Jukebox Machines

Obama’s Space Program: More Conservative than Bush’s?
Has President Obama done something important correctly for a change?As one who gripes about NASA’s sad excuse for a space program, I say yes, and gotta give credit where credit is due, since I keep saying he’s wrong on most other things. In case you do not know how he is reinventing our space program, here’s an article:http://www.transterrestrial.com/by Rand Simberg America has never had a space policy more visionary or more friendly to private enterprise.I find the current debate over President Obama’s new space policy mind-bendingly ironic. We have a radical president bent on socializing and nationalizing everything from the auto industry to hospitals, but when he comes up with a policy that actually harnesses free enterprise, we hear from conservatives nothing but complaints. Robert Costa, like many, seems to continue to view the space program through Apollo-colored glasses, 40 years on.There is no recognition in his or any other criticism of just what a programmatic disaster Constellation has become (I write “become,” but it has been this way since its inception five years ago – it only became clearly recognizable to most in the past year or so, its failure accentuated by the report of the Augustine panel last fall). Barack Obama was not responsible for that. As for Costa’s concern about the loss of jobs at Kennedy Space Center, he must be unaware that the shutdown of the space-shuttle program, with nothing to replace it immediately, was a Bush administration policy laid down more than six years ago. Never mind that the space program should not be a jobs program, although, unfortunately, it long ago became one. Where were the complaints then?The so-called conservative opposition to Bob Walker Juke Box Gold this new direction in space policy seems, at least to me, to come from three motivations: a visceral and intrinsic (and understandable) distaste for any policy that emanates from this White House; a nostalgia for the good old days, when we had a goal and a date and a really big rocket and an unlimited budget (what I’ve described as the “Apollo cargo cult”); and, in the case of such politicians as Senators Shelby, Hutchison, Hatch, et al., pure rent seeking for their states. Of course, these aren’t mutually exclusive: For some, all three apply. But none of these reasons addresses the problems with the status quo or the wisdom of the new policy.Equally ironic is the embrace by modern conservatives of Jack Kennedy, whose supposed vision about space is a myth. Yes, like Barack Obama’s speeches, his Rice speech was inspiring – sort of, if you didn’t think very hard about it. Is something worth doing just because it’s hard? Really? As I noted a few years ago:It would be hard to move Pikes Peak from Colorado to Florida. It would be even harder to build a life-size replica of the World Trade Center with used q-tips. Those things would also serve to “organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” That doesn’t make them worth doing.But Kennedy was trying to inspire and to win a Cold War. In reality, he wasn’t that into space, as he told his NASA administrator, Jim Webb, a couple of months before his assassination. Had he lived, the program might even have been cancelled, depending on how things were going in Vietnam.The reality is that Obama’s new space policy is more conservative than George W. Bush’s was, as I noted two-and-a-half months ago when the new budget was first released. Don’t take my word for it – ask Newt Gingrich or Bob Walker, or Dana Rohrabacher, conservatives who follow space policy closely and aren’t swept up in nostalgia for a Space Age that never really was, at least not in terms of making human spaceflight affordable or sustainable. The opposition from so many Republicans and conservatives to this new policy, which analysts and space activists have been seeking for years, is both frustrating and mystifying. As a former staffer for both Gingrich and Rohrabacher said at a recent space conference, “Democrats don’t think that capitalism works within the atmosphere, and Republicans apparently don’t think it works above it.”The previous plan was going to give us (at development costs much greater than originally estimated, and much later than originally planned) the capability to send a few people back to the moon some time in the late 2020s at a cost of billions per astronaut. Ares/Orion alone – just to get to low-Earth orbit, without the lunar capability – was going to cost a couple billion per flight, which is much more than the shuttle costs, for much less capability. And like the shuttle, it presented multiple single-point failures: If something happened that resulted in the system’s being shut down while an investigation occurred, the nation would have no capability to get crews into space at all (as happened with the shuttle, twice, for almI did not write this article.Mr. T: No Plastic Q-Tips! Us purists see plastic q-tips as an abomination which a more civilized folk would not permit. Is nothing sacred?! And don’t I have an inalienable Right to keep and bear Q-tips under the Liberty Clause? By what Constitutional authority could government force me to give up my Q-tips? I’ll tell you what, Mr. Government, “from my cold dead hands”!!!
Powered by Yahoo! Answers

Bob Walker Juke Box Gold