Achenblog

Another storm coming. They come every three days now. Here in Nome-on-the-Potomac, our nerves are getting frayed as we hear talk of another foot or two of snow. Hard to believe, but not so long ago the meteorologists referred to possible snowfalls in terms of inches. Soon they will switch to the yard as the unit of measurement.

This next storm could separate the men from the boys. The cross-country skiers from the downhill skiers. The glove-wearers from the mitten-wearers. Some people feel good because they have their own generators and abundant supplies of gasoline. Others feel even better, because they have their own personal nuclear power plants. Some of these lawyers around here have the uranium brought in by private rail.

The city has done a bang-up job so far, I must say. I heard the snowplow before dawn this morning, scraping up the street. Such things are marvels of the new Washington, a city that in the 1996 blizzard did not manage to send snowplows to the neighborhoods until roughly June. Back then, the city's major strategy for dealing with snow and ice was to pray for a heat wave.

Snowmaggedon has actually been a pleasant experience so far. People help one another in Blizzard Country. The snow crisis has led to an efflorescence of snowcialism.

So I guess this is why they play the game. On paper, the Colts were the better team. On the field, they looked pretty great, too. Peyton Manning did not have an off night. In fact, he threw some of the most immaculate passes we've ever seen. Even when the Saints took the lead in the fourth quarter, you knew Manning would lead the Colts back for the tying touchdown. It was just this side of inevitable. Manning hadn't thrown a bad pass all game. He was a surgeon operating on that Saints defense.

And then: Whaaaa.....?

Tracy Porter. Who dat?

Apparently he's the guy who steps in front of Reggie Wayne and takes it back all the way, six points, game over.

There were other big plays in the game, like Sean Payton's gutsy decision to attempt an onside kick at the start of the second half. But that late interception was the play of the game, and right up there with the David Tyree miracle catch a couple of years ago as a candidate for Play of the Millennium.

It was one of those plays where you just can't believe your eyes. No WAY that happens. That's an Alternative Universe Interception.

I guess it's time to take the trash back to the alley. If you don't hear from me within an hour, call 911.

The alley. Do not venture there without a shovel and a flare.

Listen. It's the Whos down in Whoville. Singing!

Already sleepy suburb now in snow-induced coma.

Excuse me, WHERE ARE THE CABS????????

Heard a pitiful yelping in the night. It was the Weber.

New sport: Palisade-jumping. You just hurl yourself off the cliff and you can't get hurt. (But you go first.)

Was it not Edgar Allan Poe who said, after the Titanic hit the iceberg, "I rang for ice, but this is ridiculous"?

This is the view out the front door first-thing this morning, with many more hours of snow still to come. What I find disturbing about this snowscape is that there's a car right in the middle of it. We'll have it dug out by June is my guess.

Whatever you do, don't drive in this storm. Unless, of course, you feel really compelled to do so. Angus has an SUV with something like 18-wheel drive (18WD). Also we needed to rescue some people freezing in a house with no power. Do not attempt: Closed course, professional driver.

We came upon a man felled by a giant windshield wiper. Freaked us out something fierce.

This is how we roll.

This was taken hours ago, and by now the Cialis chairs have probably vanished completely.

3:55 p.m.: Pip is nervous as he surveys the first flakes of Snowmaggedon. He knows that if this gets really ugly he becomes someone's lunch.

4:45 p.m.: Cynics deride my photographs for being mere "snapshots" in the same way that Capote said Kerouac's writing was just "typing." But if that's true, how come I get these incredible action shots of wildlife? In flight??? Give me a camera and it's like an instantaneous National Geographic situation.

5:00 p.m.: Poe has snow on his mind.

5:45 p.m.: The blueing hour. Some call it twilight, but in a big snow it's all skews blue.

9:10 p.m.: Reconnaissance of outdoors reveals increasing snow accumulation and trees fending for themselves. I wanted to take this tree indoors and give it warmth by my hearth. Then it occurred to me that it could actually be used as fuel for the aforesaid fire. Am getting chainsaw now.

Angus and Crow. Angus is hoping for 40 inches and pretty much the end of civilization as we know it. Crow is more easily pleased. He's such a good dog, he attempts to retrieve thrown snowballs. Like all rescue dogs he approaches life as a series of lucky breaks and nifty adventures. Snowmaggedon? What's not to like?

Waiting for the Big One. Again. This might make the Snowpocalypse of Dec. 19 look like a dusting. It's going to be like a Roland Emmerich movie. There will be so much snow that it will destabilize the earth's crust. Hidden volcanoes will erupt in once-tranquil neighborhoods. There will be devastation followed by obliteration.

I stand guard on my front walk with shovel in hand. I want to meet the storm head-on. No level of frozen precipitation or wind can drive me indoors. Later, when it's all over, I want neighbors to walk by my house and say, "Wow, what a nice snowman they made!" and then suddenly realize: IT'S JOEL.

Bring it on.

Already this morning I have made the Safeway run. It's getting frantic and desperate there -- I believe the technical term is Hobbesian -- particularly in the produce section. People are feeling the fierce urgency of snow. You see shopping carts go up on two wheels while taking sharp corners.

The milk is gone. The eggs are gone. The fresh meat is gone, except for a couple of strange, unlabeled bags of mystery chicken. There are still a few root vegetables. You find yourself hunting and gathering -- poking through corners and crevices of the store, looking underneath things, and eyeballing covetously the contents of other people's carts.

At some point you find yourself lunging for that last turnip.

Please shoot me when I no longer want to get out in the snow. Just end the whole thing. Being from the Deep South, having grown up in a place where our idea of a sublime alteration of the natural landscape was the passage of the mosquito fogger ("The fogger! The fogger!" the Achenbro and I shouted as we ran outside and chased the poison-belching city truck), I still am easily amazed and amused by frozen precip.

In the snow, old bridges appear out of nowhere. Any second you think you'll encounter a soldier in a Civil War outfit. I wish instead of hiking I could ride a horse on snowy mornings. My horselessness is at the top of my long list of regrets in life.

I came upon a remarkable cave. God knows what lives in there. Bears. Wolverines. My horse always refuses to go in there.

The mighty Potomac. In winter it's hardly bigger than a creek.

A rare photo of my house. It's drafty as all get-out. But the canal access is great and it only takes me about 45 minutes to get into town (more if the mule is tired).

I feel bad for the people who worked on Constellation. The new NASA boss, Charles Bolden, compared it yesterday to a death in the family. We need to give them time to grieve, he said. But they're not just grieving: They're furious. One made a YouTube [via NASA Watch] that's worth watching, contrasting campaign-trail promises by Obama with the decision to blow up Constellation even after it had started cutting metal for spacecraft. These folks were doing their best to get America back to the moon. Ain't gonna happen.

I also feel bad for the taxpayers. Constellation was -- or is, technically, since it hasn't yet been shut down -- an $11.5 billion fiasco. We're told that NASA has spent $9 billion so far on the plan. There's another $2.5 billion over two years that the White House estimates will be necessary to shut down the existing contracts.

Something went wrong here. This would make a great topic for a management dissertation. You can't sort-of go to the moon. You can't almost go to the moon. You can't begin to go to the moon. Having a little bit of a moon program is like being a little bit pregnant.

I haven't followed the ins and outs of Constellation since its inception and have only a rough sense of what happened and why. But I'll throw out a couple of thoughts and let others who know share their comments.

First, you can't do big things cheaply. Constellation would have cost, under initial estimates, something like $108 billion over the lifetime of the project. But right from the get-go, the Bush Administration's Office of Management Budget began trimming money from the program. Here's what Mike Griffin, the former NASA boss, told me this weekend:

"The problem was not the president. He got behind a pretty good policy document. If I had any quarrel, it would be the OMB, who, as soon as the president's back was turned, started taking money out...President Bush never had any idea what the OMB was doing behind his back, not just at NASA, but in other discretionary programs."

So with less money, Constellation's schedule slips. Then Obama comes along and, in his first budget, cuts several billion for NASA exploration in the out-years. The administration also has decided to extend the life-time of the space station, which will eat up many billions more in NASA funding. The upshot, as the Augustine panel found last year, is that you can't get to the moon until something like 2028 at the earliest and even then there's no money for lunar hardware, like a moon base. And your rocket to replace the space shuttle, the Ares 1, likely isn't ready until something like 2017 or 2018, so we have to rely on the Russians for about seven years just to get into orbit.

Second lesson: You can't do big things using someone else's political capital. If you want to go to the moon, don't expect the next occupant of the White House to champion it.

Now, this is an idealized world we're talking about. The plain reality, from a budget and engineering perspective, was that the bulk of Constellation's expenses were going to be incurred after Bush left office. NASA wanted to fly the shuttle until the space station had been completed, then shift shuttle money to Constellation. But it was a politically risky proposition all along. The hardest budgetary decisions always came down the road, after Bush (and Griffin) were gone. Here's what I wrote a year and a half ago:

... without a space race or any national groundswell of opinion in favor of ambitious human spaceflight, the Vision has to proceed in an incremental, bureaucratic manner, keeping within a flat NASA budget. That means that most of the money to build the new system will become available only when the shuttle is retired in 2010. That also means the United States will not be able to launch astronauts into space for about five years. The plan calls for us to hitch rides from the Russians. But the U.S.-Russia relationship has been deteriorating.

This makes the next few years a slippery time for NASA. At any point Congress or the White House could decide that the nation's priorities do not include sending people back to the moon. Joseph Alexander, of the Space Studies Board of the National Academy of Sciences, says he worries that NASA is being "set up to fail."

"The program is in danger of completely running aground at this point," Alexander said. "Within the constraints that this administration has put on NASA's budget, you can't get there from here."

Third lesson: You have to get the public interested and involved. Bush didn't talk much about the moon program. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe he didn't even mention it in the State of the Union Address he gave right after the Vision for Space Exploration was unveiled. If the public is fully vested in a project, a change in administration won't mean its demise. Constellation always suffered from a very basic public-relations problem: We had already been to the moon.

The Obama budget document released Monday all but said: Been there, done that.

The most vociferous howls of protest come from lawmakers in the space districts. Is there a national groundswell of opposition to the killing of Constellation? I haven't felt it.

Going to the moon again makes sense if you want to be a spacefaring civilization. The moon is the best training ground for a Mars mission. Mars is the real target. But we don't have the money to go there right now.

So the question for NASA is the same as it has been for a number of years: Where do we go from here?

--

Now here's a different view, from "Paulspudis" in the boodle this morning:

Hi Joel,

Wrong in just about all aspects.

quote: First, you can't do big things cheaply.

That was never the plan. The goal of the Vision was to return to the Moon and go beyond under the existing agency budgetary envelope. The way you do that is to construct a program that advances through small, incremental, but cumulative steps. NASA was NOT told to develop an unaffordable architecture and then whine about not having enough money to implement it.

quote: Second lesson: You can't do big things using someone else's political capital

The Presidential Vision for Space Exploration was specifically endorsed by two different Congresses in two separate NASA authorization acts. Both bills passed with large bipartisan majorities. How is this "someone else's political capital"?

quote: Third lesson: You have to get the public interested and involved.

No you don't. You simply have to provide value for money spent. That's a different thing. To put it another way, how many air traffic control system "buffs" do you know? Few, I'll wager. Yet there is widespread agreement that such federal spending is important. Are people "excited" by it? Not really. Do they think it critically important? You bet.

Likewise, a space transportation system that can routinely access the Moon can also routinely access cislunar space (the zone between Earth and Moon); this is where virtually all of our national security and economic (e.g., communications, remote sensing) satellite assets reside.

The purpose of going to the Moon was NOT to "repeat Apollo" regardless of what you (or most of NASA, for that matter) think. It was to learn how to use the material and energy resources of the Moon to create a sustainable human presence in space. As long as we are limited to what we can lift out of the very deep gravity well of Earth, we will always be mass- and power-limited in space, and therefore, capability limited as well. The purpose of the Vision was to change the rules of spaceflight.

By the way, the current robotic missions to the Moon are showing us that the Moon is an even richer scientific and utilization target than we had thought. So we're abandoning it just as we are finding that sustainable human presence there is feasible.

The so-called "new direction" is fundamentally programmatic pork, only doled out to New Space companies rather than the old "iron triangle" aerospace contractors. Plus ca change.....

Major doings at NASA! Rocketships canceled. A moon mission spiked. Fury in Congress. I tuned in to the NASA telepresser and, when the Q&A time came, asked one question -- where, exactly, are we going to go other than the ISS? Answer: TBD. But we're going to develop new technologies. We'll have orbital refueling. We'll have new propulsion. So we'll be all dressed up and ready to go -- somewhere.

[Here's my web story on the NASA budget.]

The battle over space has begun. And it's likely to be brutal.

The Obama administration is attempting to kill NASA's ambitious back-to-the moon program, an effort that carried the imprimatur of George W. Bush. The Constellation program had already run through about $9 billion to develop a new crew capsule, Orion, and a new rocket, the Ares 1. Both are vaporized by Obama's new NASA strategy.

Instead of going back to the moon, the administration wants to invest $6 billion over five years in a commercial taxi to orbit. The idea is to let the private sector take over the routine flights into space.

But change does not come easily or quickly in the complex, costly and highly political enterprise that is space travel. Key lawmakers are furious at the prospect of losing jobs and NASA dollars. Also in an uproar are companies that will see billions in expected contracts fail to materialize.

"The president's proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human space flight," Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) said Monday morning. "The cancellation of the Constellation program and the end of human space flight does represent change -- but it is certainly not the change I believe in."

Last week, anticipating the news about the Constellation, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), whose state stands to lose 7,000 jobs when the space shuttle program ends next year, said, "[T]he president's green-eyeshade-wearing advisers are dead wrong. And I, for one, intend to stand up and fight for NASA, and for the thousands of people who stand to lose their jobs."

It's Budget Day! Always a big day here in Washington, as we learn of new ways that the government will spend more than three and a half trillion of our dollars. That's about one and half trillion dollars more than the government receives in revenue. How is that sustainable? Easy: We call China! China has money. All will be well.

The great thing about debt is that it doesn't have to be repaid until the future, which conceivably might not even happen. The future, remember, is just a theoretical possibility, hardly more than a hypothetical. The key characteristic of the future is that it hasn't happened yet; thus by definition the arrival of the future is merely some probability less than 1. Sure, the future is something physicists tell us is just as "real" as the past, but if so, how come there are all these non-fiction history books by people like Gordon Wood and Doris Kearns Goodwin, but the only books about the future are "science fiction"? Isn't non-fiction more "real" than fiction?

The logic of my argument is so crystalline that I want to step back and admire it for a moment.

[Achenmuzak in background...]

Maybe if we just wait long enough the gaping fiscal wound of America will heal itself. That's my approach to car trouble. I wait for the Honda to heal. It usually does. I don't know how that happens, but the regenerative powers of modern automobiles are remarkable.

I think we can't predict the future. It's a complete mystery beyond the vanishing point that is just a few years out. The only thing we can say with certainty is that, in the future, people will travel by thought power and dogs will know computer code. In the future all consumer products will be free, and we'll just think ourselves to Wal-Mart and pick out whatever we want and the cashier will just WAVE at us. "Buh-bye now, thanks for taking at Wal-Mart!" Money will be considered as medieval as the rack and the gibbet. All this talk of -- hold on, let me get the exact language from the Post story today --
"red ink [that] would recede to $1.3 trillion in 2011 but remain persistently high for years to come under Obama's policies" -- ignores the possibility that we'll evolve beyond mortal flesh and become quantized probabilistic fluctuations in the vacuum of an eternal universe. If anyone duns us we'll just fluctuate away. We'll say, "Flux off, buddy." Yar.

What worries me -- because I'm a deficit worrier -- is that a government that is already in debt is also rather profligate with its promises. Thus the government is on the hook to give every Boomer a new hip in the near future. Thus the retirement age will barely budge even as people want to play tennis on new government knees at the age of 130. The unfunded liabilities make the debt today look like chump change.

Almost lost in the political theater surrounding health-care reform is the central fact that, once again, the biggest budget-busting element of the government remains on course to swallow up our resources in the next few decades. Everyone knows it's a problem. Nothing has been done.

Could it be that Washington, as currently configured, is dysfunctional? Your thoughts please.