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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
Well I don't think you mean perez hilton but for those that don't follow the DFL elections could you remind me who he is and what hes running for?
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+ Show Spoiler +On February 09 2017 23:43 GreenHorizons wrote:Hey Kwiz (or others who think the primary was fair and square), do you think Perez misspoke when he said: Show nested quote +
We heard loudly and clearly yesterday from Bernie supporters that the process was rigged and it was. And you’ve got to be honest about it. That’s why we need a chair who is transparent.
And that he actually meant this? Show nested quote +Hillary became our nominee fair and square, and she won more votes in the primary—and general—than her opponents.
On February 09 2017 23:47 Sermokala wrote:
Well I don't think you mean perez hilton but for those that don't follow the DFL elections could you remind me who he is and what hes running for?
Tom Perez, running for DNC chair.
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On February 09 2017 23:35 Sermokala wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2017 23:27 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 19:33 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:The Trump administration is considering a bold and controversial vision for the U.S. space program that calls for a "rapid and affordable" return to the moon by 2020, the construction of privately operated space stations and the redirection of NASA's mission to "the large-scale economic development of space," according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.
The proposed strategy, whose potential for igniting a new industry appeals to Trump’s business background and job-creation pledges, is influencing the White House’s search for leaders to run the space agency. And it is setting off a struggle for supremacy between traditional aerospace contractors and the tech billionaires who have put big money into private space ventures.
"It is a big fight," said former Republican Rep. Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, who drafted the Trump campaign's space policy and remains involved in the deliberations. "There are billions of dollars at stake. It has come to a head now when it has become clear to the space community that the real innovative work is being done outside of NASA."
The early indications are that private rocket firms like Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and their supporters have a clear upper hand in what Trump's transition advisers portrayed as a race between "Old Space" and "New Space," according to emails among key players inside the administration. Trump has met with Bezos and Musk, while tech investor Peter Thiel, a close confidant, has lobbied the president to look at using NASA to help grow the private space industry.
Charles Miller, a former NASA official who served on Trump's NASA transition team after running a commercial space cargo firm, is pushing for the White House to nominate a deputy administrator who foremost "shares the same goal/overall vision of transforming NASA by leveraging commercial space partnerships," according to a Jan. 23 communication. That deputy would run the space program’s day-to-day operations.
Trump has yet to name a NASA director, but the documents confirm that Rep. Jim Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma and former Navy pilot who ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, is a top contender.
"Fingers crossed," Miller writes of Bridenstine’s candidacy, according to a one email.
he White House and Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, another commercial space evangelist with close ties to Trump, is also pushing the White House to embark on a major effort to privatize U.S. space efforts.
"A good part of the Trump administration would like a lot more aggressive, risk-taking, competitive entrepreneurial approach to space," Gingrich said in an interview. "A smaller but still powerful faction represents Boeing and the expensive old contractors who have soaked up money with minimum results.
"No NASA program dominated by bureaucrats could take the risks, accept the failures and create a learning curve comparable to an entrepreneurial approach," he added. "Just think of the Wright brothers’ 500 failures in five summers at $1 per failure. Ask how long NASA would have taken and how much it would have cost."
The more ambitious administration vision could include new moon landings that "see private American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the Moon by 2020; and private lunar landers staking out de facto 'property rights' for American on the Moon, by 2020 as well," according to a summary of an "agency action plan" that the transition drew up for NASA late last month. Source This is troubling. It seems to put the interests of a few key confidants ahead of reality. It almost reminds me of a monarch's court, where the nobles come to curry favor with the president, and get a grant that benefits them at the cost of everyone else. I'm with you on the comparison but I don't think its necessarily a bad thing. Coordination between corporate and state interests is going to become a critical thing with space exploration and exploration. The last thing we need is corporations getting uppity and thinking that they can form their own nations in space. Getting all the ducks swimming in the same direction to get to mars would speed up the process of getting there by a decade at least. especially without the will to fund it publicly.
The problem is that he's (allegedly) basically throwing caution and reliability out the window in favor of supporting a group whose major selling point is essentially that they can reduce prices better than anyone else. For a field where a minor error means that you lose the cargo and in the case of a human flight, everybody dies, such a cavalier approach is most likely simply to yield poorly conceived rush jobs.
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On February 09 2017 23:50 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2017 23:35 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:27 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 19:33 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:The Trump administration is considering a bold and controversial vision for the U.S. space program that calls for a "rapid and affordable" return to the moon by 2020, the construction of privately operated space stations and the redirection of NASA's mission to "the large-scale economic development of space," according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.
The proposed strategy, whose potential for igniting a new industry appeals to Trump’s business background and job-creation pledges, is influencing the White House’s search for leaders to run the space agency. And it is setting off a struggle for supremacy between traditional aerospace contractors and the tech billionaires who have put big money into private space ventures.
"It is a big fight," said former Republican Rep. Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, who drafted the Trump campaign's space policy and remains involved in the deliberations. "There are billions of dollars at stake. It has come to a head now when it has become clear to the space community that the real innovative work is being done outside of NASA."
The early indications are that private rocket firms like Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and their supporters have a clear upper hand in what Trump's transition advisers portrayed as a race between "Old Space" and "New Space," according to emails among key players inside the administration. Trump has met with Bezos and Musk, while tech investor Peter Thiel, a close confidant, has lobbied the president to look at using NASA to help grow the private space industry.
Charles Miller, a former NASA official who served on Trump's NASA transition team after running a commercial space cargo firm, is pushing for the White House to nominate a deputy administrator who foremost "shares the same goal/overall vision of transforming NASA by leveraging commercial space partnerships," according to a Jan. 23 communication. That deputy would run the space program’s day-to-day operations.
Trump has yet to name a NASA director, but the documents confirm that Rep. Jim Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma and former Navy pilot who ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, is a top contender.
"Fingers crossed," Miller writes of Bridenstine’s candidacy, according to a one email.
he White House and Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, another commercial space evangelist with close ties to Trump, is also pushing the White House to embark on a major effort to privatize U.S. space efforts.
"A good part of the Trump administration would like a lot more aggressive, risk-taking, competitive entrepreneurial approach to space," Gingrich said in an interview. "A smaller but still powerful faction represents Boeing and the expensive old contractors who have soaked up money with minimum results.
"No NASA program dominated by bureaucrats could take the risks, accept the failures and create a learning curve comparable to an entrepreneurial approach," he added. "Just think of the Wright brothers’ 500 failures in five summers at $1 per failure. Ask how long NASA would have taken and how much it would have cost."
The more ambitious administration vision could include new moon landings that "see private American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the Moon by 2020; and private lunar landers staking out de facto 'property rights' for American on the Moon, by 2020 as well," according to a summary of an "agency action plan" that the transition drew up for NASA late last month. Source This is troubling. It seems to put the interests of a few key confidants ahead of reality. It almost reminds me of a monarch's court, where the nobles come to curry favor with the president, and get a grant that benefits them at the cost of everyone else. I'm with you on the comparison but I don't think its necessarily a bad thing. Coordination between corporate and state interests is going to become a critical thing with space exploration and exploration. The last thing we need is corporations getting uppity and thinking that they can form their own nations in space. Getting all the ducks swimming in the same direction to get to mars would speed up the process of getting there by a decade at least. especially without the will to fund it publicly. The problem is that he's (allegedly) basically throwing caution and reliability out the window in favor of supporting a group whose major selling point is essentially that they can reduce prices better than anyone else. For a field where a minor error means that you lose the cargo and in the case of a human flight, everybody dies, such a cavalier approach is most likely simply to yield poorly conceived rush jobs.
Well isn't this what the government does anyway for a ton of its procurement? How many rockets and various parts therein were supplied by the lowest bidder? The difference is now that working with these corporations the risk is transferred off to the corporation and thus the blame. I can forsee problems if we built out the space station to the orbital dock it should always have been planned for but i'm sure that the government will enforce a series of standards if they want to be able to use assets like that.
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On February 10 2017 00:02 Sermokala wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2017 23:50 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 23:35 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:27 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 19:33 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:The Trump administration is considering a bold and controversial vision for the U.S. space program that calls for a "rapid and affordable" return to the moon by 2020, the construction of privately operated space stations and the redirection of NASA's mission to "the large-scale economic development of space," according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.
The proposed strategy, whose potential for igniting a new industry appeals to Trump’s business background and job-creation pledges, is influencing the White House’s search for leaders to run the space agency. And it is setting off a struggle for supremacy between traditional aerospace contractors and the tech billionaires who have put big money into private space ventures.
"It is a big fight," said former Republican Rep. Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, who drafted the Trump campaign's space policy and remains involved in the deliberations. "There are billions of dollars at stake. It has come to a head now when it has become clear to the space community that the real innovative work is being done outside of NASA."
The early indications are that private rocket firms like Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and their supporters have a clear upper hand in what Trump's transition advisers portrayed as a race between "Old Space" and "New Space," according to emails among key players inside the administration. Trump has met with Bezos and Musk, while tech investor Peter Thiel, a close confidant, has lobbied the president to look at using NASA to help grow the private space industry.
Charles Miller, a former NASA official who served on Trump's NASA transition team after running a commercial space cargo firm, is pushing for the White House to nominate a deputy administrator who foremost "shares the same goal/overall vision of transforming NASA by leveraging commercial space partnerships," according to a Jan. 23 communication. That deputy would run the space program’s day-to-day operations.
Trump has yet to name a NASA director, but the documents confirm that Rep. Jim Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma and former Navy pilot who ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, is a top contender.
"Fingers crossed," Miller writes of Bridenstine’s candidacy, according to a one email.
he White House and Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, another commercial space evangelist with close ties to Trump, is also pushing the White House to embark on a major effort to privatize U.S. space efforts.
"A good part of the Trump administration would like a lot more aggressive, risk-taking, competitive entrepreneurial approach to space," Gingrich said in an interview. "A smaller but still powerful faction represents Boeing and the expensive old contractors who have soaked up money with minimum results.
"No NASA program dominated by bureaucrats could take the risks, accept the failures and create a learning curve comparable to an entrepreneurial approach," he added. "Just think of the Wright brothers’ 500 failures in five summers at $1 per failure. Ask how long NASA would have taken and how much it would have cost."
The more ambitious administration vision could include new moon landings that "see private American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the Moon by 2020; and private lunar landers staking out de facto 'property rights' for American on the Moon, by 2020 as well," according to a summary of an "agency action plan" that the transition drew up for NASA late last month. Source This is troubling. It seems to put the interests of a few key confidants ahead of reality. It almost reminds me of a monarch's court, where the nobles come to curry favor with the president, and get a grant that benefits them at the cost of everyone else. I'm with you on the comparison but I don't think its necessarily a bad thing. Coordination between corporate and state interests is going to become a critical thing with space exploration and exploration. The last thing we need is corporations getting uppity and thinking that they can form their own nations in space. Getting all the ducks swimming in the same direction to get to mars would speed up the process of getting there by a decade at least. especially without the will to fund it publicly. The problem is that he's (allegedly) basically throwing caution and reliability out the window in favor of supporting a group whose major selling point is essentially that they can reduce prices better than anyone else. For a field where a minor error means that you lose the cargo and in the case of a human flight, everybody dies, such a cavalier approach is most likely simply to yield poorly conceived rush jobs. Well isn't this what the government does anyway for a ton of its procurement? How many rockets and various parts therein were supplied by the lowest bidder? The difference is now that working with these corporations the risk is transferred off to the corporation and thus the blame. I can forsee problems if we built out the space station to the orbital dock it should always have been planned for but i'm sure that the government will enforce a series of standards if they want to be able to use assets like that.
The "entrepreneurial" contractors are notorious for being very mediocre at complying with government inspections, seeing them as a bother that slows things down (well, they do, but it's for a good reason). The result may very well be that you get what you pay for: lower prices, lower quality. And let's just say that saving a little money on the launch of a project as big as the ISS (~$150 billion total worth) isn't worth the risk of failure from shoddy quality.
Bottom line, price wars are good for some things, not others, and the "old space" just happens to be all the organizations that value reliability over cost. Focusing on "tech entrepreneurs" at the expense of those groups is good for reducing costs and making it more feasible to do a lot of lower-priority launches, but the "old space" folk absolutely exist for a reason.
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What's everyone's thoughts on Perez?
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He's not Ellison, but he knows labor and that's where some of the most important fights are going to happen moving forward. He's a fine choice, if not a bit too establishment for my liking.
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On February 10 2017 00:16 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2017 00:02 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:50 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 23:35 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:27 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 19:33 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:The Trump administration is considering a bold and controversial vision for the U.S. space program that calls for a "rapid and affordable" return to the moon by 2020, the construction of privately operated space stations and the redirection of NASA's mission to "the large-scale economic development of space," according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.
The proposed strategy, whose potential for igniting a new industry appeals to Trump’s business background and job-creation pledges, is influencing the White House’s search for leaders to run the space agency. And it is setting off a struggle for supremacy between traditional aerospace contractors and the tech billionaires who have put big money into private space ventures.
"It is a big fight," said former Republican Rep. Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, who drafted the Trump campaign's space policy and remains involved in the deliberations. "There are billions of dollars at stake. It has come to a head now when it has become clear to the space community that the real innovative work is being done outside of NASA."
The early indications are that private rocket firms like Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and their supporters have a clear upper hand in what Trump's transition advisers portrayed as a race between "Old Space" and "New Space," according to emails among key players inside the administration. Trump has met with Bezos and Musk, while tech investor Peter Thiel, a close confidant, has lobbied the president to look at using NASA to help grow the private space industry.
Charles Miller, a former NASA official who served on Trump's NASA transition team after running a commercial space cargo firm, is pushing for the White House to nominate a deputy administrator who foremost "shares the same goal/overall vision of transforming NASA by leveraging commercial space partnerships," according to a Jan. 23 communication. That deputy would run the space program’s day-to-day operations.
Trump has yet to name a NASA director, but the documents confirm that Rep. Jim Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma and former Navy pilot who ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, is a top contender.
"Fingers crossed," Miller writes of Bridenstine’s candidacy, according to a one email.
he White House and Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, another commercial space evangelist with close ties to Trump, is also pushing the White House to embark on a major effort to privatize U.S. space efforts.
"A good part of the Trump administration would like a lot more aggressive, risk-taking, competitive entrepreneurial approach to space," Gingrich said in an interview. "A smaller but still powerful faction represents Boeing and the expensive old contractors who have soaked up money with minimum results.
"No NASA program dominated by bureaucrats could take the risks, accept the failures and create a learning curve comparable to an entrepreneurial approach," he added. "Just think of the Wright brothers’ 500 failures in five summers at $1 per failure. Ask how long NASA would have taken and how much it would have cost."
The more ambitious administration vision could include new moon landings that "see private American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the Moon by 2020; and private lunar landers staking out de facto 'property rights' for American on the Moon, by 2020 as well," according to a summary of an "agency action plan" that the transition drew up for NASA late last month. Source This is troubling. It seems to put the interests of a few key confidants ahead of reality. It almost reminds me of a monarch's court, where the nobles come to curry favor with the president, and get a grant that benefits them at the cost of everyone else. I'm with you on the comparison but I don't think its necessarily a bad thing. Coordination between corporate and state interests is going to become a critical thing with space exploration and exploration. The last thing we need is corporations getting uppity and thinking that they can form their own nations in space. Getting all the ducks swimming in the same direction to get to mars would speed up the process of getting there by a decade at least. especially without the will to fund it publicly. The problem is that he's (allegedly) basically throwing caution and reliability out the window in favor of supporting a group whose major selling point is essentially that they can reduce prices better than anyone else. For a field where a minor error means that you lose the cargo and in the case of a human flight, everybody dies, such a cavalier approach is most likely simply to yield poorly conceived rush jobs. Well isn't this what the government does anyway for a ton of its procurement? How many rockets and various parts therein were supplied by the lowest bidder? The difference is now that working with these corporations the risk is transferred off to the corporation and thus the blame. I can forsee problems if we built out the space station to the orbital dock it should always have been planned for but i'm sure that the government will enforce a series of standards if they want to be able to use assets like that. The "entrepreneurial" contractors are notorious for being very mediocre at complying with government inspections, seeing them as a bother that slows things down (well, they do, but it's for a good reason). The result may very well be that you get what you pay for: lower prices, lower quality. And let's just say that saving a little money on the launch of a project as big as the ISS (~$150 billion total worth) isn't worth the risk of failure from shoddy quality. Bottom line, price wars are good for some things, not others, and the "old space" just happens to be all the organizations that value reliability over cost. Focusing on "tech entrepreneurs" at the expense of those groups is good for reducing costs and making it more feasible to do a lot of lower-priority launches, but the "old space" folk absolutely exist for a reason.
Exactly and this should be taken into account when doleing out contracts and duties in regards to the unified space exploration and exploitation plan. But the innovation potential of the new space organizations needs to be tapped. A perfect example is the dragon capsule and its ability to free up everyone from the burden of resupply and astronaut transport from the ISS to earth and back. Simpler and smaller projects like that can save money and free up the larger organizations for the more ambitious projects like ISS expansion and the mars mission.
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On February 10 2017 00:16 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2017 00:02 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:50 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 23:35 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:27 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 19:33 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:The Trump administration is considering a bold and controversial vision for the U.S. space program that calls for a "rapid and affordable" return to the moon by 2020, the construction of privately operated space stations and the redirection of NASA's mission to "the large-scale economic development of space," according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.
The proposed strategy, whose potential for igniting a new industry appeals to Trump’s business background and job-creation pledges, is influencing the White House’s search for leaders to run the space agency. And it is setting off a struggle for supremacy between traditional aerospace contractors and the tech billionaires who have put big money into private space ventures.
"It is a big fight," said former Republican Rep. Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, who drafted the Trump campaign's space policy and remains involved in the deliberations. "There are billions of dollars at stake. It has come to a head now when it has become clear to the space community that the real innovative work is being done outside of NASA."
The early indications are that private rocket firms like Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and their supporters have a clear upper hand in what Trump's transition advisers portrayed as a race between "Old Space" and "New Space," according to emails among key players inside the administration. Trump has met with Bezos and Musk, while tech investor Peter Thiel, a close confidant, has lobbied the president to look at using NASA to help grow the private space industry.
Charles Miller, a former NASA official who served on Trump's NASA transition team after running a commercial space cargo firm, is pushing for the White House to nominate a deputy administrator who foremost "shares the same goal/overall vision of transforming NASA by leveraging commercial space partnerships," according to a Jan. 23 communication. That deputy would run the space program’s day-to-day operations.
Trump has yet to name a NASA director, but the documents confirm that Rep. Jim Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma and former Navy pilot who ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, is a top contender.
"Fingers crossed," Miller writes of Bridenstine’s candidacy, according to a one email.
he White House and Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, another commercial space evangelist with close ties to Trump, is also pushing the White House to embark on a major effort to privatize U.S. space efforts.
"A good part of the Trump administration would like a lot more aggressive, risk-taking, competitive entrepreneurial approach to space," Gingrich said in an interview. "A smaller but still powerful faction represents Boeing and the expensive old contractors who have soaked up money with minimum results.
"No NASA program dominated by bureaucrats could take the risks, accept the failures and create a learning curve comparable to an entrepreneurial approach," he added. "Just think of the Wright brothers’ 500 failures in five summers at $1 per failure. Ask how long NASA would have taken and how much it would have cost."
The more ambitious administration vision could include new moon landings that "see private American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the Moon by 2020; and private lunar landers staking out de facto 'property rights' for American on the Moon, by 2020 as well," according to a summary of an "agency action plan" that the transition drew up for NASA late last month. Source This is troubling. It seems to put the interests of a few key confidants ahead of reality. It almost reminds me of a monarch's court, where the nobles come to curry favor with the president, and get a grant that benefits them at the cost of everyone else. I'm with you on the comparison but I don't think its necessarily a bad thing. Coordination between corporate and state interests is going to become a critical thing with space exploration and exploration. The last thing we need is corporations getting uppity and thinking that they can form their own nations in space. Getting all the ducks swimming in the same direction to get to mars would speed up the process of getting there by a decade at least. especially without the will to fund it publicly. The problem is that he's (allegedly) basically throwing caution and reliability out the window in favor of supporting a group whose major selling point is essentially that they can reduce prices better than anyone else. For a field where a minor error means that you lose the cargo and in the case of a human flight, everybody dies, such a cavalier approach is most likely simply to yield poorly conceived rush jobs. Well isn't this what the government does anyway for a ton of its procurement? How many rockets and various parts therein were supplied by the lowest bidder? The difference is now that working with these corporations the risk is transferred off to the corporation and thus the blame. I can forsee problems if we built out the space station to the orbital dock it should always have been planned for but i'm sure that the government will enforce a series of standards if they want to be able to use assets like that. The "entrepreneurial" contractors are notorious for being very mediocre at complying with government inspections, seeing them as a bother that slows things down (well, they do, but it's for a good reason). The result may very well be that you get what you pay for: lower prices, lower quality. And let's just say that saving a little money on the launch of a project as big as the ISS (~$150 billion total worth) isn't worth the risk of failure from shoddy quality. Bottom line, price wars are good for some things, not others, and the "old space" just happens to be all the organizations that value reliability over cost. Focusing on "tech entrepreneurs" at the expense of those groups is good for reducing costs and making it more feasible to do a lot of lower-priority launches, but the "old space" folk absolutely exist for a reason.
I don't know enough about it, but I do know Elon Musk wants to send people to Mars. Are you trying to tell me that he will do it in shoddy high-risk tin cans? Because that seems unlikely.
In general, Space X, Virgin Galactic and the other hotshot new entrepeneurs are expecting to make money off space tourism, as well as government contracts. They can't do that if their technology is unreliable.
So despite not knowing enough about it, I do question your underlying assumptions that these contractors are delivering mediocre technology.
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On February 10 2017 00:23 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2017 00:16 LegalLord wrote:On February 10 2017 00:02 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:50 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 23:35 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:27 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 19:33 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:The Trump administration is considering a bold and controversial vision for the U.S. space program that calls for a "rapid and affordable" return to the moon by 2020, the construction of privately operated space stations and the redirection of NASA's mission to "the large-scale economic development of space," according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.
The proposed strategy, whose potential for igniting a new industry appeals to Trump’s business background and job-creation pledges, is influencing the White House’s search for leaders to run the space agency. And it is setting off a struggle for supremacy between traditional aerospace contractors and the tech billionaires who have put big money into private space ventures.
"It is a big fight," said former Republican Rep. Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, who drafted the Trump campaign's space policy and remains involved in the deliberations. "There are billions of dollars at stake. It has come to a head now when it has become clear to the space community that the real innovative work is being done outside of NASA."
The early indications are that private rocket firms like Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and their supporters have a clear upper hand in what Trump's transition advisers portrayed as a race between "Old Space" and "New Space," according to emails among key players inside the administration. Trump has met with Bezos and Musk, while tech investor Peter Thiel, a close confidant, has lobbied the president to look at using NASA to help grow the private space industry.
Charles Miller, a former NASA official who served on Trump's NASA transition team after running a commercial space cargo firm, is pushing for the White House to nominate a deputy administrator who foremost "shares the same goal/overall vision of transforming NASA by leveraging commercial space partnerships," according to a Jan. 23 communication. That deputy would run the space program’s day-to-day operations.
Trump has yet to name a NASA director, but the documents confirm that Rep. Jim Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma and former Navy pilot who ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, is a top contender.
"Fingers crossed," Miller writes of Bridenstine’s candidacy, according to a one email.
he White House and Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, another commercial space evangelist with close ties to Trump, is also pushing the White House to embark on a major effort to privatize U.S. space efforts.
"A good part of the Trump administration would like a lot more aggressive, risk-taking, competitive entrepreneurial approach to space," Gingrich said in an interview. "A smaller but still powerful faction represents Boeing and the expensive old contractors who have soaked up money with minimum results.
"No NASA program dominated by bureaucrats could take the risks, accept the failures and create a learning curve comparable to an entrepreneurial approach," he added. "Just think of the Wright brothers’ 500 failures in five summers at $1 per failure. Ask how long NASA would have taken and how much it would have cost."
The more ambitious administration vision could include new moon landings that "see private American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the Moon by 2020; and private lunar landers staking out de facto 'property rights' for American on the Moon, by 2020 as well," according to a summary of an "agency action plan" that the transition drew up for NASA late last month. Source This is troubling. It seems to put the interests of a few key confidants ahead of reality. It almost reminds me of a monarch's court, where the nobles come to curry favor with the president, and get a grant that benefits them at the cost of everyone else. I'm with you on the comparison but I don't think its necessarily a bad thing. Coordination between corporate and state interests is going to become a critical thing with space exploration and exploration. The last thing we need is corporations getting uppity and thinking that they can form their own nations in space. Getting all the ducks swimming in the same direction to get to mars would speed up the process of getting there by a decade at least. especially without the will to fund it publicly. The problem is that he's (allegedly) basically throwing caution and reliability out the window in favor of supporting a group whose major selling point is essentially that they can reduce prices better than anyone else. For a field where a minor error means that you lose the cargo and in the case of a human flight, everybody dies, such a cavalier approach is most likely simply to yield poorly conceived rush jobs. Well isn't this what the government does anyway for a ton of its procurement? How many rockets and various parts therein were supplied by the lowest bidder? The difference is now that working with these corporations the risk is transferred off to the corporation and thus the blame. I can forsee problems if we built out the space station to the orbital dock it should always have been planned for but i'm sure that the government will enforce a series of standards if they want to be able to use assets like that. The "entrepreneurial" contractors are notorious for being very mediocre at complying with government inspections, seeing them as a bother that slows things down (well, they do, but it's for a good reason). The result may very well be that you get what you pay for: lower prices, lower quality. And let's just say that saving a little money on the launch of a project as big as the ISS (~$150 billion total worth) isn't worth the risk of failure from shoddy quality. Bottom line, price wars are good for some things, not others, and the "old space" just happens to be all the organizations that value reliability over cost. Focusing on "tech entrepreneurs" at the expense of those groups is good for reducing costs and making it more feasible to do a lot of lower-priority launches, but the "old space" folk absolutely exist for a reason. I don't know enough about it, but I do know Elon Musk wants to send people to Mars. Are you trying to tell me that he will do it in shoddy high-risk tin cans? Because that seems unlikely. In general, Space X, Virgin Galactic and the other hotshot new entrepeneurs are expecting to make money off space tourism, as well as government contracts. They can't do that if their technology is unreliable. So despite not knowing enough about it, I do question your underlying assumptions that these contractors are delivering mediocre technology.
I mean, the safety record of all the "tech entrepreneur" folk does leave much to be desired. And "I don't know much but I just don't think that's true" is not really an argument.
On February 10 2017 00:23 Sermokala wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2017 00:16 LegalLord wrote:On February 10 2017 00:02 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:50 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 23:35 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:27 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 19:33 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:The Trump administration is considering a bold and controversial vision for the U.S. space program that calls for a "rapid and affordable" return to the moon by 2020, the construction of privately operated space stations and the redirection of NASA's mission to "the large-scale economic development of space," according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.
The proposed strategy, whose potential for igniting a new industry appeals to Trump’s business background and job-creation pledges, is influencing the White House’s search for leaders to run the space agency. And it is setting off a struggle for supremacy between traditional aerospace contractors and the tech billionaires who have put big money into private space ventures.
"It is a big fight," said former Republican Rep. Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, who drafted the Trump campaign's space policy and remains involved in the deliberations. "There are billions of dollars at stake. It has come to a head now when it has become clear to the space community that the real innovative work is being done outside of NASA."
The early indications are that private rocket firms like Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and their supporters have a clear upper hand in what Trump's transition advisers portrayed as a race between "Old Space" and "New Space," according to emails among key players inside the administration. Trump has met with Bezos and Musk, while tech investor Peter Thiel, a close confidant, has lobbied the president to look at using NASA to help grow the private space industry.
Charles Miller, a former NASA official who served on Trump's NASA transition team after running a commercial space cargo firm, is pushing for the White House to nominate a deputy administrator who foremost "shares the same goal/overall vision of transforming NASA by leveraging commercial space partnerships," according to a Jan. 23 communication. That deputy would run the space program’s day-to-day operations.
Trump has yet to name a NASA director, but the documents confirm that Rep. Jim Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma and former Navy pilot who ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, is a top contender.
"Fingers crossed," Miller writes of Bridenstine’s candidacy, according to a one email.
he White House and Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, another commercial space evangelist with close ties to Trump, is also pushing the White House to embark on a major effort to privatize U.S. space efforts.
"A good part of the Trump administration would like a lot more aggressive, risk-taking, competitive entrepreneurial approach to space," Gingrich said in an interview. "A smaller but still powerful faction represents Boeing and the expensive old contractors who have soaked up money with minimum results.
"No NASA program dominated by bureaucrats could take the risks, accept the failures and create a learning curve comparable to an entrepreneurial approach," he added. "Just think of the Wright brothers’ 500 failures in five summers at $1 per failure. Ask how long NASA would have taken and how much it would have cost."
The more ambitious administration vision could include new moon landings that "see private American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the Moon by 2020; and private lunar landers staking out de facto 'property rights' for American on the Moon, by 2020 as well," according to a summary of an "agency action plan" that the transition drew up for NASA late last month. Source This is troubling. It seems to put the interests of a few key confidants ahead of reality. It almost reminds me of a monarch's court, where the nobles come to curry favor with the president, and get a grant that benefits them at the cost of everyone else. I'm with you on the comparison but I don't think its necessarily a bad thing. Coordination between corporate and state interests is going to become a critical thing with space exploration and exploration. The last thing we need is corporations getting uppity and thinking that they can form their own nations in space. Getting all the ducks swimming in the same direction to get to mars would speed up the process of getting there by a decade at least. especially without the will to fund it publicly. The problem is that he's (allegedly) basically throwing caution and reliability out the window in favor of supporting a group whose major selling point is essentially that they can reduce prices better than anyone else. For a field where a minor error means that you lose the cargo and in the case of a human flight, everybody dies, such a cavalier approach is most likely simply to yield poorly conceived rush jobs. Well isn't this what the government does anyway for a ton of its procurement? How many rockets and various parts therein were supplied by the lowest bidder? The difference is now that working with these corporations the risk is transferred off to the corporation and thus the blame. I can forsee problems if we built out the space station to the orbital dock it should always have been planned for but i'm sure that the government will enforce a series of standards if they want to be able to use assets like that. The "entrepreneurial" contractors are notorious for being very mediocre at complying with government inspections, seeing them as a bother that slows things down (well, they do, but it's for a good reason). The result may very well be that you get what you pay for: lower prices, lower quality. And let's just say that saving a little money on the launch of a project as big as the ISS (~$150 billion total worth) isn't worth the risk of failure from shoddy quality. Bottom line, price wars are good for some things, not others, and the "old space" just happens to be all the organizations that value reliability over cost. Focusing on "tech entrepreneurs" at the expense of those groups is good for reducing costs and making it more feasible to do a lot of lower-priority launches, but the "old space" folk absolutely exist for a reason. Exactly and this should be taken into account when doleing out contracts and duties in regards to the unified space exploration and exploitation plan. But the innovation potential of the new space organizations needs to be tapped. A perfect example is the dragon capsule and its ability to free up everyone from the burden of resupply and astronaut transport from the ISS to earth and back. Simpler and smaller projects like that can save money and free up the larger organizations for the more ambitious projects like ISS expansion and the mars mission.
My problem is that it sounds like Trump wants to hand off the more difficult projects, that require more attention to reliability, to the less reliable contractors.
I absolutely support giving the lower-level grunt launches like resupplying the ISS (a mission that isn't time-critical) to the lowest semi-reliable bidder.
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United States44194 Posts
On February 09 2017 23:33 LightSpectra wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2017 23:27 Acrofales wrote:On February 09 2017 23:23 LightSpectra wrote:On February 09 2017 22:43 karazax wrote:Pretty good explanation of why some reasonable and good people voted for Trump: How to Reason with a Trump Voter- People voted for Trump because Hillary Clinton was going to be in Wall Street's pocket. Trump wants to repeal Dodd-Frank and eliminate the Fiduciary Rule, letting Wall Street return to its pre-2008 ways.
- People voted for Trump because they thought the Clinton Foundation was "pay for play." Trump has refused to wall off his businesses from his administration, and personally profits from payments from foreign governments.
- People voted for Trump because of Clinton's role in Benghazi. Trump ordered the Yemen raid without adequate intel, and tweeted about "FAKE NEWS" while Americans died as a result of his carelessness.
- People voted for Trump because Clinton didn't care about "the little guy." Trump's cabinet is full of billionaires, and he's taking away your health insurance so he can give them a multi-million-dollar tax break.
- People voted for Trump because he was going to build a wall and Mexico was going to pay for it. American consumers will pay for the wall via import tariffs.
- People voted for Trump because Clinton was going to get us into a war. Trump has provoked our enemies, alienated our allies and given ISIS a decade's worth of recruiting material.
- People voted for Trump because Clinton didn't have the "stamina" to do the job. Trump hung up on the Australian Prime Minister during a 5 p.m. phone call because "it was at the end of a long day and he was tired and fatigue was setting in."
- People voted for Trump because foreign leaders wouldn't respect Clinton. Foreign leaders, both friendly and hostile, are openly mocking Trump.
- People voted for Trump because Clinton lies and "he tells it like it is." Trump and his administration lie with a regularity and brazenness that can only be described as shocking.
Let's be honest about what really happened. The reality is that many people voted for Trump because they got conned. Trump is a grifter and the American people were the mark. Hey, it happens, and there's no shame in being taken in by a pro. But now that people know the score, they need to quit insisting the conman is on their side. I didn't go out on election day, the choice was too nauseating. But I'll tell you why I didn't vote for Clinton: she made it clear she was going to use the full power of government to persecute pro-life groups, she was going to give as much taxpayer money as she could to Planned Parenthood, she called the CEO of Planned Parenthood a hero and made regular public appearances with her, etc. If Democrats went back to their pre-Obama position of "abortion should be rare but legal", maybe I could've voted for Clinton. But so long as pro-abortion extremists like Nancy Pelosi, Hilary Clinton, and Cecile Richards are running the party, hell no. Even Trump is better than that. I think you're misrepresenting the position here. Nobody wants abortion to happen. It's not something that anybody is happy about. But the decision to abort should be the hard part, not jumping through all the hoops government puts in your way. If you have made the hard decision not to carry your baby to term, then that should be it. It should be easy to find a clinic and have the procedure performed responsibly. No, you're wrong. Planned Parenthood recently announced that they would throw pizza parties for whichever employees met their "abortion quotas". CEO Cecile Richards is also on record saying that she needs more people to brag about their abortions in order to promote the industry.
Few things to unpack here.
Firstly, the Republicans are unequivocally the pro-abortion party. There's simply not a debate to be had on that one.
Basically the primary driver behind abortion always has been and always will be unwanted pregnancies. You basically can't get an abortion without one of those. You could have an abortion clinic on every street corner and pro-abortion advertising running on prime tv but if people aren't getting unwanted pregnancies then abortions aren't happening. (unwanted for whatever reason, fetal deformation, threat to health of mother, financial, unstable family, whatever). As an individual who has never had an unwanted pregnancy I can speak to that, at no point did I consider getting an abortion while not pregnant.
Republican policies actively push to increase the number of unwanted pregnancies. This is due to a combination of religious zealotry, plain old fashioned ignorance and I suspect, in some cases, cynicism in knowing that they can then pin the problem on the other party. It's the same as the way they support our troops by sending them to exotic locations where people will shoot at them, and then talk about how bad things are for the troops and how only they care enough to help them. It's a scam.
Brazil has the kind of abortion laws the Republican party wants, legal only in cases of rape or if they're both going to die if there is no abortion. Wikipedia puts abortions in Brazil at somewhere between 1.2m-3m per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Brazil) (hard to tell because reporting is scarce because it's illegal). The United States has fewer abortions, year on year, and had just 664,000 in 2013, between 36% and 14% of the Brazilian rate per capita (depending on if we use the high estimates or the low). Making abortion legal in Brazil clearly has not worked to reduce the number of abortions, Brazilians have between 3x and 7x as many abortions as Americans, despite it being illegal, because they have more unwanted pregnancies. This is the model the Republican policies are looking to emulate.
I'm sorry, but you've been duped. You voted pro-abortion.
Secondly, as for the pizza party quotas claim. The Washington Times, an extreme right wing rag, reported that they heard it from a single ex-employee. There is more evidence linking Obama to Harambe's murder. You shouldn't believe everything you read on facebook.
As for bragging about abortions. Here is the quote.
I think it’s time for us to be bold. Share your own story. This is the time to do it. Maybe you were a Planned Parenthood patient… Maybe you remember what it was like to be a young woman, trying to access birth control you could afford so you could finish school… Maybe you had a pregnancy and you had to make a decision and thank goodness you could make that decision in consultation with your doctor and with your family, and not your member of Congress. Those stories are important to share, because you’ll never know the thousands of women that you give courage or comfort to.
She's saying that people who benefit from a service need to be willing to talk to those who don't understand why they need it and explain that. To share their personal stories, to talk about the hopelessness they felt working for minimum wage without health insurance or a stable home etc, or how they knew that they couldn't offer a good life to a child at that time. There is no question that PP offers vitally needed services, people keep actively choosing to go to them, they're not just asking for directions, they need what PP does. But if they don't talk about why they needed it then those services could go away.
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United States44194 Posts
On February 10 2017 00:16 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2017 00:02 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:50 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 23:35 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:27 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 19:33 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:The Trump administration is considering a bold and controversial vision for the U.S. space program that calls for a "rapid and affordable" return to the moon by 2020, the construction of privately operated space stations and the redirection of NASA's mission to "the large-scale economic development of space," according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.
The proposed strategy, whose potential for igniting a new industry appeals to Trump’s business background and job-creation pledges, is influencing the White House’s search for leaders to run the space agency. And it is setting off a struggle for supremacy between traditional aerospace contractors and the tech billionaires who have put big money into private space ventures.
"It is a big fight," said former Republican Rep. Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, who drafted the Trump campaign's space policy and remains involved in the deliberations. "There are billions of dollars at stake. It has come to a head now when it has become clear to the space community that the real innovative work is being done outside of NASA."
The early indications are that private rocket firms like Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and their supporters have a clear upper hand in what Trump's transition advisers portrayed as a race between "Old Space" and "New Space," according to emails among key players inside the administration. Trump has met with Bezos and Musk, while tech investor Peter Thiel, a close confidant, has lobbied the president to look at using NASA to help grow the private space industry.
Charles Miller, a former NASA official who served on Trump's NASA transition team after running a commercial space cargo firm, is pushing for the White House to nominate a deputy administrator who foremost "shares the same goal/overall vision of transforming NASA by leveraging commercial space partnerships," according to a Jan. 23 communication. That deputy would run the space program’s day-to-day operations.
Trump has yet to name a NASA director, but the documents confirm that Rep. Jim Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma and former Navy pilot who ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, is a top contender.
"Fingers crossed," Miller writes of Bridenstine’s candidacy, according to a one email.
he White House and Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, another commercial space evangelist with close ties to Trump, is also pushing the White House to embark on a major effort to privatize U.S. space efforts.
"A good part of the Trump administration would like a lot more aggressive, risk-taking, competitive entrepreneurial approach to space," Gingrich said in an interview. "A smaller but still powerful faction represents Boeing and the expensive old contractors who have soaked up money with minimum results.
"No NASA program dominated by bureaucrats could take the risks, accept the failures and create a learning curve comparable to an entrepreneurial approach," he added. "Just think of the Wright brothers’ 500 failures in five summers at $1 per failure. Ask how long NASA would have taken and how much it would have cost."
The more ambitious administration vision could include new moon landings that "see private American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the Moon by 2020; and private lunar landers staking out de facto 'property rights' for American on the Moon, by 2020 as well," according to a summary of an "agency action plan" that the transition drew up for NASA late last month. Source This is troubling. It seems to put the interests of a few key confidants ahead of reality. It almost reminds me of a monarch's court, where the nobles come to curry favor with the president, and get a grant that benefits them at the cost of everyone else. I'm with you on the comparison but I don't think its necessarily a bad thing. Coordination between corporate and state interests is going to become a critical thing with space exploration and exploration. The last thing we need is corporations getting uppity and thinking that they can form their own nations in space. Getting all the ducks swimming in the same direction to get to mars would speed up the process of getting there by a decade at least. especially without the will to fund it publicly. The problem is that he's (allegedly) basically throwing caution and reliability out the window in favor of supporting a group whose major selling point is essentially that they can reduce prices better than anyone else. For a field where a minor error means that you lose the cargo and in the case of a human flight, everybody dies, such a cavalier approach is most likely simply to yield poorly conceived rush jobs. Well isn't this what the government does anyway for a ton of its procurement? How many rockets and various parts therein were supplied by the lowest bidder? The difference is now that working with these corporations the risk is transferred off to the corporation and thus the blame. I can forsee problems if we built out the space station to the orbital dock it should always have been planned for but i'm sure that the government will enforce a series of standards if they want to be able to use assets like that. The "entrepreneurial" contractors are notorious for being very mediocre at complying with government inspections, seeing them as a bother that slows things down (well, they do, but it's for a good reason). The result may very well be that you get what you pay for: lower prices, lower quality. And let's just say that saving a little money on the launch of a project as big as the ISS (~$150 billion total worth) isn't worth the risk of failure from shoddy quality. Bottom line, price wars are good for some things, not others, and the "old space" just happens to be all the organizations that value reliability over cost. Focusing on "tech entrepreneurs" at the expense of those groups is good for reducing costs and making it more feasible to do a lot of lower-priority launches, but the "old space" folk absolutely exist for a reason.
Doesn't NASA accept the lowest viable bidder on all its contracts? You seem to be suggesting that entrepreneurs are cost cutters unlike the government, but entrepreneurs have far more freedom to buy more expensive parts than government agencies.
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In SCOTUS news, Trump apparently was none too pleased with what Gorsuch said about him and his judge attacks, using Twitter to deflect to it being a misrepresentation despite Gorsuch's own spokesman as well as the Senate committee arranging interviews confirming what was said and then saying it was "fake news" because CNN didn't ask Blumenthal about his record...when they actually did.
4D chess to get liberals to like Gorsuch, gaslighting, or just Trump being a narcissistic dolt? Time will tell.
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poll results on jeff sessions
+ Show Spoiler +23-4, Sessions is a racist confirmed
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On February 10 2017 00:31 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2017 00:16 LegalLord wrote:On February 10 2017 00:02 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:50 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 23:35 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:27 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 19:33 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:The Trump administration is considering a bold and controversial vision for the U.S. space program that calls for a "rapid and affordable" return to the moon by 2020, the construction of privately operated space stations and the redirection of NASA's mission to "the large-scale economic development of space," according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.
The proposed strategy, whose potential for igniting a new industry appeals to Trump’s business background and job-creation pledges, is influencing the White House’s search for leaders to run the space agency. And it is setting off a struggle for supremacy between traditional aerospace contractors and the tech billionaires who have put big money into private space ventures.
"It is a big fight," said former Republican Rep. Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, who drafted the Trump campaign's space policy and remains involved in the deliberations. "There are billions of dollars at stake. It has come to a head now when it has become clear to the space community that the real innovative work is being done outside of NASA."
The early indications are that private rocket firms like Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and their supporters have a clear upper hand in what Trump's transition advisers portrayed as a race between "Old Space" and "New Space," according to emails among key players inside the administration. Trump has met with Bezos and Musk, while tech investor Peter Thiel, a close confidant, has lobbied the president to look at using NASA to help grow the private space industry.
Charles Miller, a former NASA official who served on Trump's NASA transition team after running a commercial space cargo firm, is pushing for the White House to nominate a deputy administrator who foremost "shares the same goal/overall vision of transforming NASA by leveraging commercial space partnerships," according to a Jan. 23 communication. That deputy would run the space program’s day-to-day operations.
Trump has yet to name a NASA director, but the documents confirm that Rep. Jim Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma and former Navy pilot who ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, is a top contender.
"Fingers crossed," Miller writes of Bridenstine’s candidacy, according to a one email.
he White House and Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, another commercial space evangelist with close ties to Trump, is also pushing the White House to embark on a major effort to privatize U.S. space efforts.
"A good part of the Trump administration would like a lot more aggressive, risk-taking, competitive entrepreneurial approach to space," Gingrich said in an interview. "A smaller but still powerful faction represents Boeing and the expensive old contractors who have soaked up money with minimum results.
"No NASA program dominated by bureaucrats could take the risks, accept the failures and create a learning curve comparable to an entrepreneurial approach," he added. "Just think of the Wright brothers’ 500 failures in five summers at $1 per failure. Ask how long NASA would have taken and how much it would have cost."
The more ambitious administration vision could include new moon landings that "see private American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the Moon by 2020; and private lunar landers staking out de facto 'property rights' for American on the Moon, by 2020 as well," according to a summary of an "agency action plan" that the transition drew up for NASA late last month. Source This is troubling. It seems to put the interests of a few key confidants ahead of reality. It almost reminds me of a monarch's court, where the nobles come to curry favor with the president, and get a grant that benefits them at the cost of everyone else. I'm with you on the comparison but I don't think its necessarily a bad thing. Coordination between corporate and state interests is going to become a critical thing with space exploration and exploration. The last thing we need is corporations getting uppity and thinking that they can form their own nations in space. Getting all the ducks swimming in the same direction to get to mars would speed up the process of getting there by a decade at least. especially without the will to fund it publicly. The problem is that he's (allegedly) basically throwing caution and reliability out the window in favor of supporting a group whose major selling point is essentially that they can reduce prices better than anyone else. For a field where a minor error means that you lose the cargo and in the case of a human flight, everybody dies, such a cavalier approach is most likely simply to yield poorly conceived rush jobs. Well isn't this what the government does anyway for a ton of its procurement? How many rockets and various parts therein were supplied by the lowest bidder? The difference is now that working with these corporations the risk is transferred off to the corporation and thus the blame. I can forsee problems if we built out the space station to the orbital dock it should always have been planned for but i'm sure that the government will enforce a series of standards if they want to be able to use assets like that. The "entrepreneurial" contractors are notorious for being very mediocre at complying with government inspections, seeing them as a bother that slows things down (well, they do, but it's for a good reason). The result may very well be that you get what you pay for: lower prices, lower quality. And let's just say that saving a little money on the launch of a project as big as the ISS (~$150 billion total worth) isn't worth the risk of failure from shoddy quality. Bottom line, price wars are good for some things, not others, and the "old space" just happens to be all the organizations that value reliability over cost. Focusing on "tech entrepreneurs" at the expense of those groups is good for reducing costs and making it more feasible to do a lot of lower-priority launches, but the "old space" folk absolutely exist for a reason. Doesn't NASA accept the lowest viable bidder on all its contracts? You seem to be suggesting that entrepreneurs are cost cutters unlike the government, but entrepreneurs have far more freedom to buy more expensive parts than government agencies.
I'm not really sure what you're saying. The problem I have is that Trump seems to want to expand the scope of what the low-cost, low-to-moderate reliability "tech entrepreneur" folks do, at the cost of NASA and aerospace folk, who don't do it cheaply but do it with a greater reliability.
Much of the reason the tech people are cheaper is a lower attention to safety concerns, mind you.
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On February 10 2017 00:38 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2017 00:31 KwarK wrote:On February 10 2017 00:16 LegalLord wrote:On February 10 2017 00:02 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:50 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 23:35 Sermokala wrote:On February 09 2017 23:27 LegalLord wrote:On February 09 2017 19:33 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:The Trump administration is considering a bold and controversial vision for the U.S. space program that calls for a "rapid and affordable" return to the moon by 2020, the construction of privately operated space stations and the redirection of NASA's mission to "the large-scale economic development of space," according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.
The proposed strategy, whose potential for igniting a new industry appeals to Trump’s business background and job-creation pledges, is influencing the White House’s search for leaders to run the space agency. And it is setting off a struggle for supremacy between traditional aerospace contractors and the tech billionaires who have put big money into private space ventures.
"It is a big fight," said former Republican Rep. Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, who drafted the Trump campaign's space policy and remains involved in the deliberations. "There are billions of dollars at stake. It has come to a head now when it has become clear to the space community that the real innovative work is being done outside of NASA."
The early indications are that private rocket firms like Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and their supporters have a clear upper hand in what Trump's transition advisers portrayed as a race between "Old Space" and "New Space," according to emails among key players inside the administration. Trump has met with Bezos and Musk, while tech investor Peter Thiel, a close confidant, has lobbied the president to look at using NASA to help grow the private space industry.
Charles Miller, a former NASA official who served on Trump's NASA transition team after running a commercial space cargo firm, is pushing for the White House to nominate a deputy administrator who foremost "shares the same goal/overall vision of transforming NASA by leveraging commercial space partnerships," according to a Jan. 23 communication. That deputy would run the space program’s day-to-day operations.
Trump has yet to name a NASA director, but the documents confirm that Rep. Jim Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma and former Navy pilot who ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, is a top contender.
"Fingers crossed," Miller writes of Bridenstine’s candidacy, according to a one email.
he White House and Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, another commercial space evangelist with close ties to Trump, is also pushing the White House to embark on a major effort to privatize U.S. space efforts.
"A good part of the Trump administration would like a lot more aggressive, risk-taking, competitive entrepreneurial approach to space," Gingrich said in an interview. "A smaller but still powerful faction represents Boeing and the expensive old contractors who have soaked up money with minimum results.
"No NASA program dominated by bureaucrats could take the risks, accept the failures and create a learning curve comparable to an entrepreneurial approach," he added. "Just think of the Wright brothers’ 500 failures in five summers at $1 per failure. Ask how long NASA would have taken and how much it would have cost."
The more ambitious administration vision could include new moon landings that "see private American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the Moon by 2020; and private lunar landers staking out de facto 'property rights' for American on the Moon, by 2020 as well," according to a summary of an "agency action plan" that the transition drew up for NASA late last month. Source This is troubling. It seems to put the interests of a few key confidants ahead of reality. It almost reminds me of a monarch's court, where the nobles come to curry favor with the president, and get a grant that benefits them at the cost of everyone else. I'm with you on the comparison but I don't think its necessarily a bad thing. Coordination between corporate and state interests is going to become a critical thing with space exploration and exploration. The last thing we need is corporations getting uppity and thinking that they can form their own nations in space. Getting all the ducks swimming in the same direction to get to mars would speed up the process of getting there by a decade at least. especially without the will to fund it publicly. The problem is that he's (allegedly) basically throwing caution and reliability out the window in favor of supporting a group whose major selling point is essentially that they can reduce prices better than anyone else. For a field where a minor error means that you lose the cargo and in the case of a human flight, everybody dies, such a cavalier approach is most likely simply to yield poorly conceived rush jobs. Well isn't this what the government does anyway for a ton of its procurement? How many rockets and various parts therein were supplied by the lowest bidder? The difference is now that working with these corporations the risk is transferred off to the corporation and thus the blame. I can forsee problems if we built out the space station to the orbital dock it should always have been planned for but i'm sure that the government will enforce a series of standards if they want to be able to use assets like that. The "entrepreneurial" contractors are notorious for being very mediocre at complying with government inspections, seeing them as a bother that slows things down (well, they do, but it's for a good reason). The result may very well be that you get what you pay for: lower prices, lower quality. And let's just say that saving a little money on the launch of a project as big as the ISS (~$150 billion total worth) isn't worth the risk of failure from shoddy quality. Bottom line, price wars are good for some things, not others, and the "old space" just happens to be all the organizations that value reliability over cost. Focusing on "tech entrepreneurs" at the expense of those groups is good for reducing costs and making it more feasible to do a lot of lower-priority launches, but the "old space" folk absolutely exist for a reason. Doesn't NASA accept the lowest viable bidder on all its contracts? You seem to be suggesting that entrepreneurs are cost cutters unlike the government, but entrepreneurs have far more freedom to buy more expensive parts than government agencies. I'm not really sure what you're saying. The problem I have is that Trump seems to want to expand the scope of what the low-cost, low-to-moderate reliability "tech entrepreneur" folks do, at the cost of NASA and aerospace folk, who don't do it cheaply but do it with a greater reliability. Much of the reason the tech people are cheaper is a lower attention to safety concerns, mind you.
Thats highly debatable. Smaller, younger organizations have far less overhead and have a greater propensity for technological agility and adaptation. The reason why tech people are cheaper could be that they use better tech.
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KwawK, I've already admitted that I've never voted Republican, so don't say I was "duped". I agree that Republican policies are not pro-life; I am throwing my support behind a third party that actually is.
What I was saying is that the extremist pro-abortion policies of the Democratic party means that I cannot in conscience vote for them right now. Maybe I could if they reverted back to their "rare but legal" platform, but they have practically made Cecile Richards their policy chair, so that's not going to happen.
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Glad to see someone who is pro-life on this board, the modern democratic platform is very extreme regarding this topic and alienates a lot of people who lean on the side of pro-life and would prefer abortions (imo after first trimester)not be used unless the most dire circumstances (rape, medical consequence to mom or fetus).
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United States44194 Posts
On February 10 2017 00:43 LightSpectra wrote:
KwawK, I've already admitted that I've never voted Republican, so don't say I was "duped". I agree that Republican policies are not pro-life; I am throwing my support behind a third party that actually is.
What I was saying is that the extremist pro-abortion policies of the Democratic party means that I cannot in conscience vote for them right now. Maybe I could if they reverted back to their "rare but legal" platform, but they have practically made Cecile Richards their policy chair, so that's not going to happen.
If the Democratic Party are really pro-abortion, why are they pushing contraception, increased welfare for children, sex education and family planning? These are all things which have been proven to reduce abortion, which again is at historically low levels.
This fantasy that the Democratic Party have teamed up with Planned Parenthood to fuel an orgy of pizza parties built on abortion is just that, a fantasy. Your sources, the fake news article and Richards saying people need to talk about why they needed Planned Parenthood, don't prove your fantasy.
The Democratic Party is your only hope for reducing the number of abortions that happen. Third parties have no power and Republicans work tirelessly to increase unwanted pregnancies. Democrats have a long proven track record of drastically reducing the number of abortions in their states through sex education, access to contraception and by supporting women who make the choice to keep the fetus.
And if you're reading Washington Times articles and deciding based upon those that you simply cannot vote Democrat you've been duped by the Republicans. That's how it works.
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THE Trump administration recently announced that it intends to review, and presumably overturn, the Obama-era fiduciary duty rule that is scheduled to take effect in April. The administration’s case was articulated by Gary Cohn, the new director of the National Economic Council.
Mr. Cohn, most recently the president of Goldman Sachs, called it “a bad rule” and likened it to “putting only healthy food on the menu, because unhealthy food tastes good but you still shouldn’t eat it because you might die younger.” Comparing healthy and unhealthy food to healthy and unhealthy investments is an interesting analogy.
The now-endangered fiduciary rule is based on a simple — and seemingly unarguable — principle: that in giving advice to clients with retirement funds, stockbrokers, registered investment advisers and insurance agents must act in the best interests of their clients. Honestly, it seems counterproductive to go to war against such a fundamental principle. It simply doesn’t seem like a good business practice for Wall Street to tell its client-investors, “We put your interests second, after our firm’s, but it’s close.”
The annulment of the government’s fiduciary rule would clearly be a setback for investors trying to prepare for retirement. But the fiduciary principle itself will live on, and even spread.
The truth is, the existing proposal doesn’t go nearly far enough. It is limited to retirement plan accounts and ignores the other three-quarters of the assets owned by individual investors. Any effective rule must encompass all investors.
It is widely agreed that the fiduciary rule would give impetus to the growing use of lower-cost, broadly diversified index funds (pioneered by Vanguard, the company I founded), such as those tracking, with remarkable precision, the S&P 500 stock index. But even without the rule, there has already been a tidal shift to index funds — actually, more like a tsunami. Since 2008, mutual fund investors have liquidated more than $800 billion of their holdings in actively managed equity mutual funds and purchased about $1.8 trillion of equity index funds. Low-cost index funds are almost certainly what Mr. Cohn means when he refers to the “healthy food on the menu.”
Several major brokerage firms have already embraced the fiduciary principle, announcing plans to comply with the rule by eliminating front-end commissions (known as loads) on retirement plan accounts in favor of an annual asset charge. And dozens of companies have reacted to the proposed rule by creating a class of generally less costly mutual fund shares with initial loads of 2.5 percent followed by annual charges of 0.25 percent of total assets.
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