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Obama Moves To Link Pentagon With NASA
Amiga Trombone sends this quote from the beginning of a story at Bloomberg:
"President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the US's civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China. Obama's transition team is considering a collaboration between the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency's planned launch vehicle, which isn't slated to fly until 2015, according to people who've discussed the idea with the Obama team."
Check NASAWatch to see some inacuracies in this Bloomberg story.
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
What's maddening is that nobody involved in this debate seems to realize that:
1. We solved resonance and pogoing issues in the 1960s vis-a-vis the Saturn V stack.
2. We can simply dust off the Apollo 18-20 J-series mission plans and the Apollo X/ALSS/AES/LESA studies, and execute them.
3. All we need to actually get back to the Moon is a Saturn V stack updated with newer materials and automation technologies.
4. SRBs are insanely dangerous due to their non-throttalability, and should not be man-rated beyond the poorly-designed Shuttle stack.
We knew all this *more than 40 years ago* (we ignored the SRB issue back then, which led directly to Challenger); how can these people be so ignorant?!
Here's a link to just a few of the studies which were done of follow-on missions. Here are links to Apollo X, ALSS, AES, and LESA.
Stephen Baxter's Voyage is an interesting alternate history based upon some of these mission plans (although he's way too hard on the Germans, IMHO).
The bottom line - if NASA want to go back to the Moon (far better to offer a $20B X-Prize for the first organization to put 30 men on the Moon for a year and a day, and return them safely to Earth), all they have to do is to start building modernized Saturn Vs, Apollo CMs, SMs, & LMs.
What I found odd in this story is that the DoD's space budget is $22B. NASA requested a $17.6B budget for FY2009. WTF? Does the DoD even do anything past LEO/polar orbits?
Not a typewriter
The whole reason the Space Transportation System (STS, or just "space shuttle") looks the way it does is entirely due to now-defunct military requirements. When they were designing the shuttle, the DoD had a requirement to be able to place a payload in polar orbit and return to Earth in one orbit, in order to "secretly" deploy spy satellites. This is hard. No, really, this is very hard. The earth is spinning "sideways" and it takes a tremendous amount of impulse (read: fuel) to change your orbit from sideways to vertical. Then you have to land again.
NASA, dutiful organization that it was, came up with the idea of "tacking" the orbiter on the side. And they gave it wings. This was the only way they could get the crew-carrying module to safely glide back to its original destination.
About 5 years into the design, the DoD said, "No, thanks, we don't want that system anymore," and left NASA holding the bag. So, we're stuck with this design where the re-entry surface is exposed to the outside during launch (nobody else does that). The engines on the orbiter remain the highest energy-dense engines ever developed.
For more trivia, see here.
"Diplomacy is something you do until you find a rock." --Richard Pound
Sucks for the people who were going to retire soon but if they were going to retire next year why the hell did they have so many investments in equities?
That's a good question. The general answer is that most retired investors need their portfolio to generate a return at least equal to inflation, over time. Historically cash has a negative return after inflation and bonds are maybe break-even at best. But last year all that went out the window. Stocks have had a 1-year negative return that's almost unprecedented and even high-grade bonds have taken a hit. Plus markets over the world are down, not just the U.S. So, while generally cash is a bad place to be, long-term, last year nothing else was any good. That still doesn't mean, though, that you should keep your nest egg under the mattress: over the long term you'll see no net growth and your retirement income will shrink, net inflation.
The DOD black budget is over 30 billion per annum now, as of 2007 figures I just looked at. Do you know what is in it? I don't. And it has been in the billions going all the way back, so add it up, half a trillion and change over the past few decades. That's enough to keep a little advanced space R and D going in there some place. Nasa for 2008 is 17 billion, and I would presume that any black budget efforts in space wouldn't have to be totally sourced within the black budget, a whole lot of the tech that could be used could just be schlepped over, they don't have to "develop" every single rivet or engine, etc in the black budget, just the interesting bits. A regular adapted airliner or b-52 can haul another craft, so something smaller than the shuttle but larger than the old x series of planes could be hauled up to drop point with off the shelf airframes. If Scaled Composites can get to suborbital for mere millions in a few years and a small handful of techs, the DOD could certainly already have something that could get to NEO given their budget and *half a century* lead time using similar mothership to dropship tech. Anyway, we have leaked names, aurora, brilliant buzzard, tr-3b. I say where's there's smoke, there's fire, and they certainly would have the motive and intent, plus the means as regards funding and secret facilities, plus a past track record of not only developing one off advanced prototypes, but actually deploying small fleets before it got released to the public, sometimes even at multi years level. How long were the nighthawk and spirit flying before they admitted to owning them, or the sr-71?
What I said, don't dismiss the notion out of hand, look at all the tantalizing clues plus the obviousness of how much they would want something like that as part of their total package. Robots and computers are damn useful, but sometimes there's no substitute for having a meat sack on the job someplace.
USCG is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and not currently part of the DoD since we are actually at "war".
The USCG was also transfered from the Department of Transportation and not Commerce on the creation of the DHS.
It is also considered one of the five (5) armed services under the US Code with the Marines as well (even though the Marines are administrated under the Department of the Navy due to historical reasons).
"I will not weaponize space." (and technically, weaponize doesn't mean what his puppeteers think it means)