While Andrew Sullivan makes many good points in this Times piece, in which he accuses George W. Bush of being a socialist, he damages his credibility, at least to those familiar with space policy, with this:
…when Katrina revealed that, after pouring money into both homeland security and Louisiana
Business 2.0 has a list of nine trendy fads to ignore. One of them is space tourism:
Travel to the final frontier is riskier than buying a vacation home in Aspen. When the first billionaire perishes in the icy void of space, it
More of a note to myself, if anything, to be expanded on later, in another venue.
It strikes me that NASA’s response to the president’s challenge is a statement of fundamental unseriousness about it.
A serious program to go back to the Moon, and beyond, would be based on a foundation of an infrastructure that would dramatically reduce the marginal costs of getting to orbit, operating in orbit, and getting to the points beyond low earth orbit. It would be a decision that would allow dramatic and affordable increases in space operations, for both the government and the private sector.
That they have chosen an architecture that makes the marginal, per-mission costs of doing anything in space as high or higher than they’ve always been indicates that they’re more interested in short-term milestones (getting back to the Moon and completing the lost missions of Apollo) than in opening up a frontier. I thought that I heard the president say something else over a year and a half ago, but perhaps, politically, they’re right, and I’m wrong.
[Update on Saturday afternoon]
Clark Lindsey has some expanded thoughts on this subject.
Jon Goff on trade studies, and why you can use them to justify almost any answer you want.
I haven’t read it yet, but Michael Belfiore has an article in Popular Science about t/SPACE. He’s also going to be live blogging the X-Prize Cup for PopSci.
JSC is evacuating the Mission Control Center in anticipation of the monster storm that may be about to hit them. One wonders what would happen if there was an Orbiter in orbit right now–I don’t think they could just hand that off to the Russians. It makes one question the wisdom of putting a supposedly vital function in such a vulnerable area. There are good geographic reasons for the location of KSC, and Michoud, but having the manned spaceflight center in Houston is an historical accident, because they got a donation from Rice for the land (and it probably didn’t hurt that LBJ happened to be from Texas).
There is a reason, after all, that NORAD is inside the Mountain, and it might make sense for NASA mission control to be in a similarly-secure place.
On the other hand, it also begs the question of whether or not mission control, sixties style, is really needed, or if it’s just a relic of the way we happened to do it then. That space systems are still designed to require the support of hundreds of people on the ground says that maybe there’s something wrong with the way we design them. And it’s not obvious that the new architecture is going to address that.
My Freedom of Information Act request to verify OSIDA’s claim that they are on target for December 2005 did not net any documents (all marked proprietary), but it did net a confirmation of the existence of the documents and a confirmation that the scheduled release of the environmental impact statement (EIS) is December 2005.
Ben Chertoff and Carl Hoffman at Popular Mechanics are live blogging the public announcement of NASA’s exploration architecture from NASA HQ. Chertoff’s calling it NASA’s “lunar retread.”
[Update at 1:15 PM EDT]
Griffin on commercial contractors:
…when you use a prime contractor in the traditional way it IS more expensive, but at least you know that you’ll get what you ask for. We don’t want to get in a position where we ask for something and they can’t make it happen.
Yeah, they cost more, but we all know that prime contractors never fail to come through.
I’m with Hoffman:
Only one question about commercial space activities – Rutan, X prize, Bezos, Elon Must [sic], who’s about to launch his first rocket with commercial payload into orbit for a reported $16 million – that was never mentioned by Griffin himself. And that has to make you wonder whether anything has changed at all…
This article describes why NASA’s plans are probably fiscally and politically unsustainable, though you have to read between the lines:
NASA