Dragon Docks and the commercial space era begins.

View 725 Friday, May 25, 2012

The Space Station has caught the Dragon by the tail. It’s the first instance of the success of the new NASA policy. A long time ago some of us said that NASA shouldn’t be running operations, they should create markets and let the industry take care of the rest. The government doesn’t operate the railroads, or the airlines, or the trucking industry, even though a great deal of rail, airline freight and passenger, and highway freight is government stuff. Fort Hood doesn’t operate trucking lines to go out and bring food to the mess halls. It pays for delivery. Thus should it be with NASA, and this was the 1980 recommendation of such outfits as The Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy – sometimes known as one of Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet groups” that wrote the transition team papers on space policy for the incoming Reagan Administration of 1981. One of the papers in that report was “How to save civilization and make a little money,” by Art Dula and Larry Niven after a discussion with the full panel. It outlined how to create a commercial space policy.

Congress passed the Commercial Space Act of 1988 with the purpose of encouraging commercial space development. It was followed by other Commercial Space Acts, and the transfer of commercial space regulation to a special section of the FAA, and over time a generally more favorable atmosphere for commercial space. Henry Vanderbilt’s Space Access Society and other such outfits have annual meetings. Space X, X Corp, Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, Kistler Aerospace, Carmack’s Armadillo Aerospace, and a whole raft of private space companies, some big, some small, some successful and some not so much so have sprung up. The engines of capitalism were turned on, and the successful docking of the Dragon is a major step in the renewal of interest in space.

Government arsenals can do great things. Projects organized to implement a strategy of technology can be very successful, as witness the X projects, and for that matter Apollo; but projects don’t build industries. The best thing government can do to build industries is to provide certain markets, or in the absence of markets, prizes. Of course we’ve said all this before, and many times. See ACCESS TO SPACE.

This is just the first step, but it’s a big one. I have been asked by a colleague why this is different. NASA paid for this, didn’t it?

Yes, but not in the old NASA way, with cost-plus contracts and with NASA trying to run things as they did with Space Station. Dragon wasn’t designed at Marshall or in Houston, and NASA inspectors weren’t wandering around the factory floor and insisting in “testing” components (as Marshall did with the tanks for DC/X, which they managed to break and had to weld back together – it was the failure of the weld that caused DC/X to burn up, thus ending the DC/X threat to NASA’s plans). Just as NASA doesn’t operate the trucks that deliver the chow to Fort Hood mess halls, it’s not NASA’s job to build and fly the Falcon and Dragon. They just collect the cargo. And that cargo was delivered.

It’s a first step but it’s a big one.

Hurrah!

This is supposed to be “Everybody blog about Brett Kimberlin Day” but since I never heard of Brett Kimberlin I can hardly do that. More interesting is that looking for Brett Kimberlin gets a little complicated. His Wikipedia entry is gone, gone gone, although there is considerable controversy over why. It does not seem to be controversial that he was convicted of domestic terrorism and sentenced to 50 years, but was released on parole after some 17 and is out now, possibly unsupervised. He seems to have generated rage among some – see http://wormme.com/2012/05/25/you-are-not-a-terrorist-brett-kimberlin/—as an example – and he is certainly no favorite of Glenn Beck — http://www.glennbeck.com/2012/05/25/glenn-talks-to-bloggers-about-brett-kimberlin-terrorism/ – but finding a news report about him is a bit more difficult. He seems to have friends, some powerful, as well as many enemies. http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2012/05/speedway-bomber-brett-kimberlin-threatens-blogger.html 

I’m not sure I have ever come across a situation in which someone this controversial has no Wikipedia entry. It may say something about Wikipedia and it may not. Of course one cannot rely on Wikipedia since articles there change like dreams, but it can be a good place to start.

T H White (Sword in the Stone) wrote a charming novel suitable for children although it’s not really a children’s book: Mistress Masham’s Repose. There is a Kindle edition and I strongly recommend it not only to all my readers who have children of ten or older, but to readers who like a good story. It is full of White’s observations about the world. One of the characters in the book is The Professor, who has spent his life verifying quotations. He would have greatly enjoyed the Internet, I suspect. Incidentally, children who read this book will not know it’s not a children’s book; like Sword in the Stone there are a number of levels at which it can be read, and most people like every one of them.

Aside: Mistress Masham’s Repose is a fantasy, whose premise is that a small colony of Lilliputians were brought to England in the 18th Century by Lemuel Gulliver after his travels; they were exhibited in a travelling carnival until they escaped and took refuge in a small folly in an island on a great English estate, where they have lived in seclusion ever since. The story is about a little girl who discovers them, Since it’s a Tim White story, you’ll believe it without much effort and be disappointed to realize when you’ve read it that it was just a story. (Or was it? White seemed to know many things…) The Wikipedia article on the book will tell you more.

Anyway have a good weekend. I’ll try to get out a couple of mail bags. I’ve been working on fiction.