Kevin Parkin has an interesting post on post-graduate education for blue brass. This is a problem not just for procurement and program management in general, but for strategic military vision for space.

I played hooky today for an hour or so and attended the press conference that Elon Musk held over at SpaceX. Bottom line, a launch next Friday at 1 PM Pacific (Saturday morning at Kwajalein). I took a couple pictures and some notes, and may have more info later. Attendance was sparse, at least partly because all the local television camera crews were covering the fire up in Ventura.

I take all pronouncements about the Chinese space program with a heavy dosage of sodium chloride, but for those who breathlessly (and wishfully, if it feeds their fantasies) believe everything they read on the subject (and yes, Mark, before you start whinging about it, this is a strawman–I figure turnabout’s fair play), here’s a report that says they’re three decades from landing a human on the moon.

That sounds a lot more realistic to me than “one year before NASA.” Of course, when they do, they won’t need to bring much in the way of supplies–they’ll be able to check in to the Lunar Hilton.

[Update on Friday morning]

Mark hilariously demonstrates his cluelessness about my attitude once again:

Rand Simberg breaths [sic] a sigh of relief…

No, Mark.

In order for one to “breathe a sigh of relief,” one would have to have something to be “relieved” about. I’ve never expressed any concerns about the Chinese space program (one of the reasons that you continually go off the rails), so it’s nonsensical to describe me as “relieved” at news that simply confirms my continuing skepticism. You’re the one who should be relieved, but I know that, on this subject, you’ll continue to make Chicken Little look calm, collected and rational.

Clark Lindsey says that NASA’s R&D priorities are exactly reversed.

I’ll bet you’re wondering how I’m going to pull this one off. And I’m not sure what the category should be.

But I was reading a piece from a few days ago by Michael Rubin on Iraq, and the connection dinged in my mind:

Iraq is a complex country, difficult to crystallize in a simple poll. But this is exactly what too many news organizations seek to do. On October 24, 2005, for example, the Guardian reported a new poll finding that 82 percent of Iraqis were “strongly opposed” to the presence of foreign troops in their country. Critics of the war seized on the poll to demand immediate withdrawal.

True: Polls do not lie. Iraqis dislike occupation. They resent stopping on busy highways for slow-moving military convoys. They juxtapose the Green Zone’s generators with their own worsening electricity supply. They fail to understand why U.S. diplomats who seldom leave their quarters must block off the center of their city rather than build their cantonment on its outskirts. They are annoyed by helicopters hovering over their villages. But such annoyance with occupation does not translate into demands for immediate withdrawal.

Polls in mature democracies like the United States are difficult enough to conduct and get right. The task is far more formidable in post-autocratic societies. When pollsters instead ask Iraqis to prioritize their top-20 concerns, withdrawal of Coalition troops usually ranks near the bottom of the list. Restoring electricity, combating corruption, and maintaining security are consistently at the top priorities.

There’s reason here for those who advocate big government space programs to be concerned. Yes, in the abstract, people like the space program. But when it comes down to actually setting priorities, NASA is always way down the list, and there’s little in the president’s vision, and even less in NASA’s proposed implementation of it, to change that. Dr. Griffin is riding for a fall.

Mark Whittington once again demonstrates his inability to understand the arguments against his wacky “Chinese-taking-over-the-Moon” hysteria:

Of course I am assured that the Chinese would not even think of behaving badly in space. That would be “stupid.”

No, Mark. What is stupid is thinking that anyone has ever made such an argument. Or at least anyone at this web site. Perhaps you’re arguing with someone at some fantasy web site in your own mind.

Just more evidence of Mark’s continuing flight from reality, and another demonstration of why it’s so difficult to take him seriously.

I’m about a week late on this, but Michael Belfiore is feasting on crow.

Michael, there’s an old saying on Usenet, which is that the best way to learn something about a subject you’re interested in is to post something blatantly (almost trollishly) wrong about it in a relevant newsgroup.

With the blogosphere, the whole web is Usenet now.

Jeff Foust has an interesting report on a speech by Elon Musk this past weekend, detailing SpaceX’s long-range plans.

Meanwhile, Eric Hedman is pessimistic about the business prospects for SpaceX. Clark Lindsey responds.

XCOR is going to set some precedents:

“We also plan to deliver some mail to California City

The defenders of the ESAS claim that this architecture is the only one that could get political support. This claim seems to be made in the absence of any actual analysis explaining why this is so, and what it is about this particular approach that makes it more (in fact, uniquely) politically palatable than any possible alternative. It implies that any NASA administrator, who knew what was politically viable, would have come to exactly the same conclusion as Mike Griffin did. It assumes that it was the politically inevitable result of any competent manager.

But this belief ignores the fact that Dr. Griffin has been promoting something very like this architecture for years. It’s possible, I suppose, that the sole reason that he’s favored it is because he was prescient in knowing to the nth degree what kind of plan he could get past the Congress, even in the absence of knowing who would be committee chairs ahead of time.

I think it more likely that the plan is simply what he’s always (well, since the eighties) planned to do if he ever was placed in a position to do it. I’m sure he’s quite sincere in his belief that this is the best plan, but that doesn’t make him correct.

Some have been demanding that I provide an alternative plan that would be equally politically viable. Ignoring the fact that it’s not clear that this plan is, over the long haul, if I don’t understand why people think that this one is, I don’t know how to formulate an argument why some other one would be in a way that they’d find convincing.

I’ve got lots of ideas of better ways to implement the president’s broad vision, but until I understand from the current architecture’s proponents why they think that this one uniquely threads the needle, I don’t know how to make a case for any other.

Discuss.

[Update on Wednesday evening]

I’m not going to write new stuff, but this subject reminded me on a piece I wrote right after the Columbia loss:

The lesson we must take from the most recent shuttle disaster is that we can no longer rely on a single vehicle for our access to the new frontier, and that we must start to build the needed orbital infrastructure in low earth orbit, and farther out, to the moon, so that, in the words of the late Congressman George Brown, “greater metropolitan earth” is no longer a wilderness in which a technical failure means death or destruction.

NASA’s problem hasn’t been too much vision, even for near-earth activities, but much too little. But it’s a job not just for NASA–to create that infrastructure, we will have to set new policies in place that harness private enterprise, just as we did with the railroads in the 19th Century. That is the policy challenge that will come out of the latest setback–to begin to tame the harsh wilderness only two hundred miles above our heads.

NASA has learned nothing.

[Update in the evening of November 9th]

Here’s another relevant piece that I’ve written in the last couple years. I continue to be amazed when I look at all of the pieces on space policy that I’ve written over the last few years, because I can find few words in any of them that I would change. I am simultaneously saddened that it all seems for naught.

I ought to gather up all the Fox News pieces, and build them into a book. Having to put together a thousand-word column every week does instill a certain level of discipline, and apparently results in great thoughts, at least occasionally.