So says Ron Bailey. He’s right.

So says Ron Bailey. He’s right.

Over at the Speculist.

I know I’ve been dissing barsoomheads lately, but go read Phil’s interview with Bob Zubrin, to celebrate the opposition of the Red Planet.

Over at the Speculist.

I know I’ve been dissing barsoomheads lately, but go read Phil’s interview with Bob Zubrin, to celebrate the opposition of the Red Planet.

Over at the Speculist.

I know I’ve been dissing barsoomheads lately, but go read Phil’s interview with Bob Zubrin, to celebrate the opposition of the Red Planet.

I’ve heard three references today (from NPR this morning, from Greta on Fox, and from Cici Connally on Brit Hume’s show) that today is a “milestone,” because the number of US military casualties since President Bush declared major hostilities over is now equal to casualties in Iraq during the war itself.

Can someone explain to me why this is a significant number?

Two points.

First, to make such an equation is to engage in an exercise of irrational numerology. I can’t imagine why the number, or the ratio of the two numbers, is of any significance.

Second, it seems to me that, like Warren Buffet’s comparison of California with Nebraska property taxes, this makes exactly the opposite point from that intended. To wit, rather than implying that California’s taxes are too low, it really implies that Nebraska’s are too high. Similarly, for those who complain about the “high” number of deaths since the end of major combat ops (less than the murder rate of any major city in the US), it simply points out how low our casualties in the war itself were.

But leave it to the liberal…errrmm…excuse me, “progressive” media to attempt to make good news seem like bad…

That’s what the Space Frontier Foundation says (via NASA Watch/Spaceref, and Keith has a lot of good links on the subject, but unfortunately, he hasn’t upgraded his software yet to support permalinks…)

I haven’t read the whole report yet, so maybe this is in there somewhere, but in this piece from the Gray Lady, it’s clear that the admiral was willing to go further than William Rogers did after Challenger:

“We are challenging the government of the United States” to make up its mind, Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., the commission’s chairman, said yesterday, alluding to the ease with which politicians hail the shuttle program while cutting its budget by 40 percent.

“We need to decide as a nation what we want to do,” Admiral Gehman, who is retired, warned. The solution, he said, was not just a modernized shuttle. “We shouldn’t start by designing the next vehicle,” he said. “That is a trap that we’ve fallen into several times.”

The challenge places President Bush in essentially the same place President Ronald Reagan was after the Challenger explosion. Confronting a $480 billion budget deficit this year and many more years of deficits to follow, does Mr. Bush want to commit to expending the money and energy needed to remake the nation’s space program, the step the commission said was critical to averting a third disaster? Or do problems on earth, like bringing order and democracy to Iraq, battling terrorism or rebuilding another aging technological behemoth ? the electric power grid ? rank higher?

Look, folks. It’s not about money. We’re spending about one percent of the federal budget on space. We’re spending much more on agricultural supports that are starving millions in the Third World. The issue is not how much to spend, but how to spend it.

Do we want a space program that is a jobs program for politically correct engineers, or do we want a space program that actually accomplishes something in space? If so, what are we trying to accomplish?

It’s time to write your congressman and senators, and say, not I want to send astronauts to Mars, or I want to send astronauts to the Moon, but I want my children to be able to go into space, and I want to see a payoff from space, in new resources, and energy, and political freedom. And I want to go into space myself, and it’s none of your damned business why I want to go, any more than one had to fill out a form in the seventeenth century to explain why one wanted to go to America from Europe. I want a debate on the purposes of why we’re spending money on NASA, and I’m tired of the space program being used as an excuse for jobs in the right congressional districts, or foreign aid to countries that don’t act like allies, with no attention being paid to any actual accomplishments in space.

I don’t know if it will do any good, but if it doesn’t now, it never will.

And lazy reporting, at Fox News, in a story about the Gehman Report, as pointed out by Matt Bille over at sci.space.policy today.

“There has been a subtle change at NASA,” physics professor Robert Park of the University of Maryland told Fox News, referring to the amount of outsourcing the agency has done in recent years.

Park said he’d been told that in the control room at the time of the accident “there were no NASA employees. It was all contractors.”

Three points.

First, why does anyone care what a physics professor at the University of Maryland says or thinks? Why automatically go to your rolodex of bombastic kneejerk opponents of the manned space program (which Professor Parks is)?

Second, “he’d been told” is not exactly great sourcing. As Matt says, why take the word of someone known to be antagonistic to NASA, rather than simply calling NASA and verifying whether or not there were NASA employees in the control room. As it reads, there is an implication that it’s true. There’s another implication, which brings us to item three.

Even if true, why is this a bad thing? Why should we assume that civil servants are more competent or responsible than contractor employees? There seems to be an implication here (entirely unjustified) that government employees are noble and have only the interests of safety and the program at heart, but they were replaced by black-hearted greedy knaves with no interest other than crashing space shuttles while fleecing the taxpayer. If that caricature is not what we’re supposed to infer, then just what is his point?

[Update at 8 PM PDT]

Jorge Frank over at sci.space.policy has an interesting URL disputing Professor Park (warning, it’s a big file–over two megs). As he says:

This is the group photo for the STS-107 Ascent/Entry team. For reference, NASA badges have a blue NASA logo on a yellow background to the left of the photo, while contractor badges have black barberpoles on both sides of the photo.

I haven’t really commented on C. Blake Powers’ proposal to abolish NASA. I don’t necessarily disagree, but I don’t think that it’s politically realistic. However, he’s certainly not alone, and Leonard David has a report from the Telluride Tech Festival a couple of weeks ago, at which apparently many people called for it.

Part of the problem is that many who are calling for it now (e.g., Bruce Murray, Lew Branscomb) have always been opposed to the Shuttle and station, and the manned spaceflight program in general, so their calls look like simple political opportunism. Freeman Dyson has a little more credibility, as a long-time proponent of space settlements. But they’re all scientists, and we need to get out of the mode of relying on scientists for advice about space policy. Unfortunately, we remain mired in the false association of civil space with science exclusively.

The real problem, of course, is that the political imperatives behind NASA have very little to do with actual accomplishments in space. Abolishing, or even restructuring the agency would break many rice bowls, in the districts and states of very powerful congressmen and Senators.

The most frustrating thing to me, of course, is that we continue to discuss what to do with NASA without having the more fundamental discussion of what we’re trying to achieve. Everyone (including the scientists in Leonard’s article) simply assumes that they already know that, and are just trying to come up with a solution, when they’re not even asking the right questions.