Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
You're right. But first, a slight correction. The shuttle's technology is actually a mix of 70's and 80's technology. The propulsion system is actually only about 10 years behind and the cockpit about 5 years.
Still, your point is well taken. NASA-Johnson Space Center always argues that any changes represent an unwise risk to the astronauts' lives. They argue that because NASA-JSC doesn't have to worry about costs.
And when NASA-JSC has upgraded the shuttle, the cost over-runs would take your breath away.
Jim Hillhouse (recovering aerospace engineer)
Let us go to the stars, dream new dreams, and renew the embers of hope that have long since grown cold.
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.
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.
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.
I know lots of Slashbots hate patents, but the reason a pharma corporation invests hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D every year is because the regulatory environment is such that if you discover something, you can have exclusive rights to it for a few years.
Now consider the state of Alaska. The problem: a lot of land, but no-one who wants to colonize it. The answer was called "homesteading". This basically meant that if you showed up on a plot of unclaimed land, fenced it and farmed it, after a certain amount of time, it was yours legally.
The commercial exploitation of space will be driven by similar concepts. Let's say a treaty is signed that any corporation who lands on the moon gets exclusive mining/colonization rights for a circle x km around their point of landing. That creates the incentive for investment, now a business plan can be written. Unless there's something in it for the investors, why would they invest their money?
Right now money spent on space is not an investment, it's a donation.