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NASA May Have to Buy Trips to Space
MattSparkes writes "Budget cuts could leave NASA without a Space Shuttle replacement, and leave it reliant on private firms to get payloads into space. A similar scenario happened between 1975 and 1981 when NASA made the transition from Apollo to the Space Shuttle. It seems like a strange state of affairs when a magazine can take people to space, but the USA can't."
If its cheaper than the shuttle, and works just as well, why not?
Not to stir the pot, but think of how many space missions the war in Iraq could have paid for...
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I'd expect this issue to be brought up during the 2008 presidential campaign. It'd be highly unlikely for the US to abandon the shuttle program until a suitable replacement is found, given the current Chinese space program's ambitions. Remember - it doesn't matter how much it costs, as long as it makes the US #1.
The US government doesn't design and build trucks. If they need something shipped, they use a shipping company. If the president needs to make a speech, they buy microphones and pay TV stations. Space should be no different.
This is just a small step toward the commercialization of space, and the use of off-the-shelf parts to get a job done. Perhaps one day, the Virgin Galactic, Armadillo Aerospace, and Scaled Composites will be bidding to deliver the next satellite into orbit around Mars.
I'm no rocket scientist, but I think there's a big difference between:
1) Sending someone on a sub-orbital flight at 62 miles altitude and;
2) Bringing several working payloads into space, docking with a space station at 236 miles altitude, and performing orbital repairs on satellites at 355 miles altitude.
It's not like NASA is so incompetent that some private firm is beating them at this whole space thing.
Yeah, it's a "good thing" to funnel more tax money into the pockets of corporations. Oh how we love our corporate welfare state.
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Calling a sub-orbital jaunt a "trip into space" is like calling wading in the Pacific "deep sea diving". Rocket science is difficult and expensive. Only an few private firms can actually get a payload into orbit and if you give a quick google you can get video of quite a few of these guys blowing up on the pad, or failing to get orbit and other mission failing scenarios. So before you pile on NASA make note that it is still the pre-eminent spaceflight operation in the world. No other organization has done what NASA has done. None have even come close. (Full disclosure: I am an SA at NASA).
NASA is just a wasteful old baby-boomer pipe dream.
On the plus side you must recognize that NASA is putting out a lot of research that is free to the public. This is going to be a keystone in the future of private space flight ventures. So while I agree that NASA is riding the edge of usefulness they have contributed a lot and still have room to contribute more in the areas where the private sector would not see enough ROI on some projects. This pure research could still offer a lot in the overall understanding of what it's going to take to get people into space, what it's going to take to keep them there on a functional basis and a reason to go that offers a profit motive to corporations.
Without profit motive the private sector is going to be just as slow, if not slower, than NASA. We'd have to ride the coat tails of philanthropy into the final frontier. That's not exactly a glowing prospect.
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Right now, the Space Shuttle is only infrequently used to launch satellites. The vast majority of them (military and otherwise) are launched with standard rockets. It's much cheaper to just launch the satellite, rather than launching the satellite plus a bunch of squishy bodies plus all the thousands and thousands of pounds of equipment it takes to keep those squishy bodies from going squish.
And we don't even need those squishy bodies there to successfully deploy a satellite; sending them up for such a mundane task is just wasting money and putting lives in danger for no good reason.
The US space biz with NASA and the air force has always relied on outside private companies to build all the components. They don't build fighter planes or stealthy planes or moon rockets,etc, they just *order* them. Actual government employees build very little of anything, it is subbed out all over heck into private industry or into semi private industry academia. All you are talking about here is determining who is the general contractor on the whole project. They have subbed most everything else out, this is just one more aspect to that.
All these Republicans and Libertarians do is weaken America.
Actually, I think they're generally indifferent to whether their policies strengthen America, weaken it, or whatever. To the Republicans, a policy or program is considered desirable if and only if it opens the federal treasury to their corporate patrons, who are subsequently expected to return a portion of the loot in the form of campaign contributions and other favors. Thus, privatization is a convenient and reliable way of converting taxpayers' money into campaign funds and continued power. It is the "marriage of State and corporate power" of which Mussolini spoke.
The privatization of the Iraq War is especially alarming, and not just because a lot of people close to the Bush admin are getting very, very rich. These contractors probably have more influence over events on the ground in Iraq than the military does, and they're largely unregulated. Might they have their own agenda? Is it in their collective interest for the war to come to an end, even in victory, if it stops the gravy train? Would it be unprecedented for greed and private financial interest to trump patriotism and our national interest?
Ever since the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 (PL101-611) NASA has been required by LAW to purchase all launch services from the private sector that could be reasonably provided by the private sector. As the person who testified before Congress about the passage of that grass-roots law I was fairly galled by the invitation I received a few years later from NASA to sit in the VIP stand and watch them launch the Advanced Communication Technology Satellite upon a shuttle. Well, actually, by that time I had somewhat come to expect that it was hopeless for a grass-roots legislative effort to actually have an impact on a governmental behavior but to actually receive an invitation to see them blatantly violate the clear intent of the law was still annoying.
Seastead this.
It seems like a strange state of affairs when a magazine can take people to space, but the USA can't."
Yeah, sure, because the magazine will use its own launchers and launching pad and won't turn to a third party to organize the trip...
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As long as your party loyalty is more important to getting on the ballot than the content of your character, America is going to continue its slide into corruption.