The more they remain the same:
…the masses are morons who respond only to simple messages repeated thousands of times (a perspective I discuss at length in my book).
Seventy-some years later, this belief is as popular with the powers that be as it was in 1933.
You know, like Hope! And Change! And we can spend our way out of bankruptcy. And that you’ll get to keep your private insurance.
From James Lileks:
As I’ve said before, nothing sums up the seventies, and the awful guttering of the national spirit, than a pop song about Skylab falling on people’s heads. “Skylab’s Falling,” a novelty hit in the summer of ’79. It tumbled down thirty years ago this month, and didn’t get much press, possibly because of the odd muted humiliation over the event. But it wasn’t end of Skylab that gave people a strange shameful dismay. It was the idea that we were done up there, and the only thing we’d done since the Moon trips did an ignominious Icarus instead of staying up for decades. So this wasn’t the first step toward the inevitable double-wheel with a Strauss waltz soundtrack, or something more prosaic. Wasn’t that the way it was supposed to work? Moon first, then space station, then moon colonization, then Mars.
If a kid could see that, why couldn’t they?
…Robot exploration is very cool; I’d like more. As someone noted elsewhere, we should have those rovers crawling all over the Moon, at the very least. It’s just down the street. But think how much grander we would feel if we knew that our first mission to Jupiter was coming back next month. (Without the giant space-fetus.) How we would imagine our solar system, how each planet would feel like a blank page in a passport waiting for a stamp. Perhaps that’s what annoys some: the aggrandizement that would come from great exploits. Human pride in something that isn’t specifically related to fixing the Great Problems we face now, or apologizing for the Bad Things we did before. Spending money to go to Mars before we’ve stopped climate turbulence would be like taking a trip to Europe while the house is on fire.
I had forgotten that Skylab fell a decade after the first landing. What a metaphorical fall, in only ten brief years (though they seemed longer at the time, I being much younger).
Oh, and the astronaut punching the guy in the face thing? As long-time blog readers know, it was a hoax. Never happened.
With this more generally applicable opening:
A rule we can rely on to be unfailingly applied is this: No matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom that remains. This of course is evidence of a rigged game. The government can’t possibly monitor and regulate absolutely every transaction that takes place in a country. Stalin and Hitler couldn’t do it by a long shot. So anything that displeases the ruling regime can easily be laid at the doorstep of freedom and be used as an excuse for stamping out whatever traces of liberty still exist.
The other part of the rigged game is to have so many laws that it is almost impossible to get through a day without violating one or another, making every citizen a subject of the state, vulnerable at all times to prosecution on unrelated issues if she doesn’t toe the state line.
Here’s another piece, over at Wired, that (like Charles Krauthammer’s) implies (perhaps because the author mistakenly infers) that Constellation is synonymous with returning to the moon. Whether to persist with the vision, and NASA’s particularly disastrous implementation of it are entirely different issues.
The afternoon panel on Monday is on how big the problem is, and what we can do about it.
[Update, it’s starting]
David Morrison is speaking first. He treats asteroids as enemies, while John Lewis treats them as friends. Going through arguments, and explaining what’s been happening in last few years.
Asteroid hazard is one that we can not only mitigate, but eliminate through space technology. First real awareness of hazard goes back to the Alvarez discovery that the dinosaurs were wiped out, and it was a surprise that an event that had no effect on the orbit, magnetic field, or earth itself could wipe out an ecosystem. Referring to a 1991 statement by the Congress that said we should study it internationally, and that while the risk is very small the consequences are very large, and it is a perfect charge: look at the risk, assess the threat, and figure out what to do about it.
Comes in big chunks, can go thousands of years without killing anyone, and then be catastrophic. Showing terrestrial impact frequence graph on log-log scale of megatons of energy on the X axis and frequency on the Y axis (it’s a linear relationship). Upper left is Hiroshima-size event, which occurs almost annually. Tonguska was much worse, and occurs once every few hundred years. Explosions are produced so high in the atmosphere that they don’t reach the ground, and we didn’t realize how often they occur until they got data from Air Force satellites that could see them happening. Those data were invaluable in quantifying the threat. The Air Force had stopped releasing the data a few months ago, but have started to do so again in the last week, though not to the degree of precision that they have themselves, but it’s good enough.
[Update]
D’oh!
I accidentally erased the John Lewis and part of the Morrion talk, and have no obvious way to get it back. Sorry.
The states hit hardest by the recession are getting the least amount of “stimulus.” Well, what else would you expect from Barack Hoover Obama?
[Mid-morning update]
Or is he Jimmy Carter? At this point, that’s a best-case scenario, I think.
This morning there was a business plan competition, which I skipped, needing my sleep more. The first session after lunch is titled, “NewSpace Policy: Accelerating Development Or Picking Winners?” It’s moderated by Ken Davidian of FAA-AST. Panelists are space-policy analyst/lobbyist Jim Muncy, Bruce Pittman of the Ames Commercial Space Portal, Space Show host David Livingston, and Doug Comstock of NASA HQ. The show is a little delayed because Ken isn’t back from lunch yet, and Comstock’s plane got in late.
[Update]
Apparently Davidian and Comstock are stuck in the traffic of all the people coming to Moon Day at Ames. Muncy starting with them. Question is how to include government in your business plan. Government dominant customer in space goods economy if you don’t count ground segment. To extent that government breathes in the vicinity of NewSpace, it can have a huge impact, regardless of whether or not you want it to (Davidian walks in). On one hand business advisers say to stay as far away as government as possible. On other hand we have a right-stuff astronaut who admires Franklin Chang-Diaz not because he swam from Cuba but because he is an entrepreneur who has invented a new propulsion system. We have an administration that is potentially very supportive of commercial space.
Davidian talking now, quoting Will Rogers that the two ways to learn is by reading and the other is by associating with smarter people, so glad to have this panel. Introducing David Livingston and Bruce Pittman (Comstock hasn’t shown up yet).
Livingston: Government as a customer is a fact of life and if you don’t like it get over it. Question is how to manage the relationship. Doesn’t see it as that different from private sector companies, though risks are different. Government has potential to be fantastic customer for space, but run the risk of dependence, and this can be bad in a time of change. Relationship needs to be well thought out, but is glad they’re there as a customer.
Pittman: Speaking as someone who does business with the government, has its good sides and opportunities, but policies and procedures are different, and you have to understand the FAR to do business with them — it’s the law. NASA has some different ways to do things (OTA, Other Transactions Authority). COTS is doing this, DARPA does it a lot, and NASA hasn’t traditionally, but they can, and are starting to now. Big difference is response time — rapid for entrepreneurs, glacially slow for government. A lot of good people working as hard as they can, but it just takes time.
Davidian: Government trying to be a good customer, but constrained by FAR. Overspecifying can cause issues, and government seems unable to buy off the shelf. Citing specific example of Zero G, and nonsensical requirement to handle combustion experiments, even though none were contemplated to be flown. What are advantages and disadvantages of this from both government and private perspective. Is it a good thing to overspecify if the government is capable of paying for it?
Muncy: No objective answer, but from his perspective, government is made of human beings, and humans like to change their mind. Fixed services tend to be fixed, but the government doesn’t like to accept things as is, and views it as a reduction in its freedom to change its mind. Talk about R&D being hard, and leading in unknown directions, but leads to cost-plus paradigm that eliminates the possibility of lower costs, and getting more for available resources. Had to fight a couple years ago and go to the head of an agency to convince an agency to allow a fixed-price SBIR contract ($750K). They were essentially saying that they didn’t want a ten-million-dollar product for less than a million bucks, but they still didn’t want to “risk” the money. It’s a very intractable problem. Administration has to decide whether it wants to build program, or industry, with and industrial base that can support more activity. if it only wants to build a program, they won’t get the benefits of private partnership.
Pittman: Not an or, but an and. Government must be “a” customer, not “the” customer. Talks about HP model where they shipped things to government out of a catalog and did nothing special. Disagrees that the government “distorts” the marketplace — if government is major customer, it is the market. Have to make a business decision as to whether or not to have government as a customer. Tip of the iceberg of a bigger thing called “acquisition reform,” all through the government right now. People on the government side are much more open than he’s seen to look at new ways of doing business.
Livingston: Two-way relationship, and he assumes that management of the business is competent. Management makes lots of decisions, some good some bad, and you sometimes don’t find out for years which were which. Many companies start out wanting to avoid government, but discover that they need it as a customer. Has experience with private customers who are just as finicky about requirements, the difference being that they’re not generally cost plus. If you want to do business with the government, understand their rules, if you want to do business with private entities, they’ll have their own rules.
Muncy agrees that “distortion” is a mischaracterization. Government “distorts” more so in some places and less so in others. In yesterday’s propellant depot discussion issue came up with question of why satellite owners don’t want services. Government is dominant customer of broadband services. Could say, as it does with Civil Reserve Air Fleet, that they want special requirements imposed on satellites, and will pay up front to meet those requirements, including an amount up front to have first call on services in war time without extraordinary costs. This is a useful market distortion, but it serves a public purpose and it’s market friendly. Can we encourage pubic investment to service public needs while not destroying ability to serve the private market?
Question: Instead of government distorting market, can new providers with new products distort the market within the government to change the way it does business? Davidian says that FAA doesn’t use the FAR, but yet a different system.
Pittman says that Google and the Internet have changed the way we do business. But government is like driving a supertanker, takes a long time to change unless it’s a very attractive thing. Can be done but doesn’t typically happen quickly.
Muncy uses example of COTS. He found the former NASA general counsel who had gone to DARPA, and at DARPA he convinced Congress to give him OTA. Muncy found the academic papers of how it worked and his phone number, so that he could explain to NASA how his own former agency could use its own law. Need has to be desperate, but we may be in desperate times and they may be willing to change things. Hard for small entrepreneur to get a major agency to change its ways of doing business when it hasn’t even gotten into business itself.
Livingston: Needs to have strategies about what will work or not, with fallbacks and mitigations, and indicators to know when they have to fall back.
Wingo question: Went to NASA HQ as CEO of Orbital Recovery when they were looking into procurement of new TDRSS satellites. Put an offer on the table to prolong life of existing satellites for eighty millions dollars, saving them hundreds of millions of dollars in new ones. NASA didn’t know what to do with it. The best they could do would be to put out RFP, but then you wouldn’t be able to help them structure it because of conflict of interest, which means that someone else would get the business. FAR just doesn’t have that kind of flexibility.
Pittman: Purpose of culture is to prevent change, which is risky. Bigger the organization harder the culture is to change. Have to ask who is threatened, who will lose, or perceive that it is a threat, and find ways to satisfy them.
Davidian: Can the government be a good customer? Typically space enthusiasts ask government for money (tax abatements, contracts, whatever)?
Livingston: Can be a good customer, but requires a lot of due diligence and planning, and you have to have skin in the game and offer a value a proposition and be willing accept strings attached.
Pittman: One good thing that a government will do that private entities won’t necessarily is to accept risk (at least for R&D, in things like SBIRs and STTRs). You don’t necessarily want to take money from a VC, either. Strings are attached regardless of the money source.
Doug Comstock just walked in, from the Innovative Partnerships Office (responsible for things like Centennial Challenges, Davidian’s former boss). Question: disagrees that SBIRs and STTRs are a subsidy. Development of technologies that are of interest to the government, while also being of use to private industry that can generate products and services that provide returns to the taxpayer in increased revenues through economic growth. Should think of it as a great investment for the taxpayer.
Muncy: Yes, if you want to accelerate the amount of money into an industry, increase ability to make smallsats, new launch systems, that costs money. If you want it to happen, it is a subsidy, a federal decision to accelerate, then send money, but don’t send money the way you do to Constellation — do it in a way that is market friendly. SBIR/STTR are market friendly.
Argument from Pittman over subsidy versus investment and how to do the difference. How do we know when we’re merely transferring wealth and when we’re creating new industries and products and services?
Comstock: if you look at recent Space Foundation reports on global space markets, commercial revenue is about three times government revenue in the industry, and we’re developing the next generation of that. People raised these issues in the early days of NASA, that we should focus on planet, not space stuff, but a lot of good technology has come out of those investments.
Question from Lauer: Government as a whole sometimes does a good job of purchasing, but NASA seems to have problems. Does NASA have a way of learning from the past? Giving example of a NASA-initiated concept that they wanted to put on the station and give it to NASA for free, as long as they got contract rights. Started as sole-source, which then turned into something that had to be competed, got screwed up, same thing happened with Transhab, and they still have no free-flying camera on the station.
Comstock acknowledges history, but cites COTS as an example of ability to do things differently. Hopes it’s an indicator of where things are headed. Talking about a Sabotier reactor for water production on ISS that NASA won’t have to pay for. Hopes that NASA will be able to learn lessons.
Panel over. Clark Lindsey have notes as well.
…and his terrible truths:
It takes years of yoga to learn the posture necessary for speaking clearly with all your feet in your mouth. But for some the skill comes naturally, which brings us to Joe Biden. Those who saw Dick Cheney as an evil genius crouched silent in the shadows of the Oval Office like Nosferatu must enjoy Biden’s high profile: he’s out there daily with the sunny enthusiasm of Ronald McDonald opening another store. And, quite often, telling everyone to have a Whopper.
It’s by Lileks, so you know you want to click to read the rest.
Someone asked me yesterday why I hadn’t posted anything on the death of Walter Cronkite. Well, I’m not as big a fan as many want me to be, and de mortuis nil nisi bonum, and all that. Yes, I grew up with him like everyone of my generation, but I never trusted him as much I was supposed to after Tet. There was nothing objective in his essential declaration of a lost war after a great American victory. When Johnson famously said “When we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve lost middle America,” he may have thought or meant that Uncle Walter was somehow a reflection of middle America, but to the degree that his statement was true, it confused cause and effect. If the administration had lost middle America it was because it was too susceptible to influence as a result of a reputation for objectivity that was perhaps overstated.
Middle America’s news sources were far too limited in those days. (It’s worth noting that people who listen to Rush Limbaugh have a lot more choice, at least in theory, than viewers of network news did in the sixties.) As Glenn says, all of the mourning in the media isn’t about the loss of some mythical era of press integrity and objectivity, but of lost power to propagandize the American people with the loss of a single voice to which much of America turned to for their news. I have no nostalgia for a return to those times.
But that having been said, there is no question that he was the biggest supporter of the space program in the media, and he was, for most Americans of the time, the voice of Apollo. There was a sincere, boyish quality to his enthusiam in his reporting. I was listening to some video this morning on a CBS tribute, and he was describing the launch of the first surface mission as special because it was the one that would actually send men to the moon. And then he mused (paraphrasing, not transcript handy), “…send a man to the moon. What words. Golly, just think about it.” And on the landing, “Oh, boy.”
“Golly.” It’s hard to imagine any current news reader saying “golly,” and that kind of little touch is what resulted in the myth that he was an everyman, though he clearly thought like a Washington elite, as his later statements (the most recent of which was when he declared Iraq, like Vietnam, a lost cause) displayed for anyone who chose to notice. Thankfully, his influence had waned considerably in the intervening decades.
He was purely of the Apollo era, and a part of it impossible to separate. His last day on the air, in early March, 1981, was a little over a month before the first Shuttle flight on April 12th, so there was no overlap with the more modern human spaceflight program that followed the first push. And in some ways, in relating and relaying his own enthusiasm for the program to America, he helped create the enduring myth of Apollo as the beginning of a grand age of space exploration, when it in fact was a dead end that few realized at the time. It’s a false perception that continues to haunt our space policy to this day.
Charles Krauthammer is generally a pretty smart guy, particularly on politics, but when it comes to space policy, he (like many) check their brains at the door and rely on emotion:
America’s manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the U.S. will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We’ll be totally grounded. We’ll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.
So what, you say? Don’t we have problems here on Earth? Oh please. Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us. If we’d waited for them to be rectified before venturing out, we’d still be living in caves.
Yes, we have a financial crisis. No one’s asking for a crash Manhattan Project. All we need is sufficient funding from the hundreds of billions being showered from Washington — “stimulus” monies that, unlike Eisenhower’s interstate highway system or Kennedy’s Apollo program, will leave behind not a trace on our country or our consciousness — to build Constellation and get us back to Earth orbit and the moon a half-century after the original landing.
Note the implicit unstated assumption (which occurs often in space policy discussion): there is nothing wrong with NASA that a sufficient and steady budget won’t cure, and that if only we would give it to them, and leave them alone, they’d be leading us into the solar system. That anyone who thinks Constellation in its currrent form an unwise expenditure is opposed not for sound technical or economic reasons, but because we oppose expanding humanity into space. That Constellation, if not perfect, is more than good enough, and we must redo Apollo and go on from there.
Despite the fact that he’s a former clinical psychiatrist, the possibility that it is a dysfunctional sclerotic bureaucracy, and that giving it the money that it requests to do what it wants to do might not only be a waste, but actually set us back in the goal that he seems so earnestly to aver, never occurs to him. That there might be better ways to achieve his goal is seemingly beyond his ken.