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Lori Garver spoke on new NASA budget An old friend of mine who is now second in command at NASA gave an FAA AST Keynote speech on Friday which should warm the cockles of any free marketers heart. The new budget is a drastic directional change for NASA from the old Socialist Bureaucracy model to one using entrepreneurship and free market capitalism.
I am sure this is not enough for some of you, but it is a massive change towards the right direction which we should applaud and support.
All I can say is, “Go Lori!!!!”
PS: I will endeavour to write up my take on the new direction as soon as I can. As you can see from the previous article, I have been a bit occupied. If you take from the above that I am a tad… positive… about the new policy, you would be British in your level of understatement.
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Obama isn’t implementing “a drastic directional change for NASA,” he just doesn’t (or cannot) pay for the Moon-by-2020 commitment so he kills the program, talking about private enterprise as a cover. Sad thing is that the useful idiots keep being useful!
Sun Tzu said you should “know thy enemy” as an exhortation to learn the ways of your opponent*, but he left out the most obvious meaning: first you have to know who your enemy is.
A budget is not just a tally of who gets what money, but a statement of political and economic priorities. Replacing all the money NASA spends centrally through “the old Socialist Bureaucracy model” with a nebulous commitment to private entreprise is not a shift towards private Space, but a way to change the priorities away from Space (private or otherwise). Obama does not understand (or understands and wants to destroy) free enterprise; anyone thinking he is going to help free markets (except maybe by accident) just doesn’t know who their enemy is.
* The actual quote goes something like: “If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles,” but I like the shortness of “Know thy enemy” better; I wonder who first used that one?
I suspect this means you have not looked at the budget then. I just cannot understand why so many ‘conservatives’ are crying out in defense of the old socialist space program simply because it’s “the other side” proposing the *required* changes.
NASA has had more last chances than it deserves. It must now change or die. The new budget contains virtually everything we’ve ever asked for and it has been prepared by people I trust. I have known Lori for a quarter of a century at least, through multiple career moves and I will back her to the hilt. She knows my views because she’s heard them first person in many a different hotel bar, amongst groups of mutual friends, over those long years.
Fellow capitalist Rand Simberg has similar things to say:
http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=24825
I haven’t read the budget, either, and have long been an opponent of NASA and its socialist, command-and-control structure. Frankly, I think it has long been an expensive make-work program for engineers and bureaucrats, with little tangible benefit for the rest of us. But I respect Dale’s expertise in this matter, and if he says that the right people are now in charge there, and the mission has been changed in a more appropriate direction, then I’m willing to give them a chance to prove themselves.
The other day I saw that SpaceX has moved its Falcon 9 rocket to Cape Canaveral preparatory to its first launch in a few months. If this is the future of NASA I’m all for it!
What I find interesting politically is this time around the gravest danger to moving away from the old Statist model comes from the Conservatives. They are attacking it in knee jerk fashion under the pretense that the State must spend money to make us look like the Meanest SOB in the valley. Sort of like the way some male birds fluff up their plumage to look really big to rival males.
It is important to get these folk to realize how bass-ackwards thei are acting because it is likely they will take both houses this November and that could force a policy reversal that goes back to the old Socialist model.
Fortunately some key figures from that political persuasion have come to the rescue: Newt Gingritch in particular carries a lot of clout in those circles and has praised it.
It is not a certainty we will win, but this is the best shot in a very long time since key players across the political spectrum are in place and trying to do the right thing.
Everyone who really understands what is going on recognizes this may be NASA’s last chance to change.
Dale, this might be a trifle off-topic (or at least off-center), but is the new NASA administration likely to do anything to pull NASA back from being such an embarrassing CAGW cheerleader? Are they going to return to doing real space science, and back off from the politically correct greenmongering?
From Ms. Garver’s speech: “NASA’s Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research program is developing plans to use commercial suborbital space vehicles to inspire our children.”
Yup. Under-inspired children. That’s the real business opportunity.
Ms. Garver is doing the best with the hand she has been dealt — but it still sounds like a lot of money will be spent (wasted?) on that silly International Space Station — a solution in search of a problem, if there ever was one. And this at a time when Ms. Garver tells us that the US (the only nation ever to put a man on the Moon) is trailing even the Ukraine in the commercial launch business! And Ukraine trails France, for goodness sake! And France trails Russia — which at least paid its dues in the early development of rocketry.
I’d like to be optimistic, but the US is apparently not even able to hold its end up in the existing space launch business. What are the other mysterious opportunities that under-capitalized start-ups will be able to grasp from under the noses of the Russians, Euros, Ukrainians, Chinese & Indians? Inspiring children?
It is good that Ms. Garver is so enthusiastic. She needs to be. It would be great if Congress could give her a real reason to be enthusiastic — Dump the Damn ISS Right Now! Give it to the international partners. No more US money down that sink hole. And dump the Global Warming boondoggle while we are at it! Instead, use all of NASA’s budget to expand some of the commercial partnerships beyond a piddling $1 Billion per year. Establish a goal of making US companies the leaders in commercial launch & space utilization.
US children can probably live with being beaten by Afghanistan in cricket. But tell them that the US is being beaten by the Ukraine in space lauches, and they might just become uninspired.
I hope you do realise that is part of the Obama plan: sow dissent among your opponents while you are free to do what you want with the money not spent in Space. My prediction is that at the end of Obama’s presidency, the share of US GDP devoted to Space (private and public) will be less than at its beginning. This will be due to both the administration’s direct action and the effects of the (predictable) counter-reaction. You are being bait-and-switched (take away the immediately doable by promising a brighter future that will not come to pass); why do people keep falling for this is beyond me.
I do not contend that you believe in what you are doing, or that you believe it is the the right thing to do, just that you are being had.
Frederick we may indeed be “being had” as you (and Krauthammer) believe, but frankly it’s still a step in the right direction as long as the commitment to private-sector space activity remains. Frankly, I don’t care about governmental manned space missions (including the ISS); they serve absolutely no purpose. The Shuttle never lived up to its promise and the Constellation seems incredibly ill-conceived; we should welcome its death.
With SpaceX and its competitors we will still have domestic capacity for putting satellites into orbit, and at the moment that’s the only practical application of space travel. If there is an effecient method of putting humans into space, it is they who will find it, not NASA.
You are going to see more and more of this. As the first commenter to that article said: “This is more indication that space exploration has been relegated to being a status symbol, rather than a serious program…”