Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member...

14 replies on “Irene And The Three Space Amigos”

  1. Disappointing, just goes to show how lucky we have Bridenstine who supports commercial space. (Quote from https://twitter.com/SpcPlcy… and https://twitter.com/jeff_fo…

    Tuned in to AvWeek webinar with former NASA administrators. Charlies Bolden has some frank words on commercial crew, arguing that had Boeing not gotten involved in the program, Congress would never have agreed to fund it. [Boeing was involved from the very first CCDev awards.]

    Well now we know why Starliner is so messed up, there’s no incentive for them to do a good job if the NASA administrator made them think they’re essential and indispensable.

    Q-how to avoid another gap?
    Bolden: cmrcl cargo wasn’t controversial, but cmrcl crew didn’t enjoy that support. Victim of having Obama’s name on it for one thing. Didn’t really get $ till 2015. Don’t think we’d be where we are w/o Boeing getting into it. Nobody liked SpX on Hill.

    Aren’t that the truth, remember this next time some congress critter mumbles about there’s no plan for Artemis, what they really want is to cut SpaceX out of the plan.

    Goldin: I support commercial space, but what is commercial? Revenue has to come from somewhere other than the U.S. government. The USG cannot be the target of the cash flow.

    Yeah so it’s ok for Boeing and LM to get revenue from USG, but not ok for commercial space companies to get revenue from USG?

    Bolden: okay for NASA to be an anchor tenant for commercial spaceflight companies, but not the only one. Mentions that “commercial ideologues were dominant” in space policy early in the Obama Administration.

    And that’s a bad thing???

    Bolden: took me a while to become a believer in cmrcl space. OK for NASA to be anchor tenant, but we’re not the bank.

    Well, thank god we had Lori Garver early on.

    NASA is acting like the bank for Boeing, right now.

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    Overall, there’s very little recognition that commercial space is the greatest thing happened to the US space program and NASA in the past 10 years, and commercial space – not nuclear propulsion – is what USG will have to rely on if they don’t want to fall behind China.

    1. “Commercial ideologues” is his code for “my deputy”, but my enthusiasm was shared by the POTUS – so no apologies. It was’t just Congress who wasn’t onboard.

      1. What was the driving the fear for commercial space? NASA losing a rice bowl? Commercial not up to the task? International partners not being able to follow suit?

        1. I’ve not found a better synopsis of the answer to your question than this quote from Moneyball where Red Sox owner John Henry is explaining to Billy Bean why he wasn’t “liked” by the traditional baseball community. Bean built a playoff team and won the exact same number of games that the Yankees won, but the Yankees spent one point four million per win and the A’s paid two hundred and sixty thousand. During some of the most difficult times I would go to the theater just hear this again and be reminded the backlash I got was inevitable: “I know you’ve taken it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall. It always gets bloody, always. It’s the threat of not just the way of doing business, but in their minds it’s threatening the game. But really what it’s threatening is their livelihoods, it’s threatening their jobs, it’s threatening the way that they do things. And every time that happens, whether it’s the government or a way of doing business or whatever it is, the people are holding the reins, have their hands on the switch. They go batshit crazy. I mean, anybody who’s not building a team right and rebuilding it using your model, they’re dinosaurs. They’ll be sitting on their ass on the sofa in October, watching the Boston Red Sox win the World Series.”

  2. To be honest, given how the COVID virus has set back efforts to end world hunger by many years, the UN World Hunger Program was a very good choice this year. They really need the publicity the Nobel Peace Prize brings.

    The ISS is not going anywhere for a long while so there will be more opportunities for it to win. Those that want ISS to win just need to decide to get organized instead of just wishing for it to happen.

      1. Is your question “how is it that most of the world population knows about ISS?” If true, and it’s a guess on my part: probably ubiquity, and time in service.

        If you are wondering has ISS become a symbol of international cooperation, I wish I knew the answer to that question. Guessing, if a typical world citizen were asked, she would likely regard ISS as an American adventure. Which is too bad. But a guess on my part.

        1. I think most Americans think NASA shut down when Shuttle stopped flying and that its Musk and SpaceX now taking NASAs place. I don’t think most give much thought to ISS.

  4. The first commercial flight with commercial passengers should finally change the conversation about what is commercial.

  5. As far as Bolden not being too keen about ‘commercial crew’, he is pretty typical as a NASA/military pilot-astronaut. He and many others before have thought it was all about NASA astronauts flying the missions and there was not room for anyone else; no one else would have been capable. When Russians were getting ready to bring up the first tourist astronaut, we heard the same thing: “just tell them no, we don’t want or need anyone other than NASA and its partners”. The Russians did not listen.

    And not just astronauts, the entire NASA operations organization thought no one else could do the job effectively. But we have watched for decades how USA Inc, Russians, and now Space X can do the job, and not just effectively, far more efficiently too.

    1. Reminds me of the 1930s air mail scandal in which the US Army Air Corps took on flying the mail from commercial carriers because of corruption in awarding contracts. The pilots were not trained or capable of flying the airmail and 13 died trying.

  6. I never thought of the ISS as something eligible, but I absolutely think it would be a worthy choice. But it might be too abstract one. Things that win are usually direct help to large number of people, international agencies, or peace makers. The ISS promotes cooperation, but is more identified with as an engineering/science program. And it’s hard to say it’s meaningfully promoted peace between the US and Russia. It’s existence and the western money that went with it in the 1990s certainly helped keep a lot of ex-Soviet engineers from finding employment in rogue states. But US and Russian relations have only gotten worse, not better.

    But still, it’s a worthy idea.

  7. I wonder how Administrator Golden feels now that his nemesis the NASA Worm has returned with a vengeance on both the crewed Falcon 9 rocket and SLS booster. ?

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