http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/7524990.html

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it should be “Brother Tumlinson” I mistyped the name. My apologies it was not intentional and was in error.

Robert G. Oler

Hello whoever you are! (grin)

No I wasnt much interested in the Texas Aerospace Commission in the 90’s or now. But I do write under my own name and I was pretty heavily in the space policy debate in the 90’s (A very good piece published in 1999 The Weekly Standard (July) which I wrote while in Albania during OAF…Rich Kolker did the editing and Mark Whittington just got his name put on it), and have been heavily in the space debate since the mid 80’s. I took some time off in the 00’s I was in Iraq. But before I left I predicted HERE that the Bush lunar program would “frack” up and how and I was more or less right on the Mark. (sorry Whittington). And everyone else who predicted it would be fine was WRONG.

Kolker and I belong to a small subset, we were invited to join SFF and passed. Brother Tunlinson has a unique style which as I noted chaffs me a bit as he rails on about the socialist program, but heck my style chaffs some folks (ask Pete O from 22…he didnt like my last apperance at one of his town halls). It saddens me that I am not universally loved, but it is a cross I have learned to bear or bare or just hold on to (grin)

Anyway…moving on you wrote “Groups like Rick’s, by keeping the New Space/Old Space battle flaming and spreading it to new fronts, will only delay that day.”

I dont think so.

The reality is that “old space” ie the NASA big government, favorite contractor, keep all the people employed model works literally with NOTHING these days. Brewster the Rooster from Boeing is now out hand with cup begging for some program these days to keep his 800 people employed on some version of NASA heavy lift….without asking even the basic question “why do we need 800 people to build a heavy lift”?

The foundation of “old space” is that “nothing” can survive without NASA human spaceflight done how NASA does it. Go ask the proponents and they will gleefully tell you that uncrewed exploration will die, all space efforts will die if NASA doesnt keep doing business like it has been…they never talk about NASA and its legacy contractors reforming, or even TRYING to do business another way. Every chance at doing business another way is toasted on the alter of “we have to keep what we have going”.

And yet there is no proof of anything that they say. None. There is no proof that uncrewed exploration wont keep flying if NASA HSF takes a breather (in fact there is a lot of proof to the contrary)…and there is a lot of proof that things can be done without the 15000 people it took to keep three shuttles flying…and NOT MUCH ELSE can be done while feed those 15000 people.

At some point if you want different results you have to really do things differently and that includes new structures and essentially killing the old structures.

Here is the reality. NASA HSF and its way of doing business LEFT ALONE WILL DIE. There is no support, not even in TX22 to keep the old ways…and there is no money. NASA HSF proved that with Cx…10 billion dollars and they couldnt get a darn thing flyable (much as I predicted here before I left country…go search the archieves you will find I predict that they will squander closer to 15 bill…and they would have left alone). It has been proven that on a lot less, NASA could have gotten something flying. Sorry.

Right now the old way is slike a drowning person who never learned to swim…they are clinging to everything and everyone (the Chinese taking over the Moon, national greatness, now “New space cant survive without us) that might get them some funding. I regret the words Rick uses and that might limit his personal effectivness…but it is no worse then the babble Whittington did on this forum on this thread and it wont matter. There is not going to be in less then a year any “old sapce” to cling to. That effort is dying.

Robert G. Oler

I

From the beginning it has seemed that it has been…
A bunch of folks P.O’d that they are not getting the pork
and by gosh… they are tired of seeing someone else
get it… every body just seems to want more pork
these days.

Yes, the influence of NASA is less, but it’s still concentrated in the Houston area while Jeff’s ranch is out in West Texas and AA/SpaceX are up at McGregor, so you have the ingredients for a geographic split. In the past this didn’t matter as there was no New Space/Old Space split. The elected officials were just interested in Texas Space and the space retaining its leadership role.

Rick and his 1960’s era confrontational in your face advocacy will likely split the two parts of Texas and put them against one another, just at his Space Frontier Foundation’s promotion of the New Space/Old Space dichotomy has contributed the split at the national level. Nothing good will come out of such a split for Texas.

Now I understand why groups like his like to push an “us versus them” agenda. Nothing motivates followers to dig into their pocketbooks and give more than the old “defeat the enemy” pitch, but such an attitude contributes nothing productive to the cause of creating a space faring society. That will only come from creating a stable and enlighten space policy based on consensus and compromise, not confrontation. Flipping space policy with administrations is why we are in this mess and in this mess we will stay until both sides bury the hatchet and find common ground. Groups like Rick’s, by keeping the New Space/Old Space battle flaming and spreading it to new fronts, will only delay that day.

If ATK is doing so, it’s not only a waste of money, but counterproductive on a ten-to-one scale. But they haven’t show a great deal of political acumen so far…

We should let ideas rise or fall on their technical and business merit. Neither the GOP nor the Democrats should be using the force of government to tip the scales unfairly.

We need a level playing field for aerospace companies to compete to bring their best ideas forward so NASA can accomplish its purpose, as laid out in the Space Act.

“The GOP needs to take the gloves off.”

What, they should DISCOURAGE SpaceX from hiring more Texan’s and spending less money in Texas? What Republican would do that, and who would vote for them? A silly attempt at partisan politics on your part.

“Such attempts at government ‘coopetition’ might work…”

I’m glad you’re trying to expand your vocabulary, but unfortunately you don’t understand the concepts behind this word. That’s not surprising of course, since you don’t seem to understand a lot of space-related concepts either…

“The last thing needed in Texas is to force local politicians to take an either, I am for New Space or I support Old Space stance, creating a hostile environment for space firms. I really hope that the efforts of the TXA to help Blue Origin and AA won’t force both of them to leave Texas for a less hostile environment.”

you obviously are not from Texas….your statement might sound good but it is the latest variant of the Whittington comment “you are not for removing Saddam so you are for the terrorist”…

A few points will put your mind at ease.

1. Texas is a big state and most of the “new space” particularly in sub orbital or sub orbital want to be orbital someday are way out in West Texas. 5 jobs in West Texas mean more to a local politician then 500 in central Texas and no job in West Texas matters at all to a central texas (or South Central in the case of Houston) pol. There is no or little NASA business out west and so it is not an either or proposition.

2. Even in central and south central Texas the JSC workforce and the various hangers on are not the calling card they use to be. The local pols have (painfully) come to grips with a few realities, the shuttle is ending and most are sort of resigned to the fact that there is not going to be a shuttle derived heavy lift. No one wants to really pay for the effort…and even in TX-22 there is not a lot of support for the notion.

Pete O was in a “town hall” meeting recently, I went down to beat up on him for his near goofy stand on the F-35 alternate engine and while it was quite enjoyable watching him “fish out of water” on the F-35 the most impressive moment came when someone who was losing her job at CAL in the merger asked him why a job with USA was more important to him then her job. The odd thing, even in Clear Lake where the meeting was there was a lot of support for this person…as one person supporting this woman noted “our jobs pay taxes not be supported by them”.

If Pete O and the rest of the gang (both GOP and Dem) could save a shuttle derived heavy lift, they would but the money is just to much and so they cant.

Clear Lake will do just fine with the end of the shuttle and the drawdown of the workforce…

As the shuttle goes away ANY jobs are going to be nice and so the notion that wow to get New Space going we have to support old space is goofy, as Paul Ryan says :”“We need a clean break from the politics of the past.”

that is a line I am looking forward to beating up on old Pete on.

This “save NASA save New Space” is just the last gasp of the old style politics and before long we can give it a Terry Schiavio (spell) moment, pull the plug bury the corpse and move on.

Brother Tumlinson has his moments and I cringe at his notion of the “socialist” space program but he at least has the charm of not having changed his space politics or policy to suit a greater notion of politics as Whittington et al have done.

Robert G. Oler