“Allah” responds to charges that the web site is anti-Muslim. I think (s)he’s got the better part of the argument, by far.
Press Out Of Control
“…everything is out of control…” in Iraq.
That’s all the hyperbole you need to read to not bother to take this piece seriously.
NASA’s Vietnam?
An email from Andrew Case informed me of an item that Clark Lindsey over at RLV News found. Homer Hickam (author of Rocket Boys, the book on which the movie October Sky was based) has an op-ed in today’s Journal (subscription required, unfortunately), titled, NASA’s Vietnam.
…when I put emotion aside, I can’t ignore my engineering training. That training and my knowledge as a 20-year veteran of the space agency (and also a Vietnam vet) has led me to conclude that the Space Shuttle is NASA’s Vietnam. A generation of engineers and managers have exhausted themselves trying to make it work and they just can’t. Why not? Because the Shuttle’s engineering design, just as Vietnam’s political design, is inherently flawed.
He thinks that NASA doesn’t have a culture problem, just a lousy vehicle design. He wants to build an OSP and fly it on an expendable. That will make everything all better!
Sorry, Mr. Hickam, with all due respect to your cherished agency, it has both. It has a lousy design partly because of a cultural problem, partly because of a policy problem, but there’s much more to be fixed at the agency, that simply coming up with a different expensive and unsafe way to put people into space isn’t going to solve.
I know that it pains a veteran like you, but we need to fundamentally break the connection in the minds of both the public, and policy makers, between NASA and space. They are not synonymous. It’s time to open up the competition and let some other folks give it a shot.
Besides, I’ve always thought that Space Station Albatross was NASA’s Vietnam, and that we should just declare victory and go home.
[Update at 4 PM PDT]
For those who want to Read The Whole Thing, there’s a slightly longer version of it up at Spaceref now, with a different title–“Not Culture, But Perhaps A Cult.”
[Update on Saturday afternoon]
It occurs to me that this piece, which I wrote last fall, is relevant to this topic.
NASA’s Vietnam?
An email from Andrew Case informed me of an item that Clark Lindsey over at RLV News found. Homer Hickam (author of Rocket Boys, the book on which the movie October Sky was based) has an op-ed in today’s Journal (subscription required, unfortunately), titled, NASA’s Vietnam.
…when I put emotion aside, I can’t ignore my engineering training. That training and my knowledge as a 20-year veteran of the space agency (and also a Vietnam vet) has led me to conclude that the Space Shuttle is NASA’s Vietnam. A generation of engineers and managers have exhausted themselves trying to make it work and they just can’t. Why not? Because the Shuttle’s engineering design, just as Vietnam’s political design, is inherently flawed.
He thinks that NASA doesn’t have a culture problem, just a lousy vehicle design. He wants to build an OSP and fly it on an expendable. That will make everything all better!
Sorry, Mr. Hickam, with all due respect to your cherished agency, it has both. It has a lousy design partly because of a cultural problem, partly because of a policy problem, but there’s much more to be fixed at the agency, that simply coming up with a different expensive and unsafe way to put people into space isn’t going to solve.
I know that it pains a veteran like you, but we need to fundamentally break the connection in the minds of both the public, and policy makers, between NASA and space. They are not synonymous. It’s time to open up the competition and let some other folks give it a shot.
Besides, I’ve always thought that Space Station Albatross was NASA’s Vietnam, and that we should just declare victory and go home.
[Update at 4 PM PDT]
For those who want to Read The Whole Thing, there’s a slightly longer version of it up at Spaceref now, with a different title–“Not Culture, But Perhaps A Cult.”
[Update on Saturday afternoon]
It occurs to me that this piece, which I wrote last fall, is relevant to this topic.
NASA’s Vietnam?
An email from Andrew Case informed me of an item that Clark Lindsey over at RLV News found. Homer Hickam (author of Rocket Boys, the book on which the movie October Sky was based) has an op-ed in today’s Journal (subscription required, unfortunately), titled, NASA’s Vietnam.
…when I put emotion aside, I can’t ignore my engineering training. That training and my knowledge as a 20-year veteran of the space agency (and also a Vietnam vet) has led me to conclude that the Space Shuttle is NASA’s Vietnam. A generation of engineers and managers have exhausted themselves trying to make it work and they just can’t. Why not? Because the Shuttle’s engineering design, just as Vietnam’s political design, is inherently flawed.
He thinks that NASA doesn’t have a culture problem, just a lousy vehicle design. He wants to build an OSP and fly it on an expendable. That will make everything all better!
Sorry, Mr. Hickam, with all due respect to your cherished agency, it has both. It has a lousy design partly because of a cultural problem, partly because of a policy problem, but there’s much more to be fixed at the agency, that simply coming up with a different expensive and unsafe way to put people into space isn’t going to solve.
I know that it pains a veteran like you, but we need to fundamentally break the connection in the minds of both the public, and policy makers, between NASA and space. They are not synonymous. It’s time to open up the competition and let some other folks give it a shot.
Besides, I’ve always thought that Space Station Albatross was NASA’s Vietnam, and that we should just declare victory and go home.
[Update at 4 PM PDT]
For those who want to Read The Whole Thing, there’s a slightly longer version of it up at Spaceref now, with a different title–“Not Culture, But Perhaps A Cult.”
[Update on Saturday afternoon]
It occurs to me that this piece, which I wrote last fall, is relevant to this topic.
Looks Like They Got Him
It looks like the guy behind the “Blaster” worm was a teenager from Minnesota.
One of the tenets of nanotechnology is that the distinction between hardware and software is going to increasingly blur in the years and decades ahead. This is an example where that’s happening. Had this guy demolished a skyscraper (empty of people), he’d be considered a terrorist, but I doubt that he’d have done that, or even considered it, because that’s such an obvious huge destruction of property.
But what he did instead destroyed an equivalent amount of wealth in lost data and lost productivity. We need to come up with a way to make it very clear to people, particularly young people, that there’s no substantive difference between those two crimes.
An Opening For Creationism?
Shifting gears from space momentarily, I wholeheartedly agree with Paul Orwin’s post about discussing creationism in science class.
This actually can be a good thing, as he points out, as a “teachable moment,” by taking the opportunity to point out, not necessarily that it’s wrong, or untrue, but that it’s not science. As I’ve said before, I have no objections to creationism being taught, as long as it’s not taught in a science class. And it can even be discussed in a science class, as long as it’s not taught there.
Stuck In the Sixties
There’s a very depressing example of how sterile and mindless the debate about space remains in the wake of the CAIB report over at the WaPo today. If not a full-blown fisking, it requires an almost line-by-line analysis.
Administration officials disclosed in an interview that the White House will begin work next week on a blueprint for interplanetary human flight over the next 20 or 30 years, with plans calling for Bush to issue an ambitious new national vision for space travel by early next year.
Ahhhh, no timorous five-year plans for these central planners–we’ll have a thirty-year plan!
The officials said they will wrestle with the military’s role in space, as well as with whether to emphasize manned or robotic missions, whether to build a base in space, what vehicle should replace the shuttle and what planets should be visited.
That’s interesting, but how can they do that, when no one seems to be discussing what we’re trying to accomplish? How can one decide whether to “emphasize manned or robotic missions” when we don’t know what the the hell we’re trying to do?
Guys?
“The question is: What do we say to the president about why we should continue humans in space and in what vehicles and to what ends?” a senior administration official said.
Yes, that is the question, but there’s a wide array of answers, and I seen no indication, at least not in this article, that there’s any discussion of anything beyond “exploration” and “science.”
But those answers will not come as swiftly as Congress would like, and lawmakers and some administration officials said they do not see how Bush will find the money to pay for any meaningful expansion of the space program given the costs of his tax cuts and the demands on the budget from the Pentagon, homeland security and possibly new Medicare benefits.
Well, look, not that I necessarily favor an increase in NASA funding (and in fact, right now I’m in the “abolish NASA” camp), but this is just fiscally stupid. We are spending less than one percent of the federal budget on NASA. We could double it and it wouldn’t even make a blip in the deficit. There may be, and in fact are, good reasons to oppose an increase in funding, given the current plans, but “we can’t afford it” ain’t one of them.
That could turn his aides’ study of options for future astronauts into something of an academic exercise.
“You can’t fight a war on terrorism and stimulate the economy and put billions and billions of new dollars into the space program,” an official said, adding that the end of the Cold War had made mastery of space a less pressing priority.
Well, some would argue that putting billions and billions of new dollars into the space program would be part of stimulating the economy, though how well it does so depends in part on how you actually spend the money.
But what does he mean when he says that “the end of the Cold War has made mastery of space a less pressing priority”?
Is he talking about civil space? If so, it’s pretty appalling that, almost half a century after Sputnik, policy makers still think that the only reason to go into space is to flex our technological muscles to impress other countries.
If he means from a military standpoint, I don’t know if he’s noticed, but we’re engaged in a hot war right now, and one in which space assets played a critical role that will only increase in future battles.
I would really, really love some elaboration on this comment.
Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), chairman of a Senate subcommittee that oversees NASA, said he will seek a presidential panel to examine the future of the space program, including whether to shift resources from the shuttle in order to resume the exploration of the moon.
Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.), a member of the House Science Committee, is calling for a shift from manned to unmanned flight “for both safety and research value.”
See, instead of “it’s all about ooooiiiiillllll,” when it comes to space it’s all about “exploration” and “research.”
Of course, one does not intrinsically increase “research value” by leaving people at home. I disagree with Bob Zubrin about a lot of things, but he’s certainly right when he says that you’ll learn a lot more about a planet by sending a geologist than you will a robot. And for those who obsess about “safety,” I’m sorry, but I have nothing but contempt. Yes, we should try not to kill people, but ultimately, the only way you can avoid it is to not let them go at all, which seems to be Rep. Smith’s goal here. As the old saying goes, a ship in a harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships, or explorers, are for.
A senior administration official said a White House group will meet at least weekly to assess “the benefits to the nation and the world of continued human spaceflight by the United States.”
“We know we can do it. What do we seek to achieve through it?” the official said. “Where and how does human spaceflight fit into national requirements and national priorities over the next several decades?”
Yes, those are good questions. Even better one are “is human spaceflight going to continue to be performed only by NASA, or are we going to encourage the nascent private human spaceflight industry?” “What role will they play?” “Are there things we can do to help make that happen that don’t require expenditures of taxpayer dollars to a bloated, sclerotic civil space agency?”
But I’ll bet those kinds of question won’t get asked, at least based on anything I read in this business-as-usual article.
Officials said the new panel on human spaceflight, led by the White House and involving several Cabinet departments, is scheduled to have recommendations ready for Bush in the next several months. Aides said they hope Bush will make decisions by the end of the year so that the ideas can be included in the administration budget for 2005, which will go to Capitol Hill in February.
The official said the interagency group will look at the space program’s relationship with national defense, as well as with the advancement of science, and at “the question of how this relates to national goals that, at first blush, have nothing to do with spaceflight.”
OK, this does look a little more encouraging. I would hope that those departments include (at the least) Commerce, Transportation, Energy and Defense.
The rest of the article pretty much focuses on NASA and its budget and the CAIB.
You know, it would help if reporters themselves, like Mike Allen and Eric Pianin, would bring up these issues, but they’re sadly apparently unaware as well, and stuck in the same NASA-centric mindset. Maybe they should read this weblog once in a while…
NASA Doesn’t Regulate Launches
Over at the new space blog Hypotheses Non Fingo, one of the posters writes:
That leads me to another question – NASA in the US is designed to regulate space travel and space launches (among its many other points of interest) and each country that’s involved in space exploration has its own government organization designated to do the same. So how do we coordinate with all those private companies that have the ability to build their own spacecraft? If many different organizations have the ability to launch – do we set forth regulations on safety specifications, times to launch, etc? I think this will become an issue in the near future, especially with the push for space passengers.
Well, I don’t know the answer to the question, but there’s a misapprehension here. NASA is neither “designed” or chartered to regulate space launch (thank the heavens–NASA’s enough of a problem as it is without giving it legal authority to regulate its competition). NASA “regulates” only its own launches (and judging by the contents of the Gehman Report, doesn’t do a very good job of it…).
Regulation of commercial launch is the job of the Department of Transportation. It’s currently done specifically by the FAA, but that’s not required by the enabling legislation–it was simply a decision made by the Clinton administration that could be undone by this one if it so chose. I in fact think that it might be a good idea to get it out of the FAA and reestablish the Office of Commercial Space Transportation to report directly to the secretary, as was the case through the late eighties and early nineties. But to allow NASA to do it would both require legislation, and be a disaster for the future of space transportation.
NASA Doesn’t Regulate Launches
Over at the new space blog Hypotheses Non Fingo, one of the posters writes:
That leads me to another question – NASA in the US is designed to regulate space travel and space launches (among its many other points of interest) and each country that’s involved in space exploration has its own government organization designated to do the same. So how do we coordinate with all those private companies that have the ability to build their own spacecraft? If many different organizations have the ability to launch – do we set forth regulations on safety specifications, times to launch, etc? I think this will become an issue in the near future, especially with the push for space passengers.
Well, I don’t know the answer to the question, but there’s a misapprehension here. NASA is neither “designed” or chartered to regulate space launch (thank the heavens–NASA’s enough of a problem as it is without giving it legal authority to regulate its competition). NASA “regulates” only its own launches (and judging by the contents of the Gehman Report, doesn’t do a very good job of it…).
Regulation of commercial launch is the job of the Department of Transportation. It’s currently done specifically by the FAA, but that’s not required by the enabling legislation–it was simply a decision made by the Clinton administration that could be undone by this one if it so chose. I in fact think that it might be a good idea to get it out of the FAA and reestablish the Office of Commercial Space Transportation to report directly to the secretary, as was the case through the late eighties and early nineties. But to allow NASA to do it would both require legislation, and be a disaster for the future of space transportation.