Many bloggers profess their disdain for the so-called mainstream media, in particular one of its central institutions, the New York Times. Yet some are willing to take their commentary cues from articles published in the paper, including this article Monday about the US reliance on Russia for access to the ISS once the shuttle is retired. For those who follow this topic, there wasn’t anything really new in the piece, but it did appear to serve as fodder for those who don’t follow the subject closely.
In a piece on the web site The Huffington Post, Adam Blickstein warns that the gap is evidence that John McCain “wants to effectively kill NASA”. That’s because, he argues, that McCain’s hard line against Russia could come back to haunt NASA when it needs to rely on Soyuz spacecraft to access the station:
Russia’s space monopoly, and a surging Chinese presence beyond Earth’s atmosphere, means the U.S. will have to rely on nations McCain’s campaign has already deemed as “obviously not allies” in order to bridge the 5 year gap between the Space Shuttle program and the Constellation program. It’s unclear how a President McCain would, in fact, maintain America dominance and presence in space while also throwing Russia out of the G8, and casually tossing around bellicose statements towards the only countries capable of sending people and large payloads into space. A President McCain could mean a comatose American space program, creating yet another area of science and technology where the U.S. falls behind. This would not only be dangerous to our national morale and international prestige, but severely put us behind from a strategic, economic, and global perspective as Russia and China would be able to leap light years ahead of our own space ambitions.
The logic of a five-year gap (with or without Soyuz access to ISS) creating a “comatose” US space program isn’t explained in the piece, unfortunately. But then, Blickstein writes that “a Vice President Palin would be the Chair of NASA’s board.”
Blickstein’s Huffington Post colleague, Ronald Mirman, also sounds off on space policy, in blunter language. “Both Barack Obama and John McCain have spoken on space policy, and both are wrong,” he writes. The piece reads like an extended rant against human spaceflight, which he describes as “being useless and wasting huge amounts of money”: arguments you’ve probably seen presented before, and perhaps more eloquently than here. (The site doesn’t include a bio for Mirman, other than the books he’s written; with titles like Group Theoretical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory, Conformal Group Theory, Conformal Field Theory, it would appear that he’s a physicist.)
On one of the New York Times’s own blogs, Douglas MacKinnon, a former press secretary to Bob Dole, wants both candidates to understand the importance of spaceflight, something he believes has been lacking in the White House for a long time. “Not since John F. Kennedy, has a president truly understood the incalculable value of space,” he claims. What exactly he wants either a President McCain or a President Obama to do isn’t clear: he believes that relying on the Russians “looks more and more risky”, but is skeptical about either closing the Shuttle/Constellation gap or looking to the commercial sector. “As of now, the United States has basically zero options for the four to six years our human spaceflight program will go dark.” He concludes:
While no one expects Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama to be Kennedy-esque with regard to this issue, a number of thoughtful people in and out of the business do feel that both men need to understand that if we forfeit our hard fought preeminence in space, it’s a position we may never get back. Coupled with that fear is the understanding that no nation on earth is more dependent upon its assets in space than the United States.
How a five-year gap in human space access would somehow jeopardize military, civil, or commercial satellites, as MacKinnon suggests, is also logic not fully explained in the piece.
Maybe the best approach is simply to scare people: “Russia’s Space Program Could Crush the U.S. Over the Next Decade”, proclaims the headline of a post on io9, a blog usually devoted to science fiction. (This post came just before one about a planned sequel to Tron. That’s right, Tron.) Hey, it worked 50 years ago…
The Kennedy myth won’t die, despite the fact that there is zero evidence that he “truly understood the incalculable value of space,†and quite a bit to the contrary.
I wish Kennedy hadn’t, this idiot stunt mentality will infect American Space forever it seems. Stunts waste money, science usually wastes money, but has a potential for pay-off if not some satisfaction. Engineering though is purely profitable, there is wealth out there, but we’re so blinded by stunts and jaded by science we can’t get to it.
While I would not go so far as to say the Russian space program could crush the US program it is worth noting that the upcoming decade is going to be golden years for the Russian program. With ESA recently purchasing 12 Soyuz Launch Vehicles and the US committed to purchasing seats on Soyuz spacecraft both for their own astronauts and for Japan, Canada, and ESA astronauts, and upgrading the ISS to a six man crew the Russian space industry is looking at heady times. In 2009 the number of Soyuz ISS flights will double from 2 a year to 4 a year and by 2010 the number of Progress freighter flights will almost double from 4 a year to 7 a year.
All of this against a background of having the most affordable launch vehicles on the planet. This influx of foreign currency is bound to have a positive affect on the Russian space industry and the Russian space program.
The Russian space program is doing quite well right now, but they also have been looking to make the difficult transition from “Tried And True” to “Something New”. They have tried to interest the Europeans in a winged space plane but did not have any takers there – maybe because the Europeans would rather evolve the ATV?
The Russians have now mostly gotten their Guiana launch plans in work, and recently made noises about building a launch site in Cuba. That was probably just a sop to the Cubans, since Cuba does not have the infrastructure that Guiana has.
It will be interesting to see if the Russians can manage the switch from Soyuz to something else more smoothly than we are doing it!
Here is Kennedy at a press confrence in 1962, I think he had a pretty good grasp of where he THOUGHT American would be headed in space.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9054
” 11.] Q. Mr. President, after your trip to Los Alamos Laboratory,
New Mexico, is it your intention to ask for more money to speed up
Project Rover, or for nuclear propulsion in space?
THE PRESIDENT. We’re going to let these tests go on, of the reactor.
These tests should be completed by July. If they are successful,
then we will put more money into the program, which would involve
the Nerva and Rift, both the engine and the regular machine.
We will wait until July, however, to see if these tests are successful.
It should be understood that the nuclear rocket, even under the most
favorable circumstances, would not play a role in any first lunar landing.
This will not come into play until 1970 or ’71. It would be useful for
further trips to the moon or trips to Mars.
But we have a good many areas competing for our available space dollars,
and we have to try to channel it into those programs which will bring us a
result, first, on our moon landing, and then to consider Mars. ”
Maybe he was just fronting for aerospace companies, but I think if we would have followed his vision, landing on mars would be behind us, not in 2035 as projected.
How easy it is to suggest an alternate history when the principal involved dropped out of it. And if Napoleon had had a B-52 at Waterloo…
Kennedy eventually (following Gagarin’s flight) saw the space program as one thing: a means of bolstering the status of the US in the Cold-War world and therein garnering political support for his own administration. To suggest that things would have turned out differently had he only lived is an entertaining phantasm but hardly worthwhile analysis.
Here’s another alternate history for you, equally plausible: Apollo may very well have died in 1967 (we had already pulled ahead of the Soviet space efforts with Gemini) following the Apollo 1 fire without Kennedy’s death itself as an impetus to completing the declared patriotic goal of a slain charismatic president.
Even the 1962 vision being suggested here as Kennedy’s (pursuit of the nuclear propulsion as a means of enabling the consideration of Mars) wasn’t; it was Von Braun’s vision (itself founded on earlier speculations) as laid out in the popular media a decade before: Orbit, Moon, Mars.
The true tragedy is that two presidents since Kennedy have tried to reinstitute that same vision (policywise if not financially) and efforts to achieve it remain, 46 years later, in serious risk of evaporating again.
Bob,
Where did I say “if only kennedy had lived” ?
When I say “his vision” I am not talking about a vision that was laid out by President Bush. I am talking about what I PRECEIVE to be were he THOUGHT of INVISIONED America’s space policy was heading in the long term.
If Kennedy had made that statement while NOT funding ANY nuclear propulsion efforts, then I would agree with you. If he had not wanted any funding towards nerva and rift and then making that statement I would agree with you.
Isn’t the proof in the pudding?
President Bush said he wanted nuclear propulsion funded and it was needed if we wanted to push outward. So NASA got something like 450 million the first year and the second year it was cut to like 50 million.
If you goto the NASA site now and search for project promethus it has disappeared. When it was announced there were several pages dedicated to it, all those pages are gone and promethus is no where to be found.
I believe if POLICIES that STARTED under Kennedy relating to nuclear propulsion had been taken to the POINT that Kennedy “INVISIONED” they were going to be carried out. We indeed would have been to mars by now.
V,
I regret my misinterpretation of your wording regarding JFK and his comments.
I don’t follow your second & third paragraphs.
I too deeply rue the demise of Prometheus. Back when NASA had an administrator who didn’t know his nuts & bolts but fully grasped the full premise of the VSE, I believe NASA had been moving in an improving direction, targeting critical technologies necessary for establishing a viable solar system exploration architecture. Now they’re just re-inventing launch capability with little technical advance at all.
I don’t quite understand the finer subtleties of your closing paragraph, but I reissue my primary point of challenge: exploring alternate histories is an entertaining parlor game but it doesn’t offer much guidance. [My personal favorite is the substitution of the Saturn V’s IC first stage with the ET on its nose in place of the shuttle’s side-mounted solid SRBs, which would have evolved into a fly-back booster which would later have boosted an internal-tanks evolved Shuttle II on its nose.]
We are better served when we look at how history actually unfolded to uncover any wisdom applicable to our time.
The former approach asks “What if?” for events whose precipitatory outcomes are set in stone; the latter assesses “How similar?” and can project possible qualified outcomes from particular choices given specific analogous circumstances.
The myth that Kennedy was a major space visionary is false history and has contributed to decades of false presumptions on the part of many space advocates. Space to him was nothing more than a geopolitical tool, and where the spacecraft were going was a choice he left in the hands of his technical advisors. [The evidence to support this is legion.]
The truly visionary yet practical person at that critical juncture was actually Jim Webb. It was he, a dedicated technocrat, who adroitly recognized that the country’s post-Gagarin enthusiasm wouldn’t last long and used every political skill in his repertoire to build NASA’s infrastructure up to a substantial spacefaring capability as quickly as possible, a capability that we still exploit today (Shuttle, and now Constellation, use/will use KSC, JSC, MSFC, and Stennis facilities whose concrete was poured in the early 60s). [Does anybody believe that NASA’s current infrastructure designs are so robust?]
It remains a shame that the nuclear research that Webb helped bring about under that same “fast-push” infrastructure development umbrella didn’t survive the late-60s space enthusiasm crash. Once the country achieved the goal of Apollo, most citizens had little interest in going on to Mars, certainly not in spending the money to do so…so there was no perceived need for nuclear propulsion in space.
The vision of which you speak but misassign to JFK (he was borrowing it at best) was always present and was even championed again under the Mueller/Paine/Agnew study on space goals provided to President Nixon (before being resurrected again by GHW Bush in SEI 20 years later); it died in a desert of public indifference and skepticism that was quite likely inevitable given the realities of the late 1960s and America’s consistent cultural impatience which demands something fresh and new every waking day.
The same core vision was proposed again in the 2004 VSE, this time with a practical eye toward measured, sustainable budget support. The current administration, albeit distracted by other substantial items such as the ongoing War on Terror, has not lived up to its own original space intentions, in particular where funding is concerned. And NASA’s later implementation of the VSE through the myopic constraints of ESAS may very well doom the decades-old vision to another long stall.
But perhaps other developments, likely unforeseen, will finally bring together another substantial convergence of vision and viability such as happened so briefly in the early 1960s under Kennedy and as executed by Webb. But this time it may not be elements of the government that make it happen.
Bob,
When Kennedy said that, HE was the chief policy mouth piece for the nation, webb wasn’t. As the head of the nation, in dec of 1962, I believe, when he made that statement, it was his view, that was path the nation was on for the following decade. Whether he REALLY wanted that policy, or planned on killing the program LATER, I do not know. I may have missed something he stated but i have never seen anything where he secretly wanted the development of nuclear engines and power systems killed.
It is like griffin often times is quoted as saying, I just do what the president says the nation’s space policy is and try to fullfill it.
As in my original post when I finished, whether he was just a mouth piece for defense contractors and aerospace i may never know, but at THAT particular point in time, in my opinion, he TRUELY believed that america was going to be USING nuclear engines and power systems in the next decade. ( the 1970’s )
Now if you can show me a policy statement made by kennedy AFTER dec 1962 or something he said behind closed doors that is contrary to that public statement he made then I will agree that kennedy DIDNT really believe that America was NEVER planning to follow through with not only the completion of the engine but also launching it in the VERY early 70’s.
V,
I think we’re blogging past each other, so I see little point in further comment.
But since you asked, here are some references that probe the shallowness of Kennedy’s support of the space program in contrast to the popular belief that he was a strong supporter of space and a visionary in the field. While they don’t mention nuclear propulsion specifically, I hardly find it credible that JFK saw such hardware & technology as anything more than one more piece of a space program that he viewed collectively as a very expensive geopolitical tool to be shaped & applied as necessary to fit given circumstances.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/735/1
This is an article by Dwayne Day that discusses the recordings of JFK’s discussions with his advisors that revealed his less-than-enthusiastic support for space efforts.
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/1987/2/1987_2_24.shtml
An interview with Walter McDougall about his “Heavens & the Earth” political history regarding space. One question sheds light on JFK specifically. Excellent book if you haven’t read it yet.
http://www.space.com/news/kennedy_tapes_010822.html
Another article about the revelations on the JFK tapes.
http://www.amazon.com/Spaceflight-Presidential-Leadership-Roger-Launius/dp/0252066324
Again, if you haven’t had a chance yet: the amazon link to a must-read that explains how little influence a president typically has on space policy, which highlights the anomalous nature of the Apollo decision and how the JFK space visionary mythos came about.
Bob,
You are correct, we are talking past each other. Where you are saying I thought kennedy was a visionary, I am trying to instead compare kennedy as a reporter.
“A train has left the station in new york and it will reach california in 3 days”
I am not painting kennedy as a keystone in space as the man with the ultimate vision.
I am trying to express kennedy as a reporter on where he THOUGHT the nation was heading in space, regardless of any of his personal beliefs.
I have read on the tapes before and as I said it doesnt matter one way or another how he PERSONALLY viewed the importance of space, I am saying that statement he made as a reporter on the nation’s direction in space that is where he thought it was eventually heading and what would be taking place in the 1970’s.
V-
Now I think I get it. Thanks for the further clarification.
You’re dead wrong. Just kidding.
Bob