The Art Neuro Weblog

We Are Not Alone
That is, mostly in our dissent in NASA's meandering ways. Here is a piece of commentary that essentially cover the ground we always seem to roam over. Some would say decidedly drive over, like over a piece of roadkill, but that is another issue. Take a look anyway:

Numerous people -- including its supporters -- feel that the Agency has wandered off the yellow brick road, and has lost sight of meaningful goals. I recently attended a space conference at Cape Canaveral; a three-day event that finished up with an awards ceremony for school kids. Presiding at the ceremony were a handful of Mercury and Apollo astronauts, including Wally Schirra, Jim Lovell, and Al Worden. These guys are not spring chickens anymore, although their minds are keen. On stage, they poked one another, joking over past missions and who among them was the oldest. I sat in the audience tingling with a faint sadness: these were the now-frayed heroes of my youth. Giants going to seed before my eyes. Where are today's space heroes? Were the boots of these men so impossibly large?

Its NASA's fault, many say. The Agency, wed to the crushingly expensive Space Station and still reliant on the inefficient, doubtful Shuttle, needs a shake-up. That's been the decade-old mantra intoned by hundreds of editorials in the space press. Shake-up.

Well, the agitation has begun. First there was the Columbia Shuttle investigation, which pointed its finger at bureaucratic stumbling as much as at falling foam. Then, in January, President Bush (news - web sites) sharply delineated a new objective for NASA: return to the moon, and send humans on to Mars. Last week, the Presidents Commission on Implementation of U.S. Space Exploration Policy added its own fillip: streamline the organization chart, focus on missions rather than projects, and involve the private sector in a far larger share of the work. The obvious appeal of this last point was underscored on June 21, when Scaled Composites, a privately funded aeronautics firm, lofted a rocket plane to a height of 100 km, the near neighborhood of space. They did this for a fraction of the cost of a NASA launch.

The suggested changes are practical and, importantly, politically palatable. They're a well-reasoned response, framed in accord with contemporary practice. Today, when an organization suffers a dramatic setback, the most common reaction is to first indict, and then to reorganize. (Neither seems to have been considered when Britain's Royal Geographic Society sent Robert Scott on his ill-fated expedition to the South Pole in 1911. Times change.) The shake-up of NASA will undoubtedly prove beneficial in the long run.

It's interesting at the end there that 'flame and blame' raises its head as part of the accountability process. The commentator then goes on to let NASA off the hook, which I think is a little too easy; but his perspective is that the current pile-on is too easy, so what can you do? The chasm is large even amongst critics.

Space Tourism
In an age of ornamentation, nothing seems to say we have travelled like a tourist photo and a souvenir to go with it. So perhaps it's not surprising that gossip has it that Richard Branson is interested in SpaceShipOne as a tourist craft. Of course the folks over at SpaceShipOne are more vague, if not trying to deflect attention from Space Tourism. Though what they're saying definitely sounds like Space Tourism to me.

One of our lessons learned from this program is that its a very good idea to not reveal to the media what were doing until after," Rutan said. Giving press statements and carrying out interviews would mean a year delay, in regards to SpaceShipOne work, he added.

"So you're not likely to find out what were going to do next until we have to push it outside, where that spy gets a camera in and takes a picture," Rutan told reporters the day before SpaceShipOne rocketed into history.

Just like the early days of aviation, Rutan said, there will be barnstorming-like flights as vehicles give passengers a brief sub-orbital flight relatively soon. "The crazy $100,000 stuff," he added.

"But I don't look at that as space tourism," Rutan said. A mature industry is one that has a passenger spending on the order of $30,000 to $50,000 dollars, with a second generation vehicle capable of lowering a seat price to around $10,000 or $12,000, he said.

When pressed on when passenger-carrying spaceships will show up on the scene, Rutan remained cagey. "All I ask you to do is stay tuned. I think its going to be interesting. I believe there will be a lot of activity."

So the lesson of the day is: don't grow old like the Mercury/Gemini boys did, and do save up for a ticket to space.

- Art Neuro