Apollo and Artemis

Twitter’s idea of an updated interface is making it look how Facebook looked eight years ago

It’s many layers of rent seekers. We’ve allowed lawyers and MBA’s to go in and make absolutely all the decisions for everyone at almost every level. The government has been completely infiltrated by government contractors whose priority is bilking the taxpayer not building things.

Look I’m reasonably liberal (and unlike some people claiming to be liberal I’m pretty obviously liberal) but I’m not blind. One of the big reasons why the GOP wins any elections at all is that interacting with the government leaves a bad taste in the customers mouth. This is because the government tends to be lazy, bureaucratic, and looking for an excuse to do nothing most of the time. There’s an argument to be made that this is because the government is poorly run and demoralized because of GOP sabotage over the decades… and I largely agree with that… but that doesn’t change the facts on the ground.

I know some of you guys are lawyers, but with respect I kind of hate the fact that most legislators are lawyers. A lot of laws seem to have been written to maximize the number of billable hours they could generate.

I guess I just feel like a huge % of the total complexity we see in business/law is fake. It’s only purpose is to make the people who understand it valuable. It really isn’t as complicated as they claim it is. They should go do something actually complicated like push the boundaries of some technical discipline instead of inventing overcomplicated processes and rules to justify a big check.

I dealt with the federal government a lot in a previous career and with cities a ton now. Imo government agencies are better that private industry on average. I pretty much never find city employees looking for an excuse to do nothing. Home Depot employees otoh…

I’m down for ragging on lawyers and business school people though.

Could you send some of those people to the fmcsa by any chance?

I don’t know that comparing mid tier government employees to retail workers is quite apple to apples either…

But point taken. Many government agencies are fine.

If you want to compare them to professionals, when I was a computer programmer about half the people were close to non-productive and some were very negatively productive. I had a job in lending/finance for about 6 months where I didn’t do shit and quit because I couldn’t stand it - and I got a raise there out of the blue for doing such a good job.

It’s a combo of many government agencies being fine and a lot of private industry sucking too.

It’s the customer experience that counts. Most private businesses have plenty of waste, but I guess they hide it better? I’ve had a lot of truly awful experiences on the customer service side of government than I typically do with private (except monopoly situations… nobody is worse than the power/cable company IME).

One of my main points is that it’s a fallacy to try and separate pure technology from the bureaucratic capacity to implement the technology. If you want to claim that you “can” accomplish something, but only if you assume a bunch of unrealistic preconditions, then what you’re really saying is that you can’t do the thing, but blame the guy in charge of the preconditions. From a social point of view, the technology isn’t there.

Bump for the death of Artemis, and her rebirth as something even worse:

The bipartisan legislation was introduced by Representative Kendra Horn (D-Oklahoma), who chairs the committee’s space and aeronautics subcommittee. A markup session is planned for tomorrow, at which point the document could undergo substantial changes…

The specified goal of the pending “Moon to Mars program,” as it’s termed in the proposed bill, will be to “land humans on Mars in a sustainable manner as soon as practicable,” with the “interim goal of sending a crewed mission to the lunar surface by 2028 and a goal of sending a crewed mission to orbit Mars by 2033.”

Among other recommendations, the bill specifies that the Artemis lunar lander be launched as a single component, rather than a modular multi-piece vessel that would be constructed in space. NASA would retain full ownership of the Artemis lunar landing system, which would be a dramatic change in plans, given that the space agency is currently soliciting bids from the private sector.

Bill H.R. 5666 would renew NASA’s commitment to the Lunar Gateway project but proposes that the outpost be placed not in lunar orbit but in the Earth-Moon Lagrange point—a gravitational sweet spot between Earth and Moon. At this location, the habitable terminal could support missions to the Moon and Mars, according to the bill, which didn’t rule out a lunar orbit as a possibility.

Artemis was a farce, but the imposition of a real 2024 timeline at least held out the possibility of bringing some accountability. In addition, while the program continued to pour lots of money into Boeing’s gaping maw for SLS, it also allowed NASA to contract for missions to launched on private rockets and spacecraft (currently meaning Falcon 9/Heavy, but also Blue Origin for launch and various companies for spacecraft). The new bill will eliminate both of those silver linings.

First, we stretch the timeline out to a failure-friendly 2028. For comparison, JFK’s “We choose to go to the moon” speech to Apollo 11 was less than 7 years. Alan Shepard (first American man in space) to Apollo 11 was 8 years and a couple months. We justify the delay and burning mountains of cash in the interim by adding the complete fantasy goal of Mars in 2033. In many ways, it’s (somehow) a reboot of the Constellation program, which also promised to lavish tons of money on ambitious goals. At the time of Constellation, at least, it still appeared plausible that we could develop these technologies.

Second, the bill shuts down commercial competition for the core elements of the boondoggle, by requiring NASA to use SLS and own an overengineered lunar lander. Amusingly, the bill justifies this by an explicit invocation of the sunk-cost fallacy:

In order to reduce risk and complexity and make maximum use of taxpayer investments to date, the Administrator shall in the conduct of the Lunar Precursor Initiative employ an architecture that utilizes the Orion vehicle and an integrated lunar landing system carried on an Exploration Upper Stage-enhanced Space Launch System for the human lunar landing missions.

There may be some confusion among my socialist-addled friends about the meaning of NASA ownership, given your hipster fascination with old-school state ownership. None of these rockets will be built by government employees as the NASA Rocket Design Bureau. The distinction is between a procurement contract where NASA hires a prime contractor to build a rocket for NASA’s use vs. a service contract where NASA hires a private company to launch a rocket for it (using a rocket that the contractor provides). The latter type of contract is normally based on a fixed fee for success (at least in theory), while the former is typically a cost-plus model. In other words, what NASA owns under Congress’s approach is the risk that things cost more than expected.

Relying on NASA-owned rockets also shuts the government out from actual space innovation. Since Constellation started, three new orbital rockets have been developed, all privately. SpaceX and Blue Origin are the only contractors who could plausibly land a person on the Moon by 2028, but NASA will be prevented from using them.

This is not bad news for everyone though. As it happens, the prime contractor on SLS also happens to be the only contractor to propose an integrated lunar lander in NASA’s ongoing Artemis process–launching atop “an Exploration Upper Stage-enhanced Space Launch System” no less! That company is perhaps America’s most loved and trusted aerospace institution–Boeing!

A lot has happened this year that might have convinced Congress to ditch the competitive approach and entrust our space program solely to Boeing:

  • We learned of a critical safety defect in the 737-MAX that was hidden from regulators by Boeing and went on to kill 346 people.
  • After many delays, Boeing performed the Orbital Flight Test of the Starliner manned spacecraft. That mission failed due to an apparent programming error. As a bonus, there are whisper reports that there were several other failures during the test flight as well.
  • It was also revealed that Boeing shook NASA down for a quarter-billion dollars on the Starliner contract (notionally a fixed-fee arrangement).

For fun, go take a look at Boeing’s 5-day stock price graph and see if you can figure out when this bill dropped…

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This whisper reports about Starliner have been borne out, with NASA’s safety group reporting that there was a software fault with Starliner’s thruster control software patched two hours before reentry that would have pushed the spacecraft off its reentry profile, presumably resulting in loss of the vehicle. Amazing detail:

Patricia Sanders, chair of the panel, noted that NASA has decided to proceed with an “organizational safety assessment” with Boeing. NASA announced in 2018 it would conduct such reviews of both Boeing and SpaceX, the other commercial crew company, after SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk was seen briefly smoking marijuana during a podcast. NASA, while completing the SpaceX review, deferred the Boeing one, reportedly because of cost issues.

“Cost issues” is perfection.

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Wow, I heard about them patching it in orbit but I didn’t realize they cut it this close. Hopefully NASA can find some spare change to actually look over what Boeing’s doing before they kill astronauts.