Comments on: Space policy suggestions… from Esquire

By: Library: A round-up of Reading « Res Communis

Library: A round-up of Reading « Res Communis — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:43:22 +0000

[…] Space policy suggestionsâ€¦ from Esquire – Space Politics […]

By: Rand Simberg

Rand Simberg — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:08:13 +0000

I blocked all images from the site, copied the article into MS Word, and read it thereâ€“yes I am *that* boring

That really wasn’t necessary. The page is pretty work safe, as long as you don’t follow the links (and probably even then). You probably wouldn’t know, but Esquire isn’t Penthouse, or even Playboy. And the new editor there is my former editor at Popular Mechanics on line.

By: kert

kert — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:56:41 +0000

Unfortunately, he falls short on any specific approaches to â€œopen up all nearer spaceâ€ to the private sector. Well, as a start, government declaring that they will get out of that business area for good, would help things immensely. By "that business", i mean designing and building eart-to-orbit rockets. But as government is taking up more, not less areas of conducting business *cough*GM*cough*, theres a zero chance of it happening.

By: CharlesInHouston

CharlesInHouston — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:12:24 +0000

Having read the article several times – we need to leave this dead amadillo on the road. I am all for commercial uses of space but this loser gives us historical mistakes and dubious logic. Let’s look for “policy experts” that have a lot more expertise than this guy.

A few notes: having been inside of a Shuttle, they are not designed to fly 30 to 60 times per year as this guy states. The Shuttle was advertised as flying very often but was not designed to support that. He seems to be unhappy that Pres Reagan took commercial launches off of the Shuttle – that was the best thing that ever happened. It allowed the commercial space business to fly comm satellites without competing with the government. The re-adustments have frequently been painful but necessary.

He notes that there are fewer unmanned missions now than in the 1960s but does not mention that each mission today does far more than those from the 1960s. We could argue that we have too many complex missions and could have more, less complex ones of course.

But his major blunders are stating that Russia and China have been (seriously?) requesting a treaty to ban weapons in space. They might request such a treaty but have no intention of honoring it!

And there is no way that we would build a Mars launch site on the Moon! And what is a quasi launch anyway?

Anyway, his article also says that the Air Force wants to weapsonize space – having spent 28 years in the AF there are people that want to do various things in space but there is no serious effort to turn near space into some military playground. His hints there are just fear mongering.

By: Jonathan Goff

Jonathan Goff — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:42:09 +0000

Having read the article last night (in case you’re wondering, I blocked all images from the site, copied the article into MS Word, and read it there–yes I am *that* boring), I think the commenters are giving it a harder time than it deserves. Sure, his suggestions at the very end weren’t as good as the rest of the article, but there was actually a fair number of really well thought-out points. While vague on the specifics, it was clear that he was trying to convey the importance of commercial space to any sort of spacefaring future. And quite frankly, I think that with the space community, that we ought to cut some slack to those who are genuinely trying to wrap their brains around commercial space issues.

~Jon

By: CharlesInHouston

CharlesInHouston — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:28:30 +0000

It is clear that T Barnett is not an expert on space issues. He should at least start with the Space Exploration For Dummies book. We should continue to bypass the Esquire magazine when looking for informed opinions about space, science, etc etc.

Certainly the Chinese thought that their anti satellite demo was anything except pointless.

And it is ludicrous to think that a Mars mission would “quasi-launch” from the Moon. What is a quasi-launch site anyway – do you launch a quasi from there?

And NASA (according to the budget) is focussed on development of a new booster, spending only a small fraction of its budget on any sort of exploration.

By: R.U. Kidding

R.U. Kidding — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:42:10 +0000

Barnett once again shows that savvy that helped get Fox Fallon fired. (Although Fallon didn’t need much help.)

I know Washington policy experts- and Barnett is no policy expert.

How exactly would a space weapons ban treaty prevent China and Russian from developing counterspace capabilities?

Typical Barnett- broad ideas that sound good on paper but fail on implementation.