…versus political philosophies.
I have some problems:
I very much doubt that anyone in the space community rejects Obama’s position purely out of hate for the man or his other policies or even his political party. Indeed, it often seems as though on the one issue of space Republican and Democrat positions are switched around completely.
This might be due to the fact that there are so few people – and in particular so few Congressmen – who are actually interested in space in general or NASA in particular. Those outliers might be swaying the majority that doesn’t care about space.
Similarly one cannot say that all Boomers are nostalgic for Apollo, nor are the “Homers” simply looking out for their own district at the expense of the country and its future. The categorizations just don’t match reality.
I disagree. Few people fall neatly into one of the three camps, but they do capture the reasons for opposition, at least from conservatives. And as I understand it, “Boomers” and “Homers” are nostalgic and parochial, by the definition being used here (i.e., “boomers” doesn’t mean baby boomers in general, but rather those specific ones with an Apollo nostalgia). And while “Haters” isn’t a very nice label, there are in fact people who are opposed to this policy for no reason other than it was put forth by this administration (just as there were a lot of Democrats who would have cheered the VSE had it been offered by someone other than the evil Buuuuuush). As I wrote in April (where does the time go?):
The so-called conservative opposition to this new direction in space policy seems, at least to me, to come from three motivations: a visceral and intrinsic (and understandable) distaste for any policy that emanates from this White House; a nostalgia for the good old days, when we had a goal and a date and a really big rocket and an unlimited budget (what I’ve described as the “Apollo cargo cult”); and, in the case of such politicians as Senators Shelby, Hutchison, Hatch, et al., pure rent seeking for their states. Of course, these aren’t mutually exclusive: For some, all three apply. But none of these reasons addresses the problems with the status quo or the wisdom of the new policy.
But the bigger problem is trying to map the three space visions onto the two-dimensional Nolan chart (which is itself oversimplified — for example, it doesn’t usefully distinguish between legitimate concerns about national security and jingoism). I don’t know how to do it, myself, though I have to confess that I haven’t tried. But then, it wouldn’t even occur to me to do so. I have in fact written a 4000-word essay on what a conservative space policy might look like, that I’m shopping around right now, though I may just distribute it at the FreedomWorks BlogCon next week in Crystal City, and publish it here. But it’s complicated.
You can break down the space advocates in particular and the population at large in any number of ways, though I wonder how useful this exercise is. At the end of the day, of anyone remotely committed to some measure of venturing into space, the two camps that matter are:
1. taxpayers looking to secure a concrete return on the billions spent on national space programs, and…
2. everybody else.
As of today, group 2 significantly outnumbers group 1. End of story.
Rand,
[[[Indeed, it often seems as though on the one issue of space Republican and Democrat positions are switched around completely.]]]
Or it could be that Republicans, many of whom were business owners, are much more aware of what a market is and what it takes for a business to succeed in the commercial marketplace and so don’t buy the government contracting equals commercial market argument.
“I wonder how useful this exercise is.”
Well, right now if you go to blogs like Space Politics or Once and Future Moon, or here, you see the same people having the same arguments over and over, talking past each other. Nobody is convincing anyone of anything. I think that we are all operating from different sets of unstated assumptions, and that those assumptions have much to do with the political and economic philosophies of the individuals involved. It’s like we’re all speaking the same words but using different languages.
However, how often does one first work out a philosophy and then form all their other opinions around that? Usually it’s the other way around. I think if people were to look at the opinions they hold on spaceflight and compare those to the philosophies those opinions actually adhere to, they might re-think their positions. Or, at least they might see that other positions might not be completely ridiculous, depending on point of view.
Who knows? Maybe we’ll get some more productive discussions.
Yeah. We are those people. 😉
Insofar as the comments are concerned, we read one another, pick apart each other’s thoughts and try to think up ways to keep the convo going. For a time and on the Internet, that’s just plain, harmless fun. Problem is, folks in a position do things are acting the same way on the job. NASA spends $20 billion a year on God knows what and then tries to engage the country in a philosophical discussion of man’s place in space. For $20 friggin’ billion a year, that’s a no brainer–to better Americans’ chances of recouping that $20 billion and a profit. Everything else is just glorified navel gazing.
“NASA spends $20 billion a year on God knows what and then tries to engage the country in a philosophical discussion of man’s place in space.”
They spend the money first and then ask for opinions second because most people’s opinion are that they should just them the money straight up. I mean of just about any space article of note, with comments enabled, you invariably get a post or 2 saying that space is all a waste of time and money. The obvious solution is to just make manned space flight cheaper. Most people go into the thought process with the blanket assumption that manned spaceflight has to be extremely expensive; prophecy meet thyself.
It is extremely expensive. Even at $5000/kg to LEO, that is still expensive, especially if you can’t even bother to think of a reason to do it. Especially if you can’t even be bothered to articulate a reason to do so. This isn’t just NASA’s problem, it’s Big Science’s in general. Whether it’s dropping $650 million to test General Relativity an Nth time, or $2 billion to build a whole new particle accelerate and test the Standard Model an Nth time, or to launch a new space telescope to confirm the metric expansion of space the Nth time, no one’s even bothering to ask whether or not we could be spending the same money doing more profitable things in space? Like actually settling the damn thing.
Or it could be that Republicans, many of whom were business owners, are much more aware of what a market is and what it takes for a business to succeed in the commercial marketplace and so don’t buy the government contracting equals commercial market argument.
But a government-owned International Lunar Development Corporation does equals a commercial market. Sure, Tom. 🙂
Gotta love “Republican” business professors who claim to be against government contracts except when those contracts go to their own pet projects. In which case, the only thing wrong is that the government isn’t spending enough money on them.
And why is that people calling for “international” socialist wetdreams always want Uncle Sam to pick up the lion’s share of the bill? There are over a hundred nations in the UN, Tom. Most of them are less infested with privatization, free markets, property rights, and other evils you rail against. Why don’t you ask them to fund your “international” corporation?
You don’t even need the United States. The US didn’t sign the Law of the Sea Treaty, but that didn’t stop the UN from creating the maritime equivalent of your International Lunar Development Corporation — the International Seabed Authority. Which has been a raging economic success, as Matulan economics predicts. 🙂
Nolan charts or charts of any dimension are only useful if they give us insight into how to more forward. I think the way forward is not to get everybody to agree, but to get enough people behind an idea that moves us forward.
I think the bottleneck is the cost of fuel to orbit. We could build a fully reusable ship from existing components and put it in orbit today for a one time cost (much less than $3b amortized over decades of service and many multiple missions.) Companies are today poised to provide transfer to and from those ships for a fixed ticket price. This gives us access to every point under 7 to 9 km/s or so delta V.
What does it cost to fill 2.5e6 kg of fuel tanks in LEO for my example design? I estimate it’s less than $15b but that’s should be much less if somebody smarter than me takes on the challenge.