Space Exploration: Real Reasons and Acceptable Reasons

 

Michael D. Griffin, Administrator

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Quasar Award Dinner

Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership

19 Jan 2007

Thank you for having me here tonight; I think most of you know that this is one of my favorite places. I’ve been coming to Houston and the Johnson Space Center for over thirty years, and over time I’ve come to know the area and the people quite well. So it is a real treat to be honored by those of you who are here tonight.

I must say that while I appreciate the honor, I think it is misplaced. All I’ve really done is to pick very good people, put them in their jobs, and then try to make sure we’re all going in the same direction. Some of them are people that you know, people like Mike Coats, who has returned to Houston as the JSC Director, or Skip Hatfield, who’s running the Orion project, or Jeff Hanley, our Constellation program manager. These are people that I believe can follow in the footsteps of folks like Glynn Lunney and Chris Kraft. They will become new legends that yet another generation will look up to, as we do to the Apollo generation.

I had a few things I wanted to talk about tonight that don’t have anything to do with this award, and because you’re a captive audience, I’m going to do it.

We have a very interesting conundrum at NASA, and we have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about it. In national polling, NASA as an American institution enjoys a hugely positive approval rating, broadly in the range of 65-75%, an amazing result for a government agency. But when you ask people why, they are not really sure, or at least cannot express it clearly. When you ask people what we do, beyond the broad category of “space”, again they aren’t quite sure. And if you ask them what we’re planning to do, they’re even less sure. But they know that they love NASA. So NASA has what in the marketing discipline would be called very strong brand loyalty, even though people are not familiar in detail with what we do or why they like it.

I have been trying to understand why this is so, because it is important to our agency’s future. If we don’t have public support that is both strong and specific, the things we want to do, and believe to be important, will not survive. There are many competing priorities for public funding, and always will be. So it really is important for us to communicate to the public how we’re spending the fifteen cents per day that the average American contributes to NASA, because there are other places where that money can go.

I’ve reached the point where I am completely convinced that if NASA were to disappear tomorrow, if the American space program were to disappear tomorrow, if we never put up another Hubble, never put another human being in space, people would be profoundly distraught. Americans would feel less than themselves. They would feel that our best days are behind us. They would feel that we have lost something, something that matters. And yet they would not know why.

This is an interesting conclusion, and so I’ve thought about it a good bit, and I’ve come believe that the reason is, we in the space business don’t talk about it in the right way.

If you ask why we’re going back to the Moon and, later, beyond, you can get a variety of answers. The President, quite correctly said that we do it for purposes of scientific discovery, economic benefit and national security. I’ve given speeches on each of those topics, and I think these reasons can be clearly shown to be true. And Presidential Science Advisor Jack Marburger has said that questions about space exploration come down to whether or not we want to bring the solar system within mankind’s sphere of economic influence. I think that is extraordinarily well put.

These reasons have in common the fact that they can be discussed within the circles of public policy making. They can be debated on their merits, on logical principles. They can be justified. They are what I am going to call tonight “Acceptable Reasons.” You can attach whatever importance you want to any of those factors, and some citizens will weight some factors more and some will weight them less, but most of us would agree that they are, indeed, relevant factors.

But who talks like that? Who talks about doing something for purposes of scientific or economic gain or national security other than in policy circles? If anybody asked Lindberg why he crossed the Atlantic – and many did –he never indicated that he personally flew the Atlantic to win the Orteig prize. His backers might have done it in part for that, but Lindberg did it for other reasons.

If you ask Burt Rutan why he designed and built Voyager, and why Dick Rutan and Jeanna Yeager flew it around the world, it wasn’t for any money involved, it was because it was one of the last unconquered feats in aviation. If you ask Burt and his backer Paul Allen why they developed a vehicle to win the X-Prize, it wasn’t for the money. They spent twice as much as they made.

I think we all know why people do some of these things. They are well-captured in many famous phrases. When Sir George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he said “Because it is there.” He didn’t say that it was for economic gain.

We know these reasons, and tonight I will call them “Real Reasons”. Real Reasons are intuitive and compelling to all of us, but they’re not immediately logical. They’re exactly the opposite of Acceptable Reasons, which are eminently logical but neither intuitive nor emotionally compelling. The Real Reasons we do things like exploring space involve competitiveness, curiosity and monument building. So let’s talk about them.

First, most of us want to be, both as individuals and as societies, the first, the best, the most, in at least some activity. We want to stand out. This kind of behavior is rooted in our genes. We are today the survivors of people who wanted to outperform others. Without question that can be carried to an unhealthy degree; we’ve all seen more wars than we like. But because this trait can be taken too far doesn’t mean that we can do without it completely. Competitiveness is rooted in the genes of successful people.

As to curiosity, who among us does not know the wonder and mystery and awe and magic of seeing something, even on television, never seen before, an experience brought back to us by a robotic space mission? And how much grander when one of our own, a representative of other human beings, is there to see it for herself? Who doesn’t know that feeling? The urge to know what’s over the next hill is one of the most common feelings we share, whatever our backgrounds.

We like to do what I’ll call monument building. We want to leave something behind for the next generation, or the generations after that, to show them that we were here, to show them what we did with our time here. This is the impulse behind cathedrals and pyramids and many, many other things. We could have done a lot of different things to honor George Washington. But what was done, was that in the early 1800’s people started to work on a 550-foot high obelisk to honor him.

But it is not only George Washington whom the monument honors; it says fully as much about the people who built it. And that’s okay. It is my observation that when we do things for Real Reasons as opposed to Acceptable Reasons, we produce our highest achievements. The people who do things for Real Reasons, and who know it, are also the ones who are the most successful by the standards embodied in Acceptable Reasons.

All of you in the space business know this, whether you realize it or not, because none of us is in this business for the money to be made. But I believe we see it most obviously, in our society, in sports. In my own sport, golf, certain people have over the decades risen to the very top of the game, and stayed there. People like Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, or, today, Tiger Woods. In other sports, people like Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan come to mind.

What do these people have in common and what is the lesson for the rest of us? The lesson is that they became legends because they wanted to be the very best at what they do. They wanted to leave something behind them, lasting records in their sport. And they wanted to do it because the challenge was there. Who thinks that any of them played, or kept playing, for the money?

I think that tells us something. When you do things for Real Reasons instead of Acceptable Reasons, you have a chance to obtain Real Success. And so we have a conundrum. The cultural ethos in America today requires us to have Acceptable Reasons for what we do. We must have reasons that pass analytical muster, that offer a favorable cost/benefit ratio, that can be logically defended. We tend to dismiss out of hand reasons that are emotional, or are value-driven in ways that we can’t capture on a spreadsheet. But, Acceptable Reasons alone don’t take us where we really want to go.

In my view, the space business more than most other endeavors suffers from the fact that the most important, the best, and the most basic reasons for doing it are Real Reasons and not Acceptable Reasons. The Acceptable Reasons – economic benefit, scientific discovery, national security – are, in fact, completely correct. But they comprise a derived rationale, and are not the truly compelling reasons. And again, who talks like that, about anything that really matters to them?

Why in today’s culture do we focus so much on requiring Acceptable Reasons? Only a couple of generations ago, it was not so much this way.

One observation I would make is that in the shaping of policy, the kinds of things I’ve cited as Real Reasons are “right-brain” things; they’re intuitive, subjective and difficult to quantify. And they are running around loose in a left-brain world! All of us here tonight got where we are by being analytical and objective and very left-brain oriented. Spaceflight cannot be successfully accomplished without these traits. And so I think we tend not to pay appropriate respect to the deeper parts of human nature which are intuitive and qualitative. This one-sided focus isn’t always to our benefit. In a very important sense, we’re not the right people to make the arguments as to why we should be encouraged to do what we do!

Some of you here tonight must, as I have, read Norman Mailer’s book from 1970, entitled “Of a Fire on the Moon.” Now Mailer was a unique and controversial novelist. I think of him, in the sense that I was just talking about, as quite possibly the ultimate right-brain kind of guy. And he wrote about Apollo in a very, very interesting book, but from a perspective I’ve not seen another writer choose. He didn’t write about the engineering of it, or the operational aspects, or the astronauts who flew the missions, or anything like that. He wrote about what people were feeling, and the power and majesty of the event, and the nature of the people who would engage in such a thing. It’s a compelling story, but it is not like any other book about the space program that you will read. That’s the kind of person, that’s the kind of work, that we need to exemplify the Real Reasons for what we do.

Real Reasons are not amenable to cost/benefit analysis. I’m reminded of the famous quote “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” by the character Lord Darlington in Oscar Wilde’s play “Lady Windermere’s Fan.” It’s one of my favorites. Well, in today’s America it’s smart, it’s popular, it’s clever to be a cynic. And a certain amount of it is appropriate; a healthy skepticism of bold claims is necessary. But too much skepticism causes us to deny a part of what we are.

Real Reasons are old fashioned. How many of us grew up reading Tom Swift, or Jack Armstrong, All American Boy? Or other similar books stories? Not great literature, for sure, but they exemplified many of the values I think we like to see in people: inventiveness, competitiveness, boldness, and a sense of good feeling about what it was to be an American, in very simplistic ways but ones which hit close to home.

To read those books was to understand, even as a child, that achievement is to be valued, and is not something to be set aside. So, how do we talk about our achievers today? Other than in the field of sports, we talk about today’s achievers as “geeks” and “workaholics”. People are advised to lead “balanced lives”. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t led a balanced life. But people who want to accomplish something are not balanced. And they are geeks, and workaholics. I think we owe our country to people who were like that. I don’t know that one could say that folks like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson led balanced lives. Any rational cost/benefit analysis would tell you to stay out of a quarrel with the mother country, and let other people deal with it! Who today would talk about pledging “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” to a cause? Today we are uncomfortable with such value discussions, and I think it’s a shame.

Now, I talked earlier about building monuments, and I mentioned the cathedrals and the pyramids. Cathedral builders knew what I am talking about tonight. They knew the awe and the mystery of their God. They built monuments to him, and also to themselves, just as the Washington Monument speaks to the people who built it as well as to the person for whom it was built. But they wanted to build the best cathedrals, and if you study cathedral building from a civil engineering perspective, you can see the evolution of that discipline, and you will be impressed. You should be.

When I arrived here tonight, I was told that this very lectern from which I am speaking is the one from which John Kennedy gave the speech you saw earlier on tonight’s video. Within the space business, Kennedy is probably best remembered for his “Man, Moon, Decade” speech (which, by the way, is also a classic of program management). And it’s a great speech. But the JFK quote about space that I love more than anything in the world, because it evokes exactly the things I’m talking about here tonight, was the one he gave from this lecturn at Rice University in September of 1962, when he said “We choose to go to the Moon, and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” I’ll say it again: “not because they are easy, but because they are hard”.

The cathedral builders knew that reason. They were doing something that required a far greater percentage of their gross domestic product than we will ever put into the space business, and they knew it was hard. We know it too. We look back across 600 or 800 years of time, and we are still awed by what they did. What is it that Americans make sure to see when they go to Europe? Who goes to Europe and does not, at some point, see the cathedrals? We are still awed across the centuries by what they accomplished.

To me, the irony is that when we do hard things for the right reasons – for the Real Reasons – we end up actually satisfying all the goals of the Acceptable Reasons. And we can see that, too, in the cathedrals, if we look for it.

What did the cathedral builders get? They didn’t just build cathedrals and then stop there. They began to develop civil engineering, the core discipline for any society if it wishes to have anything more than thatched huts. They learned how to build high walls and to have them stand up straight. They learned how to put a roof across a long span. They learned which materials would work, and which ones would not. And by finding the limits on how high walls could be, how broad roof spans could be, and what materials wouldn’t work, they created the incentive to solve those problems, so that they could build things beyond cathedrals, so that they could, fundamentally, build Western civilization.

They gained societal advantages that were probably even more important than learning how to build walls and roofs. They learned to embrace deferred gratification, not just on an individual level where it is a crucial element of maturity, but on a societal level where it is equally vital. The people who started the cathedrals didn’t live to finish them; such projects required decades. The society as a whole had to be dedicated to the completion of those projects. To be able to do that for cathedrals was to be able to do it in other areas as well. We owe Western civilization as we know it today to that kind of thinking – the ability to have a constancy of purpose across years and decades.

The medieval builders formed guilds, establishing professional trades beyond that of agriculture. Now, agriculture is at the root of human technology. Nothing good happens to human beings without getting beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and agriculture is that first step. But the second step is to be able to build physical works that didn’t previously exist. The organization and systemization of that in Western society today began in medieval Europe, with the cathedral builders. They learned how to organize large projects, a key to modern society. And, probably most important of all, the cathedrals had to be, for decades at a time, a focus of civic accomplishment and energy. A society, a nation, a civilization, needs such foci.

It is my contention that the products of our space program are today’s cathedrals. The space program addresses the Real Reasons why humans do things. It satisfies the desire to compete, but in a safe and productive manner, rather than in a harmful manner. It speaks abundantly to our sense of human curiosity, of wonder and awe at the unknown. Who doesn’t look at a picture of the Crab Nebula, synthesized from visible-light Hubble photographs and Chandra x-ray images, and say “Oh my God?” Who can look at that and not experience a sense of wonder?

Who can watch people assembling the greatest engineering project in the history of mankind – the International Space Station – and not wonder at the ability of people to conceive and to execute that project? And it also addresses our sense of monument building, of leaving something behind for future generations. Not for nothing, thirty-one years after its opening, is the National Air and Space Museum still the most heavily visited museum in Washington DC. And what do people come to see? They come to see early airplanes and Apollo spacecraft.

Of course the space program also addresses the Acceptable Reasons I’ve mentioned. In the end this is imperative. Societies will not succeed in the long run if they place their resources and their efforts in enterprises that, for whatever reason, don’t provide concrete value to that society.

But my point earlier is that if things are done for the Real Reasons that motivate humans, they also serve the Acceptable Reasons. In that sense, in the practical sense, space really is about spin-offs, as many have argued. But it’s not about spin-offs like Teflon and Tang and Velcro as the public is so often told – and which in fact did not come from the space program. And it’s not about spin-offs in the form of better heart monitors or cheaper prices for liquid oxygen for hospitals. Yes, you get those things and many more, and they are real benefits. But that’s not the right level on which to view the matter. The real spin-offs are at a higher level. We need to look at a broader landscape.

What is the economic value to a society of upgrading the precision to which the entire industrial base of that society works? Anyone who wants to put together space artifacts, who wants to bid on a competition for space artifacts, who wants to be a subcontractor or supplier, or who even wants to supply nuts, bolts and screws to the space industry, must work to a higher level of precision than human beings had to do before the space industry came along. And that fact absolutely resonates throughout our entire industrial base. What is the value of that? I can’t calculate it, but I know it’s there.

What is the scientific value of discovering the origins of our universe? Or of discovering that literally 95% of the universe consists of dark energy or dark matter, terms for things that we as yet know nothing about? But they make up 95% of our universe. Is it even conceivable that one day we won’t learn to harness them? As cavemen learned to harness fire, as people two centuries ago learned to harness electricity, we will learn to harness these new things. It was just a few years ago that we discovered them, and we would not have done so without the space program. What is the value of knowledge like that? I cannot begin to guess. A thousand years from now there will be human beings who don’t have to guess; they will know, and they will know we gave this to them.

Let’s think for a moment about national security. What is the value to the United States of being involved in enterprises which lift up human hearts everywhere when we do them? What is the value to the United States of being engaged in such projects, doing the kinds of things that other people want to do with us, as partners? What is the value to the United States of being a leader in such efforts, in projects in which every nation capable of doing so wants to take part? I would submit that the highest possible form of national security, well above having better guns and bombs than everyone else, well above being so strong that no one wants to fight with us, is the security which comes from being a nation which does the kinds of things that make others want to work with us to do them. What security could we ever ask that would be better than that, and what give more of it to us than the space program?

What do you have to do, how do you have to behave, to do space projects? You have to value hard work. You have to live by excellence, or die from the lack of it. You have to understand and practice both leadership and followership, and both are important. You have to build partnerships; leaders need partners and allies, as well as followers. You have to be willing to defer gratification, to spend years doing what we do, and then stand back and see if it works. We learn how to leave a legacy, because we work on things that not all of us will live to see – and we know it. And we learn about accepting the challenge of the unknown, where we might fail, and to do so not without fear or apprehension, but to master it and to control it and to go anyway.

These are lessons that we all need to learn, and they are lessons the space business teaches us. And I would submit that our country is a better place for those who have learned those lessons.

These are the values that the space program brings. This is why it must be supported. And this is why, although we don’t acknowledge it, we don’t admit it and most of us don’t understand it, this is why if we didn’t have a space program, we Americans would feel less than ourselves. We can never allow that to happen.

Thank you.

Turnaround in Baghdad

 

BY NIBRAS KAZIMI
January 25, 2007

There has been a flurry of press reports recently about insurgents battling American and Iraqi security forces on Haifa Street in Baghdad, and around the rural town of Buhruz in Diyala Province. These same insurgents also claimed to have shot down a Black Hawk helicopter near Buhruz. At the same time, the Americans and Iraqis are declaring a major victory as evidenced by the increased number of dead or captured militants, and the uncovering of massive weapons caches. So, what is going on?

What needs to be understood is the central role that Al Qaeda — or more accurately its successor organization, a group called the Islamic State of Iraq — is playing on these fronts and the diminishing role of all the other insurgent groups.

The wider Sunni insurgency — the groups beyond Al Qaeda — is being slowly, and surely, defeated. The average insurgent today feels demoralized, disillusioned, and hunted. Those who have not been captured yet are opting for a quieter life outside of Iraq. Al Qaeda continues to grow for the time being as it cannibalizes the other insurgent groups and absorbs their most radical and hardcore fringes into its fold. The Baathists, who had been critical in spurring the initial insurgency, are becoming less and less relevant, and are drifting without a clear purpose following the hanging of their idol, Saddam Hussein. Rounding out this changing landscape is that Al Qaeda itself is getting a serious beating as the Americans improve in intelligence gathering and partner with more reliable Iraqi forces.

In other words, battling the insurgency now essentially means battling Al Qaeda. This is a major accomplishment.

Last October, my sources began telling me about rumblings among the insurgent strategists suggesting that their murderous endeavor was about to run out of steam. This sense of fatigue began registering among mid-level insurgent commanders in late December, and it has devolved to the rank and file since then. The insurgents have begun to feel that the tide has turned against them.

In many ways, the timing of this turnaround was inadvertent, coming at the height of political and bureaucratic mismanagement in Washington and Baghdad. A number of factors contributed to this turnaround, but most important was sustained, stay-the-course counterinsurgency pressure. At the end of the day, more insurgents were ending up dead or behind bars, which generated among them a sense of despair and a feeling that the insurgency was a dead end.

The Washington-initiated "surge" will speed-up the ongoing process of defeating the insurgency. But one should not consider the surge responsible for the turnaround. The lesson to be learned is to keep killing the killers until they realize their fate.

General David Petraeus, whom President Bush has tasked to quell the insurgency, spent the last year and a half updating the U.S. Army and Marine Corps's field manual for counterinsurgency. There's plenty of fancy theory there, as well as case studies from Iraq. I don't know how much of the new manual is informed by General Petraeus' two notable failures in Iraq: building a brittle edifice of government in Mosul that collapsed at the first challenging puff, and the inadequate training and equipping of the Iraqi army due to corruption and mismanagement.

General Petraeus walked away from those failures unscathed and hence unaccountable. He re-enters the picture with major expectations. Most commentators, especially those who begrudge attributing any success to Mr. Bush, will lionize the general as he takes credit for this turnaround and speeds it up. Let's hope that he has enough sense to allow what works to keep working and to improve on it, rather than trying to put his own stamp on things and test out the theories he's developed.

The best way to use the extra troops would be to protect the Sunni neighborhoods of Baghdad from Shiite death squads. This will give an added incentive for Sunnis to turn against the militants operating in their midst. For most Sunnis, the insurgency has come to be about communal survival, rather than communal revival. They no longer harbor fantasies of recapturing power. They are on the run and are losing the turf war with the Shiites for Baghdad.

Sunni sectarian attacks, usually conducted by jihadists, finally provoked the Shiites to turn to their most brazen militias — the ones who would not heed Ayatollah Sistani's call for pacifism — to conduct painful reprisals against Sunnis, usually while wearing official military fatigues and carrying government issued weapons. The Sunnis came to realize that they were no longer facing ragtag fighters, but rather they were confronting a state with resources and with a monopoly on lethal force. The Sunnis realized that by harboring insurgents they were inviting retaliation that they could do little to defend against.

Sadly, it took many thousands of young Sunnis getting abducted by death squads for the Sunnis to understand that in a full-fledged civil war, they would likely lose badly and be evicted from Baghdad. I believe that the Sunnis and insurgents are now war weary, and that this is a turnaround point in the campaign to stabilize Iraq.

Still, major bombings will continue for many years, for Al Qaeda will remain oblivious to all evidence of the insurgency's eventual defeat. The Baathists, and jihadist groups like Ansar al-Sunna, the Islamic Army of Iraq, and the 1920 Revolution Brigades, may be collapsing due to aimlessness and despair, but Al Qaeda still enjoys the clarity of zealotry and fantasy. Right now, they are arm-twisting other jihadist groups to submit to them and are also taking credit for the large-scale fighting that continues in Iraq.

Al Qaeda will continue the fight long after the Iraqi battlefield becomes inhospitable to their cause, and they will only realize the futility of their endeavor after they are defeated on the wider Middle East battlefield and elsewhere in the world.

As the wider insurgency recedes, the Iraqi state will gain some breathing space to implement the rule of law and dissolve the death squads. A society that sets about rebuilding itself can endure the type of attacks mounted by Al Qaeda, although they are painful.

Counterinsurgency strategists will argue about the precise moment when this turnabout occurred and will try to replicate the victory elsewhere. Pundits will argue about who or what policy was responsible for it, a matter eventually to be settled by historians. Victory has a way of making everyone associated with it golden, and many will claim right of place. Defeat has a way of turning everyone associated with it to ash, and many will disclaim responsibility for it.

Let me state the lesson of this turnabout clearly lest it be obscured amidst the euphoria: Never mind who takes credit, kill or capture more of the killers to ensure victory.

Mr. Kazimi can be reached at nibraska@yahoo.com

A Moon Full of Opportunity

 

Paul D. Spudis
Monday, January 22, 2007

NASA gave six reasons for going back to the Moon when only one was needed

Note this article first appeared online at the Space Review.

The 2nd Space Exploration Conference held December 2006 in Houston outlined several reasons for a human return to the Moon. Remarkably, some complain that the reason for going to the Moon is still unclear. Possibly the sheer scope of the envisioned surface activities diffuses its impact. Almost 200 activities were described for the Moon, grouped under six major "themes" (as the agency calls them), including settlement, global cooperation, science and preparation for Mars. This diffusion is both deliberate and unavoidable.

From the beginning, there was dissention within NASA and the broader space community about the meaning of the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE). Was it a call for a permanent moon base? Was it all about sending humans to Mars? Perhaps it was really a stalking horse to terminate human spaceflight completely. The alt-space community whined about it being another big government boondoggle. The Mars Society whined about the focus on the Moon. The scientific community just whined. Much of this confusion stems from preconceived interpretations about the new policy and has been exacerbated by resulting changes to the status quo. This confusion, nurtured by design or misinformation, must be corrected and the Vision's direction clearly understood.

When NASA's Lunar Architecture Team (LAT) began to collate ideas submitted by the community about what we should do on the Moon, they had to reconcile many disparate thoughts and concepts and weld them into a coherent rationale. This process began with a workshop in April 2006 that drew together a wide spectrum of attendees, all bringing their own backgrounds and agendas to the table. Surprisingly, a great deal of convergence came out of this meeting, with human settlement and preparation for Mars emerging as the primary goals of lunar return.

Refinement and expansion of these two themes and four others (science, economic expansion, international cooperation, and public engagement) took the remainder of 2006, with the results being presented in Houston. In conjunction with the unveiling of six themes, NASA released a list (memorably called the "spreadsheet of death" by a colleague of mine) of 181 specific lunar activities, classified and rated by discipline and theme. It was never intended that all of these activities necessarily be implemented or even attempted by NASA; the intent was to demonstrate the scope and breadth of possible activities enabled by the presence of humans and robots on the Moon. It was necessary to examine all possible tasks and events in order to assess how well the emerging architectural details fit the potential list.

The net effect of this work was captured by Bismarck's memorable phrase: "Law (read: lunar architecture) is like sausage – if you like it, don't watch it being made." The sheer scope of the listed tasks and their collection into six themes led some to the conclusion that we really have no purpose for going back to the Moon and that this effort is an attempt by NASA to retrofit a rationale on a goal that in fact, has none.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The LAT report is simply the result of the agency attempting to satisfy as many of its constituencies as possible within the overall framework provided by the VSE. So then, what was intended as the reason for lunar return by the architects of the Vision for Space Exploration? What, if any, are the objective reasons for a return to the Moon?

For answers, read the Vision policy documents, including both the original speech of President Bush and a strangely neglected (but highly significant) elaboration on it by Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger. The Presidential speech announcing the Vision three years ago is remarkably clear as to our purpose in returning to the Moon. President Bush said:

Beginning no later than 2008, we will send a series of robotic missions to the lunar surface to research and prepare for future human exploration. Using the Crew Exploration Vehicle, we will undertake extended human missions to the Moon as early as 2015, with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods.

Also:

Returning to the Moon is an important step for our space program. Establishing an extended human presence on the Moon could vastly reduce the costs of further space exploration, making possible ever more ambitious missions. … the Moon is home to abundant resources. Its soil contains raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air. We can use our time on the Moon to develop and test new approaches and technologies and systems that will allow us to function in other, more challenging environments. The Moon is a logical step toward further progress and achievement.

From these statements, it is clear that the mission of going to the Moon is one of development – developing new techniques, procedures, and technologies, all with the aim of making spaceflight easier, routine and more capable.

If this wasn't clear enough, the speech of John Marburger two years later clarified our ultimate objectives:

President Bush's Vision also declares the will to lead in space, but it renders the ultimate goal more explicit. And that goal is even grander. The ultimate goal is not to impress others, or merely to explore our planetary system, but to use accessible space for the benefit of humankind. It is a goal that is not confined to a decade or a century. Nor is it confined to a single nearby destination, or to a fleeting dash to plant a flag. The idea is to begin preparing now for a future in which the material trapped in the Sun's vicinity is available for incorporation into our way of life.

And:

We have known for a long time that a huge gap separates the objects trapped by the gravity of our star, the Sun, and everything else. … Phenomena on our side of the interstellar gap, in what we call the Solar System, are potentially amenable to direct investigation and manipulation through physical contact, and can reasonably be described as falling within humanity's economic sphere of influence. As I see it, questions about the Vision boil down to whether we want to incorporate the Solar System in our economic sphere, or not.

The administration clearly stated that we are going to the Moon to learn how to use what we find in space to create new space-faring capability. The goal isn't simply to return to the Moon or even merely to send humans to Mars, but rather to extend human reach beyond low Earth orbit and ultimately to all possible destinations beyond.

The Vision for Space Exploration is different from any previous space policy. By design it is incremental and cumulative. We make "steady progress" no matter how slowly we may be forced to proceed at any given time by fiscal constraints. Small steps that build upon each other create new capability over time. Our activities will teach us not merely how to survive, but how to thrive off-planet. Such a task includes inhabiting planetary surfaces, doing useful work while we are there, and extracting what we need from the material and energy resources we find. We will use these new skills and techniques to build a space transportation infrastructure that permits routine access to the Moon and all of cislunar space.

The significance of this last point should not be underestimated; access to cislunar space will revolutionize the paradigm of spaceflight. Currently, we build disposable commercial space systems. They have a specific design lifetime, after which they are simply abandoned. Combined with the high cost of getting to low Earth orbit, this makes spaceflight difficult and costly. Hence, space largely has been left as the province of government, except for certain highly capitalized businesses such as global communications.

With the Vision realized, satellites can be serviced, maintained, extended and networked—space systems will be designed for an indefinite lifetime. Given existing launch costs, we cannot do this now. Even lowering such costs by an order of magnitude would still make even robotic servicing of platforms at geosynchronous orbit marginal at best. However, if we build a system that can refuel on the Moon using locally produced materials, we create the capability to routinely go anywhere in cislunar space. Exporting fuel extracted from lunar resources will permit us to go anywhere, anytime, with whatever capabilities we need. This is the beginning of true space-faring capability. Such an environment would unleash imaginations, realize potential and expand technology, science, exploration and commerce.

In short, we are going to the Moon for one clear and understandable reason—to be able to do everything else that we want to do in space. The Moon is our school, laboratory and foundry. The Vision begins by building a highway through the heart of cislunar space, creating a transportation infrastructure for diverse users – scientists, miners, sellers and buyers, and ultimately, settlers.

What is the role of NASA and the federal government in all of this? It is not to industrialize space, but to determine if the industrialization of space is possible. To accomplish such an expansive space vision requires us to understand exactly how difficult these tasks really are. Possible in theory is one thing—practical to implement is something else entirely. NASA must push the technical envelope—to address and answer questions and develop new processes too expensive or too difficult for the private sector to tackle. Learning how to live on another world and extract what you need from it is a challenging task, one suitable for a federal R&D effort.

After understanding the technical difficulties and opening up possibilities, government should step back and let market forces work while still retaining a presence to enforce the law and assure that compelling national strategic interests are served. Thus, while government will never become a resource producer, it is needed to insure that corporations respect property rights and compete fairly in an open market, subject to the same anti-trust and securities regulation as any other modern American business.

So why are some still asking, "Why are we going to the Moon?" Some space constituencies are clearly uncomfortable with the strategic direction outlined above. For many, the idea of a government-funded program, controlled by and operated for the benefit of the academic science community, is the "right" way to run a space program. In the absence of any national Presidential or Congressional leadership, such a science-driven agenda has been ascendant for the last 15 years. During the Apollo era, the marshalling of national resources by the government to carry out space goals on a wartime footing was the dominant mode of operation.

Using what we find in space to enable exploration and to create new capability has never been attempted. The Vision's goal is to extend human commerce beyond low Earth orbit, where the universe becomes accessible to everyone. America's desire to explore and create new wealth has allowed our society to thrive and to prosper. The Vision for Space Exploration extends that opportunity for all humanity into the Solar System and the universe beyond.

Paul D. Spudis is a planetary scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel MD. He was a member of the Clementine Science Team in 1994. In 2004, was a member of the President's Commission on the Implementation of U. S. Space Exploration Policy and was presented with the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal for that work. He is the recipient of the 2006 Von Karman Lectureship in Astronautics, awarded by the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is the author or co-author of over 150 scientific papers and four books, including The Once and Future Moon, a book for the general public in the Smithsonian Library of the Solar System series, The Clementine Atlas of the Moon (with Ben Bussey), published in 2005 by Cambridge University Press, and Moonwake: The Lunar Frontier (with Anne Spudis), an adventure novel for young adults about life at a base on the Moon. His web site can be found at http://www.spudislunarresources.com

What You Don't Know About The Federal Minimum Wage

 

By Captain Ed on National Politics

Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats have placed a significant minimum-wage increase at the top of their agenda for the 110th Congress. President Bush has signaled his willingness to approve it, using the increase as a lever for tax relief on small businesses. One would imagine that this show of bipartisanship springs from a national crisis, but George Will explains that the effort will benefit only a few, and not even the few that the politicos assume:

Democrats consider the minimum-wage increase a signature issue. So, consider what it says about them:

Most of the working poor earn more than the minimum wage, and most of the 0.6 percent (479,000 in 2005) of America's wage workers earning the minimum wage are not poor. Only one in five workers earning the federal minimum lives in families with earnings below the poverty line. Sixty percent work part time, and their average household income is well over $40,000. (The average and median household incomes are $63,344 and $46,326, respectively.)

Forty percent of American workers are salaried. Of the 75.6 million paid by the hour, 1.9 million earn the federal minimum or less, and of these, more than half are under 25 and more than a quarter are between ages 16 and 19. Many are students or other part-time workers. Sixty percent of those earning the federal minimum or less work in restaurants and bars and earn tips -- often untaxed, perhaps -- in addition to wages. Two-thirds of those earning the federal minimum today will, a year from now, have been promoted and be earning 10 percent more. Raising the minimum wage predictably makes work more attractive relative to school for some teenagers and raises the dropout rate. Two scholars report that in states that allow people to leave school before 18, a 10 percent increase in the state minimum wage caused teenage school enrollment to drop 2 percent.

Will makes a point which many on both sides have missed, which is that the Bush administration's spending spree makes it politically difficult for them to oppose the increase. After all, Bush signed the pork-filled farm bill in 2002 that benefited the large farmers more than anyone else, and he signed a highway bill in 2005 that notoriously contained over six thousand earmarks. If the government wants to give away money, why not to the poor?

But that's precisely the problem. They aren't giving away money, not from their checkbook, at any rate. They're distorting a market for a short-term political benefit that will do nothing to raise the standard of living for the people they supposedly want to help. Arbitrarily raising the prices of services and goods in a marketplace causes inflation, not an increase in real value. They're forcing consumers of labor to pay more for the same service, from which they will get no increased benefit -- and that means that they will have to pass the costs along to the consumers of their goods and services, all through the distribution chain.

Whose money is getting given away? Yours and mine, and all 479,000 minimum-wage workers, that's who. I can absorb the incremental loss of buying power, but the people at the bottom rungs cannot. If they're lucky, all that will happen is that their buying power will remain the same as it was after a short period of adjustment. More likely, some of their jobs will get eliminated as businesses have to support the cost increase in some other fashion than price hikes.

And it's not even the working poor that gets helped in the increase. The working poor may have started at minimum wage, but they move up as they progress in their jobs. It is an absolute fallacy to argue that minimum-wage workers have not gotten a raise since the last federal increase of the minimum wage; they get raises as they increase their value to their employer, not from Uncle Sam. Anyone who has worked at the minimum wage since 1997 is either switching jobs too often to get a raise or is not very productive. The people making minimum wage are by and large temporary workers and people who make most of their living through tips, the latter comprising three out of every five minimum-wage workers. It's not an accurate reflection of their standard of living.

Will has it right -- the minimum wage should be zero. Unfortunately, the politicians don't get re-elected when they tell Americans that they can't solve their problems, and so we get these splashy systemic solutions to issues that either don't exist at all or only affect a narrow slice of the nation. The rest of us get to pay for it, and the people with the least ability to withstand the economic consequences pay the most for it.

Perhaps we should insist on an increase in the minimum common sense of Washington officials.

War still beats "peace" under Hussein!

From Don Surber

AP played the numbers game this week with reports about how many people have died in Iraq. I always have a problem reducing people to numbers but AP said that 16,273 violent deaths in Iraq in 2006 -- 14,298 of them civilians.
Most of the dead are civilians, which the enemy targets. Prairie Pundit pointed out that is a war crime. Our side prosecutes its soldiers who flaunt this convention.
Gateway Pundit pointed out this disproves once and for all the Lancet study that said 655,000 people had died in the war.
Jules Crittenden pointed out deaths are way down in Iraq: "we're down from an annual average of more than 65,000!"
With 16,273 deaths in 2006, is Iraq still at war? AP called fighting in the Sudan "the world's worst humanitarian crisis" after the U.N. estimated 200,000 people died violently since 2003 -- or twice the carnage of Iraq in the same time period.
Sudan's population is estimated at 6.5 million; Iraq's is four times that.
By the way, the 16,273 violent deaths in 2006 compares favorably to the 600,000 documented deaths under Saddam Hussein. Many more are likely.
Hussein's carnage averaged 70 to 125 civilian deaths every day for the 8,000 days he reigned. His 20,000 civilian deaths a year (on average) were considered "peace" while last year, under war, there were 14,298 civilians deaths