Media Criticism

Rough Week

I’ve been at meetings at NASA HQ all day (sorry, nothing particularly exciting) and I’m about to fly back to Florida for about ten hours, after which I fly to California for the afternoon, then to St. Louis for a weekend family wedding, leaving on Friday morning. Blogging is unlikely for a while…

I will leave you with this irritating vignette from the White House Press Corps, offered by Jeff Foust:

Q And how is the Mars program going?

MR. McCLELLAN: NASA can probably update you on the effort. Again, this is a long-term program, and you can sit there and smirk about it, but the President felt it was important — (laughter) — the President felt it was important to outline a clearly defined mission for NASA. And we’re all excited about today’s launch and we wish the —

Q Will he be speaking about it —

MR. McCLELLAN: Hang on — we wish the crew all the best.

Q Will he be speaking about it —

MR. McCLELLAN: NASA is working on implementing it, John. Thanks for starting out the briefing on such — (laughter.)

Wasn’t that a knee slapper?

That dumb Bush and his fantasy mission to Mars. Yuk, yuk…

McClellan didn’t handle this well. The response to the first question should have been: “To which Mars program are you referring?” (Thus offering the reporter an opportunity to be more expansive on his profound ignorance about national space policy).

After he did so, saying something like, “You know, the president’s plan to send people to Mars decades from now,” the response would be: “Well, John, how much progress would you expect this year on something that’s not going to happen for decades? Do you imagine that that’s the sum total of American space policy? Or haven’t you been paying attention? Are you opposed to the nation having a long-term vision for space exploration?”

Yeah, I know that his job is to answer questions, not ask them, but still.

What’s really annoying about this is that on one of the few times the daily White House briefing leads off with space policy questions (due obviously to yesterday’s successful launch) there can’t be an intelligent discussion about it.

Space

Problem On Orbit?

It’s too soon to say. The coverage of it has been disappointing so far as I’ve heard (just listening to Fox News getting ready to come to the office). They said that “if the Shuttle is damaged, NASA has to choose between repairing it on orbit, or abandoning the Shuttle and sending Atlantis up to rescue them.”

No. Repairing it on orbit is probably pretty much a non starter, but there’s another choice (and I suspect the most likely outcome). The Shuttle is damaged, but no more so than previous flights from which it has returned safely.

Thomas James gets to the nub of it:

Given the fact that foam has typically fallen off the ET on ascent, I have to wonder how much what concern there is over the insulation is motivated by new data: being able to actually see the problem happening for once, instead of only seeing the effect of foam shedding post-landing. Perhaps the ET routinely sheds cable-tray foam (or whatever it ends up being identified as) with no ill effects.

Losing a tile around the nose gear door, however, is a little more concerning. It’s hard to tell from the picture and the data provided so far how serious it is, or whether it too is in-family with prior tile damage.

“In-family” is NASA-speak for “within a class of previously-experienced anomalies.” I’m quite certain that NASA has an extensive data base of tile damage from every single flight, organized by section of the orbiter in which it occurred (and if they don’t, someone should certainly be keelhauled across Atlantis), and are even now scouring it to see if there was similar damage in a similar location on some previous flight, including notes of any structural insult observed when the offending tile was removed and replaced. That, and perhaps a closer inspection by EVA, will determine the resolution of this.

I think that it’s most likely that they will decide to come home with it as is. And if they do, I also think that they will undergo a great deal of ignorant criticism for this decision, because they’ve “lost their safety culture,” just one flight after they killed all those astronauts, and now they’re recklessly gambling their lives again (disregarding the fact that throwing away a two-billion dollar vehicle, and a third of the remaining fleet, is not a decision to be taken lightly either).

Space

Back In Space

Well, everything looked fine so far. The ascent went off without a hitch, and now they’re just coasting, waiting to do the orbital insertion burn in a few minutes. No indication that there were any anomalies at all, from what I could hear on the chatter. Good job, to all the people who worked this flight. Launch Control Team can breathe a sigh of relief, and now the Flight Control Team is in charge.

It will be interesting to see how the tiles look in an inspection at ISS, now that they’re sensitized to the issue.

[Update a little after noon]

OK, not quite perfect. The cameras caught some insulation in the act of peeling off the ET after SRB separation. No indication of damage to the Orbiter, though.

There’s a silver lining to this little cloud–it will provide more data to allow NASA to calibrate and gain confidence in their other, non-video instrumentation to detect such things, which if successful, means that they won’t have to be afraid of launching in the dark for much longer.

Space

Good News

Jeff Foust says that, when it comes to commercial space, NASA may at long last be (in the word of Paul Dietz, a frequent commenter here) bowing to reality.

I suspect he’ll have more tomorrow at The Space Review.

Clark Lindsey also has an interesting wrap-up on the subject from Jim Muncy in Las Vegas:

Getting another “big idea” accepted is also making progress. Large scale space settlement must become the primary goal of the space program. No Antarctica-like outposts on the Moon but Las Vegas-es instead. Griffin, in fact, stated in testimony to Congress that human expansion into the solar system is his long term vision for space policy. However, this big idea is still foreign to many at NASA, in Congress, the press and the general public.

We have to continue to work to change that.

War Commentary

A Political Rorschach Test

One of the reasons that our nation, and indeed the world, is so divided on the so-called War on Terror (which, I remind once again, is really a war on a new form of totalitarian fascism wearing the not-that-much-less malign face of Islamic fundamentalism), is that we have major divisions over what motivates the people who make war on us.

In one sense, it’s like the old fable of the blind men and the elephant. If you’re a traditional leftist, you see everything through the lens of capitalist, colonialist oppression, and suicide bombers look like stalwart and admirable fighters against The Man. To people like Michael Moore, they are simply freedom fighters, just like the Minute Men of our own revolution. (Of course, they only use this comparison when they’re trying to make the enemy look appealing to those who disagree with them because, in fact, some of the time they’re actually instead denigrating George Washington and his troops, and comparing them to terrorists, which is apparently only a bad thing when they’re Americans.)

If you’re a multi-culturalist, you see them as misunderstood, their culture under daily siege from an unrelenting barrage of western music, and sexual images, and women with flesh exposed to the world. It’s only understandable that they would want to strike out, and even end their lives when they hear about their holy book being defiled:

He said Tanweer had never mentioned links with any militant group.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!