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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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).

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?

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.

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.

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

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!!!

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: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.

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.

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!-)

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).

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...

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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