 |
|
 |
Reader's Favorites
Media Casualties Mount Administration Split On Europe Invasion Administration In Crisis Over Burgeoning Quagmire Congress Concerned About Diversion From War On Japan Pot, Kettle On Line Two... Allies Seize Paris The Natural Gore Book Sales Tank, Supporters Claim Unfair Tactics Satan Files Lack Of Defamation Suit Why This Blog Bores People With Space Stuff A New Beginning My Hit Parade
Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) Tim Blair James Lileks Bleats Virginia Postrel Kausfiles Winds Of Change (Joe Katzman) Little Green Footballs (Charles Johnson) Samizdata Eject Eject Eject (Bill Whittle) Space Alan Boyle (MSNBC) Space Politics (Jeff Foust) Space Transport News (Clark Lindsey) NASA Watch NASA Space Flight Hobby Space A Voyage To Arcturus (Jay Manifold) Dispatches From The Final Frontier (Michael Belfiore) Personal Spaceflight (Jeff Foust) Mars Blog The Flame Trench (Florida Today) Space Cynic Rocket Forge (Michael Mealing) COTS Watch (Michael Mealing) Curmudgeon's Corner (Mark Whittington) Selenian Boondocks Tales of the Heliosphere Out Of The Cradle Space For Commerce (Brian Dunbar) True Anomaly Kevin Parkin The Speculist (Phil Bowermaster) Spacecraft (Chris Hall) Space Pragmatism (Dan Schrimpsher) Eternal Golden Braid (Fred Kiesche) Carried Away (Dan Schmelzer) Laughing Wolf (C. Blake Powers) Chair Force Engineer (Air Force Procurement) Spacearium Saturn Follies JesusPhreaks (Scott Bell) Science
Nanobot (Howard Lovy) Lagniappe (Derek Lowe) Geek Press (Paul Hsieh) Gene Expression Carl Zimmer Redwood Dragon (Dave Trowbridge) Charles Murtaugh Turned Up To Eleven (Paul Orwin) Cowlix (Wes Cowley) Quark Soup (Dave Appell) Economics/Finance
Assymetrical Information (Jane Galt and Mindles H. Dreck) Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen et al) Man Without Qualities (Robert Musil) Knowledge Problem (Lynne Kiesling) Journoblogs The Ombudsgod Cut On The Bias (Susanna Cornett) Joanne Jacobs The Funny Pages
Cox & Forkum Day By Day Iowahawk Happy Fun Pundit Jim Treacher IMAO The Onion Amish Tech Support (Lawrence Simon) Scrapple Face (Scott Ott) Regular Reading
Quasipundit (Adragna & Vehrs) England's Sword (Iain Murray) Daily Pundit (Bill Quick) Pejman Pundit Daimnation! (Damian Penny) Aspara Girl Flit Z+ Blog (Andrew Zolli) Matt Welch Ken Layne The Kolkata Libertarian Midwest Conservative Journal Protein Wisdom (Jeff Goldstein et al) Dean's World (Dean Esmay) Yippee-Ki-Yay (Kevin McGehee) Vodka Pundit Richard Bennett Spleenville (Andrea Harris) Random Jottings (John Weidner) Natalie Solent On the Third Hand (Kathy Kinsley, Bellicose Woman) Patrick Ruffini Inappropriate Response (Moira Breen) Jerry Pournelle Other Worthy Weblogs
Ain't No Bad Dude (Brian Linse) Airstrip One A libertarian reads the papers Andrew Olmsted Anna Franco Review Ben Kepple's Daily Rant Bjorn Staerk Bitter Girl Catallaxy Files Dawson.com Dodgeblog Dropscan (Shiloh Bucher) End the War on Freedom Fevered Rants Fredrik Norman Heretical Ideas Ideas etc Insolvent Republic of Blogistan James Reuben Haney Libertarian Rant Matthew Edgar Mind over what matters Muslimpundit Page Fault Interrupt Photodude Privacy Digest Quare Rantburg Recovering Liberal Sand In The Gears(Anthony Woodlief) Sgt. Stryker The Blogs of War The Fly Bottle The Illuminated Donkey Unqualified Offerings What she really thinks Where HipHop & Libertarianism Meet Zem : blog Space Policy Links
Space Future The Space Review The Space Show Space Frontier Foundation Space Policy Digest BBS AWOL
USS Clueless (Steven Den Beste) Media Minder Unremitting Verse (Will Warren) World View (Brink Lindsay) The Last Page More Than Zero (Andrew Hofer) Pathetic Earthlings (Andrew Lloyd) Spaceship Summer (Derek Lyons) The New Space Age (Rob Wilson) Rocketman (Mark Oakley) Mazoo Site designed by 
Powered by Movable Type |
 |
|
Too Farsighted? Hardly OK, one more space policy post, then I have to get back to paying work. The Economist is one of the best magazines (excuse me, newspapers, as they call it Across The Pond) in the world (which unfortunately is kind of like saying they're the smartest animal in the barnyard), but I've noticed that they've been going downhill lately, particularly in space policy matters. This week's issue has a leader on NASA, entitled "Too Farsighted." (Subscribers only, so I don't bother with the link.) It seemed utterly schizophrenic to me, though it came out all right in the end. Lucky Transterrestrial readers will get to read it anyway, even if they're not subscribers, because I'll stretch fair use to transcribe it here, and for lagniappe, add an additional slight fisking, but only as needed. The Dangers Of Too Much Vision So far, so good. No disagreement. For what it's worth, Mr. Delay, who is not only a "Texas congressman," but a congressman who has many constituents who work for Johnson Space Center, just outside of Houston, is also the new Majority Leader of the House of Representatives. Such accusations should not sting NASA, because they could not be more wrong. For one thing the agency already spends the lion's share of its $15B annual budget on human space-flight. Here is where they start to go off the track. How does spending billions of dollars on "human space-flight" equate to "vision"? To me, all it means is that they are spending billions of dollars in Representative Delay's (and others') congressional districts. There's nothing particularly "visionary" about it per se. For another, if there is one thing that sums up what NASA has suffered from over the past three decades, it is too much vision, not too little. Too much vision? TOO MUCH VISION? What have the Economist's editors been smoking? Let's see what they think is evidence of "too much vision." And the symptoms of this are most visible in the bloated, late, over-budget and largely useless human space-flight projects that it has been pursuing since the Apollo programme. So, their contention is that bloated bureaucracy is evidence of an overabundance of vision? On what planet? Next, they attempt to buttress their bizarre thesis, but instead continue to undermine it. Vision Express Let me get this straight. NASA needed something to do, so it decided to try to put men on Mars. This is what the Economist calls a "grand vision"? Hint: "Grand visions" have much loftier goals than satisfying the "need for something to do." The fact that NASA chose Mars had nothing to do with vision. It had everything to do with the fact that it was a space agency, so it had to put forth something plausibly related to that portfolio. Had NASA instead been the Department of Agriculture, its "grand vision" would have been to put inspectors in every stockyard to look for foot and mouth disease being promulgated by terrorists. Just as a little primer for the Economist editorialists, here are some "grand visions."
Those are "grand visions." When's the last time you heard anyone from NASA proposing anything like that?
After a brief respite, to allow a slight reduction in blood pressure at the cluelessness (at least so far) of this leader, let us go on. When we last left our intrepid but dumbfounded editorialists, they had just related that the evil Nixon had just nixed NASA's "grand vision." And so, according to Roger Pielke, director of the Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the agency simply broke the mission into three more easily sellable parts: the shuttle, the space station, and then mars. It was then left in the impossible position of having to justify each step on its own merits alone. This led to both the overselling of the shuttle and to the thin veneer of "science" that has been arranged around the space station program. As I said, the piece is schizo. This part is actually correct, and the source of much of NASA's problem. They have indeed been focused on Men to Mars for decades, though in a closet way, and not sufficiently so to satisfy those whose focus is, prematurely, on the Red Planet. My dispute with this thesis is that it was a fault of "vision." I believe that it is due instead to an appalling lack of it, a thesis in which (to the degree that I understand his complaint) I am in concurrence with Mr. Delay. It is true that science can be done in the space station. but science can also be done dressed in a clown suit atop a large Ferris wheel. The argument ought to be over where is the best place for it. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO! The argument ought to be about whether or not science is the, or even a, justification for space activities. It's always assumed that it is, for no good reason, and this unthinking and unexamined assumption is one of the things that allows NASA to get away with so much of its nonsense. The Economist fell into exactly the same trap. They go on to expand on this theme of what kind of science can be done, and isn't necessarily done, on a space station, in a few sentences, but I see no sense in repeating it, since it's not really relevant to the real point or my interests, and if I avoid retyping the entire thing, I might not get sued by them. Let's just skip to the next graf. The only good reason for NASA to be involved in human space-flight is to lay the ground for opening up space for everybody. It takes a vast leap of imagination to detect this reason in NASA's present strategy. [Thrusting fist up into the air, vigourously (note British spelling in honor of the authors, or at least the publishers...)] YESSS! The first sensible thing they've said in the entire piece, which is one of the things that makes it so disjointed and incoherent. Let's see where they go with this. Fleeting visits to the moon (or, one day, to Mars) would turn the agency into little more than an elite travel agent. But for decades there has been a huge pent-up demand for flights into space. Although the private sector is finally making some progress toward this, NASA should have been there years ago. What is still needed is research and development on an economical and safe space transport for the public at large. Space, like the Wild West, can be truly opened up only by the private sector. NASA's central goal in human space flight should be to make that possible. Amazing. They actually get it, despite all that nonsense at the beginning about "too much vision." You'd almost think they'd been reading my blog... It reminds me of one of my former .sigs on Usenet. "NASA's mission is not to land a man on Mars. NASA's mission is to make it possible for the National Geographic Society to land a man on Mars." The final paragraph is a good one, except for the part about a "science-based approach." Guy's, it ain't "rocket science" any more. All it takes is rocket engineering. But good rocket engineering. Until NASA swaps its destination-driven thinking for a science-based approach focused on such objectives, the post-1960 generation that has grown up hoping to travel or even live in space will continue to feel betrayed. Several years ago, an organisation called the Space Frontier Foundation observed bitterly: "Thirty-six years after sending John Glenn into orbit, NASA has finally achieved the capability to send John Glenn into orbit." NASA must find a more practical reason for the human space-flight programme. Sending people to eat all those soya beans cannot be it. Bravo. Posted by Rand Simberg at November 21, 2002 09:42 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.transterrestrial.com/mt-diagnostics.cgi/511 Listed below are links to weblogs that reference this post from Transterrestrial Musings.
Comments
[ ... Open up the Universe to the expansion of life and consciousness, bringing its potential to full flower, and enabling it to come to know Itself. Usher in a new era of extraterrestrial resources that will bring unlimited, environmentally-friendly prosperity to the entire planet, and to those living beyond it. ... ] Oh, heavee. Pass the joint. The last part of the movie "2001" is playing in my head. Pardon ne, Rand, but that stuff is just too hippy-duppy kozmic to sell to Ma and Pa Public. [ It is true that science can be done in the space station. but science can also be done dressed in a clown suit atop a large Ferris wheel. The argument ought to be over where is the best place for it. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO! The argument ought to be about whether or not science is the, or even a, justification for space activities. It's always assumed that it is, for no good reason, and this unthinking and unexamined assumption is one of the things that allows NASA to get away with so much of its nonsense. ... Rand, here you seem to be dangerously close to saying that science should not be a justification for space activities. Surely you don't really mean that.
Bravo. ] How about the construction of large orbital platforms for missile defense as a practical reason for the human space-flight programme?
Let me ask thes questions: What is satanic Nasa doing to prevent some Ayn Randian visionary from opening up access to space? My inference. Rand, is that you praise private enterprise while scorning gu'ment bureaus, but what you really want is for the US Government to offer a gigantic X-prize to space impressarios, and also some up-front financing of "private" space launch vehicles. Otherwise, why fret so mucvh about NASA's Hippy-dippy cosmic or not, at least they constitute "grand visions." And on the subject of science, "Dangerously close"? Wherein lies the danger? Science has never been the true justification for the manned space program--it's always been only a fig leaf. Science cannot possibly justify an expenditure that is about as much by itself as the entire National Science Foundation's budget, for all kinds of science. (Remember that this entire screed, both on the part of the Economist and myself, should be considered about the manned part of NASA, not JPL and Goddard). The money is handed out mostly from Apollo inertia, and for reasons of pork and foreign policy. It has little to do with science, and if that's the justification, the funding will not be forthcoming. It's not at all clear that manned orbital platforms are needed or helpful for missile defense, but if so, that's for DoD to do, not NASA. There would be tremendous resistance to directly involving NASA in a defense program. The Shuttle used to take a lot of flak when it flew classified missions. I have never claimed that NASA is "satanic." I'm not sure what the point of your hyperbole is. As for what it's doing to prevent it, I gave an example in the article. Its actions, whether deliberate or simply blundering, raise the barriers to private investment, by negatively influencing some investors. I'd be thrilled to raise the money and go do it on my own. Would that it were that easy. I know that I've been trying, without success, for almost a decade. I, and many others who've been fighting that battler for many years, all know that NASA in its current form is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Posted by Rand Simberg at November 22, 2002 07:10 AM[ I have never claimed that NASA is "satanic." I'm not sure what the point of your hyperbole is. ] Just my clumsy attempt to be witty. Did you see this? ( My comments are in parenthesis. )
The first task is to examine what NASA is doing and why it's doing it BY SEAN O'KEEFE, U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA's mission is threefold: to understand and protect the home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; and to inspire thenext generation of explorers. ( "Inspire"? Or is this a eupemistic way of saying that NASA is more about PR than about deeds? ) Soon after President George W. Bush appointed me administrator of NASA late last year, I asked my leadership team to help identify NASA's core strengths and activities and think hard about how each of them supports our mission. The purpose of the exercise is focus?and also direction. If a program or activity doesn't support one of these three objectives, we've got to ask why we're doing it, even if we may be doing it rather well. ( But those three "objectives" are actually quite vague. ) Once we have focused on the activities that do fit into NASA's mission, we must make sure we are managing them in the best way possible. For example, are there alternatives in universities or in the private sector? If there are, we ought to concentrate on supporting them rather than duplicating those efforts.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Concentrating on those things that advance our mission and that we alone can do will tell us what our direction should be and what specific programs truly need our support. That, in turn, will allow us to make solid decisions about what NASA's organizational structure and size should be. I've also begun scrutinizing NASA's scientific priorities. Right now, our purview includes monitoring Earth's climate, studying distant galaxies, and searching for evidence of life, past or present, in our solar system and beyond. The inauguration of the International Space Station (ISS), around 2006, will certainly expand our scientific reach. For example, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has in recent years produced an impressive array of ideas for experiments it favors for the unique environment of the ISS or the Space Shuttle. ( Translation: NASA business as usual for the ISS and the Shuttle. ) The problem is that all those ideas and disciplines are ranked as top imperatives. What we must do is assign priorities as a first step toward drafting a master plan that lays out what we're going to do and the sequence in which we're going to do it. Along the way, we need to identify the critical challenges in these various disciplines that could open up entirely new ways of looking at problems. ( In other words, do a little budget trimming at the margins. ) This task has fallen to a panel assembled by Rae Silver, a professor of natural and physical sciences at Columbia University (New York City), and David Shirley, director emeritus of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The panel, which includes a few Nobel laureates, has met several times since its formation last March. ( This is horrid. A committee of geriatric Establishmentarians. No representation for NASA critics. ) In the near future I expect to implement one of their first recommendations?the establishment of a chief science officer as a part of every ISS crew. By the way, will this CSO be issued a pair of prosthetic pointy ears? ) Developing ambitious but realistic scientific priorities will also help us decide what the configuration and crew size of the ISS should be. If we're going to ask astronauts and cosmonauts to spend weeks or months in a difficult and potentially dangerous environment, it should be for work that is intrinsically significant, not for chores concocted to justify the station's existence. ( Hints at ISS downsizing. OK, that sounds better. Until our panelists and others help us determine the best uses of the ISS, it doesn't make sense to continue developing projects such as the single-purpose X-38 emergency crew-return vehicle. After all, how can we design an escape vehicle if we don't know how many people it will have to accommodate? We nonetheless have an obligation as human beings to ensure that everyone we ask to fly on board the ISS has an opportunity to evacuate under extreme circumstances, however unlikely. As a result, NASA is considering a set of alternatives, including designing a multipurpose logistics or transfer craft that could also serve as an emergency crew-return vehicle, capitalizing on the remarkable technology developed under the X-38 project. ( X-38 on RLV, good. X-38 on ELV, bad. ) Another technological challenge I am eager to see NASA tackle is that of overcoming current limitations on how quickly we can get around the solar system and the amount of work we can do once we get somewhere. Once they pass low Earth orbit, our spacecraft today, piloted vehicles and probes alike, fly no faster than did their earliest predecessors, which took off for the planets 40 years ago. Solar power, for example, frequently causes engineering headaches and in any case is inadequate much beyond the orbit of Mars. The most mature technology for overcoming the combined problems of power generation and propulsion is nuclear energy [see "Power and Purpose in Space,"]. This technology can be used safely: for 45 years, the U.S. Navy has operated over half of its fleet with nuclear power without significant incident. ( Over half its fleet? Factually, that is simply not true. But I do apree with the desire to develop fission space propulsion. ) At President Bush's direction, NASA has revived its nuclear power and propulsion research, which had been all but dormant for some time. We will actively engage the public, as well as environmental and other interest groups, by telling them what we have in mind and soliciting their views on reaching our objectives in an environmentally safe manner. Finally, I've been struck by the incredible energy and enthusiasm that permeates the entire NASA organization. As we pursue our ambitious aeronautics and space research and exploration agenda, NASA will continue, I trust, to engage the public in an adventure without end. ( NASA is adventurous? Ummmm, NO!
Has anyone heard about this before? I haven't. The Capability Statement dealine seems very short and soon. I'll betcha NASA won't award this contract to anyone who doesn't intend to write a puff piece about NASA. Are there any NASA-critical space buffs out there interested in competing for this contract? It may not be to late to organize a group that could meet the capability criteria. Are there any PhD historians in our crowd? From www.nasawatch.com:
"NASA Headquarters plans to issue a Request for Offer (RFO) to complete a scholarly book-length manuscript on the history of the access to space. The NASA History Office will administer this project and manage professional review and oversight of the final publication of the work." .... The NAICS Code and Size Standard are 541710 and 1,000 employees respectively. The DPAS Rating for this procurement is DO-C9. The Government is contemplating conducting a full and open competition. However, in the event two or more small businesses submit capability statements which demonstrate the ability to successfully perform this effort, the Government will convert this effort to a small business set-aside. CAPABILITY STATEMENTS MUST BE SUBMITTED NO LATER THAN DECEMBER 16, 2002, to Michele Hull at: mhull@pop200.gsfc.nasa.gov. ... What needs to be written is a set of muck-raking articles about the X-33 VentureStar fiasco and other NASA follies of the 1990's. This muck-raking journalism could, perhaps, be combined with chapters proposing alternative NASA endeavors and compiled into a book that would have some mass market appeal. Posted by David Davenport at November 22, 2002 08:37 AMI suspect that some of the usual suspects out of Logsdon's shop at GWU will get the job. Posted by Rand Simberg at November 22, 2002 08:48 AM"Thrusting fist up into the air, vigourously (note British spelling in honor of the authors, or at least the publishers...)]" That should be "Thrusting fist up into the air, vigourously (note British spelling in honour of the authors, or at least the publishers...)]" I got a prompt reply to my email to NASA: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thank you for your reply. We are requesting that you submit to us YOUR Sincerely, Michelé Hull At 11:41 AM 11/22/2002 -0500, you wrote: >Hello NASA:
Post a comment |
|
