blackstar said:
mz said:
I think you'd be hard pressed to find critical analysis of anything aerospace in the press, or even somewhat technical analysis... How many relevant engineers or people with real business experience in the sector write much popular stuff?
That's inaccurate. When Bush unveiled the Vision for Space Exploration there was significant criticism, and also substantial critical analysis, at least of the political aspects, in the popular press (NY Times, Washington Post, etc.). There have been Government Accountability Office and Congressional Budget Office reports that have also addressed NASA's Constellation program to critical, and objective analysis. Even Aviation Week has addressed some of the technical aspects without being cheerleaders for NASA.
NewSpace gets ignored by the traditional actors like GAO, CBO and NRC because they are not government and are also too small to rise to scrutiny by the think tanks. It tends to get largely ignored by the media because the money amounts are too low. But even NewSpace activities that rise above the noise and get noticed by the media tend to be treated shallowly, with the media largely repeating the press releases. The non-mainstream media sources that address NewSpace are overwhelmingly supportive and not objective.
Maybe it's just my memory, but I recall most press stories just taking all NASA stuff at face value. Whatever time tables and constant changes in plans. The press does that with most things anyway, since they don't and can't really have technical expertise or enough time to do complex multi-faceted articles. Just report: "x claims y".
Florida Today perhaps was the exception at some time, as a traditional media with a web presence...
And then there's the blogs and nasaspaceflight.com. At the latter you had access to at least some technical spaceflight professionals, and some of them were quite critical of many fundamental things in Constellation.
It certainly felt (I don't have hard data to back this up so maybe I'm just wasting everybody's time here) that there was quite a big disconnect between what was being discussed "inside" and what was reported in the media. I have no way of knowing the reality of "inside" of course, just snapshots here and there. A single angry blogger or forum person with lots of claims rarely is a reliable source of information, though sometimes they are.
Considering the size of NASA and DoD programs, there's quite little investigative journalism there in my opinion.
There's even less of that tradition in Europe. Probably most people don't even know that Arianespace or ESA even exist and their tax dollars go there, or that if they go, it must be something that Government Top Men are surely taking care of in the optimal way. Different than "big government bad, cute garage thing good", but I don't know which one is worse.
Do you remember the title or date of the Constellation-critical articles on AvWeek, NYT, WaPo etc?
Googled a little and indeed, they DO quote the aforementioned Charles Lurio here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/19/AR2005091901574_2.html
But space policy and engineering consultant Charles Lurio, an advocate of innovative private-sector approaches to space travel, criticized the new proposal for being too "massive" and "unaffordable now and unsustainable later."
The press did much better than I remembered!
The GAO report I also remember, though it seemed that they were quite resource constrained in making it.
One problem of US space policy is that everything has to be always decided so very quickly. ESAS and Griffin's era is a good example. In some important sections it was a very superficial analysis with large flaws, that should not serve as a basis for spending a hundred billion dollars and possibly more.
It's a constant cycle of ADHD boom-bust. Apollo was like that and it was unsustainable. Now the big programs take so long because there's no political possibility for a hypergigantic Apollo funding peak, and they rarely reach anything operational anymore. Except maybe international ones that can't be busted like ISS. It's quite an extraordinary achievement in many ways.
Some day there won't be programs, just vehicles and capabilities.
end rant
