Arianespace, the company that markets and operates the European Ariane series of expendable rockets, is going bankrupt.

The pride of the European (but primarily French) aerospace industry is hemmorhaging money so badly that it will require supplemental government funds to keep it from going under. That’s not necessarily a problem, except that they can no longer maintain the pleasant fiction that it’s a viable business.

Ariane had its origins in a stupid policy decision by the US in the late seventies, when we refused to launch a European satellite. From that point on, the Europeans decided that they would develop an independent launch capability, regardless of the cost. In the early 1980s, when Shuttle was still launching commercial satellites, Ariane was stealing much of the business that NASA had been counting on for Shuttle, not just with lower costs, but with better marketing, and gimmics like offering free financing for the launch (NASA insisted on payment up front, often months or years before the payload flew). Their pricing didn’t have to cover amortization of the development costs–like the Concorde, these were picked up by the government, providing an illusion that it was a profitable business.

When the Challenger was destroyed, and all commercial payloads were removed from the Shuttle, as a result of all of this subsidization, Ariane became the leader in delivery of commercial geostationary satellites.

But now they have a problem. This market is limited by both current economic conditions, and issues of orbital slots and spectrum allocation, and there’s a glut of supply for it, particularly since the entry of the privatized Russian program, and the Chinese Long March. It’s also suffered from some embarrassing failures of its new version of the rocket, Ariane V.

Yet this is the market that NASA is prodding industry to pursue with their Space Launch Initiative. It makes no business sense, but NASA hopes that if a new space transport can handle this market, it will also have enough performance to replace Shuttle, without NASA having to make serious changes in the way they do business.

Circumstances like this simply make it more and more clear that the SLI program must be reexamined and dramatically overhauled.

Mr. Clinton bilked the Chinese out of a quarter million dollars for a rambling, incoherent speech, according to the Guardian.

It’s over 1600 now, and much of it is classic. Someone should archive it before they pull it down out of pique.

Susan Sarandon: Oh, of course, I’m all for this petition. I am for all oppressed people everywhere. My Mexican cleaning lady is my best friend in the whole world. Well, she was until I caught her stealing the silver. I’m sure the new one will work out just fine. Mercedes, I identify with your struggle against globalization. Now please go scrub the toliet.

Neville Chamberlain: Nothing like a little appeasment to clear up the situation I always say. Hold up a piece of paper blather on about it guarenteeing “peace in our time” and voila! crazed dictators and facisists everywhere lay down their weapons and begin dancing around the maypole. Keep up the good work Aussie profs! Someday as nukes start dropping on all of Western civilization you will realize how right you are. For me it was the glorious day of 9/1/1939…..

John Docker: I am quite vexed. I thought I would become the next Noam Chomsky and fly around the world pontificating about subjects I know nothing about. I thought Susan Sarandon would invite me to her house to meet great intellectuals like Michael Moore and Ralph Nader and the lady who sings “Puff the Magic Dragon.” But the petition has been ruined. I have to go back to teaching 18 year old Aussie nitwits who fall asleep during my lectures. Ghassan is under his desk, weeping bitterly.

[Update, a few minutes later]

OK, I’ve saved everything through sixteen hundred or so to a local drive, so at least we’ll have that many if they decide to throw in the towel and pull it down.

It’s over 1600 now, and much of it is classic. Someone should archive it before they pull it down out of pique.

Susan Sarandon: Oh, of course, I’m all for this petition. I am for all oppressed people everywhere. My Mexican cleaning lady is my best friend in the whole world. Well, she was until I caught her stealing the silver. I’m sure the new one will work out just fine. Mercedes, I identify with your struggle against globalization. Now please go scrub the toliet.

Neville Chamberlain: Nothing like a little appeasment to clear up the situation I always say. Hold up a piece of paper blather on about it guarenteeing “peace in our time” and voila! crazed dictators and facisists everywhere lay down their weapons and begin dancing around the maypole. Keep up the good work Aussie profs! Someday as nukes start dropping on all of Western civilization you will realize how right you are. For me it was the glorious day of 9/1/1939…..

John Docker: I am quite vexed. I thought I would become the next Noam Chomsky and fly around the world pontificating about subjects I know nothing about. I thought Susan Sarandon would invite me to her house to meet great intellectuals like Michael Moore and Ralph Nader and the lady who sings “Puff the Magic Dragon.” But the petition has been ruined. I have to go back to teaching 18 year old Aussie nitwits who fall asleep during my lectures. Ghassan is under his desk, weeping bitterly.

[Update, a few minutes later]

OK, I’ve saved everything through sixteen hundred or so to a local drive, so at least we’ll have that many if they decide to throw in the towel and pull it down.

It’s over 1600 now, and much of it is classic. Someone should archive it before they pull it down out of pique.

Susan Sarandon: Oh, of course, I’m all for this petition. I am for all oppressed people everywhere. My Mexican cleaning lady is my best friend in the whole world. Well, she was until I caught her stealing the silver. I’m sure the new one will work out just fine. Mercedes, I identify with your struggle against globalization. Now please go scrub the toliet.

Neville Chamberlain: Nothing like a little appeasment to clear up the situation I always say. Hold up a piece of paper blather on about it guarenteeing “peace in our time” and voila! crazed dictators and facisists everywhere lay down their weapons and begin dancing around the maypole. Keep up the good work Aussie profs! Someday as nukes start dropping on all of Western civilization you will realize how right you are. For me it was the glorious day of 9/1/1939…..

John Docker: I am quite vexed. I thought I would become the next Noam Chomsky and fly around the world pontificating about subjects I know nothing about. I thought Susan Sarandon would invite me to her house to meet great intellectuals like Michael Moore and Ralph Nader and the lady who sings “Puff the Magic Dragon.” But the petition has been ruined. I have to go back to teaching 18 year old Aussie nitwits who fall asleep during my lectures. Ghassan is under his desk, weeping bitterly.

[Update, a few minutes later]

OK, I’ve saved everything through sixteen hundred or so to a local drive, so at least we’ll have that many if they decide to throw in the towel and pull it down.

Orrin Judd, (who has lots of good classic Memorial-Day poetry over at his site), emails to remind me (correctly) that today is the forty-first anniversary of Kennedy’s request to Congress to initiate the Apollo program and to land men on the Moon within the decade.

Insight magazine has an article that may provide some insight into the policy muddle at the Pentagon.

A source close to the Pentagon’s policy office laments, “You have no idea how hard it is to work on the war, find extra hours to develop a forward-looking policy that tracks with the president’s and SECDEF’s [secretary of defense’s] priorities and then try to advance it on the Hill or in the [decision-making] process, and find yourself outmanned by an opposition funded not by the leftist foundations or the congressional-opposition staff budget, but by your own policy shop’s budget.”

I don’t have time to do his latest ravings justice, but here’s the link for anyone else who wants to have at him.

Layne found a great article in the Los Angeles New Times about the Yuri’s Night party. I had a Fox column on this subject a week or so before it occured. It gives a good insight into the space-enthusiast/fanatic subculture.

I disagree with one of the space enthusiasts quoted, though.

He’s more than a little disappointed in what has happened to space exploration in the years since the heady days of Apollo. NASA, he says, fumbled the opportunity to make it an integral part of American life, and economic downturns, fuel crises and wars that rocked the home front took the attention away, maybe permanently. “The adventure has passed, in many people’s minds,” Walker says. “But many of us in this aerospace industry recognized that this phase would come, that the average citizen wants to see the adventure, the exploration, but the public funding isn’t there.”

He’s wrong. The funding is there, and has been since the end of Apollo. NASA has consistently gotten many billions of taxpayer dollars every year. What’s lacking is not funding, but the will to spend it in a way that would truly open up space. And as long as we continue to look to the government to sate our dreams, we will continue to be disappointed.

And of course, the reporter has to ask the (admitted) obligatory question:

No discussion of space exploration — an inherently risky and expensive proposition — is complete without answering the “why” question. And it can be a painful, pointed question. During Shuttleworth’s flight, an interviewer asked how he justified spending $20 million on a space junket when that money could have gone to feeding starving people outside his own back door. His answer — to demonstrate to other Africans that space was within their grasp — must have been cold comfort to many on that famine-ravaged continent who have suffered for so long. Let’s be brutally honest here: None of the Yuri’s Night crew have ever gone to bed starving.

Implicit in this commentary, of course, is the false notion that a) if Mr. Shuttleworth had spent his money in some other way, that those Africans would have been better off, and b) that Africa suffers from a lack of money that’s currently going to space activities, when in fact Africa suffers from malgovernance on a tragic and unimaginable scale.

It comes back to one of my earlier columns, in which I described how unknowledgable most people are of how much money is spent on space, relative to those things that some would have us fund instead. NASA’s annual budget would fund the Department of Health and Human services for just a few days. So, while I wouldn’t advocate this, for reasons stated above, you could double the NASA budget, taking the money from HSS to do it, and the HSS would barely even notice it. Space is not taking money from the mouths of starving kids.

But the real problem is not the amount of money being spent, but how it’s being spent. And with more private players getting involved, that problem is going to be solved soon, regardless of how much or little NASA gets.

I wonder if Monday will be different than past Memorial Days.

For many people, so many of our national holidays seem to have become bereft of meaning other than an excuse for a three-day weekend and a beer-sodden barbecue. Post September 11, I noticed that November 11 took on a new poignancy. Will Monday do so as well?

A friend of mine once suggested that we take our holidays more seriously, by using the Jewish Sedar as a model. We should actually take time out from the consumption of barley beverages, and roasting of dead animals with sugary sauces, to tell the story of why we have the day off. For instance, for the Fourth of July, he recommended an oral reading of the Declaration of Independence.

These musings are just prelude to a link. Just in time for Memorial Day, Victor Davis Hanson writes an eloquent and personal tale of another time and place, when men were giants.

Think about reading it aloud with your family on Monday (good luck getting through it without choking or tearing up). And let us hope that the present circumstances will not require similar sacrifices on so massive a scale, and that if we do, the present generation will bear them as did our parents’, and grandparents’.