems, though this could be undermined by Congress’s insistence on parallel development of a super-expensive, super heavy lift vehicle based on Shuttle hardware.

And the double standard remains amazing:

Dr. Spudis asks,

How long will our rapidly growing government (with its rapidly shrinking discretionary budget) patiently support “commercial” New Space efforts?

This question is bizarre. The alternative to the modestly funded commercial launch services program is another gigantically expensive in-house NASA project that has no more chance of succeeding than all of the previous gigantically expensive NASA space transport projects. There is, in fact, no alternative to commercial launchers. If they don’t succeed at providing reliable transport at significantly lower costs than the Shuttle, NASA’s human spaceflight program will simply fade away. Fortunately, there is a very strong likelihood that they will succeed.

As Clark notes, it’s ironic that Paul continues to champion transportation approaches with the least probability of achieving his goal of a practical lunar base.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Rethinking Space Transportation Regulation

5 Comments

Wayne Crews, one of my colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has some thoughts at Forbes about how best to regulate the new private spaceflight industry.

[Update a while later]

Speaking of my CEI colleagues, Iain Murray has a new book out, titled Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You. Sounds like the basic theme of the last three years. If not eighty.

Business, Political Commentary, Space

Meaningless Bipartisan Space Blather

5 Comments

An op-ed from Bill Nelson and Kay Bailey Hutchison:

The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 gave us the blueprint — a way to move forward with human spaceflight and to continue exploring the next frontier.

It extended the life of the International Space Station from 2015 to 2020 and eased NASA resources away from the end of the shuttle program and toward commercial spaceflight and NASA-led development of a heavy-lift rocket for deep-space exploration.

The blueprint we ushered through the Congress last fall also will help reduce the economic impact of the shuttle’s retirement. We made every effort to boost the aerospace industry and take advantage of an extremely skilled NASA work force. We also were able to avoid huge cuts at a time when Congress is slashing across the board.

While NASA and America’s space program are in a time of transition, one thing that most people can agree on is the need to press forward with human space exploration. Our country’s commitment to exploring space is a key in keeping the United States at the forefront globally of science and technology. Space exploration and a deeper understanding of how we can best utilize the great unknown is also vital to our national-security interests.

Translation: we don’t really know what “exploration” means, or how to do it, but we managed to keep the bacon flowing to our own states and those of our buddies. We’re also going to continue to claim that building a giant rocket for which there are no funded payloads is critical to national security, even though we have no idea in what way this might be true. And we’ll take credit for commercial spaceflight, even though we’ve been bad mouthing it for a year and a half, because we merely underfunded it, whereas the House wanted to zero it out altogether.

I hope and think that Nelson will lose his election next year, and Hutchison isn’t running again. I won’t miss either of them.

[Update a few minuts later]

Here’s a summary of a panel discussion in Orlando last week, on which Nelson sat. I have to say that he does sound like he’s come around on commercial space. But he’s still likely to lose, for reasons having nothing to do with space policy. I also think that Dale Ketcham overestimates the importance of space policy to the Florida electorate. They’ll be much more concerned about ObamaCare, Medicare and other issues.