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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."
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..
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
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.
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
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.
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"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
> 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).
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XCruise your own universe
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]This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
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
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
--- have you healed your church website?
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
Karma: NaN
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.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.