“Obama needs to pounce on this. There is one more Dragon flight before the election…that needs to be a photo op”

Except he won’t.

And based on recent events, Seth Meyers needs to pounc on it as fodder for a SNL skit, instead:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9288212/SpaceX-boss-mistook-Barack-Obama-for-cold-caller.html

“SpaceX boss mistook Barack Obama for cold caller

Elon Musk has revealed how he almost hung up when Barack Obama telephoned to congratulate him on the successful launch of his company SpaceX’s first craft into orbit, because he mistook the President for a cold-calling salesman.”

The program was initiated out of the Bush VSE, as Romney will rightly claim and then instantly pivot and point to the Solendrya bankruptcy and the Obama era investments lost in the electric car industry (as reported in a CBS network news package ten days ago) to reinforce his free market vs. gov’t selection pitch. Sober up, Breed.

Support for NASA/space is a mile wide and an inch deep.

That said, Americans like to see a lot of firsts in space. During the heady days of the space race, firsts were generated at a pretty fast clip and people liked the headlines. As far as the day to day .. kinda like sausage, you don’t want to watch it getting made.

You just saw an example of it in the NASA – SpaceX partnership. There was a series of firsts and SpaceX has milked it for a lot of free press.

So it might be that Americans don’t want to dig into the nuts and bolts of it they do like know we are advancing, making those first downs and strings of firsts means just that.

[splitting sides with laughter at the idiocy]

Pot, there’s a very black kettle on line two.

Oh, wait. Was that racist?

C’est la vie.

‘I was born in the 1940s and care deeply about space exploration – – I was raised on the books of Willy Ley. But I’ve come to realize that it is a lost cause in this country. I’ve come to grips with that.’

Perhaps. Nobody said space exploration was exclusive to the United States and, of course, the Soviets led the way. Bear in mind, Ley died a month before Apollo 11 and missed it and the rest of the Apollo landings and explorations. You didn’t. Nor did you miss the Voyager flybys, the two Viking and subsequent Martian landings as well as several other deep space exploration probes, the wonders revealed by the HST and generations of crewed space stations. You’ve been pretty lucky. Most of the basic parts of our solar system are today, actual recognized ‘places’ now, not mere points of light with imagined realities. And that’s a good thing, just 42 years after Ley passed on.

In Willy Ley’s day, similar attutudes to your current fret prevailed and only a handful of dedicated advocates pushed to make space exploration a reality through some disintested and decidely lean times, beyond the leather-bound voyages of Wells and pulp comic strip sci-fi adventures later seen as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials in Saturday matinees for a nickel. Some savvy marketing by Ley, von Braun and the likes of Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov, Heinlein, etc., w/t help of TVs Walt Disney, movies George Pal, the Collier’s series primed interest ignited by some opportune Cold War timing as Sputnik and Gagarin came racing across the skies. Goddard’s line to Wells back in 1932 about generations discovering “the thrill of just beginning’ aiming at the stars remains valid. See how ‘Curiosity’ ‘thrills’ in August if survives and arrives on Mars. And consider yourself lucky, you were alive to experience ‘the thrill of just beginning’– Ley and hundreds of other were denied, like Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Tsiolkovsky, not to mention Goddard himself. They only dreamed of many of the realities you experienced- but believed they were inevitable realities all the same. Someone will go. Somebody will press onward and outward. Whether it’s American led remains to be seen.

“But I’ve come to realize that it [space exploration] is a lost cause in this country. I’ve come to grips with that.”

I tend to agree with those that say the Apollo program was an aberration, or even an impediment to an affordable and steady space exploration program. The Apollo model was too expensive and too limited to sustain, and even the Shuttle program went on for far too long at too high of a cost.

Money has also been the main reason we haven’t returned to the Moon, and the experiences of the Constellation program, though mismanaged by Michael Griffin, showed that we don’t know how to significantly lower the costs for human exploration.

Because cost is so important, I see the latest efforts to lower the cost to access space as the first step towards restarting our exploration efforts. We’ll be lucky if NASA doesn’t lose more of it’s budget, and it’s highly unlikely it will ever get more money. So the only alternative is to find ways to lower costs.

So when I see commercial spacecraft reaching the ISS, and more coming, I see the start of a strong foundation that will let us restart our space exploration efforts – through public/private partnerships, or even private efforts on their own. I’m excited about the future.

Yeah I see them on the web site; I never hear Musk talk “publically” about it…ie stuff that he says that goes into print…that means nothing really.

I just cannot see why Musk would do this…There might be some “thing” to it…I just cannot figure out why he works on this and a reusable…when clearly the reusable is the way to go…and to launch from the “twin 747″ he is going to kind of have to rework the rocket; particularly with its carry points…that is a non trivial exercise.

Who knows surely he has a plan and he has made far more money then I have (grin) with his plans so I’ll just sit back and watch. I still think that there is something more to this then just a space launch system…

but ideas are good. and we certainly have had a lack of them. I still muse over the notion of an updated black horse…RGO

“Michael Griffin would be the kiss of death on Rocketdyne.”

Wow, a point of agreement.

“Paul Allen is not Elon Musk and Elon Musk does not yet have a monopoly in the highly competitive emerging commercial space flight industry.”

Let’s keep in mind what the market is that Rocketdyne competes in – pretty much just U.S. Government demand, right? Oh sure, the odd ULA commercial contract, but otherwise it’s ULA and NASA.

Is that market emerging? No. Is that market highly competitive? No.

And though SpaceX is not yet launching DoD & NASA satellite payloads, it’s just a matter of time. Will the Commercial Crew program replace that loss of demand? I don’t think so. The only way ULA can compete is by lowering prices, and that means Rocketdyne will be under pressure to lower prices.

“In this market now, there is a true way, It’s called not throwing away your valuable and irreplaceable hardware.”

Ah, you sound like someone that used to post here a while back. New name?

Well Rankine, RLV’s will be nice, but we’re not there yet. I doubt you’d find anyone against the idea (OK, no sane person), but it will take a long time for the launch providers to perfect the technology, retool, rebuild, and then perfect their new services – all while not losing money.

SpaceX is the likely leader, and it will take them a few years to prove it out. Imagine how long it will take ULA, ESA, ILS and Roscosmos to convert over?

“People are investing now.”

Not sure what you mean by this. Investing in RLV’s? Sure Allen, Bezos and Musk. They want to become market disrupters, and they are attacking the market from the low end. However it will still take a while. Again, I don’t know who you think is arguing against RLV’s, and Rocketdyne is not even part of the discussion with these three investors.

“It’s absolutely old school obsolete nonsense in the post expendable era.”

Unless you’re from the future, we’re not there yet. And you still haven’t shown how Rocketdyne is part of that future.

Personally, I wish Obama had vetoed a few bills along the way to show Congress he has no problem telling them to shove it. He’s tried to show he’s a centrist and willing to compromise to get business done. I’m glad that he’s tried, but Congress is filled with extremists right now who won’t understand anything but a slap across the face”

Rand simberg’s idiotic and ill informed comment aside…Obama’s policy on human spaceflight proves that…and that the GOP are simply extremist.

If the goal were to actually “have” a human spaceflight program that did something other then funnel money to the favored corporations THEN the GOP House would have embraced the Commercial programs…instead of one Republican after another “standing in the door blocking the way” or “pounding their shoe on the table”.

Go ask Kay Bailey or Pete Olson (I have and have responses on the record…both knew I was recording the answer and both know I have op eds published in the Chronicle) and it is vitally important that SLS keep the “industrial stakeholders” as a “partner” to allow ” our industrial base which has served us so well since the earliest days of human space flight” (thats Pete) to “continue into the future”.

Other ideas; like even using EELV’s or of course Falcon9s and Heavies are shunned because “we might need heavy lift to secure the high ground against the Chinese” (thats Olson).

But all it is is pork…and both have had choice “John Edwards moments” (ie complete babble) trying to explain how they support commercial programs elsewhere but not in human spaceflight (“We need NASA to keep our astronauts, our heroes safe”)

Obama in my view point has hung on to the center far to long….he has let the GOP drift rightward into Simberg and Whittington land with no real effort at pointing out how badly the GOP has driven right to the rest of the American people. The other day I watched an idiot explain how Reagan had to withdrawl the troops from Lebanon because “the Congress made him”…the Fox news idiot just shoke her blonde hair…

Obama needs to pounce on this. There is one more Dragon flight before the election…that needs to be a photo op.

BTW very nice comments RGO