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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."
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
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?
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.
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.