[Moonbase-discuss] NASA & privateers

[Randall Clague]

At 10:41 PM 09/28/2001, JonAlexandr@aol.com wrote:

>First, I disagree with people who have nothing good to say about NASA.  To
>those who think that NASA is a 'big gorilla' holding down private efforts in
>space, I say that the big gorilla to worry about is the one represented by
>our military space efforts.

I disagree.  I have seen NASA officials, including Dan Goldin, deliberately 
hurt private U.S. efforts to get to space.  The same cannot be said of the 
military, who would love to see private efforts succeed - the more items on 
the launch menu, the better they like it.

>NASA was designated a civilian agency, and our defense departments
>(particularly the Air Force), have always resented this.

That's a bit of a reach.  Have you evidence of this?

>Quite a few years
>back, however, direct spending on military space efforts finally eclipsed
>spending by NASA.

This is because NASA spending went down as commercial satellites came to be 
launched on commercial launchers, where they had previously been launched 
on NASA launchers.  Same launchers, the money just went more directly to 
the contractors.

>But even worse, many of NASA's civilian programs have been
>quietly integrated with military efforts, or headed by military officials.

Really?  Like?

>(By the way, am I the first to call missile defense -- AKA
>"Star Wars" -- a faith-based initiative?)

Dunno, but that's funny!  And probably true, for a while, anyway.  BMDO 
should not have succumbed to the political pressure to represent an 
experiment as a demonstration.  A demonstration that expensive had better 
work; an experiment is a success as long as you learn something.

>I see the best of NASA as an agency under siege from several directions:
> >From the covetous military; from a fickle and uneducated Congress (and from
>its respectively fickle and uneducated public); and from the
>private-enterprise crowd that erroneously blames all of its own failures on
>the white "gorilla."

The private enterprise crowd knows perfectly well that NASA is not to blame 
for all of its own failures.  The dominant feature of most recent space 
business failures is how much they resemble non-space business 
failures.  Iridium failed because they took too long to get to 
market.  Rotary failed partially because their market was nebulous, 
ill-defined, and inconstant.  Beale failed partially because their 
development program went over time and over budget.  What development 
program doesn't?

But NASA sure helped:

1) Dan Goldin told the New Scientist that Rotary Rocket could not succeed 
(false, until he scared off the investors), and that only NASA could invent 
new rocket engines (not only false, but backwards: NASA is the only space 
organization that *can't* invent new rocket engines).

2) Andrew Beale lays the blame for the demise of Beale Aerospace squarely 
on SLI, NASA's Space Launch Initiative, which was created after Beale 
announced his intent to develop and market a private launch vehicle, was 
created to serve exactly the market Beale was selling to, and which quietly 
died right after Beale closed its doors.  Coincidence?

3) Rand Simberg of Interglobal Space Lines and Lee Weaver of Weaver 
Aerospace have developed a vomit comet business, and were negotiating with 
Ron Howard for the zero-g sequences in Apollo 13 when NASA cut in and 
offered to do it for free.  Government should not be competing with private 
industry by offering 100% subsidies.

Those are just the three most prominent instances of recent NASA 
interference with private space efforts.  I find it ironic that when Dennis 
Tito flew his tourist flight, NASA would not only not fly him - they 
wouldn't let him in the American section of the station because he wasn't 
NASA qualified.  The world's great capitalist power denied one its citizens 
access to the space station because a state agency said so, but the world's 
former greatest statist power allowed the same person the same thing for 
purely capitalist reasons.  The former Soviets are better capitalists than 
the Americans.

>I think the swipes that the space technology private-enterprise crowd takes
>at NASA are part of a larger pattern that is reflected in the overall
>Republican agenda:  Bring government spending down just enough to starve
>funds for "unnecessary" social programs.  And how does this translate to
>science and space exploration?  Cut basic research and support only those
>efforts that have a high chance of direct economic return.  Since NASA is
>supposed to be an "exploration" agency -- which is equatable with basic
>research -- then NASA is in Republican eyes a target in the same way that a
>social service agency is.

What?  I can't even make sense of this paragraph.  Can we keep partisan 
politics out of this, please?

>And what about the International Space Station (ISS)?  It goes around and
>around, but goes nowhere.  Well, I disagree with this perception as well.
>Space is a hostile environment to us now.  It's going to take a long time
>before it becomes 'second-nature' to live and work in space.  I consider the
>main task of ISS as getting people -- humans -- familiar with the space
>environment in all of its spectacular AND boring details.  Only then will
>humanity be prepared for permanent space habitation -- which, I think, is the
>REAL reason for ISS.

If that were out goal, we'd have been better off to go forward with 
Mir.  For over a decade, Mir had just one advantage over ISS: it was on 
orbit.  When NASA finally got the first couple pieces of ISS up, 10 years 
late, 400% over budget, and with less than half the original specified 
capability, the first thing they insisted on was that the Russians de-orbit 
Mir.  They didn't want the competition.

Mir was old and decrepit.  It still worked.  Much of the crew's time was 
spent doing maintenance on the station.  They had a fire.  They crashed the 
garbage truck into it.  They lost things.  Just like living in an old house 
with feisty teenagers.  If you want to learn how to live and work in space, 
that's exactly the environment you want.  Instead, we have ISS, which is 
new and somewhat less decrepit.  And it uses construction techniques which 
guaranteed safe, and which therefore cost twenty times more than the 
equivalent Russian techniques, which require good training and common sense 
to succeed, and - gasp! - aren't guaranteed safe.  Well, do you want to fly 
a mission every month, and maybe lose a cosmonaut every twenty years, or do 
you want to fly a mission every year, bet the agency that no astronaut will 
ever be killed, and lose an astronaut in forty years anyway?

We're going to lose astronauts and cosmonauts if we keep mucking about in 
space.  Every sensible person knows this.  We lose pilots because people 
fly.  We lose drivers because people drive.  We lose fishermen because 
people fish.  We will lose more astronauts and cosmonauts if we keep going 
into space.  This is anathema to NASA - it is heresy!

This is why I don't like NASA as it is today.  They deny private citizens 
access to space by any means available to them, including mud-slinging and 
disinformation, they are dependent for funding on a fickle Congress, and 
they refuse to recognize reality.  I understand their reasons for this 
behavior, and they are perfectly rational if you accept that the primary 
goal of NASA is the existence of NASA.  If, on the other hand, you want to 
fly in space, NASA is your enemy.  I'm sorry.

This not to denigrate the magnificent work that NASA did 30 years ago, in 
Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab.  Or 20 years ago, with Pioneer 
Venus/Mercury, Viking, Pioneer 10 and 11, and Voyager 1 and 2.  JPL worked 
a miracle when they rewrote Voyager 2's operating system from a billion 
miles away.  Can you imagine?  Even Galileo, crippled as it was by a stupid 
decision, hamstrung by another stupid decision, and beaten half to death by 
the Io torus, has continued to do yeoman work at Jupiter.  (We won't talk 
about NASA and Mars lately...)

But the manned space flight side of NASA is not doing U.S. citizens any 
favors if they want to fly in space.

-R

--
Clague's First Law of Troubleshooting:
If you see smoke, it isn't a software problem.
Randall Clague          rclague@rclague.net