There’s a long piece over at GQ by Sean Wilsey, about NASA.

This discussion with Jeff Hanley and Doug Cooke is sort of pathetic:

I began by saying, “The public at large has no idea what the Constellation program is or, really, that it even exists.” This brought on strong cringing, after which both men’s faces sank into resigned sadness. They nodded beleagueredly at each other.

Then I asked if the Ares rockets weren’t maybe a mistake.

Hanley, the midwesterner, cool and restrained, in an off-white suit jacket: “The Ares V’s the biggest rocket anybody will have ever built. This gets lost in discussions of performance. To redesign and human-rate”—i.e., make it safe for humans to fly into orbit on it—“an existing launch vehicle would cost a lot of time. There’s a lot of momentum behind Ares. It’ll improve crew safety by a factor of ten. Airlines have a one-in-10,000 fatality rate. The shuttle has a one-in-sixty…as safe as getting in your car.… We’re shooting for one in 1,000.”

Cooke, in a blazer, from behind his lunch: “Preliminary design review went very well.”

First of all, if he’d done a little research, instead of just taking the NASA employees’ word for it, he’d know that in fact the PDR was a disaster, and not even properly completed. And Hanley’s response as to whether or not Ares is the right thing isn’t responsive — it’s evasive. How does the fact that Ares V is the biggest rocket ever built justify that it’s the right thing to do? It doesn’t. What madness is it to think that “redesigning” and “human rating” an existing reliable vehicle will take longer than developing an entirely new one? He’s simply snowing the journalist, spouting the party line. Not to mention just pulling reliability numbers out of his nethers. He has no more idea of how much Ares will improve safety than people knew about Shuttle’s reliability in 1985.

He’s clearly become an uncritical fan boy:

…that evening I found myself walking around my hotel room saying, “It really does stupefy me how great this agency is and how little the country appreciates it.”

There is the usual assumption that NASA can do no wrong, and that it’s taking the best approach possible to get us to the stars, and that there’s nothing wrong with it that a little more public appreciation and bigger budgets wouldn’t help. It doesn’t even seem to occur to him that there might be other ways, that would not only cost less money, but give us a lot more results. It’s the typical binary world of “NASA is great” or “cancel the space program,” with no nuance or understanding of the underlying issues and pathologies of the space industrial complex. I hope that he’ll be a little less gullible, and take a broader view when he researches and writes his book.

As an aside, I worked with Clinton Dorris (Altair manager) for a couple weeks a few years ago in DC, when we were both working for the ARES Corporation. He’s a good guy.

And I find it irritating when people refer to the Zero G aircraft as the “Vomit Comet.” I would think that Zero G would be annoyed as well, because they work hard to avoid that, while the NASA KC-135 (which has had that nickname for decades) almost takes it as a perverse point of pride that they make people sick.

[Late evening update]

Jeez, Looeez. Jay Barbree makes Sean Wilsey (who has responded in comments) look like a cynical skeptic in comparison. He seems to have quaffed an entire barrel of the NASA koolaid. Check out this fantasy history:

President Bush gathered the best minds and experts of the day and told them to get started.

“It’ll be cheaper to modify an unmanned rocket like the Atlas 5 or Delta 4,” said one.

“Right,” agreed another, but they soon found the Atlas 5 and the Delta 4 didn’t have the power. They would have to be beefed up.

It was back to the drawing board, and the drawing board kept pointing them back to Apollo, to the kind of system the Russians had been flying successfully for five decades.

First they would need the safest hardware out there. They would need to build a rocket that would fly only astronauts. They had had it with the “one rocket fits all” boys, and they studied and tested, and studied and tested again. And they came up with a beauty. The first stage would be made from the space shuttle’s solid rocket boosters.

Then, they needed a second stage. Again, back to Apollo — the magnificent J-2 engine.

“Must have an astronaut escape system,” one insisted. “Can’t have another Challenger.”

“Got it,” assured another, pointing to the drawing of a rocket escape tower. “This baby’s computer will boost the living to safety in a microsecond — do it from the moment of ignition.”

“Must fly a low trajectory so the crew can survive anywhere along the way,” offered a third.

“Right. Low profile all the way out.”

“Delta 4 and Atlas 5 can’t do that. Right?”

“Right. Their flight profiles are too high.”

“This has got to be the safest rocket ever flown.”

“How about 1-in-3,000 odds?”

“Great. The space shuttle is about 1 in 75, right?

“Or less.”

“And Delta 4 and Atlas 5?”

“About a third, if that.”

It was obvious that the new rocket design, dubbed the Ares I, was the safe way to go for putting humans into orbit. The master planners realized they would also need a heavy-lift monster — a rocket bigger than Apollo’s Saturn V.

Again, they reached for proven hardware. This rocket, called the Ares V, would haul record-setting loads into Earth orbit. There, astronauts would pick them up for trips most anywhere in the solar system.

“It was obvious.”

Simple. Safe. Soon.

I’m embarrassed for him. He’s supposed to be a veteran space reporter. Maybe that’s why NASA is such a mess.

[Wednesday morning update]

More thoughts from Clark Lindsey. I hadn’t noted this, but he’s right — you’d never know from the Wilsey piece that Zero G is a completely private company, and has nothing to do with NASA, except for attempts to sell services to them:

I can appreciate the enthusiasm of someone like Mr. Wilsey for space exploration and for NASA’s Space Age accomplishments. On the other hand, such articles typically express the standard NASA is Space, Space is NASA attitude that became so dominant in the 1960s. Mr. Wilsey, for example, describes his experience of weightlessness on a ZERO G aircraft but he does not explain that ZERO-G is a private company independent of the agency. This could have led to a discussion of developments with commercial human spaceflight. Instead, a reader will most likely finish the article with the impression that the only thing going on today in space is NASA’s attempt to repeat Apollo.

Of course, the piece was supposed to be about NASA, so he couldn’t necessarily be expected to stray down that (more interesting) alleyway, but he should have made it more clear (particularly with the confusion over calling the Zero G aircraft NASA’s trademarked name).

Also, the more I think about it, the more simultaneously dismayed and astounded I am by the penultimate graf of the Jay Barbree piece:

The problem seems to be that Project Constellation was formed with a Republican in the White House — and because of this, some want a redo. But they have a problem: how to get around the fact that Constellation is sound. It’s the safest human spaceflight project ever put to paper. Opponents are groping for anything to tear it down.

This is truly wackadoodle stuff. “The problem seems to be…” Seems to be to whom? Jay Barbree? Because he can’t imagine any sane reason to oppose this (schedule slip slidin’ away, development costs up by a factor of two and a half, refusal to show the numbers on how “safe” it is, insane operational costs) it must be because we don’t like George Bush? This is like inverse BDS.

We don’t have to come up with some way to “get around the fact that Constellation is sound.” That’s not a fact. It’s an opinion (and a ludicrous one on the objective evidence), based on Jay spending too much time with his NASA buds, and too little independent investigation and critical thinking. As I said, I’m embarrassed for him.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I must have been too tired last night to pay proper attention — perhaps I was just too appalled at the rewriting of the history of Constellation, and got stuck on the first page. The more I read this piece, the more incoherent and rambling it becomes, wandering from the standard myth that the Apollo I fire was all North American’s fault (it wasn’t) to nutty paranoia about a “monopoly” of launch pads by “America’s largest military conglomerate,” Boeing-Lockheed Martin.

Jay. Please. There is no such “conglomerate” as “Boeing-Lockheed Martin.” ULA is a joint venture of the two of them, and the parent companies are largely hands off. ULA is not a “military” entity. It is a commercial launch company. And it has no plans, as far as I know, to utilize either pad 39, even if we end up launching on EELVs.

I can see why NASA gave him a public service medal, though. He apparently does them the “public” service of dutifully parroting whatever they tell him, when he’s not coming up with loopy tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories.

[Bumped]

[Thursday morning update]

Welcome Instapundit readers. Lots more around the blog, and if you’re just interested in space, and not the politics, just click on that category. “Rocket Man” over at Rockets’n’Such has another comment on the Barbree piece:

Wow. Let’s repeat that. “The safest human spaceflight project ever put to paper.”

And let’s hope it stays that way, right there, safe on the paper.

Indeed.