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The Fight Over NASA's Future
swestcott writes "The New York Times has an interesting article about the transition to the Obama administration and NASA's transition to the new Orion."
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Troll biter's rehab. Damn but it's hard to ignore the clueless trolls. I guess I'm off the wagon again, I have to respond.
"Pork"? WTF??? Do you have any idea how many technological advances, especially in medicine, that have come from the space program?
Do you have cable TV? A cell phone? GPS? None of these would be possible were it not for the "pork spending" on space. All of them rely on sattelites.
"physics"? What kind of drooling anti-nerd can't understand that launching a heavy machine into outer space doesn't use physics?
"Chemistry?" You realise how much chemistry work is involved in fuels?
If I were modding I would be undecided whether to mod the parent as "troll" or "funny". Who let all these clueless MBAs in here anyway?
Free Martian Whores!
I'd like to see a move away from the Ares-Orion stack and a move towards the more versatile Jupitor plan.
I'd also like to see us make serious use of the press and make our move back to the Moon and eventually to Mars as much as an event as the original Mercury-Gemini-Apollo missions. You have to make it romantic for the public so they feel like writing their Congresscritters to support funding.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
NASA is being set up to fail, because of the prevailing pro-corporate attitude in the US. The idea is that private entities are efficient, responsible, and capable of long-term planning and technological development. So nobody wants to be accused of being 'socialist' by giving more money to a government agency.
The original Apollo program cost $135 billion in modern(ish) money over about 10 years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Program_costs_and_cancellation
Whereas Constellation is being given $3 billion a year for about 20 years, or about $60 billion in current money.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/expectmore/detail/10004394.2006.html
So the US government is expecting a great deal more, for a lot less money, when there has been no real development in interplanetary manned travel since Apollo.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Griffin's quote and basic sentiment reminded me of JFK's 1962 Rice University speach:
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
"I don't frankly know what the answer is," [Dr. Crowley, of MIT] said, "but I know it's a lot closer and a lot more complicated answer than the one playing out in the media and the blogs."
I think they're talking about us.
===
But in all seriousness, the cost of running the shuttle for 5 years is $x and the cost of developing the Constellation program in 5 years is $y. Meanwhile, NASA's budget is not x+y and if they wanted to try to develop Constellation in 3 years its cost would be closer to $y^2.
It seems like people can't grasp the rudimentary guideline of engineering development: you've got limitations in quality, cost, and timeliness, and on any challenging project you need to pick one of those limitations that you won't particularly worry about.
I do like the articles conclusion though... NASA's budget is way too small for the amount of good that it can do for the world and for the amount of high-tech science jobs that it can create. As long as everybody in the nation has food, shelter, telecommunications, and power... there is no reason NASA's budgets shouldn't balloon.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
That's heresy in some quarters, but at this point, I don't think we can justify another trip to the moon, because we certainly aren't going to Mars anytime soon anyway, which was the whole point of going back to the Moon in the first place... to begin the process of setting up a Lunar base for future Mars exploration.
As expensive as it is, right now, the Shuttle is actually useful for some tasks that we're committed to... ISS support, for instance. The whole Orion program was basically just a re-do of Saturn/Apollo anyway. And we shouldn't do that if it's just out of nostalgia. It has to actually accomplish something significant.
During the 60's and the first race to the moon, NASA engineers were told that money wasn't a problem, time was. Unfortunately, money is very much a problem right now, and the "money is no object" days are long gone. Like anything else the federal government does, NASA's activities need a justification for the price. I simply don't think we can justify another moonshot right now.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
That raises an interesting point. How do you take a poo in zero gravity? (Side note -- that gives a whole new meaning to a "floater"!). Do they just wear diapers? Do they sit on suction seats?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
and when we see the Russians and the Chinese putting miltary bases on the moon with nuclear missles what are we going to do about it?
Sure it will be in violation of treaty, but how will they care if they can reign down Nukes from the Moon and LEO.
The threat of hostile nations doing things with the Moon we would not like is more relevent now then in the 1960's. China has stated there intentions of putting a man on the moon by the end of the next decade. Putin is bringing back the old Russia of the 1960's. If we want to mantain parity in the world, we need to get our asses to the Moon and Mars or we will find ourselves irrelevent.
NASA needs to be folded into the Department of Defense and given as much money as possible. This is a matter of National Security, and the fact Obama is treating it as an extra just shows how much he disrespects the one thing in the Constitution that Federal Government is authorized to provide. Not social programs for welfare dead beat moms who can't keep their legs closed, but to provide for the common defense.
The second point is operative today. The domestic economy is in meltdown. Going ahead with this program is akin to giving the aerospace industry a bailout. If it needs one, then let's just give them the money outright.
No statement is true, not even this one.
You need to look at Direct Space Transportation System...
And exactly what you are saying is why Democracy is doomed to fail. When everyone has a right to vote for what they may or may not get they'll eventually vote themselves benefits for which the economy cannot sustain. Why not just have a vote to make everyone a millionaire? Too much money?...how about $500k?....$1k?...$500? If handing out money some how makes everything better why is the economic stimulus so low? why not make everyone a millionaire?
The fight from the personal rights advocates are afraid of this eventual collapse, while the government support people look at the poor and seemingly neglected people and wish for them to have more. Both think they are right and both have a basis in a moral "good." Neither will function wholly in any kind of pure form. Between pure Free Market and pure Communism we have socialism. Socialism can be scaled in either direction closer to Free Market or pure Communism. finding the sweet spot is the difficult part and will be very dependent on culture.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Well, since you asked...
The Jupiter is a straightforward evolution of the Shuttle system into a traditional rocket. 1) The Shuttle itself is removed from the stack. 2) The external tank is modified and strengthened to carry a payload on top and engines on the bottom. 3) The three expensive shuttle main engines are replaced by two expendable engines and moved to the bottom of the external tank. 4) A 10 meter payload fairing is mounted on top of the fuel tank, with a capacity of up to 20 tons of hardware. 5) The Orion spacecraft is placed on top of the payload fairing. 6) A crew escape system is placed on top of the Orion.
Now, that sounds complicated, but it is much simpler once you see the results: DIRECT Launcher.
What that gives you is a versatile rocket for placing a six man crew PLUS 20 tons of cargo at the space station in a single launch. This configuration by itself is almost a complete replacement for the Shuttle, except for the Shuttle's ability to return payloads to Earth. Or, the Jupiter could lift 50 tons of payload to LEO in an unmanned configuration. Ares-I can't do either of those jobs, now or ever. No existing or planned EELV can do that. Ares-V would be such a behemoth (if it ever flies) that it would be much too expensive to fly on a regular basis. That is why Jupiter-120 is more versatile than Ares-I.
The second phase of the Jupiter proposal is to add a second liquid rocket stage on top of the core stage, while at the same time adding a third engine at the bottom. That will enable the Jupiter to place up to 110 tons of payload in LEO in a single launch. For the lunar mission there would be two launches, just as for Ares. One launch would carry the Orion CEV and the Altair lunar lander. The second launch would just lift extra fuel and the upper stage. The Orion and Altair would dock with the upper stage, then use the upper stage to send them to lunar orbit.
Jupiter can also be used to launch exploration missions to Near Earth Orbit (NEO) objects, launch large scientific payloads such as really big telescopes, Earth recon sats, etc. Jupiter is small enough and affordable enough to be used on a regular basis, but still twice as powerful as any existing or planned commercial launcher (including SpaceX).
Because Jupiter is so cleanly derived from the Space Shuttle, it needs much less development money than Ares. In fact, the entire Jupiter project, including lunar capability, would cost less than half of what is planned for Ares. The Ares-I project is going to cost around $15 billion by itself, with another $16-17 billion for Ares-V. Jupiter is projected to cost less than $12 billion for both the initial LEO version and upper stage. This economy is possible because both versions use the exact same "common core", with only the addition of the third main engine and the upper stage to allow lunar missions.
So the whole DIRECT premise is to build a single new "medium" sized rocket from the Shuttle heritage, which can be used for Earth orbit and lunar exploration. Ares requires the development of two entirely new rockets, neither of which have much at all in common with Shuttle or each other. Jupiter can use most of the existing launch infrastructure, including crawlers, crawlerways, and the fixed portion of the existing launch towers. Ares-I and -V both require extensive modifications of the launch pads, and both launch pads will be dedicated to one or the other vehicle, since they are so different. And at this point, the Ares-V is getting so large that it may require completely new pads and crawlerways to be built.
Jupiter can be used with or without an upper stage. It can launch manned missions with or without payloads. It can launch payloads with or without crew. It can be ready up to three years sooner than Ares-I, which is actually planning their first manned flight for 2016. 2016! Jupiter will still take until late 2013, but that is because it has to wait for the Orion CEV to be finished.
And that's why Jupiter is more versatile, affordable, and sensible than Ares.
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
But there is just one problem is equating this with NASA. NASA has, AFAIK, never done any research into deflecting asteroids and has never implemented or even proposed such a program.
Thought I'd do some checking on this and share with the class:
B612 Foundation
We've been anticipating the conclusion of a contract we issued to Jet Propulsion Laboratory in early 2008, and it's now available. We asked JPL to analyze, in detail, the performance of a transponder equipped gravity tractor (t-GT) in determining the precise orbit of a NEO with which it has rendezvoused, and to evaluate the towing performance of the GT per se.
And elsewhere on their site:
NASA's NEO Report to Congress (see #15 below) has stirred considerable controversy due to both its rejection of Congress' request for a recommended program to support the new Spaceguard Survey goal and it's technically flawed deflection analysis. The analytic work supporting the summary report to Congress is being withheld from public review by NASA despite it having been published as a 3-color glossy "Final Report" and distributed internally.
The sky is falling, really:
The bad news? While this all looks fine on paper, scientists haven't had a chance to try it in practice. And this is where NASA's report was supposed to come in. Congress directed the agency in 2005 to come up with a program, a budget to support it and an array of alternatives for preventing an asteroid impact.
But instead of coming up with a plan and budget to get the job done, the report bluntly stated that "due to current budget constraints, NASA cannot initiate a new program at this time."
Why did the space agency drop the ball? Like all government departments, it fears the dreaded "unfunded mandate." Congress has the habit of directing agencies to do something and then declining to give them the money to do so. In this case, Congress not only directed NASA to provide it with a recommended program but also asked for the estimated budget to support it. It was a left-handed way for the Congress to say to NASA that this is our priority like it or not. But for some reason NASA seems to have opted for a federal form of civil disobedience.
I think this ties in with NASA's, and specifically Administrator Griffin's, emphasis on manned missions over unmanned missions. I hope Obama replaces the man. Because, not having a space mission is a good excuse for the dinosaurs, we can't use that one.
I find it highly suspicious that we haven't been hit with an ELE from space in the past 60 million years.
You may have been going for a funny mod, but...
Actually there was a "minor" extinction level event approx 35 million years ago at the end of the Eocene. There are several craters associated with this event, including the one under Chesapeake bay, and one in what is now Siberia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene-Oligocene_extinction_event is a good place to start if you want to know more. (Anyone with time please contribute to that, I wish I had time)
There are other minor extinction events that we still don't know the cause, or causes, of. It is very possible that a lot of minor extinction events can be associated with asteroid impacts - not all large (>1-2 km size object) will necessarily produce an extinction event. If one occurred in a very deep ocean location it would likely have very different effects than one that occurred on land or in shallow sea waters, and that's just a very basic view of the various impact scenarios.
As we continue to gather data about impacts and the fossil record, it's very likely we'll find more impacts associated with more extinction events, especially regional or local ones. The hard part is differentiating the impact scenarios from other local or regional events; but at least we have the tools to start doing so now that we didn't have just a few decades ago. I suspect that the next few decades will show us that impacts have played a much greater part in the evolution of life than we suspect.
We can only hope that the data will convince our public and politicians that we need to develop a capability to prevent such impacts. Even the impact of a smaller object - say, 1 km wide or so - would have global consequences to our civilization, no matter where it occurred.
Life on this planet isn't really that fragile - it's survived for many hundreds of millions of years. Our human civilization, however, is extremely fragile. Being aware of how nature can disrupt that should be of primary importance for us, now that we have the tools to figure it out. To not do so, to ignore what we could learn about how to protect ourselves from impacts, or global climate change, or the resources we consume, is extraordinarily short-sighted and points to a failure of our governments, our people, and our society to work for the survival of our species. (Most people want their family lines to survive...)
If we don't survive, then all we've done before, and all we do now, is pointless.
More than going to the moon or mars - "known quantities", we need to put much more money into finding, investigating and exploring near earth asteroids, in order to develop the capabilities we'll need in the future to deal with those NEAs (and comets, eventually) which may pose a threat to us; and also to begin the investigation into harvesting resources from them. This is where much of the political and scientific vision has failed in the last few decades.
There are those who will argue that it's not important. To them, I just say, isn't it best to spend our limited space access resources more wisely, to kill at least two birds with one launch? I don't think that a return to the moon, or a manned mission to Mars* (as great as that would be) would gain us as much as several unmanned and perhaps one or two manned missions to local orbital asteroids would gain us.
*Yeah, finding out whether or not there has been life on Mars - something that will likely only be done by putting scientists on it's surface - is a great thing. I just think it is outweighed by other considerations.
We would gain both the ability to track more of the threats against us, plus the ability to start mining objects that don't have any gravity well worth speaking of and aren't geologically differentiated objects
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.