Well, I was wrong.

A year ago, right after the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia, I predicted that the standdown from the Columbia disaster wouldn’t be anywhere near as long as the one after the loss of the Challenger (over two years), but it now looks as though it may in fact approach it.

My reasons for that prediction were two:

First, that the shuttle was needed to support the continued construction and maintenance of the space station (a circumstance that didn’t hold in the late 1980s). Second, I didn’t think that the investigation would reveal as much of a problem this time as when Challenger was lost, in terms of poor NASA judgement.

But apparently, in the wake of the harsh criticism of the Gehman Commission, NASA has become ultraconservative in Shuttle operations. The unwillingness to risk a Hubble maintenance mission is one symptom of this. The recent announcement that the first post-Columbia flight will be delayed until at least a year from now is another.

I didn’t agree with the Hubble decision (and continue to disagree), and I think that NASA is being too cautious now in delaying return to flight. Of course, I thought they were after Challenger as well–they could have safely flown a month later, as long as they did it in reasonably warm weather that wouldn’t freeze O-rings, and much of the redesign of the Solid Rocket Booster joints was overkill, or at least it wasn’t necessary to wait until it was complete to start flying again.

Is the Shuttle as safe to fly as it can possibly be right now? No, but that’s a foolish standard.

While “Safety First” has a nice ring to it, there has to be a rational balance between safety and effectiveness. After all, the safest flight of a Shuttle (or for that matter, any vehicle) is the one that doesn’t occur at all (effectively the course taken over the past year, and apparently the next as well).

We are spending almost as much on the Shuttle when it doesn’t fly as we would if it were–NASA can’t simply put the processing staff in cold storage until they decide to fly again, and if they lay them off, there’s a good chance that they won’t be available when they decide to return to flight, so we’re spending the money and getting very little value for it.

I’ve long argued that, despite the national keening and wailing when astronauts die, the real asset at risk in a Shuttle launch is the orbiter itself, of which we now have only three left, and each of which would cost many years and several billion dollars to replace, given that the tooling needed to build them, and many of the subcontractors who contributed to their construction no longer exist. We simply couldn’t afford to risk losing another one, and have any hope of maintaining a viable fleet into the future.

But that argument went away on January 14th, when the president announced his new space policy.

In fact, as September 11, 2001 was a watershed date in our foreign policy, January 14th, 2004 was, or at least should be seen as, a similar demarcation in national space policy. On that date, among other things, it became formal policy of the United States that we would no longer rely on the Space Shuttle into the indefinite future. That policy implicitly converted the Shuttle fleet from a precious and irreplaceable asset to be protected at all costs, to a depreciating one, from which as much value should be extracted as possible before it is retired in a few years.

The Gehman Commission report came out before January 14, and while it requested a new space policy vision, it didn’t necessarily anticipate it. While it recommended augmenting Shuttle with a new manned launch system, it didn’t necessarily recommend eliminating the Shuttle quite as quickly, and if it had, the recommendations might have been a little different. To the degree that NASA policy remains driven by the CAIB recommendations, it would be useful to have a reconvening of the commission and revisit them to determine if the president’s new policy might modify them.

Under the new policy, there will be no more than another couple dozen flights or so of the fleet. It’s unlikely that what happened to Columbia will happen to another vehicle, because even if the foam problem isn’t fixed, the chances of a repeat over that number of missions is very low. After all, this was the first time it happened in over a hundred. And even if there is another event, we could probably still complete the ISS with the remaining fleet of two, though it might delay it another year or so. In addition, the president’s policy implies that completion of the ISS is no longer an urgent national goal (most Beltway insiders know that the main reason it wasn’t cancelled was to avoid upsetting the international partners–not because it’s in any way essential to the new goals).

Under those circumstances, we really should ask ourselves if the costs of modifying the Shuttle system for improved safety, and the opportunity costs of not flying while continuing to pay the salaries of the Shuttle program personnel, are really worth the avoided (low) risk of not losing another orbiter and crew.

A rational assessment might indicate that the answer is no, but then, one can’t always expect rational assessments to prevail in programs so dominated by politics as our space program remains, and I suspect that decisions will continue to be made on the basis of a mindset that’s “soooo January 13th.”

Leonard David continues to report from this week’s planetary defense conference in Garden Grove, CA.

The consensus? We need to get more serious about this threat.

NASA now supports — in collaboration with the United States Air Force — the Spaceguard Survey and its goal of discovering and tracking 90 percent of the Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) with a diameter greater than about one-half mile (1 kilometer) by 2008. If one of these big bruisers were to strike our planet, it would spark catastrophic global effects that would include severe regional devastation and global climate change.

By charting the whereabouts of these celestial objects, it is anticipated that decades of warning time is likely if one of the large-sized space boulders was found to be on a heading that intersects Earth.

But a uniform message from the experts attending this week’s planetary defense gathering is extending the survey to spot smaller objects, down to some 500 feet (150 meters) in diameter. These asteroids can wreak havoc too, but on a more localized scale.

For instance, if one of these smaller asteroids were to strike along the California coast, millions of people might be killed, Morrison said. A little further to the east, he added, “a nice crater out in the desert” would become a tourist attraction…

…Developing a viable mitigation campaign, Yeomans explained, demands three prerequisites: “You need to find them early. You need to find them early. And we need to find them early.”

This needs to be more closely coordinated with the president’s new space policy, both programmatically and politically.

There’s an interesting conference this week just down the street from where I’m working. Unfortunately, I’m too busy working to attend, but it’s nice to see people taking this threat more seriously.

Dwayne Day has the conclusion to his piece at The Space Review on the history of the SEI program. A key point, that I’ve often made, and one that the Easterbrooks and other spewers of costing nonsense should understand:

One of the major problems facing NASA was a cultural one, an inability to think of new human spaceflight projects in terms other than the Apollo paradigm. During Apollo, NASA had gotten a huge amount of money and a great deal of autonomy and many at the agency still thought they would conduct SEI in the same manner. They therefore felt no pressure to keep costs under control.

But in addition to the cultural inability of agency personnel to stop thinking in terms of Apollo budgets, NASA, like all government agencies, had to deal with different internal and external constituencies, each clamoring for its own priorities. The space agency’s facilities are spread throughout the country at various field centers, each of which represents different interests such as human spaceflight and robotic exploration, and each having advocates in Congress. In addition, NASA has also had a less obvious rivalry between its scientists, who want to collect data, and its engineers, who want to build equipment. In many ways the 90-Day Study was a reflection of all of these conflicts within the agency, combined with an unwillingness by NASA Headquarters to clearly establish priorities, starting by saying no to some of its constituencies.

When I first saw her, she was small enough to hold in my hand.

My lover of the past seven years had just moved out, and taken custody of the cat (only fair, since it was originally hers). In sudden need of feline companionship (generally easier and faster to replace than the feminine variety–at least a satisfactory replacement), I responded to an ad on the bulletin board in the local grocery in El Segundo, and went to a house a few blocks from mine that was dispensing kittens from a recent litter.

They were standard-issue tabbies, though a claim was made that they had a Siamese grandmother. There were four of them, playing with each other. That is, three of them were playing, and one was standing back, more aloof. It was a grayish color, with just a hint of brown stripes. It was a little smaller than the others, and looked to be the runt.

I reached over and scratched between its outsized ears. It didn’t seem afraid.

“Her name is Francesca,” one of the girls of the household offered helpfully. I opined that it was a pretty big moniker for such a little cat.

I picked it up to inspect the nether regions, in order to verify the gender, and allow it to be henceforth described by a slightly more specific pronoun. After the inspection, she (as it indeed turned out to be) curled up in my hand, and promptly fell asleep.

I realized that my choice was to either wake her up, or take her with me. She seemed to have adopted me, and it was the beginning of a long relationship in which she would, whenever possible, seek (and generally find, at least for a while) slothful slumber on various temporarily horizontal parts of my body.

I think that she left her mother too soon–she wasn’t properly weaned (perhaps partly because she was the runt of the litter, and could never get enough). For years after I got her, she would suck my finger with gusto if I offered it to her. It also took her a while to learn to, in Garrison Keillor’s immortal words, work up the courage to do what needs to be done.

When I first got her home, Stella (as I subsequently renamed her) hid under various articles of furniture for the first couple days. I gradually coaxed her out with bowls of food and milk.

At first, she wouldn’t go outside. Gradually, she started to adventure out the door, but she would only go as far as the extent of the shade of the house, stopping at the terminator drawn by the sun. She was like a little groundhog, fearing her own shadow.

But eventually, she worked up the grit and gumption to explore the whole yard, and after a few weeks, she would come in only for food and to sleep on me, two passions in which she indulged herself almost to the end of her days.

It turned out that the aloofness toward her siblings at our first meeting was not out of character–Stella hated cats with a fierce passion (again, perhaps a symptom of having to fight for her place at the dairy, and often losing). I’m not sure what she thought she was.

Accordingly, when Patricia brought Jessica into the house a few years later, she didn’t take well to the interloper, growling at her whenever in her presence (other than at dinner time, when she was too busy stuffing her jowls to notice the other cat next door).

Taking her away from her mother early didn’t seem to have damaged her other natural instincts–she was a great ratter, one time cleaning out the garage from an infestation. But she’d been slowing down in recent years, as she approached her fifteenth birthday.

I dropped her off at the vet on Thursday evening for a follow-up visit from her hospital stay last week. She’d been eating all right for the past couple days, but I didn’t get a chance to feed her before I took her in, because I had been working late and had to get her there before the office closed. I boarded her there for the weekend because I was going away, and there was no one else who could get the pills into her twice daily. I planned to pick her up on Monday morning before work.

On Friday, I got a call from the vet. She told me that her blood count was back down as low as it was when I first brought her in the previous week, and that she was extremely weak again, with a lowered temperature. She was afraid that there was more going on than just the blood parasite that had been diagnosed, and for which she was being treated. She thought that without another transfusion, she would not last long.

Unfortunately, even with another transfusion, the prognosis was poor, and it would be very expensive, because this time she would have to go to an emergency clinic to have the blood typed, and a battery of tests to determine what the problem was. She feared that it was perhaps a previously undiagnosed cancer.

The choices were to spend thousands of dollars to keep her alive a while longer, or to see if she could fight her way back again, and hope for the best. She didn’t seem to be suffering, other than being very weak, so there was no consideration of euthanizing her. I was torn because I was two thousand miles away, and didn’t want her to die alone, in a strange place, but I was helpless, short of spending a lot of money that I didn’t have, probably in futility.

We decided to give her one more chance to fight her way through, as she had the previous weekend, but with little hope.

On Saturday, the doctor called to tell me that the fierce little flame had finally flickered out in the night. No more clawing furniture, or catching rats, or sitting on laps, unless she’s gone to a place where all those feline recreations are available in abundance, and perpetuity. Jessica now has no one to annoy by batting her tail, or leaping from heights.

She’ll be cremated, and I’ll scatter the ashes in the yard in which she spent so many contented hours playing and sunning.

How do these little creatures insinuate themselves so deeply, so inextricably into our lives and hearts? We’ve bred them for certain traits over the millennia, but in some ways, just as they adopt us now (as Stella adopted me), perhaps they’ve bred us as well, in a coevolution. It’s hard to know, but I suspect that when we spread our consciousness into the universe, theirs will go with us. And if I go myself, I think I’ll save a few of the carbon atoms from her corporeal existence to take along as well.

I just got back from an LA Press Club event, where I met Geitner Simmons, who proved a very affable and knowledgable gentleman from the Tarheel State, though he’s now living in Omaha. He’s working on a book on the links between the cultures of the American West and the American South.

I’m flying to Michigan early tomorrow to visit family, so there won’t be any free ice cream until Monday. But heck, you don’t want any anyway–it’s winter time.

Stanley Kurtz enjoyed the “great debate,” mostly, it would seem, because it played to his own preconceptions. It set up the false choice of doing science with robots versus doing science (and more broadly, exploration) with humans.

He drew an analogy to the colonization of America that begged every question about cost, practicality, and timing. Zubrin?s five hundred year colonization time line turns his vision into a de facto fantasy.

I think that “fantasy” is too strong a word. There’s certainly nothing intrinsically impossible about it (just as there’s nothing intrinsically expensive about space activities, at least not anywhere near as expensive as present practice would indicate), but of course no one can predict anything even decades out, let alone centuries. Zubrin’s simply offering one potentially plausible timeline.

I, for one, think that it’s foolish to even have a plan to put a man on Mars in 2030 right now (which is why arguments against the president’s goals based on cost are absurd, since no one can know now how we’ll do it, and therefore how much it will cost). The technologies are evolving too fast, and it’s quite possible that the private sector (e.g., the Mars Society, or even the National Geographic Society) will be in a position to do it by then. Any firm plan that government officials come up with now is almost certain to be overtaken by events.

People argue against the New World analogy on two bases–the potential for material returns from space, and the high costs and technological barriers to achieving such returns.

What they forget is that many came to the Americas not just for material wealth, but for spiritual freedom. The resources that were here were not necessarily employed in trade with the old world, but were often for subsistence as a means of practicing their own religion (the LDS being the most notable example). The same will apply to space, where technologies on the immediate horizon will allow groups of people to live off the land (so to speak), free to pursue their own visions of society.

We are really not that far from the point at which it will be (barely) affordable for a middle class family to purchase the means to emigrate off planet (passage to America, or the purchase of a Conestoga wagon required the sales of much of a family’s assets, and once an infrastructure is established off planet, the equivalent functionality will be comparable in cost–Freeman Dyson has written about this extensively).

Frankly, I found these remarks just baffling:

I came away from the Mars debate still seeing colonization as a sort of libertarian heaven. I used to think libertarians, while giving short shrift to the social preconditions of liberty, were at least a hard headed lot. But the libertarian fascination with Mars increasingly strikes me as a quirky (if harmless) utopian fantasy. If anything, the radical precariousness of a Martian colony would necessitate a high degree of human interdependence. The Mars fantasy strikes me as a way of pretending that, if we could just wipe the slate clean, the necessities of social life which continually emerge to frustrate libertarian hopes would somehow disappear. Isn?t this just Marx in reverse?

I don’t know what this debate had to do with libertarianism. Zubrin is no libertarian, and certainly Park is not. This comment might have some relevance if there had been a libertarian in the debate, but there wasn’t. Park wants to send robots to space to do science with government funding, and Zubrin wants to send humans to Mars with government funding. Where’s the libertarianism?

As a comment outside the context of the debate, Dr. Kurtz’ position is one shared by many, but the point is not that space is by its nature a libertarian utopia, any more than (and yes, I know he dislikes the analogy, but that doesn’t make it invalid) were the Americas two and a half centuries ago. Yet somehow we created a form of government here previously unseen in the history of the world, that was quite libertarian in philosophy (certainly much more so than either major party today).

From the standpoint of forming new societies, the point of settling space is that it’s a tabula rasa, and that many different groups and ideologies will find room there to do social experimentation. This is a factor that is independent of technology. Yes, cooperation will be required, and perhaps even laws, but there’s nothing intrinsically unlibertarian about that. Ignoring teleological arguments about our duty to be the vessels that bring consciousness to the universe, this is to me the greatest value of space–an ongoing large petri dish in which groups of like-minded people can continue to seek improvements on society, unconstrained by existing governmental strictures that are now dominant on this planet.

It provides the best opportunity to perform the kinds of controlled experiments that might more conclusively resolve the kinds of issues that so greatly concern Dr. Kurtz. Comparing Sweden to the US to determine the potential effects of gay marriage is interesting, but not necessarily enlightening–there are too many extraneous factors to draw firm conclusions. I would think that this should be an exciting prospect to a social anthropologist, and wonder why it is not.

And I wish that he had attended this debate instead. There he could have found a true libertarian (though not a particularly knowledgable one) in the form of Ed Hudgins, but he would also have heard a broader (and more useful) range of viewpoints than one will ever get from a battle of the Bobs.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Will Wilkinson has a seemingly unrelated post, but not so much as it might seem.

…what we need is a theory of just how libertarian a particular society could possibly get, given human psychology, the set of social and economic relations, the available mechanisms of persuasion, and the set of belief systems or “macro mythologies”, at a given time, plus the dynamics that govern changes in these things. My guess is that for US society starting today, it’s possible to get significantly more libertarian, but not radically more libertarian. What might that society look like?

A point that evolutionists make is that nature has to work with the materials available, so pandas build thumbs out of existing radial bones. I suspect that if we want to truly implement new societies, we’ll have to start, at least in some sense, from scratch (at least in terms of existing governmental structures, if not cultures), and there’s really no place left on this planet in which it’s possible to do that.

I don’t have much time to write, but fortunately some of my readers do.

Mitchell Burnside Clapp, of Pioneer Rocketplane, has been commenting on spacesuit gloves in the previous post, but he also passes along some comments, via email, about how much smarter we are now than we were in the sixties.

I was thinking recently about NASA and its desire to invest heavily in new technologies to develop better launch vehicles. I know this is worthy work and that NASA’s charter requires them to do a fair bit of this sort of thing, but I can’t help be reminded of the kids who spend a hundred bucks on top of the line basketball shoes in the hopes that it will give them game.

Continue reading Where There’s A Will →

I don’t have much time to write, but fortunately some of my readers do.

Mitchell Burnside Clapp, of Pioneer Rocketplane, has been commenting on spacesuit gloves in the previous post, but he also passes along some comments, via email, about how much smarter we are now than we were in the sixties.

I was thinking recently about NASA and its desire to invest heavily in new technologies to develop better launch vehicles. I know this is worthy work and that NASA’s charter requires them to do a fair bit of this sort of thing, but I can’t help be reminded of the kids who spend a hundred bucks on top of the line basketball shoes in the hopes that it will give them game.

Continue reading Where There’s A Will →