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Does Obama Have a Problem At NASA?
MarkWhittington writes "Has NASA become a problem for the Obama transition? If one believes a recent story in the Orlando Sentinel, the transition team at NASA, led by former NASA Associate Administrator Lori Garver, is running into some bureaucratic obstruction." Specifically, according to this article NASA Administrator Michael Griffin made calls to aerospace industry executives asking them to stonewall if asked about benefits to be gained by canceling the current US efforts to revisit the moon; we mentioned last month that cutting Aries and Orion is apparently an idea under strong consideration by the Obama transition team.
It's hard to believe that NASA would be against their program being cut. While I like the space program,if it's going to be cut spending on nothing or cut spending on the space program I would pick the former. While I'd prefer to cut other things, NASA spending is probably one of the easier things to cut, from a political standpoint.
Sorry, but I have taught kids and the best way to turn children into future aerospace engineers is to launch some new rockets. I have shown 3rd graders poorly drawn CGI of a Ares 1 launch and it was enough to garner "oohs," "aahs," and "I want to do thats,"
Maybe you should fix whatever is wrong with yours
Probably because the last guy who tried in earnest to do just that got shot.
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Obama's transition team isn't asking NASA programmes only about cutting their budgets to zero. The review is also asking them about accelerating those programmes, increasing their budgets so their benefits are delivered sooner.
Griffin, the Star Wars scientist / CIA "entrepreneur", is stonewalling any change by the new Chief Executive (Obama). Which is of course threatening those projects even worse, because there's going to be less time to evaluate and save the worthwhile ones, as the economic meltdown accelerates and Obama's busy leading the nation fulltime. And of course the stonewalling shows an agency that will need an even more radical makeover by the new administration.
But why should NASA be any different from the rest of the government Bush built? Hey, over in Congress, a minority of the minority Republicans in the Senate (next month their numbers shrink to a nearly insignificant count) are stonewalling even a bridge loan from money already allocated to Detroit. They destroyed New Orleans and New York. Maybe if a Christmas Earthquake hits California they can have laid waste on every coast except Alaska's - which they maybe managed with drilling in ANWR.
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Or that is what they tell you...
Any Large organization runs more inefficient then smaller ones (unless the small ones are just poorly managed)
Lets take a look at labor.
For a small organization say 9 people.
1 Boss at 2x salary and 8 people at x salary.
average salary is 1.11x
With 0.8888 productivity
Now Here is a larger organization (a Larger Small - Midsize company)
1 Boss at 3x salary
8 Managers at 2x salary
64 Employees at x salary
average salary is 1.14x
With 0.8767 productivity
Secondly Americans don't want an efficient government, they system was designed to be inefficient on purpose. Efficiencies a trade off from compromise (A good compromise is when both sides are equally unhappy), being too efficient creates a situation where one side wins big and the other side looses big. Also an efficient government can lead to corruption and other evils and dictatorships, which is very dangerous.
Third, if you think your government is efficient then you are probably getting a bunch of propaganda from the government. Say for example some countries are creating record debt for themselves because of socialized healthcare. So the people are happy but there is a fundamental problems that need to be addressed.
Forth American Government is an open government, besides what the conspiracy nuts thinks. You can turn to CSPAN and watch on TV the debate for nearly every bill being passed. So you can see all the problems, while other more closed governments will hide this. Thus seeming more efficient
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Don't be such a Drama Queen... The Shuttle program is a screwed up kludge, but, like many screwed up kludges (say, for example, the Internet), you can move forward instead of constantly reinventing the V2. The Shuttle (and it's attendant support programs and staff) work pretty well. Some spectacular failures - both of them directly attributable to managerial decisions gone wrong. But the damn thing actually works.
NASA should work on a next gen system that doesn't use recycled Shuttle components. But that's a long ways away. Orion / Constellation is (are) a reasonable interim solution.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
RS68s are being used because they have 80% fewer parts, meaning less things to go wrong.
Also using direct for LEO is a waste of resources. Ares 1 is a much better solution for reaching the ISS and sending crews into space.
Not in this case, it's not. The use of the RS-68s as part of the ground-launch engine stack means that pure thrust actually outweighs the need for efficiency. That's why there are Solid Rocket Boosters strapped to the side and why the Saturn V used kerosene-powered engines in the first stage rather than the more efficient LHOx engines.
In fact, the RS-68 is two seconds MORE efficient at sea level than the SSMEs in exchange for the 43 second difference in a vacuum. Which, again, makes the engines ideal for ground-launches.
Yes it did. There were only two engines on the market that would meet the needs: The SSME and the RS-68. Arguments were heard on both sides. The initial decision to come out of the arguments was that the SSMEs would be used on the first generation of the vehicle with a switch to RS-68s in the second generation of vehicle. Because the RS-68s provide almost double the raw thrust, greater payloads would be realized in the second generation of the vehicle.
As it worked out, the RS-68 reached stability and completed testing soon enough to be considered for the first generation of vehicle. Given the significant cost savings in using these engines (~$36 million/engine), it became almost a no-brainer for NASA to switch over.
If you've already retooled your factory, you'd have to either have a damn good reason to lose that investment (e.g. you just retooled for Hummers and gas is now at $4/gal) or you'd have to be an idiot who likes losing money. Changing programs in mid-stream fits the latter definition.
Only to the average layman. For anyone who has even a modicum of understanding in how rocketry works, it becomes clear that two separate vehicles based on the same technologies will be far cheaper in the long run. Why? Because your big vehicle is more complex than your small vehicle. By having to man-rate the big vehicle, you're loosing the cost-savings realized in flying 100s of tonnes of cargo in a single shot. Meanwhile, you're spending more money to send people into space than if you had a smaller, less complex vehicle that was purpose-designed to get people into space.
To use a car analogy, DIRECT is like purchasing a semi as your primary vehicle because you occasionally need to haul a large amount of stuff. Does it make sense to keep driving the semi when 90% of the time you just need to go to the store? Sure, you can unhitch the trailer before using it for day-to-day activities, but that doesn't mean you're saving money on gas. Quite the opposite! Not to mention the safety problems of trying to fit such a large vehicle into roadways and spaces designed for smaller consumer vehicles.
Having two launch vehicles is a no-brainer. Any one-size solution is wrong-headed and significantly outside the bounds of what is ideal under current technological limitations.
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I have to respectfully disagree with you about Griffin. I don't necessarily have a problem with the direction he's taking (In fact, I concur with his ideas for a new manned program and end-of-lifing the shuttle) but the mistake he made was that he claimed he could do all this on the budget he's given. I know asking for more money isn't popular, but he also needs to give Congress and the president a reality check and say "We're trying for another Apollo-level project on a mac-and-cheese budget. We've got to get more money for this."
I suppose we could get it by scrapping the science missions, but at least in the case of the Mars missions, a lot of that is gathering information for an eventual manned mission there. Canning all space science for five years doesn't end space science for five years, it ends it for a generation because all those teams will fall apart, and melt into industry and academia and it will take a decade or more to get where we were before. NASA's space operations budget needs to be increased. I wonder how many people know that just "No Child Left Behind" costs about 20% more than the entire NASA budget, and I don't know too many people who have a kind word for that program, apart from politicians.