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NASA Considers Privatizing Space Shuttles
panopticon was among the many who submitted a BBC story talking about NASA considering privatizing the space shuttles as a cost saving measure since those pesky shuttles cost $400M every time we throw one up into orbit. The article really doesn't say much beyond that.
How did it ever get to the point where one of our greatest and proudest institutions needs to privitize one of their greatest resources in order to keep going? Americans everywhere should be ashamed at this rape of our space program, once the envy of the world.
No other country in the world comes close to the US in terms of economic might, and yet it is near-third-world nations like China that are now expanding their space programs as we are selling off ours. Hell, they're even talking about putting men on the moon, something we did once and then got bored with. As a nation we have the attention span of a four year-old child, and about as much forward-thinking. We'd much rather forget about the future (and everything else) and concentrate on our televisions and big honking SUVs, despite the fact that our initial lead in the space race could have been leveraged into an unassailable one.
No, this is just another symptom of the long, slow decline of the US into a narcissistic corporate paradise as the rest of the world forges on ahead of us into the future. It seems the only people here with any kind of enthusiasm are the ones that want to control your lives; everyone would rather let them get on with and have removed the intolerable burden of decision making.
Anyone who read Richard Feynman's report on the Challenger explosion knows the Shuttle design process was flawed from the beginning. Exhaustive testing of material tolerances and other bottom-up procedures used in modern aircraft design were ignored in the Shuttle design process.
It costs so much for every flight because they basically have to rebuild the engine after every run. Parts that were not designed to wear fall apart or develop stress fractures in a single run.
I would support privatization 100% if they would give Boeing or Lockheed a contract to redesign the shuttle based on what we have learned from the current design and its flaws. NASA bureaucratic BS was responsible for allowing many of those flaws to exist. Feynman asked, "Do NASA managers even TALK to the engineers they're managing?" Privatization of maintaining the existing fleet wouldn't save nearly as much money as a new design would.
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In case you "could care less" about this, I would be quick to remind you that its your tax money (if you're indeed a US citizen) and this could potentially save quite a bit of it.
I thought the point is that it isn't our tax money. Instead, the launches will be privatized and the companies who use the services to lauch satellites etc will have to pay the full price. They will then take the risks involved in choosing one bidder over another, and the private organizations will come up with novel ways of increasing their payload/cost efficiency in oreder to maximize their profits or compete effectivly.
I'm not 100% certain that this is a good approach, however.It very difficult for me to understand the economic game plan of the current executive in this country. Subsidizing launches is good for the economy in the way that lower interest rates and tax cuts are good for the economy. It seems like they are pulling with one hand while pushing with the other. Then there is just the factor that spinning off a new industry while the economy is receeding just doesn't seem smart to me. If these were boom times, then I'd be all for it.
-no broken link
The reason no one bought them then, and the reason no one will buy them now, is the horrid expense of launching & reusing them - for example, on return to Earth, the Space Shuttle Main Engines are pulled, shipped to California, rebuilt to spec, and tested for ~75% of their design lifetime - any deviation during this test period results in the engine being scrapped. The Shuttle is an old design, and it wasn't efficient when it was new. Or consider the Solid Rocket Boosters, which actually cost more to retrieve and reuse than disposable boosters would.
Quite. NASA, and it's budgets, are intensely political. The Shuttle camp were enormously influential, helped no doubt by political lobbying and kickbacks from key contractors and vendors, and hamstrung the various SSTO projects, which had the potential for cost effective shuttling between the ground and near-Earth orbits.
The solution is to move all space activity into the private sector. Break up NASA and sell it off if anyone wants it, in an open auction. By all means keep a Federal agency to certify space vehicles as safe to launch (if launches are on US territory), but all the activity carried out in the private sector. If there's a business case for it, we'll have a man on Mars decades before NASA's bureacrats have even filled in the paperwork for that mission.
Of these projects, only Kistler is still standing.
Meanwhile, the joint TRW / LMT / Alenia "AstroLink" project has quietly died. This project was to bring advanced broadband technologies into reality, building a constellation of communications satellites. The decision to terminate this project must be seen as an entirely rational one, in light of falling prices in global telecom capacity.
NASA's Space Shuttle, contrary to public opinion, is not the reason that access to space is expensive. In fact, the Shuttle is not even a market consideration because no commercial entity has the slightest bit of interest in launching payloads on Shuttle.
I'm not sure what will be accomplished by spinning Shuttle off to private enterprise. Here are some hypotheses:
It's probably the right economic decision. NASA cannot hope to make progress on affordable access to space until they can establish a firewall against that drain of money and talent. It is my hope that NASA's space research programs will turn away from operations (missions) and will start research on basic technologies such as materials, propulsion, rail launchers, etc for 'affordable' access to space. Just as NACA's airfoil research laid the foundation for a vibrant and competitive aircraft industry in the 1930's, NASA should develop the foundations of a vibrant and commercially competitive launch industry.
However, I fear for the Shuttle Astronauts. Although NASA's safety record has been good under Goldin, the Shuttle program is already stretched too thin on safety and maintenance. It's an amazing vehicle which requires a standing army to launch it safely.
Not true for all situations - yes, as NASA and the majority of the aerospace industry does it, developing a resuable launch vehicle takes years and costs billions. But there are counter-examples. Take the DC-X (or Delta Clipper or Clipper Graham, whatever). It cost $60 million to build, and was finished on time.
The technology already exists to build a fully reusable LV, with long-life thermal tiles and engines. Such an LV could reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude or more.
Just because NASA can't operate a reusable LV doesn't mean it's "proven to be a mistake".
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Vpered na Mars!