Political Commentary

Radical Thoughts

Arnold Kling writes about a movie too subversive to be shown in the public schools:

As a Jew, I am certain that I missed a number of the religious aspects of the movie. There were subtle references to Christian doctrine that went right past me. Perhaps there are Christians who would be more aware of the context and, based on their knowledge, might even take offense at the film’s stance. I imagine that passionate atheists would tend to be turned off. But I think that a typical high school student could be exposed to the religion in “Call of the Entrepreneur” without being permanently scarred or corrupted.

I would argue that “Call of the Entrepreneur” and “An Inconvenient Truth” are both religious films. However, unlike Al Gore’s movie about global warming, “Call of the Entrepreneur” steers clear of sensationalism, dogma, and misleading half-truths. It is ironic that public teachers and parents are happy to see “An Inconvenient Truth” in the classroom, but “Call of the Entrepreneur” would probably be greeted with protests if it were shown.

Yes, times have indeed changed. And not in all ways for the better.

Space

A Chance To Fix ITAR?

At the NewSpace 2007 luncheon on Thursday, the speaker was Ed Morris, the head of the Office of Commercial Space at the Department of Commerce. In response to a question from Dave Huntsman, he indicated that there might be a possibility of alleviating the situation. Jeff Foust reported on it at the time, and Dave has an interesting comment there, with which I agree. I also agree that while new legislation would help, it’s not necessary to fix some of the things, despite what Morris said.

As I noted on a panel at the Space Access Conference in March, I would like to see the burden of proof shifted for whether or not an item should be on the munitions list. The current standard is guilty until proven innocent. I think that it should be the other way around. And it is encouraging to see some recognition at the Pentagon that the cure is worse than the disease. It has alway been a much more realistic position to “mend it, not end it,” than to simply demand that there be no export controls, and the argument that, in its current implementation, it’s actually damaging our security will be a useful one with its most staunch defenders, such as Duncan Hunter.

Popular Culture

Don’t Take It Seriously

[Note: I originally wrote this back on March 7th, but in going through old posts, I noticed that I never published it. The movie has been out a sufficient amount of time now that there are no spoilers…]

OK, so we went and saw the Astronaut Farmer this past weekend (I should add, parenthetically, that it’s the second movie I’ve seen in a theatre since I moved down here, two and a half years ago.

Forget about “suspension of disbelief.” Think complete abandonment of disbelief. On rocketry, on combustion, on radio communications, on basic physics, on how the government works, on how people work, on…almost anything correlating to reality that you want to imagine.

But I’m not panning the movie. As long as you follow my advice, and empty your head of the notion that this is a movie about how a private citizen might actually get into space, it’s an enjoyable flick, and entertaining for the whole family (well, other than a couple naughty words).

Yes, I could spend the evening disquisiting on all the things they got wrong in the flick–the notion that one could launch from a barn without it being a smoldering crater afterward; the notion that a rocket could propel itself a few feet off the ground horizontally for miles, with gravity having no effect; the notion that a Mercury capsule could survive the end of that trip, after being launched off a cliff and roll amidst the desert scrub, intact with its occupant alive; the notion that the government would assemble a team from every conceivable (and several unconceivable) government entities in a high-school gym to determine whether or not he could fly; the notion that a man and his fifteen-year-old son could single (OK, dual) handedly assemble an Atlas-Mercury from antique spare parts scrounged from NASA junkyards and have it work, and not only work, but magically have it land where it took off (even though the original landed in the ocean, and not the desert southwest) after a power failure that was fixed (as all things are fixed in movies, by banging on the equipment with a closed fist). Forget all that.

With a little consulting from people who actually understand this stuff, it could have been made a little more realistic, but realism didn’t seen ti be the film makers’ goal–magic was. It’s a movie about dreams, and governments, and the intrinsic conflict between the two. Forget the physics and politics, and focus on the metaphor.

In fact, the movie hit very close to home for me, because I and my family have sacrificed a great deal for a similar dream for many years, with success still eluding us (though perhaps that situation is improving). But nowhere to the same extent as Charles Farmer, and I’d like to think that (despite his movie success) I understand a little more about how politics, business and even rockets work than he seemed to.

In a sense, the way that the development of space will eventually play out is somewhere in between the two cartoonish extremes depicted in the movie. It won’t be done by a big-govenment program, and it won’t be done by a determined man in his garage. It will be done by private entities that are already formed and forming, that will take the smart things that NASA has learned over the years (like range safety, and not launching your rocket next to the house), and try to shed a lot of the unproductive ones that are driven by pork-driven politics and institutional inertia. The minimal hope for from government, for both terrestrial and extraterrestrial endeavors, is to facilitate their dreams, rather than hinder them.

Popular Culture

Don’t Take It Seriously

[Note: I originally wrote this back on March 7th, but in going through old posts, I noticed that I never published it. The movie has been out a sufficient amount of time now that there are no spoilers…]

OK, so we went and saw the Astronaut Farmer this past weekend (I should add, parenthetically, that it’s the second movie I’ve seen in a theatre since I moved down here, two and a half years ago.

Forget about “suspension of disbelief.” Think complete abandonment of disbelief. On rocketry, on combustion, on radio communications, on basic physics, on how the government works, on how people work, on…almost anything correlating to reality that you want to imagine.

But I’m not panning the movie. As long as you follow my advice, and empty your head of the notion that this is a movie about how a private citizen might actually get into space, it’s an enjoyable flick, and entertaining for the whole family (well, other than a couple naughty words).

Yes, I could spend the evening disquisiting on all the things they got wrong in the flick–the notion that one could launch from a barn without it being a smoldering crater afterward; the notion that a rocket could propel itself a few feet off the ground horizontally for miles, with gravity having no effect; the notion that a Mercury capsule could survive the end of that trip, after being launched off a cliff and roll amidst the desert scrub, intact with its occupant alive; the notion that the government would assemble a team from every conceivable (and several unconceivable) government entities in a high-school gym to determine whether or not he could fly; the notion that a man and his fifteen-year-old son could single (OK, dual) handedly assemble an Atlas-Mercury from antique spare parts scrounged from NASA junkyards and have it work, and not only work, but magically have it land where it took off (even though the original landed in the ocean, and not the desert southwest) after a power failure that was fixed (as all things are fixed in movies, by banging on the equipment with a closed fist). Forget all that.

With a little consulting from people who actually understand this stuff, it could have been made a little more realistic, but realism didn’t seen ti be the film makers’ goal–magic was. It’s a movie about dreams, and governments, and the intrinsic conflict between the two. Forget the physics and politics, and focus on the metaphor.

In fact, the movie hit very close to home for me, because I and my family have sacrificed a great deal for a similar dream for many years, with success still eluding us (though perhaps that situation is improving). But nowhere to the same extent as Charles Farmer, and I’d like to think that (despite his movie success) I understand a little more about how politics, business and even rockets work than he seemed to.

In a sense, the way that the development of space will eventually play out is somewhere in between the two cartoonish extremes depicted in the movie. It won’t be done by a big-govenment program, and it won’t be done by a determined man in his garage. It will be done by private entities that are already formed and forming, that will take the smart things that NASA has learned over the years (like range safety, and not launching your rocket next to the house), and try to shed a lot of the unproductive ones that are driven by pork-driven politics and institutional inertia. The minimal hope for from government, for both terrestrial and extraterrestrial endeavors, is to facilitate their dreams, rather than hinder them.

Popular Culture

Don’t Take It Seriously

[Note: I originally wrote this back on March 7th, but in going through old posts, I noticed that I never published it. The movie has been out a sufficient amount of time now that there are no spoilers…]

OK, so we went and saw the Astronaut Farmer this past weekend (I should add, parenthetically, that it’s the second movie I’ve seen in a theatre since I moved down here, two and a half years ago.

Forget about “suspension of disbelief.” Think complete abandonment of disbelief. On rocketry, on combustion, on radio communications, on basic physics, on how the government works, on how people work, on…almost anything correlating to reality that you want to imagine.

But I’m not panning the movie. As long as you follow my advice, and empty your head of the notion that this is a movie about how a private citizen might actually get into space, it’s an enjoyable flick, and entertaining for the whole family (well, other than a couple naughty words).

Yes, I could spend the evening disquisiting on all the things they got wrong in the flick–the notion that one could launch from a barn without it being a smoldering crater afterward; the notion that a rocket could propel itself a few feet off the ground horizontally for miles, with gravity having no effect; the notion that a Mercury capsule could survive the end of that trip, after being launched off a cliff and roll amidst the desert scrub, intact with its occupant alive; the notion that the government would assemble a team from every conceivable (and several unconceivable) government entities in a high-school gym to determine whether or not he could fly; the notion that a man and his fifteen-year-old son could single (OK, dual) handedly assemble an Atlas-Mercury from antique spare parts scrounged from NASA junkyards and have it work, and not only work, but magically have it land where it took off (even though the original landed in the ocean, and not the desert southwest) after a power failure that was fixed (as all things are fixed in movies, by banging on the equipment with a closed fist). Forget all that.

With a little consulting from people who actually understand this stuff, it could have been made a little more realistic, but realism didn’t seen ti be the film makers’ goal–magic was. It’s a movie about dreams, and governments, and the intrinsic conflict between the two. Forget the physics and politics, and focus on the metaphor.

In fact, the movie hit very close to home for me, because I and my family have sacrificed a great deal for a similar dream for many years, with success still eluding us (though perhaps that situation is improving). But nowhere to the same extent as Charles Farmer, and I’d like to think that (despite his movie success) I understand a little more about how politics, business and even rockets work than he seemed to.

In a sense, the way that the development of space will eventually play out is somewhere in between the two cartoonish extremes depicted in the movie. It won’t be done by a big-govenment program, and it won’t be done by a determined man in his garage. It will be done by private entities that are already formed and forming, that will take the smart things that NASA has learned over the years (like range safety, and not launching your rocket next to the house), and try to shed a lot of the unproductive ones that are driven by pork-driven politics and institutional inertia. The minimal hope for from government, for both terrestrial and extraterrestrial endeavors, is to facilitate their dreams, rather than hinder them.

Political Commentary

Kinky

And pure gold (errr…golden).

I was just listening to Fox News Sunday, and Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) (in keeping with the grand press tradition, his party affiliation, as a Republican, must be identified–only Democrats are exempt and partyless in situations like this) just pronounced Peshawar as “Pee Shower.” Evan Bayh and Chris Wallace are smiling, but obviously say nothing.

Space

Northrop Grumman Buys Scaled

I was going to post some thoughts on the acquisition (which was really just an increase in equity from a minority to a hundred percent), but before I had an opportunity to do so, Jon Goff must have channeled me. A “skunkworks for NG” was exactly what I thought when I heard the news.

There will probably be more tomorrow. Dennis Poulos was the only NG person at the conference, and he was only there on Thursday (and he’s probably not a spokesman for the company on the issue). Alex Tai had little to say about it (with regard to implications for SpaceShipTwo) yesterday, other than that he thought it was a good (even great) thing, and that it was “Northrop’s story, not his,” to tell.

But I think that this points out that the nature of this business is much more complex than many would like to make it, and it’s not simply the “Big Bad, Small Good” template that many like to think, and that the line between New Space and Old Space has never been as sharp as many thought, and it’s becoming progressively blurrier. As Jon says, the Boeings and Northrop Grummans, and Lockheed Martins are recognizing that the new century brings new business realities, and it’s particularly worth considering, in light of the Apollo anniversary last week, that the old space age is over, and the new effectively begun, despite Mike Griffin’s attempt to resurrect Apollo, which seems likely to fail.

I have always swum in both seas, and have often had former colleagues at Boeing (now fairly high in management) tell me that they’re interested in this new business, but it’s not obvious how to break in, other than watch, and observe, and when something succeeds, to acquire it. And of course, they didn’t need to tell me that, because it’s obvious, from a business sense. They’re simply too risk averse, by the nature of their being large publicly-held corporations, and their existing business relationships, to do things like this from scratch on their own, and that’s not a criticism, just a statement of fact. They have to be so, because they have a fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders, many of whom are pensioners, to not take big gambles with the company’s money, on new but uncertain markets and business lines.

The fact that such acquisitions are now occurring is to me a sign of the transition of the old age to the new. When we really know that it’s real will be when one of them buys one of the new companies, born in this age, such as XCOR.

[Update a while later]

I should make one other point. This acquisition really has very little to do with space. SpaceShipTwo may be one of Scaled’s most well-known current projects, but they’re first and foremost an aircraft company, and that’s the bulk of their activities. I think that NG saw this as an aviation, or aerospace acquisition. To the degree that it helped them on the space side at all, that would just be gravy.

Media Criticism

Out Of The Closet

Penelope Trunk is right, (though I’m not sure that she understands all the implications of her position):

Here’s my advice: If you do an interview with a journalist, don’t expect the journalist to be there to tell your story. The journalist gets paid to tell her own stories which you might or might not be a part of. And journalists, don’t be so arrogant to think you are not “one of those” who misquotes everyone. Because that is to say that your story is the right story. But it’s not. We each have a story. And whether or not someone actually said what you said they said, they will probably still feel misquoted.

In other words, “objective journalism” is a myth (something I’ve been pointing out for a long time):

The first [delusion] is common to journalism school graduates (or even dropouts), because it’s part of the modern creed–that there is some achievable perfection called “objective factual reporting.”

The second, which is not only a delusion, but a conceit, is that his employer’s paper not only attempts to achieve that platonic ideal, but actually succeeds.

Here’s a reality check. Stories are (at least for now) reported by humans, with human emotions, and human points of view. They are inevitably viewed through the prism of the reporter, and as they become ink and pixels, are passed through the sieve of his experience and prejudices. About any event, there is an infinitude of information that could be provided, but there isn’t ink and newsprint enough, nor bandwidth, nor time in the day for the reporter to write it, and the reader to read it.

So a story has to be reduced to what the reporter considers to be its essential elements. Like the old joke about the sculptor, he takes the body of available facts, and cuts away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. But that’s the key; the sculptor is carving an elephant–a decision usually made before chisel is taken in hand. It may be that the rock from which he’s knocking off the non-pachydermic chips wasn’t simply a rectangular block–it perhaps naturally started out with a resemblance to an elephant, but that doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have hacked out a hippo instead.

So it is with a news story. The reporter has to start with some notion of what the story is. And as soon as that decision is made, the bias has begun, and continues. He has to decide which facts are facts, and which are conjecture. He has to decide which of those facts and conjectures should be included, and which left out. He has to decide which words to use–whether the protagonist is, for example, a “terrorist” or a “freedom fighter.” Each of those decisions, word by word, preconception by preconception, eventually determines whether the reporter creates an elephant, or a hippo, or a redwood tree.

And after that, if he works for a “serious newspaper,” he has to submit it to an editor, who will either agree that the reporter has created an elephant, or he might point out that he left out some critical item (e.g., a trunk) or included one that seems out of place (e.g., webbed bird claws for feet).

Once past this serious process, the story is complete. And in the mind of Mr. Rutten, “accurate the first time,” though a different reporter at a different “serious newspaper,” working with exactly the same body of facts (but a different background, sensibility, and bias) might write, and his editor edit, a completely different “accurate” story in which, lo and behold, it turns that it was a hippo after all, or perhaps…a platypus.

As I’ve also noted many times, what rankles so much about media bias is not so much the bias itself, but the media’s willful blindness to it, and sanctimonious attitude.

And I don’t agree with her that “it doesn’t matter,” and that when literally misquoted, or quoted out of context, we should simply “get over it.” She’s right that we shouldn’t expect any better, but we should still point it out when it happens, early and often, and that’s what the blogosphere, and free speech in general, is all about. Paid reporters have no special First Amendment privileges. Continually pointing out their falsities and frailties, and agendas, is the only way for everyone to get the full story.

Space

Kudos

Wireless is still problematic, but I want to at least mention that at lunch today, Jim Muncy gave (a very surprised) Clark Lindsey a well-deserved award for his years of devotion to Hobbyspace web site, and his seemingly tireless efforts to broadening the appeal of space to many people on a number of fronts.

I’ll be leaving for the airport in a couple hours, and socializing before then, so probably no more posting until tomorrow.

Space

Commercial Support Of VSE

Neil Woodward of ESMD is chairing a panel on how commercial activities can fit into the Vision.

Dallas Bienhoff of Boeing gave a short presentation on the value of having propellant depots in cis-lunar space (he calls them “gasteroids” to the collective groan of the audience). They have the capability of increasing landed mass on the moon from 18 to 51 tons of cargo. They provide a market for commercial providers (300 tons of propellant per year). They also provide a means for international participation that doesn’t put them on the critical path (international partners could provide both the propellant and the extra lunar cargo). And it’s not in NASA’s current plans.

Ken Davidian talked about the need to reduce or remove barriers of entry for commercial space companies.
— Investor funding
— Production of commercial space goods and services
— Demand for commercial space goods and services
– Example of Multi-Phase procurements
— prize competitors
— funded space act
— FAR 12 Contracts
– X PRIZE essentially led to COTS

[Note, above Davidian comments, which I was distracted during, gratefully stolen from Clark Lindsey]

Jim Dunstan: Describing relative difficulties between working with NASA and the Russians. Thinks NASA’s biggest problem is hubris. “Get over yourselves.”

NASA does not own space.
There is on inalienable right to explore space.
The public doesn’t care that much about space.
Neither NASA or the current private space companies know much about business.

Wants to get rid of Space Act Agreements. No enforceability clauses, so any money spent is wasted. Doesn’t like FARs and government contracting, but at least they’re available. Have to kill “cancel for convenience.” Without stiff penalties, hard to get investment. NASA needs to hire business people, not engineers or ex-military people. Same thing for engineers. Need good business help and good legal help.

Remember Dreamtime. A disaster between Hollywood media types and engineers at NASA who had no clue how to put a business together.

Jeff Greason: What does government do well? Railroads were big hit, but government running railroads less than successful. Government did a good job of creating aircraft industry in the US, after the disaster of attempting to have the government own/operate vehicles. No economic activity in Antarctica.

By government’s nature, it’s an unreliable customer and unreliable supplier, due to being a creature of politics. Private sector much more predictable. Whether or not greed is good, it’s predictable. No government infrastructure to guarantee continuing supply of tennis shoes, but they’re always available.

If the government has a mission to create a lunar infrastructure, it has to be with heavy commercial involvement to be affordable, but it seems to be the other way around. If the government is the only customer, hard to raise private money. Would have made sense to utilize transportation that other satellite customers also wanted to use.

Points out fragility of having a single government-developed vehicle, so if a commercial customer of a lunar base, you’ll be out of luck if the system goes down. Agrees with Dallas that propellant depots make sense as a market. Also critical on lunar end regardless of location. Will eventually need to produce propellant on the moon, and will need places to store it. Architecture in mind doesn’t look like one NASA is building. Unclear whether it’s opportunity lost or deferred, because unclear whether or not this architecture will be completed.

The notion that you’ll build something, then operate it for a while, then hope you can pawn it off on someone else is not a good plan. If a lunar base isn’t pre-leased, there’s something wrong with it, either in transportation infrastructure or base design or something else, but NASA won’t feel the pain, unlike a private company.

NASA has a disease of no pain receptors.

NASA can’t successfully run the railroad, or be a property developer, or be a landlord without even talking to the customers, but that’s what’s happening.

Wants the government to spend its money in such a way as to at least potentially be useful, but understands that this isn’t a guarantee.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!