Starliner and Dragon

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NASA has decided to bring Boeing’s allegedly passenger-rated capsule Starliner (so characterized by me because the thing is so robotic, its “crew” are merely passengers with extremely limited authority even to vet the robot’s decisions) back to the surface and leave the passengers it brought to the ISS on the ISS to await a flight next winter by SpaceX’s Dragon, running up there on one of SpaceX’s reusable rockets.

We’ll see if the robot, whose thrusters often malfunction (“often” in the context of rocket flight where a couple of mistakes, or even just one, kills the crew), can make it back to the surface in one piece. Oh, and remain in that one piece, undamaged, when it regains contact with that surface.

The two Boeing crewmen will remain on the ISS until February when SpaceX is scheduled to send its Dragon up with a new load of supplies for the station. That resupply mission, though, has had to be rejiggered: it will fly with only two crewmen in order to have room for the two Boeing crewmen on the ride back down.

Which gives me an idea.

SpaceX should accelerate its schedule for refurbishing and preparing for (re)launch its Falcon rockets and Dragon capsules, and get a Falcon/Dragon mission configured and ready to go by the end of September. Then petition NASA and the FAA for licensure to launch. Put the onus for quick reaction back on the government, and show Boeing how it’s done. And show the Boeing/Lockheed-Martin’s ULA how it’s done with reusable rockets.

Come to that, I challenge Elon Musk to do that. It would be more than a one-up feather in Musk’s and SpaceX’s cap, and it would be more than a demonstration of the advantages private enterprise has over quasi-private enterprise partnered with government—in which each partner has captured the other, limiting both.

No, doing so would be a demonstration of the near-emergency capability of SpaceX to get a mission launched under the tight time constraints of an in-orbit emergency.

Progressive-Democratic Party Agenda

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This is what Party has in mind, should they be the winners this fall.

Party Presidential nominee Kamala Harris will push for these, among others, even as during this campaign season, she ducks away from interviews even by her friendly press (she hoped a couple weeks ago to reach an interview agreement “by the end of the month.” Keep in mind that even as she runs away from the press–and from the questions of us average Americans, these are the policies and goals she has strongly pushed for during her prior campaign for President and during her current stint as Vice President.

  • retreads of her and President Joe Biden’s policies of the last nearly four years
  • ban on fracking as part of her moves to eliminate our hydrocarbon energy capability
  • Medicare for all
  • open southern border
  • voting by and welfare payments to illegal aliens

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) said what Harris lacks to fortitude or the integrity to say out loud for voters to hear and evaluate:

  • eliminate the Senate filibuster
  • control the Supreme Court with term limits and packing
  • impose federal takeover of elections
  • pass enormous spending and tax-hike legislation
  • additional housing entitlements

Harris’ goals are damaging to our economy and destructive of our American culture, bringing in those millions of illegal aliens with no incentive to assimilate into our culture but having access to our voting booths. Schumer’s goals are damaging to our economy and destructive of our republican democracy, converting us to a popular democracy, a form that has never worked in 2,500 years of attempts.

Price Controls and Ways Around Them

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Donald Boudreaux and Richard McKenzie, economics professor at George Mason University and emeritus economics professor at UC Irvine’s Merage Business Schoo, respectively, reflected on Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ price control scheme and some ways around them.

[C]competitive market forces will encourage them to do so, even when illegal.

Competitive forces, especially, are human nature: all of us want our goodies for as little as possible, and where there are at least two suppliers of something, those suppliers will compete with each other on some form of price in order to get our business.

Thus:

  • “shrinkflation”— keep prices the same but shrink the portions of goods
  • nonprice adjustments, such as relabeling/redefining “select” grade steaks as higher-ranking “choice” grades
  • hire fewer workers
  • devote less effort to cleaning produce
  • reduce hours of operation

Another major way, for all that it’s an illegal path—that pesky human nature—is the black market. Price controls are an open door for these to thrive, even where they’re illegal. And yes, that includes here in these United States. Keep in mind, especially vis-à-vis black markets that human nature—wanting stuff for as little as possible—can be made to work strongly against black market: free markets, especially those without price controls, will always and everywhere be able to produce goods and services at less cost and so for lower prices than can any black market. The latter’s production costs always include things that are intrinsically absent in free markets: the cost of evading the lawman along with the risk premium necessarily charged against the likelihood of getting caught.

Musk for NASA?

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That’s the suggestion for SpaceX’s (and Tesla’s, and a couple other enterprises) CEO Elon Musk from Hudson Institute‘s Arthur Herman. Both Musk and former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump say they are open to working with each other in a Trump administration.

An entrepreneur who isn’t afraid to fail, and thereby push, successfully, for more rapid progress than bureaucracies and their bureaucrats will permit, could be a good move for a bureaucratic and bloated agency like NASA, but….

The move would work only if Musk were given the hiring and firing authority the leaders of private companies have. With a government entity, though, that would be hard to achieve with all the unionized civil servants (over)populating NASA. This is, after all, the collection of bureaucrats with engineering degrees that gave us long, slow, cost-overrun and overrunning rockets for the return to the moon, and who can no longer even get a manned capsule to low earth orbit and back, leaving two aging astronauts stranded on the space station. It’s true enough that the rocket is reliable, but it’s still—all these years after SpaceX—an expensive use once and throw it away device, and Starliner appears not to work. Yes, yes, the rocket and its manned Starliner capsule were built by Lockheed-Martin’s and Boeing’s United Launch Alliance and by Boeing. But they were built under contracts let by those too-permissive bureaucrat engineers of NASA.

The long line of slow, bloated development and launch by NASA dates back to the period after NASA successfully landed astronauts on the moon and brought them back. It’s been those 50-ish years since, and no serious effort has been made to go back—it’s too expensive, say the NASA bureaucrats and the politicians of Congress, observing the expensiveness of NASA programs.

Another serious impediment to Musk having a chance of success at NASA is Congress. That body will be leery of angrifying unions generally and especially the Federal civil service unions by letting Musk get rid of the dead wood in NASA and bring in folks of his choosing. Even more, that body will be leery of Musk’s risk-taking, this time with tax dollars instead of his own and his private citizen shareholders.

My suggestion: give Musk a shot, with full backing from the White House. If he can’t bring about significant improvement in NASA’s performance and cost structure, then disband NASA altogether and leave its…programs…to the private enterprises in our private economy.

Flip-Flopping for Fun and Profit

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has completely repudiated her prior positions across a range of questions—or so she says—and she’s repudiated her own Biden-Harris administration policies in the process.

Her positions and her positions (not prior and current because she’s moving to erase the former from history and pretend the latter are all that ever existed) include the following:

  • border czar responsible for the current wide-open border, now claiming to be willing to take strong steps to stop illegal aliens from entering
  • “Bidenomics is working,” now claiming to wanting to fight the inflation, which her administration caused over the last three and a half years, by punishing price-gouging grocers
  • contributing to funds to bail criminals—including violent criminals—from jail, pushing for cashless bail, defunding police, now claiming to be the hard-nosed California AG. Except that hard-nosed AG was so hard-nosed she held prisoners scheduled for regular release for additional months, so hard-nosed she moved to reduce penalties for shoplifting. Pretending she didn’t do that is more of her gaslighting
  • wanting to ban fracking, now claiming to allow it
  • wanting Medicare for all, now claiming “if you like your insurance policy, you can keep your insurance policy”
  • wanting to erase ICE, now claiming…not so much

Harris’ originally made statements came from her heart and her core beliefs. Now, given the failure of those policies, she’s claiming to take other positions solely to cover her political behind.

Can we trust a politician who has so blatantly who made bold, clear statements of policy and belief in one direction to, on the eve of an election, makes diametrically opposite statements of policy and belief?