Rutan: NASA Needs New Von Braun

"Martha H Adams" wrote in message
...
I don't see going into space as saving the world -- I don't see any
connection from the one to the other. I favor going into space so
that somewhere, people stay alive when our little Garden of Eden here
self-destructs through agency of individuals very like some who have
spoken above.

Cheers -- Martha Adams


I have to shake my head. There are so many people on Earth like you.

When I was a member of the National Space Society occasionally a
comparison would come up to a child in a cradle outgrowing the cradle but
still being stuck in it. I never thought it a proper comparison. The best
comparison (also a Biblical reference that speaks to a certain people as a
group infant refusing birth) is to an infant in the mother's womb having
reached due time of birth and either refusing or being refused birth.
Biologically, what then happens to any infant refusing or being refused
birth?

I've pointed out again and again a reference I saw many years ago.
Mankind, in the womb of Mother Earth (if you will), has expanded and grown
one million fold in size in the last two million years. This is
one-dimensional and does not even begin to tell the story. The untold story,
the rest of the story, is that mankind has increased in its energies,
powers, complexities, reaches, needs and wants, two million fold (average
per every man, woman, and child living) over the same two-million year
period of time. One million fold of that two million fold increase coming
just within the century. This is precisely comparative to an infant in the
womb coming upon the due time of birthing; or in still another apt
comparison, it is precisely comparative to a living cell coming upon the due
time of division into two cells. If either doesn't happen, if either is
prevented from happening, Apocalypse. Internal, integral, breakdown of
cohesive structures. Breakdown of bonds. Things that have always worked
before, and should work, do not work anymore as they had before and should.
Every try to control the systems to fix the systems fail.

Tries to keep the system, the body, energized in place; tries to pour even
more energy into the system in place; tries to conserve, to make the system
ever more efficient, especially ever more energy efficient, in place;
automatically are ever increasing tyrannies tightening upon the system, the
body, like the relentlessly enveloping, relentlessly tightening in space,
coils of a very titanic, very patient python that knows that just with time
now there is but one conclusion to be had from the affair.

You mention "our little Garden of Eden". I enjoy philosophy and physics.
I'm also a lifelong student of history. I know a vast dimensional complexity
reduced to compacted, most simplest idea, when I see it. If you know the
story then you know that God tells the two humans that they can eat of the
fruit of every one of the large number of different trees in the Garden
except for one, the one in the middle of the Garden, said to be the Tree of
Life. Its fruit is pure poison. That tree is the tree of all the trees, the
fruit of all the fruit, the stereotypical collective of all in one. One
World, so to speak. It is death, oblivion, to go for it. The same idea
repeats in the story of Babel where all of a vastly diverse mankind gather
together to live in just one city (just one civilization) of all, merging to
just one. Pure poison all over again, this city of all cities, this
stereotypical collective of all in one.

The two humans are tossed out (into a new frontier by the way) as the cure
or they die. The humans of the city are confused by the psycho-babble of a
common language always spoken and/or written with double, triple, multitudes
more of conflicting 'Machiavellian', 'Orwellian', meaningless meanings to
ever word and phrase and idea: Everything said or written having
diametrically opposing double entendre so to suit all without exception,
giving offense to no one (thus ultimately confusing all and giving offense
to all). Pure unadulterated poison. Once more, Apocalypse. Supposedly, God
tells us a radicalized anything pursued ends up in its radical opposite, in
every case whatsoever from the infant analogy to the Babel analogy, a
radical reduction-ism to lowest common denominator of total tyranny, total
war, and Dark Age. In each and every case but one solution, just one cure,
breakout into a new, raw, harsh and alien frontier, a new Space Age opening
up and renewing the old womb, or cradle or nest if you would prefer. . .in
any case, opening up and renewing the Old World. Those ancient wise men were
just as much deep thinkers as anyone alive today. That is because truths and
wisdom never change. Nor do fundamental physical constants ever change, they
just rise up through every level of complexity until they reach precisely
the same reduction to fundamentality at the top as at the bottom, the
smallest picture of all at once being the biggest picture of all.

Why did the Egyptians have to pay all the price, do all the work, entailed
in just letting the Hebrews go forth? Exodus? Because they had built up a
vast and labyrinthine web, network, Iron Curtain, Great Wall, over time
holding the Hebrews in and to them. They could each and everyone of them
hold out their hands empty and say, "We aren't holding you here, go!"
knowing full well in many cases, unknowing in many others, that the chains
of "red tape," "laws," "anti-trust acts," "treaties," "bureaucracies," and
on and on into infinity, were so many and so thick that the Hebrews were
held (without any apparent "hands" holding them) irresistably immovable from
Egypt. Thus the Egyptians were required to do all the work, pay all the
price, so to undo all the web work--all the built up [infinity] of
framework--of keeping the Hebrews from leaving Eden, Camelot, Utopia, Babel,
Babylon, One World, Province of All Mankind, Common Heritage of All Mankind,
the herd in "the herd theory of all mankind," the field in "the field theory
of all life," Aldous Huxley's "A Brave New World," or in other words
specific to a long ago Biblical era, "Egypt." To their amazement, in finally
getting the Hebrew horde going over the frontier, after some reticence cost
them some more, the Egyptians discovered a brand spanking new
renaissance-type frontier opening up for them right there at home in good
old Egypt.

No opening of new frontiers is ever a one way street. Opening is always
open ended. The opening of youthful New Frontiers to new colonizations, new
exodus, and boundless new energies, new possibilities and opportunities,
always opens to new youthfulness in renewal, in rejuvenation, the Old
Worlds. No one, no matter where, no matter who, is not in or part of the
expanding and growing energies and possibilities always involved in frontier
opening. This kind of nova builds up energy backward as well as forward. A
living cell saturated with energy for division, grown almost inert with
overdosing on energy, possesses every bit of that same energy in the
resulting two after division out, but each of the two new frontiers now has
excess capacity to accumulate more to itself. And above and beyond the two
new cellular frontiers there is sprung a third new frontier dimension and
horizon for energy accumulation, that of synergy between, that of a more
complex structure of, the two. A new life form beginning right at that point
in its own right and due naturally to progressively form its own level of
life separate from but very largely symbiotic with its constituent makeup.
Just as with us and our internal and external complex structures, complex
life built over (built upon) complex life built over (built upon) complex
life built over (built upon).......

I go through all this to remind you how things work. I can predict with
certainty that you won't have any continuance to your Eden you speak of if
we don't get into the next level of frontiers en masse. The lifetime of your
Eden will be shortened ever more without it. The lifetime will be lengthened
longer with it. The old will have no room to survive longer without any
'outside' for the new to grow into. The new cannot have space or time to
mature, to age properly, without increased and ever increasing room to do
so. Even it must start to turn itself over faster and ever faster in a
shrinking, therefore closed, naked singularity of one world. Finally even
the new will turn over so fast as not to mature enough to reproduce enough
of the even newer for continuance. It may statistically believe it is living
longer, surviving longer, prospering in health and wealth longer, rather
than being short--and getting ever shorter--in all these things, but the
proof will be in the pudding of whether it can even keep up enough quantity
and quality to keep going in circles in place running ever harder to stay in
place on such a single world treadmill going nowhere at all.

Brad

wrote:
But where could NASA find such expertise?

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...u tput=gplain


-george william herbert

Here's a question. Has NASA ever had a Korlev-esq "Chief Engineer"?
Von Braun was directer only of Marshall, which limited his power.
- Ed Kyle

"edkyle99" wrote in message oups.com...

Here's a question. Has NASA ever had a Korlev-esq "Chief Engineer"?
Von Braun was directer only of Marshall, which limited his power.

Yes, the Chief Engineer (code ae) is Theron Bradley Jr.

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/codea/codeae/

In article ,
Edward Wright wrote:
Here's a question. Has NASA ever had a Korlev-esq "Chief Engineer"?
Von Braun was directer only of Marshall, which limited his power.

Yes, the Chief Engineer (code ae) is Theron Bradley Jr.

Except that this is *not* the sort of position the original query was
about. Bradley's position is basically support and advisory; he is not
directly in charge of any of the hardware programs, and cannot give orders
to the people bending metal. Korolev and von Braun could and did. The
people with the actual power are managers, not engineers.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

Edward Wright wrote:
"edkyle99" wrote in message
oups.com...

Here's a question. Has NASA ever had a Korlev-esq "Chief
Engineer"?
Von Braun was directer only of Marshall, which limited his power.

Yes, the Chief Engineer (code ae) is Theron Bradley Jr.

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/codea/codeae/

Don't follow the link! It descends immediately into the dark
world of bureau-speak, like the following.

"The Office of the Chief Engineer assures that the development
efforts and missions operations are being planned and conducted on
a sound engineering basis with proper controls and management of
technical risks."

Reading on, it seems this Chief Engineer doesn't seem to be
in charge of much more than the likes of "implementation",
"oversight", "analyses", "assessments", and "support". Of
*what* isn't exactly clear.

My favorite page linked from the above is for the Center for
Systems Management Office at Marshall which sounds very busy.
Von Braun's Marshall Future Projects Office used to do
things like, say, design the Saturn V launch vehicle.
Today's Marshall:

"provides support and independent evaluation of projects
and programs for compliance with and implementation of
Project/Program NPG 7120.5A ... "

Now I'm really interested in this mysterious "Project
NPG 7120.5A". It sounds terribly important.

- Ed Kyle

In article . com,
edkyle99 wrote:
Here's a question. Has NASA ever had a Korlev-esq "Chief Engineer"?
Von Braun was directer only of Marshall, which limited his power.

And Korolev, despite some of the vague public statements made at the time,
was head only of his own design bureau, which was by no means alone in
competing for Soviet government support. Indeed, the Soviet situation was
in some ways *worse* than the US one: the US generally picked a winner,
by one dubious means or another :-), and put most of their resources into
support for that approach, while the Soviets often were indecisive and
ended up maintaining multiple parallel programs.

Von Braun possibly *could* have become Chief Engineer of the US manned
space program, if he'd jumped ship to NASA soon after its formation.
But he wanted to stay with his team, and it took a while for them to be
formally transferred to NASA, and in the interim, the upper management
structure crystallized without him. The result had administrators but
no real chief engineer.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

OK, while finding a person with the drive, vision and ability to
communicate both of those would be great, there also must be a place for
them to fit. There just doesn't seem to be one like that right now, no
perceived need for great advances in the field. I would suggest that
people like Rutan, the people who were working on the DC-X, and the
X-prize contestants have to make a quantum leap forward to where a 5 to
10 different orbital systems are available privately at the costs seen
with DC-X and SpaceShipOne and that some perceived need is there for
NASA to step in and do the massive engineering required to go from that
technology to truly heavy lift for some project that requires millions
of tons of freight to orbit.

Jim

wrote:
Burt Rutan visited Marshall Space Flight Center recently,
where he said that NASA needs another Wernher von Braun.

"http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2864191"

NASA acquired von Braun's hands-on group from the Army
when the agency was created. NASA then proceeded to
gradually turn von Braun's group from an active R&D lab
into a paper-pusher outfit - but it remained effective
as a contract oversite group because it had far more
rocketry expertise than any potential contractor.

Today, NASA has no expertise at such a level - Rutan is
right about this.

But where could NASA find such expertise? Where could
it find a real hands-on von Braun/Korolev-style chief
engineer/project manager who has designed and built
rocket engines and rockets - and launched them too? Not
Lockheed Martin, which gets its engines from Russia. Not
Boeing, which is accused of stealing some of it's ideas
from Lockheed and is emeshed in the resulting scandal.
Maybe someone from Krunichev or TsSKB Progress in Russia?
How about Rutan himself?

- Ed Kyle