Jay Manifold has a plan to execute the president’s space vision. I agree with him that anything on the timescale of decades is likely to be superceded by technology.

I think that historians will judge Dean’s out-of-control speech in Iowa as the 2003 equivalent of Ed Muskie’s tears. Too bad he couldn’t have waited for his meltdown until after he got the nomination.

It was a little surprising, given his speech last week, that the president didn’t mention space in the State of the Union address on Tuesday.

Then again, perhaps it wasn’t. After all, John Kennedy, the last president to make successful a grand goal for space activities, didn’t make his space speeches part of the State of the Union address–they were separate addresses.

I pointed out last week that there was little different in this plan from the plans of previous administrations. I was not quite correct.

From a political standpoint, there is a big difference, and a similarity with Kennedy’s call for the nation to land men on the moon within a decade. This was an event that occurred years after his death, and, in fact, after his second term of office would have ended, had it been allowed to begin.

In that case, and the present one (and unlike the announcements of the Nixon and first Bush administrations) the president and the Congress were the same party.

As it was in the early sixties, with a young, charismatic Democrat president and a solidly Democrat Congress, it’s hard to imagine that a Republican Congress, with a Republican president at the top of his game, will deny the call for a new space initiative. Assuming that President Bush is reelected this fall, we will be five years into the new program by the time he leaves office in 2009, and while it won’t be impossible, it will be difficult to pull the program out of the new groove that the second President Bush has carved for it, which does mean, among other things the end of the shuttle program (a good thing).

All of which points out, once again, what’s wrong with space policy.

I pointed out over a year ago, after the last election, that space is a non-partisan issue, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

When I say it’s a non-partisan issue, I mean that the arguments about it rarely fall along traditional left/right or liberal/conservative lines. Ignoring the fact that such dichotomies are simplistic, the actual arguments are rarely that clean cut.

Modern liberals can object to the program for legitimate “liberal” reasons. It takes resources away from the poor and helpless, we shouldn’t be pouring money into the vacuum of space when there are so many unmet needs on earth, we are exploiting yet another new environment when we haven’t proved our ability to manage this one, blah blah blah.

Similarly, so-called conservatives have their own complaints. It’s not a legitimate function of government, there’s no obvious benefit, free enterprise will lead the way, etc. For an example of the latter, look to John Derbyshire’s recent essay at National Review on line.

I don’t agree with either position, and could put up strong arguments against them, but that’s beside the point of this particular column, which is that the real problem is that space policy is politicized, but not because of any intrinsic merits or demerits of the proposal itself.

It’s the fact that it’s so seemingly apolitical that allows all policy participants to view it solely through the lense of who supports it, or doesn’t. The party lines on this issue seem to be…non-existent. The political divide is about who proposes it, not any intrinsic features of the policy itself.

As an example, much of the discussion in the blogosphere has been filtered through the prism of various commenters’ general opinion of the Bush administration. Many people seem to be opposing it purely because it’s being proposed by the “smirking chimp.” For example, see the comments section at this post by Kevin Drum. Or from Matthew Yglesias. Or Chad Orzel (scroll up for a couple more related posts on the same subject). The sense one gets from much of the commentary is that they’d favor the proposal if it were coming from a President Gore, or President Dean, but if Bush is proposing it, there’s obviously something evil and cynical about it.

Orzel, in fact, is quite explicit about this:

I should note right up front that, like most people who have commented on this, I doubt that the Bush plan will turn out to be a Good Thing in the end. Not so much because I think it’s inherently a bad idea as because it’s being put forth by the Bush team.

There may be some people who are in favor of it for the same reason, but I suspect that they are far fewer. There are people who like George Bush, and support things because he supports them, but the ranks of those who mindlessly oppose things because of his support are almost certainly much larger.

It would be nice if the policy could be discussed on its merits or lack thereof, but I suspect that that’s a forlorn hope in a Red/Blue America.

That’s sad, because there are actually useful ideological divides on this issue that go beyond whether or not you believe bumper-sticker wisdom like “Bush lied, people died.” It’s possible to be both for the human expansion of space, and against additional funding for NASA. Similarly, it’s possible to be utterly indifferent to such a goal, and still favor NASA budget increases, if your congressional district would benefit from same.

Until we can get past personalities, and into serious discussion about the merits (or lack thereof) of space policy proposals, it’s likely that we’ll continue to be largely confined to the planet on which we evolved, regardless of how many high-toned speeches the president makes.

The basis of discussion should not be whether or not we want to send humans to other planets to stay, but what is the best policy to accomplish that, but I’ve seen little sign that the decision makers can break out of the stale binary thinking of the past. Merits remain irrelevant, and even after the most visionary space speech from an American president in years, politics continues to triumph.

The Birdman from Iowa has the inside track on Iowa caucus reporting. He’s got live coverage (too much to permalink–if you don’t read this post until sometime in the future, go to the January 19, 2004 archives).

I’m in California, back from Florida, where I didn’t get eaten by an alligator, though I may post a pic or two of some, if I get time later. I read Greg Klerkx’ new book on the plane, and will post a review, time permitting, but I’ve got a lot of work piled up.

Guess who said this today:

“Instead of spending enormous sums of money on an unimaginative and retread effort to make a tiny portion of the moon habitable for a handful of people, we should focus instead on a massive effort to ensure that the Earth is habitable for future generations.”

Yup, it was the guy who was in charge of space policy for much of the 1990s.

And here’s a quote from Clinton’s former science advisor:

I’m sad about the focus on human space flight when we’re doing so well with robotics which extend human presence. This refocus on human flight is something that worries me greatly.

Actually, to be fair, it’s what I’d expect a science advisor to say, since manned spaceflight, including the president’s new proposal, has little to do with science per se. What’s frustrating is the ongoing implicit assumption that science is the reason we have a civil space program, an assumption which few ever question, which is why we continue to have these arguments and cognitive dissonance.

Anyway, I’m very happy that neither of them is in a policy-making position any more.

[via Keith Cowing]

A West Virginia bank robber was arrested after returning to the scene of the crime to retrieve his forgotten note.

Iowahawk has miraculously come up with the original submission of Perrin’s Lileks hit piece before his editor went over it.

This is pretty funny. Or it would be if it wasn’t so pathetic.

Some reading-challenged columnist at the San Diego Union Tribune has accused me and Fox News of a “forgery” in the satire that I did last summer on post-war Iraq/Europe.

Thanks to my Internet friends, I can now identify the source of the bogus 1945 Reuters news dispatch I wrote about Monday. That forgery likely served as the basis for White House and Pentagon comparisons of Iraqi resistance to German resistance in 1945, part of its sorry attempts to compare Iraq to World War II.

The source for the bogus news (one should have known) is Fox News.

A Fox contributor named Rand Simberg, described as “consultant in space commercialization, space tourism and Internet security” made up the Reuters dispatch for Fox on July 30 (posting it on his own Web site two days later). This was only a week before the first Bush references were made to German “werewolves” in one of several inept comparisons to World War II.

OK, so much for his fevered fantasies. Here’s reality.

Weary of all the handwringing and historical ignorance of the handwringers about how Iraq hadn’t been converted to Iowa only three months after the end of major combat operations, I wrote the piece and published it on my blog on July 28, as anyone can see who goes to read it. I didn’t write it “for Fox News.”

To indicate clearly that it was satire, I attributed it, as usual, to the mythical WW II news agency, “Routers,” and I incorporated my own 2003 copyright at the bottom. Subsequently, it was picked up by emailers, the copyright was stripped, “Routers” was misspelled to correspond to a more familiar (and actual) wire service, and it quickly found its way across cyberspace. These fake versions were debunked by Snopes a month later.

Anyway, two days after I wrote and published it (not before), I decided to submit it to Fox as my weekly column, and they decided to run it, with a new title, on July 30, as can be seen here. They also made it very clear that it was fictional satire, by using an introduction, and attributing it to me. So again it was neither a “forgery” or “bogus news.”

Next, he writes:

Rice claimed German werewolves “engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces” and cooperating Germans, “much like today’s Baathist and Fedayeen remnants.”

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld embellished the story still further. Werewolves, he said, “plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings. Does this sound familiar,” he asked?

Only in Rice’s and Rumsfeld’s minds. The total number of post-conflict U.S. combat casualties in Germany was zero. In Iraq, that number is, so far, 357. Some comparison.

Well, neither Rice nor Rumsfeld claimed that there were U.S. casualties (though in fact the number was not zero–I think it was seven deaths, and there were many Russian ones in their zone), so this is a non-sequitur. The point was not a quantitative one about casualties, but about the fact that there was indeed a post-war resistance, however ineffective. (I should add that I suspect that part of the relative effectiveness has to do with the technologies available then and now, and the vast stores of weaponry available in post-war Iraq, relative to a post-war Germany that had been totally drained by a long war.)

Now, it is apparently true that, as a result of it being retransmitted as an authentic document, some in the administration were fooled, and it seems to have ultimately found its way past the firewalls even into the five-sided building itself. When I talked to the Pentagon correspondent for the Dallas Morning News about it last fall, he told me that he had attended a dinner at which someone sitting next to Rumsfeld told the SecDef something to the effect that “…and did you know that Truman was almost impeached over the situation in post-war Germany?”

Frankly, I doubt if all of the quotes this guy has in his article can be attributed to this piece, in either its original or plagiarized form. There was plenty of discussion of the Werwolf at the Command Post and other sites before I wrote my piece (and in fact, such discussions were what partially inspired the piece). We know that CNN and Fox were monitoring that site, and it wouldn’t be at all surprising if the White House and Security Council were as well. There’s no reason to think that my piece was the only, or even the first time that they had heard of the situation in the ex-Third Reich.

Anyway, I just thought I’d set the record straight, and I might suggest that the editors at the SD UT give their columnist a remedial lesson in vocabulary, date order, and perhaps a little refresher legal course in libel, lest he accuse any other innocent people of “forgeries” and “bogus news.”

[Thanks to emailer Robert McClimon for the tip]

[Update at 4:24 PM PST]

I should also note that this is old-school hackery. He didn’t bother to provide links to any of this (as I did). If he had, anyone who chose to follow them would have been able to figure out the reality, even if he couldn’t.

I suspect that this is partly because it was a dead-tree column transferred to the web, but I also suspect that even if he was a cybercolumnist, we wouldn’t have seen the links, because then his readership would have easily realized how foolish he was. I wonder how much longer these so-called journalists are going to be able to (or at least think they’re going to be able to) get away with this kind of scurrilous nonsense?

Logic alert in Kathy Sawyer’s WaPo piece this morning on the new space initiative.

There are also serious unknowns about how, physically, the mandate will be carried out. There is no mention of money for a big rocket that could replace the shuttle’s heavy cargo-carrying capacity. One congressional space expert speculated that the development of such a vehicle might be taken out of NASA hands and given to the military or done in partnership with the commercial sector — a course that has led to multiple costly failures in the past with such experimental projects as the National Aerospace Plane and the X-33.

The implication is (I assume) that this isn’t a good approach, because it’s failed in the past.

Two problems.

First is a logical one–the implied conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. That is, even if this approach was followed in the past, and failed, one cannot conclude that all such approaches will fail. In order to determine that, we have to evaluate all of the factors that made it fail–we can’t simply assume that it was the approach itself that was flawed.

The second is that the premise itself is false. Neither NASP, nor X-33 used the approach described above. NASP wasn’t “taken out of NASA hands and handed over to the military”–it was a joint program between NASA and the Air Force. And X-33 wasn’t done “in partnership with the commercial sector,” because Lockheed Martin is not part of the commercial sector–it’s a government contractor. Lockmart hasn’t done anything commercial since the L-1011 fiasco, and their “business plan” for the Venture Star, the vehicle that was supposed to follow on from the X-33, was a joke, and a bad one, because it ended up costing the taxpayers a billion dollars.

NASP failed because it was a con job, a technical chimera initially foisted on DARPA by someone who was at best naive, and at worst a charlatan.

From neither case can we conclude that the concepts of either the military developing space vehicles, or commercial partnerships with the government, are in any way inherently flawed.