Space

Music To My Ears

The Aldridge Commission is at least singing the right tune:

In many cases, the experts found the modern space agency too wedded to the agency founded at the height of the Cold War to overtake the former Soviet Union’s technical prowess…

…The changes envisioned by the panel would transform NASA into an agency working alongside an industrial partner, academia and parts of other Cabinet-level agencies to expand the nation’s economy into space as a means of creating new wealth and strengthening national security as well as advancing science.

“Creating new wealth.” What a concept.

Let’s hope that they can stay on key. I’ll be looking forward to hearing their recommendations. I do wonder at the use of the singular, though. Why not “alongside industrial partners”? Here’s hoping it’s a misstatement–I hope they’re not intending to set up a monopoly of some kind.

[Via Mark Whittington, from his home-town paper]

[Update at 9 AM PDT]

The administrator agrees.

“Business as usual, if we simply try to overlay this [vision] on top of an existing structure, isn’t going to work,” O’Keefe said. “There is no way that the present organizational structure, and how we do business today, will be the most appropriate way to go about doing this.”

I don’t agree with him on this, though.

O’Keefe also told commissioners that the space infrastructure required to push the new space effort forward is already in place, and stressed that international cooperation will play a vital role in missions to come. The cooperation needed for the International Space Station (ISS), for example, has led to the necessary political relationships, communication networks and engineering teams – among others – to take on such a project, he added.

As I wrote yesterday, international cooperation may be useful, but it shouldn’t be a goal, and it’s certainly not essential, except perhaps from a political standpoint. But more importantly, I disagree that the “space infrastructure required to push the new space effort forward is already in place.”

It remains much too costly to get to orbit, on far too unreliable launchers. The tragedy is that the agency has given up on the goal of improving this situation (not that it was really capable of doing so–it wasted billions over the past couple decades proving that it wasn’t). But the government should be doing more in terms of policy to achieve this goal, even if NASA can’t.

War Commentary

What He Said

Andrew Sullivan has an appalling summary of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and a suggestion for the president. He should take the advice.

And on a slightly different but related topic, how is “Ghraib” pronounced, anyway? I keep hearing people (including NPR people, who are usually sticklers about pronunciation, at least if it’s some trendy lefty country) saying “Grayb,” with a single syllable. I’m no Arabic expert, but I’d think that it should be “Grah-eeb.” Anyone know?

Humor

The Outrage Worsens

Iowahawk has the latest American atrocities against Iraqi prisoners.

In the newly released photos, masked Iraqi prisoners are shown forming human pyramids, stuffing Volkswagens, eating live goldfish and pounding ‘beer bongs,’ all under the supervision of laughing US guards.

You won’t read it anywhere else. I wish I knew how he gets these scoops.

Political Commentary

More On The “Fingernail Scrape”

Kerry’s first Purple Heart is looking increasingly bogus, and part of a plan for an early ticket home, having gotten his tickets punched and establishing his JFK creds. According to the attending physician:

Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore, but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on shore. The crewman thought that the injury was caused by a fragment ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks.

That seemed to fit the injury which I treated.

What I saw was a small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the skin of Kerry’s arm. The metal fragment measured about 1 cm. in length and was about 2 or 3 mm in diameter. It certainly did not look like a round from a rifle.

I simply removed the piece of metal by lifting it out of the skin with forceps. I doubt that it penetrated more than 3 or 4 mm. It did not require probing to find it, did not require any anesthesia to remove it, and did not require any sutures to close the wound.

The wound was covered with a bandaid.

Emphasis mine. Even ignoring the unsubstantialness of the wound, if it occurred as his boatmates claimed, it wasn’t the result of enemy fire, which would make him ineligible for the medal. In fact, if he really did that, it should have resulted in discipline.

That may be just a tip of an iceberg of self-aggrandizement that resulted in this morning’s press conference (click on the “Media” link), in which many of his band of former brothers declared him unfit to be Commander-in-Chief. A press conference which, by the way, the media seems to be studiously ignoring. The only mention of it that I can find with a quick Google is in the Boston Herald.

And no, before anyone asks, I’m not saying that he fired the mortar round deliberately to injure himself. I rarely attribute an act to conspiracy that is as easily explained by incompetence. I’m just saying that it strongly appears that he was looking for every wound he could to get to his magic three.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s the letter that the other Swift Boat vets sent to Kerry.

[Wednesday morning update]

The Globe has covered it now. Interestingly, the supposedly right-wing Fox News doesn’t seem to have any web coverage of it, at least not on their politics page.

Political Commentary

More On The “Fingernail Scrape”

Kerry’s first Purple Heart is looking increasingly bogus, and part of a plan for an early ticket home, having gotten his tickets punched and establishing his JFK creds. According to the attending physician:

Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore, but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on shore. The crewman thought that the injury was caused by a fragment ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks.

That seemed to fit the injury which I treated.

What I saw was a small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the skin of Kerry’s arm. The metal fragment measured about 1 cm. in length and was about 2 or 3 mm in diameter. It certainly did not look like a round from a rifle.

I simply removed the piece of metal by lifting it out of the skin with forceps. I doubt that it penetrated more than 3 or 4 mm. It did not require probing to find it, did not require any anesthesia to remove it, and did not require any sutures to close the wound.

The wound was covered with a bandaid.

Emphasis mine. Even ignoring the unsubstantialness of the wound, if it occurred as his boatmates claimed, it wasn’t the result of enemy fire, which would make him ineligible for the medal. In fact, if he really did that, it should have resulted in discipline.

That may be just a tip of an iceberg of self-aggrandizement that resulted in this morning’s press conference (click on the “Media” link), in which many of his band of former brothers declared him unfit to be Commander-in-Chief. A press conference which, by the way, the media seems to be studiously ignoring. The only mention of it that I can find with a quick Google is in the Boston Herald.

And no, before anyone asks, I’m not saying that he fired the mortar round deliberately to injure himself. I rarely attribute an act to conspiracy that is as easily explained by incompetence. I’m just saying that it strongly appears that he was looking for every wound he could to get to his magic three.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s the letter that the other Swift Boat vets sent to Kerry.

[Wednesday morning update]

The Globe has covered it now. Interestingly, the supposedly right-wing Fox News doesn’t seem to have any web coverage of it, at least not on their politics page.

Political Commentary

More On The “Fingernail Scrape”

Kerry’s first Purple Heart is looking increasingly bogus, and part of a plan for an early ticket home, having gotten his tickets punched and establishing his JFK creds. According to the attending physician:

Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore, but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on shore. The crewman thought that the injury was caused by a fragment ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks.

That seemed to fit the injury which I treated.

What I saw was a small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the skin of Kerry’s arm. The metal fragment measured about 1 cm. in length and was about 2 or 3 mm in diameter. It certainly did not look like a round from a rifle.

I simply removed the piece of metal by lifting it out of the skin with forceps. I doubt that it penetrated more than 3 or 4 mm. It did not require probing to find it, did not require any anesthesia to remove it, and did not require any sutures to close the wound.

The wound was covered with a bandaid.

Emphasis mine. Even ignoring the unsubstantialness of the wound, if it occurred as his boatmates claimed, it wasn’t the result of enemy fire, which would make him ineligible for the medal. In fact, if he really did that, it should have resulted in discipline.

That may be just a tip of an iceberg of self-aggrandizement that resulted in this morning’s press conference (click on the “Media” link), in which many of his band of former brothers declared him unfit to be Commander-in-Chief. A press conference which, by the way, the media seems to be studiously ignoring. The only mention of it that I can find with a quick Google is in the Boston Herald.

And no, before anyone asks, I’m not saying that he fired the mortar round deliberately to injure himself. I rarely attribute an act to conspiracy that is as easily explained by incompetence. I’m just saying that it strongly appears that he was looking for every wound he could to get to his magic three.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s the letter that the other Swift Boat vets sent to Kerry.

[Wednesday morning update]

The Globe has covered it now. Interestingly, the supposedly right-wing Fox News doesn’t seem to have any web coverage of it, at least not on their politics page.

Space

Who Wrote That Headline?

Neither the headline or the lead paragraphs are justified by this article at Space.com.

Hed: “Space Experts Say International Cooperation is Key for NASA’s Space Vision.”

Lead grafs:

NASA should not limit itself to merely seeking support from the American public to push forward its vision of the human exploration of space, according to the foreign space agency directors, scientists and space enthusiasts addressing a presidential commission Monday.

While support from the American people, and the politicians who represent them, is a critical component of the space vision, so to is international cooperation, panelists said during the final meeting of the Commission on the Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy.

Now one would think from such an introduction that there was unanimity, or at least some kind of consensus, among the “foreign space agency directors, scientists and space enthusiasts” on this point, but there’s no evidence of it in the article. If anyone other than the “foreign space agency directors” mentioned the need for international cooperation, it went unreported. And of course, pleas of foreign space agency directors for international cooperation on space are the space reporting equivalent of dog bites man.

And of course, they whined, politely:

The lack of a concrete plan, one with specific goals that are more detailed than the broad statement “to the Moon, to Mars and Beyond,” has made it difficult for some of NASA’s international partners to gauge whether they could be an asset in the vision.

“We’d like to see the details of the plan,” said JAXA executive director Kiyoshi Higuchi, adding that the lack of specifics in Bush’s vision are partly responsible for JAXA’s hesitation to formally commit its resources to assisting NASA. “It makes it difficult for us to single out what technology we can bring to the effort.”

Because a bureaucrat, particularly a space bureaucrat, is lost without a, you know, twenty-year plan.

I don’t believe that international cooperation is necessary for this initiative, at least in the sense that it’s normally used, though I have no problem with purchasing technologies from overseas if they’re useful. The space station experience should be cautionary, and when international cooperation becomes an end, rather than a means, it can rapidly lead to disaster. I wrote a Fox column about this a couple years ago.

In fact, I think that Mr Malik buried the actual lead. Here’s what I found of more interest in the article, which I think would have been as valid a theme:

During its hurly-burly days in the race with Russia to put humans in space, NASA’s most attractive quality was in the imaginations of the American people, who hoped they would soon join the astronauts on spacewalks, panelists said.

“What NASA seemed to forget was that then, we all wanted to go,” Tether told commissioners. “We were forgotten about.”

But if NASA can find a way for American citizens to take the baby steps that would eventually allow them to reach the moon – or even just space – themselves, it would do wonders for the space agency’s support, he added.

“If you can do that, you will have a constituency that you don’t have today,” Tether said.

That’s Tony Tether, head of DARPA. He gets it, even if NASA doesn’t. I hope that the commission was listening.

General

Back in the Ring

I had a chance to talk to Rand at SA’04 and he said I should just post whatever was on my mind and not worry about consistency with the previous course of TTM, which had been a concern for me since I’m 99% aligned with Rand on space policy and much less so on terrestrial politics. Since my Dad’s death I’ve found myself less willing to keep my mouth shut about these things (for reasons which I’m not going to go into right now), so I wanted to check things out with Rand before diving back in. Now that I’ve cleared down some of my to do list I’ll resume posting, and we can see how things work out. I suspect that the upcoming election fight will have us all longing for the solemn dignity of monkeys throwing poo, but hopefully TTM will stay far enough above the fray to avoid the splatter.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!