Here’s an interesting discussion among policy makers of current issues with NASA. What I found interesting (and disappointing, as always, is that there was almost no discussion whatsoever of what we’re trying to accomplish, or why NASA even exists. Again, there are a lot of unspoken assumptions in all of the conversation, and it’s not clear that they’re shared.

I found the transcript from Crossfire on Thursday night, about space tourism.

This is the reason that I write this blog (and maybe will have to sit down and write a book, if anyone would read it). It’s always embarrassing to me to watch (or read) things like this. The amount of ignorance displayed in this short transcript, particularly by the media pundits, is amazing, and all four participants are arguing from wildly different assumption bases, but there’s not necessarily any way to tell that for most people.

Programs like this may be entertaining to some, but they are the opposite of informative.

It’s clear that Carville is as ignorant of space (in fact probably more, since he clearly has no interest in it), as he is of almost all other subjects, other than demogoguery to elect Democrats. Carlson is slightless less clueless, but not much.

Bob Park is a physicist. He has no interest in space himself, other than as an environment to be studied scientifically, and he’s incapable of imagining that anyone else might have an interest in it other than that. He hates the space station, and manned space in general, because he perceives them as a collossal waste of money that could be spent on his pet projects (and in this sense he differs in no significant way from any other pleader for the public purse–the fact that he’s a physicist, rather than a farmer seeking crop subsidies, or the head of Amtrak, should grant him no special respect on this subject). The reality is that if we weren’t spending it on station and Shuttle, NASA still wouldn’t be spending it on the space science so near and dear to Professor Parks’ heart–it would just come out of NASA’s budget entirely and go back to the general federal pot.

Professor Parks doesn’t understand that space science cannot justify the money spent on it, in the mind of the public and their representatives in Congress. It gets the few crumbs that it does only because it looks cheap in comparison to the billions that are spent on the manned space program, which has absolutely nothing to do with science. And because he does not, and will not, understand that, he comes off looking like an aloof fool, who hates for people to have a good time, even with their own money.

And his math is wrong as well. The Shuttle budget is not four billion per year, and he also betrays his ignorance of the difference between average and marginal costs, or worse, he’s simply glossing over the difference to make his ugly rhetorical points. I’m not sure which, but having read his diatribes for years, either is equally likely. The marginal cost (that is, the cost of flying the next one, given that you’re already flying some that year) is, in round numbers, about a hundred million. Still a big number, but an order of magnitude of what he’d have us believe.

Lori came off the best. This is not surprising since she a) knows much more what she’d talking about, at least relative to the rest of the panel and b) could present a sympathetic point of view, i.e., “I’m a soccer mom who wants to go into space–the space station is for learning how to live in space, to allow people like me and you to go.” Which is true, to the degree that station has any purpose at all other than a high-tech jobs and foreign-aid program.

I would question her cost numbers on the Soyuz, though. I don’t think even the Russians know what those cost. All they know is that if they take a paying passenger for a flight that’s going anyway, they’ll have twenty million dollars more than they will if they don’t.

Just once, I wish that we could have a serious discussion about space, by knowledgable participants, and with some kind of groundrules and common assumptions established, as opposed to the freak show called Crossfire. Until we do so, there’s little hope of making any significant policy progress, at least none based on what the American public might want.

I’m going to the Space Access Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, this evening. I’m not taking a computer with me–the conference rarely allows much time for anything but schmoozing. So no posts until Sunday or Monday. But feel free to keep arguing about the cancerous nature of humanity in the comments section. below.

Probably due to the Shuttleworth flight, there’s supposedly going to be a debate on space tourism on Cross Fire tonight. Unfortunately, I’ll be on an airplane (on my way to the Space Access Conference in Scottsdale). It’ll be interesting to see how the various players come down on the issue. Or how the issue is even defined…

I’ll appreciate any reports from the readership.

For those who are wondering why their net connections are having problems today, I just talked to my web host, who told me that denial of service attacks are rampant today, and hitting everybody. I know that Earthlink has been having problems, because I couldn’t get to their news server for several hours this morning, and packets are dropping all over the place.

I’m wondering if this is pranksters, or something more nefarious, perhaps from the Middle East…

Citizen space traveler Mark Shuttleworth achieved orbit today on a Soyuz launch. He’s on his way to the International Space Station, approximately one year after the Tito flight. He is expected to get a much better reception than did Tito.

Cole Porter knew what people want, in his song “Don’t Fence Me In.”

Professor Reynolds and Mark Whittington have beaten me to this, but for those three or four people who come here for the space stuff, I want to point out a very worthy initiative by Alan Wasser (current head of the National Space Society) to provide economic incentives for space settlement. This may free up more private investment for it, both reducing the need to rely on the taxpayer, and ensuring that the money is spent on (gasp!) actual space settlement activities, as opposed to simple job (but not wealth) creation.

In brief, he proposes the establishment of a regime for property rights in space via legislation which would result in the U.S. recognizing same. The perceived lack of such rights is one (though by no means the only) barrier to raising investment funds for off-world ventures. When investors can’t be sure they’re going to hold clear title to their investment, it makes it that much harder to persuade them to invest.

I haven’t read the proposed legislation in detail, but I certainly concur with the spirit of it.

A researcher at Stanford has come up with a way to do kidney transplants from non-related donors, an without the lifetime anti-rejection drug regimen. It uses adult stem cells.

Is Orrin Judd opposed to this research, too? After all, it promises to extend life for millions. We just can’t afford to have so many people alive…

[Via Geek Press, as usual]

Megan McArdle has written another entry–an instant classic.

For weeks I walked around the site trying to appreciate it. I wanted, as in the movies, a single moment when it all came crashing over me and I finally understood in my heart all that had been lost. I never got it. I had many, many moments when I cried — the worst was when I saw those thousands “Missing” flyers papering Union Square, and every single flyer had a picture of a victim on one of the happiest days of their lives, looking radiant and expectant and utterly unable to imagine the kind of tragedy that had ended their lives. The oddest was when I was riding on the subway one night, and I was tired, and after Fulton Street the conductor said “Next Stop, Chambers Street” and I wondered, for a split second, why he wasn’t stopping at the World Trade Center — and realized for the first time that nothing would ever, ever be the same again.

So I still haven’t comprehended it, in the sense of the word that means to develop full understanding. But I keep having these moments, like when I realize that I am sitting in a trailer, in a hole that contains nothing but the absence of two buildings, and that entirely unfamiliar objects in my line of sight are in fact the skeleton of a place that I did not particularly love when it was still around, but which was part of the fabric of my every day.

Over at the More than Zero site, Mindles H. Dreck has one of the best satirical skewerings of Paul Krugman yet.