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New NASA Shuttle Program "Doomed To Failure"
Heartbreak writes "In a recent press release, the
Space Frontier Foundation warns that NASA's Oribital Space Plane program, its latest initiative to take the load off the aging STS (the 'Space Shuttle'), is essentially doomed before it starts. 'NASA's unbroken string of cancelled vehicle programs' going back 20 years makes it a good bet that OSP will also fail. Is this just really, really, bad luck, or is NASA little more than a multi-billion-dollar jobs program for important U.S. aerospace contractors?"
It seems a shame that a war, the Cold War being the main boost, is what is needed to get support behind NASA.
Why not just upgrade the internal of the space shuttle to use up to date technology rather than mid 70s computers?
Like all managers, NASA managers do not want to be in the public humiliation business, after all. Much better to start a project and leave NASA with it on your resume than have it punch a hole in Mars!
Now, having said that, let's look at the source, shall we: "Rick Tumlinson is a founder of the Foundation for the International Non-Govemmental Development of Space (FINDS), a multi-million dollar foundation which funds breakthrough projects and activities, and a founder of LunaCorp, a 7 year-old firm planning a commercial return to the Moon."
Do these lightly nutty folks have an agenda, or what?
Give NASA a goal, a date to achieve it and the threat of a budget cut and they'll work wonders. All they need is something to work towards. Why not Mars?
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
i guess there will be a new shuttle once the chinese have been to the moon.
This is one of the most on-target criticisms of NASA's operations that I've seen.
Perhaps it is time to move this effort to the private sector. On the other hand, I would really like to move to Mars (assuming I can get Internet access there), and I don't see a profit-driven operation accomplishing that anytime soon.
Let me explain : militair/scientist wants to be able to send their stuff in space and make it cheaper and easier but they have only THEIR application in mind. Whereas the public [private people and corporration] would have all sort of applicaiton in mind (some silly some very interresting).
So a widening of the space usage to the public would probably allow for more efficient launcher, more research and discovery , (and more accident too...). But it certainly would be a better return to the humanity in general than spy satellite and the ISS.
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Just the other day I saw on Discovery Wings a part all about the Russian built shuttle called the Buran. See http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/rsa/buran.html for details. The part I found interesting is that since they were running low on budget (you thought NASA has a budget problem, look at Russia!), they only flew it once, and since they didn't have money or time for life support systems, they flew it by autopilot! I thought that was pretty incredible. A Shuttle took off, orbitted twice, and landed, with no one flying the thing.
In related news, it appears that they were trying to auction the thing off, and for only $6,000,000!! Google for more info.
NASA does what it has to do in order to get funding. That means that it has to have jobs in several different states, to get support from Representatives and Senators in those states. It spends a significant amount of money just to deal with the fact that it's split up into so many different centers.
Then, it has to award contracts into other different states to get support from the politicians in THOSE states. Ever wondered why Shuttle boosters are constructed in segments so that they can be conveniently shipped halfway across the country? Maybe you thought it had something to do with reliability or safety? (For the humor-impaired, that last sentence was sarcastic.)
It's a tribute to the few idealists left at NASA that it ever got anything done. Its main goal today is to preserve its own funding. It's become a nearly-complete waste of money.
I would recomend reading Robert Zubrin's "The case for Mars", its a good read that shows things can be done in a different, more (money) efficant way than they are done now and in the past.
ISBN: 0-684-83550-9
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They want to - get this - privatize and commercialize the International Space Station!
What's wrong with that?
Right now, the space programme is going nowhere. We have been able to place objects in orbit in the 1950s. Apart from the occasional scientific probe, NASA is basically the Greyhound bus service of LEO.
Space exploration won't happen for real until miners, production engineers, manufacturing corporations, porn stars, hoteliers ands couriers are using space as an everyday part of their jobs.
Apart from the commercial satellite users - telcos and broadcasters mainly - space is a black hole for money. It's got to pay for itself, or we won't be going anywhere.
It is very arguable that the shuttle itself is the ruination of NASA as an interesting exploratory entity/department/whathaveyou.
THe shuttle is incredibly expensive to launch. The Saturn-V was (if I remember correctly) much cheaper, and could put up almost as much payload.
As it stands, we have a vehicle that does two jobs terribly inefficiently-
1) Putting people in space, and
2) putting payload in space.
The shuttle was originally conceived as a device to accomplish task #1, but was unfortunately subverted and became a compromise vehicle.
Unfortunately, this is one place where compromise can be a terrible thing.
As it turns out, creating seperate launch vehicles, one small one for people, and a big one for big payloads, makes a whole lot more sense.
Oh well, thats politics for you.
The line of failures is due to the fact that NASA can't realize that the Shuttle is the compilation of the best ideas we have. If they want to really boost their space program, they should focus on building a new fleet of SPACE SHUTTLES, with new (lighter) computer systems, and incorporating other modifications, such as an crew ejection/escape system and modules that allow the shuttle to perform more tasks (that it is capable of). Examples of these tasks include the current research lab role, whereas a slight modification could turn the Shuttle into a heavy lifter capable of carrying the biggest of payloads to the Station
You gotta wonder why NASA aren't cranking out Shuttles like Boeing crank out 747s. Any first year MBA will tell you that the key to funding any development that requires substantial upfront investment is to realize economies of scale in production. If there was a weekly - or even more frequent - shuttle run to LEO, that anyone could buy passage on, and shuttles with life support in the unpressurised cargo bay, the economic exploitation of space would happening orders of magnitude quicker than it is today. And ultimately, space exploration has got to pay for itself if it's going to happen.
I also think the failures are due to a huge lack of incentive. In the Capitalistic society we live in, there is no monetary incentive for a new shuttle; we can send satellites up on cheaper expendable rockets. The dreams for moon and mars colonies are so far in the future that the risk is far too great for anyone to invest in.
I'm not so sure that's true. Consider trading missions to the far east in the 16th century. Voyages took years, with no guarantee that everything would not be lost in a storm or other disaster. The banking, insurance and reinsurance industries were created to manage that risk, and make it acceptable to investors. A similar thing will happen with space missions.
As soon as there is a demand on Earth for products from space - raw materials, components or devices that can only be manufactured in low gravity or with plenty of cheap vaccuum, etc - Capitalists will find a way to make it happen.
This version 2 shuttle is the model that should have been mass produced.
Your references to the merchant adventurers is quite accurate, and is the foundation of double-entry accounting and the company limited by shares (I believe both started in Venice). The first English company was founded in the 16th Century for the exploration of a new route to China via a North-East passage. The voyage failed because of the ice and ship wintered in Archangel. The crew eventually were taken to Moscow and met up with the Czar and ended up with special trading rights. An excellent example of how you may fail to achieve the primary objective but achieve something else which is also profitable.
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I think the X-33 had the most potential. They had already invested $1 billion into it, why not just spend another billion and get the damn thing flying? The VentureStar would have been a damn sexy vehicle! And a single stage to orbit? WOW! It could work. Perhaps they should redesign parts of it to lower weight even more, or maybe design some sort of carbon nanotube housing for the LH2 (as the aluminum (I believe) tanks kept rupturing). Either way, the shuttle can't survive much longer. It's a set of dinosaurs just waiting to die off.
A disposable booster is a little like a formula one car, it only needs to last one race so it doesn't matter if you overrate it, because you will rebuild it from scratch. The Shuttle concept should have been more like the rally car, needing some maintenance but not a total rebuild between races.
What I don't understand is how management ignored the fact that the shuttle would need so much work between flights. The fact that the components were being overrated should have triggered some warning.
Yes, I agree with you that a more commercial approach would have been sensible, but who would want to take the risk?
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Military spending to advance scientific knowledge is one half of national socialism: that is "socialism" but only for the military and related industrial companies, ie: the opposite of what all pre-Leninist theories of socialism historically, philosophically are and advocate.
The other half consists of a military takeover of civilian institutions, and a promise to the military to destroy external enemies, while terrorizing and mesmerizing the populace with a war on "the enemy within".
It's not just an inefficient way to drive "progress", it's horribly inefficient and destructive; and it sets the country up for the drift into a complete fascist reordering of society.
Such as we're seeing now in the USA.
Interesting set of points.
... And, of course, aerospace tech hasn't stood still since then; China isn't starting from the same nearly-zero level as the US and USSR did. The Chinese can and will take advantage of all the advances in materials science, computer science, etc. since then. And to be blunt, China can and if necessary will kill people in pushing the envelope, just like the US and (especially) the USSR did in the early days.
...
I don't think it's really fair to say that China will be "30 years behind" if they get a human into space this year. It could reasonably be argued that the US is now "behind" where it was 30 years ago, since at that time we had a launch vehicle (the Saturn V) that could lift considerably more than the Shuttle, and we were regularly putting people on the Moon
I strongly suspect that Russia will essentially sell their space program to the EU at some point, yes. I also suspect that, with the way the US is pissing off the major European powers, they'll do the same with their military, but that's another story
Japan has the technology and the ambition but not, by themselves, the money. They'll have to partner with someone, either NASA or the expected EU/Russian team. (The chances of them partnering with China are roughly the chances of Bill Gates suffering a sudden attack of conscience and giving all his money to Richard Stallman.)
Europe: see above. Also, the recent Ariane failures do not detract from what has generally been a very successful program. (I believe, though I'm not sure, that Arianespace now has a greater total lifting capacity than NASA, though NASA can still put bigger individual loads up.) European money + both European and Russian tech (especially if Russia ever is actually invited into the EU, which could happen in the not-too-distant future) will be a powerful combination.
The US -- well, let's hope the competition gets us off our asses, because apparently nothing else will.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"'NASA's unbroken string of cancelled vehicle programs' going back 20 years makes it a good bet that OSP will also fail. Is this just really, really, bad luck, or is NASA little more than a multi-billion-dollar jobs program for important U.S. aerospace contractors?""
You just figured it out.
I live in Orlando Florida, on the east side of town where there are a lot of government contractors, including Lockheed Martin's big IT and research center just down the street. Orlando is all about two words, "cheap labor." The people who live here are cheap labor for Disney, the other theme parks, gas stations, food related, lodging related, and for the few companies that have built offices here that has resulted in some call centers and paper filing mills. A few other businesses lay in the area, but it is nothing like any other major metro area. The rest of the jobs just don't exist here in Orlando. The cost of living is high like Denver Colorado, but the standard of living is much lower for most people.
Orlando has only one freeway, and it is terrible. The rest are toll roads -- toll roads like I have seen in no other city anywhere in the U.S. There are no bridges here to go over or anything, they just feel like taxing the local public since Florida does not have a state income tax (stupid). I have been told many times that the toll road just south of my home is the most expensive toll road in the U.S. per mile. If you have ever been in traffic in Seattle, think of that, on the city streets, but worse -- and there is no bad weather here.
The one exception to all of this is the government contractors. They drive around here in their luxury cars and SUVs. There are a lot of nice houses (mansions) just north and just south of the government contractor center. I have had the opportunity to talk to many of them since I moved here about nine months ago, including an MCSE neighbor of mine who works as support staff for Lockheed Martin. I have been told by nearly all of them that they are very happy with their jobs, they have great job security, and that they mostly sit around and do nothing, working on meaningless projects and get paid for it by the U.S. Government.
To quote one of them who worked for L3, "...To work in government contracting you just have to get a contract, then sit back and do nothing. Don't complain, just be late with your project and you will get even more money in hopes that it might ever get done."
A few of the government contractors that I have spoken with have expressed that the new wave of security related contracts will benefit them a lot and that their shops are trying desperately to land some of those. One of these shops was a flight simulation shop that was trying to change it's image over night to be a "security software" shop, so that they could land a contract. This came from one of their software developers.
There may be some shops that are doing something good that gets used by the government or eventually by the U.S. population, but I have generally attributed the technology workers around here as being old fat do-nothing's with no ambition or drive to have pride in their work. It is nothing like the western U.S. technology social environment where there are mostly young and middle aged workers who want to be proud of their work and have lots of ambition. I don't see this from the government contractors around here at all. They are all middle aged or older and almost always bitter.