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TrumpSpace

Bolden Is Worried About Trump's Tweeting

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
June 26, 2017
Filed under ,

How Long Will ISS Remain Isolated From Terrestrial Politics?, earlier post
Keith’s note: How long is the ISS going to be able to remain an orbital, Antarctic-like, politics-free zone? The longer it manages to remain apart from terrestrial turmoils, the more space exploration speaks to a way to transcend such things. But there has to be a breaking point sooner or later.
Book Review: The Orbital Perspective, earlier post
“Perhaps the most pervasive theme in Garan’s writing about the orbital perspective is collaboration – across disciplines, cultures, geography, income, and politics. To make his point he delves into the challenges that faced the International Space Station program. Curiously, as relations between the West and Russia have deteriorated due to Ukraine, the one joint endeavor that continues, more or less unaffected, is the ISS program. Therein lies lessons for many other projects, according to Garan.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

32 responses to “Bolden Is Worried About Trump's Tweeting”

  1. Johnhouboltsmyspiritanimal says:
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    The ISS has stayed above the fray. When Russia was doing all that invading in Crimea and the saber rattling/sanction talks from obama didn’t impact access to ISS so I doubt a tweet would change that now.

  2. Neal Aldin says:
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    The tweets are relatively new and something of a loose cannon, but the risk has been there since Shuttle stopped flying. And since Orion is about 6 or 7 years behind that safe, simple, soon schedule that Charlie bought into. So now Charlie is concerned? We have had this risk for six years. Soyuz could have had a problem at any point and we would have hd exactly the same issue. At one time Charlie had the wherewithall to do something about it the risk. He took no action. Charlie as much as anyone has created this risk.

    • SouthwestExGOP says:
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      Orion will NOT go to ISS of course. You did not know that? SpaceX and Boeing will go to ISS and they (with a bit of luck) will launch people to ISS in May 2018. So, with a bit of conservatism, the U.S. will be able to launch people to ISS in about a year.

      • Neal Aldin says:
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        Yes, you are correct, now, in 2017. However at the time the decisions were made, Orion was going to be flying to ISS with crews beginning around 2011. Space X and Boeing were not players at all in carrying crews. Later Orion got to be too expensive and too late. Remember the program manager in 2008 was arguing that Orion might not fly until 2013 or 2014 and Sally Ride (part of Augustine’s committee) argued 2018 was likely. Now its not until 2021. Everyone should pray that Space X and Boeing get their vehicles on line in the next year or 2.

    • therealdmt says:
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      The NASA Administrator serves at the discretion of the president and it is his job to represent the president in relation to NASA policy. In other words, any disagreements such an administrator might have with the president or other members of the president’s team must be handled behind closed doors. If such disagreement is so strong that the administrator can’t in good conscience carry out the president’s policy, the administrator should resign.

      Now, Bolden is no longer NASA Administrator and, like any other citizen, is free to speak his mind. Before, that wasn’t the case. All we really know is that he didn’t disagree so strongly with the Obama administration policy that he felt compelled to resign. He might have loved it, might have deeply disliked it — but regardless, he wasn’t free to talk.

      My guess is that he started as an SLS true believer, ended up a commercial space convert, and basically publicly sold the ‘Journey to Mars’ for all he was worth in an effort to stall for time (keep Congress satisfied until it became obvious that public-private partnerships are the way forward)

      • fcrary says:
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        “…any disagreements such an administrator might have with the president or other members of the president’s team must be handled behind closed doors.”

        This has come up before, but I’ll try again. Why? I keep seeing people write this, so something similar, and say that’s just how it is. And, by implication, that’s how it has to be. As a scientist, I like knowing why things work the way they do, not just knowing how they work. And I don’t like limiting this to a narrow specialty, such as planetary magnetospheres. I like applying the same “how does it work and why does it work that way” approach to everything.

        This idea of publicly always towing the company line, regardless of your own views, has not always been accepted. For example, in the presidential election of 1864, John Fremont ran against Lincoln, while Fremont was a general in the Army during a war. (Note that he did resign his commission during the campaign, reportedly because he’d given up on getting a major command, not to clear any conflict between the job and his campaign. He was also quite willing to openly disagree with the President, e.g. his proclamation to end slavery in Missouri, in 1861.)

        In addition to asking “why”, I think it’s also worth asking whether or not this practice is a good idea. If you think the process should be a NASA administrator (and others) giving the President advice, the President making a decision, and then the administrator (and others) implementing the decision, that’s fine. I would also agree that, once the decision is made, the administrator should do his best to implement it. Not drag his feet over a decision he doesn’t like.

        But why is it beneficial for the advice and decision part to happen behind closed doors? Wouldn’t it be nice if the citizens of a democracy could see the process for themselves? It’s worth knowing if the President acted on bad advice or made a bad call and ignored good advice. Isn’t that what “transparency” is supposed to mean?

      • Neal Aldin says:
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        Assuming the guy does his job as Administrator, he ought to be supported by his President. Obama was not terribly competent especially when it came to NASA and space, but Obama told everyone he was going to be that way before he was elected. Obama had no interest in space. Bolden had a lot of issues too, chief among them that Obama did not want him, but was forced by the Florida senator/astronut Nelson. Fact was, if Orion and its management, all the way up to the Administrator, had been done properly they could have had their budget, been ready to fly in a reasonable amount of time, and have been flying for many years now. Obama did not do his job. Bolden did not do his job, and despite the expense, and the fact they were not trying to create anything new, Orion isn’t flying anytime soon. Now they are whining. NASA’s human space flight program crashed during the Obama years and during Griffin’s time before. Maybe the commercial entities will come to the rescue for the US.

        • muomega0 says:
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          Orion was placed on Ares I. Only 4mT of LAS mass was allocated to the combined stack for 2X/yr lunar sorties and to reach ISS. Solids cannot not shutoff, LAS mass grew to 10mT.

          Orion could not be placed on Atlas/Delta(black zones, solids, engine rating, ..). It makes no sense to certify a LV that will be retired today.

          Congress forgot Apollo 13 and sent a 20 day capsule to Mars in their ‘architecture’.

          So Obama cancelled CxP-Ares I could not get off the ground. Congress however, then placed
          Orion on a 1B+, 70mT+ HLV so obviously LEO access was not ‘practical’.

          So Garver, speaking for Obama, said “SLS” should not be built and ‘did his job’. Orion had the wrong heat shield to return from asteroid, Dragon/CST-100 duplicated LEO access effort.

          The moral is that if you start with a bad architecture, this one politically motivated, it costs alot. NASA and its Orion/HLV community put forth a significant effort to correct poor architecture shortcomings. Its highly unlikely however, that Orion or any capsule could have been certified in a reasonable amount of time and cost on any expendable rocket with solids with multiple configurations.

    • muomega0 says:
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      Orion was in the wrong architecture and riding on the wrong LVs, there is no safe simple soon solution. Your post is BS.

      It takes little thought to jot down a few tweets that would shut down the HSF space program or ISS access. But of course, we have a nation that is self centered and easily duped, compounded by the Party of Red who adapted Russian active measures to weaponize fake news.

  3. Ray Gedaly says:
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    Aren’t Trump’s tweets mostly pro-Russia?

    • fcrary says:
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      Not entirely or consistently. The only clear pattern seems to be that Mr. Trump’s tweets are extremely pro-Trump.

  4. Chuck Johnson says:
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    I know it is Aeronautics and not Space, but Mr. Bolden would make an excellent CEO for Uber. Urban Air Mobility is the next frontier, and Charlie could make a significant global impact on this emerging aviation market. Just saying…

    • Eric says:
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      Experience in a government hierarchy does not translate well to the free wheeling quickly adapting culture of silicon valley. I do not see this as a good fit at all. I think he wants to be retired now anyways.

  5. dd75 says:
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    Russia needs the money. They are not going to upset one of the few stuff that is excluded from sanctions for a tweet no matter how ill-advised it is.

  6. Giuseppe says:
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    Look at this from Russia’s point of view: on one side you have an ill-advised tweet, on the other you have 70 M$ per Soyuz seat sold to NASA. What will be their choice?

  7. jamesmuncy says:
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    Bullcookies. We have U.S. and Russian forces saber rattling in Syria, but Russia needs the U.S. cash to keep Soyuzes flying. The reality is that U.S. crews will increase to 4/6 of ISS capacity this fall… and within a year, NASA *could* risk flying crews on test flights of Dragon 2 or Starliner. Charlie should chill.

    • kcowing says:
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      What is Russia going to do when Dragon and Starliner start flying to ISS – stop flying Soyuz? NASA won’t be buying seats after that. As for taking the risk of flying people on an unproven spacecraft until the safety review process is completed that is not going to happen with civil servant astronauts on board. Bolden has a somewhat valid point. Trump has shown no hesitation in insulting everyone and anyone despite the consequences. Just because space has not been affected does not mean that it will not be affected.

      • fcrary says:
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        Mr. Bolden, in my opinion, has a good but somewhat misguided point. The President’s habit of random, off-the-cuff tweeting could cause serious problems. International diplomacy has, traditionally, been a field where people spend hours trying to get the wording right and avoid unintentionally offending someone. Eventually, one of the President’s midnight tweets will probably cause a diplomatic crisis. Hopefully a minor one.

        But, unlike Mr. Bolden, I really doubt the repercussions would affect the space station. Science just doesn’t seem to be a good, political football. The International Geophysical Year (1957-1958) in the height of the cold war, is one example. Observations of the transit of Venus in 1761 is an earlier one. Scientists traveled all over the globe to observe it, despite this being in the middle of the thirty years war. [Correction after I posted that: The seven years war. There have been enough x year wars in Europe that I sometimes have trouble keeping them straight, especially since the American portion of the wars had a different name.] The scientists were essentially given a free pass.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      We should probably realize that, with time, more and more folks aren’t taking the President seriously. This phenomena started with Progressives, sure. Folks on the right are smart and educated, and they can see as well as anyone else the quality that does not come from the WH.

      And Mr. Putin? He’s a long-term player, and surely, like Mrs. Merkel and President Marion, has taken the measure of the President.

      The General should know better.

      • hikingmike says:
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        Let’s see, Putin has a 6-year term that started in 2012. The limit is no consecutive third terms, so he can run and be elected again in 2018 (which would be his 4th term actually). Then he would be done unless he wanted to swap with Medvedev again and come back after another 6 years, or if he wanted to just make the term longer like Medvedev and parliament (and Putin) did. Basically anything could happen, lol.

        • Dr. Malcolm Davis says:
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          Remember he is a dictator leading an authoritarian state. Don’t kid yourself that Russia is a democracy. Putin can do anything he wants. He could be President for life and if anyone lifts a finger to oppose him, they wind up dead through Polonium in their coffee, or just spend their lives languishing in a prison cell!

          • fcrary says:
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            That’s not entirely true. For various reasons, Mr. Putin needs to maintain the image (however stretched) of Russia being a democracy. That’s why he did things like the one-term job swap with Mr. Medvedev. And, of course, he doesn’t do anything nasty to his political opponents. Those issues involve the courts acting independently of the executive branch, and thugs and terrorists from the Chechen Republic.

          • hikingmike says:
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            Don’t worry, I’m pretty aware of Putin’s position, journalistic conditions, opposition conditions, etc. And he does have a very high approval rating. And his annual “ask any question you want” TV show is pretty bizarre.

        • Michael Spencer says:
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          I had the opportunity this past week to interact with a few Russians, all <35 or so. And all supporters of their President, uniformly pointing to his ‘strength’.

          I have no way of placing these apocryphal stories in context. When I asked about the protests we see on TV, they asked “What protests?”

          • fcrary says:
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            That’s what makes it hard to figure out. One of the accusations against Mr. Putin is that he more-or-less controls what the press reports within Russia. If that’s true, it’s consistent with speaking to Russians who haven’t heard anything about protests. Of course, it’s also consistent with the accusation of press control being false. So it’s hard to be sure.

            I do know you can’t buy polonium at the corner drug store, and it’s very hard for private citizens to get their hands on. When a person poisoned with it happens to be a strong critic of Mr. Putin and the Russian government denies any connection, I get a little bit suspicious. And less willing to give them the benefit of the doubt over more ambiguous questions.

          • hikingmike says:
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            https://www.washingtonpost….

            “Analysts said that after the Crimean annexation, Putin became untouchable to a large slice of the population.
            “People interpret him as a permanent component of their construction of the world,””

            “In September, weeks before Putin announced Russia’s surprise entrance into the conflict, few Russians saw the Islamic State as a direct threat. Within weeks — and after constant coverage on TV — the number shot up to a solid majority.”

            “But what goes up can also go down. The longtime mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, saw his ratings plummet after he was suddenly fired in 2010. Putin critics say that his popularity may be equally fleeting.

            “Switch off the television, and this popularity would go away in two months,” said Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister who is now a leading opposition politician.”

  8. Mark Thompson says:
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    I am confused – I thought that Trump is colluding with the Russians and obstructing justice to prevent an investigation of them. Now there is concern he will utter a tweet that will offend them? Not likely given how we bombed their Syrian ally’s airbase and shot down one of their planes and the Russians did not bar our access to space.
    In reality, Bolden opposes Trump and this was the most clever anti-Trump thing he could say. He is just trying to impress his leftist friends.
    Its great that ISS is a politics free-zone. I think all concerned realize that if humans are going to live together in cramped quarters in space, we need to make a maximum effort to get along and kudos to all parties for doing so. This is probably a good sociology lesson learned for future deep space missions and another NASA spin-off.

  9. hikingmike says:
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    I don’t think he meant it would be about ISS. But anyway I think he tweets about plenty of things he doesn’t really care about if he wants to use them to make himself look better, claim he knew all along about whatever, or distract from something else.

  10. Steven Rappolee says:
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    An outright invasion of Ukraine and certainly a border incursion into a Baltic NATO state would end ISS

    • fcrary says:
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      Whatever you think of him, Mr. Putin isn’t exactly impulsive. An insulting tweet from an American president isn’t going to provoke him to launch an invasion or (probably) even a border incident. He might do it for other reasons, but not hard feelings over a rude tweet.

  11. ThomasLMatula says:
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    The Russians refusing to fly astronauts would be the best thing that could happen to NASA. The would need to go into crisis mode and get the Dragon carry passengers to ISS ASAP. This means the delays in funding would end and SpaceX would be able to surge forward with it.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      Good for NASA? Arguably possible. But good for us? And for anything else? Not so much.

      International cooperation is not zero-sum.