Redirecting NASA

anzha writes "Many people have been sitting and waiting to see what Sean O'Keefe, the new head honcho @NASA, would do with the agency. Would he clean out the temple? Would he simply go through the motions? Spaceref has an interesting article up about what O'Keefe intends for the agency's future. It highlights the changes that are going to happen this year."

Comments

What A Mess...

[cybrpnk2]

Basically we are going "back to the future" under the new NASA plan. Money that was supposed to go to a next-generation Space Shuttle is being divided up into three piles - one to support current shuttle ops, one to support current Space Station ops, and one to build a glorified Apollo capsule with wings that can be launched on expendable Delta and Atlas rockets. So in 2015 we are going to fly three guys on an expendable rocket - just like we did in last did in 1975, 40 years before. Folks, this is NOT how to get back to the moon and on to Mars....

Re:What A Mess...

[smagoun]

At the risk of sounding like a troll, do you have a better idea? Seriously, I don't know much about the space program, and the Saturn V seemed to get the job done for a lot less than the current shuttle costs (let alone the cost of a new one). SSTO is a nice dream, but it seems to me that tried-and-true is what we need right now.

Re:What A Mess...

[simong_oz]

Absolutely correct - a complete step sideways, with no forward motion at all. Where is the daring? The exploration? The pushing of boundaries? The capturing of public imagination? These are the sorts of feelings that (space) exploration should evoke.

I have been saying for ages that the this will never change while we live in the current age of cost-effectiveness and results(=profit)-now-not-tomorrow.

Go and read about the voyages of people like Shackleton (go see the IMAX film!), Mallory, Scott, Cook, Columbus - these expeditions captured the public imagination and were quite daring for their time.

No matter what some might think, we don't have the technology right now to put a man on Mars (and bring him - or her - home). It's not just 'a bit further than the moon', there is a lot more involved. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try and develop that technology.

I find it a sad statement on today's world that NASA is not allowed to have a vision.

Re:What A Mess...

[Cujo]

Yes, a mess. A very good, insightful article, but so painful to read. The tail is wagging the dog all over the place at NASA right now. The main problems as I see them are the palpable presence of the grevious absence of vision and courage, great lumbering dinosaurs consuming nearly all the budget, and the numerous little piggies who scramble to feed at the trough very time a new budget line item opens up.

Albatross!

Re:What A Mess...

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Yeah, well the reusable idea has been a resounding success. The vehicles are cheaper, less maintenance, quicker turnaround and totally reliable and are able to reach amazingly high orbits.

He, he he. Who am I kidding? Actually none of the above. Saturn V was actually 4x cheaper than the Shuttle per kg; and that was expendable. The Russian vehicles launch for about 1/20 of the cost of the Shuttle, and they're expendable.

Studies have shown that cheap expendables can cost as little as $500/kg, cf $20000/kg with the Shuttle.

And its not high tech, its the money stoopid, that is holding back Moon and Mars. We have the technology.

Re:What A Mess...

[cybrpnk2]

Whatever we do has GOT to be based on our Number One resource, the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME). This is an absolutely FANTASTIC piece of machinery that is as much an American Classic as a 1964 Mustang convertible. A Saturn 5 launched with five F-1 engines that burned liquid oxygen and kerosene - got the job done, but by far not the most efficient chemical reaction to get the job done. Thus it needed to be MUCH bigger and carry LOTS more fuel. The SSME burns liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen which is MUCH more chemically efficient - you get LOTS more energy out of much LESS fuel. In fact, the liquid oxygen / liquid hydrogen combination, and the way the SSME burns it at an almost theoretically perfect specific impulse of 480 seconds, is the BEST chemical propulsion engine that is EVER going to be built. They will still be using SSMEs in Star Trek time - Scotty would sing their praises. You can't build a "better" rocket engine than the SSME unless you go nuclear - and in our current political environment, development of a nuclear rocket seems doubtful. (Proposed changes to the turbopumps and heat exchangers address RELIABILITY concerns, not ENGINEERING IMPROVEMENTS...). So any plan to get out of Earth orbit has first GOT to include SSMEs as the core component...

The next step in an improved NASA is to use SSMEs WISELY. Here's the facts. Conquering the solar system is a numbers game. You've got to put up infrastructure to do the job you want done and that infrastructure is first and foremost WEIGHT. A good space program by definition gets the maximum infrastructure weight into space - the more you've got up there, the more you can do.

Now look at what NASA has done with the shuttle. Every Shuttle launch has three dry weights of interest - a payload weight of 20,000 pounds, an Orbiter dry weight of 180,000 pounds and an External tank empty weight of 80,000 pounds. The payload gets left in orbit. The Orbiter achieves orbital velocity and then gives that hard-won velocity up to land on a runway. The External Tank acheives 97% of orbital velocity and then is allowed to burn up and crash into the Indian Ocean because NASA has no ability established to use an ET in orbit if they went ahead and put it there - which NASA could, they just don't. So far there's been around 110 shuttle flights.

So what has NASA done with the SSMEs it's flown so far? They (could have) left 20,000 * 110 = 2.2 million pounds in orbit, they've put 80,000 * 110 = 8.8 million pounds into the Indian Ocean and they've brought 180,000 * 110 = 19.8 million pounds BACK from orbit and landed it on a runway. Of the 30.8 million pounds launched by NASA using SSMEs that could have been placed in orbit and left there, only 2.2 million pounds actuall WAS - only around 7%. So 93% of what SSMEs actually sent to orbit NEVER GOT TO STAY THERE under current NASA utilization policies....

Because of its greater efficiency, the Space Shuttle is capable of putting as much mass into low earth orbit as an old Saturn 5. The problem is that 93% of the weight put up by a space shuttle COMES BACK AND LANDS ON A RUNWAY OR FALLS IN THE INDIAN OCEAN. This is STUPID. The dream of the 1970s or routine cheap Shuttle flights with astronauts being a combination of an interstate trucker crossed with a souped-up fighter/test/commercial pilots HAS NOT COME TRUE and NASA MUST ABANDON THIS DREAM TO PROGRESS. Shuttle launches are SO expensive and the on-orbit stay time is SO limited (a week or maybe two if you REALLY stretch it) and the destination so boring (low Earth orbit) that there is NOTHING an astronaut can do in a week that's worth the cost of putting her there to do it.

Bottom line - NASA needs to abandon the manned-flight tunnel vision mentality it currently has and build an expendable heavy lift unmanned cargo vehicle based on SSMEs that it can fly IN CONJUNCTION WITH existing manned Shuttle flights. The sooner NASA acknowledges this, the sooner we can conquer the solar system...

Re:What A Mess...

[ausoleil]

>We have the technology

We also supposedly have an operation Saturn V stashed at Stennis Space Center.

Re:What A Mess...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Space Islands Project -- their website looks defunct now, but what a terrific idea! Great post, by the way!

Re:What A Mess...

[silentbozo]

The shuttle fleet is made up of damn prototypes. That's all they are - they were never meant to operate as a long term fleet, but were meant instead to serve as a testbed for the next generation of orbital lift vehicles, which would build upon the lessons of the shuttle, and maximize operating efficiency. As as a consequence, we end up rebuilding the damn things after every launch, none of the shuttles are completely standardized with any of the other shuttles, and we have no cargo-only module (meaning we waste payload space on crew and required life support/recovery equipment.) Oh, and by the way, did I mention how goddamn expensive it is to recover and rebuild all the damn components?

Right now, they're re-welding the hydrogen feed lines, and a recent launch was scrubbed because they were leaking oxygen, despite having inspected the feed lines. I'd rather we move to using Russian spacecraft if we want to go back to big dumb boosters. Unfortunately, it looks like the "new" NASA budget will be pork-barreled to death to preserve congressional influence in funding current programs (shuttle, space station, token amount to new lift capability so they can claim research into new technologies.) The sad consequence of this is that the Chinese will probably have better heavy lift capability than we do before the end of the decade is out, despite having a 30 year disadvantage, and restrictions on US technology transfers...

Re:What A Mess...

[cybrpnk2]

There are three Saturn 5 flight vehicles - one at the Space and Rocket Museum in Huntsville AL (where I live), one outside Johnson Space Center in Houston, and one at the Banana Creek Viewing Site at Kennedy Space Center, the closest you can get to watch a Shuttle launch. The ones in Alabama and Texas have been stored outdoors in the rain and sun and you would have to scrape tons of bird poop off of them to send them to the moon - basically, no way those puppies are ever gonna be launch-worthy. The one in Florida is BEAUTIFULLY preserved indoors - but still, even if a meteor was gonna hit Earth and it were an emergency, I'll bet you'd find it couldn't be made ready to fly no matter how motivated you were.

Re:What A Mess...

[archen]

I think that the daring and exploration needs to take a step back into the realm of trying to become a little more practical. Right now the main way to get into space is a vertical take-off with gigantic booster rockets - which cannot launch if there is even the slightest bad weather, and from only 2 (if memory serves me correctly) launch sites. Until we can find a better way to get into space on average without making each launch a monumental undertaking, I think we need to hold back on the exploration part.

That said, can someone tell me why we don't have a moon base? Everyone talks about sending someone to Mars, but what about the moon? It's fairly close by, and could easily maintain contact with the earth. Has a small amount of it's own gravity which I'm sure would simplify things compared to a space station. We have a relatively alien world on our doorstep yet we refuse to actually set people down on it and explore it. Am I missing something?

Re:What A Mess...

[uncoveror]

The Saturn V is a much older technology than the shuttle, but the X-4000 Launch Aparatus is medieval. THey will develop it instead of SSTO, which will never happen because it would cost too much.

Re:What A Mess...

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad consequence of this is that the Chinese will probably have better heavy lift capability than we do before the end of the decade is out, despite having a 30 year disadvantage, and restrictions on US technology transfers...

Maybe that is what it will take for NASA to move forward. Look what competition with the russians did for us in the 50-60s. Maybe the Chinese "threat" could give us a much needed kick in the rump.

Re:What A Mess...

[hyperturbopete]

mmmm. More like $5000 per kg ballpark for cheap launch vehicles. (which is still much less than shuttle)

Also it depends on what orbit you're launching into- big cost difference for Geosynchronous (comm sats) vs Low Earth Orbit (everything else). However, shuttle has lots of goodies that justify the extra cost -- robot arm, big cargo capacity, can take lots of people, is piloted, etc.

The ISS, on the other hand, eats up lots of $$$. I've heard scientists say you would get vastly more for your money by paying for individual launches for each project that would go on the ISS (i.e., ROI of the ISS doesnt nearly justify its cost)

Re:What A Mess...

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you live in or near Canoga Park, Clifornia.

Re:What A Mess...

[gorilla]

The ultimate answer is that the Shuttle was a huge mistake. It put a break in the space program from 1973 to 1984, which caused the loss of Skylab, and it's still much more expensive & limited than conventional expandable rockets.

Re:What A Mess...

[Chris Y Taylor]

The SSME? are you nuts? The SSME is far too complicated for what it needs to be with current technology. I agree that it is nice to take an evolutionary approach to rocket engine design, so that your reliability stays high, but IF we stay with H2 as the fuel it would certainly be worthwhile to go to something like an SSME 2:the sequel. Redesign it with current materials and manufacturing technology. Greatly reduce the part count to reduce failure modes. And, of course, take into account lessons learned on the Classic SSME. That assumes we stay with H2. Kerosene is still not dead, and might be the better choice. ISP is lower, but so is tankage. I'm not saying anything new, of course; just making the point that we don't want to stick with the current SSME.

Re:What A Mess...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you point me toward any of these studies showing lower launch costs?

I was trying to find information on such initiatives last month and couldn't find much.

The real key to anything we do in space is going to be $/kg to LEO. We really need to get down to $1k/kg for projects to really "take off."

Re:What A Mess...

[cybercuzco]

Ive heard the "keep the ET in orbit" bit alot. What are you going to do with it? Its a big empty tank. You could fill it up with oxygen and hydrogen again, except that its very hard to pump flids on orbit. You could use it as a habitat. Ok first you would have to empty out all the residual propellants, hard to do because of the pumping issues. Next you would have to make it habitable, which means cutting a hole in it for at least a door, hauling up an airlock, and welding it into place. Then you need to haul up all the internals, life support, etc. Third you could melt it down and use the metal. All you need is an on orbit smelting facility, and factory to manufacture stuff out of the metal.

On the other hand, youre absolutely right about the cargo bit. The ET/SSME/booster combo can launch over 100 tons into LEO, but the cargo capacity of the shuttle is only about 25 tons. So straight away you can reduce your launch costs by a factor of four by making a cargo pod instead of a shuttle.

Re:What A Mess...

[WolfWithoutAClause]

mmmm. More like $5000 per kg ballpark for cheap launch vehicles. (which is still much less than shuttle)

No. Russian Proton is about $2500/kg right now to LEO. Sea Launch is about the same. Ariane is nearer to Space Shuttle costs per kg, but that's a geosynchronous launcher whereas Shuttle can only make LEO.

My rule of thumb is that Geosynchronous is about 3x more expensive than LEO; since you need more than 3 the payload at LEO to be fuel for a kick motor to push you up the last bit into GEO (an additional 3.8 km/s).

Re:What A Mess...

[Steve Franklin]

"The Space Islands Project [cyberg8t.com] -- their website looks defunct now, but what a terrific idea! Great post, by the way!"

This makes SO much sense! And imagine what you could do if you redesigned the engines to make them even more practical building blocks. You'd think that usage of these virtually free resources would have been designed into the project from the very beginning. And think of what you could do if a little effort were made to reuse some of the "expendable" junk launched into orbit every year. One begins to wonder if the whole point of NASA isn't to spend vast quantities of money on pet projects that enrich favored contractors at the expense of real exploration. But that's another episode....

Re:What A Mess...

[Winged Cat]

You're comparing optimized, theoretical expendables vs. unoptimized but actually deployed reusable. Unoptimized varies by degree of unoptimization, but in theory, optimized (cheap) reusables could get down to $100/kg or less.

Re:What A Mess...

[cybrpnk2]

I've got no problem with SSME2:The Sequel. Certainly there are a lot of new alloys and computer gear and stuff that could be integrated into it...but that stuff is in the same category as the turbopump upgrades and heat exchanger upgrades...it is for reliability and cost, not performance. The SSME is currently optimized for perfomance. Plus, there has to be a warehouse of (admittedly overly-complex) SSME Classics that have accumulated over the past twenty years that are no longer man-rated after 10 or 15 flights but have still got one last flight left in them as components in a one-way expendable heavy lift vehicle...for a Mars ship...if we only had the nerve and will and vision...

Re:What A Mess...

[cybrpnk2]

And the majority of the cargo capacity of 25 tons is never used - half of it winds up being cradle weight supporting the other half that is TRULY payload that and get left in orbit.

And then there is the absolutely CRIMINAL hit on payload weight the Shuttle takes to get to the Space Station orbit. The Space Station was originally planned to be flown in what's called a 28 degree inclined orbit - that's the orbit you get to if you launch due east out of Florida, which is at 28 degrees North latitude, and is the max payload launch profile for the Shuttle. Fly it in any other direction out of Florida than due east and the total payload weight that can be carried is reduced. So when the Cold War ended and we "invited" the Russians to join us in the Space Station project, THE BASELINE SPACE STATION ORBIT WAS CHANGED FROM 28 DEGREE INCLINED TO 53 DEGREE INCLINED SO THE RUSSIANS COULD GET TO IT FROM RUSSIAN LAUNCH SITES. This was a TECHNICAL DEATHKNELL FOR SPACE STATION - IT WAS A POLITICAL SHOWCASE AND ONLY A POLITICAL SHOWCASE FROM THAT DECISION FORWARD. PERIOD. I DEFY ANYBODY IN NASA TO CONTRADICT THAT STATEMENT. OOOOOOhhhhh, it gets my blood pressure up just thinking about it.

Now instead of flying due east out of Florida and carrying 25 tons of payload to the Space Station, the Shuttle launches UP THE EAST COAST OF THE US AND FLYS OVER CAPE HATTERAS NORTH CAROLINA to get only 10 TONS to the space station. Want to know why there's only three crew and no science? Because by inviting the Russians to join we killed 60% of our ability to get Space Station infrastructure in place - crew, equipment, supplies. So there's just a skeleton crew aboard a ghost ship. And the public has NO IDEA how stupid this all is, NASA just keeps feeding them pretty videos of their Space Heros...

Re:What A Mess...

[silentbozo]

We feared the Soviets. Their launching of the first artificial satellite scared the shit out of the American populace, and further enhanced the boogeyman image of the Soviets, pulling ahead of us in terms of military might, scientific knowledge, "superior society", and expansion via sympathetic regimes/revolution. Our increase in engineers and scientists can be traced to the increased emphasis on science and engineering to "beat the Soviets." Now that the Soviet threat is gone, people are happy being stupid.

China is a different story. Most people here in the US really don't take them seriously as a threat. Hell we buy most of our goods from them, and that trend will only increase, given the low labor costs and the high amounts of foreign investment in China. Unless China does something stupid, like try and conquer Korea and Taiwan, nobody here will consider them a threat worth competing with. Ergo, if they get to the moon, we'll just yawn, and continue ceeding the future of mankind to them.

Re:What A Mess...

[n3uxf]

This all goes back to the old mentality of "cheaper, better, faster" that NASA used under the Golden administration. Well, they got the faster and cheaper parts right. Becasue of the rush to complete missions, many details were often overlooked. I had a brief tenrure at Langley in VA ond got to listen to several lectures relating to the Mars missions and how they were adversely affected by the "cheaper better faster" approach. Basically they got the cheaper and faster, but forgot entirely about the better.

It is also related to as to the demise of the space shuttle replacement, the X-33/X-34. That project was not cheap, already putting in over a billion dollars (if I remember correctly) in R&D. There was an actual protoype at Langley that one of my colleagues worked with. Was this a better solution to the current space shuttle? Quite possibly, but we will never know because of the monetary monstrosity the system became. (Don't even get me started on how much it cost to get a new pc connected to the main network...the IT department charged $500/per connection for them to run a patch cable from the router/seitch/etc to the new pc. Absolutely ridiculous!)

Re:What A Mess...

[WolfWithoutAClause]

No, my analysis has nothing to do with optimisation- all rockets are pretty highly optimised.

The issue is more to do with flight rate. Reusables are several times more expensive to design, and tend to have less payload, (everything else being equal, because they have to be stronger to survive being reused).

Therefore to make them cost effective you have to reuse them many times to recoup the extra investment.

The offset for this is that the cost of the hardware itself is amortised over each reuse. So if the hardware costs $10 million, then if you reuse it 100 times, it only costs $100,000 per launch. Likewise the development costs.

But typically most launchers only launch 5-10 times per year, so the flightrate isn't there right now- it would take 10 years to recoup the extra development cost, and then there is interest on top...

In contrast, a cheap expendable can be knocked out very cheaply, and at these launch rates it's a win to do that, alas.

Re:What A Mess...

[Anonymous Coward]

Has a small amount of it's own gravity

I believe it still has all of its own gravity.

Re:What A Mess...

[fredrik70]

Well, the ISS is also a learning platform for how to deal with prolonged time in space. much needed for a mars mission when the austronauts has to stay in microgravity for about a 1/2 - 2 years (correct number?). We also learn how to assemble larger structures in space, which also probably will be needed for a mars (and beyond!) mission.

Yes, shuttle comes with lots of goodies and can do lots of stuff that other launchers can't in terms of research. But just using it as a 'truck' just to move heavy stuff into orbit doesn't seem to make the best use of it, something like the russian launch vehicle seems more appropriate then.
just my 0.02 euros

Re:What A Mess...

[timeOday]

That raises an intesting question then... what and when will be the Chinese Sputnik - the moment at which it strikes home that we're losing?

Re:What A Mess...

[spike hay]

But typically most launchers only launch 5-10 times per year, so the flightrate isn't there right now- it would take 10 years to recoup the extra development cost, and then there is interest on top...

In contrast, a cheap expendable can be knocked out very cheaply, and at these launch rates it's a win to do that, alas.

On the other side of the coin, expendables also become very cheap if you launch frequently. (~1x per day or more) The way it is now, you only have a very few launches. For example, Arianes launch about every 3 weeks. You are not mass producing the rockets. It's like having your car built from scratch by a team of mechanics and machinists.

If you have a large amount of rockets being launched, you can have great cost savings through mass production,

Re:What A Mess...

[spike hay]

Oh, also, you can reduce costs a lot by having cheap infrastructure. The shuttle has thousands of people working on it just to prepare for the occasional launch. If you reduced things by cutting it down to a team of mechanics checking the safety of the rocket, a few launch controllers, and some various other people, you could reduce launch costs even further.

If you only had 150 people working to launch a good sized rocked instead of 10,000, you would save a lot of money, obviously.

Re:What A Mess...

[WolfWithoutAClause]

The SSME burns liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen which is MUCH more chemically efficient - you get LOTS more energy out of much LESS fuel. In fact, the liquid oxygen / liquid hydrogen combination, and the way the SSME burns it at an almost theoretically perfect specific impulse of 480 seconds, is the BEST chemical propulsion engine that is EVER going to be built.

The latest studies have show that for a first stage- LOX/Kerosene outperforms LOX/LH. There are lots of reasons for this:

a) the density of LH is really very poor indeed

b) (consequently) the thrust to weight ratio of LH engines is worse, kerosene gives much more thrust for the same weight

c) the weight of the vehicle goes down more slowly with LH, this increases 'gravity losses'

d) the density of Kerosene is very high

Anyway, bottom line is: LOX/Kero needs less delta-v than LOX/LH to get to orbit by about 6%. However, it doesn't give as much thrust per unit weight. But the density is 5x higher, which means that it is much easier to pack more fuel into the tanks to compensate. Once you realise that LH is more than 5x more expensive, and many, many times harder to handle then you start to seriously wonder why the Space Shuttle uses LH.

LH is good for upper stages though- the reduction in stage weight makes the lower stages smaller.

They will still be using SSMEs in Star Trek time - Scotty would sing their praises.

They may be good for deep space work. They're not as good as LOX/Kero for launching however.

Re:What A Mess...

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Yeah well, the fact that NASA didn't have an air reprocessing plant and would have had to spend more than a billion (plus overruns) designing one doesn't exactly inspire confidence that America could have gone it alone. The Russians had one from off the shelf they could use. Don't forget the Russians have been in space continuously for 30 years. NASA haven't. There's plenty of things that the Russians have realised that NASA haven't (like it's a bad idea to toss liquids overboard in space cos it condenses and jams the docking ports). And the Russians probably could have launched their entire section on one Energia if they had been allowed to. America has nothing that big.

Re:What A Mess...

[silentbozo]

The instant they put up an orbital weapons platform capable of negating US nuclear superiority. Of course, when that event occurs, we'll be screwed beyond all hope of rescue (unless we have big frickin "lasers" by then that actually work on ballistic missiles...)

Re:What A Mess...

[cybrpnk2]

I agree that kerosene has density and especially cost advantages over liquid hydrogen, and that, for launches from Earth-based facilities to low earth orbit, LOX-kerosene could indeed be a viable alternative. For solar system exploration, tho, LOX-liquid hydrogen is king for two reasons. One, it IS the lowest mass alternative when it's done right, and on planetary missions "lowest possible weight" is a BIG deal. Two, if you take along a small nuclear reactor to generate electricity for hydrolosis (sp?), you can refuel a LOX-liquid hydrogen engine anywhere in the solar system you can find water ice - the poles of the Moon or Mars, Europa, comets, lots of places. There ain't no kerosene out there.

Re:What A Mess...

[WolfWithoutAClause]

For solar system exploration, tho, LOX-liquid hydrogen is king for two reasons. One, it IS the lowest mass alternative when it's done right, and on planetary missions "lowest possible weight" is a BIG deal.

If you're worried about weight; then ion drives do much better (particularly Hall effect thrusters, ISP about 1500s). I think long term VASIMR is the way to go though (ISP 20000s); but its a waste of time right now IMHO.

Two, if you take along a small nuclear reactor to generate electricity for hydrolosis (sp?), you can refuel a LOX-liquid hydrogen engine anywhere in the solar system you can find water ice - the poles of the Moon or Mars, Europa, comets, lots of places. There ain't no kerosene out there.

That's not a small reactor that's a large one; and generating electricity is hard because getting rid of the waste heat is awkward in a vacuum. If you get off the Earth, the ISP needed goes down considerably. You should check out www.neofuel.com he talks about a nuclear/solar powered stean rocket, ISP is only about 190s but the system mass is orders of magnitude lower; you don't need such high ISP if you can refuel.

Re:What A Mess...

[cybrpnk2]

I agree that as soon as you open the door to ion or nuclear rockets as SSME replacements then the whole ballgame changes for the better. The problem is, I was kinda hoping to see a moonbase and manned Mars mission and first steps to expanding on into the solar system in my lifetime. SSMEs could do that NOW. If we wait for ion or nuclear to be developed in the cash-starved NASA environment dominated by ISS we have today, it's gonna be another twenty years before we even START to develop nuclear/ion/VASIMR as a viable manned system as opposed to lab toys and small prototypes on Deep Space One. By that time the RUSH OF EXCITEMENT that was the REAL fuel behind Apollo will be long gone...and whatever the driving force is behind planetary expansion is at that time (if it happens at all), I won't be here to see it...

Re:What A Mess...

[simong_oz]

I was kinda hoping to see a moonbase and manned Mars mission and first steps to expanding on into the solar system in my lifetime.

I'm not going to start argueing the technical details because others clearly know a shitload more than me about that. BUT, there is one thing that I think a lot of people are forgetting (or are not aware of?) when they talk about a manned mission to mars, or a moon base for that matter. We may have the technology (and it will only improve with time), but one of the biggest obstacles to these sorts of missions is the human element. After all, the thing we all want to see is a human standing on Mars.

And that is one of the things that the ISS is allowing us to do - spend extended periods of time working in very low gravity and working out things like bone density loss. Even now, the longest stay in low gravity (by russian cosmonauts) is still less than half what would be required for a 'short stay' mission to mars (about 600 days round trip), and much less than the long stay trajectory (about 900+ days). And you also have to consider the psychological stresses and implications of spending that length of time cooped up with the same people, and away from earth.

and whatever the driving force is behind planetary expansion is at that time (if it happens at all), I won't be here to see it...

Don't lose heart - as long as people dream about it there is always a chance!

Re:What A Mess...

[Moofie]

I take issue with your contention that the technology to get to Mars and return safely does not exist. What parts of the puzzle are missing?

If you're interested in the topic, check out Robert Zubrin's "The Case for Mars", significant fractions of which are available at http://www.marssociety.org for free (beer).

Re:What A Mess...

[Moofie]

ISS is a waste of NASA's budget. Russia has plenty of experience keeping cosmonauts relatively healthy for long-duration spaceflight. Trying to justify the ISS for "biomedical research" is silly.

Shuttle's a boondoggle for the vast majority of its flights, too. It is not well utilized as a giant delivery van.

There's a plan (that I've advocated before) that doesn't take any Battlestar Galactica on-orbit assembly for getting to Mars. It also has the (optional) facility for flying the whole mission under "spin" gravity, by attaching the crew module to the spent booster rocket via a long tether, and spinning the whole contraption like a bola. Makes navigation a little more interesting, but that's a soluble problem.

http://www.marssociety.org. Check out "Mars Direct".

Re:What A Mess...

[morridx]

Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.

Re:What A Mess...

[simong_oz]

What I was referring to was specifically the technology to put a human on Mars and the safely bring them home without any long term adverse effects on the person.

I would agree that the technology to send a person to Mars and return them exists, but there are very big questions about exposing a human to very low gravity for such lengths of time and the effects this would have on the human body. For example, the degradation of bone density over long periods of time is a big problem. Consider that a Mars mission would last about 600 days minimum (short stay trajectory), and the longest single stay is space so far is a little over 400 days, and there are only a handful of people who have been in space for long periods of time. This is the 'technology' to which I was referring, possibly not very well in hindsight!

I have read The Case for Mars and would also recommend it to anyone interested (as I definitely am).

Re:What A Mess...

[Winged Cat]

No, my analysis has nothing to do with optimisation- all rockets are pretty highly optimised.

For certain things, perhaps, but they're not all optimized for cost. The Space Shuttle is a case in point.

Though, I agree with the rest of what you say. It's a catch 21, though: we're not going to get a high flight rate with expensive rockets, and it's hard to make rockets cheap without high flight rates. There are ways out of this (I'm working on one), but again, it's not easy.

Re:What A Mess...

[Anonymous Coward]

Go and read about the voyages of people like Shackleton (go see the IMAX film!), Mallory, Scott, Cook, Columbus - these expeditions captured the public imagination and were quite daring for their time.

I don't know about the others, but Cook and Columbus were only in it for the money. They both wanted to set up trade routes. They didn't care about the notoriety or the philanthropy of exploring new frontiers. They just wanted the fortunes which could be had in the lands they *thought* they were going to.

Re:What A Mess...

[Moofie]

Right.

So do as Zubrin suggests, and tether the crew module to the spent upper stage and spin the whole thing.

This zero-gee dragon is not a showstopper. Zubrin spent the better part of a chapter explaining how this is not nearly as big a deal as anti-space exploration grognards want it to be.

And, while we're at it, define "safely". Exploration isn't a "safe" activity. There are STILL people who will examine the risks and choose to accept them. Why get in their way?

Re:What A Mess...

[Wolfrider]

Dude, too much SHOUTING! (covers ears)

Your ideas seem sound, but PLEASE limit the use of your caps...
.

Re:What A Mess...

[Anonymous Coward]

With all due respect, it's already there. It's called the Energia rocket, courtesy of the Soviet Union.

http://www.k26.com/buran/

As much as it does look like a space shuttle ripoff (and the orbiter's fuselage admittedly is) what you have there is something that is 100% reusable, runs on cheap kerosene (!) and has more carrying capacity than the shuttle. And you can carry people on it, BUT YOU DON'T HAVE TO (the only Buran flight was 100% automated).

What I'd like to see...

[foistboinder]

Either scrap the manned program and put the money into unmanned exploration. Or keep the manned program, but do something other than dinking around in low earth orbit.

Re:What I'd like to see...

[Random Addict]

foistboinder wrote:
Either scrap the manned program and put the money into unmanned exploration. Or keep the manned program, but do something other than dinking around in low earth orbit.

I don't think scrapping the unmanned program entirely is a good idea. After all, if we are ever going to actually make use of the resources in space we've got to have people up there making decisions in real time. If we ever get to even Mars, things will be happening too quickly for us to be able to afford the lag time for remote control radio signals to get there, do their thing, then wait for the results to make their way back. Unmanned infrastructure work in LEO might be the better way to go, as long as we keep in mind future manned expeditions.

Also, we have to start bringing stuff back that we didn't have before, materials to provide real additional wealth. We know the asteroids contain many tons of iron, for example. We also know they contain an indeterminate amount of far more valuable stuff, like platinum, iridium, etc. And it may not be necessary to get as far as the asteroid belt to exploit these facts either. A few years ago, there was a news story about an asteroid that actually passed between the Moon's orbit and Earth. Some of those suckers are already coming into our neighborhood, it's time we started thinking about how we could use them.

Re:What I'd like to see...

[foistboinder]

Unmanned infrastructure work in LEO might be the better way to go, as long as we keep in mind future manned expeditions.

That's the problem - right now the space station is an end unto itself, essentially rehashing the past stuff that's already been over the past 30 years. And with the cutbacks, that's not likely to change.

ISS?

[jamesjw]

I'd like to see more done with the International Space Station, certainly some potential there for related space exploration.

Where the funding ends up is anyoens guess though..

Rock + hard place?

[gravelpup]

Three points of note:

1) Increase shuttle flight rate (to ISS) to 5 flights a year.

2) Extend shuttle lifetime, possibly by as much as 10 years.

3) Upgrade current shuttle fleet.

Are these goals mutually exclusive, or what? The current round of shuttle upgrades pulls one shuttle out of service for a year, leaving only two that can fly to the ISS. Turnaround time for a shuttle is somewhere around 3 months, BEFORE you factor in all the delays. Finally, if the flight rate is increased, won't that lower the life expectancy of the vehicles?

Re:Rock + hard place?

[democritus]

Aren't there four operational shuttles?

Discovery
Atlantis
Endevour
Columbia

Re:Rock + hard place?

[jsewell]

Columbia is too heavy to go to the ISS.

And you spelled "Endeavour" wrong...

Re:Rock + hard place?

[A Bugg]

it may be too heavy for all i know but even if columbia wasn't it doesn't have the required docking equipment to dock with ISS.
a bugg

Re:Rock + hard place?

[Anonymous Coward]

Columbia is headed to the ISS on STS-118 in October, 2003 to install the S5 truss.

It can't carry the heavy payloads, but it can fly ISS missions if equipped with the external airlock and docking adapter.

Re:Rock + hard place?

[fredrik70]

Columbia has been renovated, should be able to get there now. Look here!

Why New Tech?

[Omkar]

Granted, new technology is cool and good in the long run, but what we need to do now is to make space transport (and travel, such as it is) cheaper. We could learn a couple things from the Russians' effective 'big dumb booster' approach.

Re:Why New Tech?

[foistboinder]

We could learn a couple things from the Russians' effective 'big dumb booster' approach.

Of course we had a really good "big dumb booster" and abandoned it. Anyone remember the Saturn V and Saturn 1B?

Re:Why New Tech?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reid Malenfant, is that you?

Re:Why New Tech?

[pomakis]

The Saturn V was anything but cheap! Just to build one of those suckers costs $630,000,000. It was probably the most expensive single-use rocket ever built!

Re:Why New Tech?

[turgid]

The way to make space transport cheaper is by more efficient rocket engines, lighter vehicles, better propellants, single single stage to orbit etc. i.e. new technology. One such project was the X33. That got canned :-(

Re:Why New Tech?

[WolfWithoutAClause]

That's not much more than the Space Shuttle; in fact the Space Shuttle is arguably more expensive. But the Saturn V payload to LEO was 100 tonnes compared to 25 tonnes that the space shuttle manages.

So it's 4x cheaper in fact.

Re:Why New Tech?

[silentbozo]

Question is, even if we wanted to put the Saturn V back into operation, do we have the institutional know-how to do it? I expect most of the engineers from the original program have long been retired, or (in case of some of the older ones) probably deceased. Sure we may have the plans, but without people who know what the hell they're doing, you can be there WILL be catestrophic failures... which will be VERY ugly with a 100 ton payload. Jeez, do we even have any contractors who are qualified to build the beast? What about subcontractors???

Too bad we're not spending more on space exploration (exploitation) - it'd be a great way to employ a lot of very skilled workers, instead of letting them disperse to designing webpages, or teaching basic high school math as probationary teachers...

Re:Why New Tech?

[mikerich]

The Russians have a whole stack of the much more modern Energia boosters sitting at Baikonur. That's 100 tonnes straight into orbit - and they'd love the hard cash.

If NASA needs a big rocket, why not go to the people who have most experience? They're already willing to use Soviet engines on the Atlas V, so it can't be pride.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Re:Why New Tech?

[WolfWithoutAClause]

No. You've missed the point really. The point isn't that Saturn V is cheaper, it was about mid-priced, it's that expendables, at todays launch rates, are cheaper.

The cheapest expendables designed use, strangely enough, ship-building skills. So the skills are out there, for constructing these vehicles.

Re:Why New Tech?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong.

The solution is to lower operational costs. Most of the cost of a shuttle launch is in paying the >10,000 people for the 6 months it takes to prepare the thing for launch. We should be willing to sacrifice efficiency in the name of simplicity and reliability, because that means we need less personnel, and that's what makes it cheaper.

Consider the DC-X, which cost $60 million, and flew repeatedly for almost nothing with a team of 25 engineers, vs. X-33, which cost $2 billion and FAILED at that, with thousands of people working on it. NASA should build vehicles like the DC-X, not the X-33.

Re:Why New Tech?

[silentbozo]

I wholeheartedly agree. The Russians have plenty of space hardware available for cheap - but you have to understand, that NASA is really all about politics right now. If the congresscritters don't get their pork-barrel allocation out of the NASA budget, they get cranky, and start stamping their feet. If I were in charge of NASA, the first thing I'd do is negotiate a bulk purchase of rockets, and needed consultants. The private sector has the right idea - they use Russian tech to launch comsats into space, and we use Russian tech to launch the resupply missions to the ISS (ie the escape pod.) Thanks for the link on the big boosters. It's a shame to let that kind of heavy lift capability lie fallow [Energia boosters]:

Payload from Baikonur

95-100 tons to 51-degree LEO
18 tons to geostationary orbit
32 tons to the lunar transfer
28 tons to Venus and Mars

NASA and materials research

[Spyffe]

The International Space Station initiative is a great idea, but I'd like to see it used more intensively for space materials research.

If we could have scientists actually up there developing new crystalline materials, and then NASA could sell them on the open market, maybe some of its funding problems would disappear!

If NASA is going to depend on the charity of the White House and Congress, their budget is going to be cut out of existence. Better to help themselves by being a little bit market-savvy.

clarification

[Spyffe]

...and then NASA could sell them on the open market...

By them I mean the materials, not the scientists :^)

What a waste

[Anonymous Coward]

All this funding and planning and still there's no talk whatsoever of extensive research into sex in zero-g.

What's the point of having a space program if it doesn't do things that will make for better cartoons in Hustler???

Re:What a waste

[Anonymous Coward]

They have shot IMAX movies up there, why haven't they done Playboy there. Send some hot chicks up to the ISS and a lot more people will become interested.

Plus fix the audio link between space and Earth. Come on, cell phones have better service.

Re:What a waste

[Arthur Dent]

Actually there is.

Check this out.

:)

Re:What a waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Privately-owened "hobbyists" have provided an acceptible stopgap. See here. There were also two sequels.

Thank God for the free market!

Other head of NASA

[AntiFreeze]

Apparently not many people know this, but as I understand it, the Vice President of the United States is in charge of NASA.

NASA is not an independent agency like the FDA or FCC, which have their own agency hierarchy and don't really take orders directly from the White House. I'm not exactly sure how NASA was formed (I would assume through an act of Congress) but however it was formed, it was made responsible to the office of the Vice President.

The Vice President does not need to get involved with NASA at all, and could let it function independently if he so wished, but he has the power to control it. After the 2000 election, I was wondering what Cheney might do with NASA, because his party has been pretty vocal about wanting to spend money elsewhere, but he had a somewhat calmer voice. It seems like the cooler head (ack, am I really calling Cheney a cooler head?) prevailled, for I haven't seen changes in NASA like I expected to when Bush took over the White House. Maybe the real test is to see what happens come inaugurations in January, or later this month when the dead-heat in the Senate is broken.

Re:Other head of NASA

[paiute]

So the ISS was the "secure and undisclosed location"?

NASA is actually doing the right thing

[Jack Wagner]

I did some minor consulting work for them earlier in the year, in fact my contract ran out just a few months ago. I can't speak for the political climate as I was hunkered down in a cube with a few of their best coders, but I can tell you that they are certainly willing to move in the right direction technology wise.

I was part of a team that was migrating the majority of their C2 server farm away from old Unix's like SCO and HPUX and moving them to Gnu/FreeBSD. They were also bringing down lots of Linux boxes and moving them to Gnu/FreeBSd but that was another team.

It seems that one of the new tech leads has some power and is eventually planning on bringing a team on board to fork the Gnu/FreeBSD sources and develop a version specific to NASA. They are able to do this due to the fact that Gnu/FreeBSD uses a non-restrictive license, well, plus they simply love the stability and security offered by Gnu/FreeBSD. I'm trying to get hired on the transition team as I used to be part of the FreeBSD dev team a few years ago and this would be quite the feather in my cap, so to speak

Warmest regards,
--Jack

Re:NASA is actually doing the right thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice attempt at trolling. The GNU/FreeBSD was a lovely addition and I'm sure will rack up many more mod points. You should've said that they're moving away from GNU/FreeBSD to GNU/Hurd due to problems and the fact that FreeBSD is dying though. Less subtle, but it would have been funnier.

Re:NASA is actually doing the right thing

[njchick]

If you were working with the best coders from NASA, I doubt that you would be concerned with such mundane things as OS upgrages. I also doubt that GNU/FreeBSD is stable enough to power a web server of a moderately large company, let alone a space project.

Re:NASA is actually doing the right thing

[chez69]

Bravo. Good troll.

Re:NASA is actually doing the right thing

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't reply to a troll with a troll.

Porn in space - cure the funding shortage

[Sabalon]

C'mon - just get a couple starlets up there with a crew and let them go at it. We all know how porn sells - zero G porn would probably sell pretty well and bring in tons of money for NASA.

Just imagine the position the stars could get into!!!

Re:Porn in space - cure the funding shortage

[The Original Yama]

They could redefine the Kamasutra, but it'd be hell cleaning up after the money shots!

I read somewhere that bacteria in Mir and the ISS have been known to mutate to the stage where they can eat through titanium. What would the extra protein in semen do for them?

Re:Porn in space - cure the funding shortage

[dpilot]

It's called, "The Uranus Experiment," and it was filmed on a Vomit Comet.

Haven't seen it, though I'm curious. I read about it in Penn's (of Penn & Teller) journal of his Vomit Comet flight, which took place around the same time.

Not quite the same as on-orbit, but most films are shot in 30-second (or less) segments and edit together, anyway.

Re:Porn in space - cure the funding shortage

[Sabalon]

I remember reading that one of the reasons the porn studs can go for so long is all the breaks in filming for moving the camera, changing positions, etc... kinda interrups things.

But "Hey...we're returning to gravity" every 30 seconds...that's hilarious

Re:Porn in space - cure the funding shortage

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, apparently they have, um, specially employed girls who, um, gives the guys head while resetting the scene, so they keep their erection. Just what I heard though.

Sixties are overrated

[Tune]

> How long do we have to wait until NASA becomes as ingenious as they were in the sixties?

I don't mean to flame, but isn't it true that nothing much happened in the 60s from a scientific perspective. Ingenious is great, but I support NASA's move from being a PR department in a cold-war setting to actually exploring the universe currently.

Isn't the problem with space (and science more generally) that "the people" just don't care about it, but rather like watching spectacles and human drama (the chalenger crash, Apollo 13).

--
XCruise your own universe

Re:Sixties are overrated

[The_Jazzman]

One word: Voyager.

Nowadays, modules and so forth are built to last a certain timeframe. If a vital component is guaranteed to fail after, say, eighteen months and yet the overall length of the project is sixteen months, NASA won't bother to find an alternative (despite there, on occaision, being a cheaper and longer-lasting solution) as time is the motivating money factor.

Alas, we all share this loss.

Re:Sixties are overrated

[The_Jazzman]

D'oh!

Think before writing next time, old man ;)

But, none the less, my point still stands. Just look at the early Apollo missions.

Re:Sixties are overrated

[Koos Baster]

> If a vital component is guaranteed to fail after, say, eighteen months and yet the overall length of the project is sixteen months, NASA won't bother to find an alternative (despite there, on occaision, being a cheaper and longer-lasting solution) as time is the motivating money factor.

Isn't it the same for cars? Refrigerators? Any stuff that's been here long enough to be optimized economically? Sure, cars have become boring - especially from a maintenance/repair perspective - over the years, but they are safer, cheaper, less poluting, ... better.

Re:Sixties are overrated

[simong_oz]

I don't mean to flame, but isn't it true that nothing much happened in the 60s from a scientific perspective.

JFK's original motivation for going to the moon may have been purely as a result of the Cold War with the Russians at the time, but if you read about the people involved in the Apollo program at the time, they most certainly were motivated by the challenge of going to the moon. And many of the scientists who were deciding what the astronauts would do while they were on the moon were motivated purely by science.

Isn't the problem with space (and science more generally) that "the people" just don't care about it, but rather like watching spectacles and human drama (the chalenger crash, Apollo 13).

I think you hit the nail right on the head there. When Apollo 11 landed on the moon (and moon conspiracy theorists can just take the right exit here - I don't want to hear your bleating) the whole world watched. It was, and still is, considered to be the most memorable moment in history.

But by Apollo 13, the public were already bored by the whole spectacle. Apollo 15-17 were practically unwatched by the general public. Even the events of Apollo 13 weren't enough to fire the public interest in Apollo 14.

And the Challenger disaster was the same - as much as the entire space program was in the media after it happened, within one or two mission it again became a forgotten entity.

The BBC are doing a poll at the moment on the Greatest ever Britain. Last time I looked the front runner was Diana (former Princess), while Sir Isaac Newton languished at number 9 or 10. Says it all really.

Re:Sixties are overrated

[Idarubicin]

I don't mean to flame, but isn't it true that nothing much happened in the 60s from a scientific perspective.

In one way, you're quite right. There was very little pure science done during the 60's. On the other hand, there was a great deal of applied science. The space program resulted in a great deal of good materials and manufacturing science. The computers aboard Apollo were state of the art, and the mission couldn't have flown based on the technology available at the beginning of the decade. From a pure science standpoint, yes--all they did was bring back some rocks. But engineering spinoffs are quite valuable as well--and marketable, which certainly shouldn't hurt NASA.

Isn't the problem with space (and science more generally) that "the people" just don't care about it, but rather like watching spectacles and human drama (the chalenger crash, Apollo 13).

Good science sometimes also is interesting. When Voyager sent back pictures (grainy false-colour ones, at that) of an active volcano on Io, it made the cover of a lot of periodicals, including IIRC National Geographic. Science is a harder sell than disaster, but it's not impossible.

Re:Sixties are overrated

[mesocyclone]

The better the space access, the more science that will happen. NASA would be better off if it focused on manned space exploration (for which it is more likely to get funding). The development required for this would provide plenty of opportunities for science.

Science, like all endeavors, has to compete for funds. To expect that nation to fund highly expensive systems (like the stupid International Space Station) for a few micro-g experiments nad some out-of-atmosphere astronomy is silly. If Americans knew how much the ISS cost, and how little it is doing to advance space travel, they would have cancelled it a long time ago.

The '60s were a golden time for space science. Why? Because systems and experience were developed in the moon race that otherwise would never have been done. These are necessary for science.

A visionary approach doesn't try to get NASA to do more "science" - it does something to capture the imagination of the taxpayers *and* the people who have to conceive and build the systems.

Finally, even though not a lot of "science" was done, a heck of a lot of good engineering was! And we are continually reaping the benefits of it (what geek *doesn't* have a large Velcro collection?)

Re:Sixties are overrated

[mikerich]

The BBC are doing a poll at the moment on the Greatest ever Britain [bbc.co.uk]. Last time I looked the front runner was Diana (former Princess), while Sir Isaac Newton languished at number 9 or 10. Says it all really.

Cheer up! Currently its Isambard Kingdom Brunel - an engineer! He'd be the perfect person for NASA - if he wasn't unfortunately dead. We'd have vast gothic, cast iron starships by now if IKB were in charge.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Re:Sixties are overrated

[MrResistor]

And the Challenger disaster was the same - as much as the entire space program was in the media after it happened, within one or two mission it again became a forgotten entity.

I'm not sure that's true at all. I was in 6th grade when the Challenger disaster happened, and here's how I remember it:

Up to then shuttle launches were regularly televised, and I mean on regular, broadcast, major network TV. I watched as many of them as I could. There were all kinds of Space Shuttle toys, even GI Joe had a shuttle-ish space fighter. Space ship toys that weren't white, winged, with those big bay doors didn't sell. No kid wanted a space ship that didn't look like the shuttle.

That Challenger launch was an even bigger deal. It was so hyped because of that teacher. That was actually the only launch I ever saw at school. Everyone was so excited about it that no one even considered doing regular class work during the launch, instead they crammed about 100 of us into classrooms designed for 30 kids just so we could all watch it on the limited number of TVs my school had.

After a few brief mentions of investigation into the accident, NASA disappeared. It was like they wanted to be forgotten. It was a couple of years before they even got passing mention on the evening news, and I was looking!

Challenger was the turning point, and it was a hairpin turn. NASA could have kept going, they could have been strong and overcome obstacles, but instead they decided to wallow in their misery and fade away into the background money-sink they are perceived as today.

Re:Sixties are overrated

[HotButteredHampster]

Thanks for the heads up. I voted. It was a toss-up between Newton and Darwin, but physics won the day.

HBH

Re:Sixties are overrated

[simong_oz]

woohoo! The man with the coolest name in the whole of history. And an engineer to boot. Now if only he was an Australian ... :)

Was anybody else disturbed by...

[Winston Wolf]

...the image of the space station crashing into the dome of the Capitol building on the same page as the headline "...NASA hits the ground running..."?

Re:Was anybody else disturbed by...

[Anonymous Coward]

The article said that the budget approach "literally hit the ground running". Reporters are professional users of the English language; is it too much to expect them to know what "literally" means?

Re:It's a clich�

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, and you're a lawyer, and you run a successful dot.com?! I'm impressed!!

Stop printing out stupid certificates...

[Jin Wicked]

I'd like to know just how much money a year NASA spends on all the stupid certificates, medals, and Bryan Adams CDs mailed out on the space shuttle. (Apparently each crew member gets a little box they can fill with bad CDs and crucifixes and other unexplainable crap.) It seems like they give even their janitor a certificate and medal/commemerative coin for "contributing to work on the ISS/making it possible." I work in a custom frame shop fairly close to NASA and people have no idea how much pointless NASA crud is brought in for us to frame. We had two women in once talking about how they had helped work on the space station, very proud of themselves... turned out they were like assistants to the secretary of one of the engineers or something two or three times removed like that.

I want to frame this... it was in spaAAAace. I have handled so much stuff that "was in space" "on the space shuttle!!!" that they probably should give me a medal for being an astronaught by proxy.

I recently had a woman have me do a frame of a piece that was formerly part of the space station, with a photo and a brass plaque -- the total bill was about $900. For someone's office. Paid with corporate credit card. If they're wasting this much money on wall decorations and passing out meaningless medals, I don't even want to know what they spend some of the rest of their money on. I like NASA and I think they should continue to exist... but sheesh.

Re:Stop printing out stupid certificates...

[Saltine Cracker]

As a NASA contractor, I'm often reminded of the Dr. Demento Star Trek spoof Star Drek. With a mission to sell t-shirts, toy phasers, and anything else they can think of.

Re:Stop printing out stupid certificates...

[spike hay]

I don't even want to know what they spend some of the rest of their money on. I like NASA and I think they should continue to exist... but sheesh.

Why are you bitching? You're the one that's getting obscene sums of money for framing their Janitor Achievement Awards.

Re:Nasa

[Tune]

> Nasa should drop all manned missions!

Yes! Have space tourists pay for their own trip.

> Robots are cheaper!

And they're more resistant to G-forces

> Joe Sixpack doesn't even notice when there is a shuttle mission up. Nobody cares anymore.

Agree. Joe Sixpack cares/cared about space exploration just enough to follow the cold war propaganda in 60s space missions.

I'm a bit disappointed

[ChuckDivine]

The best thing in this plan is stepping back to easier to develop technologies -- e.g., the space plane atop an EELV. It's a vehicle with one purpose, rather than many. The current shuttle violates the Keep It Simple, Stupid rule so strongly it's not funny.

ISS exists. It might be a black hole for money, but it exists. Incremental improvements to make it earn its keep are well worth doing.

Putting existing contractors on notice that future followons will not be automatic is a good thing. Although, like many good things, it could lead to unfortunate results. If all that happens is contractors hunkering down even more, abusing their staff and greater lieing to outsiders in an attempt to hold onto existing revenue streams, this effort will fail. If, on the other hand, new people step up with better ideas (or even old ones finally try reforming themselves), this change will be for the better. The more of us -- currently inside and outside the industry -- who focus on what's happening, the better. A bright light can show what's wrong, what's right and better ways of doing tasks.

Keeping the shuttle going is better than throwing money at ill conceived projects like the X-33. Although putting the money into a variety of efforts to improve space transportation (especially on the cost side) should be the primary focus. We should be thinking "Let's learn as much as we can." That requires many, small, nonbureaucratic efforts, not just one or two bloated empires.

I suspect at this point the real action is going to be with entrepreneurs willing to try new ideas to serve markets that don't exist because the cost of reaching orbit is entirely too high.

Re:plan... and then?

[Zeebs]

I'd say just tell everyone there are terrorists up there and we have to get them. Problem solved.

Re:It's a clich�

[deblau]

How long do we have to wait until NASA becomes as ingenious as they were in the sixties?

Three years. Here's the timetable:

• Next week: Iraq fails to approve the UN resolution; Shrub starts WW3 by invading them.
• The war lasts two years. Everyone is too scared to use nukes except for Israel, but they fall to biological agents early in the war. War eventually ends when Shrub realizes that no American really gives two shits about his mandate, and surrenders after a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
• After the war, a second Cold War develops against a new Mideast Arab Bloc; we need to go back to the moon to prove that our dicks really ARE bigger than theirs. NASA gets more money than Social Security and Welfare in the following budget year, and five years later we all get flying cars.

[/haha-only-serious]

Perhaps some competition would help?

[HealYourChurchWebSit]

My father worked for NASA from the Mercury project up through the Galileo launch. The new technologies, the fantastic missions, all of it was spurred on by a mad race against our arch rivals the USSR. Climaxing with a walk on the moon ... and plummeting in popularity with the Challenger explosion.

Perhaps what is now needed is some other finish line. A race? To what, I dunno. Could it be competition with commercial endeavours, other countries, national defense ... I just know that the race made it exciting. Well, that and watching them huge roman candles get to point A and B in spite of all the complaining I heard from my Dad when he'd get home from work!-)

Re:Perhaps some competition would help?

[Anonymous Coward]

A race to the first profitable space mission.

Re:Perhaps some competition would help?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

If China follows through on the plans it's talked about, you'll see a revival of that old competitive spirit soon enough. "Mr. President, we must not allow the Chinese to establish an orbital gap!"

GREATEST MOMENT!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that the moon landings were the greatest things that mankind have ever done. Anyone who says we could not put a man on mars now is talking rubbish. We have the technology and the know-how to do it, just not the willingness to spend the vast sums of money needed.

If they built a large version of apollo, in space, not on the ground, they could put men on mars in 5-7 years. Easy. Expensive, but easy!

The fact is, no-one is prepared to put up the funds to do something spectacular. The ISS is hopeless. They need to build a 'workshop' of sorts in space, and a reliable and cheap single use booster to get parts up there.

IT COULD BE DONE!!!!!!

If only there was the will to do it :(

Seb

Re:GREATEST MOMENT!

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, your income tax will be set at 70% for the next 5 years to pay for it. Still want to do it?

Re:GREATEST MOMENT!

[Dexter's Laboratory]

We have to think more than 2 years and more than 50 bucks from now. We should spend money now, if it helps reducing costs in the loooong run. It could be done, for example by establishing mines on the moon and a space dock (where you recieve the materials from the moon and build space ships) at L1. Enormous expenses, but I think that by doing this, interplanetary travel will be less expensive.

So you're a rocket scientist?

[Anonymous Coward]

...as a rocket scientist I feel most compelled to answer
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44937& cid=4658776

...I run a successful London-based dot com
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44933&cid =4658433

... As a lawyer myself, I can state that
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44912&ci d=4658097

... I'm an avid open-source supporter
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=211 28&cid=2238414

...I am an avid supported of the open-source movement [sounds familiar? that's because it is -ed]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20824&ci d=2207372

...I'm an avid supported of the open source movement [we know -ed]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20761&ci d=2204471

... I am a passionate supported of the open-source movement [geez -ed]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20760&ci d=2204422

Re:It's a clich�

[some_schmuck]

OK, so you're a Rocket Scientist, run a dot com, and a lawyer? Man, I bet you have a ton of student loans ...

Aeronautics?

[WEFUNK]

IEEE Spectrum magazine has a similar article actually written by O'Keefe. One thing that concerns me with both of these articles is the lack of any mention of NASA's often forgotten role as the AERONAUTICS and Space Administration.

NASA's rather underfunded work with the SATS program has the potential to completely revolutionize air travel and even population distributions (better access to flights and less reliance on the few major hubs could mean more industry for smaller communities and some officials even predict a trend away from cities and suburbia to one of the 10,000 smaller and even rural centres with decent airports).

NASA's aeronautic programs have also recently supported the development of innovations like the Eclipse 500 low-cost microjet, which, if successfully introduced, could be one of the biggest technology stories of the last few years, with the potential to have a massive impact on society. (As an interesting aside, the Eclipse is heavily funded and managed by big players in the computer and software industries, the CEO is the former head of Symantec and the Paul Allen Group, and Bill Gates apparently owns a significant percentage - insert windows crash joke here).

Space is cool, but basic and applied research in aviation is at least as important and no one else really covers this mandate in the way NASA can and sometimes does. It would be a real pity if NASA simply becomes the National Space Agency (I guess they couldn't use the acronym though).

no bright future

[Dexter's Laboratory]

Will NASA ever get enough funding to build the L1 station, moon base and to go to Mars? Right now it seems as if everything is going painfully slow. They have ideas but no money. What's the point? Space ex (ploration | ploitation) will be carried out by private enterprises. That is going slow too, but at least that is moving somewhere.

Budget trouble? What budget trouble?

[The-Bus]

C'mon, they shouldn't have any budget trouble. Just get N Sync member Lance Bass to pay up and they should be able to at least be able to cover the expense of adding a 5th flight (see table in the article).

Shrub's on the case already

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry.

The good old Shrub will have WW3 underway soon. That should bring in a little healthy competition between nations, don't you think?

Re:Nasa

[Anonymous Coward]

Manned missions can be dropped as soon as NASA or someone else develops a computer that's just as good as the human brain when it comes to making decisions on the spot.

The most interesting lunar rock samples, for instance, would never have been found if the survey had been done by robots. Why? Because being there and seeing something exciting/interesting made the crew to deviate from their original route. A robot would simply have trundled along the preplanned route or would have been guided by desk-jockeys watching time lagged TV signal from the robot's camera back on Earth.

Re:What NASA must do to survive

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA should just make up stuff and fake their space pictures. Like showing a Gorgon shaceship from the planet Xantrax.
Think about it. Don't just mod this down out of jealousy that you didn't think of it first.

+5 Insighful.

Turd droppers should be killed

[Anonymous Coward]

Goddamn! I hate it when people do that!

Why the hell do you do it? Is a premordial part (80% of it) of your brain telling you to "mark" your territory that way? Or are you just being an asshole?

Advanced Concepts and ISS

[tomzyk]

So what will happen with the funding of NASA's Advanced Concepts branch? As I read the article (2 long pages) and saw that they were basically COMPLETELY scrapping everything from the X-33, I was hoping to see that they might start pumping more money into the space elevator. But I was left disappointed; they decide to go with strapping a plane onto a rocket... which is what they've been doing for a long time already. :( Also, from what I read, it sounded like NASA is planning on letting other countries finish the station on their own.

This resulted in identifying a stage in the development of the ISS - U.S. Core Complete wherein all developmental focus should lie. U.S. Core Complete is the point at which assembly has proceeded so as to facilitate the addition of all modules and hardware being provided by the ISS program's international partners. This would result, however, in a space station with only three crew (since the crew return vehicle had been eliminated from development) and a limited ability to do science.

Uh... what's the point of building the huge, expensive station, if we're not going to be able to put more than 3 people up there and only do a small amount of experiments?? Or am I reading this wrong? very confused...

Re:Advanced Concepts and ISS

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone else can probably give you more details on all of this, but as I understand it, "Core Complete" is a move to get all of the absolutely essential parts of the station assembled and operational. The station really is intended as an international cooperative, and several other countries have bits and pieces to contribute. A good example is the CANADARM, which has already been installed. The problem is, most of these international pieces are various science and experiment modules, and can't be attached until the U.S. and Russia complete the infrastructure for them.

I guess an analogy would be a game like Halflife. Someone with a lot of game development experience had to create the initial engine, but the frame is open for others, often with less expertise, to add their own modules/levels etc.

Re:Advanced Concepts and ISS

[gravelpup]

Uh... what's the point of building the huge, expensive station, if we're not going to be able to put more than 3 people up there and only do a small amount of experiments?? Or am I reading this wrong? very confused...

Supposedly, the Orbital Space Plane could also be used as a CRV for up to 7 people. The crew capacity is TBD, though, so the extra seats will be the first thing to go when the budget inevitably gets crunched.

Re:It's a clich�

[frankie_guasch]

Wow, and you're a lawyer [slashdot.org], and you run a successful dot.com [slashdot.org]?! I'm impressed!!

I wonder who modded Jazzman interesting ? He's a troll.

Geez Mods; WAKE UP! Troll Alert!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be modding the parent up! This guy posts this kinda crap all the time and is a major troll! Do a search for his name and you'll realize!!
Mod him down, QUICK!

Space Elevator

[Niles_Stonne]

What about the space elevator? I think that it is a really good idea, and there have been some very interesting(and detailed) studies of the feasibility.

Previous Articles:
Space Elevators: Low Cost Ticket to GEO?
More on Space Elevators
Going Up?
Calling the Space Elevator
Space Elevator May Become Reality - The Linked Study(PDF) Was fascinating.
Space Elevator Could Cost Less Than You Thought
Stepping Closer To The Space Elevator

I want to walk into an elevator some day and see too buttons - "G" and "O".

Re:Space Elevator

[Niles_Stonne]

Arg, "two" buttons ;) I should stop reading slashdot, my spelling would improve!

If NASA had built the transcontinental railroad...

[Anonymous Coward]

They would have insisted on a super-locomotive that could travel from coast to coast without refueling, running on tracks made of quicksilver and fairy dust.

Why the griping about stupid certificates?

[Tsar]

they probably should give me a medal for being an astronaught by proxy.

After seeing your portrait of Richard Stallman, I'd agree that you qualify as having been to spaAAAace.

As for the rest of your tirade, I'm sorry, but I don't buy a bit of it. I visited the Smithsonian as a small child, and my only tactile memory of the event is that of touching a small rock that had once been on the Moon. That memory inspired me for years, and was one of the reasons I pursued a career in the hard sciences. How many others have been inspired by some piece of junk that a jaded Houston frame-shop worker wouldn't deign to touch, were she not being paid to do so?

So some secretary who's worked for twenty years at NASA gets a .01-ounce certificate that flew into orbit. So some Senator or Congressman who's supported our space program to the tune of a few billion in appropriations gets a $900 frame for a piece of space junk that will inspire some influential visitor to say, as you so aptly put it, "wow, it was in spaAAAce." So some astronaut who's devoted his career to the hope that someday he'd get picked for a mission, gets to take a few things he can share with his kids and grandkids. Why can't you just let it ride?

Do you really think that if Columbus hadn't brought anything back from the Americas, and there hadn't been any alien trinkets to pass around at the Court of King Ferdinand, that there'd have been as much interest to go back? And what if Spain had been a democracy? You can bet that Chris would have brought back a hold full of crap to pass around to anyone who could read, with certificates saying it was from the New WoOOOorld.

Re:Why the griping about stupid certificates?

[Jin Wicked]

No, I'm sorry, I don't equate moon rocks with Bryan Adams and Michael Bolton CDs that somehow become magical items of Immense Value and Rarity once they escape the earth's atmosphere. Big boxes of junk being put on the space shuttle just adding weight and taking up space isn't the same as something brought back from space with some legitimate value and scientific study possibility. The certificates are not usually flown in the shuttle, they just give those out to anyone and everyone. And they also give out very nice silver and/or gold plated coins, miniature flags, pins, and all other sorts of junk which I would prefer a publicly funded organization to not just willy-nilly buy and pass out. These are not going to kids (indeed, my opinion would be much different if they were), these are going to fully grown adults that are already employees of NASA.

As for the $900 frame, it was for an office of someone who works at NASA, for himself; I doubt his private office is a high-traffic area where it would attract much attention beyond Wow, how much did that cost to do? I don't approve of that any more than I would approve of a Senator or any other employee buying $900 worth of framing to hang in their office with public money.

If you had any idea of the amount and sheer absurdity of some of this stuff that gets brought in, you would probably be a bit jaded too. I suppose you just have to see some of it to believe it. As for the painting of RMS, he liked it, and as far as I'm concerned, that's the only opinion of it that matters to me.

Re:Why the griping about stupid certificates?

[sql*kitten]

So some astronaut who's devoted his career to the hope that someday he'd get picked for a mission, gets to take a few things he can share with his kids and grandkids. Why can't you just let it ride?

I'd have zero problem with this if they paid for all the "frivolous" stuff out of their own pockets, but unfortunately the taxpayer foots the bill. Astronauts are enormously privileged individuals; they receive training, equipment and opportunities that are orders of magnitude more expensive than the value they create for society. Using the shuttle to manufacture souvenirs for their friends is borderline theft.

Re:Why the griping about stupid certificates?

[Tsar]

No, I'm sorry, I don't equate moon rocks with Bryan Adams and Michael Bolton CDs that somehow become magical items of Immense Value and Rarity once they escape the earth's atmosphere.

You didn't mention the Michael Bolton CD's in your original post! I am in total agreement now, and retract my earlier reply with my deepest apologies. Since his tripe has infected over 50 million discs, destroying all affected media in this manner would be horribly inefficient.

Now, if they carried Bolton himself into orbit (in the cargo bay, of course), that would be an investment of taxpayers' money that all Slashdotters could get behind.

And as for the NASA employee's $900 wall hanging, my opinion is this: if it would be inappropriate to write that employee a $900 check, it would be just as inappropriate to spend public money on a $900 gift.

You're right that junk carried into space and back don't carry the cachet of stuff really FROM space, like the moonrock I mentioned. Sadly, though, our current space program doesn't include a lot of sample-return mass; most missions only bring in what they took out (the Bolton deployment mission would be a happy exception).

Re:Why the griping about stupid certificates?

[triumphDriver]

You don't get it do you? Most people are not driven only by money. They work at their jobs because they want to contribute. They have pride in what they do. They do it because it is important ( and in NASA case extremely cool). These "thefts" as you call them are an valuable way to tell people they are doing a important job and doing it well. It does not matter how far "removed" their jobs are from the Astronauts or whoever is at the top of the pyramid. The lowest employee contributes as part of the team. Think back in your life. Didn't you appreciate those simple pieces of Ribbon and Brass? I know I did and still do. They tell me in ways the money simply cannot. I am appreciated and am doing a good job.

Re:Why the griping about stupid certificates?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, if they carried Bolton himself into orbit (in the cargo bay, of course), that would be an investment of taxpayers' money that all Slashdotters could get behind.

Only if they promised to leave him there.

liposuction

[bkruiser]

extraterestrial liposuction would pay for all costs... just go to www.liposucmyextratarestrialass.com

Greatest effect O'Keefe has had on NASA so far...

[Anonymous Coward]

... is changing everyone's email address from "foo@[installation].nasa.gov" to "bar@nasa.gov"... Seriously.. I wonder what the costs are for that... Besides the technical change costs, there will be loss in productivity for everyone having to sit around updating everything, updating webpages, new business cards, etc... You get the picture...

Re:It's a clich�

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Sean O'Keefe is exactly the right man for the job. His job is to restore our credibility with those who pay our bills, i.e. the White House and the U.S. Congress. We are very concerned about putting our budget to best use and to getting people to trust our planning numbers. O'Keefe has a lot of initiatives going now that are building that trust back.

Fred Gregory (the new Deupty Administrator) and the new Space Architect would be responsible for what you'd like to see. Keep an eye on them.

We are working to a longer-term strategy that tries to do the most within the funding guidelines given to us. Hopefully, we'll have our research and technology portfolios going right to position ourselves for the future.

Are we as "ingenious" as we were in the sixties? Probably. NASA and the NASA community (including NASA-funded contractors, university scientists, etc...) do a tremendous amount of really great work every year. We just may not communicate what we do as well as we could.

G.H. w/ a view from NASA HQ

+1 Fascinating

[Anonymous Coward]

please mod the parent up

Not a job for the government

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as a rocket scientist and former NASA contractor, I think we should get the government out of the transport business. NASA is good at science and research, but it stinks at being a bus company.

I had to leave the business because I couldn't, in good conscience, keep taking the people's tax money for doing bullshit. We did all sorts of silly crap (eg, porting giant simulation software from mainframes to little HPUX boxes that - surprise! - could only only run it at a snail's pace) that didn't really further space exploration at all. When we DID work on stuff that was actually mission critical, there were usually twice as many engineers as really needed and we spent most of our time writing reports that justified our jobs.

Face it, folks, the government is exactly the wrong entity to run the shuttle program. Instead, the government needs to write laws that make it easy for private enterprise to exploit space travel (for example, one thing holding back private launch facilities is the insane cost of insurance - if the government just insured reasonable facilities for a reasonable fee, it would help a lot). NASA, of course, protects its turf and actually works to make it HARDER for private enterprise to get into space travel.

NASA should be in the exploration business, not the transportation business.

Re:Not a job for the government

[Anonymous Coward]

the government needs to write laws that make it easy for private enterprise to exploit space travel (for example, one thing holding back private launch facilities is the insane cost of insurance - if the government just insured reasonable facilities for a reasonable fee, it would help a lot).

Amen. I normally wouldn't agree with government underwriting the risk of private ventures, but if the net cost of an insurance program is less than the net cost of NASA, I think you're on to something.

Re:Not a job for the government

[ordinarius]

I have worked as a contractor for NASA at the Ames Research Center (in their Numerical Aerodynamic Facility), and I've worked as a contractor for Citibank and other large corporations. I hate to break this to you, but I though NASA was a hell of a lot better run (not even close). Shocking huh?

Yes, at NASA there are/were stupid projects, and yes there were reports to be written, but by and large shit got done and the people were talented, intelligent and highly motivated. It was a fun place to work. Some of the large corporations I've done work for, most projects were a nightmare, and most employees were cashing a paycheck.

Can we stop spewing the same old tired lines some Republican spin doctor shoved down our collective throats? I can not imagine a large corporation running NASA more effectively. Don't get me wrong, I can imagine a more effective NASA. Its not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But to imply every private institution is somehow innately more effective then every public one is silly. Did you sleep through the events of the last couple years or what?

- ordinarius

Fascinating, indeed!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope the Chinese are writing all of this down. ^_^

Re:Fascinating, indeed!

[spike hay]

I hope the Chinese are writing all of this down. ^_^

The Chinese are our best hope for human presence in space. Their space program isn't anemic and beauracratic like NASA. They have several very good (reliblility could use work) rockets such as the Long March series. They have sent unmanned dummy capsules into orbit.

The Chinese want to have a man on the moon by the end of the decade, and a continously manned moon base not long after that. I doubt they will have that accomplished by 2010, but they most likely will by 2015 or 2020.

Lets face it: NASA is not going to send humans out of low earth orbit any time soon. I have my doubts if we will be the first to Mars. It will probably be the chinese. The date for a Mars mission is always being pushed back. During the sixties, we figured we'd have a Mars mission before 1980. Then, we thought before 2000. Then it was pushed to around 2020. Now 2020 sounds wildly optimistic.

Why NASA is important

[Paradox !-)]

We're going to have to leave this planet eventually, if we want to survive as a species.

For this reasons, I support J. Richard Gott's proposal (in Time Travel in Einstein's Universe) "The goal of the human spaceflight program should be to increase our survival prospects by colonizing space."

He goes through more detail in the book (It's in the last chapter "Report from the future"), but the basic idea is that we could probably colonize Mars today, with about the same effort as we did the Moon missions. And to do so would exponentially increase our survivability as a species and probably do no ends of other good.

This isn't just an idea for America. It's an idea the entire world could get behind. It's an inspirational idea, one that is worthy of our species and civilization.

And it wouldn't just have to be funded by governments. Make donations to it tax deductible and let corporations help. This is a bet on our existance, folks. Because we only have a short while that we have the economy and political will to actually explore space (at least, since the Cold War ended). We go now, or we go never.

IMHO.

New Horizons?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know if this will put a lid on the New Horizons project?

Some great commentary on the space program...

[dmauer]

A friend of mine introduced me to g2mil.com, a website run by a former Marine Corps officer. Essentially he prints commentary on the state of the US Military. His insight, though, is really something. Anyway, this month, he posted This Article, in which he proposes we scrap the space shuttle program altogether. Makes some good points as far as I can tell (granted, I'm no expert, but I'd like to read comments by those who *are* experts).

-dan

Launch Homer Simpson into Space!

[silentbozo]

Isn't the problem with space (and science more generally) that "the people" just don't care about it, but rather like watching spectacles and human drama (the chalenger crash, Apollo 13).

So we just have to hold a contest, like survivor, to select an "average joe" and launch their ass into space, with plenty of publicity and press coverage. We can also feed the public a lot of bullshit about setting up bases on the moon, mining asteroids, and replacing the shuttle, which should hopefully jar some pennies loose from the appropriations commitee so we can do one of the three for real...

Just make sure we send up an inanimate carbon rod with this guy just in case things go wrong...

First, reveal the existence of ALIENS!

[boy_afraid]

If they want to get people interested in space why won't they reveal the existence of alien life and the ruins on Mars near Cydonia? That would spawn a huge public outcry for answers. First question would be, "WTF have you kept this from us?". And the second would be, "WTF aren't we going there to Mars to find out the real answers?"

Thanks JAck!

[jvance]

I would have missed the Shuttle otherwise!

New NASA vision?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Good, fast, cheap; pick one?"

(Hint, they don't seem like they're gonna go with either of the first two options.)

what? there have been moon landings?

[MadLibs]

i thought no one had been in space yet (according to some non-believers), you insensitive clods.

OneNASA

[Anonymous Coward]

No, No, No! O'Keefe is doing important things at NASA. For example, he's decided that we need to unify our e-mail system, so they've jammed the concept of "OneNASA" down our throats.

OneNASA involves removing field centers from our e-mail addresses -- no more @msfc.nasa.gov or @gsfc.nasa.gov , it's all @nasa.gov. Damn the fact that it breaks mail routing and puts pointless loads on WAN links! And of course it all runs on Exchange (now there's a big surprise.) Wait, you mean everybody DOESN'T use MS Outlook and Exchange? We can fix that, we'll mandate that EVERYBODY use Windows. (Don't laugh, it's coming and we've already seen the political push to do so.) You know their excuse for doing this? Robustness, Security, Cost, and breaking down barriers between field centers. Bullshit. Of course, O'Keefe has never heard of OpenBSD running Postfix, I'll wager.

It's the same old political bullshit. Fix the stuff that isn't broken so you look like a "visionary" and leave the tattered ruins of what was at one point one of the premier scientific institution in America.

Damn straight I'm an Anonymous Coward, I want to keep my job. But it's true, and I'm sure some of the other NASA folk around will back me up on it.

Re:OneNASA

[Overzeetop]

You must actually do research.

I remember whe Goldin came in. The joke was that he saw the enemy on the horizon and immediately ordered all the women and children executed so that they couldn't be captured.

As romantic as the shuttle is, it takes a lot of money away from the hard science which gets done at the research centers.

Good luck...keep you chin up.

(disclaimer: I'm a Goddard alum, special payloads division. I'd say hi to Stew and Craig, but I'm not sure they're still there, and I doubt they surf /.)

Interesting site - Space Islands.

[bleckywelcky]

Many people have mentioned that NASA just seems to be lingering, not really accomplishing much now in comparison to times of the past, or that what they are accomplishing now is heading in the wrong direction. An AC posted a reply with a rather fascinating link to this site that talks about an idea that uses the external tank (ET) of the space shuttle as a structural component in space for creating "Space Islands". I thought this topic should be given more light here instead of being buried several levels down in the comments. The structures could house many people and huge amounts of experimental and self-sustaining equipment and processes, using several ETs linked together that NASA throws away after each SS launch (they partially burn up in the atmosphere after being let go and then crash into the ocean near Hawaii). The site is somewhat old (they make references to the upcoming 1996 presidential election, heh) but the information seems that it could still apply. One of the key ideas behind this process is that we have already spent almost all of the energy required to place these ETs into orbit (and in the site's words, the ETs are actually "nudged back down" to begin burning up in the atmosphere and crashing into the Earth). The ETs are not released until the SS is approaching its 200 mile orbital altitude, the boosters have been released, and the SS is operating on its own engines. Other ideas include creating artifical gravity by spinning the structures (the ETs are proposed to be formed into a circle, where the actual living and operating spaces would be placed in the radial direction on the arms of the circle), and the ability to move the structures through the solar system (to, say, Mars) and then use transport vehicles to drop down to our destination once in orbit around the desitnation. Sounds like a great idea to research to me unless major flaws have since been discovered that would impede such a design.

Re:Nasa

[mikerich]

To an extent you're right, but the Soviets did good science with their Lunokhod missions which were remotely controlled from Earth. With a 2 second delay, there is plenty of opportunity for Earth controllers to get thr robot to stop and roll back to the site of interest.

And of course, if we had robots up there, we could go into the geologically interesting sites that would be too dangerous for a manned mission - AND stay there for an extended period of time.

But the manned programme looks even more ridiculous when you take the ISS into account. What are they doing up there that couldn't be done by an unmanned mission? Even the much vaunted protein crystallisation experiments or novel alloy manufacture could be done in recoverable capsules.

As for the medical experiments, they're being done to see how the human body reacts to zero G. Errr - why? Don't put people up there and you don't get the problems associated with zero G.

At the end of the day, the manned programme is nothing more than a flag-waving exercise that can only be afforded by the big players. It's the 21st Century equivalent of the liner races or the battleship races of the 20th Century - ultimately pointless, but it makes for great headlines.

I'm just glad I'm not an American taxpayer who is being expected to cough up for it.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderation Totals: Troll=5, Insightful=1, Interesting=4, Informative=2, Funny=1, Overrated=2, Underrated=1, Total=16.

It reminds me of a certain thread of death where everyone got bitchslapped.. :->

Anyway. Mod parent down, the guy's a pure troll, no questions here.

The NASA employee is dead

[heroine]

NASA will no longer have full time employees. Instead researchers in academic institutions and contractors will devote part of their time to NASA projects with their paychecks coming mostly from their institution. NASA only pays for equipment and contractors. This is how the Mars rovers are being done already. The scientists are all on university payrolls, while NASA pays for equipment.

Re:The NASA employee is dead

[anonymous loser]

Oh, so all those folks in Hampton, VA, Sunnyvale, CA, etc. are just students and professors? puhleeze

Have you ever actually been to NASA Langley or any of the other design centers? There's a LOT of people working there, full time, on real projects. Sure *some* of them are contractors, or grad students on loan, but most are NASA employees.

mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

I read that as a JOKE not Flamebait!

The new meaning of NASA

[Ektanoor]

From reading the article it seems that the new meanong of NASA will be:

National Aerospace Sliced Apart

Good bye Moon, farewell Mars, arriverdeci Space, do svidanya Cosmos, sayanora Universe, bonne nuit Science. It seems that the only thing that will fly in 2015 will be a crappy ISS falling apart and hundreds of threatening robots seeking its targets in Earth's surface. Oh, and a few commercial satellites to make people happy with streaming media and give them a chance to chat a bit on Internet mobiles from LA to Tokyo, through Space and Paris. A small taste of technology for the masses...

Re:The new meaning of NASA

[Chris Y Taylor]

Don't forget, it was W's dad who wanted to turn the peace dividend into the Space Exploration Initiative (http://www.abo.fi/~mlindroo/Station/Slides/sld049 a.htm & http://history.nasa.gov/staffordrep/main_toc.PDF ). Whether you believe this was for the good of the nation or to keep money in the pocket of defense companies, they still wanted to do big things in space (amazingly if you read his stuff, Dan Quayle of all people really had some good ideas about our future in space). The whole thing was snubbed by their political opponents (and I don't think they have forgoten that, look for O'Keefe to clean some house) and NASA was kept as a space bus operator. I wouldn't be surpised if we get some new version of the SEI proposed in a possible 2nd Bush term (especially if the war on terror is winding down and another "peace dividend" is approaching).

Oribtal's Solution

[Chris Y Taylor]

At this year's Joint Propulsion Conference, there was a session where NASA and several contractors discussed the Space Launch Initiative and thier plans. All but one of the talks centered around building completely reusable vehicles as per the SLI plan. Oribtal's talk (I think partially drawn from space economics work from William R. Claybaugh, II) was different. They showed that at currently projected rates, you could get something like 800% of the operational cost savings of the SLI program with only a tiny fraction of the research and capital costs just by developing a reusable crew vehicle (like a new and improved X-38) and putting that on top of the EELVs Lockheed-Martin and Boeing have already developed (which are not yet man-rated, but given their design reliability that should be a relatively small step compared with developing a totally new launch system). In addition to having lower R&D and capital costs, it should have less risk too. 80% savings for much less risk and capital looks very very good until you get up to launch rates of around 1/week.

This may not be a sexy as SLI, but the economics seem better. Despite people's attraction to SLI, we won't get to Mars and back to the moon any time soon if we waste our finite resources on big systems that we don't yet need (no matter how cool they look). Better to spend that money on R&D or systems engineering so that we can move the market closer to that 1 launch/week and so that when we do need to build the next big thing, it is done with even better technology.

Chris Y. Taylor

Re:Oribtal's Solution

[Chris Y Taylor]

"something like 800% of the operational cost savings"

Obviously, that should read 80%, not 800!

SpaceSex

[maxconfus]

The race to be the first to have sex on Mars should be the Viagra(tm) that gets this competition to space going.

Re:If NASA had built the transcontinental railroad

[bkruiser]

Practicality will get you funding every time... excellent example. http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist4/practical.html "This plan assumes to obviate these objections; and, 1st. To build the Pacific Railroad. 2ndly. To accomplish the same in ten years. 3dly. To raise the capital therefore. And suggests practical means for the accomplishment of its object by means of private capital. It assumes that, without confidence of the people, the road cannot be built. Therefore, It proposes to divest the project of its speculative features, and thereby endeavor to inspire the public with confidence."

Check your numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

only 10 TONS to the space station

I agree that the Station was put into too high of an inclination. But, the mass you quote that the shuttle can haul to Station (10 tons) is bullshit. It's closer to 17-20, although I don't know the number off of the top of my head.

I recommend finding the actual number and citing it. It's not the death knell of the station, but it certainly does decrease the efficiency of the shuttle.

Re:Check your numbers

[cybrpnk2]

You are absolutely correct, I should be quoting exact numbers instead of off-the-top-of-my-head estimates. So check out the Shuttle Press Kit site for details....

The Russians have launched two major components of the Space Station - the Zarya at 44,000 pounds and the Zvezda at 42,000 pounds, both on expendable Proton boosters. Total Russian contribution - 86,000 pounds.

The major US hardware contributions delivered to Space Station were the Unity Node on STS-88 at 25,600 pounds and the Destiny lab module on STS-98 at 31,000 pounds. This is 13 tons and 15.5 tons respectively which is above my estimate of 10 tons but well below yours of 17-20 tons. And remember, these CONSTRUCTION flights carried minimal crew, no docking adapter or airlock, and were streamlined one-time run-the-SSMEs-at-109%-to get-the-job-done-and-cross-your-fingers missions.

The majority of the Maintenance / Logistics / Crew Transfer flights like STS-96, 101, 102, 106 etc. and the ones planned from now on carry a lot LESS than 10 tons to the Space Station - it's probably closer to 2 tons delivered. That's because NOW when the Shuttle goes to the Space Station it's carrying CREW that has to be transferred and that means they have to launch with the airlock and docking adapter and associated support cradles in the payload bay that STAY in the payload bay and eventually land back on the runway. There's a Space Shuttle, and there's a Space Shuttle outfitted to run a Space Station mission. Those are two different birds. The latter is MUCH heavier (in fact, Columbia the oldest shuttle is too heavy to do this and has never been to Space Station) and the extra crap in the Payload Bay to run a Space Station mission comes RIGHT OFF THE TOP of deliverable payload weight to the space station.

The sad tale is all right there in the Shuttle Press Kits. Ignore the hype, just look at the numbers and use a calculator....

Re:Check your numbers

[fredrik70]

I though Columbia was renovated and now could go to the ISS?

Man..

[dirtsurfer]

Where's Robert Zubrin when you need him? :/

Re:Greatest effect O'Keefe has had on NASA so far.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah! How about the turnaround? E-mail has to go from Glenn to Marshall and back even when it's going from one cube to another.

They tell me they're going to hack the e-mail so that internal mail doesn't go out and back in but I'll believe it when I see it.

And how about trashing all the perfectly good center e-mail systems and using a centralized exchange server farm? Jesus, what kind of buttheads are running the place now?

Materials research should not be the main focus.

[Anonymous Coward]

If we could have scientists actually up there developing new crystalline materials, and then NASA could sell them on the open market, maybe some of its funding problems would disappear!

This is what NASA has often talked about doing with the station in the past. Quite a bit of materials research will take place on the station.

But, this should not be the main focus of ISS. Many materials reseach experiments can be conducted on inexpensive single-purpose satellites. What ISS is essential for, is as a testbed for developing the techniques necessary for the long-term exposure of humans to conditions in space.

To do this, we need the Japanese to provide the Centrifuge Accommodation Module, which can subject small critters to varying levels of acceleration for long times. We need 6-10 people on Station all the time, with at least four or five devoted to science rather that station maintenance. And, we need funding for ground-based scientists to develop the experiments and study the results.

I've also been an advocate for quite a while of building a second, simpler station. This one would be a habitation module connected to a counter weight, and would be rotated at varying rates to find out what level of g is necessary to drastically reduce the detrimental effects of low gravity on humans. (This station could be built after significant experimentation on animals in the station's centrifuge.)

Hopefully we won't need rotating spacecraft for humans to explore the Solar System. (It would make the bathrooms easier to engineer, though... it's amazing how much we rely on gravity on the toilet. :) The only way we'll know, though, is because of careful experimentation at the Station.

- A friendly neighborhood astrophysicist

Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

Both parties have been pretty good at funding scientific research. The Clinton adminstration really sapped NASA's funding, but hoth parties in Congress have been pretty supportive. (Of course, they're tough when something goes wrong, but many people in Congress like NASA's work, and want to see it succeed.)

Now, I wish they'd stop attaching that damned pork line-items to NASA's budget... (You wouldn't believe the kind of unrelated crap for their home districts they slip in there!)

What about two types of vehicles?

[bareman]

Ok, just a random thought here, submitted for your perusal.

We have people elevators and freight elevators. People elevators don't have to be able to lift as much weight. Freight elevators don't require as many niceties for humans.

Would there be any benefits to building a seperate people shuttle and freight shuttle?

Hey, if this would work maybe they'll let me drive the Space-Tug called "Little Toot" and I can ferry around the space barges.

Re:What about two types of vehicles?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how the "Soviet Shuttle" Energia/Buran system was supposed to work. Basically the Buran carries people and light cargo while riding atop an Energia rocket. The Energia rocket can be used by itself to move larger cargo.

Lobby NASA to buy Energia? Would they yield to superior Soviet engineering? (insert Red Alert soundtrack here) 0:)

Materials haven't been demonstrated yet

[Goonie]

The fact is, nobody has yet demonstrated a nanotube composite strong enough to build a space elevator out of. There are, however, lots of applications for carbon nanotube composites which should be *quite* sufficient to pay for the R&D. If that R&D effort succeeds, then and only then do we need to consider the space elevator.

Re:Materials haven't been demonstrated yet

[spike hay]

They've already produced a nanotube composite (about a month ago I believe) that is almost strong enough for a space elevator. Materials science progresses so fast, I'm sure we'd have a nanotube composite in another couple years that is plenty strong. (After all, 5 years ago they could only produce extremely small quantities of nanotubes. Look at where we are now.)

Re:It's a clich�

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone is too scared to use nukes except for Israel, but they fall to biological agents early in the war. ... After the war ... a new Mideast Arab Bloc ...

Israel is quite scared of nukes as well, but let us be clear about one point:

if Israel falls due to weapons of mass destruction, nuclear OR biological, there will be no mideast Arab block. or mideast Arabs.

Every sane mideast Arab should pray that Israel is never destroyed.

just remember that in your predictions.

Space Hotel

[CowboyNick]

This site has what appears to be a very good concept for putting people into space and could further the development of technologies required for a long term space stay. Plus it would be cool to stay at a hotel in space! :)

Re:Space Hotel

[CowboyNick]

Link would help ;)