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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."
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....
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?
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
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.
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.
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
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.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
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).
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
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.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
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.
~Idarubicin
they probably should give me a medal for being an astronaught by proxy.
.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?
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
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.
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.
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.
- A friendly neighborhood astrophysicist