perfidy

Ken, the lovable (and red and scratchy) Brickmuppet, has gone completely overboard in responding to one of my comments on his earlier space post. Brickmuppet's first post was about NASA's new Constellation project - which intends to build a disposable crew capsule that is eerily similar to the Apollo capsule of forty years past. But bigger! With electronics! Brickmuppet was excited about this development. But then he's a wet-behind-the-ears youngster of 35. But with the vast experience and jaded cynisism that my 36 years have given me, I have less reason for joy. I think that NASA is congenitally unable to conceive, let alone design and operate, a functional manned space program leading to a permanent presence in space achieved through lowered cost of access to orbit. In short, not gonna happen, and I don't like the dry itchy feeling of NASA blowing smoke up my ass with a sixties retro space program spun as exciting and new developments in space.

Honestly, I'd like to believe that this was cool, and would lead to something good. But I just can't. Brickmuppet followed up on my comment with an extensive and well researched post. I've started posts like his, but depression and ennui generally kill the project after a few minutes. He even throws in a pic of what he somehow knew that I would love to see more than anything else. I steal and present it here:

But Brickmuppet's obsequious (but welcome) praise will not distract me from my goal:

The great and wise Buckethead

You can't use the Jedi mind trick on me, I am immune to your powers.

His arguments are not without merit.

From gushing praise to damning with faint praise in one paragraph! Sheesh!

The thing is, everything Ken says short of the last few paragraph supports my argument that NASA is unfit and incapable of doing what they claim they are going to do with Constellation. We're sympatico on that. Where I disagree is with his belief that Constellation will not adversely effect private space development. NASA has always viewed the private sector as a competitor. Further, Constellation will compete with private launch, not just because NASA will try to block private development, but because private devlopment will be hindered by the availability of subsidized manned space flight. And further further, NASA is so repugnant to me because they won't do what's right, and won't let anyone else do it either. This is the classic endstate of a bureaucratic organization.

A lot of people have been slagging heavy lift, for little reason. In fact, that very topic is one of the posts I couldn't finish because it made me cry. It's not so much that there's a problem with the hardware - shuttle components could easily be configured into a reasonable heavy lift vehicle, as I've stated here before. The problem is that, up til now and for the foreseeable future, NASA will own those components. The only solution is to kill NASA and release those designs as open source hardware. Other people could make better, and more innovative use of them; and not spend billions in infrastructure and labor costs to use them just three times a year.

Is the NASA architecture viable economically? Is it spiffy and cutting edge? No.

But private industry will be, and they will compete and try new and risky things to tap into the space market. The constellation retro-rockets are a temporary fix, and a means of jump starting a manned space program that was boldly going nowhere.

In a generation NASA will be buying its spacecraft from the same companies that will be building them for space hotels, asteroid mining companies and even colonists heading to the Moon, Mars, the asteroids,and maybe Titan.

Exactly. That's why the Constellation is so much wanking. If it never flies, its useless. If it does, it's either pathetically redundant next to Rutan's SpaceShipFour or whatever - or it kept that ship from flying.

[wik] I forgot to mention, Brickmuppet hits the nail on the head with this one, too. Talking about Space-X's antitrust lawsuit against the big aerospace companies, BM says:

This could break open the door to commercial space...or nail it shut

That's good and bad. On one hand, the ambiguities of the current situation could really be in favor of the small space startups. If this goes badly for Space-X, then the future spins clockwise out of the picture.