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NASA Trying To Reinvent Their Approach
coondoggie writes to tell us that NASA has started down the road to reinvention with the addition of four new committees to the external advisory group that drives the agency's direction. "The four new committees include Commercial Space, Education and Public Outreach, Information Technology Infrastructure, and Technology Innovation. The council's members provide advice and make recommendations to the NASA administrator about agency programs, policies, plans, financial controls and other matters pertinent to NASA's responsibilities. In the realm of commercial space, NASA has been pushed by outside experts to leave low Earth orbit flights to other aerospace firms. The Review of United States Human Space Flight Plan Committee report recently took that a step further in recommending: A new competition with adequate incentives to perform this service should be open to all US aerospace companies. This would let NASA focus on more challenging roles, including human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit based on the continued development of the current or modified NASA Orion spacecraft."
But NASA ought to just go away.
For most of it's life it has been a public works project and now, like every other gubmint program it is a monster of inefficiency and waste.
If what it is SUPPOSED to do is so important then some company will do it.
Slashdot user A: This is great!
Slashdot user B: What a waste of money! We may not even need unmanned missions to space, let alone manned missions. Let's fix earth, instead.
Slashdot user A: You jackass. We need to be able to colonize other planets, either because (1) we such at conservation, or (2) eventually we'll get hit by a killer asteroid, or (3) eventually the sun will go out / go boom.
Slashdot user B: Those are all very speculative or a long time off. We have more pressing problems here and now.
I just wanted to get that preliminary stuff out of the way.
More committees. Way to think outside the box.
If they want to reinvent their approach, perhaps they should start by not creating multiple committees every time they want to accomplish something ... or am I forgetting the long track record of success by new committees at already-bloated government organizations?
Should be to develop and test asteroid detection and avoidance systems.
That freeze dried ice cream is useless when we all get vaporized on impact.
The sad thing is these systems are under funded and we have no credible defense against an asteroid. But we're looking to go to Mars! Yay!
Think of the children. America is so rich they bombed the moon. Tell a kid in Africa we bombed it to find water, when he has the same problem right here on earth.
Once we find out if asteroid detection, deflection or destruction is trivial and reliable, then we can go on to mentally masturbating about colonizing other bodies.
Of course, we could do both in parallel, as complementary solutions to the same problem but my point is NASA is all over the board.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Let's form some committees to help our advisory group figure out how we can fix this gigantic bureaucracy!
I've got a clue for them. They need to follow some simple rules.
1. Rockets should look like cocks
2. People should only ride on liquid fuel rockets.
3. If you're the booster designer, double the requirements.
4. Success!
Explanation:
1. Rockets should look like cocks. Stacked vertically, not side by side. Both shuttle failures resulted from the orbiter, tank, and boosters being in a side-by-side configuration. If the thing had been stacked vertically, there's no need to worry about ice hitting what's next to you, or fire burning the attachment to what's next to you.
2. Liquid fuel rockets are way safer than solid fuel rockets. It's going to be damn hard for astronauts to escape alive if they abort anywhere near a full blast solid fuel candle. Maybe do a hybrid solid, but what we have now is a fucking hazard to the astronauts and ground crew. Just ask the Brazilians. Oops, they're fucking DEAD. booom!
3. The moon mission was saved by the genius Nazi von Braun increasing the Saturn V weight capability well above the requirements. The payload turned out to be a bloated mess compared to initial projections, but the Saturn could handle it. A huge problem was averted. Compare that to the current Constellation program, where the booster was designed to lift what the payload guys said they'd need. And now that the payload has gained weight, there's some serious doubt that Ares will ever be able to fulfill the design requirements. FAIL.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
It's like the original formulation of Godwin's law: once an organization faces problems by immediately forming a committee, no further solutions are possible.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Committee: The only known form of life with 6 or more legs, and no brain.
(From the notebooks of Lazarus Long
NASA trying to reinvent ITS approach. NASA is singular, not plural.
A press release in search of a mission.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/in_the_know_should_the_government
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
They would do well to put the moon and Mars on the back burner and focus on the asteroids. Then set aside a few hundred million a year in x-prize style incentives open to *everyone* not just US companies.
Focus on alternative propulsion and energy systems as chemical engines are not going to get us very far. Get NASA out of Earth to LEO and focused toward targets that are farther out and harder to reach. Let SpaceX and friends take care of launch costs to LEO. Focus on utilising robotic missions where possible and reserve human space flight for in depth study where the time lag/AI insufficiencies become problematic. Get hacking on the problem of orbital space debris- that will be a major problem if we're going to be going to do anything outside of our atmosphere.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
is to use Energia, makers of Soyuz.
Yours In Baikonur,
Kilgore Trout
There are a lot of video about NASA's new moon vehicles on http://www.disclose.tv/ Just search for NASA there...
“Atlas Shrugged” was published 52 years ago, but in the Obama era, Rand’s angry message is more resonant than ever before. Sales of the book have reportedly spiked. At “tea parties” and other conservative protests, alongside the Obama-as-Joker signs, you will find placards reading “Atlas Shrugs” and “Ayn Rand Was Right.” Not long after the inauguration, as right-wing pundits like Glenn Beck were invoking Rand and issuing warnings of incipient socialism, Representative John Campbell, Republican of California, told a reporter that the prospect of rising taxes and government regulation meant “people are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ ”
Rand’s style of vehement individualism has never been universally popular among conservatives — back in 1957, Whittaker Chambers denounced the “wickedness” of “Atlas Shrugged” in National Review — and Rand still has her critics on the right today. But it can often seem, as Jonathan Chait, a senior editor at The New Republic recently observed, that “Rand is everywhere in this right-wing mood.” And while it’s not hard to understand Rand’s revenge-fantasy appeal to those on the right, would-be Galts ought to hear the story Anne C. Heller has to tell in her dramatic and very timely biography, “Ayn Rand and the World She Made.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Kirsch-t.html
Then set aside a few hundred million a year in x-prize style incentives open to *everyone* not just US companies.
Cooperation is one thing, but we shouldn't rely on other nations to provide us with space access. It would be bad for the economy : US funds and technological advantage going to other countries.
If you opened it to anyone, all of the conservative pundits (Beck, Coulter, O'Riley, Limbaugh) would cry and cry about how much Obama hates America because he let everyone bid.
Then set aside a few hundred million a year in x-prize style incentives open to *everyone* not just US companies.
Cooperation is one thing, but we shouldn't rely on other nations to provide us with space access. It would be bad for the economy : US funds and technological advantage going to other countries.
Deep space exploration should be an international activity, if only because it is so expensive.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
THere is nothing stopping a US company fro mwinning the funds, they're just competing with the rest of the world for those funds. If the US companies are worth a damn they'll get the prize, if not.. well there's no right to profit only the right to try to make a profit. The US should stick to what it does best and stop this silly protectionism in its tracks. It does us no good to put artificial barriers to stop other countries from stepping in where we aren't as efficient. It just helps the inefficient industries here to live when they really shouldn't. Just take a look at our auto industry if you want to see an example of the bloated corporations that were allowed to exist because of protectionism.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Yes, but important decisions at large organizations are made by CEOs or other key executives (CMO, CTO, etc.) with clear lines of responsibility and accountability, not by establishing several dozen committees. Only in government (and poorly-run, similarly-bloated conglomerates) is this kind of bureaucratic, process-obsessed operation characterized as "reinventing their approach".
In fact, all the important decisions about NASA are made not by "several dozen" committees, but by exactly two committees; one a committee of 100 members and the other a committee of 435 members-- the Senate and House of Representatives, respectively.
This is something you constantly have to keep in mind: NASA reports to Congress. (In theory they're an executive agency, and report to president, but in practice the "who pays the piper, calls the tune" rule is effect: congress writes the checks, and thus they have ultimate say in what gets done, or doesn't get done.) It really doesn't matter what the other committees or managers say, or what they want, or what decisions they make. Congress makes the decisions.
that so many idiots want to Kill NASA and America's space program when China just announced that they are going to militarize Space. I mean I can understand if Chinese are hoping that America will kill its program. BUT, there are appears to be Americans that want this.
China has 4 trillion spare dollars sitting around. They should offer up an X-prize to the world.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What protectionism is in place? The only thing that we have is that any space tech can not be shared with China. The last time we did, that tech made it into their missiles FASTER than it made it into the rest of their civilian rocket line. As it is, SpaceX has numbers that is lower than anybody, and that is before China starts mega-dumping on the market (they already are dumping).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The linked article didn't seem to mention it anywhere, but it's worth noting who the heads of the new committees are:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=29537
http://www.spacenews.com/civil/091030-bolden-revamps-nasa-advisory-council.html
* Commercial Space Committee: Bretton Alexander, current head of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation
* Education and Public Outreach: Miles O'Brien, pretty much the best and most clueful space journalist around
* Technology and Innovation Committee: Esther Dyson, well known for her tech entrepreneurship work
* (IT Infrastructure Committee chair seems to be pending)
All in all, they seem to be rather good picks. It also seems that Wesley Huntress has been chosen as the chair of the Science Committee. In 2004 he was head of a study, The Next Steps in Exploring Deep Space, a rather fascinating report proposing a space exploration infrastructure which would initially focus on Lagrange points and Near-Earth Objects, quite similar to the Flexible Path option proposed by the Augustine Commission.
They would do well to put the moon and Mars on the back burner and focus on the asteroids.
This is basically the finding of a report by Wesley Huntress (see "The Next Steps in Exploring Deep Space"), who was just named as head of the NASA Science Advisory Committee.
Then set aside a few hundred million a year in x-prize style incentives open to *everyone* not just US companies.
Focus on alternative propulsion and energy systems as chemical engines are not going to get us very far. Get NASA out of Earth to LEO and focused toward targets that are farther out and harder to reach. Let SpaceX and friends take care of launch costs to LEO.
Bretton Alexander, the newly appointed head of the Commercial Spaceflight Advisory Committee, is also President of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, a group which includes private spaceflight companies like SpaceX, Armadillo Aerospace, Scaled Composites, and the X Prize Foundation. I suspect he'll be advocating pretty much exactly the sorts of things you describe.
What protectionism is in place? The only thing that we have is that any space tech can not be shared with China.
ITAR restrictions (where pretty much anything, however mundane, related to satellites is classified as a munition) are actually rather more problematic than you describe for space industry, although there fortunately seems to be some progress on that:
http://thespacereview.com/article/1503/1
A decade-long concern for the US space industry has been export control regulations. Since satellites and related components were put under the jurisdiction of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), space businesses, including manufacturers or commercial satellites and their subsystems, have raised the alarm that the stricter ITAR rules were hurting their ability to sell to customers outside the US, even to close allies. Companies, industry organizations, and their supporters have sought for much of this time to at least partially roll back those changes to enhance their competitiveness.
While the drumbeat for reform isn't necessarily as loud as it was a few years ago, thanks in part to procedural changes that have reduced the backlog of, and waiting time for, export license applications, there is now real evidence of progress towards the reforms the industry has sought. A section of HR 2410, a State Department authorization bill that the House approved in June, deals with export control and includes a number of key reforms that the industry has been seeking.
"It accomplishes many, if not almost all, of the things that people in the export control reform movement have been dreaming of for quite a while," said Mike Gold, director of the Washington office of Bigelow Aerospace and a leading advocate for export control reform, during a presentation at the COMSTAC meeting last week.
One key component is what Gold called a "review and revision" of the US Munitions List (USML), the compilation of components that are subject to ITAR. The bill would require a review of at least 20 percent of the USML every year for five years to determine if items should be removed from the list. After the five-year period the review would start over to allow updates based on advances in technology.
Another aspect of the bill would give the President the ability to remove satellites and related components from the USML, although it would still not allow the export of such items to China. The bill language would also require the public release of what are known as commodity jurisdiction determinations, when the State Department evaluates whether a specific technology belongs on the USML or not.
The good news for export control reform advocates is that the bill has passed the House. The bad news, as Gold explained, is that the Senate has taken no action on the bill yet, and there's no indication when--or even if--they will take up the legislation before the end of the next year. "To be honest, we haven't even heard any good rumors as to if this is something that rises to the level of priority" that the Senate will take action on, Gold said.
Key to the future of the bill is Senator John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "If Senator Kerry chooses to prioritize export control reform, it most likely will get done," Gold said.
Gold also noted there is a review of export control policy going on within the new administration, although that may be of limited effectiveness for the space industry since the inclusion of satellites and related components on the USML was done in legislation and therefore must be undone that way. However, he said that the actual law does provide some "wiggle room" for the administration to change how it implements that law, if it so chooses. "If there isn't a legislative fix, there is still the possibility--certainly not a strong possibility, but the potential anyway--of the executive branch doing something helpful
Yes what you're proposing is protectionism. Any measure designed to artificially tilt the balance toward local industry against foreign competition is protectionism. You're just justifying it with national security and anti-dumping policies on which you are wrong on both counts. There's a difference between covert military tech and the civilian tech prizes I'm talking about here. You're not considering the advantages to rapid development of space flight tech by whomever is able to do so. You're just throwing out reasons why we shouldn't bother.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Adam Kirsch reviews Anne C. Heller's new Ayn Rand biography in this weekend's Book Review. His piece offers this nugget about John Galt's long radio address in the novel Atlas Shrugged: A Random House editor told Rand that "if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt's oration."
Kirsch calls the agreement a "sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing," observing that "giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist . . . would have done."
But Rand's decision to exchange money -- a portion of her royalties -- for extra paper is capitalism at work. Rand bought something that had financial value to her: the ability to disseminate her idea in the form she desired.
Without such an elegant capitalist mechanism through which to make this trade, the alternative solution would have been messy and unsatisfying. Rand would have had to give up part of Galt's speech or try to find a new publisher.
Here we have a controversial figure, Ayn Rand, who lived a life full of contradiction and hypocrisy and the best that the author of the book review in the post above could come up with was an incredibly strained story about her forgoing a bit of royalty payments for something of monetary value. Controversial? Come on. It should embarrass the NYT to have hired such an idiot.
Also, given that the above "grass roots" advertising probably came from Random House (publisher of the Ayn Rand book), maybe we should stop buying their books for a little while.
Finally, to complete this little Slashdot drama/troll, let's review (courtesy of Google) Anne Heller's 2008 campaign contributions for 2008: $500 to MoveOn.org, almost $5,000 to two Obama campaign funds (there are three other Anne Heller's contributing to those funds), and $200 to the Democrat Party. I wonder why she felt the need to contribute so much (about five times as much as the maximum in any previous year) while writing a book about Ayn Rand who would have abhorred any of the destinations for the contributions that Heller made. I guess that settles the question of whether there was any BIAS in Heller's biography.
Generally, when I see a 'reinvention' start off with new committees, I get sleepy.
Then I look around to see where the ad hoc committee in charge of making sure nothing gets done is.
When I find that, I gauge if there is any chance of disbanding that committee...
If not, time to move on.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
First, X-prizes are NOT protectionism. Protectionism is about protecting your own existing companies. An x-prize is about DEVELOPING NEW MARKETS. If you chose to develop it for your nation, how is that wrong?
Dumb question, but why are you not encouraging other nations to hold x-prizes? If these other nations are so advanced, then they will do it as well. Heck, nearly all of the western nations, Russia, as well as China, are in MUCH better economic shape than is America. What is wrong with THEM doing this? As it is, I see EU and China doing lots of development without involving American companies. Is that protectionism? How about EU and China trying to block Google, while funding their own national search engines (to be sold by private companies)? Is that protectionism?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
First of all, this is in no way protectionism. Those funds were forcibly extracted from US taxpayers. There's no reason the recipients of government funding shouldn't be limited to US corporations or individuals. The concept of economic protectionism in a free market has no relation to government expenditures of tax monies.
Furthermore, even if it were protectionism, the US has obligations to it's own citizens over foreigners. Protectionism is written right into the US Constitution, and helped to build this country into the world power it is today.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
ITAR is not protectionism. It is about refusing to allow technology to fall into another nation's hand that can use it against western nations. There is a difference. Yes, some of the companies, mostly Bigelow, are upset. What is interesting is that all involve China wanting access to our tech. NONE of the restrictions are about allowing any western or even most of the 3'rd world nation from being near this.
I have to say that I think that Obama really screwed up by moving ITAR to be under Dept. of Commerce. THat does not even make sense. ITAR is about security.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Deep space exploration should be an international activity, if only because it is so expensive.
First, it doesn't have to be "so expensive". Nobody, including the US, has tried to reduce the cost of doing things in space. Second, the US would end up paying most of the bill anyway because it already spends most of the money on space exploration and development. So international cooperation would mean maybe something between a modest reduction to a large increase in cost (as in the International Space Station) in exchange for putting other countries in somebody's critical path. It's not the solution for expensive space projects that you think it is.
ITAR is not protectionism. It is about refusing to allow technology to fall into another nation's hand that can use it against western nations.
That is protectionism. Plus even western nations like the UK are blocked by ITAR.
Protectionism is the economic policy of restraining trade between states, through methods such as tariffs on imported goods, restrictive quotas, and a variety of other restrictive government regulations designed to discourage imports, and prevent foreign take-over of local markets and companies.
Read it. ITAR is NOT about tariffs, restrictive quotas, and anything that discourages imports, or prevents take-overs. ITAR is used to prevent tech from being exported so that it gets into unfriendly hands. Are their times that it is restrictive? Yup. I saw it used in places at Boeing, NASA, Bell Labs and even Watson labs, as well as several other companies that I thought we were overly restrictive. BUT, this is NOT PROTECTIONISM. We had sat, aviation and general software tech that was not allowed to go to various companies because they wanted to use that tech to sell to China, or did not have safeguards in place. OTH, I have NEVER seen us deny it to western nations unless it was considered part of a black project, as long as the nation/company had decent safeguards.
It is only with China screaming that they want access to our tech (and they want it freely) that ITAR is suddenly pushed as protectionism. Total bunk.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
ITAR restrains trade between the US and foreign countries. Hence, it is protectionism.
India and China, homes of cheap and mass-produced, are busy going forward and they'll take the lead if NASA keeps on reiterating what a great shop it was in the seventies. It wasn't, Feynmann showed conclusively and in great detail what a structurally shoddy shop it was, but there wasn't anything better. Now? All budget cuts are more than deserved, for it's a dedicated pointy-hair support shop drenched in aint-we-cool sauce to the point of religion. In fact, you could cut it down to a ten person government grant approval office for commercial space flight challenges and you'd come out ahead.
To fix that, it's not difficult to see where they should be going:
- Go metric. All the way. Don't quibble over a couple hundred milllion as an excuse to preserve past failures. Go metric, you're well behind 95% of the world here. How is that pushing the technology forward?
- Put a proper drive behind low earth orbit taxiing. The space shuttle was a neat idea 30 years ago, but 20 years ago it became clear it wasn't so much cheaper than the usual rockets up to the point that now it's actually cheaper to launch those rockets again than launch the space shuttle. Why are the low earth orbit taxi rides more expensive than premium gold plated limo rides? Something is fishy here.
With both of the above there's room to look outside and push achievements again. But to make real progress there is something more to be done:
- Cut the crap, the red tape, the bullshit, the top-down design and millions of botches to make it fly despite management fiat. Engineer bottom-up, skunk works style. Make it work quickly, then make it work good enough to achieve the thing you wanted to explore, then make it work well. Lather, rinse, repeat. Do all that well before it's started to rust, thanks.
As Burt Rutan said: If we're not killing people, we're not pushing hard enough. There is a reason why it's called the bleeding edge. But who wants to die in an exploding space shuttle because of an engineering defect that could've been fixed a score or more years ago? Or through sheer aging of the materials? So make space exploration wort dieing for again. By making the taxi rides to work reliable and safe.
I am trying to tell you that we need everyone on this planet to be involved not just the US. I never said that other countries shouldn't have x-prizes of their own, all I said was that it was short sighted to restrict the x-prize competition to our own industry. The tech will be developed faster if countries create x-prize style incentives that are international in scale. Geeze... Everyone and their brother wants the tech to themselves it's just amazing that anything ever gets done on this planet.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
As an aside here is a fascinating article by an ex CIA agent on why the CIA has exactly the same disease NASA has and why they are dysfunctional too. Apparently most CIA agents spend most of their time angling to making a jump to the private sector where they can get rich by using their insider knowledge to get lucrative contracts.... from the CIA.
NASA is pretty similar. There are very few scientists and engineers left at NASA. They are mostly contract monitors who shuffle paper from pile to pile to get money from Congress to award contracts to the private sector and the contractors do all the actual work. Of course contractors tend to be flakes, and are just in it to milk as much money as they can. During Apollo there were a lot of contractors but there were actual engineers and scientists at NASA who did stuff, not so much any more.
A government providing service is fine. People buying service themselves is often fine. Which one of those two you prefer might vary but both can work in right conditions and both have their own pros and cons... But people paying taxes so government can buy the services from a private company is a recipe for horrible end results. There are few exceptions in the modern history.
When a government provides a service, the point is: Service is seen as so crucial that nobody should be left without it. Government tries to offer best service possible and can do it with low resources as it doesn't need to make profit. Adding private companies to the mix ruins it: Now government doesn't pay the doctors to provide best service they can but rather government pays to companies who pay to doctors. Companies take a cut of profits so it costs more tax money for government to provide the service and in addition to this, the doctors aren't now paid by entity that tries to provide good service but rather by entity that tries to make profit (and providing good service might or might not be a method for such).
Right wing supporters hate that kind of a situation. Left wing supporters hate that kind of a situation. But left wing supporters won't let government to stop providing service and right wing supporters won't allow government to hire more people directly. Democracy is a funny thing.
NASA was just following the Bush Directive. "Go to Mars".
Having a man stand on Mars is not that exciting.
I was more excited by the interesting rover designs Nasa had come up with. The In-situ resource utilisation has potential. A technology worth developing.
Basically, what is interesting/inspiring is increasing our capabilities.
This is what I would like to see NASA focus on. I was very pleased to see the Augustine panel suggest that Nasa forget Mars/Moon for now, and focus on the tech for longer duration manned space missions.
They actually thought about things. They promoted the Shuttle derived heavy lift, which, apparently would be so cheap to develop, you'd have to be insane not to do it. They promoted in-orbit refueling stations.
After that the United Launch Alliance put out plans to support these objectives, that had a lot of engineering work and imagination put into them. I hadn't seen so much imagination and rational planning in many years.
Fantastic stuff!
It is now time for NASA to consider all these events, and come up with a plan. That is what these committees are for. There are some big questions. What should NASA do, and what should they contract off to the ULA/spacex etc.
Another obvious project would be extra-solar-system probes using VASIMR engines.
- I am so thankful for Dr Chang-diaz
I'm looking forward to see how it works out on the ISS orbit keeping project.
NASA equals National Air and Space Administration
with accent on Administration. Only managers and bean counters get a paycheck from NASA. Everyone else is an outside contractor.
And yet, all nations have equivalence to itar. Heck, China now prevents exporting of any tech and even rare earth mineral. UK, france, Germany, Canada, Australia, and even Israel have ITAR equivalence.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And yet, all nations have equivalence to itar. Heck, China now prevents exporting of any tech and even rare earth mineral. UK, france, Germany, Canada, Australia, and even Israel have ITAR equivalence.
And? It's still protectionism even if everyone and their kid sister engage in it.
How about a World Space Agency instead of this massive expenditure and duplication of effort.
Oh, right. That would make sense.
The reason why NASA has problem (as does RSA and somewhat ESA), is that all have settled on one design and stick with it. What is needed is multiple designs and development. Only by doing numerous approaches will better be found.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And we all know what happens over time when a government extends itself beyond a sustainable threshold for too long - rebellions. Factions. Unrest. New states and governments that represent the people and their values. The classic example of establishing an independent base away from Earth is that one day if it survives, it will become a separate entity and demand recognition. In the past, the most technologically advanced and financially powerful countries in the history of the world had sent out ships to discover and tame a new land and guess what happened - things were never the same again.
Governments don't want colonies because of the inherent cost and effort to establish and maintain them over a protracted time. When American was new, for awhile it was a money-grab and several nations participated because it was a frontier where companies could pay others to do the hard work and extend their reach and hopefully deepen their pockets. All of those efforts were reduced to war in order to stop a new state from forming.
Historically, the human desire to acquire wealth has always run headlong into the need to exploit others to obtain that wealth and power. When a sustainable space-faring colony is finally created, we'll get to learn again that those who are in direct control will have plans of making that colony their own by establishing a new government to protect and provide for the people better than the governments that sent them there. In order to promote the ideals of wealth and power, the value of human rights gets violated.
And then begins the arms race, the effort by the governments of origin to minimize the loss of assets and sovereignty, the efforts by the separatists to establish a new place for themselves and ultimately be accepted as a distinctly different people with the right to shape their own destiny. Once people get the taste of freedom and the chance to claim their own space and write their own chapter in the pages of history, there's no turning back.
China is on a mission to control the planet via economics, while they are preparing for war. Just one example is China is trying hard to restricted access to Rare Earth minerals all over the planet. The same is true of Lithium. Assume that they do, then what happens? That kind of attitude is exactly what leads to wars. So, how to prevent it? Mine more of it. Basically, the rest of the world needs to explore the moon as well as asteroids ASAP. It is certain that one or more locations will have these minerals. Once these are plentiful, then a single nation can not really control other nations. That is how to stop war.
By adding 4 new committees, NASA is showing that they're not interested in real change. That's what any government organization does. Now, if they were eliminating some committees, that would be news.
For NASA, space is still a high priority.
Nasa, Take off your management hat and put on your engineering hat.
I think we need to review the definition of the word "profit" - which means to sell something at a higher price than it costs you to get it. The asteroids are made of iron, nickel, and silicates... the same as the earth. And they're like 200 million miles away. There is no way - ever - that you are going to be able to extract this stuff, ship it back to earth and make more money than you paid to get it - especially considering that we have an essentially unlimited supply on earth. And there's absolutely no reason to build stuff in space - no one lives there, remember? This whole "we've got to start an economy in space... so we can have an economy in space" is just another self-licking ice cream cone. There's no reason to do it, which is the real reason why no companies are champing at the bit to get started.
... since space colonies are utter pie-in-the-sky (so to speak). There is not the slightest chance we're going to be establishing colonies on other bodies in the solar system any time soon. 1) We don't have the technology. The few efforts we've made at establishing truly self-contained ecosystems on the surface of the earth have been failures - read up on Biosphere II, which experienced massive disturbances in its ecology, and had to "import" atmosphere from the outside world... an option that's not going to be available on, say, Mars. There were numerous other ecological problems noted - such as the die-off of most of the animal life, insufficient food supplies, etc, etc.
More importantly 2) there's no money in space colonization. Lifting all these people, their life support equipment, their living spaces, and whatever they need to do work, into space, would be absolutely staggeringly expensive (consider that to get something just to LEO costs around $10k/kg). Oh, you want to build all that stuff on site? Then all you have to do is invent the robot machinery to do that, and send the equivalent of several automated factories to the site. That only becomes more expensive. And what can the colonists do to recoup all that money? The answer, essentially, is that they can't. There's nothing you can get in space that can't be obtained more cheaply on earth.
Bottom line: don't count your revolutions before they're hatched. We would have to figure out how it's technologically possible and even remotely cost effect to even establish such a colony first, and we're a long, long way from there.