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Give Space a Chance, Says Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomer writes "A lot of pundits, scientists, and people who should know better are decrying the demise of NASA, saying that the President's budget cutting the Constellation program and the Ares rockets will sound the death knell of manned space exploration. This simply is not true. The budget will call for a new rocket design, and a lot of money will go toward private space companies, who may be able to launch people into orbit years ahead of Ares being ready anyway."
Weee! They'll be able to launch people into orbit years ahead of Ares! Because putting people into orbit is exactly why Ares was being built, since NASA can't do that with their current rockets.
The private industry is decades away from what NASA can do today. It's at least a century away from what NASA could do 40 years ago. They're never going to get us into mars, because there's simply no profit in it. Government funding is the only way space exploration can go forward.
I follow Phil via twitter, he's pretty spot on about space and space exploration. He even goes into the false dichotemy of funding social spending programs first then NASA in one of his posts. NASA research lead to cheaper, more viable foodstuffs for the poor in the past, I don't see why it's breakthroughs couldn't assist us in our search for solutions to problems here on Earth.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
What you need is for people to realise the benefits that come with space exploration so that they demand, through their votes, that it be included in the budget. What you don't need to do is give up on NASA in favour of private companies that can only ever be expected to be SELF serving. Capitalism as a tool is a good thing, but as a religion it is as stupid as any other religion.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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The answer to your question is, it's a lot easier for congress to allocate funds to maintain operations than it is for them to allocate funds to build a new system. So they tend to underfund system development, and pay for that many times over in increased operating costs. In particular, there's virtually no consideration given to ground-up redesign, even though we know we could gain a lot of benefits by doing so.
Yes, we do need to separate crew and cargo costs. Again, the Shuttle is an example of underfunded system development, as by merging the two together, they only had to develop one launch stack (there are a lot of even bigger development-cost compromises in the shuttle program, but that's a whole different story).
The SSTO issue is a problem. We need more basic research before we can feel confident in our ability to build a good SSTO. Scramjets or some kinds of metastable fuels could probably pull it off. New types of advanced composites might help. But it's really tough.
Noone ever goes walrus!
Leaving aside your stupidity (or should I say gullibility) what you've just presented here is the old "spaceflight will be easier in the future so why bother now?" argument. It's true that there may be new technologies available tomorrow, or next week, or next decade, but the majority of evidence suggests that chemical rockets remain the only known technology to produce high enough thrust to get out of planetary gravity wells, and to perform short duration missions beyond LEO. It's lovely to think that maybe we're on the verge of some breakthrough that will render chemical rockets unnecessary, but even the greatest optimists of alternate propulsion techniques are unwilling to claim that. Even if we develop cheap, reliable, compact and light fusion reactors tomorrow, to get high thrust you still need a rocket nozzle with a high temperature propellant flowing through it, and most likely that propellant will be even higher temperature than in chemical rockets (otherwise, what's the advantage?) and that's likely to involve an even more complex design. Even if the design isn't more complex, it is necessarily more *new* and that means most likely less mature than needed for a human rated booster.
The future of spaceflight only gets easier than today if we fly today.
How we know is more important than what we know.
We really need to get away from all this political BS.
Let's just setup a multi trillion dollar trust fund over the next 20 years and be done with it. Then we won't have to support it with taxes anymore. I think we can afford to spend 20 years frugally developing space engineering. Let's work on getting garbage collectors and street cleaners in space before we start polluting the moon and mars.
We spend how many billions of dollars putting the ISS into space and it's scheduled for a 2020 end of service...? How many billions do we spend on satellites only to have them come crashing back into the atmosphere? It costs way too much money sending all those pounds of metal up there only to waste it.
We need to concentrate on manufacturing and recycling. We need more automation in space.
We need plans to harvest asteroids and comets and put then into orbit around mars and Saturn for future manufacturing; I seriously doubt with all the asteroid doomsday movies that putting asteroids into earth orbit will get that much support. Mars is the scene of the next industrial revolution. The next wild west though it may take us a couple hundred years. And if you didn't realize it farming is destined for space. Power? You don't want a nuclear reactor next door? Guess where we can put it? It's all about real estate baby. Always has been and always will be and fortunately there is a quite a bit of it.
You're under the impression that NASA is currently capable of creating an HLV using its old contracting methods. NASA has been incapable of creating a new launch vehicle since the shuttle, not at the fault of the dedicated civil servants, but by a paralyzing management and political structure.
People and talent are mobile, and most of vehicle design in the past was done by private contractors anyway. Having NASA write you a paycheck doesn't make you more (or less) capable. What's going on here is simply a shift from cost-plus to fixed-price contracts. These are less subject to political manipulation, and push more management to distinct companies with their own structures -- if one company becomes paralyzed, it isn't a single point of failure for US human spaceflight.
And yes, currently 'commercial space' vehicles concentrate on simple LEO transport, because this is the largest, most guaranteed market. However, if NASA needs to buy an HLV, there's no reason that one can't be provided by similar methods. A less risky (and less efficient) cost-plus development contract may be necessary occasionally, but if everyone is used to fixed-price approaches, and there's an understanding that eventual acquisition of more vehicles will be at a fixed-price then the same improved efficiencies will hopefully dominate.
NASA doesn't need to design its own launch vehicles -- it needs to define requirements. If it needs something it buys it, and if it can't it can fund development, same as it always has, with modified expectations.
I think international competition is more likely to drive space exploration than all of us holding hands and doing it together.
Those of us who are in the right wing and have no problem shoveling money into NASA see this coming from a mile away. Keeping the USA in the forefront in space is more important than the development of the lateen sail was to the arabs or the silk worm was to the Chinese. It's absolutely, strategically, important.
In fact, I would say that you could the cut the US military budget in half, spend the balance on developing heavy lift boosters, exploring asteroids, getting serious about the whole thing, and get way more out of your taxpayer dollar in terms of geopolitical power than 6 aircraft carriers and 1000 fighters.
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