The Delta is not a way to replace RD-180s.
I can’t figure out if McCain is stupid, venal, or both.
10 thoughts on “No, Senator McCain”
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The Delta is not a way to replace RD-180s.
I can’t figure out if McCain is stupid, venal, or both.
Comments are closed.
Rand,
I think that you could make plausible arguments either for him being the Baptist in the “Baptists and Bootleggers” scenario, or him being venal. He already hated Boeing and ULA, and saw them as inefficient, corrupt, big industry players, and having ULA buy engines from his bete noire, the Russians just added to his reasons to dislike them. So I could easily see SpaceX and AJR lobbyists (the two companies who stood the most to gain by trying to force ULA to downselect to its least competitive vehicle) going to him and saying “you’re going to let these guys keep wiring money to Putin’s buddies when you could be buying American”, and getting him to go along with it, even without having to grease the skids of self-righteousness.
We know SpaceX and AJR have been lobbying McCain and several others along these lines for over a year. And we also know that at least SpaceX made a ~$25k donation to McCain’s non-profit, the very same month that McCain put the RD-180 ban amendment in the NDAA. I’m not sure if AJR did the same, though they’ve been playing this game longer so may have known how to be more discreet about how they greased the skids.
So yeah, classic Baptist and Bootlegger’s scenario, IMO. It wouldn’t be quite so amusing if McCain hadn’t built his reputation around supposedly keeping “big defense contractors from influencing the DoD”.
~Jon
This all started when Musk was inspired from his cameo on Iron Man 2 to play Tony Stark before the SASC and claim we ‘could get rid of the Atlas V”. It was at that point I lost all respect for Musk, and apparently when McCain was wowed and decided he had a political shiv to stab ULA with.
McCain is often both venal and stupid.
To name just one non-space example, he’s pro-amnesty except when running for reelection, when he becomes a temporary border hawk.
For a plethora of reasons, I’ll be voting (in the senate primary) for whichever Republican is polling highest against McCain. And, in November, if McCain is on my ballot, I won’t be voting for him.
What McCain mainly is is stubborn beyond all reason. He gets his teeth into an issue and refuses to let go regardless of what anyone says. (I long ago heard a joke from some Arizona political types: Who *would* McCain pick up the phone for? The Second Coming of Jesus. Maybe. But he still wouldn’t listen.)
For anyone who paid attention to McCain’s role in delaying new USAF tanker aircraft by a decade while doubling the price, this is all very familar.
Whether venal, stupid or just stubborn and mean, the key question is how effective is he? Given that he seems to have been outmaneuvered at every turn in his anti-RD-180 jihad by Sen. Shelby, I’d have to say the answer seems to be “not very.” That won’t prevent him from continuing to try monkey-wrenching ULA, but ULA’s friends in the Senate extend well beyond just Sen. Shelby so I’m dubious McCain is going to be able to be much more than a noisy pest on this issue.
And who knows? Maybe the Tea Party will succeed in getting him this time? That certainly wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen in American politics in the last few years. Wouldn’t even make the Top 10.
Appropriators beat Authorizers. Shelby and Durbin got together to overrule McCain last year, chances are they’ll do it again this year.
Take your choice of reasons, ULA building rockets in Alabama and its co-parent Boeing being headquartered in Illinois, or continued stockpiling of RD-180’s being the least-bad medium-term Defense launch policy available. Probably a bit of both.
Shelby takes a lot of flack for his leading position pushing SLS on NASA, but it is worth noting that he and Durbin did a good thing for US commercial launch competition last fall. (Almost certainly with no “bad” intent on SLS, or “good” on RD-180. Primarily taking care of constituent interests in both cases, I would expect. “Nothing personal – it’s just business.”)
Agree.
Shelby is one of those “stopped clock twice a day” types. Every once in awhile he does the right thing even if it’s for the usual venal and political advantage-seeking reasons. Shelby appears to have no real political principles that outrank staying in office and providing “constituent service” as the means to do so. In that respect, he’s hardly unique.
He is demonstrably better at it than almost anyone else in Congress, though. That’s why in any contest involving attempts to pee in the rice bowl of a major Shelby backer, such as ULA or MSFC, the attacker will likely draw back a bloody stump so long as Shelby is alive and in office (same thing, really – the only way this guy is “retiring” is when he’s carried out feet first).
The U.S. getting itself into the current RD-180 situation, like the creation of ULA, was something done as a way of muddling through a situation that didn’t seem to have any other solutions, at the time, that weren’t worse. I think that’s still a defensible proposition anent both cases.
But, once institutionalized, both “solutions” took on lives of their own and now both have outlived their usefulness due to radically changed circumstances. In the case of RD-180, it’s because of something bad – Russia having gone from tentative partner of the U.S. back to its historic norm of hostile and aggressive expansionist. In the case of ULA, it’s because of something good – the rise of genuine competition in the space launch market.
RD-180 definitely needs to go away with all deliberate speed, but the emphasis needs to be on the word “deliberate.” The short-lived post-Cold War Era of Good Feeling between Russia and the U.S. was transitory and – to say the least – atypical of historical norms. It encompassed, basically, just the Yeltsin administration in Russia.
When the veteran chekist Putin took power at the turn of the 21st century, it was soon apparent there was a new sheriff in town and he wanted to restore, as best he could, the ancien regime. Any doubt about this disappeared during the G. W. Bush administration when Russia helped itself to a couple pieces of Georgia.
If the U.S. had elected to aggressively wean itself off RD-180’s starting then, the job would already be done. But ULA was freshly created and the politico-economic imperatives in Washington were all in the opposite direction. It wasn’t until Ukraine became Georgia 2.0 that support for phasing out RD-180 became significant.
That’s why I have no great admiration for hysterics like McCain who got on the bus very late and then decided to wrestle the driver for the wheel. The larger interests of the United States are not served by a sudden embrace of the anti-Russian “religion” such that we do more damage to ourselves than to our former and once again enemy. ULA deserves a chance to prove it can be a real company and not just the pampered beneficiary of special dispensations that it has been since its inception.
The issue has been complicated by the rise of SpaceX and the initial ULA reaction to same under the low and stupid administration of its former chief, Michael Gass. Being a thoroughgoing creature of both corporate and governmental politics, Gass reacted to SpaceX – once it had demonstrated itself to be no transitory flash in the pan – by marshalling its legions on Capitol Hill and inside DoD, aggressively trying to monkey-wrench SpaceX via appropriation cuts, onerous mandates and the almost ostentatiously corrupt block buy deal.
Elon Musk proved to be a far more formidable opponent than Gass allowed for. When it became apparent that not even the vaunted Sen. Shelby knew of any magic word he could write into legislation to make SpaceX disappear, ULA was forced to adapt to its new circumstances as best it could. The one leaving the lists, splintered lance in hand, turned out to be Gass, not Musk.
In the intervening two years, Tory Bruno has been hauling manfully on the ULA tiller, but one does not turn Leviathan on a dime. By Leviathan, I refer more to ULA’s two parents than to ULA itself.
Bruno has a plan. It is by no means a plan certain of ultimate success, but it is at least plausible. Among its key requirements are that RD-180’s continue to be available in modest quantity during a period of transition to newer solutions. Bruno’s unenviable job has been complicated by all the attempted coup-counting by Sen. McCain.
That SpaceX has been at least a quiet prod to Sen. McCain’s efforts is unsurprising. ULA, under Gass, was anything but subtle about trying to suffocate SpaceX under an avalanche of politico-bureaucratic dirty tricks. Musk is a man of steamroller-like relentlessness when he needs to be and certainly isn’t above replying in kind to the seamy machinations of opponents. He would kill ULA by legislative sword if he could swing it, just as ULA tried to do him in. Sen. McCain, though, seems most likely to prove an insufficiently sharp weapon with which to assault ULA successfully.
When all is said and done, this grudge match is going to be settled in the engineering cubicles, on the shop floors and in the marketplace over the next few years.
Or why not just buy the very much cheaper Falcon 9? Really. Why not? It is the best deal in launch history, period. No one has ever come close to the price per pound, no one. Who gives a flying f**k about keeping Atlas and its alleged successor Vulcan alive by pleading with politicians? ULA should be competing against SpaceX on business terms, and doing it on their own f**cking nickel – not ours.
McCain knows how to play the game. He uses his friendships in the to his political advantage and his influence over freshman Senators to not only back his positions but also to further his political agenda.
One of my Senators is a member of the SASC and she backs McCain on the RD-180, but she doesn’t have a clue about issue (I confirmed this with a source). I wrote her office about the issue, and she handed off to an intern who wrote me a BS letter in response. After I replied to her response and basically took her reply apart, I received a call from one of her senior staff members. We discussed the issue for a half hour, but the staffer was reciting verbatim McCain’s talking points on the RD-180. When I challenged the staffer on several points, he conceded my point was valid.
As it stands now, it looks like he might lose his seat in the Senate, which could be an interesting dynamic, but if he loses his Senate seat and the Republican’s hold onto the Senate, I would like to Jeff Sessions take the Chair of the Committee. I think you would see some sanity on this issue return sans McCain.
Does anyone have a link to a web page accounting for the amount of money given to ULA through the years for keeping an American engine “ready to go” for Atlas V?