12 thoughts on “Obama Derangement Syndrome”

  1. That’s actually why I stopped commenting on Slashdot: group-think is especially bad when people are commenting on stuff they don’t understand or even care about. Over time, conversations which don’t attract group-think become taboo and you end up talking about only those things which are unimportant, while simultaneously ostracizing actual experts in the subject matter.

  2. I don’t recall anything really positive that Reagan, Bush I or Bush II did for space exploration. I recall some multi-billion Mars project ideas. They went nowhere.

    Basically the Space program was way low on the totem pole for all of those guys. As it has been for most US presidents except JFK – and then only for a brief time and for reasons that have nothing to do with Space Exploration.

      1. That law really changed the landscape. Before that, there was only one nominally commercial provider, Arianespace.

      2. Enabled?
        How about lessen the degree it was being outlawed?
        So threw a spanner into the gears of groupthink which is employing governmental power to diminish US commercial space.

      3. “Reagan created the Commercial Space Launch Act, that enabled commercial space.”

        Well I stand corrected then. That is an important first step.

      4. Sure. But it went nowhere. I only learned about Conestoga years afterwards. It had next to no impact on the market. Arianespace was the major commercial launch services player until the early 90s when the fall of the Soviet Union meant a lot of Russian rockets became available for launch services (e.g. Soyuz and Proton).

        While Lockheed Martin and Boeing provided launch services their customer was mainly the US government. The EELV rockets were not cheap enough to compete with Arianespace let alone the Russian rockets.

        The LEO comsat bubble went nowhere too.

  3. Well at least the first 2 comments to your latest ricochet post show some positive evidence of intelligence. Your first post was if you entered a big GOP/Limbaugh all night beer bender, and promptly crapped in punchbowl before even taking off your coat. “Hi…I’m Rand…..pppffffftttt…..plop”. Not the popularity you had probably hoped for.

  4. The importance of the Commercial Space Launch Act and the moves that led up to it are really not widely appreciated. In most areas, like mineral rights, the U.S. has a much more “private rights” policy than most other nations. In the long run, that serves us well. Space, because of its cold war history, was a notable exception, and was a fully nationalized enterprise — as nationalized as sugar in Cuba. While the effects of that are very much still with us, it was the first private launch in 1982 that began to turn the tide. That led to a significant discussion within Congress and the administration of the time, over how such activity would be regulated, and some behind-the-scenes turf wars, with the final decision being that commercial space would ultimately not be a military activity, nor a national one, but would become another mode of transportation and it was under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of Transportation.

    That was then codified in the CSLA, which rather than setting up a big new bureaucracy, created instead a small office with a limited responsibility — keep the uninvolved public safe — and otherwise, let companies try what they would.

    Because that policy battle had been finished by 1984, when Challenger was lost in 1986, the direction of space policy was set — and it was then that the “National Space Transportation System” ended, with the decision that in the future, the Shuttle would not compete for commercial payloads, which would instead be carried privately. So yes, all the angst about decisions of the G.W. Bush or B. Obama administrations is somewhat beside the point — the critical decisions took place back in the Reagan administration and since then the various arguments have been about managing the transition, still not complete, from a State-run to a commercial space transportation sector.

    Government will of course remain a player as a major customer of this form of transportation, as a regulator, and as a source of funding for key infrastructure — which is also true in other forms of transportation. But the “good old” or “bad old” days (depending on your viewpoint), when government was both the dominant customer and the only supplier of space transportation are gone and they are not coming back.

  5. I see this differently. For me the NSTS was the blip and aberration in history. The US previously was the major launch services provider in the West. There were some timid efforts in Europe to have indigenous launch capability but they never had that much impact until the US forced all launches to be made on the Shuttle. Heck even Arianespace recognizes this. Launch schedules kept slipping and costs kept spiraling upwards. Then the Challenger accident meant no Shuttle launches for a long time. Add to that the cancellation of Shuttle-Centaur and the Shuttle basically became useless as a satellite launch system.

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