Category Archives: Space

Space

Heading For A Cliff?

I haven’t had much to say about the submitted NASA budget, because I’ve been really busy (and have some personal problems right now), but there’s a lot of good discussion over at Space Politics (there are other posts on the subject as well).

Jeff Foust noted yesterday that it’s crunch time for NASA, sooner than many expected. I agree with Chair Force Engineer that if the program dies, or never gets beyond LEO, it will be an own goal by Griffin and company, who insisted on building new unneeded launch systems instead of focusing the funds on actual exploration hardware.

[Update a few minutes later]

Clark Lindsey has been doing some budget analysis to determine the potential fate of Centennial Challenges and COTS.

Space

Astronauts Behaving Badly

Wow. Talk about the wrong stuff.

Dr. Sanity (a former psych profiler for NASA) has some thoughts on a culture of toxic narcissism.

Unjustified astronaut worship is one of the unfortunate consequences that lingers on, almost half a century after the Cold-War space program began. Just one more reason to try to privatize things ASAP. And of course, this is going to unfairly reflect badly on all the astronauts who really do have the “right” stuff.

[Late morning update]

Heh. Comment #50:

As another famous pilot once said,

“a trench coat and wig and, a knife, BB pistol, rubber tubing and plastic bags….Gosh a feller could have a pretty good time in Vegas with this stuff.”

[Afternoon update]

It’s already been added to her bio at wikipedia.

I see that she’s only flown once, last July. I wonder when this behavior started? Several astronauts have been profoundly affected by their trips into space. Some have gotten religion, some became addicted to various substances. The Overview Effect isn’t always benign. I wonder if we’ll find out that she had a personality change after her flight?

[Late afternoon update]

I’m a little surprised to see that this has become the news story of the day, at least on Fox. But maybe I shouldn’t be. There’s probably a TCS column or two in this somewhere.

[Another update a couple minutes later]

I fearlessly predict that some kind of “space adaptation derangement” will play a key part of the defense. I say this because I already heard it on John Gibson’s show. Seriously, I do think that it will be played as insanity and a crime of passion. And I wouldn’t rule out the Overview Effect.

Space

Nasty Weather

Just to the north of me. Apparently several people were killed by tornadoes early this morning up in central Florida, and now there are tornado warnings for Titusville and the Cape. While it’s unlikely, if a twister were to hit the VAB, it could be a disaster for NASA. Of course, a hurricane is a much larger threat, due to the more comprehensive nature of it, but it’s certainly possible (and would be extremely bad luck) to get hit by a tornado.

Space

Forgotten Anniversary

Happy Groundhog Day!

I neglected to note yesterday that it was the fourth anniversary since the loss of Columbia (hard to believe, just as it’s hard to believe that last Sunday was the twenty-first since the Challenger loss, and last Saturday was the fortieth of the Apollo fire).

Here are my immediate thoughts upon hearing of the event.

What does it mean for the program?

Like Challenger, it was not just a crew that “looked like America” (two women, one african american) but it also had the Israeli astronaut on board, which will have some resonance with the war.

Instead of happening just before the State of the Union, it occurred three days after. It also occurred two days before NASA’s budget plans were to be announced, including a replacement, or at least backup, for the Shuttle.

The fleet will certainly be grounded until they determine what happened, just as occurred in the Challenger situation. Hopefully it won’t be for almost three years. [Note: It turned out to be.] If it is, the ISS is in big trouble, and it means more money off to Russia to keep the station alive with Protons and Soyuz. The current crew can get back in the Soyuz that’s up there now. They will either do that, or stay up longer, and be resupplied by the Russians.

The entire NASA budget is now in a cocked hat, because we don’t know what the implications are until we know what happened. But it could mean an acceleration of the Orbital Space Plane program (I sincerely hope not, because I believe that this is entirely the wrong direction for the nation, and in fact a step backwards). What I hope that it means is an opportunity for some new and innovative ideas–not techically, but programmatically.

Once again, it demonstrates the fragility of our space transportation infrastructure, and the continuing folly of relying on a single means of getting people into space, and doing it so seldom. Until we increase our activity levels by orders of magnitude, we will continue to operate every flight as an experiment, and we will continue to spend hundreds of millions per flight, and we will continue to find it difficult to justify what we’re doing. We need to open up our thinking to radically new ways, both technically and institutionally, of approaching this new frontier.

Anyway, it’s a good opportunity to sit back and take stock of why the hell we have a manned space program, what we’re trying to accomplish, and what’s the best way to accomplish it, something that we haven’t done in forty years. For that reason, while the loss of the crew and their scientific results is indeed a tragedy, some good may ultimately come out of it.

They seem (at least to me) to have held up pretty well, and as usual, NASA learned the wrong lessons from the disaster. And while some good did come out of it, the program is still on the wrong track, in terms of prospects for making space affordable.

You can also read many other posts on the subject in the following days. Scroll to the bottom and work your way up.