Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Joe Biden

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…and his terrible truths:

It takes years of yoga to learn the posture necessary for speaking clearly with all your feet in your mouth. But for some the skill comes naturally, which brings us to Joe Biden. Those who saw Dick Cheney as an evil genius crouched silent in the shadows of the Oval Office like Nosferatu must enjoy Biden’s high profile: he’s out there daily with the sunny enthusiasm of Ronald McDonald opening another store. And, quite often, telling everyone to have a Whopper.

It’s by Lileks, so you know you want to click to read the rest.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Uncle Walter, Space Cadet

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Someone asked me yesterday why I hadn’t posted anything on the death of Walter Cronkite. Well, I’m not as big a fan as many want me to be, and de mortuis nil nisi bonum, and all that. Yes, I grew up with him like everyone of my generation, but I never trusted him as much I was supposed to after Tet. There was nothing objective in his essential declaration of a lost war after a great American victory. When Johnson famously said “When we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve lost middle America,” he may have thought or meant that Uncle Walter was somehow a reflection of middle America, but to the degree that his statement was true, it confused cause and effect. If the administration had lost middle America it was because it was too susceptible to influence as a result of a reputation for objectivity that was perhaps overstated.

Middle America’s news sources were far too limited in those days. (It’s worth noting that people who listen to Rush Limbaugh have a lot more choice, at least in theory, than viewers of network news did in the sixties.) As Glenn says, all of the mourning in the media isn’t about the loss of some mythical era of press integrity and objectivity, but of lost power to propagandize the American people with the loss of a single voice to which much of America turned to for their news. I have no nostalgia for a return to those times.

But that having been said, there is no question that he was the biggest supporter of the space program in the media, and he was, for most Americans of the time, the voice of Apollo. There was a sincere, boyish quality to his enthusiam in his reporting. I was listening to some video this morning on a CBS tribute, and he was describing the launch of the first surface mission as special because it was the one that would actually send men to the moon. And then he mused (paraphrasing, not transcript handy), “…send a man to the moon. What words. Golly, just think about it.” And on the landing, “Oh, boy.”

“Golly.” It’s hard to imagine any current news reader saying “golly,” and that kind of little touch is what resulted in the myth that he was an everyman, though he clearly thought like a Washington elite, as his later statements (the most recent of which was when he declared Iraq, like Vietnam, a lost cause) displayed for anyone who chose to notice. Thankfully, his influence had waned considerably in the intervening decades.

He was purely of the Apollo era, and a part of it impossible to separate. His last day on the air, in early March, 1981, was a little over a month before the first Shuttle flight on April 12th, so there was no overlap with the more modern human spaceflight program that followed the first push. And in some ways, in relating and relaying his own enthusiasm for the program to America, he helped create the enduring myth of Apollo as the beginning of a grand age of space exploration, when it in fact was a dead end that few realized at the time. It’s a false perception that continues to haunt our space policy to this day.

Space

More Space Access Stuff

I didn’t have time to post yesterday afternoon (among other things, I was on the propellant depot panel), but Clark Lindsey has a good roundup, including that discussion. No permalink (yet, though I’m sure he’ll compile a page for conference links when it’s all over), so just keep scrolling for now. He also has a post of other conference links.

Space

Commercial Space At Ames

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Dan Rasky, head of commercial space portal at Ames, thinks that with the new administration and administrator, commercial space will get much more support within the agency.

Bolden goals:

Build on ISS investment
Accelerate development of next-generation launch systems
Enhance ability to study earth environment
Lead space sciency to new achievements
Continue cutting-edge tech development
Support innovation of entrepreneurs
Inspire the kids

Rasky got together with Bruce Pittman and Yvonne Cagle and others to form Ames space portal. Hosted a workshop in June 2005 (with endorsement of Mike Griffin, before he went over to the Dark Side). Been supporting conferences and workshops, working with many NewSpace companies. Worked with Steidle to start COTS program (along with Neil Woodward, Steve Isakowitz, Brant Sponberg, Ken Dividian). Eventually moved to JSC with Lindenmoyer and Dennis Stone, and it has been running very well for a NASA commercial-related program. Other new initiatives at other centers: Langley, JSC, etc. that will be revealed in near future.

Started working with SpaceX about three years ago, to provide support with thermal protection technologies (one of the areas not available commercially). Also working with life support. Particularly focused on Dragon, thinking that summer 2010 is a realistic first launch (about a year from now). Meets NASA crew-rated safety margins and failure tolerances. Noting that Elon has had to pull a lot of components in house because he couldn’t find suppliers that would meet schedule or cost. Using NASA-developed PICA for Dragon thermal protection. Only supplier is Fiber-Materials Incorporated, but couldn’t get price or schedule he wanted, so SpaceX is now building in house. SpaceX materials tested at Ames, and passed in December. Very fun to work in such an entrepreneurial environment. Describing a meeting where Elon asked his opinion, and he expressed one, and Elon said, “OK, that’s how we’ll do it.” Elon isn’t building rockets to maximize profits, he’s doing it because he wants to get into space, and that’s a game changer.

John Hogan talking about advanced life support systems. Earth only life support system that can sustain human life indefinitely. Goal is to take a small part of earth (and systems that earth does, can’t live on power bars forever) into space. Earth provides ecosystem services, things that life does to maintain life — air and water purification, radiation protection, waste and pest control, etc. Small spacesuit like a backpacking trip (can’t provide gravity, but all right for short duration). Trying to evolve lighter smaller more energy-efficient suits. ISS provides much more life-support capability than a suit, but requires resupply. Just starting to learn to recover water, moving from perspiration and hygiene water to urine recovery. Still scrubbing and ejecting CO2, but working on systems to transform back to oxygen. Going to moon will stress technology more due to higher resupply costs yet. Will be treating waste, completely recycling water and recovering oxygen from CO2. Mars will require long-term systems, and long-term effects of waste recycling. Holy Grail is completely closed system for sustainability, which may have applications back on earth.

Want to continue to work with commercial partners for this kind of research and tech development, via SBIRs and STTRs.

Yvonne Cagle up now (astronaut, though she hasn’t flown, and retired flight surgeon from the Air Force) to talk about suborbital science program. This is new for NASA. They’re going to purchase rides on commercial vehicles to to research. Presents the greatest opportunity for weightless research (short of expensive orbital) in history. New opportunity for four-minute durations, for training crews, testing, and advancing TRLs in ways never possible before.

Not just about milestone and tech development. Also about work force development. Good opportunity to allow us to maintain research and astronaut proficiency when Shuttle is retired. Also supports public education and outreach with opportunities for hands-on research, both remotely and human-in-the-loop. Want to see human operators on the payloads once safety performance is established (2012 on). Want to see students not just fly research but fly with the research.

Big difference between 23 seconds and four minutes? You can save a life. Can takes four minutes to resuscitate cardiac arrest using compression, but never had enough time to learn how to do it properly (for zero-gee medicine) in subsonic parabolas. Good environment to learn how to restrain patient and equipment in medical emergency, and four minutes a lot more time to practice and train than twenty-three seconds.

Have had two workshops to figure out what you can do with four minutes. Puts up chart of twenty or so previous research areas that can be significantly improved by longer duration. Within two minutes you can actually see things that you don’t see in half a minute (e.g., observing how lunar dust moves through bronchial tubes). Showing chart of flight profile — “hybrid of sounding rocket and parabolic aircraft.” Dirty on both ends, but very good microgravity for at least two minutes. If organized, could refly the same day. Want to explore the “Ignorasphere” where air is too thin to fly but too thick to orbit. Shuttle passes through, but disturbs too much. These vehicles will be able to do sampling and monitoring not previously possible, and also pick up information on entry transition zones that Shuttle crew is too busy to study. Looking for five to ten times more experience in microgravity than we’ve had to date. Scientific community very excited about it. Suborbital transports combine best of both worlds between parabolic aircraft and sounding rockets. Much cheaper than latter, can fly with experiments, rapid turnaround, relatively low entry and exit gees. Has developed equation:

C3 – Commercial, Cost, Customizable
Times Delta Volume (lot more

U3 — User, Unprecedented, Uninterrupted

FO (U3FO) — Frequency, Opportunistic

Equals WE (Workforce development, Education)

C3 * Delta V * UFO = WE

Sees huge opportunities for technology development, career development, and public engagement.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

The Binary Viewpoint

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Charles Krauthammer is generally a pretty smart guy, particularly on politics, but when it comes to space policy, he (like many) check their brains at the door and rely on emotion:

America’s manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the U.S. will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We’ll be totally grounded. We’ll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.

So what, you say? Don’t we have problems here on Earth? Oh please. Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us. If we’d waited for them to be rectified before venturing out, we’d still be living in caves.

Yes, we have a financial crisis. No one’s asking for a crash Manhattan Project. All we need is sufficient funding from the hundreds of billions being showered from Washington — “stimulus” monies that, unlike Eisenhower’s interstate highway system or Kennedy’s Apollo program, will leave behind not a trace on our country or our consciousness — to build Constellation and get us back to Earth orbit and the moon a half-century after the original landing.

Note the implicit unstated assumption (which occurs often in space policy discussion): there is nothing wrong with NASA that a sufficient and steady budget won’t cure, and that if only we would give it to them, and leave them alone, they’d be leading us into the solar system. That anyone who thinks Constellation in its currrent form an unwise expenditure is opposed not for sound technical or economic reasons, but because we oppose expanding humanity into space. That Constellation, if not perfect, is more than good enough, and we must redo Apollo and go on from there.

Despite the fact that he’s a former clinical psychiatrist, the possibility that it is a dysfunctional sclerotic bureaucracy, and that giving it the money that it requests to do what it wants to do might not only be a waste, but actually set us back in the goal that he seems so earnestly to aver, never occurs to him. That there might be better ways to achieve his goal is seemingly beyond his ken.

Space, Space History

At The Conference

I’ve got connectivity now (the wireless here isn’t public, so I had to finagle an account at Ames). Jim Muncy led off the morning session. Clark Lindsey has a report. The morning session focuses on what’s happening at NASA Ames, which is hosting the conference. I should point out that it’s kind of amazing that a NASA Center is hosting a Space Frontier Foundation conference, but it any center would do it, it would be this one. As Muncy said this morning, he doesn’t expect an invitation from Marshall any time soon.

Political Commentary, Space

Another Minor Ares Issue

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The Air Force thinks that it is guaranteed to kill crew in an early abort.

One of the criteria for “human rating” (I sure wish that we could purge the language of that phrase) is that the vehicle have zero-zero (from zero altitude, zero velocity all the way to orbit) abort capability. The lack of this is why the Shuttle was never human rated, because it cannot abort for the first two minutes, until after the SRBs have burned out and separated. You might think that someone would have thought about this long-known fact and said “hmmmmmmm…” when one of the things was chosen as a first stage for a vehicle that was supposed to be human rated. You might think that, if NASA and particularly Marshall weren’t involved, in which case, it wouldn’t surprise you at all that no one did, or if they did, they weren’t listened to.

I’m sure that the usual defenders will have their usual defense: “Every rocket has development issues — stop picking on poor Ares.” Well, this is a simple issue to fix, fortunately. All they have to do is replace the propellant in the first stage with something non-explosive.

Administrative, Space

In CA

I had an uneventful flight to SFO this morning, and drove over to Half Moon Bay to see the Pacific before heading to my motel in Mountain View for the conference, which starts tonight. The room was supposed to have Internet, but it’s only available in the lobby. I’m unhappy, but I’ll probably be spending most of the next three days over at the conference, so I’ll just deal, I guess.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!