Another Hudson Interview

A few months ago, I interviewed Gary Hudson, long-time space entrepreneur.

Clark Lindsey has done so as well, and it’s a very interesting one. While some of the discussion of Alternate Access may sound like “inside baseball” (as it were), this is a very important story, and sadly not atypical of NASA behavior, and one of the many reasons we make so little progress.

Clark makes a good point here:

There doesn’t seem to be much of a tradition of investigative journalism within the aerospace press. When you talk about your case and the X-37 situation, it reminds me of the X-34 cancellation, which I saw as an outrage if not a scandal. As I understand it, in the aftermath of the two Mars mission failures, all major projects got hit with system reviews to avoid any more embarassing public disasters. For the X-34, they added so many additional safety requirements that it crossed their cost limit and so was canceled. This happened even though, in traditional X project spirit, Orbital had built 3 vehicles just so it would have backups if one was lost. In addition, NASA had required that they use the Fastrac engine, which as far as I know, was a project that simply faded away without ever flying an engine or making any public accounting whatsoever.

You surely know more about what really happened in these cases than I do. However, the fact that I have to guess as to what happened [in these and your cases] rather than go to a NASA web page and read a clear and full summary of such projects [and how decisions regarding them were made] absolutely amazes me. And I’m even more amazed that the aerospace press lets them get away with it.

Yes. Unfortunately, being a good investigative reporter in this field requires both good journalistic skills, and knowledge of both the technical and programmatic aspects of the industry. That’s a combination that’s in scant supply, and there aren’t very many publications in whose interest it is, necessarily, to turn over the rocks. Even when the stories are told, it’s mostly in the trade press–it rarely makes it into the mainstream where the public becomes aware of it because, well, space just Isn’t Important.

And when the only scandal is perceived to be a waste of money (as opposed to the real tragedy, which is the time lost, and opportunity cost, and continued delay in making serious progress), that doesn’t stand out that much in the context of the general waste of government funds. People have become inured to the notion that Big Aerospace wastes money, and that almost fails to be news any more.

Almost Back To Normal

For anyone who’s been following my server saga over the weekend (too gruesome to go into in detail), I ended up having to blow off my new Moveable Type installation, because it screwed up the numbering on my permalinks. I’ve reverted to a backup from Friday morning, and rebuilt all posts since then by hand. In the process, all comments and trackbacks on posts since then have been lost, so if you said anything timeless in any of them, or want to get your link back in, have at it.

I’ve also not bothered to repost the progress reports on getting the blog back up, but briefly, I ran out of disk space on my server on Friday, and fubared my database as a result (MT really should check for the ability to write files before it attempts to write files…). The system was broken to the point that it wasn’t possible to post comments at all. All seems to be well, now, however.

The Chinese Space Race

Mark Whittington (and former Congressman Walker) will disagree, but Jeff Foust has a good piece at the Space Policy Review that explains why it won’t happen, and more importantly, why that’s A Good Thing. I think he’s got it pretty close to right.

A desire for a race with a China that’s simply recapitulating Russian hardware is nostalgia for the sixties and Apollo, and that’s a mindset that we have to break ourselves out of, instead focusing on commerce and lower cost of access. If we ever actually develop an American, free-enterprise space industry, we’ll leave all of the command economies (including NASA) in the dust.

On a related note, Laughing Wolf has a good post on why many space entrepreneurs fail, and why we seem to have made so little commercial progress to date. It’s a lot more fun to draw pictures of rockets than it is to sit down and do the hard work of figuring out markets and drawing up realistic business plans that a non-insane investor will fund. This was a perennial kvetch of the late G. Harry Stine (who used to harangue the attendees of the Space Access Conference on this subject every year).

Fortunately, I think that’s changing. I’ve tried to pick up the lecture where he lamentably left off, and I think that it’s finally sinking in, because we did see some serious companies with serious proposals, starting to raise serious money this year.

I’m very optimistic about this industry right now. We’re not going to get to orbit overnight, but some interesting things are going to happen in the next couple years that I think will have dramatic effects on both the quality of business plans, and the receptiveness of investors toward them. And it will ultimately get us into orbit much faster than any number of NASA programs (from which the prospects of the latter are, in my opinion, null).

Far Right? Far Out

Here is a graphic illustration of the absurdity and meaninglessness of labeling everyone on a left-right axis.

It has Glenn in the center, and the only two people further to the right than me are (possibly–it’s hard to tell for sure) Susanna Cornett and Iain Murray. I’ve never done a calibration, but having known him for many years, both on and off the internet, I suspect that my views line up with Glenn’s with about a ninety percent correlation (though it’s been much longer since I was a Democrat than it’s been since he was).

Sorry to disappoint, folks, but I’m not a conservative, regardless of how many people mistakenly call me one.

I’d like to know the methodology (for instance, why two instantiations of Little Green Footballs?), but, as I said above, it doesn’t matter, because the whole notion of trying to put people on a simplistic one-dimensional axis has no utility.

Solipsistic Scandal

Speaking of the New York Post, John Podhoretz writes that it’s not enough to get rid of Raines, and Boyd, Bragg and Blair. The rot comes from the top, and there’s nothing to indicate that the basic arrogance, and ongoing delusion that the paper is objective, will go away with them.

I’m reminded (as I often am) by a Simpsons episode. It’s one of the Halloween shorts, in which Mr. Burns is a vampire (as opposed to most episodes, in which he’s merely a blood sucking parasite). After putting the stake through him, they realize that it wasn’t enough–they had to kill the head vampire (which turned out to be Marge).

The board of the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper Of Record still has to kill their head vampire.

Incentivizing Commercial Space

A bill has been introduced in the House to provide tax credits for private investment in space transportation.

I don’t know whether or not this will actually become law, or even if it should.

I’ve got mixed feelings about about it. I’m all in favor of things that encourage investment in this area, but I hate the idea of further mucking up an already-complicated tax code, and I’m afraid that it may result in some things getting funded that aren’t necessarily viable, just for the tax credit, which won’t help the credibility of the industry. I don’t want it to become another hothouse plant like solar energy.

I also wonder how reasonable the process will be to determine whether or not company qualifies.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!