Why massive Democrat payoffs to their constituencies at taxpayer expense aren’t stimulative.
Category Archives: Business
Dissecting The Deficit
Most of it is spending. This can’t go on.
Lunar Uncertainty
…and Google Lunar X-Prize. The latest Lurio Report is out (subscription only). There’s a lot of good stuff in there (as usual), but I found this interesting and it was a new thought, at least to me (partly because I don’t pay much attention to GLXP):
…under the alternative exploration scenarios developed by the the Augustine group, lunar exploration and services demand from the government could be far lower than that assumed by the Futron study.
I think that for the most part the Augustine commission did a landmark job.
But the story above shows what happens as long as the political class feels it has to keep paying off the existing interest groups in and out of NASA, burning bucks on developing and operating high-overhead (instead of high practicality) systems, such as the Shuttle-derived heavy booster that is evidently in the cards, as discussed in a section below. From outside “the system” the obvious question is: Why don’t we go all the other way instead? Why not spend such money on multiple COTS/CRS-like projects and R&D items such as fuel depots, so that we can create a really sustainable and expandable system for exploration and utilization?
Of course, I understand the practical politics, and yes, it’s far better to make _some_ progress towards commercialization even when that must be “balanced” by larger and wasteful “protection money.” Mr.
Griffin left us with an unworkable exploration framework and a NASA with fictitious utility. Even new policy that just commits to elements that both “push” and “pull” to enable new markets for human access to Earth orbit would be very valuable – it alone is worth the chance that adequate private funding for the GLXP _might_ not be possible.But it’s lousy to be left with that chance (see my item in Vol. 4, No. 16, “Lunar Water and the Google Lunar X-Prize”). Perhaps a combination of increasing private lunar market potential but with a smaller degree of NASA interest could ameliorate the situation. After all, the much discussed ‘flexible path’ option from the Augustine panel – seemingly getting close White House attention – would involve a lot of robotic exploration elements, admittedly distributed more widely than a lunar focus.
Go subscribe, and read the whole thing.
The Heavy-Lift Elephant In The Room
The lack of resiliency of NASA’s transportation plans is a point that I’ve made often. For instance, in The Path Not Taken, five years ago, I wrote:
The chief problem with the Bush vision for NASA is not its technical approach, but its programmatic approach—or, at an even deeper level, its fundamental philosophy. This is not simply a Bush problem, but a NASA problem: When government takes an approach, it is an approach, not a variety of approaches. Proposals are invited, the potential contractors study and compete, the government evaluates, but ultimately, a single solution is chosen with a contractor to build it. There has been some talk of a “fly-off” for the Crew Exploration Vehicle, in which two competing designs will actually fly to determine which is the best. But in the end, there will still be only one. Likewise, if we decide to build a powerful new rocket, there will almost certainly be only one, since it will be enough of a challenge to get the funds for that one, let alone two.
Biologists teach us that monocultures are fragile. They are subject to catastrophic failure (think of the Irish potato famine). This is just as true with technological monocultures, and we’ve seen it twice now in the last two decades: after each shuttle accident, the U.S. manned spaceflight program was stalled for years. Without Russian assistance, we cannot presently reach our (one and only) space station, because our (one and only) way of getting to it has been shut down since the Columbia accident.
The lesson—not to put your eggs in one basket—hasn’t been learned. The Air Force is now talking about eliminating one of the two major rocket systems (either Boeing’s Delta or Lockheed Martin’s Atlas), because there’s not enough business to maintain both. The president’s new vision for space proposes a “Crew Exploration Vehicle” and a new heavy-lift vehicle. The same flawed thinking went into many discussions in the last decade about what the “shuttle replacement” should be.
And it’s not a new idea. As Ron Menich points out in today’s issue of The Space Review:
…the following wording appears as Groundrule A-1 in the Space Transportation Architecture Study (STAS) from the late 1980s:
“Viable architecture will be based on a mixed fleet concept for operational flexibility. As a minimum, two independent (different major subsystems) launch, upperstage and return to Earth (especially for manned missions) systems must be employed to provide assured access for the specific, high priority payloads designated in the mission model.”
The words “independent (different major subsystems)” can help us to see a value that international partners can provide in large space architectures. Soyuz was not grounded at the same time that the Shuttle fleet was after the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and a future failure of, say, a Progress resupply vehicle would likely have no effect on the HTV’s ability to supply the stations. The fact that different nations developed their own independent launch capabilities has had the happy side effect of increasing redundancy, even though the original motivations (such as political or national pride goals) for developing those separate systems were far removed from reliability considerations.
I worked on (and later managed) that study for Rockwell, which was kicked off (at least for Rockwell) on the day that Challenger was lost.
And about three months after the Challenger loss, there was a Titan-34D accident at Vandenberg (the second consecutive failure for that vehicle), which shut that program down as well, leaving the US with no heavy-lift capability for a period of time. So even dual redundancy isn’t always enough. So all through the eighties, on STAS, on Advanced Launch System, and other architecture studies, it was a groundrule that we have a mixed-fleet capability in any future plans.
But even though Ron’s article says nothing new, apparently the lesson remains unobvious and unknown to the people who planned Constellation. As they did with the requirements to be affordable and sustainable (and in fact having redundancy is one of the ways of making it sustainable), they completely ignored the need for redundancy in the design of the architecture, to the point that they didn’t even attempt to explain why their architecture didn’t have it. It’s in fact frustrating that this wasn’t an issue that even came up in Augustine deliberations. No one wants to talk about it, even though it’s the biggest Achilles Heel in space transportation, as evidence by the fact that once we shut down Shuttle, we’ll have no means of getting to ISS independent of the Russians (at least NASA won’t — SpaceX and ULA may be another matter). And the reason, I suspect, that no one wants to talk about it is that it is a fatal flaw in their plans, and one to which they have no sensible response. If people admitted that this is a requirement, it drives a stake through the heart of heavy lift, once and for all. At least, that is, until there is enough traffic to justify the cost of developing and operating not just one such vehicle, but two.
And of course, every day that they delay doing the sensible thing, and figuring out how to carry out their plans with the vehicles they have, is another day of delay in reaching that far-more-distant goal.
Why We Aren’t A Spacefaring Civilization
Here’s one of the big reasons:
Someone in the AO-100 aviation section of the FAA, who was previously unaware of Armadillo, saw video of their NGLLC flights and decided that while Armadillo had proper permissions to fly above the airport, they did not have permission to fly from a federally subsidized airport. The AST section was surprised to learn about this issue. John says it will be worked out eventually but unfortunately in the meantime they cannot even do tethered tests because of the crazy ruling last year that labeled such tests as launches.
As a commenter notes, imagine if the government had required the Wright Brothers to get permission to fly from Kitty Hawk. It is a shame that the Armadillo team has to waste time and resources learning how to negotiate bureaucracies instead of how to develop safe and effective vehicles.
[Late afternoon update]
The problem seems to have been resolved.
The Baucus Bill
“A fiscal fantasyland.”
That’s actually a pretty good description of the District of Columbia in general.
[Update a few minutes later]
The drug pusher in DC:
An initial bailout of state governments eases their pain and makes them feel better for a little while, after which they’re going to crash without another fix.
It’s all part of the goal of making us all dependent on them.
“Progressive” Hollywood Propaganda
From the early thirties. Some things never change. Unfortunately.
A Look At Fascism
…by Life Magazine, in 1938 (starts on page 31). Yup, that Italy was sure one right-wing, unregulated capitalist nirvana.
Robert Reich’s Speech
The student audience, which at first clapped enthusiastically as Reich started to tell his unspeakable “truths” stopped clapping by the end. Reich had uttered the fundamental heresy. You really can’t have something for nothing. Pulling in one direction meant giving way in another. He went on to say that America was hopelessly addicted to fantasy; that anyone who got up on stage and reeled off the points he had made was politically dead.
Although I may disagree with many of the public policy positions that Robert Reich takes, his point that the truth makes piss-poor politics seems valid. Things come down to choices: lower costs versus death panels; torture versus intelligence; equity versus growth. And politicians, ever eager to garner votes, never want to say this. They will always try to have it both ways. Even when politicians choose one road over the other, they take pains to suggest they are simultaneously proceeding down two paths. One can disagree with the choices Reich makes but he is right to say that choices are unavoidable.
Yes, “progressives” do seem to be allergic to truth, and reality.
Crunch Time For Health Care
Now it’s up to us.
I find it ironic that the thuggish congressman Grayson is accusing Republicans of wanting people to die, when Robert Reich is very explicit about that as the Dem’s plan.