This opinion piece by Republican Doug McKinnon has every false trope and misplaced assumption in the debate on display. As is often the case with opinion pieces, opinions are put forth with the certainty that should be reserved for actual, you know…facts. It starts off wrong in the very opening sentence:

Because of the 2008 presidential election, our nation’s human spaceflight program is at a perilous crossroad.

The implicit assumption here is that our nation’s “human spaceflight program” would be just fine if we weren’t having a presidential election, but anyone who has been following it closely knows that it has many deep and fundamental problems that are entirely independent of who the next president will be, or even the fact that we will have a new president. NASA has bitten off an architecture that will not be financially sustainable, and may not even be developable, and for which it doesn’t have sufficient budget. That would be true if the president suspended elections this year (as some moonbats still probably expect him to do).

Beyond that, by framing it this way, there is an implicit assumption that “our nation’s human spaceflight program” is identically equal not only to NASA’s plans for human spaceflight in general, but for the specific disastrous course that they’ve chosen. This false consciousness comes through clearly in the very next sentence:

While Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain all have made allusions to supporting the program, none has made it a priority.

Emphasis mine. I don’t expect any better from Democrats–they are, after all, the party of big government, but just once in a while, I wish that I could hear something from a Republican (other than Newt Gingrich) on this subject that isn’t brain dead.

Just once, I’d like to hear a Republican talk not about “the program,” but rather, about the nation’s human spaceflight industry, and how we implement new policies to make this nation into a true spacefaring one. The latter doesn’t mean building large rockets to send a couple crew of civil servants up a couple times a year, at horrific cost per mission. It means creating the means by which large numbers of people can visit space, and go to the moon, and beyond, with their own funds for their own purposes. It means building an in-space infrastructure that allows us to affordably work in, and inhabit, cis-lunar space. It should be (as it should have been when the president first announced the new policy a little over four years ago) about how America goes into space, not about how NASA goes into space. But Mr. McKinnon is clearly stuck in a sixties mind set, as evidenced by the next graf, admonishing Senator Obama’s apparent (at least to him, if not the rest of us) short sightedness.

Perhaps now would be a good time to remind Sen. Obama of the sage and relevant words spoken by a president with whom he has been compared on occasion. On Sept. 12, 1962, at Rice University, President John F. Kennedy addressed the importance of the United States having a vibrant and preeminent space program. “We mean to be part of it we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond. Our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to become the world’s leading spacefaring nation.”

Hey, I’m all in favor of us becoming (or remaining) the world’s leading spacefaring nation. But I don’t think that the word “spacefaring” means what he thinks it means. Clearly, he is stuck in the Apollo era (hardly surprising, when the NASA administrator himself describes his plans as “Apollo on steroids”). His myopia and Apollo nostagia is further displayed in the next paragraph.

No matter who is our next president, he or she is either going to have to buy in completely to the premise of that young president, or stand aside and watch as other nations lay claim to the promise of space. There is no middle ground. John F. Kennedy understood it then, and the People’s Republic of China, with its ambitious manned space program run by its military, understands it now. Preeminence in space translates to economic, scientific, educational and national security advantages.

Sigh…

“There is no middle ground.” What a perfect encapsulation of the sterile nature of space policy debate. Ignoring that sentence, and the nonsensical unsupported characterization of the Chinese “program” (there’s that word again) as “ambitious,” one can agree with every word in this paragraph and still think that the current plans are not going to result in, or maintain, “preeminence in space.” And particularly, the notion that ESAS/Constellation provides anything with regard to national security advantages is ludicrous. This is one of the two key areas on which it has been most harshly and appropriately criticized as completely ignoring the Aldridge Commission report.

Sorry, I don’t accept that “there is no middle ground.” There are many potential policy initiatives that could be implemented that would be vastly more effective in giving us “preeminence in space,” than the current one. It’s not ESAS or nothing, despite the next paragraph. This is called the fallacy of the excluded middle. This is stealing a rhetorical base.

And what to make of this next?

With regard to the space shuttle, the International Space Station, Orion and Ares, the new president must make three words part of his or her space policy: “Stay the course.” On Jan. 14, 2004, President George W. Bush announced a “new plan to explore space and extend a human presence across our solar system.” With Orion and Ares as the centerpiece of this new direction, it is essential that that there be no delays caused by partisan politics.

What does this even mean? Is Mr. McKinnon unaware that the Shuttle is due to be retired in two years? Does he know that there are no plans for ISS beyond a decade from now? What “course” is he proposing that we “stay”?

And again with the false assertion that only Ares and Orion can allow us to “explore space and extend a human presence across our solar system.” Not only is this not true, but there are many much better ways to do so, most of which were extensively analyzed by some of the best people in the space industry, but which were completely ignored when the new administrator came in to implement his own pet ideas. Those ideas remain out there, and will probably be reexamined under a new administration and a new administrator.

I do agree with this next statement, as far as it goes:

If a Democrat is our next president, he or she cannot look at the Orion and Ares programs as a “Bush” or “Republican” initiative to be scrapped.

Though not being a great fan of George Bush, I agree that to scrap a program simply because it is his would be stupid and partisan (not that this would keep it from happening, of course). But there are so many other, better reasons to scrap these plans, that the point is probably moot.

Should the next president decide to delay or cancel our next generation spacecraft and rockets for partisan reasons, he or she will be condemning the United States to second-class status in space for decades to come.

To this, I can only say “horse manure.”

Delays or cancellations will cause a massive loss of capability as the work force with the knowledge and expertise to take us back to the moon and beyond will retire or move on to other careers.

Again, he seems to ignore the fact that delays (and potential cancellation) are already cooked into the dough of “the program.” They will happen completely independently of who the next president is, because “the program” is fundamentally flawed.

And as for worrying about “the work force with the knowledge and expertise to take us back to the moon and beyond” retiring, this is sadly hilarious. That horse left the barn many years ago. There is almost no one remaining in industry who knows how to get us to the moon, let alone “beyond.” Everyone who was involved with Apollo (the last flight of which occurred over thirty-five years ago) is dead, or retired. This is, in fact, one of the reasons that the program is floundering. Rather than sit down and take a fresh, twenty-first century approach to space exploration, and (much more importantly) space utilization, the kids who grew up with Apollo are simply trying to replicate what the Great Space Fathers did. They imagine that by building their own big, new rockets, they can somehow recreate the glory of their childhood. But they weren’t involved–they were just observers. I’ve likened this attitude of redoing Apollo to cargo cult engineering. I think that remains a pretty accurate assessment.

The United States has committed itself to this new direction. The next president must ratify such a commitment.

Again, this false equating of ESAS with “this new direction,” is nonsensical. And we aren’t even committed as a nation to the Vision for Space Exploration itself. It would certainly be nice to see the next president continue the support of sending humans beyond earth orbit, but it would also be even nicer to see him (or, in the unlikely event, her) reexamine the specific implementation of such a plan, and to expand it far beyond NASA budgets, to encompass federal space policy in general, including military and commercial aspects, as the Aldridge Commission urged, and which NASA has utterly ignored, with the Bush administration’s apparent acquiescence.

The piece cluelessly ends up with one more attempt at scaremongering the rubes who are not familiar with the nature of the Chinese space program:

Should our space program flounder, Chinese astronauts will establish the first bases on the moon, and the American people will be the poorer for our lack of leadership.

Even accepting the nonsense that the Chinese are going to establish bases on the moon at all, let alone the first ones, there is no support at all for why this will make the American people poorer. It’s easily seen how it makes the Chinese people poorer, given that the Chinese, to the degree that they plan to go to the moon at all, are using a ridiculously high cost and very slow approach, but since NASA’s approach is similar, it seems that continuing on this flawed path is what will make the American people poorer. And keep them earthbound.

As I said, this is a perfect example of the false assumptions and false choices that permeate what accounts for the moribund state of the space policy debate in this country. Until we start to discuss space intelligently (including a bedrock discussion of the actual goals, which should not be to do Apollo again), it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get sensible federal policy.

[Update a few minutes later]

Shorter Doug McKinnon: The president’s space policy is not only wonderful, but it is our only chance to lead in space, and anyone who opposes it, for any reason, partisan or otherwise, is dooming Americans to toil in the Chinese rice paddies. So get with the program.

Is that succinct enough? It doesn’t matter that it’s complete nonsense. And completely unsupported by anything resembling actual policy analysis, and displays no evidence that he even understands the policy. Doug wrote it, and he’s a Republican, so it must be so.

While I don’t agree with their posts necessarily, (and the chances that I will be voting for a Democrat for president, regardless of what lies they tell me about their space policy, are nil), at least Bill White and Ferris Valyn have applied a little thought to the situation, unlike Doug. But then, they have the advantage of actually being interested in seeing us become a spacefaring nation. It’s not at all clear what Doug’s motivations are. Perhaps (as noted in comments) his being an aerospace industry lobbyist has something to do with it. I wouldn’t normally indulge in such an ad hominem attack, but I can’t find anything else in the piece that might explain his strange positions. That one makes the most sense, by Occam’s Razor.

[Late evening update]

Mark Whittington (who loves the piece–more solid evidence, if not courtroom proof, of its cluelessness) once again demonstrates his inability to comprehend simple written English:

Apparently there isn’t a single syllable of MacKinnon’s piece that doesn’t make Rand Simberg spitting mad.

In other words, in his hilariously stupid hyperbole, he didn’t understand the meaning of this sentence, from above:

Though not being a great fan of George Bush, I agree that to scrap a program simply because it is his would be stupid and partisan (not that this would keep it from happening, of course).

While most of my readers don’t need the clue, Mark clearly does. That’s what’s called “agreeing with a part of the piece.” Which means that there were at least a few syllables that didn’t make me “spitting mad” (not to imply, of course, that there were any syllables that made me that way, let alone every one).

And of course, as also usual, he can’t spell, being unable to distinguish “complimentary” from “complementary.” Not to mention “unweildy.” But I guess he doesn’t mind beclowning himself, as usual. Mark, get Firefox. It has spell check built in. It won’t help with the homophones, but it would have caught the other one.

And that’s the Mark that we all know and (OK, not so much…) love.