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Obama Team Considers Cancellation of Ares, Orion
HanzoSpam sends us this story from Space News, which begins:
"US President-elect Barack Obama's NASA transition team is asking US space agency officials to quantify how much money could be saved by canceling the Ares 1 rocket and scaling back the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle next year. ... The questionnaire, 'NASA Presidential Transition Team Requests for Information,' asks agency officials to provide the latest information on Ares 1, Orion and the planned Ares 5 heavy-lift cargo launcher, and to calculate the near-term close-out costs and longer-term savings associated with canceling those programs. The questionnaire also contemplates a scenario where Ares 1 would be canceled but development of the Ares 5 would continue. While the questionnaire, a copy of which was obtained by Space News, also asks NASA to provide a cost estimate for accelerating the first operational flight of Ares 1 and Orion from the current target date of March 2015 to as soon as 2013, NASA was not asked to study the cost implications of canceling any of its other programs, including the significantly overbudget 2009 Mars Science Laboratory or the James Webb Space Telescope."
Nasa has actually given results for it's money. What kind of return on the investment do other agencies produce? Perhaps a comparison vs. a kneejerk reactionary policy may be a better way to handle things... yes?
This is the best thing that can happen to a space program. NASA should not duplicate already existing capabilities, in this case earth to LEO launch. LEO launch is a commercially available service, there is no need for government-operated launch business. NASA lunar architecture should be built around existing launch capabilities, its perfectly feasible to mount big lunar, martian and other exploration efforts with our currently existing 20MT class launchers, and it will work out cheaper, more robust and future proof Government sponsored R&D should happen on frontiers, not recreating exising services.
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Don't get so full of yourself, the Russians and Chinese seem to be doing fine with capsule designs. A lifting body isn't the best choice just because you like it more. A composite lifting body design is expensive when you can't guarantee resuability. And we all know how the reusability of the Shuttle turned out.
The whole point of using many smaller rockets is some little thing known as the economy of scale.
It's also rather difficult to completely eliminate vibrations from a solid rocket without an advancement in the manufacturing process used to create the fuel.
I'm a huge fan and proponent of robotic exploration of the solar system. NASA, JPL, the aerospace contractors and their partners in universities across the world have done an amazing job with comparitively tiny sums of money. Alan Stern (the head of NASA's Space Science Directorate who resigned when his plan to make visible the pain caused by the massive cost over-runs on MSL by shutting down the Spirit MER rover was overruled by higher-ups) has recently pointed out that routine cost overruns are crippling NASA. Ares and Orion show every sign of following this trend, and for what? To keep alive the fallacious dream that seems rather too popular that Star Trek is a plan for future space exploration, rather than an entirely traditional drama turned to SF by the addition of magic impulse drive / dilithium crystal devices. When we've done a robotic Mars sample return, which although fiendishly hard to accomplish is infinitely more practical than doing a manned mission), let's talk about Moonbase Alpha or whatever. (And whilst we're at it, for god's sake abandon the ISS, the most expensive white elephant ever to wreck astronomical observations.)
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
This is an incredibly pro-space piece of news out of the Obama team, but what gets the focus is the potential termination of the boondoggle Ares program.
This article is far more interesting due to the last paragraph:
"Obama's NASA transition team also appears to be interested in a number of specific projects that have more or less languished in recent years. Among those projects are: the Deep Space Climate Observatory, a mothballed Earth-observing satellite formerly known as Triana; agency efforts to catalog asteroids and comets that could threaten Earth; and the harnessing of space-based solar power for use on Earth."
The article also alludes to a potential expansion of the COTS commercial space program, potential uses for EELV launchers, etc.
If the Obama team is serious about these projects (especially space solar power) it would mean a revolution in space funding and a committment to space development that would make Ares pale in comparison. SSP would mean a real orbital infrastructure that would enable a huge number of possibilities, such as real lunar bases and mars missions, not plant a flag crap which is where Ares is headed.
The parent poster and editor did a poor job describing the article. The obvious thing was the questions about cutting Ares 1. As mentioned, they also asked about Ares 5. What's missing, Obama's office also asked about:
What it sounds like to me is they're doing due diligence with the intention of possibly increasing NASA's budget; but, they want to spend the money as wisely as possible.
For once, I with people would read the damn article before jumping to conclusions, even here, on /.
A recent report by the Washington Post reports that over $49 Million in farm subsidies has gone to people who make more than cut off $2.5 Million per year. I've never been a fan of subsidies to begin with, I bet you can imagine how I feel when anyone making millions a year gets a check for free money
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So you believe a nation can (or even has to) continue using a centuries old constitution with disregard for the changes that happened during that time?
When the times required it amendments have been made to the US constitution, do you really think that (a constitutional amendment) is the only way to include healthcare in the list of things the federal government has the right to promote as part of the general welfare?
Please have a look around, the rest of the world is screaming past you.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Certainly Obama and company can find better places to trim in this day of multi-trillion dollar giveaways.
Maybe it would help them to determine that if they asked NASA for some sort of report on the actual cost savings of scrapping those programs?
Only by excessive weight reduction and throwing away big chunks of the launch vehicle does space travel work at all.
And? We can limit ourselves (as we do now) to weight reduction that isn't "excessive". And those parts of the vehicle (especially the propellant) aren't very valuable.
We should resign ourselves to launching small satellites and planetary probes.
This is the kind of silly nonsense you hear from people who listen to nonexperts. Astronomers are notorious in the space industry for making all sorts of poorly thought out claims. The problem is that because they are astronomers, they are seen as having some sort of experise in anything space-related. What's missing is an understanding of economics and manufacture. The launch industry needs a higher launch rate. That's it. All current vehicles have high fixed costs: launch pads, launch crews, and other overhead whether they fly or not. More vehicles means that those costs are divided over more vehicles. Second, with a high launch rate comes greater reliability and safety. That's because the launch crews are more experienced and there's greater knowledge of the vehicle's faults and quirks. Double the launch rate of any existing launch vehicle and you will reduce significantly the cost per launch.
Since 1967, the federal government has appropriated the excess monies paid into the Social Security system into the rest of federal spending because after just 4 years of the Great Society, politicians realized it was already bankrupting us. In return, Congress gave Social Security an IOU, promising to return the money when Social Security needed it.
That is, Social Security money goes into the general fund and is spent as fast as it comes in. It isn't invested and it isn't saved for the day Social Security starts paying out more than it takes in (projected to be 2017). So, yes, Social Security is as much a part of the federal budget as national defense spening.
The fun will be, come 2017, when Social Security becomes insolvent. Benefits will have to be cut for the baby boomers (pissing off an entire generation), taxes will have to be raised extraordinarily on the working age people (pissing off multiple generations) or we're going to have to deficit spend until there is no tomorrow, obliterating the value of the dollar. We've been playing games and sticking our head in the sand hoping that the day will never come, but it will... if it isn't 2017, it'll just be pushed back another couple years. The best part is, the people who are responsible for the decades of wasteful spending, appropriating Social Security money for federal spending, refusing to reform Social Security, etc will be dead and gone, having left us with trillions of dollars in debt while they lived it up at our expense.
Stop Koolaid Politics
These programs are the SDI of Nasa, although SDI turned out to be useful strategically. Basically the money for these programs would be pork. Why not give it to the NIH and the NSF ?
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." - John F. Kennedy