Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

“Thank You, Mr. President”

10 Comments

Praise for the new space policy from Buzz Aldrin.

You know, everyone has been saying how noteworthy it is that Neil Armstrong has spoken out against it, because he’s been such a relative hermit for forty years. I have a different take. Buzz has spent the past four decades fighting to get better space policy, and one that opens up space for all of us, and has earned his space-policy chops, while Neil has been a reclusive professor in Ohio, and not engaged at all. While he’s an admirable man for his life accomplishments, I’m not really interested in the opinions of a Neil-come-lately on this issue. Either way, I don’t find argument from astronaut authority particularly persuasive when the arguments themselves aren’t.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here is Scott Pace’s response on C-Span. I haven’t listened to it but I’m assuming that he’s just expanding on what he said on To The Point yesterday.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Actually, I shouldn’t necessarily assume that. His discussion on To The Point was occurring as, or right after, the president was speaking. He may have revised his thoughts after he saw the speech.

10 thoughts on ““Thank You, Mr. President””

  1. Rand, do you agree with this snippet?

    But now that the president has spoken and challenged us, the real hard work begins. I know many of my former colleagues, such as my former mission commanders on Gemini 12 and Apollo 11, Jim Lovell and Neil Armstrong, as well as my former colleague Gene Cernan, have expressed their doubts about Obama’s new direction in space. I take their concerns seriously, but I know that when they look carefully at what our president is proposing, they will see as I have seen a fabulous new opportunity unfolding before us.

    But I predict here on AOL News that it won’t take us five years to design that new booster. If we start out with a design that uses our shuttle heritage, we can be flying within five years, hauling lots of supplies to the space station and the first equipment for our deep space vehicle.

  2. Oh, and I agree with this . . .

    Buzz has spent the past four decades fighting to get better space policy, and one that opens up space for all of us, and has earned his space-policy chops

    FWIW

  3. No, because I don’t think we need a heavy lifter at all. But we have plenty of time to fight that later. We need to stabilize the current policy and make sure that Ares is really dead before we move on to the next battle. We won’t know that until next year, and maybe not even then. If there’s no budget bill this year (and the Dems are trying to avoid one to try to minimize the political damage leading up to the elections) a continuing resolution would continue Constellation as well.

  4. An interesting side effect of that is that Obama would have the authority to tear down the LC-39 infrastructure as soon as possible.

  6. Hi All,

    Yes, Buzz Aldrin has been working for decades to move space policy forward so he has really earned it and its about time they are listening to him.

    Tom

  7. Newton’s Law of Space Policy: “For every astronaut, there is an equal and opposite astronaut.”

  9. Scott Pace’s broadcast was like this really diplomatic defense of the Constellation program. He seems to basically defend much the same of what Mike Griffin did. He also glossed over the Ares delays, or the design issues, did not mention that the US has been paying for Russian flights to ISS for years already, leaving the impression that the current US President is somehow leaving the country hostage to the Russians for ISS manned access as part of some new policy. When this is not new policy at all.

    I also think he dissed the Shuttle too easily. Heck I am no Shuttle defender, but even I know when it is retired the US will lose capabilities no one else has. SLI was the last program which proposed to retain these sorts of capabilities by building a TSTO reusable.
    The fact is after the dust settles it seems only the USAF will be doing work in the area of RLVs. While this is understandable as such vehicles have more difficulty in integrating into deeper manned space exploration due to weight penalties if you use winged stages, I think developing other reusables might be worthwhile even for deeper space exploration.
    You just need to read the Project Selene and Project Deimos proposals Phil Bono made decades ago with a VTVL SSTO to figure out the possibilities had, for example, something like Delta Clipper been built.

  10. In fairness to Scott Pace, he didn’t have a lot of time to go into history or establish nuances during an interview which maybe lasted ten minutes, and the majority of the questions he got afterwards were pretty inane (I mean, How could ANY OF US support a manned space program after hearing how NASA destroyed all those astronaut sex tapes?).

    To be blunt, the public understanding of space issues is pretty small, and attempts to increase it by one shot interviews and public-released letters are not effective.

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