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House Outlaws Obama's NASA Intervention
TopSpin writes "NASA's Constellation Program and Ares rockets appear to have strong support in Congress. An appropriations bill passed by the House includes language that bars 'any efforts by NASA to cancel or change the current Constellation program without first seeking approval of Congress.' The Administration's appointed NASA leadership is being publicly hostile towards its traditional aerospace affiliations. As Charles Bolden put it to industry execs, 'We are going to be fighting and fussing over the coming year,' and 'Some of you are not going to like me because we are not going to do the same kind of things we've always done.'"
NASA's budget:17.6 billion
DOD budget: 515.4 billion
NASA's entire budget is what, 8.5 spy planes? We have bigger fish to fry, believe you me!
'Thus' is already an adverb
But if the goal is to send people to space sustainably and for the long term, then NASA should be doing things like building and testing space stations that can spin and thus create artificial "gravity", and have decent radiation shielding. The long term goal should be creating space colonies, in _space_. Colonies where future generations of humans can live and reproduce. Thus the target would be developing technologies that would make it possible.
Not working on sending people to Mars or the Moon. Getting to the moon has already been done.
Getting people stuck on other gravity wells in the Solar System is silly and expensive. And talks of expensive, rushed (because of poor shielding and other issues), potentially one way trips to Mars are even more ridiculous.
What's so great about living on the Moon or Mars? It's not like they are human friendly places. What can you get from Mars or Moon that you can't get from asteroids?
There are plenty of asteroids to mine out there. Asteroids have a lot of water:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050907_ceres_planet.html
http://www.universetoday.com/2009/10/08/more-water-out-there-ice-found-on-asteroid/
You might even be able to hollow out an asteroid and turn it into a space station.
Just because we're living on a decent planet doesn't mean that getting stuck on other gravity wells should be our goal. We should only get stuck in one if it's as good as Earth (or almost as good). And the other planets and moons in the Solar System are far from meeting that mark.
I think you missed the point, as did anyone who modded it troll.
The language that effectively ties NASA's hands was inserted in the bill by Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from...drum roll please.... Alabama. Where NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is located.
And that language boils down to: "no changes". Subcontract a part of the crew module out to Russia, Germany or France? No. Not unless Congress approves. Even if it'll get Ares off the ground sooner...nope. Cancel or delay Ares I to concentrate on Ares V? Nope. Even though Russia already has, and will continue to have, the capability to put people in orbit thus rendering Ares I redundant, while what's really needed is the heavy-lift capability of Ares V.
Shelby wants one thing: Money in Alabama. So say bye bye to Kennedy Space center, and write off the US Government using commercially (read: private industry) available means to ferry crew to space. If SpaceX or Virgin Galactic manages to get people into LEO by 2015, NASA wouldn't be able to buy a seat without Congress' approval.
The 'no changes' language has nothing to do with getting into space or not, and everything to do with making sure money flows to contractors in Alabama.
Yeah, those DoD contracts where he actually (attempted) to put stuff in orbit...what pork! They weren't paying him for power point slides...
Apparently Falcon 1 / SpaceX startup costs are around $450M, which is about what that recent Ares I-X test flight costs. You think there might be a little difference in the overhead of the two operations?
I'm not arguing against the conservation of energy, (yeah lots of energy to get something to LEO), just that there might be a better way.
Yea, because Clinton's policy of ignoring problems worked out so well for the US, about the same as appeasement did throughout the last century. Obama has brought it to a new level with his "bend over" foreign policy.
Who specifically are you referring to when you say "those who used to be our friends"? Our relationship with China was better under Bush than it had ever been. Muslim countries? Never been great, but the moderates are still as friendly as can be expected. You blame Bush for Putin's policies in Russia? Pffft. I'm quite happy living in the US, if you want change you can go somewhere else.
In other words, even though 'grew up' around NASA, you prefer urban legends to facts.
Had Congress micromanaged booster technology, you'd have a point. But the fact is, a reusable booster was on NASA's menu from very early on. Even while Gemini was flying, NASA was planning the Shuttle.
Heck, remember Gemini was itself a political creation. As Mercury was winding down, NASA management realized that it would be years before Apollo flew and that they needed some Buck Rogers to keep the bucks flowing, so they dusted off an unsolicited McDonnell (not yet merged with Douglas) proposal for Mercury MKII and justified it was 'a development program for Apollo'. (Despite the fact that the Apollo design was already frozen.)
Roadblocks largely put in front of it by NASA itself.
Despite being clearly told that budgets would be limited in the future, NASA insisted on proposing an expensive Shuttle-Station-Mars program. When rebuked by Congress, NASA responded by promising to deliver a revolutionary new spacecraft on an extremely optimistic budget and an even more optimistic schedule. Many space historians believe that NASA had convinced itself, despite abundant evidence otherwise, that the austerity of the late 60's and early 70's was an aberration and that soon happy times and near blank checks would resume shortly. More than a few believe that, institutionally, NASA retains this conviction even today.
Dropping a few cruise missiles into an abandoned training camp in Afganistan was really effective wasn't it? And trying to ignore the "little war" in Kosovo until it turned into a genocide was great leadership.
But your bluster is just a feeble attempt to change the focus from Obama's failure to lead. His predecessors kept a sign on their desk in the Oval Office that read "The Buck Stops Here". I'm so tired of seeing him and Hillary and Emanuel and Gibbs pointing fingers. The theme of the current administration is "It's not my fault".
Chem rockets can't achieve the efficiency of jet engines because they carry their own fuel and oxidizer. Jets only carry fuel and thus need to propel less weight. Rockets also must generate enough thrust to support the entire vehicle weight. Jets normally fly at thrust-to-weight ratios below one, by having wings that rest on the surrounding medium (air, lift). Rockets must also propel their payloads under these conditions to ~330,000 ft. Commercial airliners reach cruising altitude at 35-40,000 ft. The climb gulps fuel, but the following cruise sips it; rockets are climbing the entire time. This is all scraped from undergrad propulsion, but I think it's right.
One solution is to combine propulsion methods, to use airbreathing propulsion for atmospheric flight and rockets beyond. This could be either a combined-cycle engine (turbine with a rocket in the spindle), or something like SpaceShipOne/White Knight, where a jet-powered platform brings a rocket-ship to altitude. Chemical rocket costs aren't just limited by rocket makers trying to maximize profits on limited launches. They're inherently less efficient than airbreathing propulsion, but aren't limited by the atmosphere.
You have similar energy needs (a long passenger jet flight consumes a similar amount of energy as it takes to reach orbit)
Wait .... WHAT? In what universe?
I was with you on the previous comment, but now you've completely derailed and started to roll. Your average jetliner holds less than 200,000 liters of fuel. The external tank for the Space Shuttle holds 500,000 liters of liquid oxygen, and 1.5 MILLION liters of hydrogen, for a combined total of 2 million liters of liquid propellant. So, on volume alone, it takes 10 times as much fuel to go into orbit, and that's without considering the fact that the H2/02 mixture releases a hell of a lot more energy than your standard jet-fuel.
Now, yeah, the space shuttle isn't exactly the most efficient means of getting stuff in orbit, but even if you came up with a much more efficient launch system there's no way in hell you'd ever make it as fuel-efficient as a trans-continental commercial flight. Not even close.
...You are responding to a die hard lefty.
(Missions like fixing the Hubble telescope don't count, either. It would have been cheaper to build several Hubbles on an assembly line and launch them as they break than to send shuttle missions to service them.)
This is an interesting statement. References?
The estimated cost of the Hubble was $400 million. From what I've read it costs $60 million to launch the Shuttle. Now these two numbers are rubbish, of course, because the $400 million I'm quoting is to design and build one space telescope whereas the $60 million I'm quoting is to put one already designed and built Shuttle into orbit. Of course, you can also say that one Shuttle launch costs $1.3 billion, but you can also say that the Hubble cost $2.5 billion to construct--what with the delays.
(These numbers are from the wikipedia articles on the Space Shuttle and Hubble telescope)
When you say you spent $40 on groceries, do you include the portion of your car payment for the car that you drove to the store in? Do you include the cost of the gas that you burned to get to the store? How about the cost of the gas that you burned to get to the gas station to get the gas that you later burned to get to the store? Do you include the percent of taxes that you paid for the road(s) that you used to get to the store? Do you "save money" by only including the cost of the road that you used to get to the store? You can make a trip to the grocery store very expensive if you include those numbers.
In other words, most numbers you see on the costs are adjusted by one agenda or another. That's why I'd be curious to see where you're getting this from.
By the way, just as aside, one issue with the Hubble was that after the Challenger accident, it had to be stored for several years in a clean room, powered up, and purged with nitrogen at a cost of about $6,000,000 per month. So assuming that we built two Hubbles and launched one in January 1990 and the other to replace the first one in December of 1993, that would mean 2 years and 11 months at $6,000,000 per month to keep the second Hubble ready to go. Total cost: $1,584,000,000. That's more than the $1.3 Billion for a Shuttle launch.