When SpaceX suffers delays, they are criticised as being immature. When the Shuttle has a delay, it is a vital contribution to manned spaceflight.
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Category Archives: Space
An Interesting Google Ad
This looks like an interesting course:
Have you ever wondered: How do various scholarly discourses—cosmology, geology, anthropology, biology, history—fit together?
Big History answers that question by weaving a single story from a variety of scholarly disciplines. Like traditional creation stories told by the world’s great religions and mythologies, Big History provides a map of our place in space and time. But it does so using the insights and knowledge of modern science, as synthesized by a renowned historian.
This is a story scholars have been able to tell only since the middle of the last century, thanks to the development of new dating techniques in the mid-1900s. As Professor Christian explains, this story will continue to grow and change as scientists and historians accumulate new knowledge about our shared past.
I and others actually tried to condense this story down to something that can be told in forty-five minutes or so at the dinner table, which we tell on Moon Day (coming up two weeks from today, on the forty-first anniversary of the lunar landing).
What was really interesting, though (and what mindless stereotypers on the left will find boggling) was that it was a Google ad at National Review…
Muslim Self Esteem
I have some thoughts on the NASA administrator’s recent comments over at PJM this morning.
[Update a while later]
I see that (as is usually the case) most of the commenters over there can’t be bothered to read or comprehend what I wrote, but instead just take it as an opportunity to vent on a public bulletin board.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson. Bottom line:
We all know that Bolden means well and wishes to get his agency on board with President Obama’s larger plan to create a kinder and gentler image to the Muslim world in order to lessen world tension and reduce terrorist attacks against the U.S. Unfortunately, world tensions are rising, and 2009 saw the most foiled terrorist attempts against the U.S. mainland since 2001, so one can wonder about the efficacy of these approaches, or even worry that they are having the opposite effect of what they intend. But the real problem with using NASA as an arm of the State Department’s current politically correct agenda is that it is supposed to have other things to do.
What’s really stupid is that it is doing other things, and good ones, but idiocy like this wipes it off the media map.
[Update mid morning]
Mike Griffin weighs in:
“NASA was chartered by the 1958 Space Act to develop the arts and sciences of flight in the atmosphere and in space and to go where those technologies will allow us to go,” Griffin said in an interview Tuesday. “That’s what NASA does for the country. It is a perversion of NASA’s purpose to conduct activities in order to make the Muslim world feel good about its contributions to science and mathematics.”
Griffin calls NASA’s new mission, outlined by space agency administrator Charles Bolden in an interview with the al-Jazeera news agency, “very bad policy for NASA.” As for NASA’s core mission of space exploration, Griffin points out that it has been reaffirmed many times over the years, most recently in 2005, when a Republican Congress passed authorizing legislation, and in 2008, when a Democratic Congress did the same thing.
Too bad that you didn’t take NASA’s core mission seriously, Mike. Instead, you completely ignored the recommendations of the Aldridge Commission and the CE&I contractors, and decided to make NASA’s core mission on-the-job training for rocket designers at Marshall, and building an unnecessary new rocket that didn’t even get the crew all the way to earth orbit without help from the crew module.
“NASA has been for 50 years above politics, and for 50 years, NASA has been focused by one president or another on space exploration,” Griffin says. “Some presidents have championed it more strongly than others, and it is regrettable that none have championed it as strongly as President Kennedy.
Oh, please. NASA has been above politics for fifty years? NASA has been ninety percent politics since its inception. It’s a friggin’ government agency. And Kennedy didn’t champion space exploration — he championed beating the Soviets to the moon in a battle in the Cold War. He told his own administrator that he didn’t care about space.
For all his unhappiness with the new policy, Griffin says blame for the situation does not belong with NASA administrator Charles Bolden, whom Griffin calls “one of the best human beings you will find.” “When I see reports in the media excoriating Charlie for this position, that blame is misplaced,” Griffin says. “It belongs with the administration. That is where policy for NASA is set. The NASA administrator does not set policy for NASA, the administrator carries it out.”
Really? Well, gee, Mike, maybe if you’d carried out the Bush policy, instead of perverting it yourself, the agency wouldn’t be in such a mess now.
What Isn’t Wrong…?
Call me crazy, but it doesn’t look to me like Islam has any self esteem issues at all, let alone ones that NASA is likely to do anything about.
(For those who have been emailing me asking me what I think of Charlie Bolden’s excellent diplomatic adventure. I’ll have a lot more thoughts over at Pajamas Media later.)
It Just Makes You Want To Cry
Here we go again. No one at this American Thinker piece, neither the author or any of the commenters, has clue one about the new policy:
Now, with the Obama administration’s new “plan” for NASA effectively ending nationally funded human spaceflight, we drop a torch others are grabbing.
Where do they come up with this nonsense? How can one sanely characterize a policy that extends ISS until at least the end of the decade, and that has billions of dollars budgeted to buy crew services, as “ending nationally funded human spaceflight”?
NASA has long been planning to cancel the Shuttle program, which is understandable, considering budget constraints and the priority of the Constellation program. But to cancel both programs leaves the U.S. with no viable human space transport. The International Space Station, which represents a $100-billion investment by U.S. taxpayers, will be unreachable by scientists and astronauts from the U.S. without hitching a ride on Russian or Chinese space transport. This is unacceptable.
Or from commercial American services, which will be available much sooner than Ares/Orion. And later, he finally gets around to discussing this:
With the ending of the Constellation program, there are no future human missions for the U.S., except those made possible in commercial spaceflight. While commercial spaceflight is tremendous in its future implications, it will progress only in areas that have demonstrated a possible fiscal return…and space operations are so expensive and difficult that it is highly unlikely that any true exploration would occur. Commercial space flight is space exploitation, not space exploration. For the foreseeable future, an entity like NASA — which is nationally funded and not constrained by profits and losses — and a project such as Constellation is the best way to extend our reach into and knowledge of space. Robotic missions are all well and good for certain applications, but one does not learn anything about putting humans in space by putting robotic vehicles in space.
Sigh…
Where to start?
Look. We are simply transitioning from a mode in which NASA develops and operates its own earth-to-orbit vehicles to spec, to one in which it purchases transportation services to LEO for crew from private providers, as it has been doing for years for satellites and probes. No one said that NASA was “getting out of the planetary exploration business” when it launched LRO and LCROSS on a commercial Atlas, and if they had they would have rightly been considered insane. Why is it any different for astronauts?
Exploration starts when we get into LEO, not at Cape Canaveral.
And you cannot simultaneously know anything about Constellation and state that it is “the best way to extend our reach into and knowledge of space.” Constellation was a fiscal disaster waiting to happen. It was unaffordable both in terms of its development costs, and its operational costs. There are many better ways to accomplish that goal. The new policy is one of them.
Jeebus crow.
Lack Of Progress
A Russian robotic vehicle seems to be out of control, and unable to dock with the ISS. Probably a stuck or miscommanded thruster. Between this and the two Soyuz landing anomalies, I wonder if the Russian space program is falling apart? If so, it’s potentially bad news for ISS. We need to get a fire lit under the commercial crew and COTS programs.
Apollo Is Finally Over
I’ve had a lot of differences with John Logsdon over the years, but in this Space News piece (pointed out to me by Charles Lurio), he gets it pretty close to exactly right (i.e., we’re pretty much on the same page):
Yale University organizational sociologist Gary Brewer more than 20 years ago observed that NASA during the Apollo program came close to being “a perfect place” — the best organization that human beings could create to accomplish a particular goal. But, suggested Brewer, “perfect places do not last for long.” NASA was “no longer a perfect place.” The organization needed “new ways of thinking, new people, and new means.” He added “The innocent clarity of purpose, the relatively easy and economically painless public consent, and the technical confidence [of Apollo] … are gone and will probably never occur again. Trying to recreate those by-gone moments by sloganeering, frightening, or appealing to mankind’s mystical needs for exploration and conquest seems somehow futile considering all that has happened since Jack Kennedy set the nation on course to the Moon.”
Introducing “new ways of thinking, new people, and new means” into the NASA approach to human spaceflight has not happened in the two decades since Brewer made his observations. That was the conclusion of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003, and despite the positive steps taken since then to operate the shuttle as safely as possible, much of the Apollo-era human spaceflight culture remains intact. Trying to change that culture and thereby close out the half century of Apollo-style human spaceflight seems to me the essence of the new space strategy. There is no way of achieving that objective without wrenching dislocations; change is indeed hard. Gaining acceptance of that change will require more White House and congressional leadership and honesty about the consequences of the new strategy than has been evident to date.
Sadly, White House and congressional leadership and honesty have been in pretty short supply lately, on both this issue and others.
Depressing
So, over at Red State, we have an editorial from a congressman trying to preserve the pork for his district, and falsely equating Constellation with American human spaceflight. The comments are almost universally equally ignorant. I searched them in vain for anyone who understands what’s actually going on.
You want to gather them all in a room and ask them some questions:
Do you know that NASA had nothing to do with GPS?
Do you know that NASA is getting an increase in its budget (and no, it’s not all going to global warming research and Muslim countries).
Do you know that the new plan will have people getting up to the station without the Russians much sooner, and for much less cost than the old one did?
Do you know that NASA has technology development plans that will make it much more affordable to send astronauts beyond low earth orbit? Plans that were going unfunded under the old program?
Do you know that the only parts of Constellation being worked on did nothing except get NASA astronauts to low earth orbit with a redundant rocket, at a cost of more than a billion dollars a flight? That the hardware needed to get beyond earth orbit wasn’t planned to be developed for years, and wasn’t even well defined?
Do you know that a commercial rocket will fly in the next few weeks with a commercial capsule that could deliver crew to orbit in the next three years or so. And that the rocket and capsule, and its manufacturing facilities were developed, and its launch pads modified for less than the cost of the Ares I-X flight test?
Sigh…
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, I kept plowing, and I finally found a couple commenters who get it:
No thanks to Constellation
utahtim Tuesday, June 29th at 7:12PM EDT (link)Constellation is bad rubbish and good riddance. You may be correct that Mr. Obama’s space policies will reduce the number of government jobs in Alabama and elsewhere, but claiming NASA is good at “human exploratory space flight” anymore is just plain wrong. NASA hasn’t put a man beyond low earth orbit (unless you count fixing Hubbell) since the 1970s, and when it has put people in low earth orbit, it’s only been a few government employees at a cost of roughly $1B a flight, and not very often at that. NASA doesn’t even have a good safety record. I favor the idea of human space exploration, but there are far better ways to go about it than with the expensive, bloated, dated, and constantly slipping government project that is Constellation. No thanks.
Not the NASA of Apollo
freeus Tuesday, June 29th at 8:04PM EDT (link)I have worked at KSC for almost 20 years and this is NOT the NASA that launched the Apollo missions. It has become no different than any other Government agency bogged down with endless rules, regulations, inefficiencies, and bloated beaurocracy. It took 25 years – YEARS! – to build the ISS and Constellation had spent nearly 10 billion over the past 5 years with little to show. I’m certainly not an Obama supporter, but cancelling Constellation (and Shuttle – another incredibly inefficient program) is the right thing to do. The way NASA has been operating for decades has got to stop.
Unfortunately they’re pretty scarce.
Another Casualty
…of the Kos poll problems — this poll on space, done a month or so ago.
I think that most polls on space are pretty worthless, because the public is so ignorant about the subject. It doesn’t make much sense to ask someone if we should spend more or less on something when they don’t even know how much we’re currently spending within a couple orders of magnitude. But this particular poll is not particularly suspect.
[Update a while later]
Getting back to the Kos polling problem, some people don’t think that he acted so nobly:
The fact of the matter is, Kos has been – and continues to be – content to let the negative assumptions based on his published data remain in the air for as long as possible. He knew almost as soon as he first published it that this R2K anit-GOP numbers would come into question. He could have retracted it at any time, but he chose to let that bad data sit out there for months, causing as much damage as possible until he had absolutely no choice but to act.
Well, he may have bought himself a world of hurt anyway:
The attorney for Research 2000 and its owner, Del Ali, is threatening legal action too:
Ali’s attorney, Richard Beckler of Howrey LLP in Washington, told TPMmuckraker in an interview, “This guy [Markos] is completely all wet. This allegation of fraud is absurd.” He added, “These guys are basically ruining Mr. Ali’s business.”
Beckler promised to take “some kind of action soon against all of them” — referring to Kos and the three authors of the analysis calling R2K’s data into question.
Two pieces of good news in this story. First, a lawsuit will bring out the truth not only as to whether Research 2000 committed fraud, but the interaction between Markos and the polling firm. Was Markos pushing the polling firm for certain results, what was he telling them privately, etc. The e-mails between Markos and Research 2000 may be more interesting than the JournoList.
Second, the more money Markos spends fighting Research 2000, the less money he has to fight conservatives. I would not be surprised to see Markos set up a legal fund to fight this battle seeking donations from the base. Donate away, as far as I am concerned. Every dollar donated to Markos’ lawsuit is a dollar drained from some Democratic candidate somewhere.
As I said, live by the lie, die by the lie.
Well, Obviously It Will Never Happen, Then
I hadn’t seen it this explicit before, but unless he’s off the reservation, apparently NASA bans sex in space, at least at the ISS. No big deal. They’re only up there for six months at a time…
I could write a long essay on the ways in which this encapsulates everything that is wrong with the American space program, going all the way back to Mercury. I’ll bet that NASA banned adultery back then, too. Tom Wolfe just made those stories up.
[Update a few minutes later]
Glenn says that this opens up a market niche for other facilities. Well, yeah. Though it’s more like just one more reason not to count on the ISS as a tourist destination. Or at least as the hotel. What we need is a habitat coorbiting with it where space visitors can stay, and use as a base for visiting the ISS for tours, which will minimize disruption if they ever actually start doing research there, and allow people to do what they want in the sack (or floating out of it) without disturbing the little Miss Prisses on DE Street.