Category Archives: Space

Space

Unfortunate Analogy

Taylor Dinerman says that we should be optimistic about the political staying power of the president’s Vision For Space Exploration.

Unfortunately, the example he uses doesn’t inspire confidence in me, at least in terms of the potential for success of the program, though it may continue to get funding ad infinitum, as our ineffective space activities already have for the past three decades since Apollo. After all, over two decades after Reagan made his “Star Wars” speech, we still don’t have a missile defense.

Space

Shuttle-Derived Wet Dreams

Ed Kyle has an overview of Mike Griffin’s plans for a Shuttle-derived launch architecture.

I think that it’s a mistake to maintain the expensive Shuttle infrastructure, and an even bigger one to make the president’s vision dependent on heavy lift vehicles, particularly when there’s only one type, with no resiliency. But as Ed points out, politically, there are a lot of influential congresscritters with Shuttle employees in their districts, so pork may rule the day once again.

Space

Let The Tumbrels Roll

Jeff Foust asks, with regard to Griffin’s reorganization:

At what point does the standard reorganization of officials during a change of leadership become something more like a purge?

I’m not sure exactly where that point is, but it seems pretty clear to me from this WaPo article that, though they don’t use the word, we’re well beyond it.

As I’ve said before, Dr. Griffin is either going to be a spectacular success, or a spectacular failure, but either way, he’s going to do it his way. As the article points out, he’s been thinking about these issues for a long time. If I were in his position, I’d do a pretty thorough housecleaning as well, but I wouldn’t necessarily bring in all of the same people that he will.

[Update in the afternoon]

Via Keith Cowing, here’s a Slashdot discussion of this.

[Another update at 3 PM]

Thomas James says that Griffin is being Machiavellian. He means that in a good way, of course.

Space

False Choices

Jeff Foust points out a couple of editorials in the DC Examiner that set up the false choice of manned exploration versus, well, other stuff. In the one case, it’s earth sciences, though why this is NASA’s job (as opposed to, say, NOAA or NSF) isn’t said.

And both point out the continuing need for resolving my pet peeve, that we have still not had a national debate on why NASA even exists. Until we can develop some kind of consensus on why we have a government-funded space program, and particularly a manned one, we’ll continue have these pointless discussions. As it is now, the purpose is vague and chameleon like, allowing proponents of pork and hobby shops to continue to proliferate.