Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Layers Of Fact Checkers And Editors

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There’s kind of a weird editorial by Joshua Green over at the Boston Globe today. I don’t understand the title (Takeoff?), and he doesn’t seem to know the name of either the senior senator from Florida or the NASA administrator. And this kind of statement is always sort of annoying:

The real shock came in January, when President Obama killed its successor, Project Constellation, which aimed to return Americans to the moon by 2020.

What does it mean, to call Constellation the Shuttle’s “successor”? I guess it is, in the sense that it was the next human spaceflight program that would absorb all of the NASA personnel that were working Shuttle, but it’s not like it actually replaces the Shuttle in any functional sense, other than the ability to get crew to and from LEO. And then we have the usual dumb comments from people like Tom Delay:

Critics reply that killing Constellation and reorienting NASA is foolish and costly. “The innovations that have come out of the space program are phenomenal,’’ DeLay said. “With our failing manufacturing base, it is extremely important for our economy to maintain them.’’ Private space flight has shown promise, but it will be years before a commercial company can safely launch astronauts into space. Lacking the capacity to send US astronauts to the International Space Station, we’ll soon pay Russia to ferry them there, which won’t be cheap.

What “innovations” were going to come out of Constellation? The whole point of the project was to avoid innovation, with its associated technical risk. And I suppose that it’s technically true that it will be “years” before a commercial company can safely launch astronauts into space. But it won’t be as many “years” as it would have been with Ares/Orion. There’s no reason that the number of years need be more than two or three, except for resistance from Congress to fund it for dumb reasons like this:

…the loudest complaint regards “American greatness’’ — the idea that the willing forfeiture of our leadership in space amounts to a kind of moral trespass that will cede to nations like China and India the next great strides in science and technology.

This is mindless. We aren’t “forfeiting our leadership in space” by sensibly having private companies perform the mundane task of getting astronauts to and from there, half a century after the dawn of the manned space age. And China and India are both a long way from doing anything that will vault them ahead of us (and even longer, if we follow the new course instead of the moribund Constellation).

Where his critics have a point is in arguing that NASA lacks a clear mission. Without a directive and funding, talk of visiting Mars or an asteroid is grandiose but empty.

While the funding is lacking, due to squabbling on the Hill, there is a directive — to develop the technologies needed to make going beyond earth orbit affordable. But for people who look at the world through Apollo-colored glasses, unless it has a destination and date and unaffordably huge rocket (i.e., a five-year plan for the celestial crops), it’s not a real space program.

9 thoughts on “Layers Of Fact Checkers And Editors”

  1. Who is David Bolden?

    Where his critics have a point is in arguing that NASA lacks a clear mission. Without a directive and funding, talk of visiting Mars or an asteroid is grandiose but empty. Meanwhile, gauzy nostrums about inspiring children and international cooperation are creating political headaches. Last week, NASA administrator David Bolden touched off a storm when he told al Jazeera that the agency’s new mission was to “find a way to reach out to the Muslim world’’ — surely not what anybody had in mind.

  2. The thing is, folks saw Constellation as a return to the moon program. Granted they saw is as a Apollo rerun, but still going out. But now killing it and shuttle, and now Bolden’s “…America can never go past LEO by itself again…” comments, sounds like the end of NASA, and the US, as doing anything of significance in space again. I mean the argument for years was “..shuttle just went round and round, we need NASA to go outward…”, but now word from Obama via Bolden is NASA should never go out, and can’t even go to space to go round and round anymore. In a bit over a year, it will be NASA as a subordinate to Russia in space. Assuming commercial crew ever happens (which doesn’t look likely) it will just be NASA and US space program reduced further to subordinates to commercial interests.

    Effectively Bolden threw all of this into folks face, and they don’t like it.

  3. Was NASA subordinate to Russia when we depended on them during the post-Columbia stand down? Was NASA going to be subordinate to Russia during the “gap” between Constellation and Shuttle?

    That’s an absurd argument, especially given that every single person I personally know working on commercial space ventures does so, at least in part, because they want to help NASA explore.

    The word is that we will go out, but that we must do so smartly and the brute force approach no longer applies.

  4. The five-year plan for celestial crops? Lordy, that’s a good one. Throw the Potemkin 1-x in the mix and we’ve got NASA repeating Russia’s history in miniature. I guess that makes private space companies the Ukraine.

  5. > Justin Kugler Says: July 8th, 2010 at 10:00 am
    >
    > Was NASA subordinate to Russia when we depended
    > on them during the post-Columbia stand down? Was
    > NASA going to be subordinate to Russia during the
    > “gap” between Constellation and Shuttle?

    Clearly yes (they could fly and we couldn’t, theior spaceprogram cuold cut it) but in those cases you could argue it was just temporary until were “back on top again” at some stated point. Course now there is no stated future point.

    > That’s an absurd argument, especially given that every
    > single person I personally know working on commercial
    > space ventures does so, at least in part, because they
    > want to help NASA explore.==

    There was always a politically nonsensicalness about that argument, but now the argument is just gone. Boldens Al-Jezeera interview shot it down with the “we won’t go beyond LEO again” bit. That on top of them working so hard to kill Constellation, politically just says the US is not going to do exploration. You can’t argue that “well if you read between the lines they really mean to go beyond leo later after they..x,y,z.” Now its Obama via Bolden saying never again. Its hard to read between the lines and see and argue the reverse.

  9. There’s no reading between the lines required, Kelly. All you have to do is read the FY2011 budget proposal and listen to what NASA has said about the center assignments.

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