there might be a journalistic mistake here... (0.00 / 0)

There's been discussion of scrapping Orion for existing EELV's for a while at nasawatch.com  - see some commentary here http://www.nasawatch.com/archi...

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by: fuzed @ Fri Jan 02, 2009 at 10:57:55 AM CST

When you say "he is keeping 160 of Bush's 250" (4.00 / 1)

...you leave out the fact that news reports have stated that most of these remaining appointees will be temporary, and are only staying on until Obama's appointees are confirmed by the Senate.

They cleaned out the ninety worst/most expendable, the rest will be shuffled out over the first six months of the administration.

That said, I agree strongly with your final point. Obama can try to woo the Gates/Scowcroft crowd, but it will be a big mistake if he fails to get our ridiculous military budget under control. This country has subpar health care, crumbling infrastructure, minimal public transit, and a percentage of the renewable energy that we need.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is sitting fat and pretty, along with all the private defense contractors who suck at the teat of the defense budget. It's high time we get serious, and I mean SERIOUS, about rooting out waste and fraud in that department.

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by: existenz @ Fri Jan 02, 2009 at 11:32:01 AM CST

Am I the only one (0.00 / 0)

who's a bit taken aback at the fact that the Pentagon has a larger budget for space activities than the one gov't agency established a half century ago to do just that?

Although I suppose it's less surprising considering how the DoD is the biggest gov'l sacred cow in the history of this country.

And am I alone at not feeling too happy over the prospect of yet another costly space race, this time against another group of commies, the ChiComs?  Any chance here that an Obama admin will try to reach out to China to cut costs and cooperate in our space ventures and, along the way, work together to demilitarize space?  There is precedent for it -- JFK seeking to get Nikita K. at Vienna to cooperate in a revolutionary anti-Cold War effort to jointly undertake to land men on the Moon, which, sadly, the stubborn refusenik NK turned down ...  

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by: Brodie @ Fri Jan 02, 2009 at 12:00:21 PM CST

Since when has the space program NOT been militarized? (4.00 / 2)

You have to have your head in a lead-lined sandbox not to know that the space programs has always been in large part about the military.  I mean, the project for a new american century folks were a little more up front about it, but this was a difference, to my mind, only of degree.

"If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other people, then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding..."
Zora Neale Hurston

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by: bruce.dixon @ Fri Jan 02, 2009 at 12:35:09 PM CST

[ Parent ]

The NASA-Pentagon alleged (0.00 / 0)

"barrier" was something Chris B alluded to.

But it's a fair point.  The original Mercury astronauts all came from the military.  Iirc, the first civilian astronauts didn't come aboard until, what, the Space Shuttle program?  (or was Apollo XIV astronaut Edgar Mitchell the first?  I've forgotten ...)  Nasa and the Pentagon have worked jointly in respect to either launching or repairing secret DoD spy satellites, if memory serves.

Then there was the (semi-secretive) mid-90s launch of Project Clementine -- to massively map the Moon for defense purposes -- a joint project of Nasa and the Ballistic Missile Defense Org.

Just a few overlap areas which come to mind.  

And I wouldn't be surprised but that, when you get into the fine print of Nasa's original 1959 charter, there isn't some interesting language in there related specifically to "coordination in space activities" with our beloved Pentagon ...

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by: Brodie @ Fri Jan 02, 2009 at 13:06:27 PM CST

[ Parent ]

Space should be privatised (0.00 / 0)

Space is the only area where I think progressives should support privatisation. Because spending $40bn on pipe dreams isn't smart.

If there are efficient ways to make use of extraplanetary resources, then they should be able to pay for themselves, or at least attract private investment. There's also the argument that the establishment of NASA in the early 1960s retarded the development of private civilian projects that could have led to non-rocket-based forms of spaceflight.

If private management can make spaceflight work, that's great. That's good business rewarded. If they don't weaponise space, we needn't have a problem with that. Sure, we might want to break up monopolies and buy up anything good that goes bust, but that's all we need.

But since nobody seems to have been talking about selling off space research, even as the enthusiasm to privatise everything else has reached epidemic levels, I think these programs are seriously overfunded and should be taken off the government books.

Forgotten Countries - a foreign policy-focused blog

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by: Englishlefty @ Fri Jan 02, 2009 at 12:22:26 PM CST

Privatizing space is just plain silly for many reasons (4.00 / 1)

First of all, "privatizing" is simply the giving away by government authorities of a public resource to some well connected corporation or individual to operate as their private property.  The space program so far has soaked up billions of taxpayer dollars.  If there are lucrative opportunities out there, they should not be given away to cronies of whichever government is in power at the time.

The record of privatizers "opening up" new territories is the record of the African slave trade, the East India companies and lots of that kind of piracy and amorality in pursuit of a proft, some of which we are still paying for.  Not a promising legacy, and one that the advocates of privatization would have us forget.

Fundamentally privatization is always about taking institutions and resources out of the commons and placing them under the exclusive and unaccountable control of our elite.  Resources in or access to areas beyond planet earth are not the US government's to give away to the companies who make the biggest campaign contributions.

Secondly the space program makes nonsense out of national borders and nationhood, except as a military project to control the high ground over planet earth and to implement or deny access to said high ground or to global communications networks.  This is because putting small amounts of freight on top of chemical rockets and sending these firecrackers into orbit is massively inefficient.

To be about extending the human reach into space, ultimately to other planets a space program would have to lift vast amounts of material into earth orbit and beyond much more cheaply than will ever be possible with the present methods of insertion into orbit.  The only way to do that is to build what NASA and others call a "space elevator", a megastructure reaching from some point on the earth's equator or one of the poles into space along which the massive amounts of freight and human cargo can be cheaply hauled up out of the gravity well and into zero-g.  From an economic point of view, this is the only way to effectively expan human society into space.

But human society, bound by nation-states and military rivalries and, dare I say it --- capitalism --- is unable to take advantage of what should be a pretty obvious universal win-win sitation like the space elevator precisely because it would demand human cooperation across national borders, and could not be defended militarily.  Nation-states, capitalism and militarism are not win-win institutions.  All produce and need for their own stability a few winners and a lot of losers.  

It's pretty impossible to make an exclusively military case for or mount a military defense of a space elevator, and the US has no sovereign territory at the equator or the poles.  And since no military case can be made for it, and it is indefensible militarily, it will likely never get built.  We will be sticking to micro-cargoes strapped to the top of chemical firecrackers.  Oh well.

"If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other people, then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding..."
Zora Neale Hurston

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by: bruce.dixon @ Fri Jan 02, 2009 at 13:11:22 PM CST

[ Parent ]

Cutting a deal to kill the US ABM program (0.00 / 0)

I won't use GOP-marketing-speak and call the US ABM program "missile defense", 'cause it ain't.

But remember that the ABM program is likely about to die.  Since Reagan started his "Star Wars" initiative, this has been a huge military-industrial-complex boondoggle, and there's a lot of money behind it.

And my guess is that finally, Obama is going to kill the sorry fucker.  So the aerospace industry is going to be pissed off.

Letting some of these companies move from military to civilian space applications would likely soften the blow.  If this is part of Obama's considerations, it's very smart politics.

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by: mbayrob @ Fri Jan 02, 2009 at 16:55:30 PM CST

Military domination of space a top priority (0.00 / 0)

Many democrats including Gen. Clark believe US military total military domination of space to be essential. I expect this view is widespread among our military/intelligence/industrial/congressional complex.  Obama's move here would not be helpful. We need to be moving in the opposite direction for our national and global security.

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by: amberwaves @ Fri Jan 02, 2009 at 22:54:30 PM CST

Noble sentiments (0.00 / 0)

Noble sentiments that I share except to the degree that they significantly underestimate the depth of the long-standing interpenetration of the DoD and military objectives and the putatively "civilian" space agency.

First, the military has always dominated all space activities; that is not the same as saying all space activities are military activities, but rather that any efforts in which the military has even a tangential interest, their needs are given priority.  They sit early in planning stages to ensure that any possible military benefit is secured.  They also are thus able to bend civilian missions to military ends.  If one opposes weaponization of space one cannot be for cooperation.

What is more, the military has always dominated space efforts regardless of which agency logo appears on the paperwork.  See: DeVorkin, D.H., Science with a Vengeance: How the Military Created the US Space Sciences After World War II, New York: Springer-Verlag, 1992; M. Mowthorpe, "US Military Space Policy 1945-92," Space Policy, Vol. 18, 2002, pp. 25-36.

Second, the asserted barrier is little more than a PR stunt for public consumption, one designed to keep public support for NASA higher than would otherwise be the case.

Third, "dual-use" or cooperation are efforts to achieve greater military bang for the buck.  This is reflected in one-half of Chris' stated ambivalence but I think as expressed here he does not appear to appreciate the implications.  The "dual-use" canard that dates to the technology initiatives of the first Clinton administration is an effort to more efficiently and rapidly develop new applications with less mobilized public opposition.  It is a deliberate policy change initiated by and for the military.  I have written about this topic using FOIA materials from the Army and Air Force in articles published in Covert Action, Unclassified, and Peace Review in 1993.  That's dual use, which is a form of cooperation at the level of R&D and prototyping.

Here's a metaphor for thinking about cooperation generally in this context.  You are a well-meaning kid on the block.  The neighborhood bully, the one who steals all the other kids' lunch money to buy brass knuckles and such, realizing his bullying is drawing the attention of the cops and concerned parents, approaches you with an offer.  He says, 'You look like you could use some more to eat.  Tell you what, why don't you start up a donation drive.  All I ask is that I get first pick of anything you gather.  That and that you listen to my advice about what to ask for.'  That is cooperation in a nutshell.

Fourth, privatization generally, but especially in the absence of an enforceable international treaty preventing weaponization along with a robust international governing body, is an absolute disaster, a path making the tragedy of the commons inevitable.  Short of just throwing up our hands and letting the military put all their weapons in space, there is nothing we could do that would more rapidly degrade the near-earth environment, encourage the wasteful use of terrestrial resources for what should be low-priority efforts in space, and make more likely conflict as various national defense establishments position themselves to "protect" private developments in space.

Finally, and to illustrate exactly the above points, consider how large the Pentagon role is likely to be under an Obama administration when it comes to space policy.  Doing so requires, in my judgment, reading the less rose colored defense technology press where they are quite candid and persuasive about what they see under the administration in contrast to Panglossian campaign pronouncements.  See the political analysis of this situation in: "Analysts: Overall Military Space Portfolio Safe Under Obama Administration", Inside Missile Defense, Vol 14, No. 24, Nov. 18, 2008.

Obama's call for solar power from space, referenced by Chris, is already being seized by the Pentagon as a means to power terrestrial force projection as well as to power weapons in - and potentially from - space.  This application will undoubtedly precede any civilian energy benefits and in risking war in space likely preclude their later emergence.  Consider the following excerpts from an article in Aviation Week & Space Technology last month:

Military planners responsible for finding space resources to support troops on the ground wonder if a convergence of events may give new life to an old idea that could dramatically reduce the logistics train behind forward-deployed forces.

First suggested 40 years ago, the concept of collecting solar energy above the atmosphere and beaming it to the ground as microwaves or lasers has long been seen among military free-thinkers as a way to get electricity to remote airfields, fire bases or other distant outposts without having to haul fuel for diesel generators.

But that out-of-the-box concept may be gaining new life as the incoming administration looks for "green-energy" technologies to reduce reliance on foreign oil, and technologists home in on the hardware that would be needed to orbit deployable sunlight collectors kilometers across while getting power down from them without frying birds, wildlife and humans that get in the way.

The Pentagon's National Security Space Office proposed just such a study in a report on SSP as "an opportunity for strategic security" released in October 2007. "It's being talked about," says a defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity in the absence of policy guidance. "Part of the problem has to do with perception. . . . It's [about] roles and responsibilities, and having people get over the giggle factor, that this is actually something that's real."
...
For the Pentagon, the benefits of a pilot plant would be twofold. At the tactical level, it could be a "disruptive game-changer on the battlefield," providing "energy on demand" across a military theater and potentially supporting "entirely new force structures and capabilities such as ultra long-endurance airborne or terrestrial surveillance or combat systems to include the individual soldier himself."
...
Since the Pentagon report came out, the Air Force Research Laboratory has started fleshing out potential military applications for SSP and working with industry to evaluate the technologies needed to generate it. Next up at the Pentagon will be finding money to support an end-to-end study.
...
The National Security Space Office already is working with NASA on a possible orbital demonstration of SSP transmission, taking advantage of the International Space Station's "national laboratory" status that makes it available to other government agencies for experiments. The $55-million ISS effort could save the government more than $400 million below what a clean-sheet mission would cost, but it probably would need to fly before the shuttle fleet is retired. Since that is now scheduled by the end of 2010, the schedule for getting a demonstration together would be very aggressive, to say the least.

Still, there is a chance that NASA may be more willing to work with the Pentagon on SSP under the incoming administration. Two members of the Obama transition team at NASA-consultant Alan Ladwig and George Whitesides, executive director of the National Space Society-took part in a press conference on an SSP power-transmission demonstration in September. Mankins says he briefed NASA transition team chief Lori Garver on SSP developments before the election, and has found her "very supportive" of the concept in the past.

As the next administration takes shape at NASA and the Pentagon, the SSP concept is likely to find its way into the briefing books as a potential source of green energy and perhaps national security as well. Mitigating against action are the wheezing economy and the falling price of oil, which tends to take public attention off the need for renewable sources of energy. But the potential wealth available directly overhead continues to make SSP attractive.

Frank Morring, Jr., "Space Solar Power Seen Cutting Logistics Tail: Pentagon Continues Space Solar Power Effort To Drive Expeditionary Forces", Aviation Week & Space Technology Dec 08 , 2008

This story will generalize, in my judgment, to "cooperative" efforts involving NASA and the Pentagon, even ignoring the fact that there never was a meaningful operational, as opposed to declared, barrier.  Cooperation in this context means giving the military whatever it wants first, then risking the fallout from their applications, before any opportunity to realize civilian benefits might arise.

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by: T. Jacobsen @ Sat Jan 03, 2009 at 09:48:46 AM CST