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NASA Gets Smart
Shadrone writes "There is a article on CNN which discusses NASA thinking about sending up another U.S. module to serve as the main Service Module if Russia continues on its MIR first schedule." International cooperation sounds great on paper, but NASA got hosed - Russia took our money, then took some more, and NASA's finally giving up on them.
As a Russian emigrant, I can tell you right now what will cure most of these misunderstandings -- have a couple of senior NASA officials live in Russia for a year. Outside the "foreigner" protection shield. Let them feel the corruption, realize to what extent the country is in political, economic, and social ruin, and then judge as to whether expecting them to produce something that works, let alone flies, is reasonable.
As much as I respect my motherland, I must admit that the US is consistently underestimating just how f@$*ed up it is right now and will be over the next several decades.
// zyqqh
This is wishful thinking on a number of fronts. First, the space station program pre-dates Ronald Reagan's first term by many years, so he gets no credit other than that due for taking a space program that was looking at the moon and Mars and trapping it in low earth orbit for the next 50 years.
Second, I had the dubious honor of being one of the first members of the first contract ever awarded for the construction of the station. I can tell you from long, painful, inside experience that the space station was never intended to be anything more than an aerospace contractor welfare program during the downsizing of the US military and the end of the Cold War.
The large aerospace companies, especially Boeing and Lockheed, staffed these contracts to the gills with all of their cast-off, marginal, low talent employees in the early stages because the only work product was a mountain of documentation and anybody can create documents by the pound. All their talented people were still on lucrative military contracts.
Later, when it was time to bend real metal to make the station, NASA found that these programs were now all being run by these marginal bo-bos that had been promoted to senior project management over the preceding years. Coupled with repeated cuts in NASA's budget by Congress, NASA was stuck trying to build the station with 3rd string management, no dollars, and no public support.
The only choice they had was to bring in ESA, NASDA, Canada, and later, Russia, to get the thing built. It was never driven by some lofty ideal of "international cooperation." It was simple economics. We needed to suck cash out of the International partners to be able to maintain the level of contractor staffing and inefficiency that had been created around the station program in its first five years.
You can take it to the bank that no contract was ever scaled back below its original award amount, no prime contractor was ever fired, and no award fees were cut nor penalties assessed when the original launch date for the first station components ended up slipping from 1991 to 1998. A seven year slip with a 250% cost overrun has to get funded somehow. Thanks Europe, Canada, and Japan!!!
In this whole game, Russia was the only nod to an actual attempt at "international relations". If we hadn't paid money to all those ex-Soviet rocket scientists, they'd be working for hard currency in some bunker in Iraq or North Korea, building indigenous ICBM technology for countries that could give a rat's ass about international treaties against lobbing a nuke into NYC. That we got access to their robust LEO launch technology was a nice plus, too, since the flying the shuttle only 8 times a year meant that we could never construct, much less resupply, the completed station ourselves.
Don't throw too many rocks at the poor Russians for dropping the ball. You should squarely place ALL of the blame on NASA and Congress. The latter made the project 100's of times more difficult by gutting the budget and demanding pork barrel deals that moved key station tasks to 46 different states instead of keeping the work centralized. The former ensured a fiasco by mismanaging its contractors, allowing an outrageously inefficient distribution of work to over 150 individual contractors in 46 states and 15 foreign countries, and never articulating a clear vision of the station's value to the US people.
So, explain to me again how doing ourselves would have worked...?
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
The benefits of the space station are minimal compared to the cost to build it.
No offense, Joseph, but this is the same arguement that's been raised since Apollo 11 got home. The basic fact is that we don't have the slightest inkling what could come out of the ISS, especially with the interest in using it as a R&D platform. If the earth-bound Apollo program gave us microcircuitry, tennis shoes, and several insights in both astronomy and medicine, such as reliable CAT scans and better treatments for stroke victims, what might a space-based program develop that we never expected? With the increased freedom of 0g, and the large amount of postulated technology that needs only the correct research environment, especially with building materiels and pharmecuticals, the ISS could bring home a hell of a lot more bacon than a few shots of the martian plateaus.
Now, I am not knocking the Mars programs, and dearly wish to see a man walk upon Mars in my lifetime, but realistically, we need stepping stones, and the ISS is one big step. On the issue of the Mars or other intersystem probes, wouldn't it be nice to have a place to launch them from that didn't involve extrememly tempramental rockets? (If memory serves, 5 payloads were lost last year when Titan III boosters exploded? And I think 2 of those were commercial?)
Could NASA put another man on the Moon?
Probably. But if we want regular missions and expansion, once again the ISS or something similar would be a good waystation/resupply point. Especially with the growth of several movements who want to see a permanent presence on the moon in the next 15-20 years. (That's something that seems to wax and wane every few years, hopefully it will stay high this time.)
Finally, yes, NASA has been harping about Martian life, but the fact that they've been getting more interest from the public lately, even with their screw-ups, is a good thing. When was the last time you saw Newsweek do a NASA cover piece before their spread on the Mars Lander the week we lost contact? Personally, aside from a MIR issue, I can't remember one since Challenger. The fact is, NASA needs more public support if it's going to have a prayer of getting more funding, and if mentioning the possibilty of 100,000,000 year old fungi on Mars and Pyramids at Cydonia Planitia is what gets them that funding, then that's what they have to do to accomplish all these wonderful dreams we have for them.