Based on this article from the news agency that can’t call a terrorist a terrorist, I have to add a couple new (synonymous) phrases to the glossary.

“unilateral” or “on their own“:

Taking action with a large number of nations in a coalition, but without Kofi Annan’s permission.

John McCaslin at the WaPo has one of the last emails from William McCool before Columbia began its fatal descent:

“PS ? As I write, we just experienced a sunset over the Pacific, just [west] of Chile. I’m sitting on the flight deck in the CDR seat (front right) with a view of the Earth moving gracefully by. Sunsets and sunrises from space come every 45 minutes, and last only about 30 seconds, but the colors are stunning. In a single view, I see looking out at the edge of the Earth ? red at the horizon line, blending to orange, then yellow; followed by a thin white line, then light blue, gradually turning to dark blue, then various gradually darker shades of gray, then black with a million stars above. It’s breath-taking.”

Yet many people still believe that no one would pay for such an experience.

[via Betsy Newmark]

Daniel Greenberg has a good summary of the problem with Shuttle and station over at the WaPo today.

It’s all basically correct, but I want to comment on this one point.

Dating from 1981 to 1999, the surveys, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, found that between 9 and 18 percent of respondents during those years believed that the government spent “too little” on space exploration, while 39 to 52 percent felt it spent “too much.” Far ahead of space exploration, spending preferences were expressed for “reducing pollution,” “improving health care” and “improving education.”

I’d be willing to bet that a large number of those respondents who think we are spending too much haven’t a clue how much we’re spending. My experience with such polls is that large numbers of people think that we spend much more on NASA, as a percentage of the federal budget, than we actually do. Very few people are aware that it’s less than a percent. I’d be interested to see if those numbers change if you poll people after telling them that.

Of course, the issue is not how much we’re spending, but how (and how poorly) we’re spending it. NASA has had more than enough money to make great progress in space over the past few decades–hundreds of billions in current-year dollars. But they haven’t had the philosophy, will, or political permission to spend it sensibly, at least if our goal was to create a space-faring civilization.

There’s an interesting dialogue over at Slate today, between Nathan Myhrvold and Gregg Easterbrook–an extension of the discussion that Gregg started with his good, albeit flawed, Time piece. It’s obvious that Gregg either didn’t read my critique (likely) or that he disagreed, though since he didn’t really respond to any of my criticisms, most likely he’s (not surprisingly, despite Glenn linking it) simply not aware of it.

I want to focus in on three of his comments:

Almost every analyst who thinks rationally about the situation comes to the same conclusion: that what’s needed is a new generation of low-cost throwaway rockets for putting payload into orbit, coupled to a small “spaceplane” carrying people only on those occasions when men and women are truly needed in space.

Well, I like to think that I’m an analyst who thinks rationally about the situation, and I do not come to that conclusion. I happen to believe that “low-cost throwaway rockets” is an oxymoron. There are smart people who disagree with me, and some of them are attempting to build such devices. Certainly we can have lower-cost throwaway rockets, but if we want to get truly low cost, for either passengers or cargo, we have to have space transports.

As to the point about “men and women being truly needed” in space, I’ll address that after the next excerpt:

Get the payloads off the shuttle and onto unmanned throwaway rockets, and astronauts will stop dying to perform humdrum tasks. The crew of Challenger died trying to deliver to orbit a data-relay satellite; the crew of Columbia died after conducting some minor experiments that an automated probe could have handled at one-tenth the price.

Sorry, Gregg, but people die doing “humdrum tasks” every day. What is so special about space that people cannot risk their lives to accomplish things of economic benefit? Why are space workers’ lives so much more valuable than, say, construction workers, or coal miners, or truck drivers?

Yes, I know, astronauts have a high value because it costs a lot to train them, but that’s just because NASA has artificially created this myth of a superhuman called an “astronaut.” In reality, a lot of the useful things that people can do in space could be blue-collar work.

If you can truly do it at lower cost (and risk) without using people, then fine–that’s the criterion on which the decision should be made–not whether or not they’re risking their lives. Shuttle is so expensive that it probably does make sense to use other vehicles to deliver payloads, but not because of the risk of astronauts’ lives. Until we clarify our flawed thinking on this issue, which is a holdover from the Cold War space program, we aren’t going to be able to come up with the right solutions.

But a shuttle replacement is exactly what’s called for, and a small spaceplane for people, plus new throwaway rockets for cargo, would fit the bill. Once such systems existed, we could think about going back to the Moon, or onward to Mars. Right now NASA isn’t even planning trips to either place, because the shuttle stands in the way.

Gregg continues to believe that there’s no private demand for human space activities, and that only NASA can take us to the Moon or Mars, or even to LEO. He’s wrong, and his proposed solution, while perhaps an improvement over Shuttle, will simply continue to put off the day that we have affordable, low-cost access to space.

We need to recognize that we have a chicken and egg problem. We will only get low costs and reliability with high activity levels, and we will only get high activity levels with vehicles designed to sustain them, at low cost (and that means not throwing them away). Gregg’s proposal does nothing to move us in that direction–it’s just a continuation of limited space activities by the government, at a slightly lower cost than the current program.

Futurepundit Randall Parker has a good post on inherent Shuttle reliability vis a vis airline reliability, and why we need to abandon Shuttle (and ISS) as quickly as possible.

Futurepundit Randall Parker has a good post on inherent Shuttle reliability vis a vis airline reliability, and why we need to abandon Shuttle (and ISS) as quickly as possible.

Futurepundit Randall Parker has a good post on inherent Shuttle reliability vis a vis airline reliability, and why we need to abandon Shuttle (and ISS) as quickly as possible.

Patrick Ruffini, who by his own admission is no space expert, seems to get it.

What’s more striking about this accident is NASA’s nonchalance, even now, in the face of the Columbia’s known vulnerabilities. NASA wasn’t cutting corners so much as it was accepting these imperfections as a tolerable risk. Their attitude seems to be that even attempting to fix them would have introduced other (equally hazardous) safety and engineering problems; either that, or the cost would be so astronomical as to defeat the purposes of the current Shuttle program, rendering utterly academic today’s debate about whether a 5% increase here or there could have saved these seven lives. Furthermore, claiming NASA knowingly skimped on needed repairs ? and given the caliber of engineering talent working there, it would have to be knowing ? assumes that the agency didn’t even have the autonomy to simply trim back a launch or two and pay for the repairs with that. Indeed, the primary alternative to the budget-cut scenario is potentially more damning: NASA knew about the tile vulnerabilities, and took a calculated risk by not fixing them.

Yup. That’s life, in the non-Oprah world.

If this story is true, the Iraqi army is eager to get on with the war. Their families are being held hostage to get them to fight, and they can’t wait to surrender.

“They are terrified,” said one army captain, clad in a blue beret. “They won’t surrender at the first shot. They will surrender when they hear the first American tank turn on its engine.

“…I don’t think there will be much fighting here,” one UNIKOM captain said during an interview in a coffee shop. “That waiter there looks more together than any soldier I have seen in southern Iraq.”

In response to my NRO piece the other day, in which I wrote:

There are some space missions that will just never be jobs for robots. Building an orbital infrastructure that can both mine useful asteroids and comets, and deflect errant ones about to wipe out civilization, is unlikely to be done with robots. Building orbital laboratories in which biochemical and nanotechnological research can be carried out safely is unlikely to be practically done with robots. A new leisure industry, with resorts in orbit or on the moon, would be pointless, and find few customers, if we weren’t sending up people. Establishing off- world settlements to get at least some of humanity’s eggs out of the current single fragile physical and political basket is not exactly a job for a robot.

Kevin Drum replies, (inexplicably) incredulously:

That’s it? Mining the asteroids? The long-promised pharmaceutical revolution in zero-g? Sex in space?

Well, no, that’s not “it.” Those are just examples. And I don’t know where he got the pharmaceutical revolution in zero-g, or the sex in space. My point about the labs had nothing to do with zero-g. It was that there’s some research that might be too dangerous to perform on earth, and that vacuum makes a dandy firewall.

But the worst part is the final sentence, which I’ve seen repeated over and over: we need to colonize Mars (or whatever) so that humanity will live on in case we blow ourselves to smithereens here on Earth.

There’s really no polite way to put this, but the notion is simply nonsensical. Do space enthusiasts keep writing this stuff because their neurons stop firing before they put finger to keyboard, or is it just that they’ve been saying it for so long that it’s become a habit? Do they have any idea how dumb the proposition really is?

No, Kevin, we really don’t. One of the reasons we don’t is that you don’t even bother to put up any reasons to support your statement that it’s dumb, or nonsensical. You seem to think that it’s so obvious that it requires no explanation, and you think that simply calling it that makes it so. When you’re prepared to actually discuss it intelligently, then perhaps I’ll find your fulminating a little more persuasive.