An amusing political cartoon, but pretty much inside baseball for space enthusiasts.
Category Archives: Space
In Which I Agree With Nancy Pelosi
“If you are asking me personally, I have not been a big fan of manned expeditions to outer space in terms of safety and cost. But people could make the case – technology is always changing … and that could change depending on the technology,” she said today in a press conference with regional reporters.
I don’t think that safety is that big an issue, though apparently the body politic insists that it is (which is why we make so little progress in opening the frontier). But she’s dead on. The current plan makes no fiscal sense whatsoever, but with a change in technology (e.g., orbital infrastructure), it could be improved dramatically. Of course, it would also involve not just a change in technology, but more importantly, a change in philosophy, from a government command-and-control space program to one much more attuned to market incentives and private initiative. Somehow, I suspect that Nancy will be much less interested in that…
Anyway, it’s a shame that the Augustine panel couldn’t put a stake through the heart of the money-sucking heavy-lift myth. But I’d be happy to attempt to persuade Madam Speaker (assuming that she’s sincere…OK…OK……..OK…………OK, you can stop laughing now) that there are better ways to go.
No Lunar Landings For The Indians
At least no time soon, or affordably:
Theo Pirard, who attended the conference, discovered the projected plan of the Indian manned Mission on the Moon, which is the result of recent feasibility studies made by ISRO. This plan offers some similarities with the US Constellation programme for the return to the Moon but no date could be announced, because of lack of money.
Yes, the main similarity is that they think that in order to go to the moon, you have to replicate Apollo. We’ll see how these long-term plans evolve in the years to come when the reusables start flying, and Bigelow is doing lunar excursion using depots.
How Technology Will Change Our Lives
…in the next decade. Prognostications from Ray Kurzweil. This is the part I like:
We won’t just be able to lengthen our lives; we’ll be able to improve our lifestyles. By 2020, we will be testing drugs that will turn off the fat insulin receptor gene that tells our fat cells to hold on to every calorie. Holding on to every calorie was a good idea thousands of years ago when our genes evolved in the first place. Today it underlies an epidemic of obesity. By 2030, we will have made major strides in our ability to remain alive and healthy – and young – for very long periods of time. At that time, we’ll be adding more than a year every year to our remaining life expectancy, so the sands of time will start running in instead of running out.
For those of us interested in space, we’re going to need it, because one thing that doesn’t seem to be improving over time is government space policy.
Why Not Just Fund The Program Of Record?
Chris Kraft weighs in with a “common sense approach”:
NASA should essentially stay the course that has been pursued for the past several years. It makes good common sense to preserve and continue the use of the present NASA assets. Specifically, NASA should:
* Continue to operate the space shuttle until a suitable replacement is available, and initiate a study to consider a modernization program aimed primarily at reducing the operating costs.
* Operate and maintain the international space station until it ceases to be economically reasonable and scientifically productive.
* Continue to push forward with orderly haste to accomplish the goals set forth by the Constellation program.
* Initiate an aggressive research and development program aimed at the technology required to make space exploration to Mars and other deep-space objectives rational and affordable.
* Estimate a realistic set of budget requirements for the total NASA program based on the above goals and the other elements and goals of the agency.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t explain how much this would cost (it would cost billions to get the lines started again to keep Shuttle flying alone, even ignoring the orbiter-aging issues), or where the money would come from. Without doing any analysis, I’m guessing that it would require a doubling of the current HSF budget, or on the order of an additional ten billion dollars per year, for a system that will continue to cost billions per mission.
Jon Goff, on the other hand, explains why Kraft’s proposal is a non-starter, and fiscally insane:
Where I come from, we tend to think that getting a heck of a lot less while paying a heck of a lot more is usually the sign of a sucker. I just wish that a few space pundits and public figures didn’t keep enabling Senator Shelby and his ilk from hijacking NASA’s budget to enrich his campaign contributors at the rest of our expense.
Unfortunately, it’s more than a few. He also has a good question for Chris Kraft and other America bashers:
Why does Congress trust Russian commercial space more than American commercial space, btw?
Obviously, Russians are much better than American entrepreneurs and businesses. The latter can’t be entrusted with the vital duty of spending billions of dollars per flight on unsafe vehicles to protect jobs in key states and congressional districts.
Good News
I hadn’t noticed this from last Thursday:
According to insiders, the White House is looking at four options, each of which would scrap Ares I, dramatically revise Constellation and start new programs allowing commercial space companies to carry humans to the space station. All would be blocked by the latest move by Congress.
Emphasis mine. If the insiders are right, we’re approaching the end of our long national space-policy nightmare. Oh, and as for Congress blocking it? They can do that, I suppose, but it won’t save Ares I. It will just keep any other option from being implemented. NASA (via the administration) will decide what its new plans are. Congress can oppose them, but it can’t force a different direction. And most of Congress, other than the Alabama delegation, doesn’t give a damn.
[Update a while later]
Bobby Block has the latest on the battle at the Orlando Sentinel. This is interesting (if a little depressing):
Last week, Boeing executives, including the company’s vice president for Space Exploration Vice President and General Manager, Brewster Shaw, a former astronaut, called on their employees “to share their excitement and commitment to human space flight — and the Constellation project and Ares program — with their elected officials” through a company-assisted letter-writing effort.
It is the first time that a company has called on its workforce to try to fight to save NASA’s embattled Constellation moon rocket program.
“Now more than ever, it is extremely important that everyone become involved in this conversation,” Shaw wrote in a message to employees last Thursday.
What they’re trying to save, of course, are the upper stage and avionics ring contracts. My question is, how seriously would they expect a Congressperson to take a letter from someone whose contract is at stake? It’s one thing to get a letter from an uninvolved but interested citizen — it’s another to get one from a Boeing employee. I’d be inclined to ignore it myself, particularly given the knowledge that it was at the behest of management. I’m not sure this is a great PR play.
Of course, it could be that they’re just following orders:
Gabrielle Giffords, the head of the House subcommittee with NASA oversight and the wife of NASA astronaut Mark Kelly, says she urged aerospace leaders to get their employees to write the President over the summer, but said only six letters were written.
…Boeing spokesman Ed Memi said that the company recently decided that a big push to back Constellation by its employees was a good move now.
Well, we can see why…
[Bumped]
Kudos To Management
The Tehachapi news has the most detailed story yet of the actions taken by Stu Witt and others to ensure the safety of everyone at the party in Mojave. This video shows the main tent actually being blown down. Glad I got out in time. The earlier video of the partying wasn’t taken in that tent, but in one of the smaller domes, in which belongings had been checked, and where much of it was (at least temporarily) lost in the rush to evacuate.
Another Obama Promise With An Expiration Date
What happened to the Space Council?
I find it hard to get worked up about it. As Dwayne notes, the history of the utility of a space council isn’t encouraging. If civil space were important, we wouldn’t need one, and since it isn’t, one can understand why the White House doesn’t want to have one more clamoring voice at the table.
Also, Jeff Foust has a more detailed report of last Monday’s events in Mojave, and a book review of The Extraterrestrial Imperative. Other people have told me that it doesn’t do justice to Ehricke’s work and legacy.
Emily Bazelon’s Problem
Emily Bazelon isn’t aware of the depth of the irony of her piece at Slate, that describes her apathy to space (which she defines as “astronomy”):
The other night, my boys curled up on the couch with my husband and went to the moon. They were enthralled by a grainy video of Neil Armstrong’s 1969 shaky descent onto the pitted lunar sand. “Mom, the Eagle has landed!” they shouted in unison. “Come watch!” I was in the kitchen, reading Elizabeth Weil’s New York Times Magazine story on the perils of trying to improve a companionate marriage.
She and Liz Weil are soulmates. Liz spent many months hanging around Rotary Rocket in the late 1990s (I had dinner with her once in Tehachapi), doing research for a book
I sat down, put the magazine aside, and tried to care about the moon, the planets, the stars, the galaxy. I concentrated on the astronauts and Sputnik and the race with the Soviet Union from JFK to Nixon. But I was interrupted by a stingy voice in my head: Just think what we could do on this planet with all the time and energy we spend trying to reach other ones. I know, I know: It’s anti-science, anti-American, anti-imagination. But I am incorrigibly, constitutionally earthbound. I have never willingly studied a single page of astronomy. My knowledge of the planets begins and ends with My Very Elderly Mother Just Sat Upon Nine Pillows (except, no more P, as Simon has informed me). I relish stories about NASA boondoggles for confirming my suspicion that the agency is a budget sinkhole.
Well, the agency (at least the human spaceflight part of it) is largely a budget sinkhole. We certainly don’t get value commensurate with the costs. It doesn’t have to be, but because most people are, like Emily, not that interested in space, at least as done by NASA, politicians are free to do whatever they want with its budget, so much of it ends up being simple pork. That’s just Public Choice 101. If Emily and others actually cared, perhaps NASA might have to do more useful things with the money.
But her ignorance extends far beyond simple astronomy. For someone who seems to revel in the fact that NASA wastes its money, like much of the public, she is profoundly unaware of how much (or relatively, little) money it actually is:
Simon has been asking for a periscope. He also says that when he grows up, he’s going to be an astronomer and an astronaut. I mentioned biologist as an alternative a few times. But then I stopped. Now I tell him that I can’t wait for him to teach me all about the solar system. Maybe he’ll be a rebel astronomer, and someday reform NASA, or call for an end to manned space missions so that the money can be used to fix Social Security? A mother can dream.
If she thinks that ending human spaceflight would be more than spitting in a hurricane with regard to the Social Security budget, she is innumerate beyond belief. You could either double, or zero, the NASA budget, and either way it would barely be a rounding error in SS, or the rest of the federal budget in general. I wish that more people thought that space was important, and that it was about more than astronomy. I also wish that people would think and care more about how, not whether NASA was spending the money. But as long as they’re so ignorant as to think that NASA, wasteful or not, has anything to do with the deficit, or the failure to solve intractable social problems (we saw an excellent example of this during the presidential campaign, when candidate Obama’s first space policy was written by an education staffer who thought that we could use the NASA budget for more education funding), we’re unlikely to get better space policy, or policy in general.
The Desert Hurricane
Virgin Galactic has a press release out:
Hurricane Provides Dramatic End to Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Event
At the start of a dramatic week of weather right across the US, hurricane force winds hit Mojave Air and Spaceport CA on the evening of Monday 7th December, tearing apart a specially created site which had been used throughout the day to house guests attending the first roll out of Virgin Galactic’s new spaceship.
Along with Sir Richard Branson and spaceship designer Burt Rutan, over 800 press, future astronauts and VIP guests including Governors Bill Richardson and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie and Victoria Principal had gathered in the desert to witness the roll out of the world’s first commercial manned spaceship. Standing at the end of the runway, guests braved gale force winds and stormy weather, to see SpaceShipTwo for the first time. The spaceship was carried down the runway as snow fell, by her mothership, VMS Eve, to a spectacular display of lights and music.
A few hours later as guests celebrated, an evacuation was called by local officials who had become aware of the approaching storm. Sir Richard Branson said: “It was absolutely incredible, the roll out of the spaceship had been fantastic and everybody was filled with terrific energy. We were all in the tents when the evacuation was called. 20 minutes after the last of the 800 guests had been coached away, the main 200ft tent literally took off”. Gusts were reported of up to 116MPH, and local residents commented that the Mojave area had not experienced such a combination of high winds, rain and freezing temperatures for over two decades. Both spaceship and mothership were unscathed thanks to the rapid action of the crew as were all guests thanks to an efficient evacuation to waiting buses.
Sir Richard Branson added: “We were fully expecting to be blown away by our beautiful new spaceship but got a little more than we bargained for!”
I have to say, despite my earlier criticism, that this could have been a lot worse, and they did do a good job of getting everyone out quickly. No one was even injured, and some, even many could have been killed without the warning.