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Katrina Delays Shuttle
guildsolutions writes "The scoop on MSNBC has it that NASA will not fly again until next fall. With NASA's reluctance to get back into space, and Hubble dying, We just wonder when private industry will put NASA out of the game."
Because private industry did such a great job of evacuating the city of New Orleans before hurricane Katrina. Let's turn over our space program to the free market and see how it handles it.
Does anybody ever notice how whenever the free market fails at something, the government steps in to take the blame, which provides further "evidence" that government is incompetent, which results in further reduction of government services, and more privatization. Then, when private industry screws up yet again, we blame government, and round and round we go. It's a nice circular argument. This is of course the problem with privatization, is that private industry cares about one thing, and that is profit. Markets are horribly inefficient at solving certain kinds of problems, such as the evacuation of the city of New Orleans (or space exploration, unless the only thing we're interested in is sending rich people into space). It would be nice if the free-marketeers in the White House understood this fact.
When there's a buck to be made at little or no risk. Not before.
We just wonder when private industry will put Nasa out of the game.
When space travel and space telescopes become profitable.
What's the deal? NASA is solely a governemt organization. There's no question of layoffs, economic setbacks, anything. Uncle Sam's checkbook has no limits. The only thing keep shuttles on the ground is... the weather? Please. At least give us something misleading that will defer our curiosity.
I'm a lifelong space buff and even I am starting to think it's time to trash the current system and go with SafeSimpleSoon.com's proposals.
Waiting from September til March to fix a problem is fine, but when you've barely done any work so far on fixing the problem (that I'm aware; I haven't seen any test summaries beyond "we got a few tanks to work on now" hit the specialized news sources), suddenly admitting that you never even really thought March was achievable -- if you haven't done any testing yet and you're already saying a 6+ month delay is going to happen), you're clueless.
I used to say that the time wasn't up for the Shuttle yet. Now given this latest example of incompetence, it's time to move on.
Either that or take a hint from id Software, and just say "When it's done". No false promises. No bullshit.
i am a soviet space shuttle
My advice? Stop work on the ISS, buy some Soyuz spacecraft to service it through the end of its tortured life, and spend the money that would have been spent on the Shuttle for a replacement system.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
All available foam-coating engineers have been reassigned to the Superdome.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
They're called the transportation industry, i.e. bus, trains, and airplanes. The last two were started by gravy train government subsidies. However, when they are needed, they bail and close up early, leaving the majority of poor people, and even some well-to-do stranded. At least you see government pretending to take some blame. They're doing a terrible job of it, becuase the conservative administration doesn't take responsibility for much of anything, but the corporations, well, they're invisible. In fact, if you watched CNN's footage of looting, you would think that walmart was the biggest victim in all of this.
Leaving these problems up to industry is not the answer. The reason, it's obvious, because industry doesn't care about poor people.
And now they are blamming Katrina. It took ages between recent few launchings.
... what DOESN'T delay the shuttle? And for those of you who keep fighting the privitization of space with such arguments as "Who would put up telescopes and run pure science research?" The answer to that is NASA- instead of inefficiently and ineffectively blowing billions of tax dollars keeping the wheeles of their wussified, red tape, burocracy running, they could just bid out the launch of their projects to the lowest bidder in the private sector. Ohh.. and while I am venting.. what happened to NASA's hardcore pilots? The kind in the movie "The Right Stuff" and "From the Earth to the Moon?" The people they trot out now to fly the shuttle all look like Volvo drivers.
With NASA's reluctance to get back into space
So being cautious is now a reluctance to go into space? Maybe they don't want to kill another seven astronauts? They are probably quite expensive to replace.
I would think that NASA want to be in space, as much as possible, but they are being careful because they figure that their last act of absolute incompetence put them on notice. They know that they have to be careful - or their funding will dry up because of the outcry that would result from being stupid enough to not do something as simple as "look at the wing".
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
Our market system discourages anything but profit, and I don't see any corporation or consortium spending the kind of money that NASA spends, until there is a easily exploitable resource for them to take advantage of.
Yes, Virgin Spaceways (whatever it's called) will do their thing with ballistic shots, and very probably orbital shots someday as well.
But full-on space programs will be something that only governments will fund for a long time.
Certainly MS could fund a small space program... who knows, maybe Paul Allen can talk Bill into something like that.
Ignore Alien Orders
How many low-income workers are still getting paid by their supposedly uncaring employers? I've heard countless stories of compassion by employers both large and small. They don't do it out of guilt, or shame, or because it's going to make them money. They do it because they value their workers as human beings.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
Actually - in many of the areas along the Gulf you will see that private charity (Baptists, Red Cross, various church /goodwill groups etc) were in the disaster area WELL before the government was!
This is a pillar of the free market/libertarian ideal. People cannot depend on the government to help them, and most, not all but most, of the time it should not be the place of the government to provide support and assistance.
Persoanlly I think that the government did have a duty here and there was obviously a breakdown in the system.
However, in this situation, and many others, it has shown over and over again that people CANNOT depend on the government and SHOULD not.
Free markets, individual freedoms, limited government, and personal responsibility are the most reliable courses of action.
Libertas in infinitum
It won't be private enterprise that makes NASA irrelevant. It will be the Chinese.
Private industry hasn't even come close to being able to reach the orbits that NASA does routinely (remembering that NASA's vehicles are built by private industry contractors).
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Not a chance in the next decade. The space elevator has the best chance of meeting these goals, and it's still just an idea.
In the case of New Orleans, the required investments in levees have consistently returned large benefits to the society. Because of the excellent location of the city, it was an efficient hub for shipping that benefited not just the Mississippi River basin, but the entire nation, and even the world. Sure, other ports exist and competed with New Orleans, but the city's ongoing prosperity was proof of how it contributed to the prosperity of all the other communities that helped pay the taxes that maintained the levees.
In the case of NASA, the people who talk about privatization are consistently clueless about the real numbers involved. Actually, this is also complicated by the fact that most of the return on space exploration is in the form of knowledge that has no short-term market value that could attract investors.
However, both New Orleans and NASA are suffering from the side effects of incompetent leadership at higher levels. Some of them are faith-based fanatics who can't deal with the complexities of the real world. Others are short-term profiteers whose only real mission is to steal as much money from the government as possible. A few of them even have delusions of recreating the Holy Roman Empire.
Whatever. For all of them the same response is appropriate. As Rocky said to Bullwinkle, "That trick never works."
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
No, that's just more leftwing spin, trying to make NASA look out of touch. In fact, the Shuttle has been deployed to rescue survivors of hurricane Katrina. Bush's FEMA assures the Gulf Coast that help is on the way, ASAP. We'll have that Shuttle right over - in Fall 2006, just in time for the Congressional elections. Otherwise, enough Democrats might get elected to the House to impeach Bush, and then where would our faith-based space program be, without its greatest champion?
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make install -not war
*bashes head on table*
I always hate it when people say that NASA should be on its way out, and private industry should take over. NO! Failures! F-! Private industry is out looking for profit, finding a dollar in something. If there isn't a dollar to be earned, they won't be in business very long. Private industry isn't interested in furthering the field of science, they don't care too much about contributing to the knowledge of mankind. This is why we need NASA-- to make scientific breakthroughs that are available to ALL for (ideally) noble causes.
Quickly sidestepping too much politics, NASA embodies what the government should spend its money on (yes, improving infrastructure of the country is important, but I'm sure there's a lot that the government shouldn't spend money on *cough*war*cough*). NASA is set up to do wickedly expensive, yet groundbreaking research which can be useful 30+ years down the road-- very few companies would make such an investment. It's the department that's set up to be the exploratory fleet of our time. Who else would put a couple of rovers on Mars? Where's the profit in that? We got tons of scientific benefit from it, and I think we all can concur that it was a damn good thing that we landed on Mars and scouted the area. What motivation would private industry have to do the same?
I agree that currently NASA is kind of a broken department. Politicians are more interested in financing bridges named after themselves and whatnot than advancing science. Society today is more interested in what some celebrity ate for breakfast than science. It's a damn shame too! Look, what NASA needs is a bit of a reorganization, a shakedown if you will. They need to get back in gear, and instead of being a political lapdog, they need to get back into their R&D groove. You can't argue that they've done great things in the past. Currently, they've got some of the best damn brains in the country. They were able to hit a friggin comet with satellite! I say that we throw more money into NASA, and tell 'em to make something of it. Make a new shuttle! Find a way to setup a moon base, or mine the moon for materials. Push further into ramjet/scramjet research. There's so much that they can do, we just need to let them do it.
Please, realize that NASA is not a detriment to the country. It's done a lot of great stuff, and has the potential to do a lot more. If you privatize all of NASA, science will be set back many, many decades.
Lockheed Martin Katrina Response
As a weekend help desk guy, I personally have had 3 calls from people out there: 2 of them were living out of hotels. Any time one of them calls up, my coworkers and I give them priority: we couldn't imagine being in their shoes right now. They're still trying to figure out where everyone's gone. Employees from other states are going there to help out their relatives & bring them back with them. They know the "ET" is important. But right now, many don't even have homes.
American Red Cross
You may even want to find out if anyone in your area is matching donations. I heard Albertsons was.
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
cheers, ben
cheers, ben
Never miss a good chance to shut up -- Will Rogers
I've been a long-time advocate of pulling NASA out of the LEO launch service. I think if you put it in terms like that, where science, engineering, and commerce have made huge strides to the point that having NASA do this sort of "pickup to LEO" just isn't a smart thing.
All NASA programs, including unfortunately the Shuttle Program as well, have been working under the assumption of "get it done, regardless of the cost". The private sector companies working for NASA have had little incentive to try and knock the price of their efforts down to capture the next level of the market either.
Think about it in terms of just pure economics for the moment, if you will. Larger governments around the world have a few projects, like communication satellites, military surveilance equipment, orbital nuclear weapons (don't say they don't exist... you are fooling yourself if you think that dream), scientific research equipment, and things like the GPS satellite constellation. All of these items are of the sort (with the exception of perhaps strictly comm sats) that will be needed by governments regardless of the cost. Or more to the point, in a competitve global launch market the general price level per launch and what the "market" is willing to pay to get these kind of payloads to go up is about $100 million to $500 million per launch. And that is roughly what traditional commercial space launchers are charging in order to send stuff up.
The next "level" of economic demand to go up into space is for space tourism, but even multi-millionaires are only willing to spend between $10 million and at the upper end about $30 million for a trip into orbit. There is slightly more demand for this than is currently handled by the Russians, but this is about the very upper limit for what a private individual can come up with after nearly a lifetime of incredible success as a private entrepreneur. Those that have more money just aren't the type that would want to spend larger amounts of money (unless you are more like H. Ross Perot and don't care if you blow $100 million on a silly personal PR campaign that goes nowhere). The Russians have been able to capture this market exclusivly, but it is also very small. Boeing is not really interested in servicing this market in part because of how very few people there are that are willing to pay even those modest amounts. Keep in mind that the SpaceX rockets are going to be competitive in this general price range, but there really isn't going to be that many more rocket flights at $10 million per flight as opposed to $200 million per flight, so these private companies are saying essentially, "Why kill the golden eggs when we can continue to charge $200 million per flight?"
Do some simple math: If there are only 100 flights per year at $200 million per flight, compared to about maybe 300 flights per year at $10 million per flight, which price point are you going to try and market your stuff at? You actually start to seriously lose money by lowering your cost, with no real benefits except pissing off your investors and a general "goodwill" to mankind.... usually not a part of the corporate charters of any of these companies.
As Virgin Atlantic and some of the current space tourism companies have found out, there is a huge market for space travel that is in the range of $100,000 to $1 million, especially closer to the $100,000 range. Most middle-income people in 1st world countries will have that sort of money in their lifetime. Perhaps they have to mortgage their house, and certainly it would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try and go up in space for that kind of money, but it is something that many very ordinary people are willing to do.
Not only is space tourism going to be feasable when you can get space launches this cheap, but there are whole new tiers of commercial applications when you can get prices down to this level, including same day or previous day parcel delivery.... when crossing the international date line as an example. This pr
If there was no NASA everyone would be clamoring for such an organization. While it might be mismanaged in peculiar ways as is expected of a government bureaucracy it is doing a job that private industry is not going to do. NASA funds and facilitates all sorts of blue sky research all over the country. Not only is this true of NASA but also NIST, the NSF, NIH, in some cases DARPA, and several other agencies. Open ended research is important because it expands our whole body of knowlege, it doesn't necessarily lead to marketable products. When Dupont and Pfizer fund research they're looking for a payoff because they're looking to drive a profit, government funded research doesn't even have to break even.
Private industry is only going to explore space if there's a dollar in it. Scaled Composites and Virgin envision space tourism while other companies are looking towards resource mining. Boeing isn't launching probes to the outer solar system for the benefit of all mandkind, they're building satellites for DirecTV to pump more channels of HD video into televisions. While Boeing or Scaled Composites might contract for NASA or other research organizations they're not going to initiate the explorations altruistically.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to generate a profit, it drives people to work harder and become more creative. There's also nothing wrong with diverting tax dollars into blue sky research. NASA needs to rethink the ISS and SST programs. The ISS is never going to do us any good if it's only manned by babysitters rather than researchers. The shuttles aren't terribly useful if they're only being used as extremely expensive construction rigs and aren't launching with any sort of regularity.
What NASA's spending $1bn a pop on can be done far more efficiently with heavy lift vehicles that don't need to use up payload weight on wings and crew compatments. Crews can be sent up in capsules that aren't wasting payload weight on empty cargo bays and unpowered engines. A larger fleet of cheap less flexible vehicles seems like a step backwards but in the long run it ends up being far cheaper. Say you need a large crew to do EVAs to put together a large habitat for the ISS. Two crew vehicles can be launched from different pads (say KSC and Vandenberg AFB) while the habitat module could be launched from another location entirely. A construction crew doesn't pack everyone and their equipment into a single huge truck that can barely fit on the road, they take a couple different specialized vehicles to the site and the crew shows up after picking up coffee.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
According to the ARLA researchers, all you need is a gas cannon to fire a ramjet at the required 400 MPH, the ramjet then carries a rocket to the upper atmosphere and a starting velocity of Mach 5. It should be relatively simple to build a rocket that can start from there and reach LEO.
(Not trivial, but certainly within the capacity of a joint project by amateurs licensed to wield larger rocket motors.)
Ramjet designs are on the Internet - all it would really take is for someone to build one from light enough (but strong enough) material. If you use a liquid hydrogen fuel, rather than normal aviation fuel, you can get ramjets up to about mach 7 or 8.
There are three benefits of this design - ramjets are much more stable than rockets, so easier to build reliably. As this part would not need to leave the atmosphere, it may also be reusable. The second benefit is that ramjets are vastly more fuel efficient than rockets, making it cheaper for amateurs to launch such systems on a limited budget. The third benefit is that jets are more controllable, so a less sophisticated guidance system is needed.
The first stage could probably be replaced with a rail gun/linear motor, as all you need is an initial velocity. The direction is unimportant to the ramjet. An "Air Turbo Ramject", which can handle both subsonic AND supersonic speeds effectively might even eliminate the need for that initial kickstart stage.
Is this a viable possibility? Maybe. Jets work well up to about 30 miles. The "GoFast" rocket, on May 17, 1994, reached an altitude of 74 miles from the ground. Rockets do better in thinner atmospheres, as there is less air resistance and the air isn't needed for anything. It would also be starting off at Mach 6, not from a standstill. So, the combined altitude of 104 miles is definitely a major underestimate of what could be done by amateurs TODAY, no further work needed.
LEO starts at around 125 miles. If we're just adding altitudes directly, we'd be 21 miles short. But we aren't adding them directly, because we've the initial velocity for the rocket and the reduced air resistance. I don't know if these are enough to add 21 miles to the vertical range, but I imagine it would be damn close.
Can we make this a little more definite? Yes. Ramjets work extremely well in a thick atmosphere, but NASA engineers pioneered in the 50s a technique of adding supplemental oxygen to boost the altitude they'll work at. This is why a lot of US spy-planes can operate at the 50 mile range (and so get all those astronaut wings).
So if we revamp the ramjet to use hydrogen fuel, supplemented with oxygen to maintain pressure at high altitudes, we should be able to shift the point of launching the rocket to 50 miles. Furthermore, hydrogen fuel gives you better output on a ramjet, so our starting speed will move from Mach 6 to perhaps Mach 8.
Again, just adding altitudes, we have a combined total now of 124 miles. This is more workable. The initial speed, plus the lower air resistance, only needs to add one mile before we're in LEO. That would seem plausible enough.
At this point, a rocket like GoFaster isn't going to carry communications satellites into space. On the other hand, amateurs - especially amateurs who are open-sourcing their methods and techniques - who reach LEO are going to kick up an unbelievable stink in the space industry. They are going to be seen the same way Linux is seen by Microsoft - an annoying buzz that won't go away, can't be kept away and keeps getting bigger and louder.
All it would take is the sorts of investments comparable to those being put into Virgin Galactic going to amateur rocketry and distributed computing systems for the number-crunching, and
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)