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Reported Obama Plan Would Privatize Manned Launches
couchslug writes with this excerpt from the not-yet-paywalled New York Times: "President Obama will end NASA's return mission to the moon and turn to private companies to launch astronauts into space when he unveils his budget request to Congress next week, an administration official said Thursday. The shift would 'put NASA on a more sustainable and ambitious path to the future' said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But the changes have angered some members of Congress, particularly from Texas, the location of the Johnson Space Center, and Florida, the location of the Kennedy Space Center. 'My biggest fear is that this amounts to a slow death of our nation's human space flight program,' Representative Bill Posey, Republican of Florida, said in a statement." If true, this won't please the federal panel that recommended against just such privatization.
Exactly right. This is one of the main reasons the space program went down the toilet in the early 1970s and has stayed there. As Martin Luther King, Jr said: "If our nation can spend twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God's children on their own two feet right here on earth." http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-04b.html
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I'm not sure I understand your objection. NASA would still be free to do big projects (horribly), they'd just have to buy the first ride from commercial providers.. which is really the way it should be. NASA shouldn't do anything that can be bought off-the-shelf and, if it currently cant buy something off-the-shelf, it should be doing the work to ensure that it soon will be able to do so. No commercial company has ever launched a person to orbit. Suborbital was only done 5 years ago. How freakin' disgraceful is that?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Privatisation isn't privatisation when your primary customers and sources of funding come from the government. There is in fact no difference, just an illusion of competition. What is needed is for them to remove the regulations that exist against private space travel. Remove the monopolistic government funded NASA entirely, leaving the playing field completely open for private firms to build a true spot in the marketplace. That is the only way space exploration, tourism and travel will be able to survive.
Cap and Trade - Pragmatic, market-based solution to a serious problem, a solution that Libertarians loved until a Democratic president proposed it. Centrist.
Universal Health Care - The standard for Western industrial nationals, and supported in some form by 60-80% of the US population. Centrist.
Income Redistribution - A loaded term for making the wealthy pay their fair share for the national infrastructure that as capital owners they get far more use from. Centrist (the rightist Republican version of course is Income Redistribution from the poor and middle classes to the rich).
Canceling NASA projects - eliminating wasteful spending. Centrist.
Studying global warming - Necessary science to resolve a looming crisis. Non-political.
So yeah, fairly centrist so far.
(Just a note before we start: I'm a black American. Don't misconstrue my hard truths as "racism" or some bullshit like that.)
We have, as a nation, given huge amounts of aid to all sorts of "disadvantaged" groups. It's not the giving that has been the problem; it is that many of these groups have outright refused to take advantage of the generosity provided to them.
That's why we have thugs in L.A. who bitch and moan about living in the ghetto, but then they never even try to get an education or even any sort of remedial training that will allow them to get a legitimate job. We provide all of that to them, basically free of charge, too! They just don't want a "white education," even when the curriculum has been designed by blacks, and is taught by blacks.
So let's stop wasting our time and resources on them. If they want to marginalize themselves, so be it. Let's spend the money on spaceflight. Let's spend the money on science. Let's spend the money on funding research.
We've tried to help these people, but they just don't want the help. So let's cut our losses and say to hell with them. Those of them who have the yearning to succeed will, and the rest should be ignored.
NASA had originally planned to do dozens of flights per year - the logistics of turnaround on the Shuttle turned out to just consume too much time, particularly due to the fact that even with a "reusable" spacecraft it was essentially being rebuilt every time it was turned around. For example, even though the landing gear were rated for say 10 flights they would be stripped down and refurbished after every launch. Same goes for the thermal protection system, the main engines, and hundreds of other functional units. NASA's fastest turnaround performance was in 1985, with 9 flights that year. Next year was Challenger. When something goes wrong and people are killed, who wants to be the person in management who ends up having to say "Yeah, we could have refurbished that part, but we needed to shave a day off our turnaround time"?
How are for-profit corporations going to be any faster at turning around a space vehicle than NASA? Even though manned spaceflight went on hiatus after Challenger and Columbia, it did continue after a time, and all the costs involved in the recovery, analysis, and remediation of the accidents were eventually footed by the US taxpayer. With a for-profit corporation, one fatal accident and you are finished, if not from the legal costs of the inevitable lawsuits, then from the loss of market share in what will most likely be a rather limited market. If you're going to drop $200,000, why do it with the company that killed people? Of course, perhaps companies like Virgin Galactic have figured something out that NASA was unable to figure out during the 30+ years of the Shuttle program. Then again, it's not like the current private spaceflight corporations have exactly been racking up the numbers of completed flights. It's a money pit, if there is no longer the political and/or economic will in the US to continue manned space flight for reasons of national pride, technological research, or scientific discovery, I don't think one should expect for-profit reasons to continue doing it to suddenly materialize. I'm of the opinion that you'd probably have more luck opening a transatlantic steamship line.
I think that one thing for-profit corporations would do (presuming someone is buying manned space launches. If there's no market they won't do anything.), is look at the costs and turnaround time and realize that they would need to have more vehicles if they want more frequent launches.
Then they'll realize that it's stupid to spend money on sending stuff to space only to bring it back, so you only bring back the stuff you absolutely need to instead of a whole freakin' rocket. Which would lead them to the conclusion that single-use rockets are both less expensive per launch and inherently parallelizable.
They should be safer, too, although the numbers at the moment still suggest otherwise, and also that "safer" is a relative proposition: in the history of manned space flight, a 1:50 failure rate with loss of crew seems to be the economically acceptable risk factor.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
You honestly think that's thanks to Obama?
And it has nothing to do with spending billions of dollars on war, increasing your country's national deficit beyond even something imaginable?
I think I agree with something the President said. Now, if we can guarantee property rights for those companies in space, too, this'd be amazing! Maybe Mr. Obama read Robert Heinlein when he was a kid and hasn't told anyone yet.
Private companies only produce as little science as they possibly can get away with, putting much more emphasis on patenting the crap out of the little they do produce, and then keep it for themselves.
Spoken like a true ignoramus. Who do you think developed the automobile? The airplane? The microchip? Who develops the pharmaceuticals which keep us living twice as long as our great-grandparents? Who's creating newer, more efficient forms of power, whether it be solar, wind, or nuclear? Who created the high-yield crops which are the only thing staving off mass starvation?
Private industry does more R&D than all the government organizations put together. Most of the great advances in our history were created by private individuals and small companies, and most of the incremental changes around us are driven by private industry. Governments are great for putting together huge research projects like the LHC and the ITER which cost billions and have no immediate practical application, but for everyday innovation and discovery nothing beats private business in search of larger profits.
Right now, the US has one - count them - one man-rated orbital vehicle.
Bzzzt! Wrong! The US has zero - count them - zero man-rated orbital vehicles. If you disagree, then do this simple exercise. Find any man-rating standards you can. Then look at the requirements for abort at and after launch. See that the Shuttle can't possibly abort within 5 minutes or so of launch. Conclude that the Shuttle is not a man-rated vehicle.
For bonus points, take that same man-rating standard and look at the engineering margin for structural members. Note that the Soyuz doesn't meet that margin. Conclude that the Soyuz isn't man-rated either! Nor anything else (aside from the Shuttle) that has ever flown people into orbit.
Conclude that the human race never had man-rated vehicles! Wonder what the purpose of man-rating actually is. (Hint: it was to rationalize the selection of the paper rocket, Ares I over the real commercial rockets, Delta IV and Atlas V).