Category Archives: Business
Screw Dick Shelby
“…and the lobbyists he road in on.”
An epic rant (IMHO) over at my underfunded Kickstarter project.
[Friday-morning update]
I’ll re-run the rant here:
I’ve been writing all week, in various venues, about the mess that we’ve gotten ourselves into with Russia, whose space systems seem to be having reliability issues, despite the successful landing today of the Soyuz (the same Soyuz that on Monday fired an uncommanded thruster for half a minute, resulting in an attitude and course change to the ISS that took a couple hours to get under control). For background, here is my latest post on that, with links to previous ones at Ricochet and (from last weekend) PJMedia.
As you’ll note, the House had previous cut about a quarter of a billion from Commercial Crew in its appropriations bill, about a 20% cut in NASA’s request. The Senate, under the “leadership” of CSJ Chairman Richard Shelby (DickShelbyParty – Alabama) (and full appropriations committee Chairman Thad Cochran, R-Mississippi, who also gets a lot of SLS jobs in his state) just passed out of committee an appropriations bill that ups (or downs?) the ante, cutting it by over a third of a billion dollars.
This, despite repeated warnings from NASA that such a cut would delay commercial crew beyond 2017 (Senator Nelson actually went on the floor yesterday and said by as much as four years, but that’s probably hyperbolic — SpaceX isn’t going to wait that long to get ready to support their commercial human spaceflight customers). Note that however long the delay is, it is of great benefit to Vladimir Putin, who will continue to defy INKSNA with impunity, continuing to provide aid to Iran in developing nuclear weapons and missiles, and continuing to enrich himself and his cronies from NASA payments to Roscosmos and other Russian space entities. I started a hashtag over on Twitter called #DickShelbyLovesPutin, and I think it’s entirely appropriate.
Why did they do this? Senator Shelby will blame sequestration, and that NASA just doesn’t have enough money to do all that they want to do, but as Jeff Foust’s article at Space News notes, they cut the Commercial Crew budget in the same bill in which NASA had an overall increase.
Folks, this is not about money.
It is about preserving and protecting the Senate Launch System, in two ways.
The first is that all of the money taken from Commercial Crew (and other money presumably taken from somewhere else) was used to up the SLS budget by hundreds of millions of dollars over the NASA request. As I noted in the video, this is crazy. No manager can sensibly spend a sudden increase of hundreds of billions of dollar dumped in her lap in a given year. The fact that they just come up with arbitrary numbers (e.g., the House simply slashed the budget to an even billion) indicates that zero thought or planning has gone into this.
But the other point is that, if Commercial Crew succeeds, it will simply be another nail in the coffin for one of the (insane) justifications for SLS — that it is an “insurance policy” should Commercial Crew “fail.” Yes, these people in Congress actually put forth the economically lunatic notion that a launch system that won’t fly with people until 2021 at the earliest, and will cost multiple billions per flight, is somehow a way to eliminate our need for the Russians.
Now you know that’s nuts. I know that’s nuts. But too many people don’t pay enough attention to understand why that’s nuts.
And this isn’t the first time this has happened. Every year, Shelby comes up with another scheme to hobble Commercial Crew because he knows that it’s a threat to his pork. Last year, the failed scheme was to cripple SpaceX with unnecessary accounting rules. He hates Commercial Crew, but he’d tolerate it if he could be assured it would go to Boeing, which is why, in his socialistic way, he continues to insist that the taxpayer would somehow be better off with no competition. What he really hates is SpaceX.
But now it’s gone beyond simply wasting tax dollars for pork in Huntsville (and Michoud, and Promontory, and…). It’s to the point that this is keeping us dependent on the Russians, into the indefinite future. Simply put, Dick Shelby doesn’t give a damn about that. He is Vlad’s BFF.
Beyond that, he doesn’t give a damn about our future in space. He doesn’t give a damn about taxpayer dollars, as long as they can be deployed to get him re-elected.
He has nothing resembling political principles, other than the importance of Dick Shelby keeping his Senate seat.
He’s not a Democrat. He’s not a Republican. He’s the one and only member of the Dick Shelby Party (emphasis on the first word). But sadly, because he caucuses with them, and he’s got seniority, too many Republicans go along with this treachery against the nation and against our future in space. And yes, that’s the word I use. It is, in the words of a Continental Army officer some time back, “Treason, treason, black as hell.”
And he gets away with it. This whole thing is happening because too many people think that SLS is necessary, and resist cutting it for that reason, even though it is absorbing all the money needed to develop things actually needed to move America into space. Ending that perception is not a sufficient condition to put an end to this madness, but it is a very necessary one
The purpose of this project is to show that this perception is simply untrue. Senator Shelby just gave you more reasons to support it. If you can afford more, please up your donation. If you can spread the word, please do so. Don’t let him get away with this.
[/rant]
The Coalition For “Space Exploration”
If you were wondering how worthless/evil they are, they just praised the Senate mark up of the NASA budget.
Disgusting.
This is one of the reasons I’m on the warpath against the phrase “space exploration.” It’s so vague and meaningless that it can justify all manner of awful ideas.
[Update a while later]
The whole hog: Stephen Smith’s report on the NASA budget mess.
The First Pr0n Shoot In Space?
Congress Continues To Fiddle With Monster Rockets, While Human Spaceflight Burns
It’s been an exciting week on the International Space Station. On Monday, it had to dodge an old upper stage that was in danger of colliding with it. Then, yesterday, a reaction-control thruster unexpectedly fired for half a minute, causing a sudden unplanned shift in the facility’s attitude. Fortunately, the system reacted well overall, and things were restored to normal within a couple hours.
The misfiring thruster was on the Russian Soyuz capsule currently attached to the ISS. This is the vehicle in which it is planned to bring three crew members back to earth later tomorrow morning.
This is just the latest problem with Russian space hardware. The reason that the crew are coming home this month, instead of the originally planned return in May, is that there was a failure of a (Russian) Progress cargo ship at the end of April. As I wrote at PJMedia this past weekend: Continue reading Congress Continues To Fiddle With Monster Rockets, While Human Spaceflight Burns
The ASAP
…is finally coming around on Commercial Crew:
VADM Dyer also appeared to be against the notion of downselecting to one partner ahead of time, as has been intimated as a cost-saving option by some lawmakers.
“The thinking there is: If you need a house, why would you want to build two houses? Why not select one?” added the minutes. “VADM Dyer opined that it is a ‘very complicated house.’ The ASAP believes that competition brings the best of both providers to the fore.
“It also allows NASA to watch these two approaches and companies mature before making a downselect. The Panel stands foursquare in support of competition, as does NASA.”
It was also notable that NASA managers responded by stressing the ongoing discrepancy between the requested budgets for the Program and what has been appropriated.
With the two companies under fixed-price contracts, it was noted that it is important for all to recognize that if NASA does not receive the appropriations that it is counting on, it will have a very significant impact on schedule, and we will end up relying on the Russians beyond the 2017 target.
You don’t say.
Tulip Subsidies
A parable:
Higher education is in a bubble much like the old tulip bubble. In the past forty years, the price of college has dectupled (quadrupled when adjusting for inflation). It used to be easy to pay for college with a summer job; now it is impossible. At the same time, the unemployment rate of people without college degrees is twice that of people who have them. Things are clearly very bad and Senator Sanders is right to be concerned.
But, well, when we require doctors to get a college degree before they can go to medical school, we’re throwing out a mere $5 billion, barely enough to house all the homeless people in the country. But Senator Sanders admits that his plan would cost $70 billion per year. That’s about the size of the entire economy of Hawaii. It’s enough to give $2000 every year to every American in poverty.
At what point do we say “Actually, no, let’s not do that, and just let people hold basic jobs even if they don’t cough up a a hundred thousand dollars from somewhere to get a degree in Medieval History”?
I’m afraid that Sanders’ plan is a lot like the tulip subsidy idea that started off this post. It would subsidize the continuation of a useless tradition that has turned into a speculation bubble, prevent the bubble from ever popping, and disincentivize people from figuring out a way to route around the problem, eg replacing the tulips with daffodils.
(yes, it is nice to have college for non-economic reasons too, but let’s be honest – if there were no such institution as college, would you, totally for non-economic reasons, suggest the government pay poor people $100,000 to get a degree in Medieval History? Also, anything not related to job-getting can be done three times as quickly by just reading a book.)
If I were Sanders, I’d propose a different strategy. Make “college degree” a protected characteristic, like race and religion and sexuality. If you’re not allowed to ask a job candidate whether they’re gay, you’re not allowed to ask them whether they’re a college graduate or not. You can give them all sorts of examinations, you can ask them their high school grades and SAT scores, you can ask their work history, but if you ask them if they have a degree then that’s illegal class-based discrimination and you’re going to jail. I realize this is a blatant violation of my usual semi-libertarian principles, but at this point I don’t care.
Never happen. It makes too much sense.
[Afternoon update]
“College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one“:
A college education, then, if it is a commodity, is no car. The courses the student decides to take (and not take), the amount of work the student does, the intellectual curiosity the student exhibits, her participation in class, his focus and determination — all contribute far more to her educational “outcome” than the college’s overall curriculum, much less its amenities and social life. Yet most public discussion of higher ed today pretends that students simply receive their education from colleges the way a person walks out of Best Buy with a television.
The results of this kind of thinking are pernicious. Governors and legislators, as well as the media, treat colleges as purveyors of goods, students as consumers and degrees as products. Students get the message. If colleges are responsible for outcomes, then students can feel entitled to classes that do not push them too hard, to high grades and to material that does not challenge their assumptions or make them uncomfortable. Hence colleges too often cater to student demands for trigger warnings, “safe rooms,” and canceled commencement speakers. When rating colleges, as everyone from the president to weekly magazines insist on doing nowadays, people use performance measures such as graduation rates and time to degree as though those figures depended entirely upon the colleges and not at all upon the students.
What a government-driven disaster.
The Court “Victory” For The EPA
This doesn’t sound like a huge legal victory for the administration. It only postpones an actual ruling until later this summer.
First They Came For The Male Athletes
“…and I said nothing, because women deserve to play sports, too. Then they came for the frat boys, and I not only said nothing, I cheered it on, because frat boys are the scum of the earth. Then they came after men in general, and I said nothing, because they need to understand the fear women have of rape, and to fear engaging in sex.
Then, oh, wait. Holy s**t, they’re coming after me!”
More Thoughts On Congress’s Monster Rockets
From me, over @Ricochet.