I’ve been at a celebration/workshop since Friday to commemorate the first flight of a radical new vehicle back in 1993 (which I attended at the time — it was just two or three months after I resigned from Rockwell International to try to be entrepreneurial).
Here’s an article about it by my (new) friend Megan Gannon at Space.com.
Asked by Jeff Greason why we as a society stopped pushing the technologies we needed to be pre-eminent in civil and military space, the former administrator blamed it on “My Generation,” the Baby Boomers. He prefaced the statement with the caveat that he had thought long and hard about it, and didn’t have a good answer, and that it was only his opinion, and that it might be wrong. Obviously many of us are exceptions (and he obviously thinks himself one) but that was the only answer that he could come up with.
In response to a question from Greg Sullivan, he noted that when we feel threatened (e.g., being attacked with IEDs) we throw the acquisition book out the window to solve the problem. Clearly, we don’t currently feel threatened enough to do that with space technology development and acquisition.
[Update a while later]
Jeff’s answer: We don’t want game-changing technologies, because they upset the Russians, and arms-control regimes. They don’t like game changers, because they like and are comfortable with the game. Reagan administration was rare exception. Not surprised that we do not attain that which we do not want.
In commercial market, the market will drive things. If Brilliant Pebbles had gone forward, we’d have much cheaper launch today. If there was a market, we’d have satisfied it by now. If assured market, he could go to the bank and get the money for reusable vehicle.
Demand is key. Airmail-like things would help (already starting this with COTS). Could buy payloads and capability, rather than resources. Isn’t as concerned about tech development for launch vehicles, except things that allow SSTO. But it’s important to learn how to integrate two-stage stage system, and that would be productive area.
…just made a dinner speech at #DC-X little of which I disagreed with.
…continuing denial, and maleducation, at The Nation.
He’s supposedly speaking at dinner tonight here in Alamagordo, so if you hear about an explosion in southern New Mexico bigger than Trinity, it was probably a total mass/energy conversion with me.
Colorized versions of historic black-and-white-photos.
…is Rearden metal:
Rand’s fictional progressives don’t want Reardon Metal to succeed any more than their modern, real-life equivalents want shale gas to succeed.
Why not? For the same rag-bag of made-up, disingenuous reasons which progressives have used to justify their war on progress since time immemorial: it’s unfair, it uses up scarce resources, it might be dangerous. Rand doesn’t actually use the phrase “the precautionary principle.” But this is exactly what she is describing in the book when various vested interests – the corporatists in bed with big government, the politicised junk-scientists at the Institute of Science (aka, in our world, the National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society), the unions – try to close down the nascent technology using the flimsiest of excuses.
It was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual.
Thoughts from George Schultz
…are worse than Nixon’s.
Yes. Much worse. And what’s even worse is that, unlike Nixon, the media support him in his lawless behavior.
Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt:
Few people have read The Black Book of Communism – which should be taught in our schools, in every grade, in grade-appropriate chunks – but our highs chools boast Howard Zin’s People’s History which is the Soviet view of America; Young Hegelians clubs and hipsters decked in Che Guevara.
The “Well educated” are in fact indoctrinated, taught communist propaganda and syllogisms until they’re UNABLE to think. We now have an administration composed of people like this, who are unable to connect to reality. They might be our first Marxist administration, but they suffer from third generation blight, not having come to their opinions from their own mind, but having been browbeaten into them. They are the good kids, trapped in an illusion from which they can’t break out.
But the d*mned ineradicable fact about communism and its cousin “state capitalism” and the hellish hybrid they’re trying out here is that it doesn’t work. IT NEVER WORKS. It doesn’t work even when instituted by very bright psychopaths. It works even less when instituted by people so indoctrinated they can’t SEE reality.
And it will crash here – hard or soft, with a bang or a whimper. It will crash and it might drag the rest of the world with us into the endless night.
Perhaps liberty will re-arise amidst the wreckage, but I hope we don’t have to get that far.