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Obama Taps Charles Bolden To Lead NASA
viyh notes that President Obama has named former astronaut Charles F. Bolden Jr. as NASA administrator. Obama's campaign space adviser, Lori Garver, will be Bolden's deputy. Bolden flew four shuttle missions, two as commander, as well as 100 combat missions over Viet Nam. If confirmed, Bolden will take over an agency uncertain of its direction. The shuttle Atlantis's landing will mark the end of the servicing era — it was the last planned mission to repair any satellite. Some inside the agency are less than happy about how NASA's future looks from here.
Used to be, back when I was in high school, that we listened to Kennedy's speeches about space and dreamed of becoming astronauts. NASA, in those days, was something of a heroic world where the best and brightest grouped to find ways to get men to the moon and return them safely to Earth.
We looked at the Alan Shepards, Louis Armstrongs, and Buzz Aldrins as supermen. They were our Sanjaya back then. The right stuff, they had it, and we wanted to have it too.
But now, NASA is just a sad shadow of what it used to be. The agency is hamstrung by lack of funding, but more than that, in the decades that have passed since I was a boy, educational standards have dropped to such an extent that even if we were to increase funding to reasonable levels, that we'd need to bring in foreign contractors just to make up the intelligence gap.
The average American doesn't care about space. They care about what is directly in front of them. Their car, their job (if they still have it), and their bellies. The curiousity and hunger for space is gone except in a scattered few.
It'll be another 12 years before any kind of rehabilition can take place. Until the next generation of kids passes through schools that encourage thought, discipline, and creativity and not just feel-good, everyone wins, it only matters if you try "education".
I agree that NASA is a pale shadow of what it used to be. I'm not sure I agree with why.
Kids are fine these days. There are plenty of smart folks out there kicking ass. Why is it that every generation thinks kids suck today? Have we all forgotten the stupid stuff we did?
NASA may be lacking funding, but are they using the funding they have wisely?
Why do we maintain the space station? There's no real good science going on. Why do we want to go to the moon? There's nothing there. Why would we want a colony on Mars or the Moon? No magnetic shield makes radiation very hazardous. We can't live there.
Why don't we use robots? Well, we do, and frankly all the good exploration comes from robots, not from people.
Yes, we've lost the jazzy "coolness" of space. Know why? 'Cause it's EMPTY. Nothing there. Nothing to get excited about. B O R I N G.
Lets explore the oceans instead!
Lets put our gumption and know how to solving problems here. There's plenty to go around... and you know what? Plenty of people hack, build, problem solve, and explore right here.
Creativity and exploration isn't dead. It just went somewhere more fascinating than cold empty space.
-T
I've had the distinct pleasure of working with Jim Wetherbee, the man who has commanded more NASA shuttle flights than any other.
During that time I asked him why he left NASA. And I don't want to put words into his mouth, but suffice it to say I think he felt like the country's support of NASA is terrible and he decided he wanted to go somewhere that he could make a difference (because he no longer felt that way in NASA).
It's sad really. The space program, while expensive, has resulted in many great technological discoveries and inventions. And yet do you even know how small of a percent of our GDP goes towards it? It's pathetic.
I only hope this Bolden is something like Jim Wetherbee. If so, there may be some hope yet.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
there is nothing left to cut because the cow went dry...
In a sobering holiday interview with C-SPAN, President Obama boldly told Americans: "We are out of money." http://www.drudgereport.com/flashocs.htm
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Have you read your first link? Besides, have you ever seen the cockpit of a fighter before? let alone the space shuttle? He was a damned test pilot, his whole job was to fly questionable craft at ridiculous speeds, i'm sure he knows how to spot and fix technical problems. Now he's piloting NASA, i think he'll do fine.
The last guy, Griffin, had 7 degrees and i think everyone was unhappy with him. So we gave an academic a shot, now let's try someone else.
Selected by NASA in May 1980, Bolden became an astronaut in August 1981. His technical assignments included: Astronaut Office Safety Officer; Technical Assistant to the Director of Flight Crew Operations; Special Assistant to the Director of the Johnson Space Center; Astronaut Office Liaison to the Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance Directorates of the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Kennedy Space Center; Chief of the Safety Division at JSC; Lead Astronaut for Vehicle Test and Checkout at the Kennedy Space Center; and Assistant Deputy Administrator, NASA Headquarters. A veteran of four space flights, he has logged over 680 hours in space. Bolden served as pilot on STS-61C (January 12â"18, 1986) and STS-31 (April 24â"29, 1990), and was the mission commander on STS-45 (March 24, 1992 â" April 2, 1992), and STS-60 (February 3-11, 1994).
Bolden was the first person to ride the Launch Complex 39 slidewire baskets which enable rapid escape from a shuttle on the launch pad. The need for a human test was determined following a launch abort on STS-41-D where controllers were afraid to order the crew to use the untested escape system.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
You hit upon something that does need to be made apparent to other American taxpayers here:
NASA is not only smaller than the U.S. Air Force's space program, it is also smaller than the National Security Agency's space program as well. That is right, not just the #2 space program in America but actually it is #3... in terms of dollars spent and personnel employed on making things that go into space. That should be a hugely sobering thought by itself.
I hope that Obama actually does take a stronger interest in setting space policy, but his efforts to date seem rather lame and more resembling a policy of maintenance rather than trying to boldly set out a new course for NASA.
What's uncertain is how well an experienced pilot with very little technical knowledge [wikipedia.org] can run a huge agency that has extremely complicated technical problems.
This is a popular meme amongst the technically-inclined (a group in which I include myself), but when it comes down to it, a NASA administrator with a high level of technical expertise is largely what got us into the current mess we're in. Nobody would dispute that the prior administrator, Michael Griffin is a technical expert, with several masters degrees (aerospace, civil, and electrical engineering) and a PhD in aerospace engineering.
Unfortunately, as often happens with us technical types, he ended up getting obsessed with a particular technical idea and ended up blocking out potentially-superior alternatives. In Griffin's case, he designed a novel shuttle-based manned rocket (using a solid rocket as a first-stage) prior to becoming administrator, and once he became administrator he put NASA's weight behind his pet design and clamped down on engineers who raised concerns. According to some recently-leaked NASA documents, the supposedly-unbiased ESAS study which selected NASA's current rocket design in fact gave safety exemptions to Griffin's pet design while unfairly penalizing competing designs. Fast forward to the present, and it's looking like the issues with Griffin's design (now called the Ares I) are fundamental design problems with costs ballooning skywards.
While technical proficiency is nice, it's not the most important thing in a manager of a program like NASA. Far more important is the ability to judge things in an unbiased manner, and being able to listen to your subordinates when they voice concerns.
The notion that children need longer in school is pc and daft! And the idea that you can teach a cohort of children for 15 years, as is now done in the UK is ludicrous. First children differ hugely in ability and are profoundly affected by their environment, here in Switzerland most 10 year olds are tri-lingual, because, in this tower of babel it is easy to become so. Since we stream and have different types of school, as do Germany and France, kids get the type of schooling their minds need and become satisfied and succeed at what they are asked to do, and when they leave, go on to higher education or ON THE JOB training.
Kids leave Berufschule or Ecole Artisanel at 17, reasonably numerate and able to read and write, normally in two languages.
The academic kids go to University or one of the Federal Technical Highschools eg ETZ Zurich. There they can do a first degree or PhD as fast as they can, or more slowly.
The US system has stopped working since it seeks to achieve equality of achievement, not equal opportunity, which leads to endless erosion of standards since no one can fail. Thus you have a politicised school systems in which I pity the academically bright student.
You need to get your priorities right, get the bright kids out of normal High School and into somewhere where they can progress as fast as they can. In my view, 5-6 years in school is enough for anyone, two years for basic numeracy and literacy in two languages, two years maths and another one/two years in science. Before some of the teaching profession jump up and pontificate about History, Geography, Religious Studies and Social Sciences I say the kids can do RS on Sundays and pick up most of the rest as part of coursework, your kids should read the Constitution and Bill of Rights, ours UDI at Ruetli Field (1291).
Finally you _do_ need to teach maths first, you cannot understand science otherwise.
a huge desert from which nothing profitable can come from, not even Helium 3
And your basis for this sweeping declaration is ... what, exactly?
there were things to extract, sell, harvest
The Great Plains were once called "the Great American Desert." And with the technology of the time, they were; it took a significant portion of the 19th c. to develop agricultural technology that made farming in, say, Kansas a viable proposition. Once that technology was in place, the "desert" became the breadbasket of the world.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Fixing the Constellation / Orion program is not really going to fix the problem. "Go to the Moon, again!" and "Go to Mars!" are not strategic objectives. They are relics of the Cold War, where space exploration is viewed as a trophy. We got there first!
We spent a decade and over a hundred billion on a space station, only to yank the transportation system out from under it without preparing another first, and change the plan to:
"abandon it a few years after its completion, never funding the science research it was built for, so we can... go to the Moon!"
Could there be a more colossal failure of leadership in our space program?
In fact, there has been. A series of programs over the past 30 years were cancelled before they could yield the fruits of R&D which would be required to build a next generation space transportation system. So now we've decided to stop pretending that there is any motivation beyond the Cold War trophies, and get down to business building trophy capturing systems, updated versions of tried and true expendable rockets.
Sure, we could send people to Mars, once, or maybe twice, before the program was cancelled or cut back to occasional in-orbit operations only, which at that point will consist of visits to the Russian or Chinese space station or Lunar outpost.
The biggest problems with Constellation are that the system will do little to reduce the cost of a pound of payload into orbit, and is designed to conform to a launch infrastructure which isn't scalable. Two launch pads, with room at the Cape, but no funding to build a third. Two giant crawlers, Four vertical assembly bays (in practice 3, because 1 is use for storage), but barely enough funding to keep that facility water tight, let alone expand it.
How many flights per year could this infrastructure sustain? Enough to sustain a base on the Moon and occasional flights to Mars? Unlikely. It can barely sustain six or eight Shuttle flights per year. It could possibly handle a dozen or maybe 18 launches under Constellation per year, in a well funded year. What can you achieve with that? That certainly isn't going to be a foundation for a growing space economy.
We need to think about space access as an economic stimulus on the nature of the trans-continental railroads. We need to build an infrastructure to get to orbit reliably, then the moon reliably, then the asteroids and beyond. The first step would be an X-33 / VentureStar style program (with reasonable goals for the current generation system, but planning and R&D to lay the groundwork for advanced systems like space elevators come later) which builds R&D, then a fleet of vehicles, to increase our ability to get there, reduce the cost of a pound of payload to orbit, and increases the reliability. In parallel, we would have steady funding for technologies laying the roadbed to the next generation vehicles, twenty or thirty years out, as well as the power plants, and in-space engines needed for the in-space operations.
Maybe Constellation could be a first step in that plan, but it doesn't look to me like we're planning anything beyond failure. This system isn't scalable, and can't become scalable. It won't be cheap enough to fly, so we won't fly it often. (Sound familiar?)
Compared to fixing health care, this project wouldnâ(TM)t be all that expensive. Approached with the mindset that we are building a railroad to allow us to develop an in-space economy, the payoff would be enormous. If we continue a cold war, Moon-as-trophy mindset, we will never reap the full rewards of the investment weâ(TM)ve already made.
Perhaps we could redirect the 4% DoD increase to a long term investment.
Obama's Warfare State
Of course, Iâ(TM)m just tinkering at the margins here with the radical suggestion that the 4% DoD increase could be better spent laying the rai
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I hope so. Ares is nonsense. One tiny rocket whose sole job is to lift the crew module into orbit, and it can't even do that; and one giant beast of a rocket that is so big that they can barely fit it through the doors of the assembly building, and will require completely new factories to build. Without the Ares V, Ares I has nothing to lift crew to, except to jump onto the ISS treadmill. Plus, that's all it can lift. No more supplies. No more spare parts. No more modules. Just people up, people down
It is ironic that you are complaining about the lift capacity of the Ares I when the entire point of making the Ares V is to have an ultra heavy lift vehicle that can carry large modules. Yes, you could put a manned module on top of the Ares V, but if you use both the Ares I and the Ares V, you don't have to man-rate the Ares V and your ultimate capacity is larger and cheaper. Man rating a rocket like the Ares V would be monumentally expensive.
We need an ultra heavy lift vehicle. The Ares V can lift almost 190 tonnes into LEO. This is about half the mass of the completed ISS. Any realistic plan to explore around our planet will require massive rockets. The cost of the ISS is about $100 billion primarily because the US side of it was designed to be put together in small 20 tonne modules with separate launches in a cargo truck (Space Shuttle). If you decide launch the Orion on the Ares V, you will lose about half of your capacity to put useful modules on the Moon and you will also need to reduce its capacity because the g-forces during launch will be too high for the astronauts.
This is really an engineering decision, and it is the right one. The only major error is the design of the Ares I. The Delta IV Heavy should be man rated and used instead because it is already launching and because it does have significant upgrade potential. Slap the Orion on top of it. The g-forces on the Delta IV Heavy don't require any major modifications and the cowling size is an almost perfect fit for the current Orion design. The Ares V needs to be built as is, not man-rated and only for cargo. If it is built as designed, it will also allow NASA to cheaply build LEO space stations as well as massive planetary probes.