Space Commerce Debate on PBS Tonight

I finally registered an account here, just so I could post my disappointment with the woefully inadequate (on both sides) debate on NewsHour. Sigh.

I think Brett did a good job.
Keep at it, Brett!

I agree with Frank that Brett did a good job. I did cringe when I saw Mike Griffin though. :^P

Video and transcript: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june10/nasa_02-02.html

Brett made a mistake when he compared the emerging private commercial space companies to the private health insurance companies. US private health insurance companies provide the most over priced health care on the planet and are helping to cripple America's business competitiveness around the world!

Marcel F. Williams

We must tread carefully when comparing NASA to health care. It is easy to get mixed up.

US private health insurance companies are very successful and make lots of money and provide great health care to lots of people. So Brett's comparison works very well for him there.

What doesn't make it through the comparison as well are the problems with the health care system.

That wasn't pretty. Brett looked like a deer caught in the headlights. He didn't sound very convincing and rolled out the same catchphrases more than once. Gwen Ifill is obviously clueless about the actual details (buying rides from the Chinese on their "space shuttle" eh Gwen?) and Brett missed the opportunity to forcefully correct the misnomer about ending manned U.S. spaceflight. When you have people like news anchors talking about the budget "ending manned spaceflight" it get's ordinary people's attention and might even get them to call their congressman and complain. It obviously needs to be pointed out again and again that no matter what is done, indigenous U.S. human spaceflight is going to end this year and that crewed COTS is likely going to reduce the time before it restarts, not lengthen it.

Griffin always said this was about 'who is going to get the money'. In the end, Commercial Space won the battle.

BTW: The Merchant 7 picture makes me gag. The Original 7 were brave souls. The Merchant 7 are overpaid CEO's with golden parachutes who probably don't know the price of a gallon of milk.

The Original 7 were brave souls. The Merchant 7 are overpaid CEO's

The Marchant 7 will open human spaceflight to more Americans because it will be in their collective business interest to expand the market.

NASA's program of record was on a trajectory to fly fewer and fewer astronauts on even more expensive rockets.

If you're really interested in opening the high frontier, which option would you chose?

The Merchant 7 picture makes me gag. The Original 7 were brave souls. The Merchant 7 are overpaid CEO's with golden parachutes who probably don't know the price of a gallon of milk.

Your attack on these contract awardees is shameful, especially considering that with the $50 million contracts they just received they're likely to achieve much more than NASA did with the $445 million suborbital Ares I-X.

Your attack is particularly shameful in the case of Ken Bowersox (one of those "overpaid CEO's"):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Bowersox

He attended the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and graduated with class 85A.[2] He served as a test pilot on A-7E and F/A-18 aircraft, and was selected as an astronaut candidate in 1987. Bowersox holds the rank of Captain in the United States Navy. Bowersox first flew as a pilot on the Space Shuttle missions STS-50 and STS-61, he commanded missions STS-73, a microgravity research mission and STS-82, a Hubble Space Telescope repair mission. He then launched on STS-113 with Don Pettit and Nikolai Budarin for an extended stay aboard the ISS as a member of ISS Expedition 6 in 2002 and 2003, returning aboard Soyuz TMA-1.

The irony in all this is that the Constellation program really has nothing to do with missions to LEO. Its a return to the Moon program. And the relatively small amount of money the administration wants to give to private industry to develop their own manned space flight capability would have had little effect on the Constellation budget.

I'm now convinced that Obama terminated the return to the Moon because Bolden didn't want to go to the Moon. Bolden wants to go to Mars. But NASA informed him that they just don't have the technology know how to do that because of the problems of radiation shielding. So now he wants to shut down the Moon program in order to focus on developing the technology to go to Mars.

But I think this is a mistake since the US economy will probably make a lot more money commercializing and colonizing the Moon than Mars. And any delay in going to the Moon will probably significantly reduce the chance of any future US commercial dominance of the Moon which is good news for economic competitors like China, India, Russia, Europe, and maybe even Japan.

Marcel F. Williams

No, worse, they're just 7 snake oil salesmen-and-saleswoman.