Clark Lindsey has a roundup, and some thought of his own. I agree with them. No surprises there, and it the dissing of the moon was disappointing (probably even more so to Paul Spudis), but as Clark notes, destinations aren’t important right now. There’s plenty of time to figure that out and argue about it while we (finally) get the other pieces straightened out.
[Friday morning update]
Alan Boyle has more on the story, with a lot of links.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here are some comments on the plan over at PBS, from Jeff Greason, Keith Cowing, Tom Young, and a clueless state senator from the Space Coast:
[With the new plan] we’d have to rely on the Russians to get to the station. And you know, I’m a historian, I teach history — and needless to say they have not always been our most reliable allies. I fear once we lose the ability to get ourselves into space, it puts us in vulnerable position.
New flash, professor. That was the case under the old plan. And it was going to be for a lot longer. The opposition to this continues to live in a logic-free and fact-free zone.
[Update about 9 AM PDT]
Justin Kugler muses on the impact for JSC. I agree with him on pretty much all counts. I’m considering my personal war on heavy lift won for now, given that policy is no longer being driven by it, and there’s now plenty of time to educate the community on the lack of need for it. My next target is the notion of a “lifeboat” that has to bring the entire Titanic’s complement back to Southampton.
To make this sustainable, we will probably need to re-elect Obama in 2012.
Otherwise the new guy will just want his own space program for NASA.
One thing that Scott Pace got right in on the radio today — if we want to have a sustainable program, it has to be one that’s not dependent on who is president. I’m not sure how to get there, but as much of an improvement as this policy is, I’m not willing to sustain the damage on the country that would result from a second Obama term.
Will everyone who made incorrect claims about what President Obama was going to talk about today please stand up. Now apologize. Let me make a special callout to Keith Cowing of NASA Watch: everything you say is wrong, all the time. People who continue to listen to you are morons.
“if we want to have a sustainable program, it has to be one that’s not dependent on who is president.”
That’s the trick. Anything worth doing is going to take a lot of time and money to complete. That means it is likely to take more than one administration t do. So you either have to make the per administration buy in low enough so it doesn’t get noticed, or you set up a program that is not exclusively about NASA. Obama seems to have done a bit of both here.
Mr. Obama told us that people will land on Mars within his own lifetime. That must be just about the time that Mr. Bush told us we would have hydrogen-powered fuel-cell cars.
One difference is that landing humans on Mars doesn’t casually ignore the laws of physics. Unlike hydrogen-powered fuel-cell cars.
Since that’s off-topic, I’ll just point you here:
http://www.stephenfleming.net/files/Fleming_HydrogenMythV5.pdf
Stephen,
That was a little off topic, but good. It matches a lot of what I already knew, but presented it in a clear way.
Gel Bill, now I will have to vote for Obama!
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah!
Sorry, I can’t say that and keep a straight face.
Yes, Mike Puckett, you will have to vote for Obama, or at least hope that he wins in 2012 because without Obama’s backbone and spinal fortitude the FY2011 budget won’t survive past January 2013.
Too many GOP Senators will be looking for revenge, otherwise.
Ironic, isn’t it?
Cheers! 🙂
It’s a short window of opportunity, but if the private players make big inroads over the next two years then they provide the impetus to keep it going whoever is President in 2013. Success is hard to argue with, and several private companies are poised for successes over the next couple of years.
“if we want to have a sustainable program, it has to be one that’s not dependent on who is president.”
Real space commerce pays for itself and doesn’t depend on who is President. Too bad when it comes to the rapture of heavenly pilgrimage unmanned machines don’t count.
Rand,
I think the key to making it sustainable is realistic, short-term goals that yield real progress. Like these technology demonstrators. Even if Obama is gone after one term, it’ll take a new president a while to pick up the reigns on space policy, so they probably have a 3-4 year window to start making real progress. Programs that are doing well, and delivering visible results, on-time, and affordably (ie the opposite of CxP) tend to be more sustainable. If commercial space, and the technology demonstrators are executing well when the new president comes around, it would be really surprising (and a lot harder politically) to gut things at that point.
~Jon
I fully expect the Orion CRV to be flying by the end of 2012, as well as Dragon prototypes. Those two elements alone will represent substantial progress.
An unintended benefit of sending astronauts off to asteroids and around Mars is that it leaves the moon to real commerce.
Some NEAs may turn out to be useful, too, but out of the thousands of NEAs the odds of NASA choosing one of the few that turn out to be most useful are minuscule.
That was the most uninspiring list of “clear objectives” I’ve ever heard. His personal favorite was spending $6 billion more. It was the first “objective” he mentioned, after all.
It wasn’t much of a speech, but if it had been delivered BEFORE the budget rollout, it might have been an effective one. Now all it has done is energize “right wing” talk radio (Laura Ingrahm, anyway) to say that he is setting a lofty new space goal of third place for the US. This isn’t a simple issue, and I can see how she and other detractors reach that conclusion. It’s too bad this is the president who put forth some necessary changes. It’s even worse that he’s doing it so ineptly.
“Too many GOP Senators will be looking for revenge, otherwise.”
If that’s the case, it will likely be a goner next year because it looks like the Dems are going to get blown out.
I also think it is more likely to survive if the country turns away form the current path to fiscal insolvency too. We need to end this Max Powers fyscial policy.
Mr Goff:
None of those things saved the X-38.
Mfk, I watched the speech on Fox News, and it was great to see Shepard Smith’s enthusiastic reaction afterwards. I’m pretty sure he was hearing this information for the first time. Others watching Fox are welcome to tell me if they don’t recall it this way, but it was pretty clear to me that the speech left him “inspired”. He immediately said (not a quote, just a paraphrase) “I don’t understand where the Obama detractors are coming from on this one – I’m excited.” He seemed surprised human space flight wasn’t being canceled, he liked the idea of doing something new, and doing it smarter, using private enterprise and better technologies, and, surprisingly to me, he was particularly enthusaistic over the idea of visiting an asteroid. He then interviewed Homer Hickam, who was quite negative, saying Bolden and Garver didn’t know what they were doing. Shepard Smith seemed irritated by the exchange, waved off Hickam’s sourness, and went back to being excited when the interview was over.
Among uninformed people who heard the speech, people who perhaps had heard only “not going back to the moon” and were suprised when they just heard “shuttle program ending”, I wonder if the reaction was less like your reaction, and more similar to Shepard Smith’s.
Anything worth doing is going to take a lot of time and money to complete.
But if you do it in tiny steps there is less risk of everything being cancelled without anything to show for it. That’s pretty much what happened in the last twenty to thirty years. The choice is between going in circles and going in spirals.
None of those things saved the X-38.
It’s still the appropriate thing to do for technology development. On the operational front you should have a series of ever more capable missions of opportunity. Orion as a lifeboat is one such mission of opportunity. It’s not a bad start, although it is not what I would have chosen since it still duplicates emerging commercial capabilities.
“But if you do it in tiny steps there is less risk of everything being cancelled without anything to show for it.”
Exactly right. That’s what I meant by making the per administration buy in low. You eliminate the problem of some future administration having to decide if they want to expend effort on the “Obama Plan” or not. Because the real question will be whether to continue with current technology development, or use what has been developed already for some other space oriented purpose. No one has to be tied to someone else’s wagon.
My next target is the notion of a “lifeboat” that has to bring the entire Titanic’s complement back to Southampton.
It could still be an acceptable target of opportunity in a spiral development program. Not ideal, but acceptable.
Rand, is there one document or posting where you lay out the details of your lifeboat alternative? My understanding is that your lifeboat plan has two parts: an orbital safe haven, and a minimalistic crew transfer vehicle. (I’m unclear on how much delta-v the transfer vehicle would be capable of.)
The president has signaled that an Orion CRV could eventually be the basis for a beyond earth orbit spacecraft. I assume this means evolving Orion to be used as a direct re-entry vehicle from beyond LEO missions, instead of having beyond LEO missions rendezvous with ISS or another LEO destination. If your lifeboat solution was implemented instead, the merits of direct rentry might have to be reconsidered, or we’ll end up building your system and Orion too. Beyond that, do you think there is merit in planning from the start to evolve the lifeboat solutions you envision into craft which can play a role in BEO missions? I wonder how the design of the safe haven and the design of the transfer vehicle would change if it was known that these systems should be evolvable for use beyond LEO…
We still risk getting into the typical things, where newly elected leaders cancel the technology proposed by the previous administration. Please correct me if my memory is wrong: The Dems canceling the Delta Clipper and Project Timberwind, the Repubs canceling RS-84, RS-83. Now the Dems probably canceling J-2X.
Each of these projects, AFAIK, was going fairly smoothly (as well as can be expected for new technology development) at the time they were canceled. Had these technologies been developed the options at the table now would be considerably different. I would shed little tears for J-2X, since it provides nothing significantly new, however any of the other technologies could have been game changing.
I agree with Jonathan Goff and Ed Minchau, who are saying the same thing from different perspectives; successfull programs will be harder to stop and will have the political backing of a diverse constituency, some of whom will even be represented by Republicans. As for the space policy of a possible Republican presidential candidate, it’s too soon to tell. But the report of the Reagan era National Commission on Space, “Pioneering the Space Frontier”, called for many of the same elements as the “Flexiable Path” and I would say that George Bush’s “Vision for Space Exploration” is actually better served by the new plan than by Constellation. As to the continuation of Orion, yes, the “lifeboat” is lame reason but Orion plus the Service Module gives us a potential orbital tug and service vehicle and Orion plus widebody Centaur and orbital refueling gives us a beyound LEO exploration vehicle. That Obama may not recognize this may be disappointing but immaterial.
Dean, while Obama surely does not know or understand the details the way you do, he did talk yesterday about Orion-CRV becoming an element in beyond LEO missions. I agree it is immaterial but no need for disappointment.
Rand,
[[[One thing that Scott Pace got right in on the radio today — if we want to have a sustainable program, it has to be one that’s not dependent on who is president. I’m not sure how to get there, but as much of an improvement as this policy is, I’m not willing to sustain the damage on the country that would result from a second Obama term.]]]
History already provides the model in the form of focused government corporations as with the Panama Canal (3 administrations), (Alaska Railroad), TVA, BPA, Hoover Dam, (multiple administrations).
As long as a space program is driven by a government agency it will change direction as often as administrations do.
For example, if you don’t want commercial crew to become a cost plus program then instead of NASA buying commercial crew create a Government Launch Services Corporation to do so. Its mission would be to simply to purchase launch services for government agencies that require it. In the charter that creates it you would outlaw it from owning or building launch vehicles or owning or building launch facilities or paying for services in any form other then a fixed price contract awarded to the lowest bidder.
History already provides the model in the form of focused government corporations as with the Panama Canal (3 administrations), (Alaska Railroad), TVA, BPA, Hoover Dam, (multiple administrations).
All of these examples come from the first half of the 20th century, an era dominated by a central planing mentality in these matters. None of these were novel kinds of infrastructures for which real commercial demand had not already long been solidly established. During the early industrial revolution in Britain, before the railroad when canals were most crucial, the canals of Britain were privately financed, designed, built, and run. The first fifty years of railroads and electric utilities were similarly dominated by privately owned companies with private (real market) customers.
Successful infrastructural innovation has with very few exceptions come from entrepreneurial companies operating in free markets, not from activities dominated by government funding. When we have government try to speculate about future markets and develop “infrastructure” for them we get bridges to nowhere like Salyut, Mir, Shuttle and ISS.
During the early industrial revolution in Britain, before the railroad when canals were most crucial, the canals of Britain were privately financed, designed, built, and run.
Even many roads were, if the fine people at the Mises Institute are to be believed.
As long as a space program is driven by a government agency it will change direction as often as administrations do.
This is one of the strangest beliefs of the NASA Old Guard. Every government agency has changes in direction when a new Administration comes into office. They don’t get to work on the same plan for 50 years, with no changes. I don’t see the Air Force, the Navy, or the National Park Service saying that makes it impossible to accomplish their missions.
Compared to government, change in the private sector occurs even more rapidly. The modern business world is all about being agile and “thriving on chaos.” Plans change from week to week and month to month. Four years is forever. If you look at Apple’s iPhone strategy, for example, you will see numerous mid-course corrections. That’s a product that didn’t even exist four years ago.
Instead of relying exclusively on history books about old smokestack industries, how about looking at modern authors like Tom Peters and Clayton Christensen? Smokestack industries are dying, in part because they are not agile enough to compete in the modern world. TVA, which you like to cite as a role model, has been described by journalists as “the government’s Enron.”
if you don’t want commercial crew to become a cost plus program then instead of NASA buying commercial crew create a Government Launch Services Corporation to do so
Tom, even if that’s true, you’re about five years too late in saying so.
The Bush space policy review affirmed that NASA would be in charge of the USG’s civil space activities. That was at the heart of the BVSE. If you disagreed, you should have said so then.
There is no chance that another full space policy review will happen any time in the near future, so complaining about it now is just Monday morning quarterbacking.
Do you know what they say about making beds?
TVA, which you like to cite as a role model, has been described by journalists as “the government’s Enron.”
Hah. Sayings from people without any sort of capacity for strategic thought. One of the main reasons for the dominance of the Allies during WWII was strategic airpower. The main reason why the Western Allies had this strategic airpower was strategic resources. Namely aluminum production. This was made possible by cheap electricity from hydropower for electrolysis. A lot of this came from dams built during this period. Compare this air force with the Soviet Union which had to concentrate on low altitude aircraft because they had little such materials available…
Why do you think the Allies went to the trouble of designing bombs specifically to blow up German hydropower in the Ruhr?
This was a war winning investment, and contrary to others, an investment which continues to generate wealth long after the war was won.
Compare this air force with the Soviet Union which had to concentrate on low altitude aircraft because they had little such materials available…
Sigh. Yes, that was obviously because the Soviet Union did not believe in socialist dam-building projects. And obviously, if TVA helped build B-17s during World War II, it must still be a good investment today. Nothing could possibly have changed in the last 65 years.
Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. (Note, learning from history does not mean simply copying what was done in the past.) And those who read only history can do nothing but repeat it.
Just because something was a good idea in some past century doesn’t necessarily mean it is a good idea today. We don’t build B-17 bombers anymore, for good reasons.
As I’ve told Tom before, those grand engineering projects like the Transcontinental Railroad and TVA were justified on the basis of hard facts and contemporary reality, not by handwaving about historical analogies. If anyone walked into President Buchanon’s office and said, “We ought to build a Transcontinental Railroad because Pharoah built the pyramids,” he would have been thrown out the door.
Stephen Fleming,
Cute analysis, but about on par with “An Inconvenient Truth” for technical content. You need to do a well-to-wheels analysis for other fuel sources (natural gas, gasoline, diesel) before damning hydrogen fuel cells for insufficient efficiency. You also need to do some analysis regarding weight & efficiency problems of battery-powered electric vehicles (the solution doesn’t converge.) Finally, a third of your presentation amounts to sound bites from a variety of people who’ve I’ve never heard connected to any significant fuel cell development or research. Seriously? Do you also take voting advice from Hollywood stars?
Edward,
[[[ if you don’t want commercial crew to become a cost plus program then instead of NASA buying commercial crew create a Government Launch Services Corporation to do so
Tom, even if that’s true, you’re about five years too late in saying so.
The Bush space policy review affirmed that NASA would be in charge of the USG’s civil space activities. That was at the heart of the BVSE. If you disagreed, you should have said so then.
There is no chance that another full space policy review will happen any time in the near future, so complaining about it now is just Monday morning quarterbacking. ]]]
You mean the VSE that has just been dumped by Obama? Without a new full space policy review 🙂
Googaw,
[[[All of these examples come from the first half of the 20th century, an era dominated by a central planing mentality in these matters.]]]
You mean the part of the century where the we went from the Wright Flyer to landing on the Moon?
The same part of the century when “socialist” planning took the nation from mud covered horse and buggy roads to the Interstate Highway system, at the urging of “free market” entrepreneurs like Henry Ford and Walter Chrysler?
The same part of the century when those socialist dams transformed the economy of the southern U.S. and made the west bloom while making cities like those meccas for capitalism Las Vegas and LA possible?
The same part of the century when the productivity from such “socialist” planning created the environment for entrepreneurs to make America the richest nation in the history of the world?
Hmmm Comparing the expansion of wealth and increase in the standard of living that resulted from such a “socialist” planning mentality, versus the relative stagnation in areas like space technology, aviation, (where’s my SST!), etc. and the emergence of “bubble” wealth like the dot.com boom and housing boom, maybe its not a bad idea to return to it 🙂
Of the course the real secret was back then they didn’t worry if something was done using a ‘socialist” or ‘capitalist” model. They were too pragmatic for such philosophical nonsense that consume so much of national debate today, they just figured out a funding and organization structure that worked and ensured the project was completed no matter which way the political winds blew.
Really, at times I wonder who has done more to setback human progress, Ayn Rand with her objectivist fantasy or Karl Marx with his communist one. In any case both philosophies are too simplistic and extremist related to the true complexity of economic progress and the creation of sustainable wealth.
Edward,
[[[If anyone walked into President Buchanon’s office and said, “We ought to build a Transcontinental Railroad because Pharoah built the pyramids,” he would have been thrown out the door.]]]
Read up on Theodore Judah sometime. The one they called “Crazy Theodore” because he argued for the government to fund a railroad that would never pay for itself. After all you had sailing ships that bought the good needed to California while the wagon trails were just fine for the volume of traffic generated by pioneers…
Tom, in your overwrought and highly selective paean to the New Deal, which far more than Ayn Rand fans (never read her myself) may dispute, you keep dodging the issue, diverting the discussion into the relative merits of government vs. private industry in mature industries which is not what is at issue here. All of your examples have been mature industries for which civilian demand had long been observed. Dams, electric utilities, canals, railroads and much else that governments nationalized in the 20th century were very mature and very productive industries long before governments started building and operating them them. And, BTW, the economic growth rate in the U.S. was higher between the Civil War and WWI than between the New Deal and the end of the Cold War.
All this is a diversion however, because mature industries are not the topic at hand. The relevant issue is novel infrastructures serving unproven civilian needs. For that, the government track record is indisputably terrible, and the long sad history of the Soviet and NASA attempts to develop space infrastructure — well over 90% of attempts ending in economic failures at the cost of nearly a trillion dollars (not a loan, like TARP, but simply massive numbers of man-lives down the tubes) — is exhibit A as well as being closest to our concerns. But there are numerous other sad examples such as Yucca Mountain, Concorde and the Tu-144, the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, Jimmy Carter’s Synthetic Fuels Corporation, Sematech, and many, many others that squandered hundreds of billions of taxpayer money with little to no benefit to commerce.
Martinj, indeed the most advance roads during the early industrial revolution were the privately funded, built, and operated turnpikes. The Eurotunnel is one of many modern examples of privately financed and operated highways.
BTW, here is a very good study showing how infrastructure pushers have strategically lowballed cost estimates for at least 70 years across Europe and the U.S.:
http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/JAPAASPUBLISHED.pdf
The Eurotunnel is one of many modern examples of privately financed and operated highways.
Heheh, you chose precisely the wrong example. The Channel tunnel was a disaster that sucked up untold billions of taxpayers’ money. It was later privatised and went bankrupt several times. The project was started by Margaret Thatcher (big surprise) and Francois Mitterrand (no surprises there). A much earlier attempt by Napoleon had failed.
Edward: there were a lot more aluminum built airplanes than the B-17. The B-29 skin was all aluminum. The P-51 fuselage was entirely made of aluminum.
It is still used in aviation today, although titanium and composites are increasingly important. For example a present generation Boeing 777 is 50% aluminum, while a next generation Boeing 787 is supposed to be 15% aluminum.
Even if aluminum is made redundant the electricity generated, as well as the water stored, at such hydropower facilities makes them an important factor in generating wealth today and tomorrow.
At one time cheap hydro electricity was very important for uranium separation and heavy water production as well. Perhaps you also consider these irrelevant…
The Soviet Union lost a lot of generating capacity since they were actually invaded (perhaps a novel concept to you) and their infrastructure bombed while they fought against the Nazis and the Japanese. Power plants of any kind are an obvious target for strategic bombing.
Yucca mountain is only a failure in the sense there has been no political will to go forward with a frankly simple project.
As for Concorde the interest was somewhat more complex than you might think. The Olympus engines were originally made for this little plane called the TSR-2. It was a long range supersonic bomber. The Russians might have canceled the Tu-144 but they still have Tu-160 strategic bombers flying today, using the same NK-32 engines, and are in the process of building more. As for the US they canceled the politically correct civilian version however the B-1 was still funded and deployed. People who think the supersonic civilian projects were just for prestige are sorely mistaken. The technology was funded because it was considered relevant for defense purposes.
As for the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, you will rue the day research on this technology stopped being funded. Mark my words.
As for the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, you will rue the day research on this technology stopped being funded.
The technology still exists. And if I’m not very much mistaken it is being worked on in Houston.
Martijn: research on fuel production from oil shale (one of the things Synthetic Fuels Corporation was working on) was restarted in 2003.
As for people who think this sort of activity does not need funding, you can buy tar sands fuel from Canada, or Gas-to-Liquids diesel from Qatar using South African technology while oil fields in the US are depleted.
Shell has enormous expertise in GTL (Pearl, Bintulu) and has a major research lab in Houston, a sister lab to the one in Amsterdam where I’ve been a contractor. On reflection I’m not sure they do GTL work there.
Googaw,
What is the basis of your assumption that building rockets is not a mature industry? The Soyuz dates to the 1960’s. The Shuttle to the 1970’s… The main difference between the Falcon and earlier Kerosene rockets is the electronics and new structural materials, but the Falcon is something that Dr. Goddard would understand and even be able to provide useful input on.
BTW the failure of the various rocket projects you mentioned was not the technology or govern funding, but politics which starved the money needed to achieve their goals as new administrations went in new directions, the starting point of this thread.
Also you seem to forget Comsat/Intelsat which was dealing with new technology and were very successful in achieving President’s Kennedy’s other goal of a space based communication system. It survived multiple administrations because it was a public-private partnership. And its organizational model made privatization easy when the economics enabled it.
BTW England wasn’t the only country pushing canal building technology. France and the German states were doing so as well, using government funding. And let’s not forget the Erie Canal which was also a government project, although it was the State of New York, not the federal government. Other U.S. states were building canals as well during this period. The Panama Canal was not the first government built canal by a long shot, just one of more successful, I also suspect that the fact it was finished a year ahead of schedule also undermines your anti-government argument which is why you have to discredit it.
Also growth of GDP is not the only measure of wealth. Distribution of wealth is also important for a stable economy something often over looked.
And you don’t have had to read Ayn Rand. Like Marx her ideas have become part of the backdrop of political philosophy. Its no accident the anti-government project viewpoint started emerging in the 1960’s after her most popular work. You should learn some history about the philosophy you argue for. For example, I would be surprised if 1 in ten of the New Space advocates who argue against cost plus contracting have any idea where it came from and why it developed…
Godzilla,
[[[At one time cheap hydro electricity was very important for uranium separation and heavy water production as well. Perhaps you also consider these irrelevant…]]]
Yep, there are reasons why Oak Ridge is in Tennesse and Hartford is in eastern Washington 🙂
Indeed, without the New Deal projects World War II would have been a lot longer and much more bloody. With an outside chance the result might have gone the other way…
BTW I saw a documentary about the CCC, another New Deal program that is hated by conservatives, that indicated the possible role the CCC had in the successful rapid mobilization following Pearl Harbor since it have already provided millions of youth with an introduction to a semi-military lifestyle making it easier for them to transition from being civilians to GI’s.
The issue is not building a normal commercial-sized rocket, it is civilian “infrastructure” where the real market need is speculative: super-heavy rockets, capsules for carrying astronauts, space stations, lunar “infrastructure”, and so on. In such speculative areas there is no economic accountability, because there is previous or current real market to compare government performance to. In all your examples — canals, dams, railroads, and so on — there was a long history of previous commercial activity in these areas that management and taxpayers could compare government performance with. By contrast novel infrastructure not financed by a real market is economically unaccountable.
Rocket launching is one of the few examples where an infrastructure first designed for government use (launching long-range missiles) fortuitously turned out to satisfy a civilian need as well. Said infrastructure was first designed to fulfill a compelling military need, e.g. the need for long-range missiles. Then it was repurposed into two other national security needs (one unique to that time, the other ongoing), prestige and reconnaissance. Then as happens in a small fraction of such cases meeting a compelling military need led to meeting a related civilian need. Indeed, such examples provide the only major successful examples of governments developing novel infrastructure. As for Comsat/Intelsat, that model proved to be a failure and the comsat industry was far more thriving after government stopped enforcing those artificial monopolies.
I’m not claiming, BTW, that harm could not come from nationalizing normal launchers, or airliners, or many other kinds of privately run infrastructure. One need only looking to the Cold War states with nationalized industries like the Soviet Union to see more than ample examples of such harm. I’m simply observing that the harm from such nationalization is far less than the harm from government designing and funding infrastructure for which the need is speculative. Positive examples of nationalized infrastructure in mature industries are not good evidence for the ability of government to prophecy about future novels kinds of markets and anticipate what infrastructure they might need.
the failure of the various rocket projects you mentioned was not the technology or govern funding, but politics which starved the money
The oldest and worst excuse in the book. Hundreds of billions of dollars was not enough to blow on our economic fantasies, you should have given us more, more, more! Economically unaccountable. Unimaginably greedy. Indeed, incredibly pathological.
Errata: The second sentence above should of course be “In such speculative areas there is no economic accountability, because there is no previous or current real market to compare government performance to.”
Thomas,
Many technologies are not mature at half a century, or even half a millenia.
At the start of the civil war, firearms had been in use for half a millenia, and they were still muzzle loaders. Even the Colt revolvers were loaded from the front of the cylinder in a time consuming manner. A quarter of a century later, muzzle loaders were obsolete and the first machine gun was available. .
At the time of the first transisters, vacuum tubes were a mature technology with over half a century of use. We know what happened then.
Underground mining has been around for many centuries. Do you think the many century old technology of underground mining was mature a century ago when it had a history of over a millenia?
Sailing ships had been in existance for how long when engines took over on the oceans? Do you think ocean travel was mature at the time of the American revolution?
While I agree with much of what you say, I strongly disagree with the concept that rocketry is a mature industry. Industries mature at different rates and different stages. It is not safe to assume that any industry has reached a point that it is immune to paradime shifts.
I have read Ayn Rand and believe that a lot of the ideas are good, but not all. I will take her concepts over Marx’s every time. I believe in a balance of free enterprise and central government. Right now the balance is badly tilted and getting worse with too many people trying to get the government to do the things for them that they should be doing for themselves.
I have a pretty good idea of the basis for cost plus contracting and why it is used. The problem is that it is very often misused by people that are trying to control things they don’t understand. Cost plus must have intellegent leadership that is responsible for results. At this time, it is quite difficult to make the claim that this is the case.
In my day job, about half the work is cost plus. It only works well when the project controllers are good at their job. When they are not, or even worse, indecisive, the results are discusting even with all the same workers and suppliers.
Googaw,
[[[As for Comsat/Intelsat, that model proved to be a failure and the comsat industry was far more thriving after government stopped enforcing those artificial monopolies.]]]
Evidence? Or just more of the usual libertarian revisionist history…