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Preview of Moon-To-Mars Report
schnarff writes "Space.com has obtained a sneak preview of the Moon-To-Mars commission report, which will be officially released June 16. The report calls for spinning off NASA centers as FFRDCs, establishing an independent cost estimation bureau, and otherwise streamlining NASA's bureaucracy."
"It's not going to happen. This whole deal is just election-year BS from your friends at the Bush Administration who are still trying to distract you from the gigantic fucking mess they've created in the middle east by waving around some cool-sounding ideas that they have no intention of following up on. Oh sure, we'll spend a whole lot of tax dollars coming up with reports (like this one!) and let some worthwhile science projects fall by the wayside, but in the end absolutely jack will come of it. Hey! Look at that shiney thing! And have a nice day."
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Perhaps I'm just to cynical but I tend to think that the USA decided to go to the moon to make the USSR look weak.
In a sense it was a competition between the USA and USSR over who had the bigest "dick", and phallic objects don't get any bigger or more powerful than a Saturn 5 rocket :-)
Now the enemy is Islamic fundamentalists, and none of them are going to compete in a race to Mars.
"The Commission believes that commercialization of space should become the primary focus of the vision, and that the creation of a space-based industry will be one of the principal benefits of this journey...."
This one point seems so obvious. It has been said many, many times. Yet it's so hard for "The Powers That Be" to implement.
When the history of the airplane is considered, one has to be thankful that the Wrights did not work for the National Aeronautic Administration in 1904.
I am grateful for all that NASA has given us. But if we are to truly make the next step, the financial incentives for space must be given a chance to exercise their power.
It's hard to allow a child to move out on it's own, but for the good of both the child and the parent, it must be done. Yes, there will be mistakes and risk and danger. But the alternative is a stunted, deformed life that is nothing but tragedy.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
Now the enemy is Islamic fundamentalists, and none of them are going to compete in a race to Mars.
China announced they were going to put a man in space and on the moon. Suddenly the US announced they were going to the moon and to Mars. It's not hard to connect the dots when there are only two.
[the commission] is recommending streamlining the NASA bureaucracy, relying more heavily on the private sector, and maintaining more oversight of the nation's space program at the White House.
My leap to a conclusion leads me to believe that this is just another chapter in killing NASA completely. This means that more funding previously routed to NASA/JPL will go to the private sector. Whitehouse oversight further implies that the administration does not trust NASA with what little self-governance it has remaining to it, particularly after the most recent shuttle disaster.
Which all just points to the private sector being the future of spaceflight for all practical applications. Hopefully companies will do a better job than our government has been doing.
As an added bonus, people who complain about their tax dollars being "wasted on space" will have much less to bitch about.
While I agree that the Moon To Mars mission is just a PR stunt, and that they haven't even approached a reasonable budget for it, I have some real problems with the report. Namely, the "NASA As A Punching Bag" style.
I'm probably going to get jumped on for this, but *every* national space agency has had huge problems of every type. NASA being the biggest, it's no shock that we seem to have more than our share. But seriously - look at the ESA. Ariane has been a disaster. How many more bailouts are they going to need? How many more times is Ariane 5 going to explode? The Soviets, in their hayday, were even more unsuccessful than us; look at their appalling mars record, for example. We've got some newcomers on the scene - China, Japan, and India - for whom it is too soon to judge. However, don't hold your breath for a miracle.
Private industry? What a laugh. First off, much of NASA's work *IS* done by private industry. The company I used to work for, Rockwell-Collins, had a major shuttle contract when it was being developed. They abused the hell out of it. Whenever any project ran out of hours, they charged it to the shuttle, even if it was unrelated. Private industry is supposed to *save* us money?
Small startups? Not even the slightest bit of success. Hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into private space startups during the dotcom boom, and all they have to show for it is a bunch of loping along companies and half-completed projects of bankrupt companies.
Is everyone just doing a bad job? Of course not. The problem is that the engineering challenges are *massive*, and there are so many variables that it is almost impossible to see what realistically could go wrong. On the really big projects, it gets even worse: not only do you have so many more things that could get wrong, but you have so many more people who have their ideas of what could pose a problem, most of which are not real threats. And now, if you don't investigate each of them, you're accused of suppressing whistleblowers.
This probably isn't going to be a popular post. I'm OK with that. But I don't like the typical Bash-NASA threads that these usually turn into, so I thought I'd add my two cents. Mod me as you will.
Carbon, made, only wants to be unmade.
So if this program is all a distraction, where are all the ads? Where is the heavy press covering the thing?
If one in a hundred people in the US could not even tell you anything about the program, could you really consider it a "distraction"? Or instead is this just another mindless attack agaist Bush, the content of which you post weither the topic is caterpillar reform or what kind of hot dog to include in the national school lunch program?
Perhaps you should get off your high horse and read the report to see if it's a good idea, regardless of who is elected. NASA needs an overhaul and at least this is a start. Otherwise you are really just an off-topic wanker.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"oh-my-God-it's-a-conspiracy"
No, not a conspiracy. A plot. It's just Bush's attempt to make himself appear "Kennedyesque," ingnorant of the fact that Kennedy launched the space program because he was already Kennedyesque. It doesn't work the other way around.
Not that it matters, because a project of this magnitude is going to take the continued support of multiple administrations, these aren't Kennedy's times either, and that continued support will not be forthcoming. This project is essentially doomed. It's a shame, but that's the reality on the ground. We'll get to Mars when a canditate runs on the "We're going to Mars" platform and wins, and not before.
But that's ok. The point of the project is exactly where you say it is, and where the real conspiracy lies. Spinning off tax dollars into the private sector, into the hands of cronies.
Make hay while the sun shines, as it were.
KFG
Another advantage of Zubrin's idea is that the Fuel production is done FIRST, ahead of time. A manless lander is sent to Mars FIRST, just to start making fuel.
We'd know way in advance if there are any problems with fuel production before we sent humans there.
As it happens, JPL runs as an FFRDC, and as a result is, IMHO, the best of the NASA centers (they pay real money instead of the paltry GS salaries, and thus are able to get some of the sharpest engineers).
Sorry, but "Huh?".
By "harvesting the efforts of private industry", do you mean "licensing patented technology"?
The point of government research is that they often (especially when it comes to NASA) do research that is cost prohibitive for private industry to do. And, since all taxpayers contribute to the development, the results are freely available to all citizens. For example, NASA has large air tunnels and tons of specialized equipment to do research on icing (on airplanes, especially the wings). Their results are freely available to anybody who wants them (like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Delta Airlines, you and me). I have a very hard time believing that you'd get better results for lower cost using private industry. Even assuming that PI would 1) take on the high-expense (possibly low-yield) research, and 2) produce results more cheaply than NASA, you can be sure that they're not going to give away the results. Maybe I'm too cyincal, but I'm convinced that the few dollars of my taxes that go to NASA every year would be less than all the Intellectual Property fees I'd be paying on my first private industry-provided space service.
My other problem with the PI view is, what the hell are they going to commercialize? Space tourism? Only for a very few damn wealthy. I don't know of any vacations that the wealthy typically spend $200 million on for a few weeks time. The cost per person to make all that research and development (years and years, all operating at incredible losses) profitable would be astronomical. And for what? To float around a bit and have nothing to show for it except a memory? Maybe...
Mining? More likely, in my opinion.
Research? Yeah, some companies still do pure research.
But, does each one want to develop their own launch vehicles and platforms? No. They want to focus on their core business, and buy launch space. They already can get that from NASA, often for free. So, the question is whether PI can provide launch and mg-housing services for less than NASA (to the ones who actually pay NASA). I'm not holding my breath.
You've seen nothing of it since because it was a complete flop. There was this big televised press conference, and it was all over the news. And it came across very poorly. A week later, in the State of the Union, after this big hullabaloo about presenting it.... .nothing. Not a word of mention. So, either they "accidentally" publicized it a whole lot, or they meant for it to win support, and were disappointed. Take your pick.
Carbon, made, only wants to be unmade.
[SNIP]
Too bad it doesn't come with a plan on how industry will benefit from space applications.
[SNIP]
Too bad the Internet didn't either. And after quite a bit of hype, folks are actually making money on it in ways that no one ever anticipated.
Do you know what the "killer app" is for space? I can assure you NASA doesn't. The civilian sector initially saw that communications was the big thing and now they're making money on it. Imagine that. What will happen if we can radically drop the cost of getting to LEO?
I worked as a contractor to NASA for a year. I have friends that worked there for almost a decade. We were all unsurprised that NASA is having the safety problems it is. Inevitable, really. It's the most ineffective org I've ever seen -- and I've been in the USAF and worked for DOE for a few years. Corporate politics is polite conversation in a tea room to the full combat that is NASA.
One of the most useless things I've ever seen is a NASA civil servant. Not that they aren't nice, but useless. Now look at what Rutan is doing over at Scaled Composites, how badly the Air Force shocked NASA when they ran the Clemantine mission, and tell me why we shouldn't get NASA out of the way and put the space program where it belongs: the universities, the private sector, and the military.
Find out how many people got fired for the shuttles blowing up and you'll start to get the picture.
-- Lou
$250/ton launch costs to low earth orbit sort of change things a bit. Even the Space Elevator no longer makes sense competing with something like this, and the problems with blimp-to-orbit projects are a hell of a lot easier to solve than the problems of getting carbon nanotube technology ready to build ribbons long enough and strong enough to carry freight by the ton to orbit.
They make projects like solar power satellite networks look feasible. BTW, NASA's numbers that pointed toward feasibility were based on hypothetical $400/kg launch costs. The numbers look a lot better at $250/ton.
Given the risk-averse nature of modern corporations, this still would be a hard sell.
Perhaps government loan guarantees, liability caps like the ones given to nuclear power producers, and guarantees of X-million pounds of payload contracts to companies who prove the ability to deliver to orbit at $X or $XX dollars / pound would make it a lot easier to get private capital on board.
More of that sort of thing is discussed on my technology page, check the sig.
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