I found the transcript from Crossfire on Thursday night, about space tourism.

This is the reason that I write this blog (and maybe will have to sit down and write a book, if anyone would read it). It’s always embarrassing to me to watch (or read) things like this. The amount of ignorance displayed in this short transcript, particularly by the media pundits, is amazing, and all four participants are arguing from wildly different assumption bases, but there’s not necessarily any way to tell that for most people.

Programs like this may be entertaining to some, but they are the opposite of informative.

It’s clear that Carville is as ignorant of space (in fact probably more, since he clearly has no interest in it), as he is of almost all other subjects, other than demogoguery to elect Democrats. Carlson is slightless less clueless, but not much.

Bob Park is a physicist. He has no interest in space himself, other than as an environment to be studied scientifically, and he’s incapable of imagining that anyone else might have an interest in it other than that. He hates the space station, and manned space in general, because he perceives them as a collossal waste of money that could be spent on his pet projects (and in this sense he differs in no significant way from any other pleader for the public purse–the fact that he’s a physicist, rather than a farmer seeking crop subsidies, or the head of Amtrak, should grant him no special respect on this subject). The reality is that if we weren’t spending it on station and Shuttle, NASA still wouldn’t be spending it on the space science so near and dear to Professor Parks’ heart–it would just come out of NASA’s budget entirely and go back to the general federal pot.

Professor Parks doesn’t understand that space science cannot justify the money spent on it, in the mind of the public and their representatives in Congress. It gets the few crumbs that it does only because it looks cheap in comparison to the billions that are spent on the manned space program, which has absolutely nothing to do with science. And because he does not, and will not, understand that, he comes off looking like an aloof fool, who hates for people to have a good time, even with their own money.

And his math is wrong as well. The Shuttle budget is not four billion per year, and he also betrays his ignorance of the difference between average and marginal costs, or worse, he’s simply glossing over the difference to make his ugly rhetorical points. I’m not sure which, but having read his diatribes for years, either is equally likely. The marginal cost (that is, the cost of flying the next one, given that you’re already flying some that year) is, in round numbers, about a hundred million. Still a big number, but an order of magnitude of what he’d have us believe.

Lori came off the best. This is not surprising since she a) knows much more what she’d talking about, at least relative to the rest of the panel and b) could present a sympathetic point of view, i.e., “I’m a soccer mom who wants to go into space–the space station is for learning how to live in space, to allow people like me and you to go.” Which is true, to the degree that station has any purpose at all other than a high-tech jobs and foreign-aid program.

I would question her cost numbers on the Soyuz, though. I don’t think even the Russians know what those cost. All they know is that if they take a paying passenger for a flight that’s going anyway, they’ll have twenty million dollars more than they will if they don’t.

Just once, I wish that we could have a serious discussion about space, by knowledgable participants, and with some kind of groundrules and common assumptions established, as opposed to the freak show called Crossfire. Until we do so, there’s little hope of making any significant policy progress, at least none based on what the American public might want.