On the 28th anniversary of the event (and my birthday), Mollie Hemingway (to whom I gave a copy of the book at the Ricochet podcast Sunday night) has already read and reviewed it over at The Federalist. I would clarify this, though:
He suggests that NASA consider returning to an R&D function consistent with its original charter, otherwise getting out of the human spaceflight business entirely.
I don’t necessarily want them out of the human spaceflight business entirely, but I do want to get them out of now-mundane things like getting people (or anything) into orbit, and focus on the systems they need to go beyond. We have a commercial launch industry, and they should avail themselves of it instead of trying to compete with it.
[Afternoon update]
Molly has a post up at Ricochet, with a lot of discussion in comments.
[Bumped]
[Update a while later]
I was particularly gratified by this:
In any case, the book is just wonderful. I’m not someone who’s particularly interested in space exploration (though I have gone to many Space Shuttle launches and landings, so maybe I’m selling myself short). I’m definitely not someone with much knowledge of the space industry. And I wasn’t sure if this book would be so technical or wonkish as to be inaccessible. It’s not. It’s just a really engaging read with a compelling story about human nature, risk and reward.
That was what I was aiming for.
Interestingly enough, the law already requires NASA to get out of the Earth-to-orbit space-transportation business.
51 USC Sec. 50133, which dates from the Reagan era and is still on the books, states:
The [NASA] Administrator shall prepare for an orderly transition from the Federal operation, or Federal management of contracted operation, of space transportation systems to the Federal purchase of commercial space transportation services for all nonemergency space transportation requirements for transportation to and from Earth orbit, including human, cargo, and mixed payloads.
The NASA Administrator has ignored that law for almost 30 years.
Well, given the wording, perhaps NASA has spent 30 years preparing for an orderly transition, making sure their files are properly alphabetized and indexed, getting psyched up to write some speeches for the handover, and what not. The law unfortunately fails to say that NASA shall transition, just that she shall prepare to make an orderly one, should the far off day ever come.
It is also pretty easy to twist this phrase to a desired end, ” …for all nonemergency space transportation requirements”
In other news, it looks like the Jade Rabbit might be a lunar dust fatality.
And the NY Times has a piece on bone and ocular issues in long duration space flight.
“”However, lunar dust can be electrostatically charged and can stick on sensitive parts,” he says. ”
Could this affect be harnessed to mitigate lunar dust?
Yep. From the 2009 Lunar and Planetary Conference, SPARCLE: Creating an electrostatically based tool for lunar dust control.
Rand dropped a bomb and no one said anything about it.
Happy Birthday.
Oops! But it was in parenthesis! Do we have to notice things that are in parenthesis?
Happy birthday, Rand!
Happy Birthday, Rand!
It’s easy to forget that NASA manned spaceflight has really only had two different programs governing operations for nearly fifty years. The moon shot drove Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. Skylab was mostly an offshoot of Apollo. And then they spent 3 and a half decades with the Shuttle. A major problem with NASA manned spaceflight is the impact of government procurement processes when it comes to pushing the state of the art. It’s weird to have a procurement process for something that nobody knows how to build yet, and the result is usually disastrous (see: the F-35). NASA spent three decades smashing prototype squares into operational round holes, and unsurprisingly spent more than a billion dollars a flight doing so. When operational experience has so little opportunity to influence redesigns you end up wasting a lot of resources continuing to deal with mistakes that could have been corrected long ago.
Imagine how different things would be if NASA were always investigating new vehicles designs, even at say $500 million a year. Always doing R&D. Always improving designs and building new systems. Actually testing vehicles instead of just flying down the center of the flight envelope every time. And always concentrating on cost of operations and practicality.
“Imagine how different things would be if NASA were always investigating new vehicles designs, even at say $500 million a year.”
The part you left out is the dissemination of information and technology into the private sector. NASA should do a better job of this.
ITAR prevents that information dissemination for all but the most trivial or superficial.
And completely off topic, but it seems they just figured out that Multiple Sclerosis is a food-borne illness.
Plosone article from October, “Isolation of Clostridium perfringens Type B in an Individual at First Clinical Presentation of Multiple Sclerosis Provides Clues for Environmental Triggers of the Disease.”
The strain produces a toxin called “epsilon” (there are five strains of the bacteria whose toxins are called alpha, beta, etc.) and which afflicts sheep and cattle, but it wasn’t previously suspected to affect humans. Doctors detected the strain in a woman who was showing the first signs of MS, then checked other MS patients for prior exposure and found they were 10 times more likely to show immunoreactivity to epsilon toxin than the control group of healthy people.
So they just finished testing the affects of the toxin itself, and it happens to attack the cells affected by MS in the same way they see in MS patients.
NBC News link.
The good news is that we already have vaccines for it for farm animals, and have already developed some antibody techniques to combat the toxin in people in case the toxin is ever used as a weapon. The scary news is that this strain has been detected in about 3% of food samples.