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White House Panel Considers New Paths To Space
Neil H. writes "The White House's Human Space Flight Plans blue-ribbon panel (the 'Augustine panel') has posted the material from their first public meeting on the future of NASA's spaceflight program, which was held on Wednesday. NASA officials presented their Ares I rocket plans and their belief that they can work around its design flaws, with projected development costs ballooning to $35 billion. The panel also heard several alternative proposals, such as adapting already-existing EELV and SpaceX rockets to carry crew to orbit; these proposals would have better safety margins than the Ares I, be ready sooner, and cost NASA less than $2 billion to complete, but are politically unattractive."
We really ought to be way past the phase of getting wet in the crotch about putting a man on the moon. We've got the t-shirt already.
What we ought to be looking at is beginning construction of a moon base and the development of the infrastructure to perform longhaul transport back and forth from the Earth to the Moon. That means both reusable capsule technology and low-cost fuel.
If the original space race taught us anything, it's that there is a lot of prestige in doing the impossible. Putting a man into orbit is now not impossible. Putting a man on the moon is now not impossible. It's time to look beyond that towards building habitats elsewhere.
I know, this is /., but the article was written by someone who wasn't even able to spell correctly the names of the rockets, and the summary fails to mention the stronger alternative that doesn't requires big jobs losses within NASA in the next few years (DIRECT).
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
How about they create a goddamn Space Elevator already!?
Obama's economists decided that they need to spend their way out of this recession, and even though Orion would not pass muster by my bang-for-buck standards, it's not the worst way to spend money if spending money is what you're trying to do.
Of course we could do better: We could dream big like JFK and (for the first time since the 60's) try something truly ambitious and expensive. As Americans, it's time we finally accomplish something! Ever since we lost the Vietnam war, we've been complete pussies about big projects. (It doesn't help that when we do try we fail miserably, like when we try to impose Western democracy to Iraq) As far as I can tell, the largest public project recently was the Big Dig in Boston. We can't even rebuild Ground Zero. We act like a country who lost faith in ourselves, in a time when it's very important that the rest of the world has faith in us (and our currency). We lucked into the internet - yes, that was cool, but it wasn't something we deliberately set out to do as a public communication tool.
I think that Obama should just ask to dust off the Titan V blueprints and build factory to produce them on a massive scale. Then use those to lift into space something really cool, like a 100m mirror for a telescope, solar collectors that beam power back to Earth, etc.
Call me crazy, but as far as I can tell, we're a month away from the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. The bulk of the current population of the earth was born into a world where man had walked on the moon.
And NASA is asking for (another) $35B and a couple years to develop a rocket that can launch humans into space, never mind to the moon? Seriously?
I'm all for space exploration (and exploitation), and I even partake in the probably misguided notion that there is real value in having humans go into space, even though for the most part, it makes more rational sense to have robotic probes go in our place.
But even I have to question the sanity of pouring billions and billions of dollars into an organization so fscked up that they have to reinvent technology they provably had over forty years ago, and who keep losing people and equipment because they refuse to listen to their own engineers.
I grew up admiring NASA and the astronauts, and with a burning desire to be one myself, or at the very least work there, but today I wouldn't buy a used car from the current crop of hacks running the place.
It may help get us there, but in a recession where media hype is king, spending on something 'with no immediate returns' will be frowned upon by the public; maybe cause an uproar or two. Obama will probably be looking for the fastest way out of the recession, so a big project is definitely not on the agenda at the moment.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
If we have to make a choice between health care and building a moon base, I say go with the less expensive lift vehicles and health care.
The moon base will just have to wait.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Like what... DOWN, this time?
If you can send two rovers to mars for less than 500 millions, then please do.
PS: I'm sure some moron will try to explain us how the supremely intelligent Ayn Rand (cough cough cough) would have been able to do it for less than 1 million.
Without it, nobody is interested in space.
Deleted
Other than "up"?
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
It's not NASA's fault that they lost the technology used to put the first people on the Moon. It's the fault of the government of the USA. They are the ones who set NASA's goals. They killed manned space exploration with the Space Shuttle, which was a compromise designed by committee for the purposes of putting up and bringing down spy satellites and to "build the space station."
After the Challenger disaster (a direct consequence of the Shuttle's poor design), the spy satellites went up on different vehicles.
How long did it take them to design a space station? It must have been the better part of a decade that they spent arguing about it before any of it got built.
As people keep saying, they could have build it with about 3 launches of a Saturn V.
The space shuttle is an over-engineered, fragile, over-complicated, unreliable piece of design by politics. It's an exemplary lesson in how not to design things.
Politicians, as usual, ruined manned space exploration.
But why should it be up to the Americans on their own to put human beings in space? Yes, Russia and China have done it, but I'm very ashamed that ESA hasn't done it yet.
If China were to announce plans for a semi-permanently staffed Moon base by 2022, say, things would become interesting again. Go China.
Russia should not be overlooked too. They have huge gas reserves, and if they stop being aggressive towards their potential customers, they could make huge amounts of money out of it to fund their space programme.
Stick Men
You know, with a 100m magnifying glass in space, we could create a free chicken toasting area right here on earth, thereby reducing the vast global power consumption of McDonalds, KFC, Burger Kings, etc.
But that would cost us nearly as much as one month of war. Sorry, can't do that. Have to murder people, and be called "a true hero" by everyone. Including the commentators on the Colbert Report full episode site.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
But even I have to question the sanity of pouring billions and billions of dollars into an organization so fscked up that they have to reinvent technology they provably had over forty years ago, and who keep losing people and equipment because they refuse to listen to their own engineers.
Standards have changed since 1969. The Apollo programme was expensive and dangerous. Building another Apollo mission today would still be expensive and dangerous, and worst of all it wouldn't meet modern ambitions. NASA is looking at building an inhabited lunar outpost, visiting an asteroid, launching a large deep-space telescope, and a mission to Mars. It might be a short hop from the Moon to Mars on a poster of the solar system; in real space it's a whole different prospect. Doing new stuff requires new technology.
Give me $499m. I'll get 'em there.
Oh, you mean... in working order?
The Manifold series predicted many of the problems we have here today; the aging Shuttle fleet, the private entrepreneurs trying to step up to the plate to supply heavy lifting capability, and all the political BS from "The Gun Club" (NASA) cock-blocking the private entrepreneurs.
There's also no small mention of how asteroids are flying goldmines. If we want to head off-planet, it would be wise to take advantage of resources that aren't already at the bottom of a gravity well that costs what, $30,000/lb. to LEO?
"it makes more rational sense to have robotic probes"
No robotic probe can tell you how it "feels" to be there. A robotic probe is a machine. A manned spacecraft is a part of Humanity.
But, about pouring billions into NASA... Well... I seems like they lost their mojo. They need to reinvent themselves, be willing to take risks more smartly (it took over 100 flights, 7 deaths and a lost spacecraft for someone to even look at what kind of damage a shuttle takes on launch? Seriously?).
I guess NASA needs more test-pilots and engineers and less scientists. I suggest we sacrifice the science for now in order to build a more solid, cheaper and versatile space access infrastructure. The very moment we can launch stuff cheaply we will see an expansion of space science like we never saw before. You spend billions on a space probe because it will cost a couple hundred millions to launch it. It's easy to imagine hundreds of cheaper science projects piggybacking on cheaper space access.
Inexpensive space access is the key. That should be the _only_ focus for NASA for the foreseeable future.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
"I'm very ashamed that ESA hasn't done it yet."
Don't be. LEO is a very boring place for humans to be. Until there is a credible way to go somewhere (hint: the Moon) there is little reason for humans in space.
Or, perhaps, a satellite repair crew could be stationed in LEO and operate a fleet of unmanned tugs to bring back and forth damaged satellites for refurbishing. I am sure the math would not work out at first, but it would be an insanely cool thing to try.
And, if we develop the cheap launch technology, it may even work.
The only reason for a shuttle-like spacecraft is to bring bus-sized payloads back from space. Every other role could be played by simpler, more reliable, cheaper spacecraft.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Tell me exactly what we have gotten from manned space flight -- besides velcro and tang!
If it's a grand project you want I suggest you go manhattan-project on fusion power, the costs would be enormous and the benefit likewise.
me too if we figure out fusion I think that full out space travel will follow after ridiculously cheap energy
In a NYT article in the Sunday Magazine, Buzz Aldin thinks the Russians have a better idea in going to Phobos as a stepping stone to Mars. The moon..."is not promising for commercial activities."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/magazine/21fob-q4-t.html?ref=magazine
This ad space for rent.
It's not NASA's fault that they lost the technology used to put the first people on the Moon. It's the fault of the government of the USA. They are the ones who set NASA's goals. They killed manned space exploration with the Space Shuttle, which was a compromise designed by committee for the purposes of putting up and bringing down spy satellites and to "build the space station."
Nonsense. NASA wasn't some powerless orphan pushed around by bigger forces. They were the only ones who really understood what they were doing. The Apollo program worked as advertised and possibly ended later than planned (after all, once someone walks on the Moon you've satisfied all the requirements laid out at the beginning by Kennedy!). Sure they didn't have the ability to retain their cushy Apollo era budget, but Congress didn't force them to design a vehicle that only made sense with an Apollo era budget. My view is that NASA, if it had come up with a competent vehicle, could have gotten the funding approved. The "spy satellite" capability only was needed when NASA's vehicle became so big that they couldn't fund it solely with NASA funds. A smaller vehicle (for example, get rid of 90% of the payload capability of the Shuttle) wouldn't have needed military funding and hence would not have labored under military requirements. But NASA wanted the big, heavy lift vehicle. So in order to get enough funding for the Shuttle, they had to get some from the DoD.
The key to understanding the drama surrounding the Shuttle is to realize first, that the original design of the Shuttle was too ambitious. Virtually all of the problems and difficulties (eg, the Shuttle tiles, attempting to force all commercial satellites onto the Shuttle in the early 80s, making numerous space science projects and the ISS dependent on the Shuttle) since flow from that original bad design decision.
The problem with NASA is that it has been hobbled by the past several administrations. NASA simply does not have enough money to do what it is supposed to do. This is particularly true with Bush's vision for space exploration. He wanted NASA to develop a new launch architecture, build a Moon base, and send people to Mars, all with the current level of funding. It is hardly surprising that things are not working. As Scotty might say... Ye canna change the laws of economics.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The big problem with health care spending is rising faster than inflation. In a country where over 15% of the GDP is spent on health care, that ought to concern us. It's projected to hit 17% of GDP very soon.
A simple minded projection would have us spending 1/5 of every dollar created on health care within a decade; 1/3 in about 25 years; 1/2 some time in the 2050s.
Of course that won't happen. The economy will collapse well before then, if it isn't doing so now. There are basically two options: crash and burn, or engineering some kind of soft landing. The latter option gets more expensive the longer we wait. If we'd done something the 1960s, when we spent 5% of GDP on health care, it would have been an incredible bargain by today's standards. If we could roll back the avalanche of cost increases back to 1980 when we spent half of what we do now, it would be a no-brainer. In today's terms, we're looking at a trillion dollars per decade, and in a few years that might well look at that figure as a deal we were foolish to pass up.
We have come to this point: it's not health care or X, where "X" is space or military expenditures or infrastructure or whatever. It's heath care or not-X. You might not not get that Moon base after paying to fix health care, but you definitely won't get it if you let the crisis get even larger.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That's certainly the party line, but it's not consistent with reality. The problem with NASA is NASA. See Rogers commission report or the Columbia accident investigation report, Tufte's or Feynman's criticisms. NASA is a bureaucracy that's sicker than most, and the criticisms haven't changed much over the last few decades. They aren't quite terminal yet, but they are circling the drain. COTS is a bright spot, firm fixed price for actual accomplishments rather than cost-plus for power point slides and paralysis by analysis (Lock-Mart and Boeing I'm looking at you), that's a win no matter how you look at it.
The "spy satellite" capability only was needed when NASA's vehicle became so big that they couldn't fund it solely with NASA funds.
I understood part of the shuttle design had 'input' from the military who demanded it be big enough to launch spy satellites. NASA wanted a smaller one for crew.
I know a lot of people are down on the idea of sending people to the moon, or to mars, or to any other place outside of earth's gravity, for the sake of doing so. I think that is exactly why we should do something. In the short term, there is no logical reason to put people in space. But in the long run, we know that we must go there, and thus, we must make halting, childlike, inefficient steps to learn how to get there.
As a species, our first craft to traverse the waters with were not 70,000 ton container ships, 100,000 ton aircraft carriers, or 200,000 ton oil tankers. Most likely it was a crude piece of wood that floated. Later, we would learn to hollow things out, or put pieces of wood together. It took us many years to get from those days to now.
There does not need to be a contest of manned exploration versus unmanned science. At most we are quibbling about an additional 5 to 10 billion dollars per year. Out of a federal budget of several trillion dollars, this is chump change. I would shocked to find that as we have achieved some sort of victory in Iraq, we cannot use some of the nearly 700 billion dollars a year in military spending for this purpose.
This is my sig.
There's also no small mention of how asteroids are flying goldmines.
I've read "Stephen Baxter" as "Stephen Balmer" at first and was wondering how asteroids relate to flying chairs... Damn /. memes..
Up?
The panel also heard several alternative proposals, such as adapting already-existing EELV and SpaceX rockets to carry crew to orbit; these proposals would have better safety margins than the Ares I, be ready sooner, and cost NASA less than $2 billion to complete, but are politically unattractive."
I love Space-X, I love their ambition and what they're trying to do, but it's just clueless to say that going with Space-X would result in "better safety margins". Space-X is a start-up. Their safety record is entirely hypothetical. They just toss off their first three failures as "oh, well, we had a little problems starting up but we're better now," but in fact they are not yet out of the learning stage, and there's no real evidence yet how long it will take to get out of the learning stage. Their reliability, to date, is one success in four tries.
They are cheap, but they have not yet proven that they can be reliability while staying cheap, or that they can be cheap while staying reliable.
It's not at all clear that their option would "cost NASA less than two billion to complete," either. If everything works as planned the first time, well, sure, maybe. But if things don't work first time? What's their track record?
For all their work, most of what Space-X is actually offering so far is pretty pictures and really enthusiastic exclamations of how great they are. I want them to be great... but I am also a skeptic. What have they proven? And, frankly, "better safety margins" is not it.
What I learned is that Adam Smith's invisible hand is broken -- although technosocialism like the Shuttle program is even worse.
So fix the invisible hand by reforming government to attend to its real business: Paying out citizens dividends under the social contract that brings us together to protect property rights that would not exist in the absence of that social contract. As with any dividend stream, there is an optimum for the shareholders that does not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Seastead this.
Hmmm... Get out of the recession a little faster? I'd propose killing off the ability to patent software and business methods. That would open the door for new players and spur the creation of small businesses. Right now, a part of the market is locked out because of that bullshit.
Another idea? Give some modest money to people with debts to pay off. Perhaps folks who are having trouble finding work despite recently getting various degrees. If there was some kind of national job placement program that would help cover relocation and educational debt, maybe there would be some spending money once the burden is gone and real income becomes a possibility. Companies participating in this would be able to get some kind of tax break, and there would be some kind of standardized tests for pool qualification instead of random and arbitrary HR screening B.S. (Experience schmecsperience! If you present the skills necessary to do the work, you get sent to the job if your number comes up.)
But noooo. What do they do? Dump money upon the debt holders while doing nothing for the people that really need to get out of the hole. I guess nobody cares enough to apply compound interest equations to compounding debt, if you help out the people that owe the least and have the smallest earnings it's easier to fix. But if they don't get help ASAP, then they end up in a financial black hole. And then there's some kind of stupidity that the holdings of debt with no ability to get past the event horizon (they lost their job, etc.) had some kind of value to it. Believe it or not, the economy is built like a pyramid. (I believe that's part of the reason why chose that symbol to put on the back of the national seal and the dollar way back when.) Right now the base of the pyramid has been dug out to patch the bricks on the top, and now the whole thing is sinking.
Anyhow, getting serious about space travel would be nice. But the majority of Earth society is too far inward looking right now in regards to the issue. It'll probably take an earthly encounter with a space rock that causes kinetic energy transfer on a national scale to snap humanity out of it.
Well, there is truth to that, but it is not the underlying problem. The underlying problem is the lack of funding, and underlying that (which I did not mention in my original post) is the lack of a well-thought-out vision of what NASA is supposed to be doing. The NASA-is-a-bad-bureaucracy story is largely a myth. I have worked in many large organizations and NASA (where I currently work) is no worse than many others. The problem with the bureaucracy at NASA is that NASA has been in a holding pattern for a generation. That takes its toll. The only parts of NASA that have been moving forward are the unmanned science directorates, and they are doing amazing things with fairly small amounts of money, largely because they have reasonably coherent visions behind them (the astrophysics Decadal Surveys, for example). The manned programme needs a similar, well-though-out, set of goals.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Dig hole through Earth, now you can literally go down to space.
Now if only we had an expert driller on hand... where is Bruce Willis when you need him?
I'll agree with you about lack of vision/leadership, but that is a symptom not a cause. The system rewards and promotes a certain type of manager, right now NASA's system promotes and rewards bureaucrats (like most gov orgs, I'm not just picking on NASA) rather than technically competent leaders. You get the leadership that the system gives you, this has nothing to do with funding levels. I've seen really great leaders do awesome stuff on a shoestring. I've consistently been impressed by the technical competence of NASA engineers in my field (especially out of Langley), but as a taxpayer I've been consistently disappointed by their management (you're right, many other orgs have the same problems).
I stumbled across a study not so long ago that did just what the Augustine panel's attempting to do now.
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA426465&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf
Perhaps a combined lightcraft / bussard fusion rocket could be the way to go?
If we're going to be blowing away massive amounts of money how about a mass driver? At least it's reusable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver
Politically unattractive is the idea of depending on the Soyuz to get to the ISS while we continue to develop a new launch vehicle that by any reasonable metric should be done by now.
I'm a huge fan of the Russian space program, but I also feel that it's a matter of national pride to have our own crew launch vehicle(s). If NASA is incapable and commercial interests can step up, then let's go with commercial interests - bidding out to American companies means it's still an American project; an American "win."
What's more attractive - sending US Astronauts into space on a SpaceX or Scaled Composites launch vehicle, or bidding for space on a Soyuz launch (at over $40 million a seat) while bureaucrats continue to insist Ares/Orion will work?
NASA's highest budget years (in today's dollars) were 1963-69 and topped out at 5.5% of the federal budget. In the 70s this dropped to below 2% then below 1% where it stayed until the late 80s early 90s where it went back to 1%. It then went back down below 1% and has stayed there since. The total cost of Apollo was somewhere around $145b in today's dollars. For comparison the ISS is at about $150b with about $100b of that being paid by the US. The Interstate highway system between 1956 and 1991 cost about $500b and World War II cost about $288b. The Big Dig doesn't even come remotely close to these so your sense of scale is a little distorted. I wonder though which megaprojects do you think we should have taken on after Apollo but neglected to because we all decided to be pussies? Apollo only had as much funding and Congressional interest as it took to beat the USSR to the Moon. Once we landed there everyone stopped giving a shit and cut NASA's funding in half. Don't kid yourself, Apollo was an awesome project that advanced many fields of science significantly but it was undertaken as a dig swinging contest with the USSR.
In terms of rockets, while the Titans were a relatively dependable family they were expensive and dangerous. The current batch of EELVs beats the biggest Titan IV in lifting capability and price. I can't find any specifics on the Titan V's proposed payloads or costs but if they're anything like the Titan 3L2 and 3L4 studies done in the 60s they would have been expensive but impressive LVs. As it stands though the existing Delta IV and Altas V heavy variants are cheaper and have good lifting capacity. With nominal upgrades both EELVs can be man-rated and easily capable of both ISS and Lunar Orion launches. It would also mean that NASA is opening up a market for man-rated HLVs. This fulfills your proposal for opening a factory and building rockets on a massive scale. You're not going to see SBS systems any time soon as they're impractical to build and launch from Earth but there's a lot of missions that will become tenable if the cost of HLVs comes down due to demand.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Mass drivers work best on or near the equator. This is why me and my army of robots will take over Australia, not the USA!
We should be able to mod this Flamebait-but-beyond-that-he's-fucking-right...
The pols that are fighting against SpaceX and even ULA, are the ones that pushing for Russian launches. Why? Because EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM ARE WORRIED ABOUT JOBS IN THEIR AREA. They would rather ignore what is happening to America, ignore the issues of depending on a country that is NOT our best friend, to protect a few measly jobs.
It is a sad state of affairs that the west has become.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How about "Up"?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
ESA have kicked the idea around from time to time, most notably with the Hermes project of the 1980s to build a mini-shuttle to launch on an Ariane V, but politics got in the way. The Germans got quite irate about being asked to fund far more than their share, especially with the costs of reunification with the East. The British wouldn't pay anything at all towards any manned project. And since Russia was opening up, it made more sense just to pay for Soyuz flights as needed.
There's probably a better chance now of a European manned launcher than at any time before. ESA have the ATV, a cargo carrier for supplying the ISS: this does not carry crews, but is man-rated and acts as extra inhabitable space while docked, and there's a possibility it might form the basis of a manned spacecraft, should it prove necessary in case of an extended American failure to replace the Shuttle. Sadly, it's not just a matter of adding an independent life-support system; the ATV is meant to burn up on re-entry and take all the accumulated rubbish and waste from ISS with it. Not a feature you really want in your crewed spacecraft.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
But even I have to question the sanity of pouring billions and billions of dollars into an organization so fscked up that they have to reinvent technology they provably had over forty years ago,
Actually, it's not just technology that NASA had forty years ago, but it's also technology that a number of commercial companies possess today. For some bizarre reason though NASA (or at least certain parts of NASA's management) has a not-invented-here syndrome when it comes to manned spaceflight, and feels the need to spend a few dozen billion dollars to try to duplicate and compete with what the commercial sector can already provide.
Going to the Moon earned the ultimate "shut your mouth" bragging rights. It was a huge jump, and the Soviets had no chance of beating us to it. All they could do is watch,
I hope you do realize that the Soviets actually were the first to land on the moon, not with people but with a probe. They also had the first satellite, and the first man in space and the first probe that landed on another planet and the first spacewalk and the first space station and... well the list goes on.
The US landed the first man on the moon, and it was quite an accomplishment, but all things considered it wasn't a cut and dry race like you seem to think it was. The Soviets were winning. Perhaps the only reason they didn't land a man on the moon first was simply because of financial troubles, or because the US had so much cash to spare for such an endeavor.
Obama's economists decided that they need to spend their way out of this recession, and even though Orion would not pass muster by my bang-for-buck standards, it's not the worst way to spend money if spending money is what you're trying to do.
Of course we could do better: We could dream big like JFK and (for the first time since the 60's) try something truly ambitious and expensive. As Americans, it's time we finally accomplish something! Ever since we lost the Vietnam war, we've been complete pussies about big projects. (It doesn't help that when we do try we fail miserably, like when we try to impose Western democracy to Iraq) As far as I can tell, the largest public project recently was the Big Dig in Boston. We can't even rebuild Ground Zero. We act like a country who lost faith in ourselves, in a time when it's very important that the rest of the world has faith in us (and our currency).
I am with you, 100%
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I disagree with the idea that a lack of funding is NASA's big problem. At least focusing specifically on the Ares I, the problem is that the former NASA administrator Michael Griffin decided to push his pet project onto NASA and silence engineers who protested about its inherent design flaws.
If NASA had instead used commercial rockets (two of which already existed and only needed relatively minor modifications, and another which was being built at the time and now exists), the rockets would likely be doing initial flight tests today or in the near future. It would also cost dramatically less, even if multiple competing rocket designs were contracted, freeing up NASA funding to focus on what to do in space, instead of how to get there. In contrast, giving the Ares I additional funding would just deepen the hole NASA is currently in.
The system rewards and promotes a certain type of manager, right now NASA's system promotes and rewards bureaucrats (like most gov orgs, I'm not just picking on NASA) rather than technically competent leaders.
I don't think anyone would question that former NASA administrator Michael Griffin is technically competent -- he has multiple engineers master's degrees and a PhD in aerospace engineering. However, the reason NASA suffered under him is because he sucked as a bureaucrat, pushing NASA towards his own pet ideas and suppressing contrary opinions within NASA.
For those unfamiliar, the White House panel (the "Augustine Commission" on human spaceflight plans) was given the following objectives in their charter:
The Committee shall conduct an independent review of ongoing U.S. human space flight plans and programs, as well as alternatives, to ensure the Nation is pursuing the best trajectory for the future of human space flight â" one that is safe, innovative, affordable, and sustainable. The Committee should aim to identify and characterize a range of options that spans the reasonable possibilities for continuation of U.S. human space flight activities beyond retirement of the Space Shuttle. The identification and characterization of these options should address the following objectives:
a) expediting a new U.S. capability to support utilization of the International Space Station (ISS);
b) supporting missions to the Moon and other destinations beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO);
c) stimulating commercial space flight capability; and
d) fitting within the current budget profile for NASA exploration activities.
Unfortunately, as the "Restore the Vision" blog notes, while the presentations by SpaceX and ULA (maker of the EELVs) addressed these issues, NASA's Constellation presentation largely ignoring these objectives:
http://restorethevision.blogspot.com/2009/06/thoughts-on-june-17-human-space-flight.html
On "expediting a new U.S. capability to support utilization of the International Space Station (ISS)", the Constellation presentation was silent. It mentioned having ISS crew transport by 2015, the current goal, and how they'd made changes to improve confidence they'd meet that date (eg: reducing initial crew size to 4 on ISS missions). However, "expedite" doesn't mean "increase confidence you'll make the current late date". It means "accelerate the process or progress of : speed up". The presentation doesn't suggest any ways to have Ares/Orion ready for ISS transport by, say, 2013, nor does it suggest any ways to have any other U.S. system ready by that time.
Even former NASA Administrator Griffin always claimed that Ares/Orion was only meant as a backup for ISS support, and commercial transportation services were the intended route. Thus the natural inclination should be for NASA management to encourage commercial services to take on that role. The Constellation presentation could have suggested a COTS-D or similar competition for human transportation services, or some other means to get commercial vendors working on basic ISS transportation. Then Constellation could concentrate on the Moon and Beyond. Alternately, the presentation could have suggested ways to alter Ares/Orion to be ready by 2013. It did neither.
On "stimulating commercial space flight capability", again the Constellation presentation was silent. It has a line about "promoting international and commercial participation in exploration", but no details on what that participation is. Where is this participation in the plan? The original goal of the Vision for Space Exploration was for launch support to be done commercially, except perhaps for heavy lift, if needed. Where is that in the plan? The presentation didn't suggest that any of the components of the Constellation architecture be implemented commercially. There's a picture on "Future Exploration Capabilities" with an Ares V linked to some "Commercial and Civil LEO" spacecraft, but what commercial activity is going to be launched by Ares V? There's a slide on "Economic Impact: Contractor" and others on billions of dollars of prime contract value (as if high cost is a virtue), but that's not commercial, it's government contracts. If a contractor is going to sell commercial services enabled by its government contracts, I'm willing to call that commercial, but how much of
I understood part of the shuttle design had 'input' from the military who demanded it be big enough to launch spy satellites. NASA wanted a smaller one for crew.
I understand that came after NASA went to the DoD for funds. IMHO there's no way the DoD could force NASA to fly a particular heavy lift vehicle (especially since the DoD has the budget to buy its own vehicle). And if you think that the DoD tail wags the dog, then why didn't NASA continue to launch DoD payloads on schedule after the Challenger disaster? They had the cause nailed down within months (perhaps even weeks). They could have continued to launch the Shuttle while they investigated. That's how they do it in the aviation world. Sometimes airplanes or helicopters are grounded for a time, but it's not very long.
If you can send two rovers to mars for less than 500 millions, then please do.
PS: I'm sure some moron will try to explain us how the supremely intelligent Ayn Rand (cough cough cough) would have been able to do it for less than 1 million.
Nobody is proposing that strawman argument, however the two Mars rovers you mentioned were launched on commercial Delta II rockets, a predecessor to one of the commercial Delta IV rockets the White House panel is considering as an alternative to Ares.
Would someone who is technically competent "push his pet project," as you say, in the face of solid analysis that says his bar napkin rocket wasn't really that good an idea after all?
Technical competence means being willing to walk away from your own sexy ideas when they don't stand up to the cold light of reality. It means not using your positional authority to support your ego / biases.
I would argue that he was incompetent despite his many degrees. Falling in love with your own ideas breaks Feynman's first principle.
I grew up on Star Trek and Space:1999 and Blake's 7, I want to see us colonize space. But one-shot super-expensive showcase missions to put a handful of people on nearby planets for a few days at a time isn't gonna get us there. It isn't gonna get us _anywhere_.
You want a grand challenge non-pussy project that costs billions of dollars and changes the world, and makes the Star Trek future really happen? Manhatten project II - build a real positive-output controlled fusion reactor. Inertial, tokomak, longshot fusor/aneutronic - try them all. Do it as if we had to stop the Nazis with it - in 5 years, not 50. The goal should be electricity cheaper than coal. Yes, the machines are complicated, but so is your car - mass production is magic.
Stop global warming cold and get a bonus: a fusion reactor is pretty much the only near-term technology (other than shooting atom bombs out the back of your ship) which can maybe give us real deep-space propulsion, so it doesn't have to take years of living weightless in a can, and a lot of stupid orbital mechanics tricks (okay, they're actually pretty clever, but still a bit desperate), to get people out into the solar system. Build the technology first, then worry about the manned missions, when we really have the tools to do it right. Sending people to mars using chemical rockets is like someone in the 17th century building a wooden 747 powered by gunpowder rockets - sure, it might have flown but no way was it remotely practical as transportation, nor was that technological path _ever_ going to lead to anything useful, hence it would have been little more than a sideshow.
Of course, a fusion project would not be a massive makework jobs program, except for technical workers (ahem), but neither, really, would a manned mars mission. You want jobs, build more highways, we sure need more of those ;-)
Google "Dream Chaser" and SpaceDev to see a mini-shuttle being slowly developed by the company that supplied the hybrid rocket engines for Rutan's and Branson's SpaceShipOne. The US Airforce is going to launch the X-37B, a miniature unmanned shuttle, in early 2010, on top of an Atlas V rocket. It might take a few years yet, but I think that there might be at least a few mini-shuttles in the future.
I think DIRECT is better than Constellation.
http://www.directlauncher.com/
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just posted my suggestion #3 for the Human Space Flight Plans Committee and NASA: "throw away NOW in the garbage the 5 and 5.5 segments SRBs!" http://ow.ly/f3vQ
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There's also no small mention of how asteroids are flying goldmines.
Quite true. One moderately sized asteroid contains more nickle and more iron that has ever been mined on Earth - ever, in the history of our planet. Most of the world's nickle comes from a site in Canada where an asteroid hit. Most of our iron comes from banded iron formations and to get at them, we dig giant open pits that we can never refill and that eventually become toxic to the environment.
Imagine a future where mining on Earth was illegal. Imagine a future where the Earth is like a nature preserve where people live or go on vacation, where all of our destructive and polluting industry, power generation, and resource collection happens in space. All of that is possible, but we wont do it because we'd rather spend money on short-term problems (like health care for example, but also wars).
Space is to our generation what Europe was to the first humans. They stood on the north coast of Africa and could just barely see that there was another world out there. But they had other problems. They were always hungry, they were being eaten by lions. I'm sure some people said, "whoa whoa whoa you want to try and swim over to Europe? No way! We have to solve ALL of our problems here in Africa first. We need to invest in domesticating zebras and concentrate on trying to grow crops here in the desert. Then, when we've got all that worked out, then you can go to Europe." But see, that's just short-sighted. If you go to Europe all of those problems take care of themsevles eventually. You find better land for crops, a better environment, better animals for domestication.
If we really commit ourselves to space, we'll find that the benefits of doing that solve most of the problems that we use today as excuses to not go into space. The reason is simple: more resources, more riches, will benefit everyone - sometimes in ways that we can't even imagine. You're sitting, wherever you're sitting, in a nice air conditioned room. All of the technology and infrastructure that insulates you from the heat outside is made possible by the resource, "oil" that flows into your economy. The first person to discover coal or oil couldn't have imagined air conditioning or the internet or synthetic fertilizer, just like we can't imagine how the "gold mine" as you put it, in space, will change our future.
But alas, we wont do it because people are too shortsighted.
Not just politics. The Hermes project was a disaster. They kept redesigning the vehicle until it was so big it couldn't be launched with an Ariane 5 any more. AFAIK nothing got out of it but reams of paper at the cost of $2 billion USD. After that crap the French decided they needed to scale back their efforts and try something less complex, so they launched their ARD reentry capsule demonstrator. Which worked just fine and didn't cost a bundle. After which they promptly shafted the whole effort because there was no destination to go to at the time.
The elephant in the room (which doesn't get enough attention) is that the Ares rocket design is fundamentally flawed due to politics taking precedence over engineering. The Ares first stage will be a solid rocket booster which not only is inherently less controllable than a liquid fueled rocket (since it can't be throttled), but also makes the whole vehicle aerodynamically unstable (since it has a smaller diameter than the upper stage). The proposed reusable solid first stage has the same segmented design that caused the Challenger shuttle explosion when inter-segment seals burned through. It may have problems with severe in-flight vibration which cannot be dealt with by throttling engine power, leading to absurd hacks involving giant shock absorbers. Why is this poor up front design being officially pitched by NASA? Because of the high-powered, big money political lobbying of Morton Thiokol, the Shuttle's Solid Rocket Booster producer, which saw its meal ticket vanishing with the Shuttle retirement. Why has every other human-rated rocket (aside from the Shuttle) been liquid fueled with progressively smaller stages? Because the engineers went with the best design instead of having key pieces decided a priori by senators with law degrees and pockets full of contractor dollars. It will be truly pathetic if NASA winds up with another unreliable, problematic, unsafe vehicle due to back-room lobbying by government contractors. NASA engineers realize the truth which is why they are openly calling for a better design concept. Morton Thiokol should be forced to independently build its own solid-fuel rocket and participate in a fair competition with other rocket designs instead of using back-channel politics to sell its products.
New Book shows how NASA could completely ABANDON DANGEROUS and ECOLOGICALLY UNFRIENDLY ROCKETS and shift manned space ships to MAGLEV. By repelling off of and attracting to Magnetic Fields placed strategically around the planet, space ships of the future could life off silently and with no environmental damage to the home planet. Read and sign on to complete explanation of tomorrow's space flight by Science Fiction Author Michael Mathiesen at www.michaelmathiesen.com
Sea Dragon will solve all the problems. It's the brute force approach. It's huge. It can throw a shuttle and then some. It's made in a shipyard by submarine welders. It's brutally simple.
Why the hell haven't we built it yet? Because it isn't sexy, it isn't bleeding edge, it isn't high performance, and it isn't high tech, all of which are wrapped up in the high tech image of aerospace manufacturing. Look at the russians, building dirt simple equipment that works, for ages.
About your ESA position: quite the contrary, I'm very proud of them. They seem to be the only space agency with a vision.
When they launched SMART 1 (which coincidentally spurred the current moon frenzy), they were only testing a new type of engine called ion thrusters. Half the instruments on board were actually there just to monitor it. NASA is too concerned with doing the "cool" things and their current vision (if there is any) would be more fitting for the 60's.
Meanwhile ESA is learning how to play with Lagrange points and better understand ITN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network). A mission like GOCE, designed to map the gravity of Earth could have never even been dreamed up by NASA, but it actually makes perfect sense if you are really searching for better ways of reaching spots in our solar system cheaper (not very fast though). It all comes down between the choice of making "bold" missions or actually trying to advance space science to the point where bold missions are just routine and cheap enough to make sense.
So for now, although ESA seems like the dark horse, they are the agency I would bet on actually becoming the next leader in this domain.
Very interesting! I look forward to seeing what becomes of the ATV in relation to all of this stuff.
Stick Men