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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.
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!
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.