With the (at least hoped for) imminent departure of Mike Griffin, there may be opportunities for more sensible approaches to carrying out plans to expand humanity into the solar system. One of the key elements will be propellant depots, and Jon Goff has some policy thoughts on how to (and how not to) make them happen. They echo some thoughts that I presented at Space Access on his panel on the subject in March, but he’s expanded on them quite a bit.
An Interesting Blogo Discussion
Jim Lindgren has a timeline. Lots of interesting discussion in comments, including this:
What’s missing from most of this analysis is the timing vis-a-vis the context.
The charges of selling the Senate seat, while spectacular, are just a small element of the overall corruption involved here. Going past the headlines, the other charges include some actually more serious corruption, in the usual pay-to-play manner that is so ordinary here in northeastern Illinois that locals hardly raise an eyebrow.
In fact, I am starting to think that Fitzgerald did indeed pull the trigger much earlier than planned or desired. The huge Federal cloud hanging over Blagojevich isn’t new, and it didn’t start on Election Day 2008.
Blagojevich is but one of the Machine’s operatives abroad working for the benefit of the Machine. The fact that he went wrong isn’t even exceptional; recall failed US Senator Carol Moseley Braun, who also was “sent”, in the Chicago Outfit sense, to Washington.
Blagojevich failed as a Machine person and has been an outcast among his peers for a considerable time now. The fact that the Tribune has been very loudly working against him, leading the way for a Constitutional amendment to permit recall, shows how far off the reservation he’s gone.
But the Trib’s opposition, worthy of the description “all-out attack”, is a clue all by itself.The Tribune is the organization that made it possible for the Machine to install Obama in the Senate and so on, by taking out his opponent back in 2000 with an Axelrod-style oppo campaign.
The tie here is the protection of Obama. Blagojevich was dangerously close to damaging Obama, and taking him out was high on several people’s lists.This is not to suggest that Fitzgerald would have helped in that regard, but the help he got from within the Machine certainly must have weighed in the decision to go forward with still so much investigating to be done, and so many more Machine people to indict. Arresting Blagojevich so soon must have pained Fitzgerald, but he did it anyway.
A year ago, Chicagoans widely believed that Fitzgerald would be sent packing in January, 2009 if any Democrat won the White House. This does not seem so obvious, now. Still, it is possible to argue that there was exigency in moving against Blagojevich with the possiblity that the Fitzgerald era in Chicago was drawing to a close.
Keep in mind, especially those who don’t follow the Machine so closely, that Fitzgerald has put some seriously heavy Machine people behind bars, and is getting close to even bigger targets. The desperation on the Fifth Floor (at City Hall) is palpable. Even Richard Daley himself has been interviewed.
But Blagojevich was doing far worse things than the charges presented here, and the Feds wanted a lot more than just this one guy and his chief of staff.
There is local speculation that Rezko suddenly decided not to talk to reduce his sentence, an event that coincided with the election of Obama, and that with Rezko going silent on the possiblity of either a pardon or to take one for the President. Some also believe that without the help of Rezko, Fitzgerald found a number of other avenues becoming less inviting and so, went with what he had.
Finally, it’s clear from the tapes that Blagojevich has gotten unstable, saying such things (which are not extraordinary around Chicago in the least) knowing full well the prosecutor’s office was draped all over him like a blanket. I believe Fitzgerald acted early in order to prevent even more eccentric behavior.
I urge anyone looking for background on this to look up columnist John Kass at chicagotribune.com, who not only accurately foresaw the events of yesterday, but many others as well.
You will learn that this is all a large picture of a large organization, and separating the three Daleys, Blagojevich, Obama, and the others just isn’t possible.
The thought that Blagojevich was too corrupt for the Chicago machine beggars the imagination, but anything is possible, I guess. Or perhaps he was just too erratic and unreliable.
That Which Is Not Seen
Jim Manzi points out an excellent example of my piece on how those claiming to want “change” cling so desperately to the status quo, at the expense of the economy and productivity:
The amount that would ultimately be loaned to the Big 3 is unclear, but most observers believe that when all is said and done, it will be much, much more than the $34 billion that the Big 3 have requested. Let’s assume $100 billion. As a pure thought exercise, how many jobs could we create with an extra $100 billion of venture capital? How much more sustainable would these be than jobs in companies that need to come to Washington to beg for capital?
We’re not supposed to ask those questions. These threats of financial armageddon if we don’t bail out the UAW are just scare tactics. It will be very bad in the short run for some locales (including my home town of Flint, and my family there), but the nation would survive, and if we can break out of this “too big to fail” mentality, much the better for it.
Farewell, BFF
Condolences to Paul and Diana Hsieh on the loss of their dog.
A Misdiagnosis
I’m not sure what to say about this, except that I think that lack of time doesn’t adequately explain his inability to find a real woman.
The NASAverse
Clark Lindsey has some thoughts on two parallel universes, in which one has orders of magnitude higher costs than the other. As he notes, I too hope that the new administration will reside in the one with the low costs, but if it does, it will be fought tooth and nail by legislators to whom jobs are more important than either taxpayers’ money or progress in space.
[Update a while later]
I see that, amusingly, Mark Whittington is foolishly attempting to lecture his intellectual betters on matters that he doesn’t understand:
If the sole purpose of Ares/Orion was just to get people into low Earth orbit, Clark would certainly have a valid point. But the purpose of Ares/Orion is to get people into Low Earth Orbit in a vehicle (Orion) designed to go to the Moon. Dragon doesn’t have to go to the Moon. (Of course, imagining a Dragon that could do that, with the extra radiation shielding, the extra consumables, and so on would be an interesting thought experiment. Could a Falcon 9 Heavy still loft such a vehicle?).
There is vastly insufficient difference between a vehicle that goes to the moon and one that goes to LEO to justify the cost difference between Orion and Dragon. A lunar mission requires a) additional radiation shielding, b) twice the thickness of the entry heat shield and c) extra consumables (two of which he points out). That doesn’t translate into orders of magnitude in cost difference by any sane cost model. As for “lofting” it, it doesn’t need to be lofted in a single flight. Once you break out of the notion that you have to do everything in a single launch, it becomes easy to build both a spacious crew capsule, and a service module with abundant consumables. But Elon’s BFR follow on would even be able to “loft” it in one go, and I’d be willing to bet that he could get there on a billion dollars or less, extrapolating costs from Falcon 1 and 9 development. Again, this could be done at much less cost (both development and operational) than is currently planned for the Orion/Ares combination. What part of already spent ten billion on Ares without its even having passed a legitimate PDR, while Elon has only spent a small fraction of a billion does Mark not understand?
This is pork, not progress.
[Late afternoon update]
Now Mark says I (in addition to fantasizing that I claimed to be his intellectual better) that breaking up CM and SM would require three launches “in a short time.” No. They would require two launches, one for each system element, and one or many launches for propellant, but none of which, other than the CM launch, would have to occur in “a short time.” Propellant could be stored on orbit for an indefinitely long time with proper depot design, and there is nothing intrinsically in an SM that couldn’t allow weeks or months of on-orbit LEO storage.
I don’t know where this myth comes from. People who want to justify tens of billions for a heavy lifter, I guess.
The Chicago Way
Well, I certainly missed a big news day by sitting in airplanes all day. I’m in LA, and I saw on the CNN monitor at DFW that the governor of Illinois (and one of the “guys in Obama’s neighborhood”) has been not just indicted, but hauled off to Club Fed. I think that there will be political repercussions…
[Late evening update]
Well, that was quick. Illinois resident David Burge has found the governor’s Ebay page. I particularly like the “slightly retarded” used Senator for sale.
He’s Going To Find It A Lot Harder Now
Prez-Elect Obama hasn’t been able to quit smoking.
I’m glad I never started.
Hornet Down?
I’m hearing that an FA-18 crashed into a neighborhood in San Diego, near Miramar (the former location of the Navy’s “Top Gun” school), with an ejected pilot. If so, that’s very unusual. Pilots usually do what they can to make sure that the plane doesn’t hurt anyone on the ground before ejecting (if they eject).
[Update a few minutes later]
For those without access to radio/television, here’s a live thread tracking it over at Free Republic. It doesn’t sound good–several houses are reported to be burning. Let’s hope that no one was home.
A Grim Anniversary
It’s been seventy-five years since Stalin deliberately starved the kulaks. As many (or more) died as in Hitler’s Holocaust, but it was all right, because his intentions were good, and you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
It’s also the anniversary of an early, and odious, failure of journalism on the part of the New York Times. It should be ashamed that it not only accepted the Pulitzer for Duranty’s fawning lies and propaganda, but kept it for so many years.
And Ilya Somin has some thoughts on the less-than-useful distinction between genocide and mass murder.