I’m going to be attending this conference in LA in a couple weeks. Those who are interested in the other space program may want to do so as well.

You know, if Tom Hanks could stop being so enthralled with NASA, and use his money and influence to help out some of the private players in space, he might actually be able to get to the moon before 2018. And they’d even be willing to build a vehicle that can handle his 6’1″ frame.

[via Fred Kiesche]

Clark Lindsey just got back from the Air and Space Museum. He’s got pictures.

That’s the title (except theirs is declarative, not interrogative) of an op-ed piece in the business section of today’s Journal (sorry, subscription required) by Holman Jenkins, in which he quotes yours truly, Henry Vanderbilt and Charles Lurio:

We put these views in the paper as a public service. NASA can be expected to dismiss them. Most of the media, bound up in its notion of legitimate “sources,” reports only the views of NASA, the lobbying sector and the congressional delegations whose main interest is keeping the pork flowing.

Political reality is that government does not admit mistakes, briskly decide not to throw good money after bad, junk failing organizations and start over with a clean sheet. That’s what business does.

To his credit, and at the risk of ridicule, NASA’s Mr. Griffin has at least given the best explanation of why space colonization is important: survival of the species over the long term. Yet already visible is the unworkable budget logic that’s destined remorselessly to deflate NASA’s conceit that only a government-led program, at a cost of billions of dollars per astronaut, can get personnel and equipment the first 100 miles of whatever journeys we take to elsewhere in the solar system.

NASA’s core competence, which Mr. Griffin is fighting to retain, consists of treating space as fit terrain for occasional budgetary blowouts, with the inevitable intervening hangovers.

This may be a way to keep its massive civil service and contractor armies together. But it’s the enemy of routine access to earth orbit, which would allow space finally to become a thriving part of our human economy and make it affordable to contemplate a permanent human presence on the moon and Mars.

Note the new media flavor. Also, go check out Henry’s latest thoughts (probably not a permalink):

This plan is crippled from the start, in that it doesn’t contemplate more than minor trims and reshuffles of the current Shuttle/Station standing army, and it calls for development of not one but two major new NASA-proprietary launch vehicles rather than working with existing US and world commercial launch assets. The combination ensures costs will be far too high for the program to have any chance of doing sustainable deep-space exploration over the long term – possibly too high to allow NASA to even make it past the first major hurdle, simultaneous winddown of Shuttle/Station and development of the oversized new “CEV” Shuttle-minus-the-payload-bay and the large new CLV launcher to lift it.

[Update at mid morning]

This part bears a little comment:

It may not be important in the grand scheme of things, a $16 billion a year agency. But one thing has changed: There’s now a popular constituency for space policy that does more than just tune in for the blast-off extravaganzas. Blame the Web: We told you last year how seething space fans had kept Congress’s feet to the fire and ended up saving a bill designed to speed development of private space tourism.

The same folks are also a source of critique of NASA’s Exploration Systems Architecture Study, issued last month, mostly in consultation with the usual suspects — the giant aerospace contractors, who’ve been NASA’s primary iron triangle sounding board since Gemini. Now there’s an effective peanut gallery, their voices magnified by the Web, which has sprouted numerous sites devoted to criticizing and kibitzing about NASA.

This plan actually wasn’t in consultation with the usual suspects, or at least not all of them (other than probably ATK-Thiokol for the SRB, and Lockmart for ET mods). At least in Boeing’s case, this architecture is not at all what they recommended in their architecture studies. The sixty-day study was strictly a NASA-internal activity, initiated and led by Mike Griffin and Doug Stanley, and as far as I can tell, they paid little attention to industry input, except what they needed from the contractors named above to flesh out their Shuttle-derived designs.

[4 PM EDT update]

Instapundit has more excerpts, including the quotes.

That’s the title (except theirs is declarative, not interrogative) of an op-ed piece in the business section of today’s Journal (sorry, subscription required) by Holman Jenkins, in which he quotes yours truly, Henry Vanderbilt and Charles Lurio:

We put these views in the paper as a public service. NASA can be expected to dismiss them. Most of the media, bound up in its notion of legitimate “sources,” reports only the views of NASA, the lobbying sector and the congressional delegations whose main interest is keeping the pork flowing.

Political reality is that government does not admit mistakes, briskly decide not to throw good money after bad, junk failing organizations and start over with a clean sheet. That’s what business does.

To his credit, and at the risk of ridicule, NASA’s Mr. Griffin has at least given the best explanation of why space colonization is important: survival of the species over the long term. Yet already visible is the unworkable budget logic that’s destined remorselessly to deflate NASA’s conceit that only a government-led program, at a cost of billions of dollars per astronaut, can get personnel and equipment the first 100 miles of whatever journeys we take to elsewhere in the solar system.

NASA’s core competence, which Mr. Griffin is fighting to retain, consists of treating space as fit terrain for occasional budgetary blowouts, with the inevitable intervening hangovers.

This may be a way to keep its massive civil service and contractor armies together. But it’s the enemy of routine access to earth orbit, which would allow space finally to become a thriving part of our human economy and make it affordable to contemplate a permanent human presence on the moon and Mars.

Note the new media flavor. Also, go check out Henry’s latest thoughts (probably not a permalink):

This plan is crippled from the start, in that it doesn’t contemplate more than minor trims and reshuffles of the current Shuttle/Station standing army, and it calls for development of not one but two major new NASA-proprietary launch vehicles rather than working with existing US and world commercial launch assets. The combination ensures costs will be far too high for the program to have any chance of doing sustainable deep-space exploration over the long term – possibly too high to allow NASA to even make it past the first major hurdle, simultaneous winddown of Shuttle/Station and development of the oversized new “CEV” Shuttle-minus-the-payload-bay and the large new CLV launcher to lift it.

[Update at mid morning]

This part bears a little comment:

It may not be important in the grand scheme of things, a $16 billion a year agency. But one thing has changed: There’s now a popular constituency for space policy that does more than just tune in for the blast-off extravaganzas. Blame the Web: We told you last year how seething space fans had kept Congress’s feet to the fire and ended up saving a bill designed to speed development of private space tourism.

The same folks are also a source of critique of NASA’s Exploration Systems Architecture Study, issued last month, mostly in consultation with the usual suspects — the giant aerospace contractors, who’ve been NASA’s primary iron triangle sounding board since Gemini. Now there’s an effective peanut gallery, their voices magnified by the Web, which has sprouted numerous sites devoted to criticizing and kibitzing about NASA.

This plan actually wasn’t in consultation with the usual suspects, or at least not all of them (other than probably ATK-Thiokol for the SRB, and Lockmart for ET mods). At least in Boeing’s case, this architecture is not at all what they recommended in their architecture studies. The sixty-day study was strictly a NASA-internal activity, initiated and led by Mike Griffin and Doug Stanley, and as far as I can tell, they paid little attention to industry input, except what they needed from the contractors named above to flesh out their Shuttle-derived designs.

[4 PM EDT update]

Instapundit has more excerpts, including the quotes.

That’s the title (except theirs is declarative, not interrogative) of an op-ed piece in the business section of today’s Journal (sorry, subscription required) by Holman Jenkins, in which he quotes yours truly, Henry Vanderbilt and Charles Lurio:

We put these views in the paper as a public service. NASA can be expected to dismiss them. Most of the media, bound up in its notion of legitimate “sources,” reports only the views of NASA, the lobbying sector and the congressional delegations whose main interest is keeping the pork flowing.

Political reality is that government does not admit mistakes, briskly decide not to throw good money after bad, junk failing organizations and start over with a clean sheet. That’s what business does.

To his credit, and at the risk of ridicule, NASA’s Mr. Griffin has at least given the best explanation of why space colonization is important: survival of the species over the long term. Yet already visible is the unworkable budget logic that’s destined remorselessly to deflate NASA’s conceit that only a government-led program, at a cost of billions of dollars per astronaut, can get personnel and equipment the first 100 miles of whatever journeys we take to elsewhere in the solar system.

NASA’s core competence, which Mr. Griffin is fighting to retain, consists of treating space as fit terrain for occasional budgetary blowouts, with the inevitable intervening hangovers.

This may be a way to keep its massive civil service and contractor armies together. But it’s the enemy of routine access to earth orbit, which would allow space finally to become a thriving part of our human economy and make it affordable to contemplate a permanent human presence on the moon and Mars.

Note the new media flavor. Also, go check out Henry’s latest thoughts (probably not a permalink):

This plan is crippled from the start, in that it doesn’t contemplate more than minor trims and reshuffles of the current Shuttle/Station standing army, and it calls for development of not one but two major new NASA-proprietary launch vehicles rather than working with existing US and world commercial launch assets. The combination ensures costs will be far too high for the program to have any chance of doing sustainable deep-space exploration over the long term – possibly too high to allow NASA to even make it past the first major hurdle, simultaneous winddown of Shuttle/Station and development of the oversized new “CEV” Shuttle-minus-the-payload-bay and the large new CLV launcher to lift it.

[Update at mid morning]

This part bears a little comment:

It may not be important in the grand scheme of things, a $16 billion a year agency. But one thing has changed: There’s now a popular constituency for space policy that does more than just tune in for the blast-off extravaganzas. Blame the Web: We told you last year how seething space fans had kept Congress’s feet to the fire and ended up saving a bill designed to speed development of private space tourism.

The same folks are also a source of critique of NASA’s Exploration Systems Architecture Study, issued last month, mostly in consultation with the usual suspects — the giant aerospace contractors, who’ve been NASA’s primary iron triangle sounding board since Gemini. Now there’s an effective peanut gallery, their voices magnified by the Web, which has sprouted numerous sites devoted to criticizing and kibitzing about NASA.

This plan actually wasn’t in consultation with the usual suspects, or at least not all of them (other than probably ATK-Thiokol for the SRB, and Lockmart for ET mods). At least in Boeing’s case, this architecture is not at all what they recommended in their architecture studies. The sixty-day study was strictly a NASA-internal activity, initiated and led by Mike Griffin and Doug Stanley, and as far as I can tell, they paid little attention to industry input, except what they needed from the contractors named above to flesh out their Shuttle-derived designs.

[4 PM EDT update]

Instapundit has more excerpts, including the quotes.

Keith Cowing says that this is more bad news for NASA, but I disagree. If the cause was worker carelessness, at least we now know what it is, and it’s easily fixable, by retraining workers, or hiring new ones. Ideally, of course, you’d like to have a system that’s not so sensitive to the individuals who have to implement it, but at some point, the people are part of it, and you have to look for quality there as well.

Over at Reason, Ted Balaker takes a whack at NASA. It’s not always fair:

When I interviewed him earlier this year, X Prize winner Burt Rutan pointed out that after almost half a century of manned space flight, NASA still hasn’t achieved the kind of safety breakthroughs his small team achieved in a just a few years. Take the “care-free re-entry” design. It allows Rutan’s SpaceShipOne to align itself automatically for reentry, making it much safer to plunge back into the earth’s atmosphere. Although Rutan’s ship only returns from suborbital space, the design takes the traditionally complex process of reentry and makes it simple.

Emphasis mine. That “although” makes all the difference. Burt’s approach wouldn’t work for an orbital entry, and it’s not a valid comparison. Entry from orbit is a tough problem, and it’s going to take a lot of experience and approaches to figure out how to do it safely.

And when he writes:

…when they’re not swimming in tax dollars, inventors come to appreciate the value of simplicity. Take the hatch, for example. Private astronaut Brian Binnie explained to The Space Review’s Eric Hedman that SpaceShipOne’s hatch opens inward and has no moving parts. Binnie estimates that it costs a couple hundred bucks. Compare that to the multimillion dollar shuttle hatch which swings outward and requires complicated mechanisms to seal it for flight.

While the principle of parsimony is good, this is a dumb example. NASA’s hatch designs are a legacy of the Apollo I fire. I hope that Burt doesn’t kill too many people before he figures out that there are sometimes good reasons for the way NASA does things.

I do agree with this, though, at least in concept if not detail:

How many cosmic hints does NASA need to realize that it might not be long before it’s eclipsed by space entrepreneurs? If it wants to stay in the game, NASA should move from player to manager: Spell out the mission, offer a nice reward for its completion, and kick back until someone collects the dough. NASA could borrow from a suggestion made by the Aldridge Report, itself the result of a presidential commission, and offer, say, $1 billion “to the first organization to place humans on the Moon and sustain them for a fixed period.”

Speaking of a new space age, this is a real coup for XCOR. It’s been a long slog since the EZ-Rocket first flew, four years ago, but they may now be able to raise the money they need to build a vehicle, and not just engines. In fact, in rereading that old post, it’s remarkable how prescient it was:

While EZ-Rocket doesn’t fly high, or fast–unlike NASA’s reusable rocket programs–it actually flies. And in fact, though it doesn’t fly particularly high, or fast, it is a testament to the neglect of this field that, had XCOR bothered to call the appropriate French certification agency to have them witness today’s flight, they would have simultaneously awarded it the new world’s records for height, speed, and time to climb for a rocket plane.

It not only flies, but it can, given small amounts of money (equivalent to just a fraction of the overruns on programs like X-34 and X-33), fly every day, or twice a day, for mere hundreds of dollars per flight. And the experience developed from it can lead to bigger, faster rocket planes, that can also fly every day, or twice or thrice a day, and teach us how to fly rocket planes, and by selling experiment time, or even (heaven forfend!) rides to wealthy people who want a thrill, make a little money while doing it. We may have rocket racing competitions, sponsored by ESPN, or the Xtreme Sports Channel, or Pratt & Whitney.

Now, let’s hope this prediction works out as well:

And the records will get faster, and higher, and the revenues will grow, until we are offering rides to orbit, and people (with fortunes less than Bill Gates and Larry Ellison) are buying. And then some crazy fool will develop a space suit, and haul up enough parts to build a space hotel, and we’ll offer week-long stays, instead of barn-storming joy rides. And someone else will actually rent space in the hotel and perhaps do some research, or figure out how to build something bigger, like a Mars mission vehicle, that can be afforded by the Planetary Society, or the Mars Society, or even the (renamed?) National Geographic Society.

Jon Goff has similar thoughts, and congratulations to XCOR.

[Update at 10 AM EDT]

Michael Belfiore has more:

Initially XCOR will build 10 rocket racers. My editor tells me that these babies will cost $1 million each, so that will be a nice boost to XCOR’s finances.

It will indeed, assuming that they can build them for less than that (and I think that’s a pretty good assumption).

Belfiore also has a story in Wired about John Carmack and Armadillo.

Two years from today, it will have been half a century since the launch of Sputnik and the beginning of the old space age. Sadly, rather than initiate a new one, NASA seems determined to prolong the old one.