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NASA Admin Says Shuttle and ISS are Mistakes
Teancum writes "NASA Administrator Michael Griffin was recently interviewed by the USA Today Editorial Board regarding the current direction of the U.S. Space Program, and in the interview he suggested that the past three decades have been a huge mistake and a waste of resources. As a total cost for both programs that has exceeded $250 Billion, you have to wonder what other useful things could have been developed using the same resources. Griffin quoted in the interview regarding if the shuttle had been a mistake "My opinion is that it was... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible." Regarding the ISS: "Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in.""
I'm sure I've heard that the ISS was supposed to have a more equatorial orbit, but when Russia came on board the orbit was tilted to give them easier access to it.
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Sure, that $250 billion could buy us another year in Iraq!
But seriously, the ISS is not a waste of money. When you think of all the research done there, the international goodwill spread there, it is well worth the cost. I do wish the degree of internationality was a bit larger. Simply having Americans and Russians isn't very diverse -- it would be nice to see China/India/other aspiring space powers to join in the fun (and help with the bills).
Headline doesn't reflect the Michael Griffin quote in the summary :(.
I wonder if he is aware of the recent wars that the US has gotten involved with. Talk about real wastes of money. At least the Shuttle program, and the ISS to a lesser extent, have furthered our knowledge of science and engineering, rather than just our ability to mindlessly destroy.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I RTFA and can see what he's saying that the shuttle and ISS were basically mistakes, and I agree. However, I'm not so clear about his proposed alternatives. Is he shilling for Bush's "Man to Mars" mission and saying that should have been our goal since the 1970s? That would certainly be a wise career move (at least for the moment) but what purpose would it serve to send a man to Mars? We can't even get some of our unmanned probes to the Martian surface successfully. Maybe we could try to get a probe there and back to Earch first.
Remember spaceship one used knowledge and tech that NASA developed/figured out.
They were first to do it privately, not first ever.
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When you consider our prodigious investments in both combat and weaponry, it's hard to see any kind of space exploration as anything other than progress.
Having no space program would be a mistake. Having an inefficient one just reminds us that there is always room for improvement.
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As a total cost for both programs that has exceeded $250 Billion, you have to wonder what other useful things could have been developed using the same resources.
"Useful"? I hate it when people use words like that in reference to the sciences. It's like they think every last penny of the national budget that's not being spent on Medicare or disaster recovery should be spent feeding the homeless.
How do you define "useful"? This is NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Their entire charter is building giant cans that explode out of one end in order to throw chunks of metal into orbit. They're science, which means $99 out of every $100 they spend goes toward what amounts to research and development of ideas nobody else can implement, and then working with them for a couple of decades to see what comes of them.
How can you gauge the "usefulness" of the Cold War space race in the 1950s and '60s? Yet that race eventually led to the technology and processes which, today, have placed hundreds of communications, weather, and astronomy satellites in orbit. Was any of that "useful" at the time? Heck no. We haven't gained one "useful" bit of knowledge from our trip to the Moon in 1969, but we didn't know that would be the case until we actually went there.
NASA's budget is on a shoestring as it is. Give them credit for doing what they do with as few dollars as it is. You never know when an investment will pay out until it does.
It's fairly well known that the space shuttle was a compromise between NASA and the military. In order to get the budget, they agreed to design requirements that involved weird payloads and the ability to launch them into polar orbit. That in turn drove the design to be what it is today.
In terms of the space station, it seemed to quickly turn into an exercise to divide up the money according to country and state. I'm not even sure what science goes on up there any more. These days the reduced crew seems to spend their time repairing the place. Crazy.
Imagine if the Space ship One team had 250 billion...
.com era to realise that.
They would probably become just as inefficient as NASA. Generally, the bigger the budget you have, the less efficient and more wasteful you become. You've only got to look at some of the excesses of the
they wouldn't have accomplished jack, if NASA hadn't come up with the tremendous knowledge base that current teams get to draw from.
NASA could put a tiny ship with barely any payload into low orbit decades ago. Not really all that comparible.
Your post was rated insightful? More like overly-rehashed nonsense.
1) Cheap, reliable, frequent trips to geosnychronous orbit.
2) First generation platform at one of the Lagrange points.
3) Lunar observatory on the dark side.
4) Another Hubble-like telescope at L3.
5) Space elevators, aynone?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
He offers plenty of criticism of the current plan, but the article lacks one important detail:
- Exactly what would Mr Smartypants have had us do with the money?
I mean, he states the shuttle was "deeply flawed". What would he have built? Kept shooting Apollo capsules up forever more? Built an Apollo 2? And if the ISS isn't in a good orbit, what orbit would he prefer? And additionally, how were we supposed to know the Shuttle wasn't a solid idea, until we had actually built a few and tested them operationally?
It seems to me he's just trying to ride the wave of popular opinion that says the shuttle must go and the ISS isn't interesting. It's plenty easy to offer criticism, but it's a bit harder to come up with an viable, alternative solutions. If he's going to be so critical as to call the last 30 years a mistake, than it's only fair he steps up to the plate and specifically outline what he would have done better.
I've always found it interesting that hardware and research which began as byproducts of various military initiatives may actually preserve our species in the end.
It's almost poignant.
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The thing is, even if Scaled Composites had 250 billion in one large lump sum, it wouldn't get them very far at first. You see, the Space Shuttle was nickled and dimed into existance, as was pretty much all of the space program (except maybe Apollo, those budgets were kinda wild).
In fact, if we go back to why the Space Shuttle concept was even dreamed up, it was to cut costs, so that the program wouldn't have to keep nickel and diming their way into space. Of course, it didn't save them as much as they had hoped, and more recently has scaled up quite a bit in expense maintaining old flight hardware, but nevertheless the reasoning is all there.
I mean we can all look at what we've spent to date in any industry, find flaws of where the money was put, credit them to bad engineering, cutting corners, whatever you like, but the point remains the money is spent and you should be working towards moving your industry in a forward direction and not spinning your wheels trying to figure out what to do next.
This is why I'm supporting the SDLV so much. We have flight hardware that works, and has worked many times. The flaws have been hammered out by catastrophies that happened with the Shuttle hardware that can now be retired to a museum. Even if this will set us back a few years, and it will make us look like the Soviets had it right all along, we will still be moving forward into further reaches in space, and we'll be able to go back to the moon (something the shuttle would have never allowed us to have done).
Sometimes it's good to have disasters like these; it makes you look at yourself and realize that man is mortal and that the hardware you're flying on is only as good as its weakest link. It makes you grow out of complacency and mundane attitudes about flying into space. And it opens up people's checkbooks to help mend the ailing space agency. The only really sad part is the loss of human lives to make people realize that this needed to have been done years and years ago.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
When people state that a arguably successful endeavor was "was extremely aggressive and just barely possible", I have to wonder exactly what is behind the statement. The shuttle has been successful on a number of fronts, too many to list here. Yes, exploration is a dangerous business--an not just space exploration. You can always look back in history for dangerous expeditions and high casualty rates. Test pilots, famous historical exploration, modern-day exploration (in space, underwater, and caves), unnamed and unrecorded Viking, Chinese, Phoenician, Portuguese, and Polynesian explorers, etc. I am sure you can find many harrowing tales of death and suffering in the name of exploration. I am sure there are a number of tales of failed Colonial settlements which ended tragically. It makes me wonder if we have lost our tolerance for casualties in the name of science and/or exploration. If it wasn't for seemingly foolhardy or impossible endeavors, would we have really learned anything of value?
I don't understand what you're complaining about. This guy isn't doesn't like frivolous expenditure of money, and somehow he's a bad guy? Would you have preferred more of the do-nothing status quo?
Sounds like you don't like him simply because he's a Bush appointee, which is hardly relevant in this case. Besides, he right. NASA has been horribly mismanaged for the lat three decades, and it's time someone on the inside came out and said that.
As Richard Feynman's brilliant analysis from 1986 clearly states, the shuttle's main engines were NOT designed properly and are doomed to be both expensive to maintain and markedly dangerous to use.
t ml
A link to his comments is at http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.h
He has a wonderful explanation, in terms that non-engineers as well as engineers can understand, about how to build complex devices. Good engineering, he says, comes from dividing the task in to component parts, creating specifications for those parts, building samples, testing them to their limits, retesting them to various other limits, until you have a complete understanding of all the failure modes of that component, as well as the reliability of your manufacturing process for that component. Then, you assemble multiple components together and test that assembly together in all the modes you can conjure up, to create what I have always heard termed, "A Well-characterized System".
As he points out, the space shuttle main engines (SSME's), though complex and "groundbreaking" in the sense that they were very big and incorporating some (at the time) quite advanced technologies, they were NOT WELL CHARACTERIZED on a component basis. To my knowledge (although I'm not a NASA watcher with as much fervor as some) I don't believe the SSMEs have EVER BEEN analyzed and re-engineered to create characterizations of their failure points, reliability, etc.
The fact that NASA's next plan is to use them in the follow-on vehicles for heavy lift only testifies to NASA's complete lack of focus here. They should put out several contracts for heavy lift engines with well-characterized failure modes, with focuses on reusability, reliability, maintenance cost, and overall operating cost.
We're soon going to be stuck with the next-gen heavy lift using components of unknown reliability, which forces us to replace component parts ("tune-up" or "overhaul") the system too often and with too large an expense.
Feynman was right. Solve the root cause. Engineer these things with good methodologies. And don't tie us down to next-gen-of-schlock-engineering if we don't have to be. I congratulate the able engineers who worked on the SSME's, but I respect Feynman's analysis that correct procedures benefit lowering long-term costs and ensure safety of the admirable crews who pilot our national spacecraft.
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You are a liar and a loser. You criticize Griffin without any grasp of the facts, and in doing so lie and distort his significant record. Griffin was distinguished head of the Space Department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Before that he worked at NASA and previously did important work for SDI which led the development of the Delta anti-missle system. When he was appointed to head NASA he had just been elected to be president of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a group of scholarly aeronautics engineers. He is also shockingly well educated: BS Engineering from University of Maryland College Park Masters in Aerospace Engineering from Catholic University Masters in Electrical Engineering from University of Southern California Masters in Applied Physics from Johns Hopkins Masters in Civil Engineering from George Washington University MBA from Loyola College, MD BS Physics Johns Hopkins He was working on his BS in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins when he left for NASA. He plans to return at then of his term. He co-wrote what many believe to be the definitive textbook on space vehicle design used in virtually every graduate aeronautical program. In general, you are an asshole. Griffin is not a hack. He is a shockingly well qualified man. His views expressed here are refined, excellently thought out, and very reasonable. Disagree? Fine. Say why and be prepared to be ripped apart. Assholes like you are the reason qualified people avoid politics and positions of responsbility. You labeled him a hack without even knowing anything about his impressive qualifications.
NASA waited too long to move past the shuttle, by now they should have been useing the next genneration of shuttle one that can fly into orbit. This thing that they are doing now is just a waste.
If it was up to me I would cut NASA just to unmanned stuff and set more prizes to private business for achiving goals like orbit and moon orbit etc.
To those to say we could have spent the money to feed the poor and other things, the space program has taught us things we could not have learned on earth and things that help or one day will help all mankind...
NASA Admin Says Shuttle and ISS are Mistakes
is not the same thing as
he suggested that the past three decades have been a huge mistake and a waste of resources
which is not the same as
"It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible....we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in"
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This is not meant to be a troll. I love the space program and everything about it. But I do have a serious question to make sure I'm not overlooking something.
At this stage of the game, what is it that we can do on Mars with a manned mission that we cannot accomplish better, cheaper, and safer, with a robotic mission?
I really don't see a point in a manned mission to Mars until we've been on the Moon long enough to have a permanent station of some kind there.
As much as I loved Apollo, I'm not sure I see that it really accomplished anything with manned missions that a robotic mission couldn't have done. Especially since if I'm not mistaken only one or two real 'scientists' went on any of those missions.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I think most of us SysAdmins new that IIS was a mistake for years now.
Absolutely. Flood that money into the private market and let it take their chances with space exploration.
I can't believe a NASA Administrator (read: advocate) would be so candid. But the point here is not that space exploration is bad, or science is bad or we are bad at science or we shouldn't invest in science. The point is Government is bad at science. Government is bad at running a multi-hundred billion science program. Government is inefficient. Government is bad at ensuring safety and reliabilty.
What we need is less government involvement, whether it is domestic government or foreign governments. Yes, japan, china and india can help stem the costs - private japanese, indian and chinese firms. Not more mismanaging governments. Other space exploration will just be run by the same types that run the UN. Gross incompetence, malfeasance and inefficiency.
The problem isn't overinflated budgets, it's poor management of those budgets. People who design soemthing turn around and say "hey look, we need more money to keep going, this is going to be more expensive"; make them quantify why it will be more expensive, come up with a list of alternatives, and make these people work for the money they're getting.
If Scaled Composite was handed a check for 250 Billion they'd wet themselves, hire a ton of new engineers, and start on their way to becoming NASA. But forcing them to work with a small budget makes each and every bolt a considered cost, and a lot more streamlined.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that Scaled Composites can do better than NASA, but it will take some self control when it comes to spending, designing and testing. But I would be greatly disappointed if they were handed a huge check for a quarter trillion dollars.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
The Russians put the first parts of the ISS in orbit, and did it in an orbit that is easier for them than for the Americans. The large angle with the equator reduces the amount of payload the shuttle can bring to the ISS.
why do people always refer to spaceship one when space shuttle articles come up.
space ship one wasn't designed as an orbital vehicle. in the fact that it was designed to do one thing and one thing only, it actually mirrors the short term thinking that went into the space shuttle.
therein lies the issue. and it isn't just with NASA. All of our governmental goals are short term. So there is no natural evolution of our technological process in regards to space.
just our whole governmental process is screwy. How is it that George Bush promises no tax increases in light of the recent meteorological disasters. How is this fucking possible? Would I have a problem with a slight tax increase to cover shortfall and to finance the rebuilding of an american city? No. Would I have a problem with the slightly increased cost of what we learn of protecting our coastal cities because this is a country built on the economic might of its coastal urban centers, especially because I live in one? No. Who are these people in our country that favor these reduced tax rates; it's like the governmental equivalent of anorexia. How is this possible, Mr. Bush? Regardless of whether there are billions of dollars wasted on other things, and I assume they are, they've already been allocated. Where is this cash coming from? And who the fuck cares about Mars when we can't get back to ORBIT. Orbit, Mr. Bush. We can't get to orbit.
Our government is like a macrocosmic MTV. Short attention span.... much ado... about nothing. Everyone knows that overspecialization breeds inherent weakness, but we keep making task specific ships.... we keep overspecializing over and over, which forces us to throw out designs when administrations and priorities and mission requirements change.
and please, lets not even refer to space-ship one - it's a glorified bottle rocket. It's not even innovative; the air force pioneered all the research in the 50s. It doesn't even have avionics; which is why it pitched wildly (catastrophically!) during one of its "record" setting flights. We shouldn't be "piloting" spaceships; shit, as a species, we can barely drive.
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Omg what are you talking about, we got the memory foam bed out of nasa teknol0gy. Definately worth the 250 billion
Imagine the beowulf cluster you could build with $250 billion!
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Absolutely. Flood that money into the private market and let it take their chances with space exploration.
.coms failed; they had little or no ideas, but a ton of cash to blow on hardware.
Bad idea. I don't want to be picking up would be space explorers off my lawn each and every morning. Better to put money into ventures you know have some kind of chance than to just flood the market with money. This is why so many
The point is Government is bad at science.
Sore point really. Government can be an aid or a hindrance to science as society guides it to be. It just so happens we wouldn't have rocket science or even jet science if it wasn't for a government's overinflated military spendings and need for the next latest and greatest weapons. Things you take for granted are almost all rooted back to some government spending. Remember ARPANET?
What we need is less government involvement
No, what we need is less governmental hindrance, and from what I've seen, the goverment is apt to do just that right now. Step out of the way of anyone who wants to go into space, and even provide a little room in the budget for them. The FAA has been more than pleased to grant several air-worthy and space-worthy some flight time recently. This is the American government at work for science.
Lastly, I want to add my own point. Space flight in this country is generally overlooked by people. Most people equate the saftey of spaceflight to the saftey of air travel, which is a gross misunderstanding. While we were singing the praises of the Apollo-era astronauts, the Space Shuttle Astronauts are generally not even given a single block of airtime on television, or a mention in the evening news. Most people don't even realize that there are people in space this very minute, and think it's a generally safe place to be. This needs to stop. Space flight is exceedingly dangerous, it's industrious, hard work, and the people who have the courage and training to hop on top of a million gallons of high explosives need to be seen as national heros for what they are doing. The work they are doing right now in space is almost entirely peace-oriented, even if the science could easily be turned to make weapons. These are the kinds of things we need to look at as a society if we ever want to colonize space. Sadly I don't think any of the things mentioned above will happen in my lifetime.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
The ISS had its start under Reagan, and there were no doubt many political and bureaucratic reasons for it getting started. But by the Clinton Administration, it was _continued_ primarily for one purpose: to allow the US to indirectly subsidize the Russian space industry, and give all those soon-to-be-unemployed Russian rocket scientists a paycheck. Thus giving them less reason to wander off to Iran, Pakistan, China, etc. And that seems to have been fairly successful.
sPh
There's a thing called overspecialization. Ever heard of it? Sure it works, but will it scale well? lol... and from a company called scaled composites no less.
The fact that there are no avionics means that much will have to be redesigned from scratch. lol
And like I said, much of this "testing" was done in the 50s. lol.
And like I said, it's not "their" tech. The air force did it in the 50s. Ever heard of the cold war? lots of good tech came from it. check it out.
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No, what we need is less governmental hindrance . . .
Government involvement == government hindrance. The (US Federal) government is incapable of 'providing a little budget' for something without attaching all sorts of strings to the money. The fact that the FAA is 'granting' flight time to vehicles is not the government supporting anything. It's the government interfering less than normal.
'I ain't a liar, baby, and I ain't proud I just want what I'm not allowed.' -- Violent Femmes, 36-24-36
Oh yes, the "Scaled Composites kicks ass, NASA sucks!"-argument.... SC has the benefit of being able to take advantage of stuff NASA, ESA and Soviets invented for them. Shuttle and the like were built from the ground up. Gradual evolution from something else was not possible, because there was nothing to evolve from. Some of the required technology did not exist, so it had to be invented. Computers were at their infancy when they designed the shuttle etc. etc.
Now all that hard work is done, and we have so powerful computers that the computer I'm typing this message on, is propably faster than all the computers combined NASA had when they designed the Shuttle. Now we have Scaled Composites who marches in, takes advantage of all the stuff NASA pioneered at great expense, and they barely manage to get one spacecraft (with just the pilot, and nothing else) in to space for short amount of time. And they shout off "look how cheaply we can do this!". Well, no shit Sherlock, since NASA and others did all the hard work for you! NASA had none of that whiz-bang technology at their disposal that you take for granted! The foundation on which SC can build their space-operation on already exists. It did not exists back when NASA designed the shuttle, NASA had to build it from the ground up. And that takes money. SC didn't do it, they just take advantage of it.
Yes, what SC did was great. But I'm getting sick and tired of listening to the "NASA sucks, Scaled rules!" choir of fanboys. NASA has done A LOT of work for space travel, and now we have others taking advantage of their pioneering work. Usually it is very expensive to be the first one at doing something. Those that follow have easier job in front of them.
And of course it's very easy NOW to point out the flaws in the Shuttle. And of course it's easy NOW to deisgn something better than the shuttle. And the reason for that is that we can learn from the shuttle! NASA didn't have that luxury when they designed the shuttle, it was the first of it's kind.
NASA does lots of stuff. SC managed to barely do a sub-orbital spaceflight. Maybe NASA spends more money, but they also do A LOT more than SC does!
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http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/shuttle.htm
As far back as 1970 cost was an issue
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Sigs are like arse-holes, everybody has one
Engineers were criticizing the shuttle as it was being built and pointing out the flaws in it's design before it was built. The problems that the shuttle has have all been predicted. One doesn't need a operational test to know that if I fling my self off a 100 story building I will end up as a crumpled dead smear on the ground.
What would be the point of outlining an entire plan of "What would I have done if I was king of NASA?" I prefer that he outline what he will do NOW. Which if you note the beginnings of this was announced last week.
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why do people always refer to spaceship one when space shuttle articles come up.
Good question. My only answer is that Space Ship One has reinvigorated people thinking about spaceflight, even if SSO is a farcry from the STS.
just our whole governmental process is screwy. How is it that George Bush promises no tax increases in light of the recent meteorological disasters. How is this fucking possible? Would I have a problem with a slight tax increase to cover shortfall and to finance the rebuilding of an american city? No. Would I have a problem with the slightly increased cost of what we learn of protecting our coastal cities because this is a country built on the economic might of its coastal urban centers, especially because I live in one? No. Who are these people in our country that favor these reduced tax rates; it's like the governmental equivalent of anorexia. How is this possible, Mr. Bush? Regardless of whether there are billions of dollars wasted on other things, and I assume they are, they've already been allocated. Where is this cash coming from? And who the fuck cares about Mars when we can't get back to ORBIT.
Many people will have disagreements about this paragraph. I've already heard hundreds of sentements like "Why would you build a city under sea level anyways", "Why should my tax dollars go somewhere that isn't helping me", etc. Some people simply don't realize what their dollar is actually doing for them, and some people don't really realize the value of a dollar. Only a few people exist that actually don't have a clue of either side of this issue, and to all our lamenting I think one of them is in the White House as we speak.
As for the point about space; by setting a goal to go to Mars, you encompass the goal of getting into space. A plan already exists as a back up plan to the shuttle; Soyuz capsules will be bought from Russia, and, when they are ready, SDLVs will replace the ailing Space Shuttle as our main route to space. Not only will we see space flight get cheaper per pound, we will see a greater number of people getting into space, as it is almost trivial to launch 50 people into space once you remove the cargo limitations from that launch vehicle.
Lastly, people fear change, which is why the government tends to be very short-sighted with its goals. Setting short term goals of even 10 years (which might seem long term to most of us, but this is a government; governmental long terms are hundreds of years) is hard for congress because the next politician will simply come in and undo what the last one did. Now that the Republicans have railroaded our government, we will see a lot more focusing of budgets, lots more spending, and probably, lots more taxes. There are good things and bad things about every situation, and limiting yourself to the short-sightedness of one political party or spectrum really can make you miss the triumphs of another. I'm personally a Socialist, but I do have to commend the Republicans, first of all for attaining the position they are in, and second of all, for not being frugal in a time of need. My biggest fear, though, is that no internal investigations will happen as to why these things have taken place in the first place, but I don't think the Democrats will let this one go.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Asked Tuesday whether the shuttle had been a mistake, Griffin said, "My opinion is that it was. ... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible." Asked whether the space station had been a mistake, he said, "Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in."
I disagree with the article's description here. Griffin's being pretty blunt in those answers, esp. for a government employee. Most would never admit to such huge mistakes.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/
"My opinion is that it was... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the point of space exploration as a whole? That it's really hard, fraught with danger, and constantly pushes the envelope of what's possible with our technology and ingenuity?
We stunned the world by putting men on the moon, but for chrissakes, that was decades ago. With advancements in technology since then, we should have half the solar system under our belt by now.
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Government involvement == government hindrance. The (US Federal) government is incapable of 'providing a little budget' for something without attaching all sorts of strings to the money. The fact that the FAA is 'granting' flight time to vehicles is not the government supporting anything. It's the government interfering less than normal.
I take it you believe heavily against the government, and that's fine by me, but you've done nothing to strip my point from validity.
The government is more than capable of handing money over to anyone it wants, and in fact, you probably wouldn't have made it through elementry, middle, high school or college if they hadn't have (of course you'll say the government never gave you a grant, but what you fail to realize is that they gave your institution a grant, and thus, helped pay your astronomical schooling fees). Of course, there are always exceptions to this rule, but if you are one of them, you are exceptionally wealthy or exceptionally poor and never went to school at all.
The fact that the FAA monitors flight is something they've also done for you. If it weren't for them, all kinds of machines that should never see air travel would be up there fluttering around, and coming down on people like you on a whim. In order to prevent "the sky is falling" catastrophies from making the nightly news every day, the government instituted a way of tracking, monitoring, and guiding the aircraft over your head so that you don't even think about it when a Boeing 747 comes barreling over your head in a large city. If you think that the government "interfering" by trying to keep your life well and protected is a shame, then perhaps you are in the wrong country. That same government keeps a house over your head with building codes, keeps the food you eat safe with regulations and guidelines, and tries to prevent you from being ill with hospitals, and the CDC. But of course, you don't think of any of this during your ordinary day, and don't realize just how much you need that government supporting you to maintain the quality of life you have now. If you don't mind it, though, you can find a nice little island somewhere and live off coconuts for the rest of your days.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Freedom was foreseen as primarily a US venture for launch and support, as already indicated. Ascent from French Guiana was possible (they were our friends, right?) without too much trouble in a 28.5 deg inclined orbit, but it took a fair bit of delta-V to get from Baikanor to 28.5 deg. Of course, that wasn't our problem as the Soviets were on the other side.
OK, international politics aside.
One of the real problems we saw was the US Congress, and yes, NASA management.Space Station Freedom was often a dumping ground for "retired in place" senior engineering management waiting for that magic day when they could sit at home and impede their wives instead of coming to the office and impeding engineers. That's not to say we didn't have decent, enthusiastic, qualified management but they were outnumbered... or simply out-numbed... by the incompetents.
A lot was preordained, despite engineering advances. "Don't try to convince me, my mind is made up." I could go on at length about the decision to scrap the 100 khz power distribution system on Freedom in favor of the DC system. I was around when the "test" destroyed some computer hardware at MSFC that was used as justification, despite the fact that the test was protested by competent engineers with a knowledge of VAX power supply design. Were there problems with the high frequency AC distribution? Some, but not insurmountable.
SSF was also a training ground for kids right out of college. Get them in, turn 'em loose with little guidance, slap 'em around a bit until they started doing good design, then move them to Shuttle.
We had a lot of design by Aerospace Conglomerate, too. Let's get that design that Lockheed wants, because it'll make them easier to deal with at contract time. Let's use THIS design that MD wants, even if it's not what NASA wants/requires, because we think their design is going to make them do something else for us on another project.
Still, and all, most of the conglomerate designs I saw, worked with, and helped shape (and, yes, I worked for a contractor company, too, but I was doing specs and requirements, as well as working with the prototyping) would have been acceptable, even if somewhat limiting in their own ways.
The BIG problem, however, was Congress. Every three years or so, we'd get a "stop what you're doing, reassess the design, and then start over" command from the Hill. I've gotta say, we wasted a LOT of money on those exercises, and we wasted a LOT of time.
There are improvements borne of waiting time and engineering advances in ISS that would not have been, and may never have reached SSF or Alpha, but we could well have bent metal and flown hardware by 1990 if Congress had stuck to original budgets and timelines and stayed the hell out of the way. I flew prototype hardware in 1992 that was the first piece of Space Station hardware to fly, be proven and certified for on-orbit Space Station operation. I could have flown it 3 years earlier save the Challenger accident.
Final thought. We developed or promoted a lot of stuff that's now common place in the world. Speaking from the perspective of medical hardware development (I also did a bit for the medical facility in terms of GNCC and COMMS) there's a lot of stuff I see in hospitals, doctors' offices, dentists' offices and ambulances that makes me smile and think, "I worked with the prototype of that...", or, in a couple of cases, "I wrote the SBIR paperwork that made that happen".
So, yes, NASA's efforts HAVE improved life ont he planet. Really.
Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by tenure.
I don't see the RutanGang as a model to follow. Sure, there is a lot of bravado and ingenuity but I really don't think you can compare the product against what Nasa has accomplished.
What Nasa is now saying is basically that politics have intervened with science and technology at a great cost. The ISS is in the wrong spot and is not suited to the tasks at hand. However, it does provide a number of usefull lessons and shows us that StarTrek style space exploration should remain in hollywood. Long term habitation in space is a stupid thing to do and now that we have learned that, we should concentrate on the rock we live on, send robots out to space.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
Well, it depends on whether they know what they want to spend it on.
The first prerequisite of any successful engineering project is to have a worthy goal that is clearly identifiable and governs everything else. In this sense, Scaled Comoposite's acheivement has a lot in common with Apollo, and the Shuttle and ISS have a lot in common with each other. The Spaceship One effort and the Apollo program were both narrowly focused on one thing -- sending one or more humans to a specific place and returning them safely. All the engineering done on them was focused on achieving that goal. The Shuttle and ISS programs, while they support many worthy scientific an technical goals, are primarily driven by pleasing enough constituencies to continue their operation. These are political goals, which means many types of missions under many types of conditions.
If you had to put the Shuttle's purpose on a bumper sticker, it would be "Cheap Access to Space". Except "Access to Space" is vague. Obviously, we mean "Manned Access to Space", but even stipulating that, different missions under different scenarios require different performance characteristics. The shuttle has all kinds of capabilities that it uses on very or none of its missions; yet all the things needed for those capabilities are shot up to space and landed on every single mission. I'm thinking primarily the wings here, but its large payload capacity and its capacity to launch satellites into polar orbit count here too. It follows that the Shuttle design is likely never to be the cheapest way of doing any mission. But, without the ability to perform a wide array of missions, NASA would never have got the backing of the Air Force, which wasn't really all that interested in the Shuttle.
You can't design any system to do everything; and the more the system does the more complex costly and unreliable it's bound to be.
Specific goals such as "get two men higher than 100km and return them to the surface safely" are inherently more efficent to pursue than broad, vague goals such as "build an orbital launch capability" or "cheap access to space". And, this has other consequences. Scaled's accomplishment, while signficant in its own right, gets them practically zero percent of the way to orbit. They just built an air launched rocket plane like the X-15. About the only thing they're almost immediately ready to do is create a suborbital space tourist business. If the mission was "get two men higher than 100km and return them to the surface safely primarily with components that will be part of a future orbital capacity," they'd have spent a lot more money, taken longer, and may not have been as safe.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
NASA used to be the shining example of a good Federal agency. They lost that status after Challenger and instead of regaining it they sank even further with Columbia. The unmanned programs are still doing well. The unmanned propopents say we get a better return on our investment with robots. From a scientific point of view, the answer is yes, but from a public perspective, the answer is no. Without manned space travel we have no visions of space as a frontier. The lure of the frontier is deeply embedded in the American psyche. We look to the people, the astronauts, who enter it. NASA needs to do a better job with it's manned program. The return on investment with a manned space program isn't the same as those of an unmanned one. We need both.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I mean, he states the shuttle was "deeply flawed". What would he have built? Kept shooting Apollo capsules up forever more? Built an Apollo 2? And if the ISS isn't in a good orbit, what orbit would he prefer? And additionally, how were we supposed to know the Shuttle wasn't a solid idea, until we had actually built a few and tested them operationally?
After nearly 35 years imagine how the original Apollo design might have evolved? We might be on the 10th iteration! The ISS orbits sucks because it is highly inclined and low altitude. Highly inclined orbits are less accessable from low latitude launch sites (thanks Russia). Throw in the new lighting requirements for the Space Shuttle and you have absurdly few launch opportunities from the Cape. The low altitude of the station results in the need for frequent reboost due to atmospheric drag. It is also of marginal use in earth remote sensing because there is no global coverage.
I do agree that a shuttle-like vehicle has great R&D value. Perhaps a smaller reusable vehicle could have been built that integrated smoothly with Apollo launch capabilities.
It seems to me he's just trying to ride the wave of popular opinion that says the shuttle must go and the ISS isn't interesting.
Better that than ride the wave of mindless groupthink that left the US without a space architecture. Now that there is a negative (and richly deserved) feeding frenzy against shuttle/ISS lets make sure we kill the beast!
an ill wind that blows no good
> > Imagine if the Space ship One team had 250 billion...
> They would probably become just as inefficient as NASA.
1/2 billion on Spaceship One, 249 1/2 billion on whores and cocaine.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Because NASA actually wants to get stuff into orbit and beyond, instead of just barely peeking out of earth's atmosphere.
What I think you, and others, fail to realize is why the net, amongst other things, was invented in the first place.
DARPA created the net. Note the D in DARPA stands for "defense", as in, to keep you safe from foreign invaders. The network kept military installations in contact with each other quickly, when someone realized this technology would work just as well in the private sector, keeping people together.
So let's start to think of what other things can be attributed to Defense budgets.
Computers were first used in governments to crack codes from other goverments, arguably dating as far back as Caesar's ciphers (though, you need to think of a computer in the human sense, for this). Mechanical computers aided the government, and eventually the private sector got ahold of the idea.
Human transport! People needed ways to get to people to conquer lands. So engineers figured out how to build extremely effecient bridges, people figured out how to make things float. Of course, these things were invented by private citizens, but were capitalized by, you guessed it, the military.
Firearms, the original concept was invented as a toy, was quickly modified by a government to produce weapons, which were then turned and used again by the government to create designs for even more powerful weapons, which lead us to space flight. But of course, the private sector really had a jump here, the Chinese tried to fire a man into space thousands of years ago. Sadly, I don't think they ever got anywhere...
Face the world around you and realize that governments invent things to control people. Uncontrolled people are less productive than controlled people. Though we might have figured out something as complex as space flight entirely in the private sector, it would probably have taken another thousand years, if even that. People would run around killing people because they wouldn't give them their latest and newest inventions and as soon as someone actually had the time to do something on their own, they too would meet their demise either at the hands of their inventions, or other inventors. People aren't naturally civilized; we are brutes by nature. Just look at New Orleans if you need any example of that. Even when well laid plans were in place, they failed and people took law into their own hands and became what we Americans are so against.
So, please realize that government is a delicate balance, and that the things you and I take for granted are almost assuredly invented because a government needed it. Most of us wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for government, and I'm sorry your middle/high school didn't teach you that lesson.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
There's no excuse for the wasteful and incompetent management of the Iraq war. If our leaders weren't so arrogant they would have required real support from the international community as a prerequisite to invasion. They would have gotten informed opinions from real experts (manipulators like Chalabi make me sick), they would have let skilled people manage the war (not idiots like Rumsfeld), and they would have been honest with their own people. The WMD issue is extremely humiliating for the United States because, to the objective observer, it looks like we invaded the wrong country - and at a time when we had just raided the piggy bank in tax giveaways and were still running an operation in Afghanistan!
Now, it's true that Saddam was a nasty dictator. It's true that Iraq could possibly have had a better system in place. I realize that the popular conservative view of the day is that the rest of the world is full of children that need our constant monetary and military support. None of that even comes close to excusing the blunders, incompetence, and arrogance of our leaders. I'm sorry if this sounds overly liberal, but sometimes it's good to be critical of the government.
100 KHz? Really? I don't know much about power distribution, but wouldn't AC at that frequency cause all sorts of interference? And wouldn't you have to stick transformers everywhere to actually use it?
A bit of googling says yeah, people really do 100 khz power supplies, and higher. But I don't understand the advantage.
I think that would be Napolean rather than Julius Caesar... but yes still thanks to the (French) military.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
NASA's funding has always been low.. Just because they have spent 250$ Billion up to this point does not mean it was a large waste of money. It took them several decades to rack up a tab like that. How long did it take the newest Bush Administration? Couple years? The only reason people (republicans) complain about it, is because they would rather of had that money for either war, oil exploration, or their pocketbook. If NASA had even 25% the funding of the American Military, we would already been living on, and exploring the surface of Mars.
Newsgroups: sci.space
From: j...@pnet01.cts.com (Jim Bowery)
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1993 07:16:54 GMT
Local: Tues, Jun 29 1993 12:16 am
Subject: Who I am and why I support Big Science
There have been some questions about who I am and what my positions are. Here are the relevant details for sci.space readers:
As chairman of the Coalition for Science and Commerce, I have, over the last 5 or so years, been the principle activist promoting the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 and the launch voucher provision of the 1992 NASA authorization.
To preempt some noise:
Allen Sherzer has yet to apologize to me for his repeated slanders in this forum 2 years ago, declaring that my contributions to the passage of the LSPA were insignificant compared to those of Glenn Reynolds, then chairman of the legislative committee of the National Space Society. However, during congressional hearings on space commercialization, the LSPA's sponsor, Congressman Packard, gave me a personal introduction (the only panelist out of over 10 to receive such an introduction) and my organization credit for passage of the LSPA. Congressman Packard did so with Glenn Reynolds sitting next to me on the same panel -- and he did not mention Glenn Reynolds or the NSS. This is in the Congressional Record and on video tape. Allen Sherzer's words are in the sci.space archives of late spring to early summer 1991. I encourage those with access to the sci.space archives to retrieve them and see exactly what Allen Sherzer said and the manner in which he said it.
I've been involved in several other, as yet unsuccessful, legislative efforts to reform NASA, DoE (primarily fusion), NSF and DARPA. In so doing I've come across gross inefficiencies in technology development -- inefficiencies that some small high technology startups were ready to fill with technical advances of great economic and social import. The government agencies I just mentioned see these high technology startups, not as vital partners, but as deadly political threats to the credibility of those, within the agencies, that picked incorrect technical directions. These government-funded individuals drive funding away from those who would bring us critically needed technical advances -- rather than working with and help them.
The dollars we spend on NASA, DoE, DARPA and NSF to promote technology are actually used to suppress this country's technology in a frighteningly effective manner. But when one looks at the political incentives of these institutions, one wonders how anyone could believe it to be otherwise.
My first and most tragic experience in this area was George Koopman's statement to me, made in person just before his untimely death, that NASA had been relentlessly driving his suppliers and investors away from doing business with his company, AMROC. NASA appeared to reverse its behavior in a tokenistic manner just prior to Koopman's death. The first test of an AMROC booster, shortly thereafter, failed and AMROC was forced into capitulation with established aerospace firms. This pattern of hostile behavior from NASA, combined with the means, motive and opportunity, leave room for reasonable suspicions of murder against individuals within or funded by NASA.
This is only one story and I wasn't even inv
Seastead this.
I'm not trying to troll here, but what kind of experiments are being done in space and how do they benefit us? Since the start of the space program, how have we benefitted aside from getting dried ice cream and Tang? It's nice to learn more about the environment we live in, but I can't think of anything offhand that has come out of space exploration other than learning about our surroundings, getting pretty pictures, or development of better materials that were driven by the desire to get into space.
I'm sure there are many valuable things that we have learned as a result of being in space, but most people just don't know about them. Most average non-techies probably do not understand exactly why we're going into space so much - I'm even a nerd and I don't understand. Perhaps the public needs to be enlightened, and they'll be able to appreciate the space program.
The shuttle was originally sold as a cheaper way to get things into space. It's not meaningfully cheaper. They said it would cost $28 million per launch. As of January 1986, (in the same 1980 dollars), it cost over $200 million per launch. They said it would turn around in seventy-two hours. As for reliability, how many fatal failure modes does the shuttle design have? What sort of improvement over the final Apollo design is that?
Which of its original design goals has the shuttle actually met?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I think NASA is back on doing politics instead of science.
.... that stinks like politics again for me.
Quote: "It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path," Griffin said. "We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can."
So, Griffin thinks the path was wrong? Couldn't it be that the path was right but the conduction was wrong, or some minor planning?
For me that sounds like big games of politics again.
The original purpose of the Shuttle Fleet was not only small lifts and minor exploration. As everybody knows the shuttles carry a hughe main tank, which is dropped after burn out.
The original plan was: take the main tank into orbit, move them into parking orbits, use them later for space stations and interplanetary vehicles.
This was first reduced to: drop them on a parachute for refuling and reuse. And later it was reduced to: just drop them.
If NASA did not had stepped back from the original path we now had about 111 empty main fuel tanks in orbit around earth. If you use 6 main tanks to produce one ISS like space station the shuttle starts would translate to 5 space stations with together 30 fuel tanks used. There would still be 80 fuel tanks left for building manned Lunar vehicles or a lunar orbiting station, or 2 Earth/Lunar L4/L5 stations, probably several manned Mars vehicles and unmanned Mars supplies vehicles.
Landing some on the moon for having a starting base for a manned Lunar base would also be an option. Selling them to other nations with a space program, but not the resources to place "containers" in orbit would have been an option also.
The Shuttle path was completely right, but it got stripped down more and more until only the shuttles itself where left. The reason behind that mainly are political, the cold war was over, no need anymore to to show presence or impress the enemy or to fund the "military industrial complex". In fact budget cuts where needed to use the resources elsewhere (but they did not get used wisely anyway, look at the education system e.g.).
And now, we hear a NASA politician/bureaucrat making big words
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There is a big difference between getting to 100km with a payload of three people and building something that can make it to the ISS and higher orbits with a significant payload. And the reason that the shuttle is several technology generations behind, is because it's thirty years old.
NASA has no clear mission that the average tax payer can understand. Bush's plan of going to the Moon and Mars is another huge blunder, because again, we'll do one-off missions rather than build any real capability to do things in space.
What we really need is an overall plan to identify and develop resources in space that can be exploited economically. The space elevator could easily be completed with the kind of money that was spent on the shuttle and ISS, and it would eventually give us very economical access to space.
We need to work on technology to divert asteroids, not just to protect the Earth from possible collisions, but to capture asteroids that have valuable resources that we can mine.
The New World didn't get settled by explorers, but by people who moved there to stay. We won't really conquer space until we establish and populate colonies in orbit, on the Moon, and on Mars. But even those goals should be put on hold until we have some kind of strategy for making them pay off. Considering the enormous wealth available in a single nickel-iron asteroid, it shouldn't be hard to develop such a plan.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
The Earth's deviation from a sphere is enough to make a noticeable difference in the ground track of a satellite or spacecraft in all but the very briefest of missions, see here.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
Exactly. Which was and still is a completely valid reason for invading since Iraq was attempting to purchase materials for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. And they already had quite a bit. They just didn't have massive stockpiles of ICBMs that the Left suddenly thinks we went there to get.