Category Archives: Space

Popular Culture, Space

Grumpy Thoughts

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From Lileks:

I like Grumpy. Don’t identify with him, though – I’d go with Doc, maybe.

What? You don’t see many people wearing mildly abrasive Grumpy shirts? You need to spend more time in Disneyworld, where such things are encouraged as an expression of the outer limits of Disney-sanctioned negative personality characteristics. They’re aimed, probably, at the middle-aged men who accompany their families and need something that seems aimed at their particular demographic, and they accommodate Disney agnostics and Disney adherents. Doc speaks to them both.

Aside from that, though, what do adult males have for Disney character identification? Squat and diddly, it seems. We’re not in the mood to wear a Prince on our shirt: teh ghey. Sully: too hairy and fat for some. There’s Donald, but in his T-shirt form he’s Grumpy + anxiety disorder.

There’s no Disney version of Bugs Bunny. No character with the self-possession, the amused expression – he’s laughing at you, not with you, but he’s doing you the favor of not laughing out loud – the cynical tilt of the eyebrow, the carrot-cheroot, the eyes calculating the odds and the way this caper will play out. There’s a scene in “Roger Rabbit” where they finally meet, and I remember at the time it was a moment of great pop-culture significance. Which, I suppose, it was. It was fleeting, as it should be – together they would never work, like swing played on top of ragtime, but for that one moment there was a certain pleasure in seeing them together, like Bogart shaking hands with Harold Lloyd.

Which is a roundabout way of saying the only Disney shirt I’ll wear around the Kingdoms is a Classic Mickey.

No one opines on pop culture better.

[Update a few minutes later]

And don’t miss Red Planet Mars.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Missing The Point

32 Comments

Over at Popular Mechanics, Erik Sofge says that NASA misses the point with its new video game. Unfortunately, he misses the point himself, setting up the age-old and false dichotomy between humans and robots:

The game serves as an epitaph for what appears to be NASA’s lost decade. The agency failed to stay on time or on budget throughout the life of the Constellation program, its highest and most expensive priority. But while manned spaceflight foundered, unmanned exploration thrived. The modern-day equivalent of Aldrin and Armstrong are Spirit and Opportunity, robotic vehicles that survived years longer than expected on the surface of Mars. The rovers uncovered signs of water, and paved the way for the discovery of actual Martian ice by other intrepid bots.

The success of the rovers—and the increasingly tepid public response to shuttle launches or to the astonishing fact that there is a space station orbiting the planet—has called into question the relevance of astronauts. Moonbase Alpha, in its own small way, only hurts the case for humans in space. If the game featured an all-bot lunar mining facility, players would be spared the burden of gradually, tediously fixing a life-support system. Critical decisions such as whether to carry a wrench or a welder (apparently, NASA doesn’t plan on producing a moon-worthy toolbox by 2025) could be replaced with, say, a simulation of the powerful, spider-like ATHLETE robot’s perilous navigation of craters on the dark side of the moon. Instead of being given control of the array of awe-inspiring bots currently in NASA’s labs, such as the humanoid Robonaut 2, players can deploy toylike rovers whose arms and integrated welders make the astronauts piloting them even more redundant.

Apparently, he suffers from the exploration delusion. If it’s only about exploration, then yes, robots are more cost effective (though not more generally effective). But when you start to say that robots can do it better, it begs the question of what it is that they’re better at. While they can be good helpmates, they are ultimately useless for allowing humans to experience space first hand, and that’s ultimately the real market for human spaceflight, albeit not government human spaceflight. Robots can make it easier for humans to go but they don’t make them superfluous. He also has bought into the popular perception of the new policy:

Even if it was possible to build an astronaut game that’s both exciting and realistic, why bother? It will be more than a decade before humans even attempt another trip outside of Earth’s orbit. If NASA wants to inspire the next generation of astronauts and engineers, its games should focus on the real winners of the space race—the robots.

No one knows when we’ll go beyond earth orbit again, but a decade is a long time. When I see the kind of progress that SpaceX has made in seven years, I’ll be very surprised if there aren’t private trips at least around the moon, if not landing, by 2020. Of course, the new policy makes that more likely than the previous one did, and the previous policy hadn’t a prayer, or even a plan, to meet President Bush’s original VSE goals. And the notion that government ten-year plans are the key to opening up space is one that should have died with Apollo, which wasn’t at all about opening up space. I’ll also say that if robots are really the “winners of the space race,” we’re all losers.

Political Commentary, Space

Not A Stake Through Its Heart

2 Comments

…but it looks like HR5781 is mostly dead in its current form:

A controversial House NASA authorization bill that appeared headed for a floor vote July 30 has stalled, and it appears unlikely the measure will be taken up before lawmakers leave town for a six-week summer break that begins Aug. 2.

House leadership aides said just before midnight July 29 that the bill, a three-year authorization that recommends funding the U.S. space agency at roughly $19 billion a year through 2013, would not be taken up July 30, and that it is very unlikely the measure will come to a vote before lawmakers head home to campaign in their districts.

This at least buys some time to either fix it more in accordance with the Senate plan, or kill it altogether.

Business, Political Commentary, Space

The Space Policy Battle Continues

25 Comments

The latest, from Henry Vanderbilt and the Space Access Society:

NASA Exploration Funding: An URGENT Call To Action

Background

We strongly support the new White House space exploration policy. We believe it can gives NASA a meaningful future, as opposed to the dead end the Constellation “Apollo on Steroids” program has become under any reasonably foreseeable budget. (See the Augustine Report.)

The core of the new White House space exploration policy is:
– Getting NASA out of the business of developing and operating its own (massively overpriced relative to both military and commercial vehicles) space transportation.
– Passing full responsibility for basic space access to the US commercial launch sector just as fast as the commercial operators can demonstrate they’re ready.

The several billion per year freed up by doing this, and by retiring Shuttle after this year (as planned since 2004) would be used to refocus NASA on developing new technologies for future space transportation and deep-space exploration (things that have been shorted at the agency for decades), to keeping Station (the nation’s sole and dearly-bought existing space outpost) operating beyond the former 2016 shutdown date, and (once the new more affordable deep-space capabilities are available) to conducting new exploration missions beyond low Earth orbit.

The last few months have seen an organized Congressional effort to derail the proposed NASA reforms, largely for reasons of short-term local political self-interest. The Congressional regional coalition accustomed to seeing NASA exploration funds flow regardless of results is fighting the new policy with everything they’ve got.

Various Congressional committees have voted to reduce the new commercial and research programs by various amounts, giving the money instead to continued NASA booster and crew capsule developments. Briefly, the Senate committee NASA Authorization version diverts roughly half the commercial and research funding to a new in-house NASA heavy booster plus continued NASA crew capsule development. The House committee NASA Authorization version is far worse, diverting almost all the commercial and research funding to in-house NASA booster and capsule work, while also imposing onerous restrictions on commercial efforts both orbital and suborbital. (We have not covered these committee votes in detail because after the first it became obvious the decks were stacked in these committees and we had little chance of affecting those intermediate outcomes.)

Now, however, the House NASA Authorizers are attempting to get their version approved by the full House in a last-second maneuver before the Congress goes on August recess starting Monday the 2nd. An attempt will probably be made to bring HR 5781, the House committee version NASA Authorization bill, to a floor vote tomorrow, Friday July 30th. (Other unrelated Congressional business could prevent this, but that’s not something to count on.) The attempt if made will be under “suspension of the rules”, a streamlined procedure that limits debate and doesn’t allow any amendments. The only choice is, up or down, pass HR 5781 or reject it.

We and many others think HR 5781 should be rejected. “Suspension of the rules” also requires a 2/3rds majority to pass a bill, so there is a good chance that constituent pressure (that’s you!) on Congressmen in general can either delay this attempt till after August if the votes aren’t there, or defeat it outright.

Action

If you are reading this before east coast close-of-business July 30th (the earlier in the day the better, before 9 am is best), please call your Congressman. If you know their name, you can call the House switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask for their office. (If you don’t know who your Congressman is, go to here and enter your home zipcode.) Once through to their office, let the person who answers know you’re calling about HR 5781, the NASA Authorization. They may switch you to another staffer (or that staffer’s voicemail) or they may take the call themselves. (If you’re calling after-hours or they’re getting a lot of calls, you may go directly to a voicemail.)

Regardless, tell them you want your Congressman to oppose this version of the NASA Authorization. Give one or two reasons briefly (e.g., that you support full funding for NASA Commercial Crew and full funding for NASA space exploration technology, that you are very much against any new in-house NASA booster development as very likely being a massive waste of taxpayer dollars, to support the US commercial launch industry, to enhance our national technological competitiveness, to support the President’s NASA policy, to address the NASA problems pointed out by the Augustine Commission and restore NASA’s ability to usefully explore, etc). Answer any questions they may have as best you can, then politely sign off.

We will likely be seeing more action on this as the year goes on. Keep an eye out for further Updates. Thanks for helping!

If you haven’t called yet, you can still do it tomorrow.

Business, Political Commentary, Space

Pushback In The House

9 Comments

It looks like (contrary to the idiotic claims that there was “widespread opposition” in Congress to the new direction for human spaceflight) Bart Gordon is having trouble selling his porkfest to “aggrieved” representatives outside the committee:

In a July 21 letter to Gordon, 13 California Democrats urged the committee to restore funding for commercial crew and cargo initiatives and exploration technology programs requested in Obama’s 2011 spending plan.

“These reductions will have a serious effect on California’s workforce and economy, and that of many states,” states the letter, which was spearheaded by Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Silicon Valley Democrat who has worked closely with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on energy and technology policy initiatives in Congress. “These are areas that should be the cornerstone of NASA’s new direction because they will drive innovation and job creation across the nation.”

It’s nice to see the California delegation finally acting like they give a damn about space, after all of the jobs they allowed NASA to move to Florida, Alabama and Texas in the nineties. I assume that some of this is a result of successful lobbying by SpaceX.