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Obama's Impending NASA Decisions
eldavojohn writes "From delaying Project Constellation to an additional $2 billion in funding, Space.com looks at some immediate decisions the President Elect will have to make once he takes office in January. The biggest one will be the shuttle plan: do we retire the shuttle fleet or keep it on for more missions? If it is retired, we would have to rely on another country to bring our astronauts into space between 2010 and 2015 as a new fleet is built. Will Obama hold true on his $2 billion pledge to NASA?"
Don't forget NASA is one industry that puts a lot of money back into the US economy. Due to export controls and ITAR restrictions nearly every man hour is paid to a U.S. Citizen and nearly every part is built here. NASA farms out quite a bit of work to Universities so the next crop of engineers actually gets hands on experience in building equipment.
At a seminar I was at one NASA employee said that it takes over seven years after a student graduates before they are fully beneficial to the NASA program. If the student had hands on experience that number can be reduced to below three years. Many NASA employees are nearing retirement age and there already is a problem finding replacements. If you cut money now NASA won't/can't hire new employees to be trained by experienced personnel, Universities won't be able to fund new space projects so the students will not be fully prepared or trained to take over jobs once funding is returned, and those that are looking for jobs now will most likely go into private industry where their innovations and ideas will become the property of their employer and be lost to public enterprise.
So I'm for our government pouring money into NASA and rewarding a group that has been highly successful (recently). Why should they just be dumping money into failures (mortgage companies, banks, wallstreet, automotive).
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They *hate* that.
The President traditionally submits a budget to set the agenda. Of course, the congress is free to totally ignore it, but in practice the President generally provides a roadmap of what he wants to see.
That's why I blame Reagan for the runaway budget during his years, even though conservatives tend to blame the Democrat congress. Reagan didn't even *try* to submit smaller government budgets, and he certainly didn't do any veto threats.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
There is a problem with not expecting a budget to be spent. First is that under the current law, the government has to spend the money or give it back to the people. This mean that outside of some rainy day fund that the Feds have never bothers creating but states do, that excess revenue will have to be spent.
The second problem is in accounting. If they can't justify using less of their budget then their budget should be less. It really is that simple. If you ask for 10 million dollars and only spend 5, you have wasted the ability to either use that other 5 million or for some other department to effectivly use it. Then there is the issue of public trust, if agencies are purposely over funded to a point of surplus revenue, how do you expect to justify tax rates and collections?
The problem isn't with the laws, it is with the greedy department heads who think that wasting 20% of a budget that wasn't needed is appropriate just so they can hoard the same amounts the next year. My local school system used to have this problem of budget burning and we actually made a law declaring it a felony. All this did was cause the schools to waste money in other ways and now they claim they need levies and so on but the people don't trust them enough to pass them. Now I don't want to seem like I'm picking on schools, it's just that in my area, we actually attempted to address the budget problem with less then desirable results. Now there is some screwed up scheme where the state takes the property taxes that would go to schools normally and then gives it back at the end of the year in order to redistribute it to poorer districts where people moved away from for various reasons.
Unless you can say X happened that won't happen next year, then if you have a surplus in the budget, your budget is too big. It needs to be cut next year. X could be a number of things like some stage of something failed so the later portions of development wasn't spent or maybe something like, Y had a closeout sale and parts or supplies were obtained at 25% of normal costs but they are out of business now. There are a number of things like falling gas prices during on quarter or the lack of snow one year or whatever. The costs need to be justified and burning budgets should be a felony that disqualifies people from positions of public trust ever again. The people deserve a fair accounting of their money and a sense of it not being wasted because some department head is greedy or too ignorant to justify why they had a surplus that won't be the same case next year.
SpaceShip One has in fact flown with an astronaut. Dragon has not. Falcon is a rocket, not a crewed vehicle, and only the satellite launcher has reached orbit - Falcon 9 is still in ground testing. SpaceShip One is the current high water mark of private manned spaceflight, such as it is. At that end of the post, discussing present options for a shuttle rescue, neither is an option, because neither right now are remotely capable of the task.
And they already did. You seem to be treating an ongoing program, started years ago, as if it's a hypothetical...
At this end of the post, discussing options for Shuttle replacements, Dragon might be a competitor. I don't see, however, that the government have simply said 'we will pay you to build us a spacecraft'. SpaceX was founded with dotcom wealth. They've received contracts for launches from NASA and the USAF - but neither commit to any great funding. According to Wikipedia,
On May 2, 2005, SpaceX announced that it had been awarded an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract for Responsive Small Spacelift (RSS) launch services by the United States Air Force, which could allow the Air Force to purchase up to $100,000,000 worth of launches from the company.[4] On April 22, 2008, NASA announced that it had awarded an IDIQ Launch Services contract to SpaceX for Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launches. The contract will be worth between $20,000 and $1 billion, depending on the number of missions awarded. The contract covers launch services ordered by June 30, 2010, for launches through December 2012.
So NASA and the USAF have options to buy launches from SpaceX. Doesn't look like either have committed to any specifics, though. Orbit a Falcon 9 with a manned Dragon and bring it safely back to Earth and NASA may very well buy up all that billion dollars' worth and then some, but not before. Scaling up from one rocket to a cluster of rockets while maintaining man-rated reliability is a hard problem. Ask the engineers who built the N1.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I hope somebody at NASA starts pushing for nuclear powered rockets based on Gaseous Core Nuclear Reactors. In a gaseous core reactor or "nuclear lightbulb" a cloud of gaseous uranium would be confined in the center of a sealed quartz bulb, by a buffer gas swirled around the inside of the bulb. The uranium gas heats up to 25,000C, emitting intense ultraviolet. Pure quartz is 100% permeable to UV, which passes through and heats a stream of liquid hydrogen flowing past the outside of the bulb. The superheated hydrogen expands and exits through a rocket nozzle to provide thrust. Keeping the nuclear fuel from touching anything overcomes the temperature limitation of solid fuel reactors, which can only be taken to about 3,500C without melting. They're also safe; completely destroying a GCNR in the atmosphere would release less than 1% of the nuclides from a single 1950 A-bomb test.
Here's an interesting hypothetical design for a 100% reusable, non-polluting GCNR-powered rocket using the Saturn-V form factor, which could life 1000 tons of payload into Earth orbit and return an equal size cargo to a fully powered landing. This rocket could launch a space hotel in a one shot or carry lavishly equipped missions to the moon or Mars, with dozens of crew and plenty of radiation shielding. True Buck Rogers style spaceships that take off and land vertically again and again.
I remember the same argument for nuclear submarines... that even though we really dont need any more at the moment, if you even temporarily shut down existing production you pretty much permanently lose the ability to produce submarines in the future. Or at least make it prohibitively expensive to restart the program since so much would have to be rebuilt from scratch. On the surface it sounds like a BS argument, but if you do a little analysis on it theres probably quite a bit of truth to it.
What we COULD do is dump the manned missions until we, as a society, evolve far beyond our primitive level of technology. Send machines, many machines, which would be both cost effective and expendable. The rush to send meat into space was understandable during the Cold War, but is not wise today.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Good point.
Moreover many of the problems that NASA is facing with the Constellation program are due to the stupid insistence of the current Administrator, Michael Griffin, with the Ares architecture with two launchers. In particular, Ares I it's a running joke between actual rocket scientists. NASA engineers have developed a cheaper, safer and faster alternative: DIRECT (the site includes hi-res images and videos).
The first thing Obama should do is replace Griffin and then do a real independent review of all the alternatives, including at least Ares, DIRECT and the EELVs.