Rocketforge

Between Mike Griffin’s recent speech to the AAS and his recent comments on design and operations I think that he probably means what he says and is probably as good as we’re going to get on space commercialization. The questions still left outstanding for me are the following:

1) Mike has said several times that “as commercial service stand up, NASA will stand down”. But a move from government to commercial services isn’t a binary operation. There is a transition period during which equity markets need a very firm committment that NASA will actually either purchase the service or will discontinue its own service. The current Administrator may have a personal committment to do so and has said as much with regard to commecial crew and cargo to ISS. But the Architecture as currently instantiated creates an expectation on the part of several congressional districts that their pork is secure. How will an Administrator tell the congressperson from Utah that the ATK contract is being cancelled in favor of a commercial service? Is there a way to make the stand down a legal requirement that gives a commercial provider legal recourse?

2) What happens after Mike is gone? As I’ve discussed before, one of my largest concerns is that the hardware and lunar return portions of the ESAS architecture have overshadowed, and in some sense “swallowed”, the other non-NASA parts of the Vision. If we end up with a Democratic President in 2008 that gets rid of Griffin along with all of the other Bush appointees, will the Architecture, and thus the commercialization aspects of it, be swept out with him? The Architecture is already seen as Griffin’s personal intepretation of the VSE. If he is gone in a little over 2 years are we back to square one? Or even square zero?

I think my solution to both of those problems would be legislative. Something written into law that sets a particular test that a private company must accomplish. Once they’ve passed that test then NASA is required by law to use that service within two years of the company passing the test. One of the biggest issues would be who gets to write the test criteria since “fly an exact replica of the CEV as NASA designed it using the same number of employees and processes” wouldn’t accomplish anything.

Congressman Dana Rohrabacher recently submitted HR 1021: The Space and Aeronautics Prize Act which outlines several prizes run outside of NASA itself. I think that bill could easily be tweaked to provide for the requirement that NASA make significant use of the systems/products of whoever won the prize. Or possibly that within 4 years after a prize is won NASA must be purchasing 100% of anything in that category from commercial providers.

I also think its important to note that while I whole heartedly support HR 1021, that doesn’t mean I think that the Centennial Challenges budget should have been cut. I can understand the budgetary reasons for why they were cut but I think they should be restored somehow once the NASA Authorization bill passes later this month.

Alan J. Lindenmoyer was named as project manager for the new Commercial Crew/Cargo Project office. You can see Alan in this webcast that ESMD gave least week. This is the presentation that Alan is speaking to in that video. All of this was from the Industry Day from last week.

Frontier Files Online is back! It was around earlier last year as a blog/portal run by Al Differ and others for the Space Frontier Foundation. It has found a new host and all of the old articles have been reloaded. Its nice to see such a useful resource back among the living. Welcome back!

cur·mudg·eon (kr-mjn)
n.
An ill-tempered person full of resentment and stubborn notions.

scha·den·freu·de (shadn-froid)
n.
Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.

One can be curmudgeonly without engaging in or hoping for the rather shameful emotion of schadenfreude. There is a difference between saying you think someone is wrong and seeming to openly hope for and possibly work toward their failure.

In the native German the term schadenfreude has two connotations. Private or secret schadenfreude is an understandable human emotion that we know we have but keep to ourselves along with those other emotions that keep us from turning into emotional animals. Open or public schadenfreude is when you verbalize or take action to express or bring about your internal schadenfreude. The first is a base human emotion we learn to live with. The second is shameful, wrong and a character flaw to be corrected.

Or, stated in a more pop culture accessible way: Oscar the Grouch is a curmudgeon. But we all still love him. But if Big Bird’s nest burned down you wouldn’t find Oscar standing in the burned out ruins singing “Nyea, Nyea You suck!” That’s the difference between being a curmudgeon and engaging in public schadenfreude.